April 13--The titular, 11-year-old hero of "Jabari Dreams of Freedom," the frank and compassionate new children's play from Nambi E. Kelley, goes to school in Chicago. Like too many of the real-life kids in his neighborhood, he lives with the constant threat of gun violence. He sees it on the news, which seems to revel in its presence. And one day he really feels its weight when one of his best friends falls to the ground.
Kelley's play with music, now in its world premiere with the Chicago Children's Theatre, is all about the struggle of Jabari's father to preserve his son's sense of hope in the face of such trauma. But for much of the show's 50-minute running time, Jabari has a dream of his own. Therein, President Barack Obama serves as his personal tour guide as Jabari visits many of the young heroes of the civil rights movement, including Claudette Colvin, the high school girl who became the first person arrested for resisting segregation on the buses of Montgomery, Ala., and Ruby Bridges, the brave little girl who found herself at the vanguard of change during the New Orleans school desegregation battle of 1960.
It's really a very excellent idea, with all kinds of educational value for any and all 11-year-olds (or thereabouts), regardless of where they are being raised. But I'm sure that Kelley wanted to speak specifically to kids who live with the mental stress of random gun violence near the places they should feel safest of all, their homes. As many experts have said, we rarely pay enough attention to what resembles the post-traumatic stress disorder of military combatants, except in this case we are talking about children who just happen to share a neighborhood with senseless, violent death.
"Jabari" does not dwell on that insanity, even if it surely afflicts any adult mind and heart watching this show. Here the focus is on keeping your own dream alive and learning about stories of struggles that ended better than what happened to Trayvon Martin, a person of whom Jabari and his school pals are very much aware.
It takes a while for Lili-Anne Brown's production to find its focus. I think it's invariably tough to combine real kids on stage (13-year-old Cameron A. Goode played Jabari at the Sunday show I saw) with adults playing children, which is how the rest of the characters in his dream are portrayed by a multi-duty adult cast that includes Patrick Agada, Emily Glick, Matthew Keffer, Gavin Lawrence and Leslie Ann Sheppard.
The production, which felt a tad under-rehearsed and scattered, also hadn't yet found a cohesive visual vocabulary, although there is some video footage of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. that transfixed the young man next to me. I also found the father-son relationship quite moving. But there's a lot more work to be done on this show.
In its best moments, "Jabari," which imagines the young Obama in his bedroom dreaming with his mom, gives you an advanced sense of how pivotal the existence of that presidency might be for young people with outsize aspirations and enough caring adults around to tend to their safety and their dreams.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@tribpub.com
2.5 STARS
When: Through May 1
Where: Ruth Page Center for the Arts, 1016 N. Dearborn St.
Running time: 50 minutes
Tickets: $10-$39 at 872-222-9555 or www.chicagochildrenstheatre.org
