Playwright: David Lindsay-Abaire. At: Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted St. Tickets: 312-335-1650; www.steppenwolf.org; $20-$86. Runs through: Nov. 11
"Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home"and in that homily lies the key to what keeps generation after generation down on the farms, or imprisoned in the ghettos, never seeing Paree or anyplace more than a few blocks distant. The cult of "family values," bolstered by religious and ethnic parochialism, perpetuates a homebound and pregnant female populace, indentured to men chafing under restless inertia. It doesn't stop there, eitherthe girl or boy who escapes this defeatist environment will forever find their pride in accomplishment crippled by guilt over their filial impiety.
David Lindsay-Abaire, himself a product of Boston's predominantly Irish South Side district, doesn't sentimentalize this destructive irony. His protagonist, Margie Walsh, may retain a few residual scruples from before she dropped out of school to raise her mentally-impaired child, but when our middle-aged single-mom loses her minimum-wage job, despair spurs her to seek the aid of an old boyfriend from the 'hood. "Mikey" Dillon is now a doctor, married to a Georgetown-raised wife, and living "comfortably"a condition Margie declares to be "better than rich"but all it takes is an accusation of having gone "lace-curtain" to goad him into proclaiming his street cred (or a romanticized version thereof).
These are the kind of personalities usually relegated to peripheral roles in TV-sitcoms, their heavy regional dialects immediately branding them hicks, whether urban or rural. Director K. Todd Freeman and his actors reject cheap stereotypes, however, instead delivering a brutally candid portrait of an American subculture founded on an economy so precarious that an unplanned trip to the dentist is capable of toppling growth plans for decades. We may cluck over the necessity of meek store manager Steve firing his needy employees, but what if we were suddenly without income and our landlady demanding the rent? We may jeer, too, at Mike's prosperitythe wealthy are easy targets, after allbut what dark secrets mark the route of our upward mobility?
Are these people good or bad, or are they simply hungry for the security that permits such moral judgments? Whatever level of sanctimony its audiences may have achievedat whatever pricethere is no hiding from the arguments raised by Mariann Mayberry's unflinching Margie (pronounced with a hard "g") leading an ensemble who cheerfully watches us squirm in reawakened recognition of our own social vulnerability.