April 21--Stephen Adly Guirgis' Pulitzer Prize-winning "Between Riverside and Crazy" gets its local debut at Steppenwolf in June. But before that, you can dip into his earlier work with Eclipse Theatre Company's "Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train," the first entry in the company's all-Guirgis season.
This 2000 play, which has had a few productions locally, probably carries extra resonance in a year when criminal justice and questions about mass incarceration have been pushed to the foreground. Set in Rikers Island, the notorious New York City jail, Guirgis' play traces the parallel fates of two inmates -- Lucius (D'Wayne Taylor), a serial killer known as "the Black Plague," and Angel (Johnathan Nieves), a young Puerto Rican. The latter shot a Korean minister (apparently modeled after the Rev. Moon) in the hindquarters and ends up facing a murder rap when the minister dies in surgery.
Angel's stated justification is that the minister ran a cult that took his best friend away from him. As his name implies, Angel wrestles with questions of faith, and those questions come pouring out from Lucius during their side-by-side exercise sessions in the prison's outdoor cages. (Kevin Scott's grimy set and Kevin Hagan's harsh lighting capture the joyless world of the jail yard.)
Valdez (Christian M. Castro), the quick-with-the-club guard, has no use for Lucius' proclamations of faith. Nor does Angel, at least initially. He's also suspicious and angry toward Mary Jane (Elizabeth Birnkrant), the public defender who sees in Angel's defiant attitude flashes of her own past as an angry "charity case" in a private school with a drunken father.
Guirgis tosses a lot of moral questions into the mix here, and while he avoids moralizing (as does Anish Jethmalani's crisp and high-octane production), he also doesn't seem to have fully decided whether he's writing a searing portrait of the dehumanization of the correctional system or a theological deconstruction of the rock of faith in a hard place. Guirgis has a gift for mixing the humorous and the horrific, but it doesn't always land in the writing or the production here.
What is clear is that the justice system leaves even the people on the other side of the cage scarred. Castro's Valdez and Birnkrant's Mary Jane certainly seem as flawed -- if not quite as violent in the case of the latter -- as Angel. Lucius, despite Taylor's fearsome performance, remains a bit of a conundrum, as captured in a beguiling late-in-the-play monologue from D'Amico (Zach Bloomfield), a guard who loses his job for doing too many favors for the killer.
Even if Guirgis' play doesn't always add up, the individual pieces are highly watchable. Jethmalani's production gets a little overstated in the small space, with some dialogue lost in the echoes. But Nieves' resonant performance negotiates the line between adolescence and adulthood, faith and nihilism and other boundaries that cage in Angel's soul as surely as the Rikers walls encase his body.
3 STARS
When: Through May 22
Where: Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N. Southport Ave.
Tickets: $30 at 773-935-6875 or www.eclipsetheatre.com
Kerry Reid is a freelance critic.
