If you want to see Chicago ensemble acting at its best, go see the new production of “East Texas Hot Links” at the Court Theater.
That’s not the same thing as saying that each member of the ensemble gives a great performance, although that’s a pre-requisite. A genuinely special ensemble feels like a singular, organic whole, far more than the sum of the individual parts.
This 1991 play by Eugene Lee — written very much under the influence of August Wilson, in whose work the actor-writer Lee has frequently performed — is mostly naturalistic, and the natural-ness with which this cast performs it crackles with life and personality, even more so than it did in 2017, when director Ron OJ Parson staged it at Writers Theatre with half of the eight-person ensemble we see here.
The returning four, stalwart Chicago actors all — Kelvin Roston Jr., Willie B., Alfred H. Wilson and A.C. Smith — welcome the others – AnJi White, Juwan Lockett, David Dowd, and Geno Walker — into this remote part of 1955 East Texas such that they too seem right at home, as if they’ve lived here all their lives, which every character has and probably multiple generations before them too.
These characters don’t just know each other — the backwoods Top o’ the Hill Café where the play is set has obviously long been a favorite hangout, and in Jack Magaw’s set design has the peeling paint and fading posters to show for it — but they knew each other’s parents. For decades, nothing much has changed here except the passing of time and the aging or dying of the people. As XL Dancer (Lockett) likes to joke about the primary employer in town, “My family’s been working for that ugly white man since he was an ugly white baby.”
There seems to be change on the horizon; a federal highway is being built nearby, with the construction contract run by that same ugly white man. But this is also still the rural South well during Jim Crow. A Klan cross-burning is a regular occurrence, and young Black men occasionally disappear, perhaps found later buried in highway cement.
Those events feel peripheral for much of “East Texas Hot Links,” not much more than topics of discussion, local intrigue, for the denizens of the café/bar. It mixes in with the often lighthearted, frequently funny dialogue about Roy Moore’s (Roston Jr.) basketball heroics of yore, café owner Charlesetta’s (White) late father’s roast pig, blind Adolph’s (Willie B.) philosophizing, the much younger Delmus’ (Dowd) desire to run off to Houston with his girlfriend, the terrible cooking of small-time landlord Columbus Frye’s (Wilson) wife, who also happens to be XL’s sister.
They talk, as people do, about other people, desire, food, drink (and buying each other one) and money, as in trying to make it. The scarcity of this world has formed these characters, with none of them yet finding the balance between being generous and taken advantage of or selfish and generally alone.
The talk is so rich and meandering that you begin to wonder whether much of anything will really happen in this play, until the local gambler with a talent for doom prognostication (Smith) shows up and insists something terrible is about to befall one of those present.
I don’t think Lee really needed that sudden leap into the semi-supernatural to find his catalyst for action, but it was certainly one way to change this single-scene play quickly from a slice of life to a thriller that explodes in both predictable and unpredictable ways.
It’s when all the frenetic action starts happening that you become aware of the shocking effortlessness with which Parson and the actors have laid the groundwork for what’s happening.
The palpable reality they’ve skillfully fabricated makes the sudden suspense tingle, the characters they’ve craftily embodied make you care about what happens to them, and the community they’ve formed makes acts of betrayal or generosity feel earth-shattering.
No single performance could make it all feel this dramatic.