The Scottish playwright David Harrower, whom Chicago theater fans likely will best know for the harrowing 2005 drama “Blackbird,” not that any theater would dare produce that play now, is a famously minimalist scribe. His work also is poetic and intense.
Some years ago, when he emerged as part of Britain’s so-called in-yer-face group of writers, Harrower gave an interview to The Guardian. His interlocutor asked whether he was part of an “exciting time” for British theater. His response? “To agree a time is especially ‘exciting’ is pointless. It’s a word that tells of nothing — probably why it’s ubiquitous in theater publicity.”
So that’s a clue as to the man’s gestalt.
Steep Theatre isn’t fazed by such writers; on the contrary, it specializes in them. And its new production of Harrower’s “A Slow Air,” starring Kendra Thulin and Peter Moore, two of Steep’s best-known actors, is ample evidence of the benefits of experience.
The play, which premiered in Scotland in 2011, is centered on a 2007 incident at Glasgow airport wherein a pair of terrorists, Bilal Abdullah and Kafeel Ahmed, drove a Jeep Cherokee filled with propane tanks into the terminal building, injuring five, surviving themselves (although they said they had intended to die) and unsettling a Scotland that not seen the likes since Lockerbie and Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988. Just that level of detail is perhaps enough to explain why a theater might be interested in this play, given recent incidents at a German Christmas market and in New Orleans.
Harrower sets his play partly in the diverse Glasgow suburb called Houston, where the two terrorists happened to live, and partly in suburban Edinburgh, geographically close but culturally more different than you might think. We listen to two overlapping monologues spoken by a prosaic pair of long-estranged siblings. Morna (Thulin) is the livelier of the pair. Something of an aging rocker, she cleans posh houses and loves U2. Athol is more subdued, or wound more tightly, at least on the surface. He installs floors in homes for a living and prefers the band Simple Minds, and, yes, the bands matter to the play. I’ll stop there, except to note that Morna’s adult son shows up at Athol’s place, impacting Athol and his community. You are better off experiencing what is revealed thereafter in real time.
If you go, expect a slow burn but plenty of flames, from which it becomes increasingly difficult to look away. The incident I detailed above is a backdrop, mostly, or maybe not; either way, “A Slow Air” is not so much a study of terrorism as one of division or alienation, which is of course relevant. The fascinating thing about this play is how well the writer teases out such themes from what really feels like an ordinary, working-class conversation among two Scots, carrying scars but maybe (only maybe) also some hunger for unity. In U.K. terms, of course, that has further resonance.
Thulin and Moore have worked together countless times in Chicago and you can tell. They both are excellent here under Robin Witt’s careful direction; Thulin comes with her familiar dialectal excellence and Moore his signature ability to dissect introverted men who don’t fully know of what they are (or could be) capable.
You should know you are just watching two monologues spoken by reluctant narrators in a bleak room and that the play is the work of a writer who conveys emotion and meaning only with a very glancing blow.
It’s not an “exciting” play. Harrower would not know how (or want) to write one. But I’ve not been able to shake it since I walked out of Steep’s door.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
Review: “A Slow Air” (3.5 stars)
When: Through March 1
Where: The Edge Off Broadway, 1133 W. Catalpa Ave.
Running time: 1 hour, 25 mins.
Tickets: $35-$45 at 773-649-3186 and steeptheatre.com
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