The Humanities at Victory Gardens Theater thru October 4th

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“No Easy Answers in Victory Gardens’ Captivating: The Humanities Playing at Victory Gardens Through Oct 4th - Review By: Paul Lisnek

*** ½ /4

“No Easy Answers in Victory Gardens’ Captivating: The Humanities”

Zayd Ayers Dohrn’s “The Humanities” arrives at a relevant and turbulent moment for both higher education and Chicago theater, and its world-premiere production at Victory Gardens makes the most of that collision of interests. This play is a smart, combative, dramatically alive new play making its world premiere and it asks audiences not just to choose a side, but to see the contradictions within the side they choose.

Directed with Chicago legend Eddie Torres, this volatile campus drama transforms a debate over a controversial invited speaker into a study of power, desire, institutional self-preservation, and the volatile gap between the values people claim and their instincts that surface in the face of a threat.

The acting, for the most part, is uniformly strong. Ernest Bently gives Jonas a compelling, calibrated urgency. He lets the character’s intelligence and vulnerability live parallel to each other without ever pushing for effect. Steve Pickering brings a grounded, forceful and often humorous presence to Martin. He indeed finds both the pain and humor in the role’s internally competing convictions. As Milta, Isa Arciniegas is strong and emotionally conflicted often simultaneously as she struggles with what she knows to be right and her internal desires. Daniil Krimer’s Lukia rounds out the ensemble with an open, engaging performance—always appearing likable, we wonder where the danger lies beneath his youthful energy. There is more complexity under the surface than we realize when we first meet him. 

There is no shortage of plays these days that announce themselves as “ripped from the headlines.” What The Humanities shows us is that headlines are not arguments; they are pressure points. Dohrn’s The Humanities finds its force not simply in its familiar premise—a controversial speaker is invited to an elite American university—but rather in the mess of the aftermath. Dohrn understands that freedom of speech on a campus is never only about the discourse. It is about status, money, sexual politics, racial identity, image management, and the resentment triggered by political language that creates a fracture in the foundation of an institution.

That is Dohrn’s achievement: he does not present a civics-class debate in isolation. Rather, he creates a social environment in which every person has something such as moral principles to lose and hide. The questions addressed, such as who deserves a platform, where does institutional responsibility begin and end—are expressed as real and urgent. The Humanities is most compelling when it transforms with speed lofty questions into personal ones.

Dohrn does not seek to score points for one ideological camp or another. Instead, he challenges the approach and tactics of thought all sides. It becomes clear that one’s own position can quickly be seen as living with contradiction.

The Humanities will provoke discussion and disagreement—it has to do so because the characters are scared, ambitious, wounded, vain, and ill- equipped to meet the enormity of the moment. The play’s best passages are when the academicians who have built their careers around parsing language come to realize that language is no longer sufficient to meet the day.

Eddie Torres directs with the kind of intelligence this material requires. A veteran Chicago artist and Victory Gardens’ interim artistic leader, Torres understands that these characters do more than debate from a fixed self-position. We get the building of a crucial sense of escalation. The focused upon controversial lecture is not an isolated event. It is an accumulation of a growing crisis. Scenes gather pressure and conflicts emerge as emotional events, not just talking points. 

These characters can be wrong without becoming cartoonish. In their own way many of these characters believe in their own integrity. 

NOTE: The world premiere carries added symbolic weight as Victory Gardens returns to producing work at the historic Biograph Theatre after a prolonged and turbulent period in the company’s recent history. That fact need not be imposed on the play itself, but it’s hard not to feel its shadow on the evening. This is after all, a theater strongly reentering the public conversation with this new work about the fragile nature of institutions, and the high stakes of public accountability. It’s hard not to see the connection. I’m guessing this was intentional in the selection of this play.

Victory Gardens has long been identified with the development of contemporary American plays; it’s been seen as a writer’s theater. Chicago audiences enjoy sophisticated challenging theater and will most likely appreciate the essential nature of the conversation offered in play. Indeed, The Humanities is a fitting if not symbolic reintroduction to Victory Gardens return to the theater scene. It may not leave everyone satisfied, but it should leave many people arguing, reconsidering, and perhaps recognizing their own reflexes in the play’s most uncomfortable mirrors. The Humanities is not simply about culture wars; it is about what those conflicts reveal when civilized language and principle meet the realities of institutional power and human need.

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The Humanities plays at Victory Gardens Theater and runs thru October 4th. Tickets can be purchased at: www.VictoryGardens.org