The Chicago playwright Netta Walker says her new, gale-force drama “Hayward” is a riff on both “Electra” and “Hamlet.” And, indeed, the central character here follows the directions of a ghost of her father and also has the Sophoclean heroine’s wild-eyed, somewhat deranged determination to avenge her dad’s death, whatever the personal cost.
Walker has written a riveting, 90-minute world premiere play for Gift Theatre actors willing to dive so deep that they almost get down to the Red Line subway below Steppenwolf’s 1700 Theatre. She is very much in the same territory as Tracy Letts’ “August: Osage County,” Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ “Purpose,” and that definitive episode of “The Bear” called “The Feast of the Seven Fishes,” wherein an entire family nearly killed each other on Christmas Eve.
Walker is a Black playwright, and her play, she writes in the script, is set “in the deep, real, Black American South.” But it’s also a potent new entry into that most traditional of American genres of plays about a family, raw in the days following someone’s death, that rips itself into pieces.
I’ve no idea to what degree this is culled from Walker’s own story, although the sensitive central character, Luna, definitely has an unmistakable authorial vibe. And experience has taught me that writers rarely pen such visceral works by imagining them out of whole cloth. I was particularly unprepared for this play Sunday night because the last work by Walker I saw, “Keerah” at Definition Theatre last spring, was so disciplined and carefully structured I thought it could be a pitch for a Hollywood movie. “Keerah” was cool, but “Hayward” has to be the real Walker deal. Aptly enough, she saved it for one of Steppenwolf’s venues.
This talented new voice in Chicago playwriting is lucky indeed to have the director AmBer Montgomery, whose staging is relentlessly intense, as well as this particular cast. Many writers penning this kind of play are not so lucky. Here, an entire cast of actors go to the wall.
Take, for example, Sydney Charles, playing a recovering addict who at one point, appears to overdose. Such was the veracity of this moment, you could see people look around the room nervously, wondering if something had gone wrong. The veteran and famously genial Chicago actor Alfred H. Wilson, best known for August Wilson monologues, not only gets into this seemingly dangerous room, given that every other character on the stage wants to kill or otherwise harm his Pastor Johnson, the Claudius/Aegisthus of Walker’s imagination, he literally has to dance around Sydney Lynne’s set to stay safe from bodies lunging wildly in his direction, although he gives as good as he gets.
There is very solid work here from Victor Musoni, Gregory Fenner, Shanésia Davis and Watson Swift, but this is Ireon Roach’s show. At one point, she sits on the couch, her Luna immobilized by anger and grief, caught between her love for her imperfect family, now torn asunder, and her fury at the man she blames for maybe more than he deserves. I won’t quickly forget that moment, actually, because in its stasis was so rich an evocation of what tends to get easily defined as depression or a mental-health crisis, but that really is a human body’s response to trauma, both short-term and life-long. It is, as the scholars say, one heck of a performance.
I don’t mean to imply “Hayward” is perfect. I think the first scene, which is shaded a tad too much towards humor after a curtain speech that sets the wrong tone, should come with the same dramatic intensity and veracity that then takes over the play. And precisely what this Pastor-hypocrite-maybe murderer has done perhaps remains a tad too oblique. Sometimes when you see a play forged with this level of observational prowess, you want to suggest to the writer that maybe there’s room for more of the why, of the what this might mean beyond the world of the play and into the laps of the audience. Walker is young; that will come.
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Lord god, though, people will recognize these people and the damage they can do to those they love.
I know I did. And you don’t need to be from that deep, real, Black American South either. As with “A Strange Loop,” this is a barnstormer of a play about a sensitive, artistic soul trying and failing to escape the human mess around them/her, even as she also tries to navigate how it, he, forged her.
The very paradox that ripped Electra apart. And did a number on Hamlet, too.
Not to be missed, this raw “Hayward.” Bring your seatbelt.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic
Review: “Hayward” (4 stars)
When: Through Nov. 22
Where: Gift Theatre in Steppenwolf’s 1700 Theater, 1700 N. Halsted St.
Running time: 1 hour, 30 mins.
Tickets: $45-$50 at 312-335-1650 and steppenwolf.org