Playwright: Lanford Wilson. At: Griffin Theatre at The Den, 1333 N. Milwaukee Ave. Tickets: www.griffintheatre.com; $35. Runs through: April 19
Missouri-bred Lanford Wilson ( 1937-2011 ) lived in Chicago for five years, taking writing classes and living near Clark and Division streets, then a hangout for sex workers, junkies and gays. In 1962 he bought a one-way bus ticket to New York, skipped out on two months' rent and left Chicago with $12 and the clap, as he told me himself. In New York, he found Broadway and 72nd Street, similar to his Chicago 'hood but only worse. All thisChicago and his early NYC circumstancesis faithfully reflected in Wilson's first full-length play, Balm in Gilead ( 1965 ), taking its title from Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven and the Bible.
The play is rarely performed because it requires a cast large enough to occupy a small nation. Many roles are small, yet doubling is nearly impossible. The play is a montage of scuzzy urban life, set in a busy all-night diner, which stops only momentarily to focus on two or three central characters. When they are goneeven deadlife surges on as if they'd never existed. There's very little story but, oh, the teaming lowlife humanity of it: longing, flirtation, sex, love, despair, failure, exploitation, ego, retribution and the music of a thousand voices, or so it seems. There are fragments of hope, too, naive though they are. Ballsy for its time, Balm in Gilead has narrators who describe the 'hood sex trade in specific detail.
The play doesn't require interpretation so much as an orchestrator and traffic cop for its nearly non-stop motion and sound ( famously overlapping dialogue, a Wilson signature ). In that regard, this production is splendidly put together by director Jonathan Barry working with a big, bountiful company. Each player, even those with few words, finds precise individual qualities for the play's 28 characters, ably assisted by costume designer Mieka Van der Ploeg. Dan Stratton's slice-of-life diner set cleverly incorporates the real windows of the Den's second floor, allowing Chicago rooftops to provide urban ambience.
The controlled chaos eventually gels into a small story about Joe ( Japhet Balaban ), a small-time drug pusher, and Darlene ( Ashleigh Lathrop ) the naive kid newly arrived from Chicago with $12. Using words as music ( Wilson was heir to Tennessee Williams as king of poetic realism ), Wilson gives Darlene the big, fat aria in Act II as she recounts her near-marriage back in Chicago. This scene is effective not just because of Lathrop but because of the casebook study in listening provided by Cyd Blakewell, as the prostitute with whom Darlene shares her story. A scene like this takes two to tango.
Steppenwolf Theatre Company leapt to national fame with a 1981 production of Balm in Gilead, which left indelible impressions on those who saw it. This one will, too.