Steppenwolf’s Ensemble Theater, a 400-seat theater in the round, opened in the fall of 2021 and has proved a creative challenge for the company. Director Steve H. Broadnax III’s superb staging of Suzan-Lori Parks’ “The Book of Grace” is the first show I’ve seen in that space to truly inhabit what it means to perform in the round, and to exploit the advantages of having an audience surround a trio of characters on whom the walls are closing in fast.
Set in Texas near the U.S. border, “The Book of Grace” follows a fractured family wherein the patriarch is Vet (Brian Marable) a border patrol officer. Vet’s son, Buddy (Namir Smallwood), returns to his father’s home after 15 years away, claiming to have been a “tech bro,” although in reality he is desperate for a job. Why he has returned takes a long time to become clear, although there are plot elements that fans of Sunday’s finale of “The White Lotus” will recognize.
Vet’s wife, Grace (Zainab Jah), is a waitress and Buddy’s stepmother, and a cheerful woman who writes a kind of secret journal that she keeps hidden under the floorboards.
Parks’ play premiered in 2010 at the New York Public Theater and the justly esteemed playwright has updated the work for the Steppenwolf production. The border between the U.S. and Mexico is far more in the news now than was the case in the relative quiet of 2010, of course, and that has served Parks’ artistic purpose. “The Book of Grace,” feels very of the moment, especially to the degree it probes the dangers of instability and panic.
To my mind, Parks has forged a play about the personal toll that doing a job like intercepting migrants inevitably takes on a man and his family, with the moral compartmentalization that’s required and the built-up aggression and resentment, as well as the deep sense of isolation that’s passed down to the next generation. You can see all of that in Marable’s Vet, who at one point delivers a speech not unlike the famous Jack Nicholson monologue in “A Few Good Men,” where he says that he does what he has to do so others can enjoy their lives while pretending his role does not exist. Grace, meanwhile, is penned as someone just trying to hold it together and get through her days in the light of all of the above. “I’m steady,” she says, poignantly, to Buddy at one point. “I’m waiting it out.”
Buddy, meanwhile, is another of the characters created by the superb Chicago actor Namir Smallwood who you could reasonably describe as neuroatypical. Not dissimilar from the role Smallwood recently played at the Goodman Theatre in “Primary Trust,” Buddy is a mix of man and child, soldier and moral crusader, a determined seeker of personal revenge that we quickly intuit will bring disaster down on his own head.
It is surely significant that while Grace was a white character in 2010, she’s now a Black woman. The play has become more specifically focused on a Black family involved in what you might call the military-law enforcement complex. On a metaphorical level, you might see the play as probing the Black MAGA mindset.
Parks also is the writer of “Topdog/Underdog,” a brilliant allegorical masterpiece that is appearing in Steppenwolf’s next season and this later play is, by those standards, far more of a realistic familial play, at least by her standards. I actually thought there were palpable echoes here with Tracy Letts’ “August: Osage County,” another Steppenwolf play that explores a family living in a place where they don’t really belong and that ultimately will do them damage; certainly, the explosive second act conjures up a similar intensity. It’s worth the wait.
This isn’t an easy play to watch. And I found the last few minutes to be not fully satisfying, either from a text or a production point of view, the action running on too long in search of the right coda. But “The Book of Grace” is very much what most of us think of when we try to define the Steppenwolf aesthetic and there are three blistering performances here from Smallwood, Marable and Jah, all superbly cast and all fully willing to go to the wall.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
Review: “The Book of Grace” (3.5 stars)
When: Through May 18
Where: Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted St.
Running time: 2 hours, 35 minutes
Tickets: $20-$102 at 312-335-1650 and steppenwolf.org
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