Dec. 25--This past spring and summer, hundreds of Chicago Public Schools teachers came to see Ike Holter's "Exit Strategy," a riveting new play from the little-known Jackalope Theatre about the last gasps of a Chicago school. Serving a disadvantaged population of students, the school was branded a failure and earmarked for closure, but nonetheless loved, as all places of learning are loved. At least by those who have learned therein.
It was not easy to find this scrappy play, staged in a small room on the second floor of the Chicago Park District's Broadway Armory in Edgewater. But CPS students came too. So did union officials, like Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis. So did administrators and politicians. And parents. And theater lovers interested in the work of one of the most exciting young writers in Chicago, who, most nights, could be found in or around the lobby. Listening.
"Whatever side people were on in reality, they all seemed to come out of the play seeing themselves as the heroes but having more respect for people on the other side from them," Holter said in a recent interview. "I think it felt both real and a little bit fantastical to a lot of those who came. Most of all, I wanted to give voice to all sides of the story: teachers, kids, administrators. You know, we don't hear very much from administrators."
Write about a young, 29-year-old, political, African-American playwright and you expect to write a lot about voice -- the writer's voice. But Holter really cannot be confined to a single vocal track in any way. He records life in multifarious voices.
"A lot of people expect things from me when it comes to race but I don't just write black characters," Holter says. "I really like getting inside the mind of a 55-year-old white woman and giving her the kind of text that no one has given her before. I like surprising people, and I think perhaps I grew up in such a way that gave me a lot of empathy for a whole lot of different people."
Holter grew up in Minneapolis, came to Chicago to attend DePaul University and intends to stay. He already has seen one of his shows move off-Broadway -- that was "Hit the Wall," a 2012 piece created by a Chicago theater collective called The Inconvenience and dealing with the Stonewall riots in New York, ground zero for the modern gay rights movement. "Hit the Wall" had an encore engagement in Chicago in 2014, meaning that Holter was in the happy position of being able to trek between two different North Side theaters, each doing one of his plays. "That," he says, "was kind of hilarious."
Hilarious maybe, but there was Holter's work in two Chicago theaters, playing mostly to Chicagoans ("Exit Strategy" was sold out every night) and Holter was genuinely happy.
"Really," he says, "very few of the writers who live in this city write about Chicago. It's a weird town for writers. Yet this is an incredibly interesting time in the city. I guess I have this obsession with giving Chicagoans voices -- I want to do so much more of that before I go and write a play about Rome, or somewhere."
Holter, who generally has avoided publicity and self-promotion, does not write in any kind of usual way. His dialogue is atypically poetic, punchy and literary. He pays inordinate attention not just to what his disparate characters say but how they say it. On the page, his work looks more like free-form poetry; one-word sentences, riffs, richly metaphoric language. But on the stage it has been humanized by Chicago actors and found real life.
Despite his success with "Hit the Wall" (now a hit at university theaters across the country) and "Exit Strategy" (more than one potential New York production is in negotiations) and new commissions from the likes of Teatro Vista, the professional Latino theater company in Chicago, and Writers Theatre, a classy and classicist joint in Glencoe, Holter is hardly submerged by big checks. Such is not the nature of Chicago commissions.
So he's come up with a novel way of paying the bills, one actor at a time. If you find Holter on Facebook or stop him on the street and pay him 50 or 100 bucks or so, he'll write you a monologue for you to use for auditions, performances or whatever floats your boat.
"I must have written 150 different monologues for actors," Holter says of his "crazy monologue business." Once you make a deal, Holter guarantees that you have exclusive use of your original Holter composition for a year. It is not hard to imagine a scenario in which, one day, these little compositions find their way into print, or become an otherwise valuable part of the early career record of a great, young, thrilling Chicago writer.
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