Verböten a new musical at the House Theater

Or: Breaking Home

“A Story about how Punk saves lives.” In 1983, in Evanston Illinois, a band was formed: Verböten. Born of rage against complacent suburban lives, the thrum and promise of punk rock, and the wild green shoots of youth which strive to tear up the heartiest environment. There was the drummer, Zack (Jeff Kuryaz) who blisters the air with sticks and acidic comments, Chris (Matthew Lunt) a wailing bass, a few bricks shy of a full load (chemically, not innately) but enthusiastically committed to what he commits too. Front woman Tracey (Krystal Ortiz) burns, with frustration, excitement, love of music while Ortiz’s deep python voice (textured, uncanny, and low to the ground) muscles its way through the air. And then the song writer Jason (Kieran McCabe) who can tackle his guitar with passion like a young sweltered Apollo.

Except that not all things lie well with Jason. He spends the show like a poorly patched balloon, swelling and shrinking and folded up around himself, distorted. While his bandmates struggle with their own families, and prepare for one of their first big shows in Chicago, Jason’s has split right down the middle, navigating life with his stepfather (Jimmy Chung) and in the increasingly dangerous stone of his own roiling Dad (Ray Rehberg). The bands brand of punk has always been have on the angst, but something in the newer lyrics speaks to something roiling, and poisonous.

Set up in concert form, flowing from bedroom to couch, stage to deep basement under Nathan Allen’s protean direction, the play erupts into punk at a pick drop. It follows the tradition of a true musical: when feelings are to powerful to be spoken, they take flight as song. But it’s not all rebellion and revolution (it’s a lot, but not all) in Jason Narducy’s muscial. Brett Nevue’s script focuses on the parents of the band as people and musicians in their own right (they serve as both as the band and the writhing fans). Zack’s father (Marc A. Rogers) tries to flow around and over his sons jagged rebuffs talking about the music that has been such a part of his life, culminating in a lightening-blaze anthem (and a heart-squishing hug). On the more brittle note, Chris’s sister Brenda (Markia Mashburn) gives us a sharp and jagged tale of scorn and sourness, promising to take her her little brother down with her as they sit amid cigarettes and beer cans (the Wheeler sibs, these ain’t). Nevues sparks with witticisms and wryness, a lot of it attracted to Paul Brain Fagen ad Jenny M. Hadley as Tracey’s straight laced parents who get a truly moving reprise turning around one of their daughters sinkhole songs of doubt and filling it with love and regard.

Chung is an absolute delight, as a gentle blue grass musician, trying to build bridges to his stepson through the time honored tradition of corny phrases, and taking to the guitar and dance floor with a vibrant glee. And Rehberg, handed a prickly role, takes great care of it, neither letting Jason’s father become too flatly villainous nor too sympathetic, but just believably, respectably Unfortunate. A Highlight of the show is a guitar duel between Jason and his Dad, reworking the lyrics of the same melody, a competition that’s something like love, until it turns nasty.

And we get the flashes of their youth. Towards the end of the show we get live footage of the real life Verböten in concert. And though we may have been reminded of it at odd edges of the play it never hits home that they are middle schoolers; tremendous musicians (pulling mad respect from the Punk community in the day and after) but persons who the phrase “wee tykes” would not be unjustly applied. It makes their legacy far stronger but also pushes a wrenching new lens on their struggles. One ought to wince when McCabe suffers a blow at his father’s hands, but imagining him in a far more breakable body is positively shuddering. A third level is woven when you check your program to realize the Jason Narducy who’s crafted these bumptious songs is THE Jason, member of the band, who credits it with saving his life.

The band doesn’t act young, but the script provides enough veins of childhood shot through their rocker toughness: Tracey rocking a long to a children’s record (ala Free To Be, You and Me) or Zack and Chris debating the merits of physical and metaphorical buttholes. They make terrible discussions by processes clear only to them, but then make the right ones for equally inexplicable reasons. These latchkey kids and their well meaning parents, who had their own youthful misadventures (some more harmful and longer lasting than others) find solace in the ongoing revolution of Punk, knowing that even if they leave the beer stained stage they will never be squares, and will always have a family; rough glued and missing pieces, but theirs all the same, to come back to.