With his consuming 85-minute drama The Wolf at the End of the Block, given a compelling Teatro Vista world premiere under Ricardo Gutiérrez’s air-tight direction, Chicago playwright Ike Holter shows he’s gloriously out of step with current trends among big-name, award-winning American playwrights. While like many of them he writes about pressing social issues, here the debilitating effects of police oppression on a majority-nonwhite community like Humboldt Park, he never wastes a moment, never lets his characters dawdle through extended demonstrations of their quirks, never diddles around the edges of his story in search of “interesting” but dramatically irrelevant encounters. He avoids moral schematics and easy sympathy. And most uniquely, he never mistakes forced poesis or overworked metaphors for dialogue.
Yet Frida’s passionate interest in Abe’s story is the play’s great misstep. If a single report from Frida could seriously challenge systemic police misconduct—and nothing in the play makes us question everyone’s belief that it might—then she must be a prominent national media figure (her assertion that anyone would kill for a producer’s credit on her piece makes it clear she’s not working for local news). As such, she’s scrupulous, schooling Miranda, “You need to double-check the sources, and the work and get backups, and testimonial, and a lawyer, video, voices, facts.” Yet she’s ready to air Abe’s allegations 48 hours after the attack with no corroborating witnesses, no surveillance video, no filed court case or IPRA charge, not even a medical opinion that his injuries likely resulted from an assault rather than, say, falling down a flight of stairs.
