Six years ago, the in-house pub at Chicago Shakespeare Theater moonlighted as a performance space for a touring production of Roddy Doyle’s “Two Pints” by Ireland’s Abbey Theatre. Audience members — who sat at the pub’s tables with drinks in hand — spent a couple of hours eavesdropping on two longtime friends at the bar, their conversations meandering between the mundane and the profound.
This spring, the upstairs bar at Mrs. Murphy & Sons Irish Bistro in Chicago’s North Center neighborhood will similarly transform into a theater venue for “Drink the Past Dry” by Ghostlight Ensemble, a local company with a penchant for site-specific productions. Written and directed by Maria Burnham, this world premiere puts a science fiction twist on the otherwise familiar setting of a Chicago bar: at this watering hole, if you sit on the right stool and order a particular drink, you can travel in time.
In an interview with the Tribune before a rehearsal at Mrs. Murphy’s, Burnham explained that the play is structured as a series of vignettes, with the stories of three individual time travelers loosely tied together by the appearances of recurring characters and the overarching theme of familial relationships.
“I’ve always enjoyed science fiction and time-traveling (stories),” Burnham said. “I particularly like when writers who aren’t science fiction writers take the trappings of science fiction to tell very basic human stories.”
Burnham mentioned several authors who have inspired her, such as Emma Straub, a contemporary fiction writer who ventures into sci-fi territory with “This Time Tomorrow,” a 2022 novel about a woman who travels back to her 16th birthday and meets her younger, healthier father decades before his cancer diagnosis. Horror powerhouse Stephen King explores the possibilities of time travel changing history in his book “11/22/63,” named for the date of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. On the genre’s more whimsical side, Burnham enjoys Japanese stories such as “Before the Coffee Gets Cold,” Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s international bestseller about a time portal in a Tokyo café.
In “Drink the Past Dry,” Burnham hopes audience members will connect with the characters’ humanity and the universal elements of their stories, even if they don’t relate to the exact circumstances. The play’s time travelers have a variety of motivations, such as searching for a lost family recipe or hoping to reunite with a childhood pet, and they all make surprising discoveries along the way.
“I feel like the draw for time travel, especially in this piece, is deeply personal, and it is that desire to learn something new about the past or about the present and to learn something new about ourselves, too,” said Katharine Jordan, a cast member who plays Mica, a young adult acting as the caretaker for her elderly father.
Why stage these family-centric stories in a bar? According to Burnham, the decision was part dramaturgical, part practical. Ghostlight Ensemble, founded in 2016 by a group of Chicago storefront theater veterans, often chooses immersive or site-specific settings for its productions. Currently in its first full season since the pandemic, the company staged a play about book banning in 1950s Alabama at two Chicago booksellers last fall, followed by a holiday production of Victorian ghost stories at the Driehaus Museum’s 19th-century mansion.
Before returning to fully staged productions, Ghostlight produced smaller events such as readings of movie scripts at a different bar in North Center, a partnership that sparked the idea for a play set in a bar. That venue has since closed, so the show has been transferred to Mrs. Murphy’s, which previously hosted Ghostlight’s holiday cabarets. For “Drink the Past Dry,” audience members will be welcome to bring food and drinks from Mrs. Murphy’s main bar into the upstairs performance space.
Khnemu Menu-Ra, who plays the bartender in the show, feels that a neighborhood bar is a rich setting for the stories this play tells. By evoking a sense of nostalgia and familiarity, such places offer a way “to perhaps stay frozen in time,” if not to literally time travel. “Life is constantly changing, so memories provide a sort of comfort and a sort of safety when life becomes very difficult,” said Menu-Ra.
“I think this is a really interesting and unique piece,” Menu-Ra added. “It seems such a simple concept, but I’m surprised that no one’s ever come up with it before — the idea of time traveling inside of a pub like that. It has a lot of really moving and touching moments, and a lot of simple truths that’ll really resonate with people, so I really hope that people are able to come out and make time to see it.”
“Drink the Past Dry” plays on Fridays and Sundays and select Thursdays and Saturdays from May 2 to June 1 at Mrs. Murphy & Sons Irish Bistro, 3905 N. Lincoln Ave.; tickets are pay-what-you-will, with an average donation of $25, at ghostlightensemble.com
Emily McClanathan is a freelance writer.
