Donuts

All my writing, reading, and internetting time has been devoted to working on my dissertation proposal, with the occasional burst of writing poems here and there, but I wanted to make a quick comment about the play Superior Donuts, showing at the Steppenwolf. I'm far from a theater critic, but I really, really liked this play.

It's set in a donut shop in Uptown, run by an old Polish-American Vietnam war resister/stoner/etc, played by David St. Hubbins. I'm not going to summarize the play or review it or anything, but I wanted to share that I thought it was awesome.

More specifically, I was worried that it was going to traffic in overblown old Chicago nostalgia, and self-righteous commentary about gentrification in Uptown, which would be pretty rich coming from a well-established theater company. (I'm not saying that artists, even/especially middle-class ones, shouldn't address gentrification, and I'm also not saying that the play dodges the issue at all. But it does so in a much more nuanced, thoughtful, etc way than I had anticipated.) Anyway, you get your Magikist and Starbucks riffing, but not in a nauseating way at all. The sense of nostalgia and awareness of change shared by the playwright and the thoughtful characters really suits how I understand it: they use nostalgia as a way to tell their stories and express their feelings about the world around them. It's done really, really beautifully. And if you're a softie like me who thinks that realistic, unromantic human kindness and love is often underrepresented in the arts, I dare you not to cry at the end.

The play, written while playwright Tracy Letts was dealing with the attention and massic success of Ausust: Osage County, is not perfect. I generally like its sociology but found Franco a bit of a "magic Negro," and I have a hard time believing that a Black cop working an Uptown beat is gonna flinch at a Russian business owner referring to "black sons of bitch." What I'm saying is occasionally the writing shows a tiny, tiny, tiny bit of relying on easy archetypes and sight gags like eastern Euros in tracksuits and the word "douchebag," but you all know I'm not complaining, I'm just saying.

PS- When on the southside and looking for a donut, eat at Dat's. 83rd and Cottage. Open all night.