This play features a pretty teenage girl afflicted with cancer working in a church-affiliated charity facility—but don't haul out your hankies yet. There's also a paranoid ex-hippie prone to go off his medication, but you can keep your tasers holstered, too. Staff employees include a Dominican immigrant and a nun, but don't come anticipating discussions of green cards or saying of rosaries (though an oven timer sometimes signals a call to prayer). Neither will you be rewarded with a tidy resolution to the arguments posed in this disturbingly candid portrait of a behavior universally observed, but rarely acknowledged.
The language of every culture recognizes the existence of certain unfortunate individuals who somehow contrive to turn every achievement to their own disadvantage. Sometimes they are intimidated by the psychological reorientation that accompanies changes of fortune. Others may feel undeserving of success and fear inevitable discovery of their fraudulent claims thereto. Still others delight in the forgiveness extended them following appropriate displays of remorse. Usually, their only injury is to themselves, but they can inflict considerable damage upon unwary companions.
How long it takes you to spot the chronic self-saboteur in Heidi Schreck's Grand Concourse depends on the extent of your own encounters with such personalities, but what is quickly apparent is the difficulty of exercising caution in a community whose very mission is based in assumption of innocence, even after repeated evidence of underlying motives encouraging suspicion. Sister Shelly is no rosy-eyed idealist, having long ago shed the superficial trappings of her vows and in danger of abandoning its fundamental tenets as well, but the weariness that comes of daily confronting human failure causes her to waver in her resolve. Ironically, the very traits mandated by her calling are what render her and her likewise kind-hearted assistant vulnerable to guilt-induced stratagems perpetrated without malice, but no less destructive for being so.
Yasen Peyankov's earlier experiences with a theater company performing adjacent to a social-services facility (not unlike that replicated onstage down to the last detail by Joey Wade) informs his direction of Schreck's incisive symposium on moral crises arising from the conflict between good intentions and faulty execution.
Mariann Mayberry, rapidly becoming Steppenwolf's foremost character actress, anchors an ensemble embracing the ambiguity of their painfully flawed personae with compassion as unflinching and unsentimentalized as the industrial kitchen fixtures—including fully functional stove, sink, fridge, microwave, chopping knives, paper-towel dispenser—found in mean-street outposts providing sustenance to starving souls, however you define that word.
