Congo Square, Lookingglass and The Who have a chat.
Shows are living breathing organisms. I like imagining what they’d say to each other.
The terrific Willie "Prince Roc" Round
Pretend you’re at a party, expect instead of people, you’re socializing with shows. Hamilton’s over in the corner having a drink with 1776, Time of Your Life is rubbing elbows with Clyde’s and a bunch of Oklahomas are having a heated chat around the backyard solo stove. Me? I’m in a huddle with Congo Square’s What To Send Up When It Goes Down, Lookingglass’ Her Honor Jane Byrne and The Who’s 2022 Who Hits Back tour.
Like people, shows have lives. They are born (and reborn), they grow up (some aging more gracefully than others) and they exist in community with each other. When I meet them, I like to make sure I’ve introduced them to each other, and then lay back and see how the conversation unfolds.
I recently went to Lookingglass Theatre to see Congo Square’s What To Send Up When It Goes Down. I’m not the first to describe Aleshea Harris’s play as brilliant, challenging, engaging and humbling, and as directed by Daniel Bryant and my friend Ericka Ratcliff was deeply stirring.
What To Send Up boldly and appropriately declared to its audience, and itself, that it was created with Black people in mind. It made it clear that while my straight white American male self was absolutely welcome, the show had some uncompromising demands – to listen actively; when spoken to, to speak; and throughout, to be humble, respectful, and willing to consider that however highly I may regard my progressive mindset and actions, as a non-Black and privileged American I am incapable of understanding the fear, sadness and rage of Black people living around and dying at the hands of police.
Period, Amen, and I’m good with that. Empathy, one of my strong suits, is of limited value when the experiences depicted before me are by definition out of my reach and comprehension. Sure, courtesy of my last name and some Catholic school bullies, I’ve experienced some violent and scary anti-Semitism. But there was always escape, and while I can certainly resent authority and be angry at institutions, I’ve also been able to turn to them for assistance. I’ve never had to genuinely fear them, at least where my personal safety is concerned. My biggest anxiety when I see a cop approach is a speeding ticket.
What To Send Up makes damn sure I acknowledge that privilege to myself, the cast and the audience. It implores me to bear witness to the fear, loss and rage that has been passed down and accumulated in the Black bodies with whom I shared the Lookingglass Theatre space and share the world.
I don’t just admire, I’m in awe of the extraordinary way What To Send Up refused to make me feel good about myself simply for having bought a ticket and shown up. It’s a rare and extraordinary accomplishment to create a ritual experience that makes me feel better (as in exposed, enriched and enlightened) by inviting me to safely feel worse. Participating in the rituals of What To Send Up When It Goes Down was both arduously and exquisitely beautiful, something that both dismantled and rewarded me, a show for which I am grateful and one which I will processing for a long time.
About a year earlier, in the same theater space, I saw Her Honor Jane Byrne, a brilliant piece by my dear pal J. Nicole Brooks, a uniquely voiced writer whose plays are often fantasias that use real world events, both personal and historical, as launching pads for surreally transcendent piece of theater.
Her Honor Jane Byrne, for example, recalls the time when Chicago’s first (and up until Lori Lightfoot only) female mayor moved into Chicago’s Cabrini Green projects, amid controversy and speculation that has not entirely ended even today. A lot happens in Her Honor Jane Byrne, more than I can convey here, but one moment in particular thunderbolted into my memory while I watched What To Send Up.
I’d never seen Willie “Prince Roc” Round perform before Her Honor and thanks to the pandemic hadn’t seen him since, so I was thrilled to see him in the cast of What To Send Up. His commanding presence in Her Honor as a character simply and universally named Kid had already worked its way into my core when, with only a few gut-wrenching seconds of dread preceding it, Kid is shockingly gunned down.
A year later, in the same space, here he is again, playing another young black man being murdered on stage, but this time I am watching his character die not instantaneously but gradually, over many minutes. Instead of a body falling to the ground at the deafening pop of a stage prop gun, now we experience a death surreally unfolding as, throughout the evening, it is woven through the fabric of stories of other Black lives demeaned and ended, his end-of-existence thoughts raining on the audience as his life bleeds away. The time and space given this specific individual death embodies countless lost lives and an entire People’s worth of hurt, loss and confusion, ultimately becoming the gravity drawing all the characters, and I imagine the actors enlivening them, together in a moment of howling rage.
Obliterated by how the extraordinary sequence in What To Send Up related to the devastating moment in Her Honor Jane Byrne and knocked out by how Willie played these moments, I was thrilled to introduce them to each other. How excited they would be to meet!
The reality was that they needed no introduction. They have known each other for a very, very long time.
A quick post-script, if you’ll allow.
Seeing What To Send Up was the first of two shows I saw that night. For months, I’d had a ticket to The Who’s Hits Back tour. Married with two stepkids, for me nights out are relatively rare, and so when I realized that my only chance to see What To Send Up would be the same night I was likely to see The Who for the last time, I decided to see the play first and then head over to the United Center and catch whatever songs the band had yet to play.
It felt like the right way to prioritize the performances. Few things scream out white privilege like “I’ve got a ticket to see The Who perform live with a symphony orchestra.” So, small as the gesture is in the grand scheme of things, it felt meaningful to me.
A few years ago, The Who recorded a new track called “Be Lucky,” a title lead singer Roger Daltrey uses as a bit of a mantra. After The Who closed the show with a rousing “Baba O’Riley” and the band linked arms to say goodnight to a rapturous crowd, Daltrey exhorted the crowd “be lucky!”
If you’re at a Who show, lucky is something you likely already are and can afford to feel, in ways that many of the characters in What To Send Up and Her Honor Jane Byrne.
In my mind, I’ve introduced The Who’s concert to these two breathtaking pieces of Chicago theater. They had not previously met. Wisely, The Who are listening quietly.