Nov. 25--Tank tops, shorts and sweaty sexual desire are the main currency of the aptly titled "Hot Georgia Sunday," the engaging little sleeper of a show from the rising Haven Theatre Company, staged at The Den Theatre in Wicker Park and directed by Marti Lyons, who is rapidly becoming a leading exponent of the intimate theatrical experience in Chicago.
Given the premature arrival of winter around these parts, it takes a few minutes to get into the mindset of the working-class young women who dominate this compassionate but tough-minded story by Catherine Trieschmann, each navigating her own raging sexuality within the patriarchal constraints of a small Southern town. But we care about these women, and the inept, mostly atrophied men who surround them with their manly neuroses and blustery moral inadequacies.
"Hot Georgia Sunday," which has not been seen in Chicago before, nor in many other places, is told almost entirely through monologues. It begins with the point of view of young Jenny (Emily Woods), a high school girl and the daughter of a church janitor with an alcohol problem. Jenny is preoccupied with what her best friend Tara (Kay Kron) may or may not be doing with the married youth minister at the church that dominates these character's lives. From there, we hear from Jenny's father, Glenn (HB Ward), her sister Flora (Julie Schroll) and Flora's boyfriend Robby (Rob Fenton), and then, eventually, the patriarch himself, Pastor Thompson (Ed Dzialo). It all makes for an interesting narrative structure -- in essence, Trieschmann keeps rewinding her story to offer a revised view of events from someone else's point of view.
That form -- which has also been used to fine effect by Neil LaBute, whose work is closer to Trieschmann's than you might think -- has some limitations, not least because it makes it easy to get ahead of the story, since we're only getting one point of view at once. But it works surprisingly well in this particular piece, mostly because of the commitment to believability. The events that befall these women are quotidian, in the great scheme of things. But if you are living a life when your boyfriend might just smack you in the head, if you don't get him first, the crises are all-encompassing, and it's that ability to accommodate the macro and the micro, so to speak, that makes "Hot Georgia Sunday" a steamy play with a real pulse of small-town life.
Trieschmann did not swoop into this landscape from, say, Brown University, as some scribes do. She's from Athens, Ga. And, in Lyons, she has a director who clearly understands that plays like this in Chicago are often staged with unconscious condescension, as if anyone growing up poor was an opportunity to unleash a bit of Southern Gothic. I hadn't seen a couple of the actors in this cast before -- the charming Woods is still in college. But they are all very good. Most notable are Schroll, who plays the kind of Southern woman who finds herself dancing in a strip club with the requisite, ahem, personality, but still lets you in on her vulnerabilities, and Kron, who plays a teenager who refuses to be broken up with, whatever the tardy moral awakenings of her married lover.
The show could lose 10 minutes, as most shows could. And there are times when Trieschmann needlessly inserts some subjects (Aristotle, dramatic theory) that a playwright might talk about, but not the women she here depicts. But I found that these characters, and these performances, have stuck with me, their stories carefully charted by actors who care and a sympathetic director, all adding up to a sultry (and frequently funny tale) of little feminist struggles in a town where the asphalt sticks to your toes.
cjones5@tribpub.com
Twitter@ChrisJonesTrib
3 STARS
When: Through Dec. 21
Where: The Den Theatre, 1333 N. Milwaukee Ave.
Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes
Tickets: $30 at haventheatrechicago.com
