“Standing up and saying ‘no’ is the least I can do,” says Jenny, part of a three-member, cash-strapped Ithaca commune trying to get themselves — and anyone else they can enlist — to Chicago to protest the Vietnam War in “Days of Rage,” the Steven Levenson play on stage last weekend, and next, at the Greenhouse Theater Center on Lincoln Avenue.
After weeks of effort, they’ve signed up two people — five if they count themselves.
Current events have a way of resonating with history. America’s undeniable current slide into authoritarianism evokes the 1930s: all-powerful, venerated leader with his thumb jammed in every aspect of public life? Check. News media condemned while ridiculous lies are promoted and believed? Double check. Powerless groups blamed unfairly for social ills and persecuted in public displays of random cruelty? Yup, got those too.
Meanwhile the reaction, of some, to that slide harkens back to the 1960s, when youth took to the streets to raise their voices and tell themselves they were accomplishing something.
It’s an awkward fit, as the whole-world-is-watching grandiosity of the 1960s is generally missing from the inflatable-frogs-will-lead-us “No Kings” rallies, where the whole point seems to be registering massive opposition while demonstrating that sending in the military is unwarranted. They’re trying to shore up the American system, not smash it.
“Days of Rage” opens with the show’s focal point, Jenny, played with understated mastery by Olivia Tennison, leafleting outside a Sears store on a cold day. She’s confronted by employee Hal (Dontaye Albert, in a fine post-college stage debut) whose younger brother is in Vietnam. Her face is a symphony of disgust as Hal at first tries to get her to move on, then trots out his own paltry revolutionary bona fides: “I broke a toaster oven.”
Hal is stirred into their distinctive mix of political agitation and sexual drama, as what starts as a love triangle turns into a love pentagram. He becomes the voice of the outside observer with a foot planted in the real world while his new radical friends quote Engels and spin their schemes.
“This is how the process happens. Revolution,” says Quinn (Amanda Hoople backstopping the cast with unshowy precision).
“By yelling stuff at people?” Hal wonders.
Though set in October 1969, “Days of Rage” makes scant attempt to capture the era — from pre-show punk rock a decade in the future, to language mostly devoid of 1960s lingo while including a few anachronistic touches —”Totally!” — to Spence’s Warby Parker-ish eyeglasses (Matt Tenny brings energy to the role, but not authenticity: he’s a buff 21st century man cosplaying his grandfather).
The anachronistic aspect annoyed my wife, while it merely puzzled me. It’s not like 1960s-era dress of threadbare radicals would be expensive to replicate, prompting me to check when the playwright was born: 1984.
It starts slow, but Levenson picks up the pace in the second half, and “Days of Rage” builds in force and well-deployed surprise. Throughout is much oblivious ridiculousness.
“I hate white people,” says Peggy, the manipulative new convert, oddly eager to join their ranks, and herself white. “I can’t help it. I always have.”
But Jenny grounds us back in why this tumult is happening — napalm burning children alive in Vietnam. While Spence wonders how the towns around concentrations camps could go about their lives pretending nothing was going on.
“They didn’t do anything!” he cries, underscoring the value of all those Chicagoans with whistles and cellphones dogging ICE as they snatch residents off the street. Imagine if the Germans had done that.
Though sharply directed by Carol Kelleher, “Days of Rage” is not a standout piece of writing. When the play debuted in New York in 2018, The New York Times labeled it “disappointing” material from the guy who wrote the book for “Dear Evan Hanson.” Though for a moment I thought going to Chicago would be a metaphor for thwarted ambition, like going to Moscow in “The Three Sisters.” Chekhov this is not.
But then you would not expect high polish from an organization called the Ego Death Theatre Collective. I found it moving. My wife and I talked about the play afterward, and you will too.
“Once you know what’s happening in the world,” says Jenny, “then the only extreme thing really is to do nothing. To just go on living your life.
Hard to argue that. Though the problem today, with social media, is how vigorously many people never approach that knowledge, preferring to applaud their favorite fictions like seals.
“Days of Rage” is being performed Thursday through Sunday at the Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln Avenue. Tickets are $27 and available at www.greenhousetheater.org.