‘We Live Here’ takes edifying spin through Chicago life

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A Chicago bike messenger (Cyd Blakewell) keeps having accidents in one of the vignettes in "We Live Here," by Theatre Seven.

Updated: August 8, 2011 6:18PM

Sometimes art not only imitates life, but turns out to be an eerie harbinger of real events.

Consider one of the strongest stories in Theatre Seven of Chicago’s delightfully bittersweet new production, “We Live Here” — a collection of short, personal, subtly interwoven tales about people making their way through this city. it revolves around Kim (Cyd Blakewell, operating at high speed and intensity), a gonzo bike messenger. As it unspooled onstage it was difficult not to think of the young woman who, not long before, had lost her life in a real bicycle accident on Wacker Drive, just blocks from where this story is set.

Outwardly tough, Kim easily pedals her way through downtown traffic on her various delivery routes. Then she falls in love with a guy, moves in with him and begins to have a series of increasingly serious accidents. Gradually, her boyfriend (Keith Neagle) — perhaps alarmed at her raging daredevil nature — grows increasingly distant and ultimately moves out, leaving her to nurse the most painful scar of the many she has accrued. The story is expertly told with the help of two actors clutching handlebars, and Blakewell, expressively wide-eyed and angry in a helmet.

Theatre Seven is the company that earlier this season gave us the Chicago Landmark Project, a beguiling anthology of plays (almost instantly self-published, by way of Amazon) that captured various historical moments and neighborhoods in this city — a place that serves as its chief source of inspiration.

Laced with video projections and the taped voices of real Chicagoans enumerating all the familiar bests and worsts of Chicago, “We Live Here” (conceived by Margot Bordelon and Cassy Sanders, with contributions from writers Scott Barsotti, Molly Each, Laura Eason, Brian Golden, Kristin Idaszak, Kim Morris, Nick Ward and Doug Whippo) begins on the L. That’s where we encounter George (the amusingly guileless George Zerante), a nerdy little 14-year-old on his first visit to downtown Chicago along with his parents and obnoxious older brother.(In a neat little twist, by the end of the show George is a graduate of the Theatre School of DePaul University — trying to make it as an actor, and still awkwardly trying to pick up a girl.)

Along the way there are a slew of other winning little stories. They involve: the MFA student (a very animated Desmond Gray), who moves here from Pittsburgh and spends much of his first semester in agony from kidney stones; the lonely woman (expertly played by Sarah Gitenstein), who, facing a failed pregnancy, compulsively follows a handsome young man down Michigan Avenue — a man who might be her inattentive lover, or even the grown son she will never have; the aspiring writer (a most likable Behzad Dabu), who has worked far too long as head waiter at a trendy eatery; the ever-elusive girl (Jessica London-Shields), who only wants the adoring Doug (Cody Proctor) as a best friend; the young Chicago woman (luminously pretty Paige Collins), who encounters the fellow she slept with shortly before an accident plunged him into a coma, and, of course, those eternally beleagured Cubs fans.

Running through the show is this Nelson Algren-like adage: “You don’t move into Chicago; Chicago moves into you.” Clearly the spirit of Chicago theater has moved into this young, engaging group that boasts a fine sense of physicality and ensemble playing.