Michael Patrick Thornton, an actor who uses a wheelchair and a Chicagoan who has risen from the Gift Theatre in his native Jefferson Park to a big TV career and starring Broadway roles alongside Jessica Chastain and Daniel Craig, has a game he plays to needle the insensitively ableist and keep himself entertained.
Every time someone asks him a variation on “What happened?,” a near-daily occurrence, he said, he makes up a story. “My standard one,” he said dryly, one evening early last week in Steppenwolf’s Front Bar, “involves my falling out of a news helicopter. Sometimes it’s a police helicopter.”
Friday night, I watched Thornton tell a different wheelchair-origin story in Andrew Hinderaker’s profoundly risky new play, “Obliteration,” a stunner of an experience at Steppenwolf’s 1700 Theatre that recalls classic, deeply disorienting Chicago theater. It’s playing only through Sunday.
It’s already a near-impossible ticket. But to say it is worth standing in line for is to understate. There is nothing else in town to compare. Especially for anyone who ever wanted to show up at an open mic, or loved someone who did.
Thornton’s story? It’s a long monologue told into a microphone by a returning-to-the-biz comic named Neal, played by Thornton, who is Sarah Silverman’s opening act (Silverman’s real voice appears in the show and she helped Hinderaker with ideas).
Neal’s set begins with the line, “My name is Neal and I think it is obvious why I do stand-up.” (It takes the audience a while.)
The opening story involves a misplaced safety bar on the American Eagle rollercoaster at Great America in Gurnee, and Neal’s briefly transcendent experience of flying through the air, before landing in his chair. For the audience, which barely moves a muscle at this show, it’s a riveting experience. For anyone who already knows Thornton’s policy on the origin story of his wheelchair, it feels uncomfortably personal. Especially if you also know what really happened. That’s buried in here, too.
But “Obliteration,” is a show that isn’t just personal to Thornton but also to his co-star, Cyd Blakewell, who plays a second stand-up comic Lee who has come to see Silverman’s show and meets her opener. Lee is a rising star looking for a mentor and who reveals so more of her own self in her ever-expanding comedic sets that you start not just to feel uncomfortable for the raw character but also for this brilliant, long-term Chicago performer, also an ensemble member at Gift. She seems at times to be telling her own story.
(Critics, especially long-timers like me, pick up fragments of actor biographies, of states of being, over the years, but there always are holes and absences and even inaccurate yet festering perceptions. It’s unavoidable, even if absolutely to be avoided.)
One of Lee’s Act 2 monologues, or sets, shocks the audience into silence. Fiction? Truth? A blend? That’s what stand-up comics do every night, of course, but here we have actors playing stand-up comics. How much has bled through? The question dances in your head. The show is that raw.
Adding to the strangeness of this beautifully weird and quirky show: Hinderaker has written into his script that only Thornton and Blakewell ever are allowed to play these roles. (Or, at least, they will have the right of first refusal into perpetuity.) “Part of the reason,” he says, “is to stop some commercial producer from replacing them with more famous people. I wrote it for them.”
I can’t remember seeing a show so determined to push the boundaries of personal revelation and fictional performance, which is, of course, the entire point. On Wednesday, I sat much of the night with my mouth open. But given Hinderaker’s history, that was not entirely a surprise.
Hinderaker has risen precipitously from Gift and his brilliant, breakout play, “Suicide Incorporated,” which I reviewed in 2010. He has created “Away,” a 2020 Netflix series starring Hillary Swank. He has created “Let the Right One In,” a 2022 Showtime series starring Anika Noni Rose. And he is the showrunner on the upcoming “Black Rabbit,” a high-profile Netflix project starring Jude Law and Jason Bateman, set around two brothers in New York’s restaurant and nightlife scene. (Thornton has had roles in all three of those projects).
With “Obliteration,” Hinderaker is doing what I’ve seen highly successful Chicago theater people do before: return to their place of creative origin, or breakout, or both, and use it as a safe place to take risks even Netflix or Showtime or Hollywood at large would eschew. When you have had all the resources in the world, you crave having none of them. The smaller the theater, the better (there are 80 seats only at the 1700 Theatre). Those are the shows a wise Chicagoan should be sure never to miss.
Hinderaker actually lives some of the time in Madison, Wisconsin, where his wife teaches. He told me that when there, he goes almost every night to see a stand-up comedy show. He’s seen over 100 nights. “And when the big comics come through, I’ll get in touch, which is easy, since we usually have the same agents and I’ll buy beers and talk to them. They aren’t doing anything else in Madison. This really made me want to do a piece about the intersection of theater and stand-up comedy.”
“Obliteration,” though, is very different from “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.” For one thing, it’s set in Chicago. And can be seen only here. For another, it’s thrillingly live, even if you can sense the Netflix series it could become. If the suits have the guts.
“Obliteration,” captivatingly performed, ends up saying more about differently abled persons and the entertainment business than any show I have seen, maybe even more about using the painful content of your own life to entertain others. The only scene that needs more work is when the two characters become angry at each other; that’s not entirely convincing, no doubt because they are so, well, linked.
Toward the end, Thornton’s Neal makes what feels like the most significant authorial statement, if there is one.
“Our intent is not to make light of what you are feeling, but to make light out of it,” he says.
Mission accomplished. What a spring at Steppenwolf. Three hit shows in a row, thanks to a Gift that should keep on giving.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
Review: “Obliteration” (4 stars)
When: Through Sunday
Where: Steppenwolf’s 1700 Theatre, 1700 N. Halsted St.
Running time: 2 hours
Tickets: $30 at 312-335-1650 and steppenwolf.org