It’s time the ‘burbs got their fair shake.
“I just grew tired of hearing everyone always slamming and dumping on the suburbs — that they’re all the same, that they’re boring because that wasn’t my experience,” Mat Smart said. “So this in a way is my love letter to Naperville in defense of Naperville and the suburbs in general.”
After premiering Off-Broadway two years ago, the award-winning playwright’s comedy “Naperville” is set to open Sept. 6 at Theater Wit in Chicago. The play tells the story of Howard, who is considering moving back home to Naperville after an accident leaves his mother, Candice, blind.
“A central question in the play, and in my own life, is I’ve left home and live in New York City to pursue my own dreams to be a playwright. So there’s always that tension of questioning ‘Am I being selfish by being away?'” Naperville native Smart said. “Or am I doing exactly what my family would hope for me to be doing, which is pursuing what I love. That’s a big question in the play, is whether the son should come home and be in Naperville or stay in Seattle, which is where the character in the play lives.”
The play runs through Oct. 16 at Theater Wit, with performances at 8 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday and at 2 p.m. Sunday. There is no performance Sept. 9.
“I’m really excited to see what people think of it because people in New York for the most part, had no opinion or knowledge of Naperville,” Smart said. “And so here in the Chicago area, people are going to bring in their own ideas about the town.”
A 1997 graduate of Waubonsie Valley High School, Smart was born and raised in Naperville. While he has lived in New York on and off for about eight years, Smart returns to the area several times a year to visit family.
“I loved growing up there and loved all the people that influenced me — my friends and teachers and family,” he said.
It was at Waubonsie where Smart first fell in love with theater, he said, especially after being cast in the “powerful story” of John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” his sophomore year.
“Initially at Waubonsie, I was really into band. I played the trumpet. And at the end of my freshman year, they just needed a bunch of guys to audition for the play because there’s all these guy roles and very few guys auditioning, so you’re guaranteed a part,” Smart said.
“So a friend of mine convinced me to do that, and I just fell in love with it. I still played in the band throughout the four years at Waubonsie, but I started to do the plays and musicals.”
After high school, he earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Evansville and a Master of Fine Arts in playwriting from University of California, San Diego.
He uses his extensive travel experience in his plays, having visited every continent and all 50 states.
For three months he worked as a janitor on a science base in the Antarctica. His resulting play, “The Royal Society of Antarctica,” won the 2015 Equity Jeff Award for Best New Play when produced at Gift Theatre in Chicago.
“I’m trying to write a play set on each continent,” Smart said. “I just have one left. But then I also write a lot about my home, and Naperville or the Chicago area. So I thought it was funny that I had a play about the Antarctica that premiered in Chicago last year, but then I have a play about the Cubs that’s been in New York and Massachusetts, but not in the Chicago area.
“So I started to wonder if people like to hear stories about places far away versus their own community,” he said. “But with Theatre Wit doing this play, that streak has been broken, so I’m excited to see what people think.”
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Smart was recently in Chicago for rehearsals of “Naperville” at Theater Wit. While working on the production, some changes were made from the version that premiered in New York.
“The biggest thing I’m rewriting is the ending. I think the ending of plays are especially challenging. When we did the production in New York, it was all pretty quick. I had written a play just seven months before the production, which is unusual to get to produce something so quickly for me,” he said. “So I’ve gotten the chance to think about it more and spend some more time with it.”
“Every day I brought in new pages to try new things,” Smart said by phone from New York. “I’m pretty happy where we landed. But I’m sure during previews I’ll keep changing it.”
And then there’s the setting. The play takes place inside a Caribou Coffee in downtown Naperville, which is where Howard and his mother run into his former classmate, Anne — an expert on the suburb’s founder, Capt. Joseph Naper.
All of the cast members, Smart said, are “very, very funny. So I think the play will be quite hilarious.
“One exciting thing is there’s a character who’s supposed to play the clarinet. But not that many people play the clarinet that are professional actors. In New York we just sort of pantomimed it and used a recording. But the actor here (Andrew Jessop) playing T.C. is quite an accomplished clarinet player, so we’re going to be able to do a lot of things live, which I wasn’t really expecting.”
Smart plans to return to Chicago at the end of the month in time for the show’s previews. In the meantime, he is busy working on two new plays, both of which are commissions.
One is about the friendship between Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass for Geva Theatre in Rochester, N.Y.
“I’m also working on a play with The Second City to write a comedy for them,” Smart said. “They’re trying to get more into scripted works. So it’s sort of an experiment, so I’ll be back and forth to Chicago over the next year working on that as well.”
After that, he will be working on another play based on his travels.
“I just hit my last continent this year. I went and volunteered on an organic farm outside of Mendoza, Argentina,” he said. “South America was the one continent I hadn’t been to, so I was down there about two months. That’s the one play I haven’t written yet. I’ll probably get to work on that next year sometime.”
In the meantime, he’s excited to see what kind of reaction “Naperville” gets with the production so close to home.
“I hope that people in the city and suburbs, especially Naperville, come out to see it,” Smart said. “I think it will hopefully teach them something about Naperville’s history that they didn’t know, but hopefully make them feel good about where they’re from.”
Kathy Cichon is a freelance writer.
‘Naperville’
When: Sept. 6-Oct. 16
Where: Theater Wit, 1229 W. Belmont Ave., Chicago
Tickets: $12-$36
Information: 773-975-8150 or theaterwit.org