BTE’s Naperville Celebrates the Ties that Bind

Place stamps us more than we realize.  It influences the kind of people we encounter and the values we develop.  Where we’re from has the power to stoke or stifle how we regard our futures.  Even if we grow up veritable nomads, place will still influence the kinds of experiences that define our understanding of the world.  It’s one of the factors that shape us.  Naperville, a winning dramedy now being staged by Buffalo Theatre Ensemble in Glen Ellyn, stealthily probes into how place sways our day to day lives.

Thirty miles outside Chicago, prosperous, brimming with excellent schools and sporting more than their fair share of three car garages, Naperville’s mystic as a haven for the professional classes goes back decades. But this story isn’t focused on that aspect of city. It’s more interested in how much in common its comfortable populous has with everybody else inhabiting the globe.

When we meet Anne (Lisa Dawn), we’re not given many clues why she’s so intent on speaking each name of the Great Lakes into her phone’s recording app. She just seems overly frustrated at forgetting one of them.  We do learn her recitation has something to do with a story she’s composing about a shipbuilder and adventurer named John Naper.  At this early stage, we don’t know she’s on the verge of imploding.  That she’s not just studying or writing, but hiding out at the Caribou Coffee to avoid the reality of her life.  With just two years to go before she’s 40, on the broken side of a hard divorce, living at home with her parents in her old still pink bedroom and so fragile she’d eventually end up prostrate on the coffee shop’s bathroom floor, we have no idea she’s virtually destroyed.   We just see the façade, an attractive young woman using a commercial space as a casual office.  When T.C. (Whitney Dottery) bursts from the back of the coffee shop checking in on her customers, we realize laughter is going to be a part of the mix.  T.C.’s intensity is equal parts endearing and hilarious.  Determined to please her patrons and impress her bosses, she’s more ingratiating than annoying because you can sense an almost aching honesty in her efforts.    

As a character piece, Naperville builds layer by layer. Candice (Kelli Walker) and her son, Howard (Ravi Kalani) don’t arrive until we think we have a grasp of Caribou Coffee new manager, T.C., and the prickly Anne.  Caribou is Candice’s favorite coffee shop and she makes Howard bring her here after her recovery from an accident.  Candice proves womanly maturity can come with a wryly comic edge. Brashly independent and a natural born match maker, Candi’s not about to let the blindness she’s incurred from her fall from a ladder keep her from being the rabidly self-reliant woman she’s always been.  In all other respects a perfect mensch, when it comes to his mother, Howard is prone to hover and fret. Understanding that protective sons and self-sufficient moms are a little like oil and water, it’s clear that eventually someone is going to have to give. The sparring that happens in between though rouses a stream of chuckles you usually associate with a Trevor Noah or Stephen Corbert monologue.  Throw in what Howard perceives as either a scam artist or someone with inappropriate feelings for his mother, and you have a stew of emotions that rival Shakespeare. None of them invoke the revenge, animus and enmity we tie to the Bard’s tragedies.  The folks we meet in Naperville drag their baggage, haul their crosses and, for the most part, endure their hardships and challenges with a hushed humor cushioned dignity; even though a part of their mind might wander to more drastic responses to their difficulties.

For everyone except T.C., Naperville is home, their anchor.   The suburb-city, with all its glistening attributes, can’t protect its residents from the vagaries of life.  Playwright Mat Smart’s revealing peek beyond the surface does a fine job emphasizing the importance of being open to connections and insuring that their benefits flow in both directions.  A strong cast, each of the actors beautifully embody people you understand because their problems are universal.  Much like T.C., some of us make more than one false start before we find that firm toe-hold we need to move forward.  Others of us might relate more to Roy (Robert Jordan Bailey), whose life is an ongoing act of atonement for a deep regret.  Howard would never confide that he’s lonely; although his mother seems all too aware of it.  And Anne, looking up from the bottom of her abyss thinks her climb out of her despair is futile. Trying to understand what drove a shipbuilder to become a farmer and settle a town 30 miles outside of Chicago led her to some unexpected discoveries.  Discoveries she wouldn’t have made without the people she met in a coffeehouse.

Theater goers in the western suburbs already know what a treasure they have in the Buffalo Theatre Company.   In operation since 1986, the resident professional ensemble of the College of DuPage’s McAninch Arts Center has a long history of keeping the area culturally nourished and entertained.  It’s current production of Naperville underscores the variety and depth of theater talent filling the Chicago metropolitan region.   

Naperville

April 28 – May 29, 2022

McAninch Arts Center/College of DuPage

425 Fawell Blvd.

Glen Ellyn, IL  60137

www.atthemac.org/buffalo-theatre-company