Eastland, a musical

Or: Up from the River

She is drowned already, sir, with salt water, though I seem to drown her remembrance again with more. — Twelfth Night, II i

The one nice thing, if there’s any nice thing, about the present hour is the opportunity for second chances. Years ago I heard tell of a musical put on by the Lookingglass Theater of Chicago, commemorating the deaths of the SS Eastland, a passenger ferry contracted by Western Electric for a company picnic in the summer of 1915. Before it even left the dock the ship capsized drowning eight hundred and forty four passages and crew, more than twice the dead of the great Chicago Fire.

Odd choice for a musical, I thought, and didn’t see it. Tonight, as the Lookingglass asks for donations to keep the ghost light burning, I got, and seized a second chance.

Written by Andrew White, directed by Amanda Denhart, Eastland unfolds between a sweet folksy flow of banjo and guitar, the unfolding lives of a girl, Bobbie (Clarie Wellin), and Ilse (Monica West) a young mother, one at the start of her life, the other watching her chances and dreams dim and fade, slammed into the cavernous hold of a capsized ship, cast into darkness, utterly alone, both ministered by the unsung hero of the day, the Human Frog, Reggie Bowels (Doug Hara).

The slam of the past according down to horrific, gasping present; a water hammer right behind the breastbone, is drained away by the gorgeous, cascading rhymes, tender touching memories, of sisterly teases, and love letters and sunsets and even the Human Frog’s imagined rivalry with Harry Houdini (Derk Hasenstab). These glittering pieces, their rhymes burgeoning in the most unlikely ways, slowly freeze into pictures of loss, chances not taken, days that will never come again.

Mixed in with these are truly gorgeous pieces, scored by Ben Sussmen and Andre Pluess; the song of an undertaker (Lawrence E. DiStasi) whose gallows humor is dealt a mighty blow, to the interlude Into the River, to the caressing tales of Ilse’s hopes Extraordinary Light.

 Most moving of all is when the bodies come up.

We start in an intimate space, closed in by canvas, a plan stage and a small pit for the orchestra. Denhart’s world, exquisitely crafted, falls away from us as the plain boards erupt in traps where the drowning clutch and cry and slip to watery ends. The canvas parts and pales for us to see Reggie Bowels diving on wire and steel pipe, weightless in the air as he would be on water, and finally the wreckage of the Eastland itself (beautifully imagined by designer Dan Ostling), a vast ruin that runs all the way to the ceiling around us. It is here, as the cast comes forward they fish dripping approximations of their own costumes from washtubs and the open traps, still dripping with water and hang them high; mixing in a gorgeous cacophony of questions and fears and wishes, threaded by a sweet, diamond voice (Tiffany Topol, as Bobbie’s sister Solveig and others), not rancorous or horrified but sadly bemused. “Today I die alone, die alone.”

One of the things I miss most about theater is the sense of communal conjuring. There’s something about two sisters pushing themselves up on tip toe to look over a railing that isn't there, or an amorous shopkeep (Erik Hellman), taking a moment to court over imagined produce, that sets the weary soul to rights. So too, the horror of the tragedy, slipping fingers in the dark, lip clothes still wet with water, doesn’t hit but catches one up in an unbreakable embrace of grief. The fragile mind palace of Bobbi as she waits for rescue, the mischievous imaginings of Isle as she thinks of a world were her and her friends could do more than work and care and breed.

I feel, personally, a little selfish to grieve over unknown folk of a hundred years ago, killed only by thoughtlessness and and an uncaring river, when there are so many larger and weightier tragedies that hammer at us every hour or every day. But the beauty of Eastman is to show us not the horror of death, but the inability to touch on our lives, and the myriad of souls that float through them, before they are gone.

By its finale, Eastland’s artistry has surpassed itself, from the music that reaches right through our sternums to illuminate the lizard brain, that immortal part of us, to the delicately picked together script, to the incredible feats of storytelling envisioned by a fresh imagination and the power of living limb. A catastrophe in a different time feels fresh to us, not dredged up or sensationalized, but woken, the clammy touch of its ghost squeezing our hands (even from a computer screen, eight years on), in comfort which it, and they, could not have. Then it slips under, and the chance is gone again.