In a graduation speech I heard this May, the physician-writer Abraham Verghese talked about his experience as a small-town doctor during the AIDS era and how he found, to his amazement, that rural emergency rooms had filled up with AIDS patients even as everyone assumed the crisis was restricted to large cities. But many of these mostly young gay men had chosen, Verghese said, to come home from New York or Chicago to the likes of rural Tennessee to die. And for the most part, he observed in another stereotype-busting comment, he found they were treated by their families with compassion and love.
The word AIDS is not mentioned in “You Will Get Sick,” a rather unusual play by Noah Diaz that opened Sunday night at the Steppenwolf Theatre Company with Amy Morton (making a long-overdue return to Steppenwolf) and Namir Smallwood in the two leading roles. All we know is that the central character, known only in the script as #1, has been given a diagnosis of imminent death from an affliction that is never described. But Verghese’s speech did come floating back into my head, because this is a play about how we handle not just death itself, but the period of our lives in chronological proximity to our inevitable exit. To understand the incontrovertible truth behind show’s title — not exactly a box office seduction — you have to put the emphasis on the will.
Moreover, there are powerful themes here of working towards acceptance, of finding the courage to tell loved ones you are leaving. Diaz draws imagery from, believe it or not, “The Wizard of Oz,” but Dorothy takes a long time to reveal herself, and nothing is solved by any clicking of heels.
Here is the initial setup. Smallwood’s sick character, #1, is having such difficulty communicating about his fatal illness that he chooses to hire someone to do the job for him. He puts out an advertisement to that effect and gets an answer from a woman, Morton’s #2, a matter-of-fact opportunist who negotiates hard for piecemeal rates as she sets about her weird job, some of which involves her client’s self-involved sister (Sadieh Rifai).
Amy Morton is back on stage in ‘You Will Get Sick’ at Steppenwolf Theatre. What took her so long?
That all might sound straightforward but Diaz freights the play with a much heavier symbolic load, including an amplifed, off-stage narrator who voices the things that #1 cannot bring himself to say, stepping pretty much on top of his lines. That takes a good while to understand and for it to become in any way comfortable as a theatrical experience. Meanwhile, #2 has her own eccentricities; she’s a sometime actor who turns this truly bizarre assignment into fodder for her actor’s studio and perpetual auditioning for her local community theater production. Other people show up (the cast also includes Cliff Chamberlain and Jordan Arredondo), but the less you know about them in advance, the better.
Both Morton and Smallwood are superb here, not least because they are two Chicago actors of different generations who share an obsessive interest in finding the humanity in unusual people and then listening not just to what their character is saying to them, but also to others with whom they share the stage. They’re both a real pleasure to watch.
I think the play’s symbols and metaphors get a bit too dense and oblique in places and this is one of those shows (it recalls the work of Noah Haidle) where you need a lot of patience before it becomes clear what the playwright wants to achieve. It’s the kind of show that actors easily understand, being so suffused with the iconography of the theater, but it occasionally crosses the line of self-indulgence; I suspect some subset of the Steppenwolf audience might be a bit too baffled to care. Although sometimes moving, director Audrey Francis’ production could have used some sharper edges and more of a forward thrust, especially in the studio scenes.
But if you hang in there for just 85 minutes, not only are there twin beautifully crafted performances for you to enjoy but the surprise-filled last few minutes really pays off, not just in the writing but in set designer Andrew Boyce’s visual landscape Certainly, you’ll leave the theater thinking about what Diaz clearly wants his audience to think about. More specifically, it’s hard not to watch this show and think not just about sickness but about how it is described and communicated. By a society at large. By oneself.
After all, most of us won’t be able to get home without having to tell someone where we are going. Perhaps the hardest cut of all.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
Review: “You Will Get Sick” (3.5 stars)
When: Through July 20
Where: Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted St.
Running time: 1 hour, 25 minutes
Tickets: $20-$136.50 at 312-335-1650 and steppenwolf.org