Musing: A Big Donut For Neighborhood Preservation

A couple days ago, I saw the latest play at the Steppenwolf Theatre here in Chicago. It's called Superior Donuts, and it's by Tracy Letts. You may know him if you follow arts news at all. He wrote August:Osage County for Steppenwolf last year, which was moved to Broadway, won Tony awards for everyone involved (including the audience members), and scored the author a Pulitzer Prize. And, yes. It was that good. After I saw it last year, I started telling everyone that I thought it was the best new American play of the last two decades, despite the fact that I'd seen only a small fraction of the plays produced in America since 1988.

So, Superior Donuts isn't as good as August, of course. But that's not stopping it from playing to packed houses of people who don't want to miss Tracy Letts's latest, or from playing to houses full of Broadway producers in its opening week. It's a wholly different animal from August, which was a massive, epic family drama that was probably so cathartic for the writer that he won't be able to produce something like it again until he reaches retirement age, if ever. Superior Donuts is much smaller in its scale and focus. It's also very funny (it's sort of a black comedy/drama), very touching, and very good in its own way. But the really cool thing about it is that it is set in Chicago, and more than that, is uniquely of Chicago. The city is not just a setting or a backdrop, it makes up the themes behind the action. The play could not have been set anywhere else.

Very briefly, the play is about the owner of the last independent donut shop in Uptown--played by Michael McKean, who you might know from the Christopher Guest movies, or Lavergne & Shirley if you're really old--who is forced to face up to some of the failings of his character when a black kid from the neighborhood comes to work for him. As I said, it deals with several Chicago-centric themes (like ethnic tensions) to a lesser extent, but the main theme, and the one I found most interesting, is the passing of the neighborhood era in Chicago.

Chicago gets a zero for preserving neighborhood character. In other news, I like chocolate covered cake donuts with sprinkles.

In an interview between the director and the playwright that I read in the program, both noted how Chicago was the only American city they knew of in which people strongly identified themselves by their ethnicity. It might be a part of who you are if you live in another city, but only here do people routinely ask questions like, "Where are you from?" and think of themselves as Polish or German or whatever, even if their family has been American for two generations. Chicago used to be distinctly organized into ethnic neighborhoods, which formed strong social networks based on common backgrounds. My dad, for instance, grew up in Greektown and knew most of the other Greeks because that was his neighborhood. Still, to this day, he knows a lot of the Greek families in Chicagoland, because they all grew up together. Of course, the majority of the neighborhood was bulldozed to make way for UIC's campus, which turned Greektown into a strip where all the Greek restaurants are, instead of a neighborhood where all the Greek people live.

In Superior Donuts, the store owner is Polish. He gives free coffee and donuts to the Russian video store owner next door and the old alcoholic woman who comes in every day. He knows the two beat cops that stop in for their morning coffee, and they know him and everyone else who frequents the place. They ALL know each other, and they help each other out when they can, because they're part of a distinct neighborhood. Uptown is one of the last places on the North Side where you find that type of neighborhood character. But everything changes, of course--Superior Donuts is getting killed by the Starbucks that opened across the street.

Nowadays, North Side neighborhood distinctions in Chicago mostly matter for real estate listings. What was once an immigrant city is no longer working class. I live near Old Town, which is a pretty historic area in Chicago, the site of some major events in its history, like the riots during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. When I go to sell my place, though, my realtor will probably call my location Lincoln Park, because it might up the sales price a bit. It's pretty ironic that Old Town is also the birthplace of Crate & Barrel. I'm not trying to say that I'm opposed to gentrification or anything. (That would be awfully hypocritical--I'm about as yuppie as you can get). But I do get a little sad thinking about how Chicago used to be, and how homogenized it's become. My dad can tell you about the family of some Greek guy we might happen to run into at a restaurant in the suburbs. Me, I hardly know the people who live in my building. I get my groceries from Whole Foods (before they closed it down for a rodent infestation... hear about that one?), I get my coffee from Peet's, I get my furniture from Crate & Barrel. Just like everyone else. And I can't remember ever eating a donut that didn't come from Dunkin Donuts. That's modern urban living for you.

In other news, my fascination with reality competition TV continues (why and when did this happen to me?). My latest fixation is "So You Think You Can Dance". Seen it? I recommend it. The talent level is very high, and unlike on Idol, very few of the contestants are irritating. And there's a lot of hot girls (they're fricking dancers!). Aside from one of the judges, Mary Murphy, who is completely insufferable, the show is really entertaining. My male and female favorites are, coincidentally, a dance couple on the show: Chelsea and Mark. Maybe I'll go into why, if I feel like it in a later post.