Michael Redfield and Hugo Armstrong (Photo by Jeff Lorch)
Reviewed by Deborah Klugman
Rogue Machine Theater at The Matrix Theater
Through March 9
RECOMMENDED
As the title for a play, Evanston Salt Costs Climbing seems rather a mouthful. It suggests the lead-in for an essay on pedestrian urban challenges, as opposed to a teaser for a dramatic or comic event. This is no accident. According to an interview with playwright Will Arbery published in Northwestern Magazine in 2023, the phrase was randomly plucked from the newspaper at the behest of an instructor of his when he was studying playwriting at Northwestern University in 2014. Arbery’s assignment at the time was to write a play inspired by a local headline. It occurred to him, he said, to opt for something “boring” — which is how this gawky title and eventually the entire play came to be.
The plot is launched around a pair of blue-collar workers — Basil (Hugo Armstrong) and Peter (Michael Redfield), whose job is to salt the streets and highways of the community to keep traffic moving and citizens safe during blustery, snowy winters. Basil, who emigrated from Greece, is a single man upwards of advancing years, with aspirations to write short stories (In the opening scene he is reading one of them to Peter). Peter, somewhat younger, is married with a daughter. The pair are good buddies as well as co-workers who share a male camaraderie (albeit with a limited vocabulary and a reliance on the f-bomb to relay their emotions). But whereas Basil, while something of a cypher, tends to be reflective and laidback, Peter is moody and depressive, and frequently airs thoughts about suicide that Basil must swiftly move to assuage.
The other principal character is their friend and employer, Jane Maiwan (Leslie Fera), an enthusiastic and hardworking city employee who helps oversee such public services as snow removal, a vital necessity in wintry Evanston that is becoming increasingly expensive as the price of salt rises. So the conscientious and green-minded Maiwan has been searching for alternatives — and has come up with a possibility of replacing snowmobile trucks with a newer de-icing technology that would be more efficient — at the same time, as she’s aware, that it would put Basil and Peter out of work.
Along with the displacement of humans by technology, Arbery’s story takes on a broader existential theme, one that reflects on the fear and anxiety in the lives of these closeted denizens of a small Midwestern city. Besides Peter and his persistent reflections on suicide, there are the troubled ruminations of Maiwan’s stepdaughter, Jane Jr. (Kaia Gerber), who has trouble finding a reason to do anything at all; when asked by Maiwan what she aspires to, Jane Jr.’s answer is that she would like to marry a famous singer and live in a warm place. It’s a vague notion — not even a passionate yearning! — that she has no real intent to pursue. Jane also broods about floods and earthquakes destroying the east and west coasts of the United States, with hordes of refugees descending on Evanston as a last desperate place of refuge.
As to Basil, though he’s fine with his waking life, he’s subject to haunting dreams where he’s stalked by a woman in a purple hat. The only character whose concerns connect to the here and now is Maiwan, but she too finds it hard to sleep when she contemplates how the technological changes she herself advocates may lead to her friends losing their jobs.
Evanston Salt Costs Climbing is one of those plays wherein sterling execution hangs on the scrupulous intermingling of light and dark, the wacky with the serious, the humor with the gloom. With actors like Armstrong and Redfield, the expectation is (as one company member wrote in the program) an interplay along the lines of Godot’s Gogo and Didi. That hasn’t quite evolved; Redfield’s Peter to date is too much a despondent single-note presence as, in a lighter key, is Gerber’s Jane Jr. — not wholly generic but not fully inhabited either. Fera is appropriately lively as the relatable Maiwan, but there’s room for more shading and depth. The ever artful Armstrong skillfully shares his character’s complex internal narrative with gesture and nuance, but the ensemble work as a whole needs more cohesion for this versatile actor to shine at his best.
The staging works well, with scenic designer Mark Mendelson effectively utilizing the wide, shallow stage to serve each element in the story: the office where the guys report to work, Maiwan’s living room that she shares with Jane Jr., and, most impressively, the front of the garage where the vehicles are kept, whose door rumbles ominously open (sound by Christopher Moscatiello) to reveal Basil and Peter perched on the front seat of their creaky, cranky truck, trying their best to get to work. Christine Cover Ferro’s work-clothes costuming for the men adds a welcome splash of color. Moscatiello’s sound design also bolsters the winter landscape (the snow pelting down) created by Michele Hanzelova-Bierbauer’s projections, while Dan Weingarten’s lighting underscores the ambience of each sequence’s time and place, from the story’s down home interiors to the spookier other-worldly spaces where the most unexpected event occurs.
Rogue Machine Theater, Matrix Theatre, 7657 Melrose Blvd., West Hollywood. Fri.-Sat., 8 pm, Sun., 3 pm, Mon., 8 pm, dark Feb. 3; thru March 9. https://www.roguemachinetheatre.org/ Running time: one hour and 45 minutes with no intermission.
