The Love Song of Saul Alinsky Terrapin Theatre at the Blue Rider Theatre
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Indeed, the overall ineffectiveness of this disjointed, seemingly unfinished drama is rather stunning–the subject would seem to make it a slam dunk. This is the story of a man who roused rabble from the Chicago stockyards to the New York ghettos to the California barrios, who took on Hizzoner, Mayor Richard J. Daley, and authored the classic manifesto Reveille for Radicals. The Blue Rider Theatre, where the play is receiving its premiere, is only a few miles northeast of the Back of the Yards neighborhood where Alinsky agitated. Terrapin Theatre’s production has won the cooperation of all the usual suspects, from Studs Terkel to David Orr to Leon Despres to Dr. Quentin Young to Alderman Helen Shiller to others who weigh in on Sunday-afternoon postshow discussions about Alinsky’s legacy.
And director Pam Dickler has found the perfect actor to play Alinsky: Chicago stage veteran Gary Houston perfectly captures the spirit of the committed yet fun-loving, street-smart and book-smart radical, educated on Halsted Street and at the University of Chicago. Chain-smoking and adopting a distinctive Chicago patter, Houston perfectly embodies the acid-tongued man who–like Thomas Paine–cried, “Let them call me rebel.” In one arresting image near the play’s opening, Houston, portraying Alinsky toward the end of his life, sits alone in a cheap motel in the wee hours of the morning in a haze of cigarette smoke, flipping through stations on a crappy bedside radio. Wan and bedraggled, Houston heartbreakingly captures the loneliness of the long-distance radical.
Of course, there’s no crime in not being T.S. Eliot’s equal. The real problem is that there’s little drama in The Love Song of Saul Alinsky. The play’s elements of Brechtian epic theater, straight drama, musical satire, historical pageant, and lecture never coalesce. And with the exception of the shrewd casting of Houston in the title role, Dickler has done little to overcome the script’s lack of consistency and polish. Few of the performers are convincing as they play a variety of unconvincing characters. Even the slide projections meant to illustrate Alinsky’s history prove ineffective: the images are too small to make much of an impression. Ultimately the play registers as little more than a “tedious argument,” to quote Eliot, leading again to that overwhelming question: Was it worth it after all? o
