In 2004 Brett Neveu gave us American Dead, his drama about Lewie—a pleasant but shattered former house painter who’s taken to drinking too much and talking with ghosts since his sister’s murder. Produced by the American Theater Company, American Dead was all about aftermaths. Neveu’s latest work is a kind of spiritual prequel to that spare, strong piece. Premiering at the Goodman in a heartbreaking production directed by Dexter Bullard, Gas for Less lets us see the events that create a Lewie, the moments that make a normal life untenable for certain fragile people.
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The Lewie of Gas for Less is 25-year-old Anthony Pelenkovic. Stolid Anthony’s no world-beater, but then he’s not interested in beating the world. He’s exactly where he wants to be, working for his bluff Croatian-immigrant grandpa, Art, at the play’s eponymous gas station—an independent business situated somewhere around Lincoln and Montrose (and modeled on a real place that closed in 2005 and is about to be demolished). Anthony spends his autumn Sundays at the station, nominally manning the counter while he watches the 2005 Bears on TV. Aside from a Bears Super Bowl trip, the only thing that could complete his happiness—or, more accurately, his contentment—would be getting Art to loosen up and give him more of a hand in running things.
Neveu lets slip the occasional whisper of hope for revival. The Bears season serves as a metaphor for that hope: the 2005 team came back from a miserable 1-3 start (and safety Mike Brown’s famous evaluation, “We suck”) to end up 11-5. But all bets are off when something entirely arbitrary and devastating happens. No feel-good come-from-behind story here, no return to Eden: like American Dead, Gas for Less bypasses all other considerations to concentrate on a single psyche, shaken unalterably loose from the world that kept it safe.
