Eastland stories – Chicago Reader

The Neo-Futurists have shown a penchant for applying their aesthetic (personal tales from the artists’ lives commingled with footnotes in history) to stories of disasters in the past. In 2006, they presented Roustabout: The Great Circus Train Wreck! (based on the Hagenbeck-Wallace circus train crash of 1917 that killed at least 86 people), and Burning Bluebeard, a show about the Iroquois Theatre fire, premiered with the Neo-Futurists in 2011 before going on to seasonal appearances with the Ruffians elsewhere. The common thread between those pieces and Switchboard, the company’s latest now in a short run at Steppenwolf’s 1700 Theater as part of the LookOut series, is survivors’ guilt.

Switchboard
Through 12/14: Thu–Sat 8 PM, Sun 3:30 PM; no shows 11/28-12/1; ASL interpretation Thu 12/5, masks required Thu 12/12; Steppenwolf 1700 Theater, 1650 N. Halsted, 312-335-1650, steppenwolf.org or neofuturists.org, $15-$25 sliding scale

Created and performed by Neo-Futurist ensemble members Annie Share and Sivan Spector and directed by Anna Gelman, Switchboard uses the 1915 SS Eastland disaster as its spine. The ship rolled over at the dock before embarking on a planned outing to Michigan City, Indiana, killing 844 people, most employees or family members of employees of Western Electric’s Hawthorne Works in Cicero. 

Two real-life figures from the tragedy figure in the play: Leander Leighton, who commissioned the troubled ship originally (reports of instability with the Eastland were present almost from the beginning) and who disappeared from another ship in 1906, and Margaret Condon, Western Electric’s chief switchboard operator, who fielded calls for over 30 straight hours from colleagues and family members trying to learn the fates of loved ones on the day of the disaster. The two are represented here by puppets, with Condon’s occupying a space crisscrossed with telephone wires and framed by circuit boards and Leighton mostly appearing as a shadow puppet. (Though the Neo-Futurists have long used overhead projectors in their shows, the combination of overhead projections and puppetry inevitably call to mind the work of Manual Cinema.)

Interspersed with the Eastland history are stories of Share’s failed relationship with a college crush and Spector’s memories of suicides at a train crossing among her well-to-do high school classmates in Palo Alto, California. Stage business, including the filling of a large plastic tub from buckets and watering cans, slices of salami moved by pulley over the stage (don’t ask), and a large angler fish puppet all add oddly dissonant yet piquant moments to this uneven, but often engaging, narrative, enhanced by Spencer Meeks’s lighting design and live sound and music. Not all the meditations on communication and miscommunication land effectively, but Spector and Share manage to twitch the wires of memories and history without losing essential connection to their historical source material.

Toward the end, we see a projection of Carl Sandburg’s poem about the Eastland, in which he takes on the voice of a cynic whose “guts ain’t ticklish about the Eastland,” given how many women and children he sees “killed by the con, tuberculosis, too much work and not enough fresh air and green groceries.” The cynicism is warranted, as the show also illustrates how nobody ever really was held to account for the greed and corporate shortcuts that led to so many drowning in the Chicago River. As we head into an administration seemingly hellbent on overturning all regulatory guardrails, it’s a grim reminder that what keeps us afloat in life rests on fragile and fickle human impulses.