The world of quarantine is paradoxical, with our immediate environments smaller and more constrained even as the big existential issues grow ever more ominous. What does it mean to live, to love, to dream in such circumstances?
Just seeing a crowd of people gathering on a sunny day in West Town’s Walsh Park is enough to trigger nostalgia in a time of pandemic. But the show also begins with the cast giving a rapid-fire rundown of “everything we remember that we love about Chicago.” The list includes outdoor water parks, Chinatown, roller skating on the south side, SummerDance at Michigan and Balbo, the smell of chocolate downtown, and music. Music everywhere.
As has been the case with Maher’s work now for several years, through such shows as The Hunchback Variations and The Strangerer, There Is a Happiness That Morning Is uses a sterile institutional background environment (and one dedicated to carefully structured public discourse) as a way to explode that environment and expose the rotting beams holding it up.
“Hearts can’t say what’s in their now when dizzied by their future,” Ellen says late in the play. As we stay stuck in our now, dizzied and terrified by the future, the idea that perhaps salvation lies in choosing joy over fear, moment to moment and as best as we can, has never felt more noble.
