Column: The new fall arts season is looking rich indeed, but also election-year anxious

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The fall arts season, ambitious, meaningful, robust — probably too robust for any one person — does the heavy lifting of the annual arts calendar. It’s saintly and silly, it’s epic and intimate, it’s frightening and heartening. It carries the weight of the culture. Especially during an election year. For three months, it’s there to escape into. But at the same time, it’s expected to make sense of everything. War and racism and poverty, but also hope and bravery, commitment and laughter …

My initial reaction to the fall arts season, every autumn, without fail, scanning the great harvest about to drop in Chicago’s movie theaters, art galleries and concert halls, is to feel excitedly overwhelmed.

My next reaction, unfairly, is to put the weight of the world on these next 90 days: This art season needs to produce. And particularly when a fall arts season coincides with a presidential election year, bolts of criticism arrive: Is this art season speaking to the moment? Does it reflect the amorphous nerves of the country? Or does it want only to apply ointments until you’re too busy holiday shopping to care?

Whew.

Seasons, we are told as children, land abruptly, with clear beginnings and endings. Summer pink leads to pumpkin orange, snow white turns to spring green. Yet, in reality, like the bounty of a fall arts season, during a 21st century marked by climate change, our seasons blend. Feelings blur. A promising fall season, likewise, never serves one purpose or strikes one note. Anxiety arrives every autumn on time, like the inevitable 10 p.m. doorbell ring on Halloween night. Unwelcome, but expected. But then so do the warmer feelings of family and perseverance, maybe even uplift. It’s all mashed up in autumn. We gush over nice weather on Thanksgiving, but not without nagging unease. We greet the civic duty of continuing democracy, but with uncertainty.

This is not just me and my unsettled mind.

National polling backs me up: You are nervous too. And nerves have a way of painting everything, intentionally or not, sometimes in thoughtful, surprising ways.

Consider Brat Summer, for instance: Charli XCX, its self-appointed queen, brings her hotly-anticipated Sweat Tour to the United Center on Sept. 30; it’s billed as a celebration, a “commitment to inclusivity and diversity within the music industry.” But there’s also a ripely humid, frantic, dancing-at-the-edge-of-oblivion in her club music that’s somehow better suited to unnaturally warm Octobers than predictable Augusts.

Sam Clemmett as Albus Potter and Anthony Boyle as Scorpius Malfoy in the New York cast of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” on Broadway. (Matthew Murphy)

Consider what’s likely the hardest theater ticket of the season, “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” at Nederlander Theatre. It’s a showcase of stage effects, a continuation of the most significant pop franchise since “Star Wars.” But also, during an election year, it could come across as a reminder that the actions of your elders shade the world to come.

Conversely, consider that while Newberry Library’s ambitious “Indigenous Chicago” exhibit, opening soon, dramatically reframes the immigration debates you’ll hear all season, it also offers images of families rooted deeper than yours. And since it’s only natural for a city of immigrants to double down: “Radical Craft: Arts Education at Hull House, 1889-1935” — the settlement’s biggest show in years, says Tribune critic Hannah Edgar — spotlights how immigrant artists met the social reform movement of the 20th century.

Of course, there is another argument to be made about all of this, that what we have is a fall arts season in name only, a busy backdrop to the only two-ring circus that matters:

The presidential campaigns.

I mean, is there a TV series more consequential this fall than the presidential and vice presidential debates? Maybe the season finale on Nov. 5.

“Saturday Night Live” will remind everyone how old they are by celebrating its 50th season, but not even the most toothless parody would send me scurrying to find out the details for applying for dual citizenship to Canada. “The Franchise,” the new potty-mouth HBO series from “Veep” creator Armando Iannucci, is nominally about a crew that makes superhero movies, but based on what I’ve seen, it’s really about cowardice and the ways people lose faith in their peers and their systems. That’s a thought for the presidentially-minded writers of “SNL,” and for “A Complete Unknown,” James Mangold’s biopic opening Christmas Day, about the most incendiary political years of Bob Dylan (played by Timothée Chalamet). Mangold — who both hit and missed with the Johnny Cash movie “Walk the Line” — could remind us how socially timid a lot of pop music has been in an election year. Or, presumably, as with a pair of musical performances on the life of activist/artist Paul Robeson — at Harris Theater (Oct. 1), and during the Englewood Jazz Festival (Sept. 19-21) — we just get fresh reminders of the need for artists to spark a fire.

That would be nice.

Singer Paul Robeson confers with accompanist Helen Thierry before singing to the delegates of the Congress of Partisans of Peace at the Salle Pleyel in Paris, April 20, 1949. (Jean-Jacques Levy/AP)
Singer Paul Robeson confers with accompanist Helen Thierry before singing to the delegates of the Congress of Partisans of Peace at the Salle Pleyel in Paris, April 20, 1949. (Jean-Jacques Levy/AP)

If we’re unlikely to get a fall arts season that speaks directly to our political moment, take heart that agitprop is rarely as compelling as metaphor. It’s not hard to grasp the urgency for new books reiterating the concept of freedom — “When Freedom is the Question, Abolition is the Answer” by Hyde Park cornerstone Bill Ayers and “On Freedom” by Timothy Snyder both publish this month. Consider also the return of witches as a symbol of unease with women in power. “Tim Murray is Witches!,” at the Den Theatre Oct. 8-9, is the return of a brilliantly funny cultural history of witches and queer communities. Even “Agatha All Along” coming on Disney+ is a Marvel-made case for covens, assembling a Wiccan-Avengers — Kathryn Hahn, Aubrey Plaza, Patti LuPone …

Fall, it’s important to remember, is about an unsettled world. That is the environmental purpose of the season itself: it is a moment of decline and retreat, then coziness and hearth, so that life can grow again. The aptly-titled “Every Brilliant Thing” at Writers Theater in Glencoe (Oct. 31-Jan. 5), in which the audience receives a long, beautiful list of things to live for, is about hope gathering steam in the wake of a loss — and exactly the right play come November. What is Riot Fest, back in Douglass Park (Sept. 20-22), but a weekend festival that balances in the autumnal chills of vulnerability with three days of music acts geared toward audiences who have aged out of the innovation and hedonism they knew decades ago?

There’s worry in that carnival mud, and that’s OK — that’s also a sign of a rich season.

As Henry David Thoreau wrote of the musk of autumn and its darkening forests littered with a bed of dead and dying things that in turn breed renewal, “We are all the richer for their decay.”

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com

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