(Photo by Sean Williams)
There comes a moment in every drama depicting a disaster or grotesque societal injustice when the artists must “go there” – to that frightening, uncomfortable place that the audience collectively dreads in nervous anticipation. Scary, though it may be, that visceral high is an absolute necessity to truthfully relaying the past. In the grand human tradition of telling each other our stories, what’s passed down are deeply felt emotions; not rote facts and figures. To shy away from fear and to, instead, purify the controversial, messy subject matter, dishonors the event, its victims, and its fighters. “Eastland,” a new musical depicting the tragic 1915 sinking of the S.S. Eastland and which opened on Saturday night at Lookingglass Theatre Company, does not go there.
The sole, insurmountable problem facing “Eastland” is its gooey and sentimental, though uniquely structured, script by Lookingglass Artistic Director Andrew White. Written in sing-songy verse evoking T.S. Eliot and Dr. Seuss at their pluckiest, White’s book chooses caustic kindred gentility over the true grit of his circumstance. Just imagine the horror of drowning on a Chicago River cruise. I squirm when I merely catch a glimpse of kayakers on those murky waters, but to have that sooty grime cramming your lungs to unbearable capacity on a mockingly gorgeous summer’s day – with the intense pollution of the early twentieth century, no less – would be unfathomably hellish. It’s the discomfort I felt while writing those words that this altogether pleasant musical is missing entirely.
