For Keeps and a Single Day
Company members mentioned in this entry: John Musial
Ensemble member and director of Nelson Algren: For Keeps and a Single Day John Musial writes about what first attracted him to the works of the great Chicago writer.
"For keeps and a single day" is a life sentence. It is what a judge would say when announcing the decision, driving home the point, "Your fate is sealed, there is no escape." This phrase is something that writer Nelson Algren heard spoken in the court rooms and on the streets of the city he chronicled some four decades ago. The man had a gift for hearing the language spoken around him and spinning it into poetry. He did the same for the lives and stories of the underclass people he saw all around him in his West Side three flat apartment - the struggling, dispossessed people society tried to ignore. Algren didn't ignore them. He knew their humanity and labored to be a voice for them. He believed that a writer had accomplished a pretty great task if, in one lifetime, he could tell the story of the block he lived on. Chicago of the 1940's, 50's and 60's was Algren's block, and it is a story he told more compellingly and with greater compassion and insight that any writer since Carl Sandburg.
Our production Nelson Algren: For Keeps and a Single Day examines Algren's relationship with Chicago, from his point of view. His poetry has been edited into a series of 12 monologues. The action plays out in front of a series of film screens upon which are projected a poetic montage of film imagery, created by myself, evoking the cityscapes and scenes Algren describes. The films become a window into Algren's world.
Ultimately, the piece is a search for Nelson Algren himself; an exploration of his contradictory relationship with Chicago, the city he loved passionately yet knew all too well. Several texts from Chicago: City on the Make provide the piece's backbone, laying a broader canvas of the city's history and mythology and observing Chicago's rough melting pot of people, languages and politics. Bringing the audience closer to Algren's heart are several more personal narratives observing the people he most empathized with: the hustlers and the squares... the people for whom everyday existence is a struggle... the forgotten people whose lives are hidden behind the million watt billboards of our national prosperity. It is my hope that Nelson Algren: For Keeps and a Single Day will show you the link between Algren's Chicago and the Chicago of today, and make your Chicago a richer place for the connection.
This piece was originally written for the 2001 production of Nelson Algren: For Keeps and a Single Day
