After so long in the reviewing biz, I crave firsts. Here’s one. I’ve never before picked up my ticket at a box office under a sign offering titanium anodizing racks.
That’s because a company calling itself the Chicago New Theatre Project (basically the formatively ambitious Chicago director Spencer Huffman, I believe), is staging Caryl Churchill’s play “Far Away” on a real factory floor. Specifically, that’s Servi-Sure, the manufacturer of said fabrications for the aerospace, automotive, electronics, cosmetics (?) and cookware industries. The low-rise factory is located in Chicago’s Bowmanville neighborhood, across from the busy RSI Rendered Services towing yard.
You wait with fellow audience members in the office and are led to a clutch of folding chairs in a corner of the factory floor. It is never fully evident what is part of an intentional theatrical design, per se, and what just happens to be sitting around as part of the regular lines of business here. I could not take my eyes off a sign saying “No pacemakers beyond this point.”
You might say the same for “Far Away,” a 50-minute play that enjoys mythic status among Churchill fans. Premiering in London in 2000 and first locally produced by the great Next Theatre in Evanston in 2004 with a creepy Karen Aldridge, “Far Away” is part of an era of British theater very much preoccupied with telling audiences they were not as safe as they thought. The “Harry Potter” series, of course, came from the same era and did much the same for kids; the honesty was appreciated by hundreds of millions of readers. When “Far Away” arrived in New York in 2002, the city still was reeling from Sept. 11 and it was not hard for audiences to understand what this sparse and oblique play was saying.
In scene one, we meet a young woman, Joan (Olivia Lindsay) who tells her aunt, Harper (Michaela Petro) that she has seen her uncle loading blooded kids into the back of a truck. Harper soothes a kid who cannot unsee.
From there, Churchill takes us to a factory where the adult Joan is fabricating hats and chatting with her co-worker Todd (Danny Breslin), not for Easter Sunday use, but as headgear in which to parade prisoners of war. We learn mass executions typically follow, which begs the question as to whether the hats should be saved.
That should be enough to warn you of the bleakness of Churchill’s dehumanized dystopia, albeit one filled with astonishing linguistic invention. This is a crucially important play, highly influential on the younger playwrights who read it and who went on to amplify the sparseness of its vision for their own purposes. Both Lindsay, whose work is quite haunting, and Petro, a longtime deep diver in Chicago theater, will get under your skin in these short scenes. It’s wonderful to see this strange, beguiling play again. I’ve left out some of its shocks.
That said, I do think the factory staging imposes a text of its own on a piece so intentionally skeletal and, really, domestic at heart. I’m guessing the hat manufacturing was the impetus and fair enough, but this is a play about how the view from your bedroom window isn’t safe, more than a workplace dissection. So, at times, that jars.
On the other hand, new resonances emerge, too, as all the creepy sounds emerge from the corners of machines and lathes and, well, I really don’t know what everything there was. Clearly, that was one of Huffman’s key ideas and good for him for having this level of vision. For some folks in this town, “Far Away” will scratch an itch and Churchill fans will not be shocked at its plethora of newly prescient observations.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
Review: “Far Away” (3.5 stars)
When: Through March 30
Where: Servi-Sure, 2020 W. Rauscher Ave.
Running time: 50 minutes
Tickets: $15-20 (suggested donation) at ticketstripe.com
