I was in Russia when a tourist from New York turned to me and said, “Whatever happened to Chicago?†To this mysterious question he added, “I kept thinking it was going to break through, but it never did.†Nonplussed, I tried to think of a Chicago breakthrough. Eventually I must have sputtered something about Nobel laureates because he interrupted me dismissively. “Eds and meds,†he said. “Every second-tier city has those.†That concluded conversation between us–-for the rest of the trip.
And that’s the problem with Rachel Shteir’s article on the front page of last week’s New York Times Book Review. Conversation ended the minute she turned a review of books about Chicago into a pan of the city itself. Oh, there were responses aplenty, but most were reflexively protective, the kind you’d expect from a mother charged with having an ugly baby. So we’ve had a week of “So’s your old man†and “I’m rubber, you’re glue†without anybody’s communicating much of anything worthwhile.
Which is a shame, because Shteir’s review was a gigantic missed opportunity to investigate the fact that “Chicago†is a performance. Chicagoans perform the city’s epic nature, its street smarts, its unshockability. Most of all we perform its blue-collar roots even–especially-when we have none of our own. How could a professor of theater miss the fact that she’s in the midst of a production as deft and complicated and self-referential as Brecht? Continue reading “Rachel Shteir versus Chicago: Performance versus Reality”