Court Theatre presents THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH Review

Not for long. Once the house lights go down, Chicago’s immigrant ecosystem of the late 1920s and early 30s springs to life. Playwright David Auburn who adapted Bellow’s novel, director Charles Newell and movement specialist Erin Kilmurray convey this coming of age tale with rough and tumble vitality. The visual palette is somber enough but the story teems with a rainbow’s range.

A stream of movement at Court Theatre

Unlike the older immigrants who surround him, Augie came to America young enough to dare to call himself an American. What does that really mean? Augie’s impoverished home doesn’t make it easy to find out. He lives with his shrewd older brother Simon, mentally-disabled younger brother George, passive half-blind mother and a boarder called Grandma who, in the absence of his father, has taken control. She loathes Augie’s soft spot for others. “You’re too easy to tickle,” Grandma tells Augie. “In short, you’re a fool.” This is a place to leave, yet a place that will never leave him.

Augie (Patrick Mulvey) is always on the go, leaving one experience to hurry to the next. In this staging, it is more a stream of movement than a chronology of events. When Simon gets himself expediently engaged to a young woman from a wealthy family, he arranges for Augie to meet her younger sister at a family dinner. It goes well at first. Augie impresses the dad, catches the eye of the sister. But then, Augie-style, he dashes to see Mimi, a friend who’s pregnant with another man’s child. As the dinner continues quietly upstage, Augie ruins his prospects of marrying into it by helping Mimi to get an abortion downstage.

THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH’s dance-like fluidity

The 13-person ensemble is barefoot throughout, going everywhere and doing everything with dance-like fluidity. Scenes in which Augie takes a job with a pool hall owner or jumps between rail cars or learns to steal and resell valuable textbooks capture the flow of youth.

By the third act, Augie has fallen for a bizarre woman, Theo, who lures him to Mexico with an outlandish money-making scheme: They’ll train an eagle to capture iguanas that can be sold for profit. Played out in silhouette behind a curtain with actors using their bodies as well as cutout figures, the horseback journey into the mountains is an imaginative wonder.

In this viewer’s opinion, the Mexico section could use some trimming. Otherwise, the three acts speed by on the fleetest of bare feet, always in a light mist. By the end, the mist takes on meaning. Augie responds to what he can see right in front of him, and the larger context of his adventures isn’t visible until it is already part of his past.