Oct. 29--Lots of playwrights write about their dads. Most of them just don't have the guts to stick it right there in the title.
But Boo Killebrew, a scribe with the kind of name you won't find easily duplicated on Wikipedia, did just that with her 2011 drama "The Play About My Dad," a cleverly structured piece about her own family and community in Gulfport, Miss., in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in summer 2005. At the time, Killebrew was in New York City, dabbling in the theater, even as her father, a doctor in Gulfport, found himself at the core of a truly horrific emergency with flood waters raging all around.
If we take her play, now in its Chicago premiere at Raven Theatre, at face value, Killebrew's relationship with her father was, to say the least, complicated. Her parents' marriage was not good and Boo's dad left her mom for another woman.
And thus in an attempt to sort all of that out through her art, "The Play About My Dad" is very much a metadramatic affair, with Killebrew appearing as the lead character in her own play. Indeed, the play unfolds very much as a manifestation of the act of writing. Boo's dad, Larry Killebrew, reads pages from a script, questioning the scenes as he acts them out, and chatting proudly with the audience about his daughter, the playwright. There is much debate about whose story we really are watching: Larry lived it but Boo wrote it. So who owns it? Discuss.
That's an interesting notion. Yet more stimulating is the play's exploration of how weird it can feel when we are far away from home at the very moment when our community is going through some kind of existential crisis; one can feel as if in a dream. And in a very solid Raven production from director Marti Lyons, the capable young actress Tuckie White certainly shows us that dislocation as she scurries around Courtney O'Neill's set, setting her cues and coaching her dad, played, with not inapt stiffness, by Joe Mack.
But with all sympathy for Killebrew's predicament and admiration for her frankness, I found myself resisting her lamentations about being in the Drama Book Shop when waters cut off (and, in some case, carried off) the good citizens of Gulfport. To her credit, she does not just tell the story of her own situation, but also of another small family who lose each other in the trauma, and of two emergency medical personnel who similarly struggle with a summer from hell. Lyons elicits strong performances from such actors as Patrick Agada, Nick Horst, Paloma Nozicka and Miguel Nunez, and the result is that you want more of the real people of Gulfport and less of Killebrew fiddling with the light board.
It's tough not to hear from your dad, even if you aren't talking to him, but it's worse when the waters swell around your home.
"The Play About My Dad" is not without some moving sequences, and both the piece and this product have integrity. There's no questioning Killebrew's affection for her home community. But self-referential plays aren't an easy match for natural disaster, times when nobody really cares about who owns whose story.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@tribpub.com
REVIEW: "The Play About My Dad"
2.5 STARS
When: Through Nov. 28
Where: Raven Theatre, 6157 N. Clark St.
Running time: 90 minutes
Tickets: $17-$42 at 773-338-2177 or raventheatre.org
