In Letts’ ‘Minutes,’ a town confronts shameful past
Long before reaching its shocking, blood-soaked conclusion, Tracy Letts’ “The Minutes” — ticketed for Broadway next spring but now receiving its world premiere at Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago — resembles a Greek tragedy.
But this tense and taut thriller – directed by Anna D. Shapiro and featuring a terrific ensemble stuffed with Steppenwolf veterans — begins as a slice of folksy Americana, unfolding in the neoclassical council chambers of a midsize heartland city named Big Cherry.
Having spent a moment in prayer before dutifully pledging allegiance to the flag, Mayor Superba (William Petersen) and eight council members get down to business, which includes a discussion of parking and architectural plans for a new fountain.
But as with Thornton Wilder’s seemingly genial Grover’s Corners — or any one of those ostensibly friendly but invariably nightmarish towns dotting the map of Stephen King’s world – the business behind this business isn’t nearly so benign.
Council Member Carp (Ian Barford) is absent; nobody will explain why to the newest council member, who’d been absent when Carp was voted off the island during the preceding week’s meeting.
A naïve but well-intentioned outsider, new to town and to politics, Peel (Cliff Chamberlain) asks to see the minutes from that meeting so he can understand what went down. When the city clerk (Brittany Burch) finally coughs them up, the council meeting takes an abrupt left turn and the fur begins to fly.
What Carp had then been carping about — subtle, Letts’ names aren’t — goes to the heart of Big Cherry’s image of itself, involving the truth behind a civic myth that’s whitewashed one of the most infamous slaughters of native peoples in American history (that massacre is never named, but Letts’ chosen date for this faux foundation story makes clear he has Sand Creek in mind).
Will this city own its past, even if that undermines its image of itself ? Can we, living in the land of the free and home of the brave? And when even the most liberal among us choose instead to go along so we can get along, what does that say about who we are? Is history, as the mayor insists, a verb, allowing us to write the story we please? Or does it have a weight of its own?
Letts has asked such questions before — his Pulitzer-winning “August: Osage County” immediately comes to mind — but never this directly or with so much anger, all this play’s bent humor notwithstanding.
Although he finished his first draft before last November’s election, what Letts has written joins novelist Ali Smith’s “Autumn” as one of the first great works of art interrogating the meaning of the Trump era, in which we’ve never more needed to take a hard look at who we and how we got here.
“The Minutes” has been extended through Jan. 7 at Steppenwolf Theatre Company, 1650 N. Halsted St. in Chicago. For tickets, visit www.steppenwolf.org/.