It seems like Ann Keen was destined to direct “Three the Hard Way.” After all, it’s been following her around for years.
“Back in 1995, it won a playwriting contest at my old college in Minnesota,” she said.
When she did her internship at The Cleveland Play House, the woman who taught her playwriting class had appeared in the play’s original staged reading.
“And when I got to Chicago, I was auditioning as an actor. I literally got cast in the play as one of my first professional productions,” Keen said. “The production got cancelled because the producer’s mother got sick. I was like, ‘this play keeps following me.'”
While the play didn’t quite fit the mission of the Chicago theater company she founded, Polarity Ensemble Theatre, she “always kind of kept it in my back pocket.”
Now, the play has followed her to St. Charles. Directed by Keen, “Three the Hard Way,” runs Feb. 23-March 18 at Steel Beam Theatre, where it is making its Midwest professional premiere. Performances are at 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays and at 3 p.m. Sundays.
“They have the perfect space for it, because it’s such an intimate play, I never saw it in a huge theater,” Keen said. “It has much more impact when you’re right there, watching these women sort out their relationship with their father. And each other.”
Describing it as a drama “with some fun in the dysfunction,” the play follows three sisters who had very different experiences as children, Keen said. Their mother died when they were young, and their relationship with their father is complicated.
“There are some laughs. Two sisters cannot get along, and watching them try to be in the room together is hilarious,” Keen said. “They were so close in age, and they did not get along. And then they had to be parents because of their absentee professional pool playing father.”
The sisters travel to Reno to sort through their dysfunction about how they were raised and their relationships with each other.
“The issues of the past are always with us. And they manifest in different ways. Especially when people come together and haven’t seen each other in a while and have a dysfunctional family, these things tend to bubble to the surface,” said Keen, who lives in St. Charles. “In the end it really is about the three of them trying to find a new way to have a relationship with each other and actually be a family. Because they were never a family.”
Featuring a cast of four, Keen gives the play a PG-13 rating based on language. She keeps the play set in the ’90s, when it was written, because of references that were significant to the era.
“It had some very specific lines to that time,” she said. “So you’re going to see some lovely ’90s fashion.”
Keen previously directed two other works at Steel Beam, including “Crimes of the Heart” in 2011. She has also appeared on stage there in several productions too.
Calling “Three the Hard Way” non-conventional, it’s also kind, sweet and funny, she said.
More Top Picks Best Tablets For Reading Pdfs
Kathy Cichon is a freelance reporter for The Beacon-News.
‘Three the Hard Way’
When: Feb. 23-March 18
Where: Steel Beam Theatre, 111 W. Main St., St. Charles
Tickets: $28 adult; $25 senior, $23 student
Information: 630-587-8521; www.steelbeamtheatre.org