Dystopian times, these. Netflix had a hit with “Leave the World Behind,” executive produced by Barack and Michelle Obama, a movie wherein America descends into chaos. Many Americans went to see “Civil War,” imaging a nation ripped asunder. And the American playwright Levi Holloway has penned “Turret,” a play about two guys who live in a bunker, who appear to be soldiers and who are dealing with something terrible outside that wants inside.
“Turret,” which opens Sunday at the Chopin Theatre in Wicker Park, stars the Chicago actor turned Hollywood star Michael Shannon, who practically had the word dystopian stapled to his forehead when he was a baby.
Holloway, an A Red Orchid theater ensemble member since 2019 and erstwhile Chicago actor as well as a playwright, has previously premiered work in Chicago that transferred to Broadway. His creepy thriller “Grey House” started out at A Red Orchid’s Old Town home in 2019, but then moved last summer to New York, where the new cast included Laurie Metcalf, Tatiana Maslany, Paul Sparks, Millicent Simmonds and Sophia Anne Caruso. His unusual specialty (in the theater world, at least) is what people tend to call genre plays, works within the penumbra of horror. The combination of the needs of the play, Holloway’s broader acclaim and Shannon’s ongoing fame has led A Red Orchid to produce “Turret” in a theater of significantly larger capacity than its usual home.
And like the recent Steppenwolf Theatre production of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins “Purpose,” which closes Sunday with a Broadway future currently being ironed out, Holloway wrote the three-character “Turret’ with specific actors in mind — in this case, Travis A. Knight, Lawrence Grimm and Shannon.
“I could hear those guys in my head when I was writing the play,” Holloway said in a recent interview in one of the Chopin’s numerous vestibules. “I started writing this piece in 2020 and finished it recently just as my kid was born, which is sort of attached thematically. It’s a personal thing. The pandemic happened and my dad died in 2020 and I wanted to write about that, our relationship. I wrote a draft but it wasn’t quite right. There was something angry about it. But I couldn’t really understand the play until my son was born. Something warmed up.”
Is his dad in the play?
“The ghost of my dad is certainly in the play, as is our father-son relationship,” he said.
Shannon interrupts: “But it’s told through the prism of a sci-fi thriller, it’s not like an autobiographical drama. I’m not playing Levi’s father. Just to be clear, so you don’t write ‘Levi Holloway has written a play about his father opening Sunday.’ It’s a genre piece, but it’s also personal.”
Which perhaps explains why Holloway also is serving as director.
“There are touchstones of reality,” Holloway adds. “It’s easier for me to be honest when I wrap something in genre.”
Since that draft, Holloway says, a collaborative process followed. “In the original draft there was just two characters,” Shannon says. “And then Levi had the idea of adding a third character, one other sole survivor in the wilderness who does not have the benefit of a bunker in which to hide. He’s outside, scavenging. I’m glad he added Larry’s character. First I was like, ‘Aren’t we enough?’ But he was right.”
“Adding a third character really threw the story into a new direction,” Holloway says.
“My guy is scraping by,” Grimm says. “Levi has woven some very intricate rules into this world, this entire thing. It’s all very specific, very complex.”
“My character has never left the bunker,” Knight says.
This bunker, these men say, is filled with resources because the world outside did not so much disintegrate as merely stop. They’re in a former military facility on the coast, hence the play’s title, “Turret.”
“The air may be poisoned,” Shannon adds, noting that his guy was in the military but there is no military anymore.
Holloway says the larger space offers the company the chance to try and “make the spacious seem claustrophobic.”
Shannon’s history at A Red Orchid goes back to about 1992. He founded the company with his friend Guy Van Swearingen. At one point, during a youthful impecunious period, he even lived at the theater; a critic in the 1990s seeking curtain-time information in the middle of the night from a box office recording might get live Shannon instead.
Holloway is headed to Leeds, U.K. next, where he is opening another play, “Paranormal,” on the way to London’s West End. It’s a take on the movie “Paranormal Activity.”
Shannon has been spending quality time in Budapest making the film “Nuremberg” (he plays Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson) and he is returning to Budapest for some four months after the “Turret” run here to play President Garfield in a Netflix miniseries called “Death by Lightning,” which he says is “concurrently about President Garfield and the man who assassinated President Garfield.”
“I will get to know Budapest,” he says. “But right now I am back in Chicago, doing this.”
Through June 9 at Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division St.; tickets $70-$75 at aredorchidtheatre.org
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com