'Trust' at Lookingglass: David Schwimmer's story of a shattered family hits close to home

Three and one half stars (out of four) 

There is little in the way of safe artistic remove in David Schwimmer and Andy Bellin's relentlessly gut-wrenching new theater piece “Trust,” dealing with a vulnerable 14-year-old girl who falls prey to an insidious Internet creep and the girl's progressive, once-happy, three-kid family, which finds itself suddenly ripped into shreds.

Although fictional, the girl lives in Wilmette and is a freshman at New Trier Township High School. You might recognize the building (by the Chicago River) in which her father, an advertising executive, works, and the leafy North Shore street on which her mother, a realtor, sells. On the Lookingglass Theatre's giant video wall, familiar signposts of upper-middle-class life in the Chicago suburbs appear. You'll note movies and shopping at the Old Orchard mall, the security line at Terminal 1 at O'Hare, the French Market, and ice cream at the Cold Stone Creamery.

This rather jarring specificity has an explicit moral purpose. Unusually for Lookingglass, this isn't an aesthetic, ephemeral, ambivalent or metaphoric exploration of an ancient or literary narrative. This is old-fashioned, agit-prop theater designed to warn families of a danger, and, should that not entirely avoidable danger strike, to suggest strategies for coping. And as Bertolt Brecht and theater politicos across the years have always known, the more local and specific you are, the harder you bring your point home.

This piece, co-directed by Schwimmer and Heidi Stillman, certainly hits with force. On opening night, moist eyes were everywhere and narrative twists were often accompanied by vocal exclamations of shock from the people in the seats.

Any number of parental nightmares play out. Most powerful is the way this piece makes clear that you can't protect your children against everything. Good kids get hurt. But the scenes that disturb the most involve these well-meaning parents' slow realization that, just because they think they are open and approachable, that doesn't mean their daughter necessarily wants to confide in them.

At one point, the father (played by Philip R. Smith) tells his daughter, as any good father would, that she should not concern herself with being liked by the popular girl at school, but should just be herself. The girl (played, exquisitely, by Allison Torem) looks at her dad like he's from Mars. “This is high school,” she says, as if talking to one mentally deficient. She well knows that if she's not liked by such creatures, she is in big trouble. That is what life is like when you are 14. We just forget.

“Trust” is being made into a movie (starring Clive Owen) even as the stage version plays at the Water Tower Water Works. And it's true that this sometimes feels more like a staged screenplay (with myriad short scenes in multiple locales) than a work for the stage. The topic has been well-mined by television movies of the week, and some will doubtless argue that “Trust,” which hits many of the typical talking points of this issue, merely follows that predictable trajectory.

Some of that is fair criticism (the unnecessary last scene, which is on film and too pat, actually detracts from the communicative power of the human ending). But after seeing these performances, I'm not so interested in seeing the movie. The acting at Lookingglass is of such high quality that anything schematic in the writing is consistently deepened and enriched.

And on some primal level, this show just works. Pieces like this often fly in the face of what is most valued in the arts establishment. Much claptrap about risk is spoken in the theater. Sometimes the biggest risk of all is to create clear, accessible shows about life as it as actually lived. And a passionate point of view can be riskier than a metaphor.

Smith, who plays the girl's father, is doing the best work of his long career in Chicago. Smith is a quiet, meditative kind of actor who shies away from flashy articulation. His inherent resistance to the rage that envelops this guy is precisely what gives that anger such force. And Torem, whom I first admired at the Profiles Theatre, seems to capture so many sides of her young character: independence, vulnerability, spark, sexual curiosity, sadness. I could barely stand it when her mother (Amy J. Carle) simply cries out that her daughter has been broken.

This may all sound like too much emotional bathos, but trust me, these feelings are expressed here with a restrained eloquence, and the piece is not without some humor (the family has three kids, after all). The superb Raymond Fox, who plays the predator, avoids every cliche and replaces it with a quiet simplicity, pockmarked with a kind of gentle self-loathing. Once the crime is committed, a major message of this piece is that it's really not about him and his ilk. It's about getting him out of your life.

If I had teenage girls, I would take them to see this play and talk about it (or try and fail to talk about it) afterwards. You get the sense throughout “Trust” of a family maybe much like yours, catapulted into a new world order that it neither wanted nor deserved. But that happens to many families. Predators take many forms: they can be human, economic, a disease. And this play is honest enough to feel real and kind enough to want to help.