Victory Gardens roared back to life this past weekend with a provocative, free-thinking and highly entertaining new play from Zayd Ayers Dohrn that offers a strikingly even-handed look at the issue of controversial campus speakers and comes infused with much delicious cynicism about academic virtue signaling.
Given that Dohrn infuses his thoughts on this hot-button issue within a sexual web suggesting that some of the more veiled lives of some administrators, faculty members and students do not necessarily gel with their public personas, the piece also appears likely to attract some measure of outrage. By intention, clearly.
A few people left an intermission. Not me. Far too daring a show.
Nor did the large number of students present at Friday night’s performance, some of whom vocalized their reaction to such an extent that it appeared pre-planned by the director, Eddie Torres, although by no means in every case. Either way, the reaction fits the premise of Dohrn’s play, which looks at a power structure within a humanities department in the face of an invitation made to a Ben Shapiro or Milo Yiannopoulos-like figure (in this case a former student) to address the campus body and the violent reaction that ensues.
Dohrn is not only exploring the role of the university along the familiar fault lines of where or when the educationally desirable tolerance for opposing ideas runs into the counter-argument of the immorality of “platforming,” although that is an interesting topic in and of itself. Ranging more deeply, he is exploring the gulf between what we say we believe and how we actually act.
Dohrn, who is the son of the longtime radicals Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers and who has taught for several years at Northwestern University, certainly has enjoyed a catbird’s seat on the culture wars of academia.
“The Humanities” has been around for quite a while, and I suspect it scared off several nonprofit theaters. It was one of the winning plays showcased, bravely so, at the Eugene O’Neill Center in Connecticut back in 2019. I was there that summer and heard all kinds of buzz but did not see the show.
Torres’ new production has some very distinguished and talented Chicago actors, including Steve Pickering, whose work I have not seen in a long time. Pickering is very poignant as the aging professor who extended the invitation, only to find that it bites back hard and feeds his enemies; not that Dohrn or Pickering let this character off the hook.
In a strong ensemble that also features Isa Arciniegas, Naomi Evans, Daniil Krimer, Devaughn Asante Loman, Derrick Sanders III and Sabine Wan, I clocked especially notable work from Ernest Bentley, playing the new Black faculty member at the university who decides in the end that these people are unbearable and irredeemable. Also of note is Piper Murphy, a young newcomer to the city who throws herself into some very intense scenes and convinces us that neither she nor her character has planned a future escape.
Indeed, all the individual scenes are intensely acted here (the show is very much of the old-school Chicago style) and, as a whole, they work better than the transitions, which still needed work in the final preview I saw. (I’d also note that Victory Gardens has a lot of recovery work to do on such things as ticketing, customer service and lobby concessions. But those are side issues when the show is this alive).
There are times when it feels like maybe Dohrn wanted to write a screenplay more than a play. That’s not unusual and not always a bad thing, just as long as the dead air gets taken out of a show that still needed to pick up pace.
This is especially important because this “The Humanities” is conceived very much as a live experience wherein the artists set up the provocations and then leave the audience to bring its own prejudices and arrive at its own conclusions.
As such, it’s ideally timed with the beginning of the school year at the many campuses around the city. I hope some first-year students find their way there.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic
Review: “The Humanities” (3.5 stars)
When: Through Oct. 4
Where: Victory Gardens Biograph Theater, 2433 N. Lincoln Ave.
Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes
Tickets: $59-$65 at eventbrite.com
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