TALKING TO MYSELF
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In this Northlight production, the acting ensemble is superb. The staging is stark but effective. The graphics are riveting. And the way the music weaves through the script is as magical and unobtrusive as a dream. Yet, despite its complex and often fascinating subject–Terkel himself–Talking to Myself is remarkably lightweight. After two acts and nearly 90 minutes of theater, this exercise in nostalgia seems a little too familiar.
We have to ask: Are we interested because the stories are really interesting? Or are we interested out of a certain civic loyalty? In Talking to Myself, Terkel tells us his life while evoking west-side jazz clubs, the Bughouse Square debates, gangsters, election chicanery, union organizing–the whole Chicago iconography. His command of Chicagoese–both the lexicon and the culture–is masterful, but then, he’s practically Chicago personified, isn’t he?
In a line somewhere near the middle of the play, the young Studs refers to Nelson Algren. The allusion is somewhat out of place, but it reveals the play’s aspirations. Unfortunately, although Terkel himself understands the grit and substance of Algren’s work, the stage version of Talking to Myself has nothing of Algren’s dark side. The reference then becomes gratuitous, and maybe cynically perfect, a cheap aside, for a suburban audience.
