Playwright: Will Eno. At: Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted. Phone: 312-335-1650;$20-$73. Runs through: Aug. 14
At one point in our play, an astronaut reports from his tiny home in the stars that his carefully-rationed supply of oxygen is "good," to which his controller on the groundsurrounded by oxygen in abundancereplies "It sure is!" At another, a landscaper planting a tree outside the emergency entrance to a hospital expresses hope that arrivals thereat will be comforted by its beauty. Later, a pair of tourists, weary of ancient monuments, are enchanted by the thought that the air they are breathing was shared, centuries earlier, by the stonemason who sculpted the memorials they now view.
Every American playwright, sooner or later, pays homage to Thornton Wilder's Our Town. Unlike the residents of Grover's Corners, though, the citizens of Middletown are fully conscious of the wonder and mystery to be found in the most commonplace occurrences, savoring each precious passing moment as a gift to be explored and contemplated. All but one, that isan unexceptional man so lacking in direction that even his sentences trail off unfinished. When an end to his opportunities finally looms, his efforts to crowd a lifetime into his final minutes are heartbreaking in their futility.
Will Eno's brand of verbal microanalysis demands a high level of intimacy to generate the empathy necessary to appreciate observations that could easily become cloyingly twee. (Did I mention the equine fancier whose fondness for statues of mounted generals is limited to their horses?) It's unlikely to be achieved on the Steppenwolf mainstage, however. Despite an all-star cast that includes an underutilized Brenda Barrie, a droll cast-against-type Michael Patrick Thornton, and an appropriately self-effacing Tracy Letts (who contributes the most clinically harrowing death scene in Chicago theatre history), the sheer dimensions of our physical environment cannot help but dwarf Antje Ellermann's spare scenic design and the people thereon, rendering Eno's delicate universe self-consciously artificial.
Playgoers recalling the production of Eno's The Flu Season in 2009 will attest to the quirky charm associated with closereally closescrutiny of discourse we too often take for granted. Director Les Waters tries to bridge the aesthetic distance by means of devices lifted straight from his text's 1938 prototype, but ultimately, we are left with a concert for chamber orchestra diluted by an arena better suited to brass bands.