Magnolia Goodman Theatrehorses at the window trap door theatre
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
It’s 1963—100 years after America’s Emancipation Proclamation, but still some time before jim crow’s last gasp—and headstrong, clueless Lily Forrest has returned from a trip abroad to find that her family’s fortunes have dried up and their estate, a former plantation, faces foreclosure. Neither she nor her ineffectual brother has a head for business or a facility for facing facts. What they do have are a lot of sentimental notions about the past and a coterie of more or less loyal relatives and retainers, including Lily’s daughters (hopeful, teenage Anna and serious, adopted Ariel); Anna’s spunky governess, Carlotta, a former vaudevillian who claims she lost the role of Prissy in Gone With the Wind to “that Butterfly heifer”; younger black servants with aspirations personal and political; and Samuel, an ancient menial who’s seen to the family since time immemorial.
Stop there and you’ve got yourself a pretty clever and faithful Chekhov update—already vastly superior to Drowning Crow, Taylor’s 2004 hip-hop take on The Seagull. But Taylor deepens her version of the story by making the Lopakhin character, here called Thomas, its emotional center.
