Theater Week: Fulfillment Center and The Realistic Joneses

Chicago Theater Week is coming up and it is probably one of the most interesting weeks of the year for me. Of course, it's never just a week and plays start before the week and continue on afterwards.


In my first year I went to four plays in a week. That was an overkill and in years since, I have used a different approach.What I value most from TW is that it introduces me to theaters that I absolutely did not know about. The Goodman, Steppenwolf, Chicago Theater etc are good but the theater there isn't always what I enjoy. In recent months, the plays that I see on there are also not plays I want to watch -- either the description feels too vague or the plot is just not for me. I know that I like my plays to be at least somewhat solid -- I need a beginning, a story and some sort of an end. Metaphors and all are fine in small doses, but if everything is a metaphor for something or a tangent, then the play is not for me.  Note, I am not calling them bad plays. They have their place and they have their people. I am just not one of them.

In the last two weeks, we went for two plays and honestly I was pleasantly surprised (we've seen some that felt real shitty and a few months ago, walked out of one at Steppenwolf). I must say they were both at small theaters, one with a very bare bones set. Both have fairly tight seating, no coat checks and both these plays had no intermissions. If you are like me and have to pee pretty regularly, that is not a great thing. Also, if like me you have at least two bags post the work day, plus a giant coat, it is cramped. But I recognize that this is the price of watching quality theater put on by people/groups that do not have access to large amounts of donations and grants in the same way I imagine the Goodmans and Steppenwolfs do.




The Realistic Joneses at Theater Wit

This was our first visit to Theater Wit and I will go back, when there is another play there I want to watch. This was a preview and so at the beginning they did tell us that at the end, they would request the audience to wait and give their feedback. I was not one of those because I had to spring out of my seat and into the bathroom. The play is about two couples, an older couple who has been in this town for a while and a younger couple who have just moved into town. Both are the Jones. The husband in the older couple has a rare disease and the doctor who discovered it lives in that town, which anchors them over there. The wife has left work and is taking care of her husband, who himself is shown to be scared and unwilling to understand his treatment. It is obvious that talking is not his way of expressing himself.

The younger couple feel a little jarring in the beginning: him being a sort of goofy smartass and her seemingly intense and flighty. Still, there is humor since their first interaction with the older Jones (I no longer if I am using the s/ses/apostrophe correct here). One of my favorite lines has to be when Pony, the younger woman asks about the quality of schools in the town and when the older couples asks her do they have kids, she responds with "oh no, it's just that John (her husband) hates stupid children".

Their daily lives keep intersecting although it is not clear why the younger couple have landed in this town. Slowly it emerges that John also has the same rare disease, although he has not confided in his wife. Their relationship seems to be surface-level, even though eventually it doesn't end that way.

The part that I wasn't impressed with was when the older man and Pony sleep together -- to me it feeds into the trope that if a man and woman who are not partnered are thrown together, there must be some sexual outcome.

It ends with a death, but not of any of the Joneses', their lives are still left to unfurl and perhaps unravel some more.

The set for this show was quite marvelous, it moved in and out and you could truly see the couples sitting outside on the patio, listening to the crickets and watching the stars.

Note: this was a book and then a Browadway play as well. There is an informative (and less amateur) review of the Chicago play at this link.

Fulfillment Center at Red Orchid Theater

Again, a first visit to this theater. It's very close to the main Second City location as well. There was no set except a stage. The cast had some props that they moved around to create the idea of a room, a chair, a car and more. The fact that the set or lack thereof mattered so less is a testimony to how powerful the performances were.

This is set in a town in New Mexico, where John is a manager at something called the Fulfillment Center, which reminds me of what I know about Amazon warehouses. Susan is passing through the town, when her car breaks down. She is somewhat a singer and somewhat a drifter. She convinces John to give her a job in the center, where the holiday season has put John, who already doubts his capabilities, under further stress with times and numbers that aren't working out.

Johns' girlfriend, Maddy, moves from New York to be with him and that move is clearly a strain on her from the moment she lands there. The town with its emptiness and adobe houses, scares her. She feels that people stare at her and she doesn't make sense there. So she works from home, she drinks and she looks for encounters because as she puts it "the sex is nice but not great but nice". On the night she arrives, Josh pulls a ring out of his pocket and she screams. Multiple times. He then tells her he was just trying to see if it fits and she likes it, but that doesn't save the situation.

Susan, who is living out of a tent, comes across Alex who is living out of his care after a woman in Albuquerque threw him out. He is tinkering with his car when she approaches him and almost wheedles him into conversation. You get the sense that Susan cannot be silent, silence is her enemy. Alex also happens to be the person Maddy meets in an encounter, that felt seedy and simply through the actor's voices and gesture and nothing else. At a later stage, Maddy invites Alex to her house where she talks about her life. We see Alex drinking, which he has not done so far because he claims he has had bad experiences. He drinks and drinks and starts telling Maddy about his life and his words and language scare her. There is a tense moment where it is entirely possible he will strike her, him facing her, her holding a knife. He then steps back and tells her he is not like that and walk away.

The play ends with Maddy and Josh at a stone sculpture site which are meant to make humans understand their diminished scale. Eventually they both acknowledge they hate the sculptures, and amid tears and jokes make their way to a cafe. This is the first time in the play I could see why they were together.

Susan has finally convinced Alex to drive her to Maine, which was her original destination. She continues talking, which is what seemingly causes Alex to scream again and again. To me, it was a good moment for her to ask him if something was bothering him but she did not. I imagine she knew she would not like the answer. She gives him some sleeping pills so he can sleep and the scene ends with her on the side of the road, calling her sister and begging her to come and get her, that she needs help because she has made some bad choices in her life.