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Thoughts about watching, working and living in the arts, from HMS co-founder, executive producer and arts advocate Scott Silberstein.

October 15, 2022

ADVENTURES IN YES: Congo Square, Lookingglass and The Who have a chat.

Shows, it turns out, can talk to each other. Like people, they have lives. They are born, they grow and they exist in community with each other. When I meet them, I like to introduce them and see how the conversatsion unfolds.

Shows, like people, have lives. They are born, they grow and they exist in community with each other. When I meet them, I like to introduce them and see how the conversatsion unfolds.

Vibrant and diverse theatergoing helps me keeps my life in perspective, my eyes wide and my heart open. As is the case with my friends, the more I introduce the shows I’ve seen to each other, the more fascinating they become, the more revealing they are and the richer my life is.

Case in point:

Wednesday night I went to Lookingglass Theatre to see Congo Square’s What To Send Up When It Goes Down, a brilliant, challenging, engaging and flat-out humbling piece written by Aleshea Harris, directed by Daniel Bryant and my friend Ericka Ratcliff and performed by a cast I know numbered seven but who I felt embody millions.

What To Send Up boldly and appropriately declared that it was created with Black people in mind, and that this was a ritual to which I was clearly welcome but with uncompromising demands.

First and foremost, to listen. When spoken to, to speak. Throughout, to be humble and respectful, and willing to consider that however highly I may regard my progressive mindset and actions, as a white person (and a straight American male at that), I am incapable of understanding the fear, sadness and rage of Black people living around and dying at the hands of police.

Period, and Amen.

Empathy, one of my strong suits, is of limited value when the experience before me is by definition out of my reach and comprehension. Yes, courtesy my last name and some Catholic school bullies, I’ve experienced some violent and scary anti-Semitism, but there was always escape, and I’ve never really had to fear – I mean really fear ­­– authority or institutions. My biggest anxiety when I see a cop approach is a speeding ticket.

What To Send Up makes damn sure I acknowledge that privilege, not only to myself but also to the cast and the audience, More important, it implores me to bear witness to the fear, loss and rage that has been passed down and accumulated in the Black bodies with whom I shared the Lookingglass Theatre space and share the world.

I admire – I’m in awe of, actually – the extraordinary way What To Send Up defiantly and justifiably refused to make me feel good about myself simply for having bought a ticket and shown up.

It’s a rare and extraordinary accomplishment to create a ritual experience that makes me feel better – and here I think I mean enriched, enlightened and exposed – by allowing me the opportunity to safely feel worse. Participating in the rituals of What To Send Up When It Goes Down is an arduously exquisite experience for which I am grateful and which I’m still processing. It closes this weekend, and if you can, go, bring your whole self to it, and allow that self to be dismantled and rewarded.

I wrote earlier about introducing shows to each other in my mind, and here’s a great example of what I mean.

About a year ago, in the exact same theater space, I saw Her Honor Jane Byrne. It’s a brilliant piece by a uniquely voiced writer, my dear pal J. Nicole Brooks, whose plays are often fantasias that use real world events, both personal and historical, to launch into something surreally transcendent. One of the reasons I like genre storytelling – sci-fi, fantasy, superheroes, all that stuff – is that realism shows what something is, but these genres can convey how something feels. In Her Honor, and in other works (like her new show 1919, now playing at Steppenwolf), Nicky accomplishes both, and it makes her storytelling rare and precious.

A lot happens in Her Honor Jane Byrne, more than I can convey here, but one moment in particular thunderbolted into my memory last night while I watched What To Send Up. I’d never seen Willie “Prince Roc” Round perform before Her Honor, but his commanding presence as a character simply and universally named Kid, had already worked its way into my core when, with only a few gut-wrenching seconds of dread preceding it, Kid is shockingly gunned down.

Now it’s a year later, same space, same actor playing another young black man who is being murdered on stage, and I am watching his character die not instantaneously but gradually, over many minutes, his death woven throughout the fabric of other stories of Black lives demeaned and ended, absorbing the rush of his end-of-existence thoughts as life literally bleeds away. By giving time and space to this specific individual death, it embodies countless lives and an entire People’s worth of hurt, loss and confusion, and by weaving it through and around the other stories it ultimately pulls all the characters, and I imagine the actors enlivening them, together in a moment of howling rage.

I will always be grateful for the chance to connect this extraordinary sequence in What To Send Up with the devastating moment in Her Honor Jane Byrne. I’m blessed that these two shows live together in my mind. Each informs the other, makes the other resonate more deeply, allows me to process more wholly and makes me glad they both live in my world.

I’m also humbled by the thought that while I take personal satisfaction in the idea that I’ve introduced these two living breathing pieces of art to each other, the reality is that they need no introduction. They have known each other for a very long time.

A quick post-script.

Seeing What To Send Up was the first of two shows I saw last night. For months, I’ve had a ticket to The Who’s Hits Back tour, having immediately grabbed a ticket over the summer with the gnawing feeling that this was my last chance to see them. As I am married with two stepkids, nights out are relatively rare, and so when I realized that my only chance to see What To Send Up would be the same night The Who were playing, I decided to see the play first and then head over to the United Center and catch whatever songs The Who had yet to play.

Cost of the ticket and love for the band notwithstanding, it felt like the right way to prioritize the performances. Few things scream out white privilege like “I’ve got a ticket to see The Who perform live with a symphony orchestra, and small as the gesture is in the grand scheme of things, it felt meaningful.

A few years ago, The Who recorded a new track called “Be Lucky,” a title which lead singer Roger Daltrey has used the title as a bit of a mantra. After The Who closed the show with a rousing “Baba O’Riley” and the band linked arms to say goodnight to a rapturous crowd, Daltrey exhorted the crowd to “Be Lucky.”

If you’re in a crowd for a Who show, lucky is something you likely already are and can afford to feel. Pete Townshend’s songs for himself and The Who are masterful and I love them, even as most gaze inward with a particular kind of angst, but you have to be lucky in a way that many of the characters I witnessed in What To Send Up and Her Honor Jane Byrne.

In my mind, I’ve introduced The Who’s concert to these two breathtaking pieces of Chicago theater. They had not previously met, and they are having quite a conversation.

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