Walk into the Theater Three at Theater Wit, and it feels like you are walking into a teenager’s bedroom.
Jonathan Berg-Einhorn’s set may be the best I’ve ever seen in this Belmont Avenue venue. With the audience arranged around the perimeter, the theater is filled with cushions, lights and the kind of decor associated with a highly creative young woman, perhaps one who has been obliged to spend a little too much time alone as her mom becomes yet more familiar with Margaritaville, as is the case in “Adolescent Salvation.” Writer Tim Venable’s closely observed play attracted some attention in Los Angeles and now has moved to Chicago, where it has gained some terrific young Chicago actors, including Piper Jean Bailey, who is a star in the making if ever this theater city had one. And that’s not the first time I’ve noted that.
Plays written about teenagers are not easy to pull off with authenticity and without condescension. But “Adolescent Salvation” builds its dramatic action slowly and cautiously, pulling you into the world of its central character, Bailey’s Natasha. Essentially, the audience is a fly on the wall during a sleepover Natasha is hosting for besties Taylor (Jordan Levene) and Taylor (Brandon Acosta). One is a girl, the other the pair’s self-described gay best friend with the same name.
All three of the characters are, to a greater or lesser extent, wounded souls. Some of what they do in the show will perhaps shock, although I think it’s important to understand that “Adolescent Salvation” is far removed from “Euphoria,” which traffics in extremes and thus inevitably complicates its moral messaging, or at least its observational determination, with commercial exploitation. That’s not at all what this play wants to do; it realizes that teenagers of 15 or so are far closer to children than adults. And it points out the dangerous deficiencies of adults who do not.
At the start of the show, everyone naturally is on their phone and if you’re a regular off-Loop theatergoer, you’ll clock immediately that the L.A.-based Guillermo Cienfuegos is a clear-eyed director who really knows what he is doing when it comes to physicality and emotional consciousness. We see the characters laze around in a variety of postures, their little screens illuminating their visages with the help of a sophisticated lighting design from Ellie Fey that pinpoints these characters’ isolation as they are turned into soporific consumers of, well, whatever they are being fed. They’re all together, of course, but what does that even mean now? Now, when teenagers are prey for the outside world even in what used to be their private spaces?
Finally, adults show up and in what circumstances they do so is best experienced without foreknowledge; suffice to say that the actors Maura Kidwell and Joe Foust craft a pair of hapless, equally wounded, endlessly defensive souls who are more pathetic than intentionally evil and thus all the more moving in their inadequacy.
Cienfuegos’ show is exceptionally well-acted by the entire cast, this being a company that holds its fictional characters close to the heart and is determined never to overplay in this intimate venue. That temptation would have blown this show apart. But it stays whole.
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Still, this is fundamentally a showcase for Bailey, a superb young actress already capable of formidable emotional depth and yet never showy. It’s a quite astonishingly empathetic performance, for sure, but also the kind of carefully calibrated one that typically only flourishes like this when a director is paying very close attention to its nuances.
I don’t claim that Venables’ play is saying anything new; at times, I thought of Kenneth Lonergan’s masterful “This is Our Youth,” a play from 1996 (also seen more recently at Steppenwolf Theatre) that seems to have provided something of a tri-teen template for “Adolescent Salvation.”
But the challenges of being a teenager now are inestimably different from being one in the 1990s and not only is an update entirely legitimate, but Venable actually makes it feel like he has more skin in the game as compared with the more observational and melancholy Lonergan oeuvre. And as a result, you fear more for the young characters. Especially Natasha.
Sure, these kids have Google Maps and Reels and reinforcing algorithms and whatever, but the human consequences of adult failure have not changed one jot.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic
Review: “Adolescent Salvation” (4 stars)
When: Through Oct. 3
Where: Theater Wit, 1229 W. Belmont Ave.
Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes
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Tickets: $32-$46 at (773) 975-8150 and theaterwit.org