Theatre in Review: Evanston Salt Costs Climbing (The New Group/Pershing Square Signature Center)

	Quincy Tyler Bernstine. Photo: Monique Carboni

The weather outside is frightful, but it's nothing compared to the spiritual heebie-jeebies suffered by a gaggle of Illinois civil servants in Will Arbery's latest report from an unsettled heartland. They're a distinctively jittery bunch: As climate change promises ever harsher winters, roadworkers Peter and Basil are tasked by the city of Evanston with distributing salt on snowy roads. At first glance, they have fun on the job, trading jokes and profanity-laced arguments in the cab of their truck. But Peter keeps having suicidal ideations, insisting that he can no longer stand the sight of his wife and daughter. Basil, a loner, whose hobby is writing micro fiction, is haunted by nightmares featuring his late grandmother and a menacing woman in a purple hat.

Maiworm, their supervisor, is obsessed with the idea of replacing the city's ice-encrusted streets with "heated permeable pavers," even as she frets about the feasibility of the new technology. Her stepdaughter, Jane Jr., is all but paralyzed with angst, holing up at home while combating a rising sense of dread. (When she forces herself to volunteer at a nursing home, an aging scientist in residence there terrifies her with lectures about the universe's dark energy.) "I just want to marry a famous singer," she says, offering her version of a life action plan. "And I want to live with the famous singer in a warm place." Maiworm, puzzled, wonders, "Do you think that's an actionable goal?"

Evanston Salt Costs Climbing offers a vision of the Midwest that David Lynch could love, a surface of eccentricity stretched over untold depths of dread. A local journalist kills himself, leaving Peter to complain that the deceased has stolen his thunder. He also muses, "They should write a thing about what's it like, what's it gonna be like, when the super volcano underneath Wyoming erupts, and everyone has to move to Evanston, and what Evanston is gonna do with all the people when they come." Basil, a Greek immigrant whose idea of a pleasant evening involves staring out the window and playing with himself, notes the pleasure of being "a small man observing things in the new Rome. In the days before the fall." Jane Jr., who can't stop thinking about impending ecological disaster, tells Maiworm, "There's something under everything and it's making us all want to die! It's pushing out from under everything and it's telling us to die, and you can't leave me alone with it." Maiworm, a superfan of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, is stunned to see Jane Jacobs herself emerge from under the stage, announcing that Evanston "should be leveled." "You're an optimist!" protests Maiworm. "You must not have read my later books!" Jacobs snaps.

Throughout Evanston Salt Costs Climbing, personal fears merge with anxieties about a planet spinning out of control. It's a hybrid piece: Arbery, who has several styles at his command, merges the apocalyptic implications of Heroes of the Fourth Turning (his best work to date, a vision of America slipping into anarchy), with Plano, a torrent of kooky, deadpan one-liners about family and identity. At times, his writing soars, especially in arias that express each character's creeping sense that fundamental, irreversible change is happening right now. In other stretches, however, the play comes across as a cutesy absurdist sitcom, an arbitrary collection of oddball gags that don't quite land.

If, under Danya Taymor's direction, the sometimes actors push hard for laughs that aren't really there, they remain unshakably committed to the script's hairpin turns. Jeb Kreager, unrecognizable from the gun-toting Catholic recluse he played in Heroes of the Fourth Turning, is solid as Peter, forever poised on the edge of a breakdown. The role of Basil is, at best, a fuzzy proposition, but Ken Leung gives him a certain charm; he also turns up as Jane Jacobs, who is having quite a theatre season, also being featured as Robert Moses' nemesis in David Hare's Straight Line Crazy. Making her Off-Broadway debut, Rachel Sachnoff shows a knack for Arbery's nerve-jangling comedy. Quincy Tyler Bernstine, always good to have around, brings both discipline and a maniacal edge to Maiworm, a closest visionary who wants to transform Evanston for the better, even when she takes to running wild outdoors without a winter coat.

Matt Saunders' set design, which places multiple interiors (including a truck cab) inside an enormous salt-storage building, is a smart solution to the play's demands. Isabella Byrd's lighting evokes frozen, snowy exterior scenes and carves the actors out of the darkness with her typical skill. Sarafina Bush's costumes are just what one would wear in frigid northern Illinois. Mikaal Sulaiman's sound design begins the production with an effect that nearly made me jump out of my seat; subsequent effects, such as winter winds and truck engines, are equally well done.

For all the alarm on display, not much happens in Evanston Salt Costs Climbing. Arbery deserves credit for getting at the profoundly upsetting issue of ecological disaster, tying it to a more general sense that society is drifting, aimlessly, toward ruin. But his play ends up chasing its own tail, pursuing the same points repeatedly, to diminishing effect. By the time Jane Jr. once again asks, "Do you think there's something underneath everything that wants us to die?" the thought has lost its power to provoke. This, I suspect, is not what the playwright intends. --David Barbour