Beggars in Chicago have become more aggressive since my last visit to the big city. In a train station, an African-American kid approaches and, in a robotic monotone, asks for money. I open my wallet. In the same monotone, the kid says: "Gimme 20." No, I reply, I can give you two. "But you have lots of money," he says, peering relentlessly down at my wallet, with absolutely dead, comatose eyes. "I promise," he says in his flat machine voice, "I promise I won't do no drugs..." "I don't care what you do," I respond, thinking "Dude, your voice tells me that you are drugged out of your mind right now." The kid takes my money contemptuously -- "fuck you too," he mutters. The taxi-cab driver drops me at the curb next to a big ragged Black man with a mouth full of snaggle-teeth. Instead of getting out of the car -- it's a big cold -- the cab driver gestures and the big ragged man pulls open the back of the car and gets out our luggage, stacking it neatly on the curb. Jack says: "Do you work here?" "Do's I look like I work here?" the man says, grinning through his half-dozen remaining choppers. Jack says: "No, I thought you worked for the cab." The man is suitably amused: "If I worked for the cab would I be doin' this?" he asks, grinning again. I give him three dollars for his "God bless you!" We go into a deep dish pizza place and it's too crowded -- the wait is an hour and a half. As we turn to leave, another ragged Black man, this time lean and sinewy with a whiskey-yellow beard, holds open the door for us and, then, tags along as we walk down the sidewalk. "I can show you another pizza place, much better," he says, "it's owned by Michael Jackson." He points vaguely toward the Hancock Tower. Thanks, I tell him -- the advice costs me three dollars. On a street corner, a black teenager runs over my toe with his bicycle. He's carrying a pizza box. "I got a slice," he says, "but I ain't got no soda pop." "Okay," I say. "I need two dollars for the soda pop," he says. "Don't want to eat the pizza without a drink." I give him a dollar in coins. A Black woman stops me in front of a Walgreens. "I'm homeless and hungry," she says. I give her a dollar. But I want to talk to her. "How do you I know to whom to give money?" I ask. She looks at me expressionlessly. The transaction is over, and disappointed with my frugality, she is already turning away. "No wait," I say. "How do I know to whom to give money?" She glares at me: "Give to those in need," she says. "Any fool knows that." About four blocks later, a heavy set Black woman comes charging up out of the sidewalk, levitating up a shaft down to a subway. "I'm hungry," she screams. "Gimme three fuckin' dollars for a sandwich." Everyone turns away. "You heard me bitches!" she screams. "Gimme three fuckin' dollars for a sandwich." We are all pretending not to see her. "Just three fuckin' dollars," she shrieks, "that's all I'm askin' of you bitches." The line for the play Evening at the Talk House, the Chicago premiere of Wally Shawn's 2015 theater piece, extends out onto the sidewalk. I'm attending a 3:00 matinee, the afternoon after Thanksgiving at A Red Orchid Theater at 1511 N. Wells. A Black man stands twelve feet from the line of theater-goers waiting patiently on the sidewalk -- the theater is very tiny and the doors are not open yet. "I'm hungry and homeless," the man bellows. Then: "I'm homeless and hungry, I'm hungry and homeless." He declaims his words with melodramatic flair -- for a moment, I suspect him to be an actor, someone hired to make certain points about the kind of people who attend the matinee of a Wally Shawn play the day after Thanksgiving. But, apparently, he's authentic. The real McCoy.
A Red Orchid Theater seats maybe 50 people and everyone is basically on-stage with the actors. Shawn's play has a relatively large cast, about 8 actors and they are all gathered together on the thrust platform that simulates a kind of drawing room, some loveseats facing one another, a third seat looking out to one side, a cart (about three feet from my toes) with bottles of booze and ice and some small sinister-looking vials displayed in plain sight. The actors enter through the one entrance into the theater and the play begins with a man named Robert who stands among the theater-goers speaking very naturally, although, of course, in a highly self-conscious and sardonic way. (Robert plays the sort of jaded man-about-town that George Saunders specialized in.) Robert announced that a man named Ted has called him and invited him to an old hang-out, Nellie's Talk House, a sort of salon where Bohemians gathered previously. Robert makes some snarky, if funny, remarks about Ted -- Robert doesn't seem to like anyone and, an equal opportunity hater, despises himself as savagely as he detests the others. It seems that ten years earlier, Robert authored a play with a florid title about midnight and the moon and stars. The play was something like Game of Thrones, set in a sort of medieval kingdom parallel "or set apart" from our world -- a place where concepts of honor and self-sacrifice and physical courage were joined to Romantic ideals about love and the beauty of the body in violent motion. The play was a failure and Robert doesn't do that work any longer -- now, he runs or produces a TV show, something called Chicos. Robert purports to detest the theater -- "an animal occupation," he says, "One group of human animals staring fixedly at another group -- lots of sniffing and staring." In an elliptical way, Robert brings us up to date on the political situation -- although the play was written before Trump took office, the piece seems prescient. Two candidates succeed one another at three month intervals -- "there are too many elections," one of the characters laments. One of them, an expert on the breeding and origin of dogs is "really remarkably cruel." Wars seem to be ongoing and the two regimes, which apparently mirror one another, disapprove of anything like high or meaningful art -- the people are fed a steady diet of idiotic comedies like Chicos and Mouse Chatter or a very popular show (in Luxemborg and parts of Africa) called Sea of Blood, a program everyone purports to detest although they admit that the show about "wounds" and "being wounded" is fascinating enough. The initial monologue, bristling with self-loathing, is similar on a much smaller scale to the vast monologue comprising Shawn's earlier The Designated Mourner -- the world has gone to hell and self-loathing, narcissistic intellectuals can not even be bothered to grieve what has been lost. Robert narrates a meeting with a TV star, now down on his luck, named Dick. This is acted out as Dick appears. His face is all scuffed up and his moustache matted with blood and he has two black eyes. Dick announced that his "friends beat (him) up", something that he acknowledges that he "deserved" for crossing certain lines, and that the beating, in fact, was, more or less, enjoyable. But Dick doesn't seem to be enjoying things, can barely walk, and, from time to time, lapses into making weird sounds, barking in pain like a seal. Dick apparently has suffered some kind of internal injury and he seems more dead than alive. When explaining why he was beaten, Dick becomes hysterical, making horrible bellowing noises and shaking his head back and forth violently, and, then, flailing at the air. As the ninety minute play progresses, we learn that three of the eight people at the soiree are working for the government "targeting" -- that is, selecting other people for assassination. One of them, a woman named Jane, has worked as an assassin herself. She kills people by scratching them with a poison-laden hat pin -- "not a bad way to go," she says. Many victims, it seems, are purged by being killed with poison. When Jane mixed a drink about a yard from me I noticed her lacing one of the glasses with something in a vial, a few droplets from a medicine dropper and, indeed, at the end of the play one of the characters is, apparently, killed by poison -- we hear the actor gasping and choking with seal-like barks off-stage. Jane once had a sexual relationship with Robert. When Robert asks her to recall it, she retches and gags violently -- so much for love and sex. Nonetheless, Robert very subtly importunes her and you get the impression that he is some sort of party official, someone responsible for determining who lives and dies and that, if Jane were to have sex with him, he might spare her. He even suggests finding her a small part on the show that he is running -- she was previously on Mouse Chatter but dismissed because not "funny enough." For her part, Jane is sick of living and wants to be killed with a swift anonymous bullet shot into her neck. But she knows that this kind of swift and unexpected coup de grace is reserved for more important people and suspects that her death will be much worse. She recalls a friend who was beaten by her friends who, then, covered her with "really brutal cuts." Then, they dragged her outside where she was publicly hanged. "It was a bad hanging, a really bad hanging," she recalls. Someone else acknowledges a man named Felix or Rudy -- "if they want you have a really horrible death, they send Rudy." Rudy also is in show-business and everyone who knows him grimaces -- "we all know how Rudy is." The conversation is brittle, sarcastic, cruel -- everyone mocks those who are not present. At any moment, you expect the nasty repartee and vicious backbiting to morph into a savage beating, the kind of beating that Dick claims that he enjoyed and that has almost killed him. Periodically, we hear an overwhelming sound like a jet plane passing over the Talk House. Nellie pathetically wants to bring back the good, old days before criticism has become synonymous with literal assassination. She wants someone to read a purple passage from the play that Robert wrote years ago: "Midnight in the clearing with Moonlight and Stars." No one will read this and one suspects that the willingness to declaim this wild Bardic soliloquy is some kind of marker that the person who so indulges will have to be killed. Finally, poor bruised Dick, who has nothing to lose, reads the passage, something about eating "roast antelope at a feast." The antelope meat is so delicate it is said "that a small child could easily eat ten servings." The speaker in the soliloquy must fight on the morrow and so he leaves the antelope-meat feast and plans to go to his own home where he will rest at his hearth with a bowl of raspberries -- the soliloquy is called "the raspberry speech." It is strangely moving, although, of course, bizarre and Dick performs very beautifully -- his voice is resonant and he speaks with great conviction. Everyone applauds him. The speech is some kind of relic and, later, Robert accuses Jane and Nellie of "hiding Dick" or, at least, acting in such a way that the seem to be hiding Dick -- and this suggests that something very bad will happen to them soon. Robert and friends are discussing another actor who is a pig -- "really just a human head attached to a pig" -- and, about to tell us something really juicy and salacious about this man, when we hear someone gagging off-stage: poison.
The play is haunting and elliptical. Horrible stuff is suggested but never exactly articulated. Shawn knows that ghastly material is best left to the imagination. The show is also very funny and the production that I saw was excellently performed -- it's really just a bunch of people talking in a small room, but it's very scary, in fact, a terrifying piece of theater. The tiny venue at A Red Orchid, with the actors no farther than fifteen feet from your seat, make the experience electric and shocking.
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