Tony Fitzpatrick’s latest show is his swan song to Chicago — the 55-year-old artist/poet/performer/provocateur is packing up and moving down to the Big Easy by the end of the year. But in “The Midnight City,” a show packed with Fitzpatrick’s lovely avian images, it’s the smaller and quieter bird who poignantly warbles the sweetest notes.
That would be Stan Klein, Fitzpatrick’s longtime assistant and collaborator with Firecat Projects (the gallery/publishing company that is producing this show). Klein was his sidekick in three previous performances over the past few years — “This Train,” “Stations Lost” and “Nickel History: The Nation of Heat.” In those endeavors, the trim and affable Klein served as a comic counterpoint to Fitzpatrick’s bearlike physique and verbal bluster, even as common elements in their personal histories (distant and disapproving fathers, insecurity about their own chosen careers in the arts) came into play.
This time around, Klein takes center stage and leaves a lasting impression that rivals Fitzpatrick’s well-established, take-no-prisoners persona. Klein has been doing his own social-media creative project in the form of Facebook posts about himself and his alter egos — “Leo,” who works as an usher at Wrigley Field (a job that Stan tried and failed to get in 2012’s “Nickel History”), and “Vito De Salvo,” a swaggering bad boy who, as Klein explains in “The Midnight City,” came into being when he felt his real self was overlooked at art school.
Or, as Anna Fermin sings at the very beginning of the show — Fermin and guitarist John Rice provide lovely musical interludes throughout) — “you get lost in the crowd.” One can’t imagine that ever being true of Fitzpatrick, but with Klein, it’s easy to imagine him being shouted down in a world of bigger and louder sorts — like the guy sitting on the other side of the stage.
This is a show that is about many things, and Fitzpatrick and adapter and director Ann Filmer mostly succeed at tying them together while allowing many of the smaller asides to stand on their own. The biggest subject, of course, is mortality — the “midnight city” of the title. There is a moving symmetry between Fitzpatrick’s elegiac reminiscences of Lou Reed and Klein’s memories of his mentor, the color-field painter Kenneth Noland. It’s not just human mortality, though — Fitzpatrick is also mourning the death of the things that he loved about Chicago, from the old Cock Robin hamburger chain to the imminent demise of Hot Doug’s. (He wears a T-shirt from the latter.)
Though he starts out by claiming that his move to New Orleans is because “I just want to be warm and draw birds,” it’s clear that he, like many of us, is starting to wonder if the old can-do spirit that built the greatest architecture in America still exists amid shuttered public schools (the mayor may want to skip this one), where a certain blowhard from the East plasters his name on a shiny tower. (Fitzpatrick’s one-line description of Donald Trump really needs to be savored firsthand.)
But it’s also about the enduring power of friendship. Fitzpatrick notes how many great Chicago elbow-throwers have gone the way of the dodo (while giving a tip of the hat to photographer Art Shay and the Tribune’s Rick Kogan — both of whom were in the front row opening night). Fitzpatrick also revisits the Eastern European woman with whom he had a love/hate neighbor relationship (a comic centerpiece of “This Train”) — and shamefacedly admits that he didn’t know her first name until he visited her toward the end in the nursing home. (For the record, it’s Magda.)
And then there are the birds — projected in Kristin Reeves’ colorful video design (interspersed with Chicago street footage), carved figurines that stand like refugees from a Joseph Cornell box on William Boles’ battered-boards set, sung about by Fermin in musicalized excerpts of Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” A fan of hobos, Fitzpatrick recounts a story from an old rail-rider he knew in his bartending days who proves that not only is hope the thing with feathers, as Emily Dickinson noted, but feathers can be totems of hope.
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Fittingly, as Fitzpatrick flies the coop, he leaves the stage and the city to Klein, whose understated observations about compassion and community suggest that Chicago isn’t done yet. Not as long as Stan, Vito and Leo are singing out.
When: Through Oct. 19
Where: Steppenwolf Garage, 1624 N. Halsted St.
Running time: 90 minutes
Tickets: $25 at 312-335-1650 or steppenwolf.org