Fourth of July weekend … our way. We kicked off the holiday with another adventure in our summer of Windy City discovery. A lovely dinner at Trattoria Gianni, followed by an utterly remarkable evening of theatre at Steppenwolf Theatre. Mia Chung’s Catch as Catch Can – featuring Gary Cole, Audrey Francis, and Tim Hopper with direction by Amy Morton – is revelatory, devastating, provocative, and blisteringly funny. This is a theatrical experience you will need to sit with for a minute to understand how impactful, triggering, and ultimately healing it was.
Originally produced by Playwrights Horizons in New York City in 2022, the play focuses on two Rhode Island families, with histories long intertwined and a common love language of fussing, teasing, guilting, worrying, avoiding, and eating. A LOT of eating. The theatrical conceit of the play is that six characters across two distinct generations (parent/Boomer and child/Gen X) are played by three actors: Cole as Anglophile helicopter matriarch Roberta Lavecchia and her curmudgeon-beyond-his-years and hard drinking son Robert; Francis as Roberta’s warmly and comically cantankerous husband Lon and their accomplished and insightful and altogether stuck daughter Daniela; and Hopper as Roberta’s lovably twitchy and anxiously overbearing bestie Theresa Phelan and her sweet and ingratiating but increasingly lost son Tim.
The play opens with the kind of superficial celebrity obsessing only mothers of a certain generation can do. I’m not being ageist or misogynist. Just accurate. The audience is dropped in medias res, as Roberta and Theresa chatter at length about the British Royal Family in that fawning, judgmental, yet ill-informed, very American way. It’s a bit of foreshadowing for the play’s overall positioning, not in a way that demeans or minimizes these women, but highlights how some parents escape their own familial realities by focusing on the charms and foibles of more famous clans. As the conversation proceeds, charmingly and deftly delivered by Cole and Hopper over a cuppa, IRL truths and worries slowly emerge. Their fears for their own children’s futures, debates over their progeny’s life choices, cultural assumptions and prejudices, outright gossip are all delivered with the lightest touch. Yet strangely ominous.
(My beloved late mother, for one, could sit at the kitchen table for HOURS, monologuing at me, her only child, about the relative charms of Javier Bardem or Russell Crowe or Hugh Jackman, chain smoking one menthol light cigarette after another, playing cutthroat canasta, as the clock ticked inexorably through the wee small hours of the morning, her mood darkening progressively, until she was reliving every perceived dark and tragic wrong she’d endured at the hands of various family members. Think Long Day’s Journey Into Night by way of Coffee Tawk … and Joker. But I digress. Needless to say, this play had me from the jump …)
As the story continues to unfold, we are introduced to each family member carefully and thoughtfully, allowing every character to be established in singular context with their spouse or sibling. It’s a smart structure, helping a modern attention-deficit audience member (like me) track easily who is who and what is what. And key to what is yet to come.
Let me take a moment to commend not only the sharp, clean direction by Steppenwolf ensemble member Amy Morton (who shared stages with Cole in their early days with the company) but the entire production team: scenic design by Andrew Boyce, costume design by Izumi Inaba, lighting design by Yuki Nakase Link, sound design by Mikhail Fiksel, dialect and voice coaching by Kate DeVore, and dramaturgy by Jonathan L. Green. For this doubling of performers to work, a) the actors have to be pitch perfect in their character differentiation (which they are … tens across the board), b) the director has to block this beast with military precision yet make it all seem effortless and fluid (boy, does she), and c) the production team has to aid and abet the enterprise in sundry unsung ways (hell, yeah they do!).
What is truly ingenious about the play (and I really need to tread carefully here so I don’t spoil the full impact) is the existential, disorienting pivot that occurs at the mid-way mark, unexpectedly sliding us from relatively broad comedy to deeply felt tragedy. And, damn, does it work. The play runs without intermission, but *if* it were divided into acts (and for the sake of this argument, let’s say it is, but quite frankly an intrusive intermission would ruin the roller coaster-esque plunge), the first “act” is a realistic farce, heightened to a dizzying level as the three actors switch characters, sometimes at breakneck speed, culminating in the charming yet nettlesome chaos of an Italian-American family Christmas gathering. The second “act” is a fever dream of heartache, misunderstanding and hopes deferred, a fragmented surreality, made all the more poignant as the voices of parent and child elide through each actor, signaling the ever-present conflict between desired autonomy and needed connection.
Imagine if someone ran All In The Family, Angels In America, Wit, and Our Town through the Dario Fo machine, turning the concept of a familial memory play on its proverbial head. Yes, I’m finally putting my masters of theatre history and criticism to use with this dubiously sourced, arguably shallow/pretentious comment. Francis and Hopper particularly have a high wire act to execute, switching instantaneously from riotous whimsy to feral pain. Their performances are grounded, compelling, haunting with a precision of technique that should be studied in MFA programs across the land.
One additional specific note on the scenic and lighting design. What is notable and adds to key elements of surprise is how the set and lighting begin as sitcom “realistic”: a static home – kitchen, living room, breezeway – in which the mundane joys of daily life play out. However, as the narrative folds in on itself, like a puzzle box, so do the set and lighting, with key furniture pieces disappearing and emerging via a central lift, and lighting that grows increasingly stark and isolating. Akin to those dreams you may have in the still of the night – the ones that start out conventionally but morph nightmarishly – otherwise comforting spaces grow and contort and become increasingly oppressive. As in all expertly executed stagecraft, the audience doesn’t really notice the atmospheric shift occurring until it’s, well, too late; yet, in post-show analysis and reflection, the magic trick reveals itself.
Fun fact … in full transparency: last year, Audrey, Steppenwolf’s Artistic Director, led a sharp and insightful exercise around genuine connection, engagement, and listening at my firm’s associate attorney retreat. My colleagues Laurel Dearborn and Sarah Ayers, knowing what a theater geek I am, and more than likely seeing the unbridled fandom in my eyes, were kind enough to introduce me to Audrey afterward. In my “Lucy Ricardo” fashion, I insisted we set up a lunch date, and no doubt from morbid curiosity or amused pity or BOTH, Audrey accepted. We have since become friends (lucky her! 😅), but I’d yet had the opportunity to see her do her thing on Steppenwolf’s stage. But I’m so grateful it was with this show. Quite frankly she is transcendent; I’m so damn proud of her. And the fact that I know her had no impact on my objective assessment of this remarkable show. She’s just that dang good.
In short, don’t miss this one. I don’t know that I’ve ever had an experience in the theater where the audience goes so very quickly from laughing riotously at the absurdities of life to SUCH a gut punch about how fragile it all can be. Exquisite emotional whiplash.
As a treatise on mental health and self-care (or the lack thereof), the generational divide between performative and authentic connection, the tight rope that Gen X children are now walking between aging parents and their own dissolving sanity, and the unfair expectations we all thrust upon one another in the guise of love, this play – so expertly performed and staged – is a marvel.
Catch as Catch Can runs through July 12. Do. NOT. Miss. This.
Tickets can be purchased here.
