If you were an unfathomable, almost omnipotent being, what would you do with your one wild and precious life?

wyrd

This spooky season step into a modern myth and prepare to laugh, gasp, and have your reality expanded; wyrd by Matt Minnicino produced by the Lazy Susan Theatre Company is the world-bending story we need in these times. Wyrd is a potent fable, funny and quirky, full of monstrous magic, and of course a love that is out of this world. Right now, when it is far too easy to despair, wyrd is a spirit-lifting battle-cry, reminding us hope is not a delicate bird; it is something entirely more fit for survival.

Jeff Award winning Sonya Robinson makes her directorial debut with Lazy Susan Theatre Company’s production of this viciously funny, and heartbreakingly poetic script. Robinson serves us this play as a powerful impetus to choose to build a better world – even with rubble all around us – not lie down in the ashes. Wyrd reminds us that building the next world means love, magic and embracing the power of our essential selves.

In a cramped Bushwick apartment, the fate of two people is being spun. One is soaring above the clouds in love, the other fancies themselves an alpha – unwittingly poking at a poorly-restrained predator. The three sisters who live here – Snow, Red and Iras – seem just a bit odd at first, but they are far more ancient and unfathomable than they initially appear. As the sisters squabble over whether it’s appropriate to use magic to order dinner or turn pain into a grape, the wheels of fate are turning. As the threads of their lives weave together new love launches into a fight for the soul of humanity against the vagaries of what could be, how that might come to pass, and the eternal question of why.

Playwright Matt Minnicino is a Jeffrey Melnick Award and Helen Hayes nominee, and winner of the Arts and Letters Prize and David Einhorn Memorial Playwriting Prize, among many other honors and accomplishments. Minnicino says he writes little myths and calls them plays, but wyrd is no little myth. The three sisters are older than time and vaguely Checkovian. With a mix of tension and humor their human interactions evoke Charmed or Practical Magic. And like the old fairie tales, wyrd travels deep into the darkness in their journey to transformation and redemption. Wyrd reaches deep into our fears of powerlessness and rips our hearts out through our throats. It gives us hope, but it does not give us wings. This hope gives us teeth and claws, fierceness and agency. And isn’t that so, so much better than some fragile, feathery wings?

Fragility is not completely at odds with the existence of an eternal being. Maria Ines Manuel’s Snow perfectly captures this. Snow is a fractured, shimmeringly beautiful being and Manuel is hauntingly other-worldly as she fumbles through how to love a human while her own psyche is wandering across eons. Snow dreams to love and we want to fold her delicacy into protective arms. Snow dreams to challenge the sisters’ status quo and we cheer her flash of bravery. When Manuel is crumpled and breaking her own heart with inaction Snow’s surrender is as traumatizing as the scene she witnesses. The magic and poetry of wyrd lives not only in Snow’s words, but her in her entire being.

Snag Flynn is stellar as Red, the ‘fucked up angry one’ of the three wyrd sisters. Flynn brings every shade of Red: rage, passion, blood-thirsty-demi-goddess. She is a simmering cauldron, a buzzing nest of wasps, a caged blood-thirsty predator, internally pacing while tracking her prey. She is effortlessly ominous. And she is even more threatening when she smiles. She delivers comedic throw-aways with a snarly deadpan that is perfection. The abuse Red commits is a cold, calculated fire made chilling by Flynn’s masterful shifts from attack to sociopathic, saccharine manipulation. When it is Red’s moment to open to happiness Flynn is still spectacular, allowing Red’s rage to reluctantly dissipate into honest gentleness.

Jan (Blair Prince) is the life and soul of this tale, and we live the struggles and ecstasy right along with her. She is a ball of energy, seemingly an eternal optimist – until she’s not. Prince has created a Jan that is unabashedly open and available; to love, to cozying up to unfathomable beings, and to leaping fearlessly into her chance to save the world. Prince loves and fights so fiercely we simultaneously fall in love with her and want to be her. She nails the flitting, modern patter so at odds with Snow’s old-fashioned speech, making delightfully comic moments. When Jan comes undone at the anger boiling over in the world Prince lives that struggle. When Jan takes on her role of emissary for humanity Prince brings such passion and outrage for the world this could and should be, she moved the audience to tears.

Iras (Nealie Tinlin, Co-Artistic Director and Co-Founder of Lazy Susan Theatre Co.) is the flustered, clucking mother hen of the trio, and Tinlin captures this energy completely. Iras is a blustering comedic presence through most of the play, but Tinlin lets us see there is something swirling underneath the fussing. When Iras grapples with her dark night of the soul Tinlin lives that desperate prayer, needing to know that the harms of this world will be healed.

Some of the harms of this life are manifest in the being and actions of Stuart (Layke Fowler). Stuart is a narcissistic bro in a world that crowns the biggest dicks. The volume on his awfulness inexorably ratchets up, moment by moment, from ordinary obnoxiousness to disturbingly creepy, to an ultimate vileness that is shocking despite its inevitability.

There are several violent and violating interactions in wyrd. As designed by Fight and Intimacy Director Madeline Meyer moments of violation are striking, and appropriately deeply disturbing, without being gratuitous, even where Minnicino steps a bit over that line. Meyer and Robinson create vicious tableaus – especially between two of the sisters – that are haunting.

Scenic design by Elly Burke is a masterpiece in metaphor within the small space and the play’s proscribed limits of a single basement NYC flat. Most prominent are the bold white lines angling down from each side of the backdrop, forming a view of bridge cables, suspending the flat in the middle just as the characters are suspended between possible futures. The cables placement strengthens the forced perspective of the set, the farthest point inside the scene an extraordinarily narrow doorway, evocative of the narrowing opportunities to escape a fate controlled by anger and violence. Burke brilliantly transforms even the common kitchen floor into a subtle but unmistakable menace.

The wyrd world flickers between the mundane and the magical. Special effects by Lighting Designer Amina Gilbert does yeoman’s work. Gilbert’s lighting creates alternate universes that cloak the actors in magic, smoothly evoking the changing supernatural forces taking over. There are warnings about strobing lights but the flashing – while effective in highlighting key moments – is not so intense as to cause concern.

Without giving too much away, the audience was delighted by the clever manifestation of a portal hiding in the tiny kitchenette, perhaps the work of Props and Magic Designer Hannah Loessberg.

Alive with laughter and hope, and swimming with life, this tragi-comedy will open your heart. Ultimately wyrd is a modern fairy tale about agency; we all have a role in turning away from bro-kings to reclaim our power, and our fate, as our own.

Highly Recommend.

Reviewed by Soleil Rodrigue

wyrd runs Thursdays through Saturdays at 8:00 PM and Sundays at 2:30 PM through October 26. All shows are at the Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln Ave., Chicago.

Tickets are $15 to $29 and may be purchased online at https://www.lazysusantheatreco.com

Additional information about this and other area productions can be found by visiting www.theatreinchicago.com