My theory? The people who’ve known Tracy Letts longest know him the least. I mean those of us who remember the enfant-terrible days of Killer Joe and Bug, the former a rude jest about a murder-for-hire scheme gone very wrong, the latter a skin crawler about codependency gone very, very, very wrong. Together with his Oklahoma roots, the two plays conveyed an impression of Letts as a postpunk cowboy avant-gardist a la Sam Shepard—the sort you can picture getting into a bar fight over somethin’ bad somebody said about Rimbaud. Killer Joe, in particular, gave Letts significant street cred in London, where he was adopted as an American cousin of theatrical bomb throwers like Martin McDonagh and Sarah Kane.
Linda Vista is the tale of Wheeler (Ian Barford), a career curmudgeon remarkably similar to Rob Gordon—the misfit audiophile played by John Cusack in High Fidelity—but, crucially, older. Formerly a photographer for the Chicago Sun-Times, the 50-year-old Wheeler is now the darkest thing in sunny San Diego, working as a camera repairman in a store owned by a logorrheic creep named Michael (Troy West, making you want to get deloused). We first see Wheeler moving his plastic milk crates full of vinyl LPs into a new apartment, having just come off a bad stretch sleeping on a cot in his estranged wife’s garage.
Through 5/21: Wed 2 and 7:30 PM (7:30 PM only through April), Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat-Sun 3 and 7:30 PM (3 PM only Sun 5/21) Steppenwolf Theatre 1650 N. Halsted 312-335-1650steppenwolf.org $64-$89
