Dystopian dramas are all the rage — for obvious reasons — and in Jojo Jones’ droll “Veal,” now at A Red Orchid Theater, we have somehow ended up with a Queen of North America, even as the rest of the country is starving and living in refugee camps.
If that were not shocking enough, the queen here wants to re-litigate her time in middle school.
I mean that entirely literally. This 90-minute show, an attraction that certainly holds your attention, is basically “The Last of Us” meets “Mean Girls.”
When we first meet said monarch, Chelsea (the amusingly intense Alexandra Chopson), she is arranged in Versailles-like splendor, with a male concubine in pliant attendance, as the audience filters into the theater. Also arriving for an audience: Three old millennial-type pals who have followed conventional careers at Google or Spotify or doing social media for a restaurant group or whatever — “who even cares now?,” one of them says, dryly and mid-humiliation — hoping that their past relationship with Her Royal Highness will lead to the provision of desperately needed insulin for one of their number’s relatives. “You are definitely the most successful person from our middle school,” one of the sycophants says, before crawling back to the camp of the desperate, wondering what the hell happened to their life and their country.
Maybe the friends will win their quest. But first, Chelsea, aka Chaligula, will extract her price by reliving the touchstones of myriad middle-school horrors from some 13 years ago: the lunchroom, the school dance, somebody’s especially humiliating bar mitzvah. She seeks the precise replication of her friend group’s “dynamic.”
Does Chelsea want absolution? Revenge? Therapy?
Or is this dictator-queen (“doing bad things is really easy”) merely on a nostalgia trip? “It’s not like I don’t want people to visit,” she says, staring at the hungry mouths of her former peers.
Such are the questions of the night in this rather beguiling world premiere, a show that certainly ratchets up the stakes of adolescent angst.
Paring the famously non-linear director Dado with a work of this level of abstraction has sometimes in the past resulted in a hat upon a hat. But in this instance, the director and writer feel quite copasetic. Thanks in no small part to the three suppliant pals, played by Jojo (what were the odds?) Brown, Carmia Imani and Alice Wu, the show has plenty of life: Brown is especially impressive, evoking a character that is desperately trying to keep things casual, as in middle-school cool, despite the life-and-death stakes.
Linguistically, the script is very interesting along those same lines, with ‘tween talk crashing up against the agony of refugees and the naked application of power. Certainly, it’s a one-idea kind of satire with set characters, but Jones also is smart enough to make sure that her allegory does not extend past the freshness of her metaphors. I can see this script being popular in colleges in the future; it’s a zesty little piece that certainly makes good on its thesis that nobody ever leaves the traumas of middle school behind.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
Review: “Veal” (3 stars)
When: Through Nov. 9
Where: A Red Orchid Theatre, 1531 N. Wells St.
Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes
Tickets: $55 at 312-943-8722 and aredorchidtheatre.org
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