‘Hit the Wall’ the fastest vehicle in Steppenwolf’s Garage

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Updated: March 22, 2012 8:05AM

Steppenwolf Theatre’s laudable Garage Rep series, now in its third season, is devoted to showcasing three innovative Chicago storefront operations — introducing these smaller operations to a broader audience, and giving them the added luster of the Steppenwolf imprimatur. In return, the storefronts lure a far younger and edgier audience to the mother ship, so everybody benefits.

Though radically different in style and content, the productions of this year’s three chosen companies all riff loosely on the notion of “war and the homefront,” echoing the theme around which Steppenwolf’s mainstage series has been built.

“He Who,” is unquestionably the most surreal and elemental of the works on view, and arrives courtesy of Theatre Zarko and its visionary artistic director, Michael Montenegro, a master puppeteer who also involves live actors and musicians.

Set in what feels like a corner of a battered Balkan state (instrumentalists Ben Goldberger, Stephen Lieto, Jude Mathews and Noah Silver-Mathews set the mood with accordion, strings and vocals), the action focuses on a giant baby in the form of a remarkable, eerily organic puppet head perched on a tall platform. Alternately sad and demanding, the baby requires continual care and feeding from a group of women, all expertly played, who might be his mother, lover and/or wife. The baby’s father, a military man, looms large, and eventually the son, too, heads off to war and loses an arm. Intermittently, an Inquisitor enters the scene, posing questions that reveal both the trivial and profound aspects of existence. The narrative here can be frustratingly opaque at times, but the aura of “He Who” is enthralling.

The most timely and most traditionally structured work on view is LiveWire Chicago’s production of Bekah Brunstetter’s “Oohrah!” (the title is the celebratory shout-out for the U.S. Marines), directed by Brad Akin. Set in a North Carolina military town in 2007, it looks at a working class family caught up in the tough transitional period that often follows a soldier’s return from war.

When Ron (Josh Odor), comes home after his fourth tour of duty in the Middle East, he is met by many demanding people. They include: His wife, Sara (Melissa Engle), overly eager to move up the social ladder, fix up the house and resume their sex life; Lacey (Madeline Long ), his 14-year-old daughter, hellbent in emulating her Army dad, even as her mom is planning her coming out party; Sara’s jealous sister, Abby (Calliope Porter), a flight attendant engaged to a security guard, Christopher (Joel Ewing, ideal as a loose cannon), who is not macho enough for her; and Sara’s dad, an aging veteran (Peter Esposito). Things get dicey when Abby picks up a man in uniform (Ian R. Tranberg) who is not quite who he appears to be in this somewhat contrived but always perceptive story that suggests men who have NOT served in the military have their own set of issues.

The flashiest, most scorchingly acted work in this series is The Inconvenience company’s production of Ike Holter’s “Hit the Wall,” with power-packed direction by Eric Hoff. This show (which makes “Hair” look like children’s theater), may very well be the most authentic evocation ever of New York’s counter-culture scene in Greenwich Village in the late 1960s, complete with a mood-setting hard rock band (Ryan Murphy, Josh Lambert and Will Wood).

The play focuses on a notorious homegrown revolution often seen as the birth of the gay rights movement — the violent “Stonewall riots” in which homosexuals famously fought back as police raided a divey gay bar, the Stonewall Inn, in the steamy, early morning hours of June 28, 1969.The full panoply of “outsiders” is caught brilliantly here, with vivid language and spot-on characterizations by Arturo Soria and Desmond Gray as the Latin and black “gay boys”; Manny Buckley as the fierce drag queen; Rania Manganaro as a frightened but fierce “dyke”; the brilliantly funny and explosive Shannon Matesky, who steals the show, as a fast-talking feminist lesbian beauty with a wild Afro; Steve Lanz as a draft-dodging hippie; Walter Owen Briggs as a cop; Mary Williamson as a lost suburbanite; and Layne Manzer and Daniel Desmaris as men on the prowl. The play may have a few too many endings, but its 95 minutes race by and set the stage on fire along the way.