THEATER AS ARTISTIC COMMUNITY JOURNALISM: “EUREKA DAY,” “PURPOSE,” “DHABA ON DEVON”
The 2025 Tony Awards were particularly good for regional theater this year – and for plays by, for and about the community they are staged in, a phenomenon that is rare but of which we have a few exciting examples this year. Theater today is notoriously New York-centric. The Pulitzer Prize, for example, reportedly went 85 years before a play that had not yet played in New York was picked, from the first prize ever given for drama (to Why Marry? by Jesse Lynch Williams) in 1918 to 2003’s Anna in the Tropics by Nilo Cruz, which was commissioned by and first performed at New Theatre in Coral Gables, Florida (in the Miami area, not a city widely known for its theater). There have since been very few others, including Fat Ham by James Ijames, which won the Pulitzer while its first off-Broadway production (I saw it at the Public Theatre in New York) was still selling advance tickets. Thanks to the pandemic, it had only been staged in an online video production, by the Wilma Theatre in Philadelphia. But even more rare is when theater functions as a kind of community journalism, in which the play is written by a local resident of the theater at which it is first staged, about that community, and staged first for that community. This has been a good year for that style of play.
The best example of this phenomenon is perhaps this year’s winner of the Best Play Revival Tony award, Eureka Day by Jonathan Spector. I happened to have been visiting Berkeley, California while that play was running its first production at the Aurora Theatre Company, which commissioned it. Aurora, whose little space is located on the same block as the Tony-winning Berkeley Repertory Theatre, does a great job of programming for the community, though this level of localism is rare even there, and Eureka Day’s success would seem to put it in the running potentially for a Regional Tony of its own down the road. I know whereof I speak, apparently, because two years in a row recently I correctly predicted in advance of the Regional Tony which theater would get the award. One of them was Wilma, and Fat Ham was a major reason I predicted it, along with the fact that Philadelphia had gone almost 50 years without a single theater on the list despite being home to the longest continually operating theater in the country, the Walnut Theatre.
Meanwhile, the Tony for the best new play also went to a play about the city in which it was first staged. The playwright was not a resident of that city this time, although he did live in the city while working on the play. That was the excellent Purpose by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, which I saw in its original production at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago. It tells a story about the family of a civil rights leader obviously based on Jesse Jackson and was set in Jackson’s home city of Chicago. When accepting the award, Jacobs-Jenkins said Chicago had “some of the best actors in America” and spoke movingly in favor of regional theater. “I want to thank the city of Chicago, honestly, who literally made the show what it was with their enthusiasm,” he said. “A lot of great stuff happens in New York but a lot more happens out in the regions, so use your next commercial break to Google a local theater near [you] or have a very difficult conversation with your family members.”
This month at Writer’s Theatre in Glencoe, Illinois, which the late Wall Street
Journal critic Terry Teachout called “the number one regional theater in
America” in 2016, another example has taken the stage: Dhaba on Devon Avenue
by Madhuri Shekar, the author of the play A Nice Indian Boy, which was
turned into a very entertaining movie this year starring Jonathan Groff. Google AI says Shekar splits her time between New Jersey, New York City and Chennai, India, but Dhaba on Devon
reads like it was written by a local of Chicago’s “Little India” neighborhood
on the famous Devon Avenue (6400 North on Chicago’s North Side). The play covers the evolving
demographics, and the alleged decline, of the neighborhood and its still-extant restaurant
scene. I saw that play this week after eating a delicious
dinner at Udupi Palace on Devon. This is the way to watch it, if you ask me. (Actually,
the ideal might be to see the play first and then go to Devon for Indian food,
when you know what to order based on the play.)
Dhaba on Devon Avenue starts with the exciting premise
of reporting in theatrical form on the state of a local neighborhood, and specifically
on the evolution of the restaurant scene on Devon as Indian families from the
area have in large measures moved to northern suburbs and (according to one of the characters
in the play) seen their kids become doctors. The subject of Dhaba on
Devon is a Sindhi clan (hailing from a region that is today in Pakistan but
was in India before 1947) that owns a family restaurant on Devon that has survived
for decades but is now in danger of foreclosure. The fictional restaurant in Shekar’s
play is profiled by the Chicago Tribune, and while they were expecting a
30-year anniversary puff piece, the family is disappointed to find the paper focuses
on the decline of Devon instead.
“Today, Devon Avenue is purely nostalgic,” the play’s
program quotes Indian suburbanite Viral Shah as saying. “I don’t think I’ve been
to Devon in the last, maybe 10 years.” Shah,
who was speaking to Chicago Public Radio in 2023 when she said this, was at the
time helping to organize the Indian Independence Day Parade in Naperville. She
was presumably promoting the parade in Naperville at the time and so might
not be the best example, but the play conjures an elegiac tone from such sentiments that is compelling and heart-wrenching. Actually, my family’s experience going
back to Devon (not for the first time in recent years) did not bear out the
play’s thesis, as parking was still almost impossible to find, and Udupi Palace, which I first visited 30 years ago, was still pretty busy on a Sunday
afternoon at 4 p.m. Many of the restaurants I’ve been going to for three
decades are sill there. But the play, originally supposed to be
staged in 2020 but cancelled then due to the COVID pandemic, is even more
resonant now that many restaurants have shuttered after the extended closures
of those years.
I used to work in local newspapers, including a small paper renowned
for covering its neighborhood in award-winning detail, so I know how big an impact community journalism can
make on its neighborhood, and how important a good paper can be to a community. (That paper, like most print newspapers, has declined in some ways since.) I get easily excited by theater that delves into
the shifting trends of a specific locality besides New York City. Chris Jones
of the Chicago Tribune, writing about Dhaba on Devon, twice
described himself as a “sucker” for local content, so he knows what I’m talking
about.
As tantalizing as the theme is, however, I was somewhat disappointed
that the play, for all its talk of the changing
economic climate of Devon, ultimately rests the decision to close or open the
restaurant not on elements that shed light on local trends but on fictional
personal concerns of the characters. This might not be a problem if the conclusion
of the play wasn’t also something of a let-down. An hour of fun and drama climaxes
in the sort of explosive family argument that has been the stuff of great
American theater from Eugene O’Neill to Jacobs Jenkins’s Purpose. But, as I
feared, the explosion left nothing for the remaining half hour of the play but hushed reconciliation of the sort
one associates with television sitcoms. I won’t say how Dhaba resolves but
I was reminded of a rule Jerry Seinfeld invented when writing episode conclusions for his
formula-breaking sitcom “Seinfeld” in the 1990s: "No hugs and no lessons.” There are no hugs in the end of Dhaba, but there might as well have been, and there were lessons. One doesn't wish the play to be "Seinfeld," but the rule feels instructive here. I wished the last 40 minutes (it ran 10 minutes over) were somewhat different. For example, The
patriarch of the play’s Madhwani family, beset by Parkinson’s disease and therefore
unable to fully taste his own cooking, is played by Anish Jethmalani with a sizzling intensity that is desirable but which ends up exhibiting a one-note quality that keeps the play locked
in a similar tone for too long. By the last act, I wanted more variety and comedy in the
mix. More, perhaps, like the balance between humor and pathos struck so deftly in A
Nice Indian Boy.
Still, there is more to like in Dhaba than dislike. The
cast alongside Jethmalani is strong. Tina Munoz Pandya gives a likeable breeziness
to her character, the Madhwani daughter who aspires to take over the restaurant
and give it her own fusion spin with grilled paneer sandwiches and pepper-speckled
ice cream. Mueen Jahan, playing the one Sindhi character who wasn’t born in the United
States, is funny and moving. The dramaturgy by Karina Patel is superb, especially in a magazine distributed at the door called Backstory that features articles on the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, the history of Devon, and the changing times in the Little India neighborhood. Meanwhile the play’s set, a thoroughly realized restaurant
kitchen designed by Lauren M. Nichols, is so detailed it takes just a little too long to do one of the set changes. And
the smell of Indian food, which greets you when you walk into the theater,
gives an authenticity that will make you eager to get back to Devon.
Ultimately Dhaba on Devon Avenue doesn’t have quite the
power of Eureka Day, Spector’s thrillingly original treatise on the explosive conflict between vaccine adherents and “anti-vaxxers” in Berkeley. This
might sound like a predictable subject after the pandemic until one learns that
the play was written in 2017. Since then, what struck me as an excitingly local play
when I encountered it in 2018 in Berkeley has acquired a world-wide universality as well as an explosive timeliness.
The play centers on a kindergarten in Berkeley called Eureka Day School that
becomes subsumed in a mumps outbreak, triggering a violent debate between progressive
parents angry that some of the students were not vaccinated, and progressive
parents adamant that vaccines are dangerous to their kids. The highlight of
the play is a knock-down,
drag-out flame war amongst the parents in an online chat during a broadcast of
an emergency board meeting to discuss the epidemic. Many of the funniest and most
explosive lines are not heard but read by the audience, as video screens give us
access to the degenerating chat battle. Stylistically the play feels perhaps
most influenced by the plays of Bruce Norris, who usually writes combustible arguments
that expose with blade-sharp wit the foibles and fumbles of the same
progressive communities who go to his plays – and who praise them most highly. See
Norris’ Clybourne Park, another play by a Chicagoan staged in Chicago for
Chicagoans, though it debuted in London before it ran in Chicago and before its New York productions went on
to win it both the Pulitzer and the Tony. See also Norris’ The Pain and the Itch
and Downstate. Eureka Day will be performed back at its original stomping grounds at the Aurora Theatre Company in Berkeley in August and September, with most of the original cast returning. The TimeLine Theatre Company, which co-produced Dhaba on Devon Avenue, will also be producing Eureka Day next January and February in Chicago.
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