By allowing us to better understand others, theater helps us understand ourselves. Lettie, a play that quickly draws you in and keeps your curiosity stimulated throughout intensifies our awareness of released felons; an invisible class of people who is as marginalized as it is huge. A commissioned work for Victory Gardens by playwright Boo Killebrew, the play removes a veil and gives us a long hard look of what real struggle is all about.
Lettie, wonderfully played by Caroline Neff, is getting out of prison a couple of years earlier than projected and her checklist of things to do and “make right” when she’s released would make climbing Mt. Everest sound easy. She’s got to find a job, a place to stay and take her kids back. At this point, she doesn’t fully grasp that the felony now grafted to her DNA will make each one of those things a Herculean challenge.
Playwright Killebrew specializes in characters like Lettie. Working class folks that blend into the background living painfully complex lives. Lettie’s most pressing need is to see her kids, a boy and a girl being raised by her sister, Carla (Kirsten Fitzgerald). Imprisoned for over seven years, the kids, River (Matt Farabee) and Layla (Krystal Ortiz) are now in high school and have few memories of her. For all practical purposes they consider Lettie’s sister and her husband, Frank (Ryan Kitley), their parents.
Resentment can often be the most recognizable component in a family’s dynamics and when it’s aggravated by compulsory sacrifice, it can become corrosive. In Lettie, it never reaches that level but it’s toll is still high. One sister resents the other for her inability to right her ship and for her penchant for making bad decisions. Understanding motivation is key to understanding actions. Carla doesn’t reach that point with Lettie until much later in the play, after the cold realities of surviving on a meager wage brings clarity to Lettie’s ambitions.
According to the Sentencing Project, there are 1.2 million women in prison in the United States. When they’re released many of them go into the trades; brick laying, carpentry and welding. Lettie ends up training as a welder. Hard, dangerous work but if you can make the grade you could pull 30 to 40 grand a year. She doesn’t and ends up on the night cleanup crew at a junior college. Progress is something that comes slowly and in tiny increments. Like leaving the curfew and rules of her initial communal housing assignment to a shared apartment.
It’s clear that she’d like a better job and her own place. But she’s beginning to grasp how wide the gulf is between the earning potential of the formerly incarcerated and the monetary cost to make her dream come true. Being smart and tough will eventually work to her advantage. Her intelligence tells her this is as good as it’s going to get and her strength tells her she can woman up and meet the challenge.
Beyond the resentment of brothers and sisters, damaged children are also common collateral of drugs and alcoholism. Lettie bluntly reveals the ramifications of that damage. Layla was too young to remember much about her mother before she was sent to prison. Her son, River, does remember. Children have a natural need to want to be cared for and loved. And they are acutely aware of the absence of either. Carrying the physical scars from a fire caused by Lettie’s negligence when he was a child, he eventually explodes with rage at her audacity to attempt making amends. He mocks and laughs at her dreams. She doesn’t let the assault drain her of hope. Perhaps she saw something of herself in him. The rebellion and indignation he feels was something she could have felt for her own mother who had also chosen drugs over responsibility. At least her son was now in a stable home where he could be nurtured; something she never had and couldn’t offer now.
She was settling in to the realities of her life. A dead-end job that pays the rent and a cordial enough relationship with her family that might lead to something deeper. Small gains like these are major victories because of the amount of fortitude and resolve it took to get even here. Like thousands upon thousands of the formerly incarcerated, Lettie is chiseling away at life with the hope that her efforts would one day be rewarded with both tangible dividends.
Set in Chicago, from all appearances the southeast side, Stephan Mazurek’s projection design was a marvel. Projecting floor to ceiling images onto the back of the stage, he created ever changing worlds on top of the play’s standard physical set. From el platforms to factory locker rooms, the projections made the city instantly recognizable and gave the play’s appearance a layer of depth rarely captured on stage.
Lettie
April 6 – May 6 2018
Victory Garden Theatre
2433 N. Lincoln
Chicago, IL 60614
773-871-3000
victorygardens.org
