“It’s not just that Chicago has an overwhelming preference for realism, but that even within non-realist plays, the characters are made out to be as real as possible.”
The Chicago storefront scene is haunted by what could be called the Steppenwolf effect. As the “home of the dysfunctional family play,” Steppenwolf is known for their psychologically-driven, realist style where conflict emerges from messy interpersonal relationships. This is much of what Chicago’s famed storefront theater scene has to offer: “scrappy” aesthetics and “edgy” plays (or at least “edgier than Broadway”).
More often than not, those working in Steppenwolf’s shadow offer us a codified aesthetic of “edginess” rather than radical theater. “Edginess” is often measured in content alone: these are stories about people on the edge, talking about things people don’t talk about but should talk about. This ethos narrowly imagines the theater as a place to tackle “hot-button” issues.” In order to bring these issues home, audiences must be made to feel how these issues impact real people, living real lives. The theatrical medium is reduced to a mechanism of identification, amplified by the intimacy of the storefront’s limited seating. Audiences may encounter (often tokenized) forms of cultural difference, but the people we see onstage, while increasingly diverse in their backgrounds, are nevertheless fully fledged, psychologically complex, and caught in the flow of lived experience. (It should also go without saying that diverse casting and subject matter should be standard practice, not evidence of one’s position on the cutting edge.) Even when I see experimental plays in Chicago—usually those enshrined as canonical like works by Pinter, Brecht, or Churchill—the engine of the play is almost always treated as a psychological one. I often refer to this form of theatrical misinterpretation as “putting it through the empathy machine.” It’s not just that Chicago has an overwhelming preference for realism, but that even within non-realist plays, the characters are made out to be as real as possible.
As both a theater critic and a dramaturg, I take the theater to be a site of knowledge production. I return to live performance with endless hope that I will be taught how to see something I couldn’t have seen otherwise. Rancière might call this a “redistribution of the sensible,” Artaud the violent shattering of the “servile copies of reality,” Peter Brook the space in between the “anything that can happen” and the “something that must happen.” But as an avid theatergoer in Chicago, I often only catch brief sparks of theatrical innovation that diminish with sustained engagement. I want a theater that understands the asymmetrical relationship between the stage and the world outside of it and the sometimes seismic, sometimes hairline shifts that can occur in the act of reconciling their incommensurability. To my mind, a really good play gives you the tools to attempt this reconciliation without a map. It delivers theatrical pay offs—stunning, gasp-worthy moments of clarity—that leave something unexplained.
When Clifton Frei stepped off his stool in a shallow pool of water that covered the entire stage floor in TUTA’s recent production of Celine Song’s Tom & Eliza, I audibly gasped. The water didn’t register as anything other than a dark surface for the first hour of the production, undisturbed and calm while Frei, in the role of Tom, sat on his stool. To suddenly see the floor ripple before our eyes was not only a moment of gorgeous theatricality but a moment of thematic condensation—Tom is obsessed with the history of ancient rivers, taking baths in his own bodily excretions, and convincing his wife, Eliza, played by Seoyoung Park, to buy a waterbed. Water had accrued several meanings throughout the play and its sudden appearance onstage gave immediate texture to a set of overlapping metaphors. This is a specialty of TUTA’s, under the artistic direction of Aileen Wen McGroddy and Jacqueline Stone. In Tom & Eliza, McGroddy, in her role as director, plays with the texture of theatrical language, both of spoken text and scenic design, and how they collide, a sensibility that extends across her collaborations with costume and scenic designer, Tatiana Kahvegian, and lighting designer, Keith Parham. In Martin Crimp’s Attempts On Her Life, McGroddy’s 2024 collaboration with Kahvegian and Parham, the audience enters the theater by walking through the set, ambling across a plush red carpet that extended wall to wall and passing through a curtain of slatted blinds before taking our seats. The walls were fully covered with aluminum foil and the scenery consisted of a stairway and a few pieces of furniture made from unfinished plywood. Tom & Eliza shares this style of lush minimalism. Staged inside an off-set black box elevated above the ground, Tom and Eliza sit on stools with two microphones hanging from the ceiling on either side of them. They are costumed in fleshy, cream tones and lit from below. The textures of the world call attention to themselves; the distinct materiality of this world matters and we are rewarded for attention as new atmospheres bloom onstage.
Tom & Eliza by Celine Song, dir. Aileen McGroddy (2025). Photos by Candice Conner, Oomphotography.
In McGroddy’s hands, language is another texture. Most of the action in Song’s play is narrated to the audience in forms of direct address marked by repetitions—“My mother and father made love. I was born. I grew up” is a recurring preamble to the play’s various mundane events. Song’s play has two competing dramaturgies: one tidy and one messy. If Tom is subsumed by water, his wife, Eliza, is consumed by fire. She is a librarian with a compulsion to burn books. This is a Manichean world, with Tom and Eliza locked in a dualistic struggle. Yet the metaphorical poles that structure their lives at once cancel each other out and bleed into one other. On the one hand, Eliza burns the many books Tom has written about the great civilizations birthed along great rivers; but Tom also gives us a graphic description of his own conception, its own mingling of fire and water as his father’s sperm swims into his mother’s “hot egg.” This is a world where the forces that created civilization also destroy it; and yet, this grand symbolic order culminates with our two protagonists fucking behind the dumpster next to the 99-cent pizza place where they conceived the next generation of “pizza children,” “dumpster children.” “I’m horrified,” Tom says at the birth of his children. “What do you need?” he asks them. “Are you even human?” This world is black and white, hot and cold, but it’s also squishy, smelly, and sticky.
Despite reviewers complaining that “we don’t get a lot of narrative clarity in terms of the reasons why Tom and Eliza are the way they are” and that we are not able to “fully understand these characters and their motivations,” McGroddy does not treat Tom & Eliza as a play populated with people who “are the way they are” because of complex backstories and psychological profiles. She feels no need to twist Song’s play into knots in order to wring out answers to those critics who demand to know, “why would a librarian want to burn books?” And neither does Seoyoung Park, for whom being a book-burning librarian is not a contradiction at all. Park is one of my favorite Chicago actors because she is able to give textured richness to language without overdetermining its relationship to character. Her Eliza is not a unified, coherent subject who knows why she does things. Eliza wants to burn books, that’s all the clarity that Park needs. Her eyes burn with every mention of flames.
Of course, Song’s dramaturgy is far from new. Since Elinor Fuchs noted the “death of character” in theater after modernism, or Hans-Thies Lehmann put forward the notion of the “postdramatic,” we should be familiar with plays that foreground text over plot and scaffold worlds that are not mediated through the individual. Yet even when plays within these traditions are produced, they are met with expectations of narrative clarity and psychological realism, a mandate that extends across the American theater.
Attempts on Her Life by Martin Crimp dir. Aileen McGroddy(2024). Candice Conner, Oomphotography.
I am grateful for companies like TUTA who refuse such mandates. Instead, in Tom & Eliza as in other productions, they offer rich theatrical ecologies that demand interpretation. After seeing a TUTA show, you might wait at the Brown line stop for your train–a rare instance where “the el” tracks are level with the street–or walk through the tree-lined streets of Ravenswood Manor on your way to a nearby bar in Lincoln Square. You might puzzle over how exactly TUTA fit a load-bearing, water-tight tub in the back of their elevated stage. In my case, I drove home up Western Avenue to my house in Edgewater talking to my partner about how we might reconcile the world of Tom & Eliza with our own. We might want to trace the origins of civilization from the “cradles” of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers to the “cradle” of our own “pizza children.” We might then want to record these great historical narratives in books that sit in libraries. But Tom & Eliza doesn’t allow history to conform so neatly to these narratives of progress. Song delivers us to a world that despises its history as much as it worships it—Eliza’s book burning is not only deemed lawful by the police but she is honored for her act of civil service by the city. Eliza, in her psychological unresolvability, makes us consider whether book-burning is not a condition of our purported march towards progress rather than its exception. My partner and I then turn to Tom, who turns pruney sitting in a bath of his own semen, piss, and shit, believing he is an oyster making a pearl, and ask each other: “What value are these pearls of wisdom, condensed from our own filth?”
“Should we have children?”
“I don’t know, should we?”
“Would you be horrified?”
“Would they even be human?”
Marissa Fenley is a Harper Schmidt Fellow in Theater and Performance Studies at the University of Chicago. She is also a dramaturg, sometimes-puppeteer, and avid Real Housewives fan.
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