In ‘Stations Lost,’ you’ll find adventure

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Tony Fitzpatrick in “Stations Lost,” the second installment of his theatrical trilogy, at Steppenwolf’s Garage Theatre.

Updated: October 16, 2011 12:18AM

Tony Fitzpatrick is a Chicago-bred polymath — a distinctive visual artist, as well as a writer, actor, traveler, raconteur, radio veteran, free-form political philosopher, American mythologizer and genetically predisposed provocateur.

A big, burly guy, whose heavily muscled arms are covered with tattoos that draw on iconic signs in his intricate, poetry-laced collages (works that hang in many major museums and private collections), Fitzpatrick also is something of an all-around overgrown kid now stuck in the very middle of middle age. A man with the rebellious edginess of a creative spirit, he holds fast to solid working-class affinities, liberal leanings and a self-professed hedonistic streak. As a Catholic school kid in the 1960s he often felt the rod of disapproving nuns, but was then happily “saved” by jumping into the counterculture. And his fear-driven Catholic upbringing aside, he continues in a quest for spiritual connection.

Though Fitzpatrick admits to a fear of flying, it doesn’t stop him from boarding planes. Knowing he is unfit to drive a car (a compulsive looker, his focus is easily distracted), he leaves that task to his devoted studio assistant, Stan Klein, the Cleveland native who plays a guileless Sancho Panza to the artist’s Don Quixote. And while he fancies himself a supremely streetwise type, and hates being taken for “a chump,” Fitzpatrick is big enough to admit he can be fooled.

But here’s the truth of the matter: Despite all the tough-guy talk and ambling walk, when all is said and done Fitzpatrick would probably be the first to admit he’s got a heart of pure mush. He’s a romantic of sorts ­— the kind of guy who will happily dance an elegant but reluctant old lady around the floor, wax poetic about moths or a medieval guy who tried to fly, and riff dreamily on the otherworldly beauty of the ceramic tiles in Istanbul’s Blue Mosque.

True, he might have no compunction about settling the score with a rich Frenchman in a skimpy bathing suit who objects to his smoking in a hotel pool, and he easily will make satirical mincemeat of a waspy dinner guest whose comments send him packing for a trip to Turkey. But he is a sentimental soul. And you will discover all this, and more, in Fitzpatrick’s “Stations Lost,” the second installment in his planned American theatrical trilogy. The show, now at the Steppenwolf Garage, has been supremely well directed by Ann Filmer. She has created an ideal weave of storytelling, video (superb work by Kristin Reeves that combines Fitzpatrick’s artwork with other footage) and music (the full-bodied rootsy sound of vocalist Lynne Jordan and the seamless playing, on guitar, oud and violin, of musical director John Rice).

Those who caught Fitzpatrick’s first show, “This Train,” a hit last season, already know he is great fun to watch onstage as he chronicles his adventures and gives us something of a self-portrait of the artist engaging in mischief and commentary. What he gives us is life as a road trip. And while he amusingly notes that “Route 66” tried to be a mainstream television version of Jack Kerouac’s fabled book On the Road, his own shows are variations on Kerouac, too.

We follow him on a car trip with Klein to Ohio and New Mexico (as he rails against the poisonous reactionary voices he hears on car-radio talk shows). And then we fly with him to Istanbul, where, aside from the marvels of the Blue Mosque, the allure of appple tea, the calls to prayer and a stunning terrorist incident that occurs just hours after he leaves his hotel, he chronicles his very funny visit to the Grand Bazaar where he was pursued by salesmen of tube socks and pashmina shawls.

Of course, for all his geopolitical romanticism, had Fitzpatrick been raised in either a communist or fundamentalist religious state, he would have been in prison long ago. Happily he is alive and well and living free in Chicago. So get a ticket to ride.