YOUR HOME IN THE WEST
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
But let’s not forget John Osborne and Arnold Wesker, from whose kitchen-sink working-class dramas Your Home in the West has devolved. (There actually is a kitchen sink in the Steppenwolf production, though it’s sort of hidden stage left, more like a reference than a part of the set.) Nor should we overlook Jean Genet, whose phrase “When slaves love one another, it’s not love” is quoted in the program notes. Nor Clifford Odets’s radical rhetoric, nor Eugene O’Neill’s long-winded dashing of delusions, nor the down-and-out depravity of Tobacco Road, nor the tragic pretensions of Arthur Miller, whose Death of a Salesman this play’s ending seems both to borrow from and to mock. There’s even a dollop of Steppenwolf’s own Grapes of Wrath here, when lead actress Rondi Reed whips out her breast to sarcastically offer milk to a mother-obsessed man before hauling the man’s dead mother off the stage like poor old Grandma Joad.
Your Home in the West has bits and pieces of all these antecedents–and the power and believability of none of them. It’s not that the problems Wooden’s writing about aren’t real, but that the characters he’s invented to embody those problems are so patently arranged to make their points. You want male anger? Here, take Micky Robson, the thuggish bully who struts his male bravado while clinging parasitically to the women around him. (He’s fiercely protective, though, of his retarded younger brother Maurice, who faithfully follows him like King Lear’s Fool.) You want female frustration? Take Micky’s ex-wife Jean, a former hooker who has custody of their children but must constantly wrangle to minimize Micky’s lawless influence on the kids.
Your Home in the West lambastes England for subjecting its underclass to fickle charity giveaways. The actors and designers of Steppenwolf Theatre are luckier; this AT&T-funded show gives the company what England has failed to give Wooden’s characters–jobs–and they do them well. Meanwhile, a few blocks from Steppenwolf (but a world away from most of the theater’s subscribers), the realities this play attempts to dramatize are played out daily in the apartments of Cabrini-Green. I wonder if somewhere in Great Britain a highly acclaimed provincial repertory company is presenting a play about impoverished Chicagoans; meanwhile, going all the way to England to find this script is a little like–well, like carrying coals to Newcastle.
