Review: EVANSTON SALT COSTS CLIMBING at Rogue Machine

Evanston Salt Costs Climbing is the Southern California premiere of a new drama at Rogue Machine through March 9th. This astounding new play by Will Arbery is about truckers who salt the roads in Evanston, Illinois, where the polar vortex just keeps driving the temperatures lower and making the snow more of a daily menace.  

A smash hit at Rogue Machine, many performances are already sold out.  Evanston Salt Costs Climbing is a strange, satirical, darkly funny meditation on loss, anxiety, and depression.  Among other things, it touches on our universal creeping feeling of dread, the vastness of the problems facing humanity such as climate change and environmental devastation, our struggle with our own bitter destructive natures, our fear of closeness and our desperate need for it.

There is a surprising abundance of laugh out humor here too, and a prankish sensibility you would not necessarily expect in material this profound.  Surreal and impishly strange, Evanston Salt Costs Climbing dips its toes playfully and luxuriantly in postmodernism and absurdity. It mixes the mundane, even the pedantically administrative, with the otherworldly, the haunting. 

The sheer exquisiteness of the execution by the creative team at Rogue Machine in this production must be noted. There is brilliance and creativity in the scenic design by Mark Mendelson, in a snowy set that captures the arctic chill so well that I felt the fictional brutal cold throughout the entire play.  The truck is particularly imaginative.  Casting by Victoria Hoffman is astute and sensitive.

Guillermo Cienfuegos is a rather supernaturally gifted director, particularly at home in the wild tangles of Will Arbery’s language.  I am still regularly thinking about his work on Will Arbery's previous play, Heroes of the Fourth Turning, almost two years later; Guillermo Cienfuegos’ direction was that kind of luminous miracle.

Cienfuegos has a furious sensitivity and gutsy aliveness in his work directing Evanston Salt Costs Climbing.  There can be that anemic and squeamish thing with some directors where they dance around things and get overly cerebral, but what I love about Cienfuegos is his rare combination of intellect plus never being afraid to get into the dirt, the mess, the viscera, the juice.  As a noted actor himself, he knows how to find the ripe, raw flesh of the scene and sink his teeth into it, guiding actors to work their most audacious, textured, truthful magic.  Guillermo Cienfuegos is one of the finest directors alive today.

Kaia Gerber, daughter of supermodel Cindy Crawford and an accomplished model and actress in her own right, does rather wondrous things with the unassuming part of Jane Jr., whose life plan is to marry a famous singer and move someplace warm.  Gerber brings something luminous and ineffable, a genuine sweetness, quirk, lively humor and bone-deep authentic depth to her character -- too lost in the brambles of depression and anxiety to do much more than volunteer sometimes at the local nursing home and try to keep track of her mother, an eminently wonderful, beautifully human Lesley Fera as local administrator Maiworm.

Hugo Armstrong is an absolute revelation as Basil, a Greek truck driver who writes short stories and is hiding from some darkness of his own.  A scene where Armstrong tells of a recurring dream is so spellbinding that you can feel the audience almost stop breathing.  Hugo Armstrong is a master storyteller, and this is a mesmerizing powerhouse performance that begs rewatching.

Will Arbery’s previous play Heroes of the Fourth Turning, had characters speaking in a striking eloquence that has long since departed film and theatre, in gorgeous, baroque language that I found irresistible.

But Evanston Salt Costs Climbing, Will Arbery's latest, is strikingly different.  It has a penchant for dropping nuclear f bombs and salty, aggressively plain Midwestern language, Dada-esque word play and a transfixing, off-kilter weirdness.  There are those times when it feels like the writing could use more development and precision, when it feels a little too clunky, particularly in the second act. But for the most part, its rough-hewn messiness works surprisingly well, opening up an experimental, raw, funny place of pure resonance that is exhilerating.

At it most intriguing, Evanston Salt Costs Climbing suggests that the anxiety and depression that characterize our modern age are more than our individual pathology, but reflect something chronically, collectively, deeply wrong in our approach to things on this planet that is simply unbearable.

Evanston Salt Costs Climbing is the kind of play that lingers with you for a long time, something that touched me to my core.   This is another masterful, must-see achievement from the genius creative team at Rogue Machine.

To post a comment, you must register and login.