‘Evanston Salt Costs Climbing’: Is humanity doomed to self-destruction?

From left, Hugo Armstrong, Michael Redfield, Lesley Fera, Kaia Gerber / Jeff Lorch

LOS ANGELES — The opening of a play by Will Arbery, in its West Coast premiere, is truly an event. Audiences and critics raved over his last play, Heroes of the Fourth Turning, a Pulitzer Prize finalist that examined the strains of contemporary Catholic conservatism. And now we have Evanston Salt Costs Climbing, which previously played in New York in 2022, and is now playing in its West Coast premiere.

The salt referred to in the title is the substance large municipal service trucks spread over icy roads in winter to help melt the ice and make traffic safer. Evanston is a city in Cook County, Ill., hugging the North Shore along Lake Michigan. Considered a suburb of Chicago, it borders the city, whose downtown area is just 12 miles south. I can’t recall if Chicago itself is ever mentioned in the play, but other Midwestern cities in neighboring states with snow removal and ice-reduction strategies are often referred to.

The two salt machine operators are Basil (Hugo Armstrong), a Greek immigrant with a disturbing backstory that only comes to light late in the play, and Peter (Michael Redfield), who has a wife and daughter he barely relates to, and speaks often of ending his useless life. Both have difficulty articulating their ideas and feelings, often resorting to crude language and insults in a bond formed over many years of working together. Basil writes short vignettes that are raw and underdeveloped from a literary point of view, but which at least signify he is trying for a deeper understanding of the human condition. Peter likes them, but is incapable of responding to them with any discernment.

The other two characters are Jane Maiworm (Lesley Fera), a municipal employee in the public works department with supervisory authority over the two men, but she is really more their booster and pal. And there is her stepdaughter, Jane Jr. (Kaia Gerber), who came into her life through her late husband. Jane Jr. is in school, but is barely functional, lacking confidence, indecisive, uninquisitive, and herself given to frequent thoughts of suicide.

The theme of suicide is as much at the forefront of the play as any other, though it is tightly related to the two other main themes. These are the inability of these characters to form close, intimate relationships, even with life partners and family members, and the rising cost of salt every year, which we now know is highly toxic to the environment, damaging soil and killing plants and wildlife.

Kooky as she is—as all the characters are—Jane at least takes the news about salt seriously. She admires the programs starting to take root in other cities of converting to heated permeable pavers, which will melt the snow as it falls, prevent formation of ice, and send the precipitation through the paving blocks down into the subsoil. Of course, converting to such a system is expensive, but salt costs are rising too, along with labor and overtime costs, and weather is ever more severe from year to year. And if the salt misses a critical spot on the road, dangerous accidents can occur, which is in fact what happens at one point in the play.

The title of the play suggests that the environmental crisis, and how to address it, is the central theme, but the whole country, not just Evanston, is befuddled. The fossil fuel forces of denial are strong and loud, markedly so in the current administration, putting a damper on serious planning for the future; political and economic priorities militate against change even as we know it is critically needed; and if workers are laid off, well, there’s no plan to give them meaningfully equivalent jobs. The language problem—the inability to articulate—symbolizes the barricaded conversation around these big issues. In the vacuum of implementable ideas, the talk is reduced to tiresome volleys of “Fuck you!” and “No, fuck you!”

Suicide is a problem in American society, and I don’t mean only the end-of-life kind such as portrayed in the recent film The Room Next Door with a well-off terminal cancer patient. I mean recent retirees or laid-off workers who don’t see a future for themselves, women in bad marriages, anyone with serious health conditions they simply can’t afford to treat and, tragically, teenagers and young people who look around and see nothing but despair awaiting them—the world burning up, the futility of love, the constriction of basic rights, unending war, punishing the poor and homeless, pandemics, criminalization of speech, diminishing opportunity, and so on.

It’s too bad for the play that Kamala Harris lost the election. There might have been some hope on many fronts—healthcare, women’s and LGBTQ+ rights, green energy, jobs, infrastructure, housing, judicial appointments. Now, with Trump in the Fourth Reich White House and a Caligari’s Cabinet of Horrors running a livable future into the ground, Arbery’s play, with its eerie sense of dread seemingly oozing up from below the earth’s surface and infecting the global vortex, really needs to carry trigger warnings about suicide.

At least in the character of Jane—who, by the way, is an avid reader of Jane Jacobs’ 1961 The Death and Life of Great American Cities—Arbery posits that perhaps our hope lies in competent, conscientious civil servants who educate themselves to make wise decisions. And there is a ray of hope for Jane Jr., too, for it took her two years, but she finally made her way through that book, and maybe she will take on a sense of higher purpose.

“The people in this play want very much to connect with each other,” writes director Guillermo Cienfuegos in a program note. “They need it—but that fear and anxiety [get] in the way,” “[e]specially right now; political uncertainty, war, terrorism…natural disaster.” In its own awkward, stumbling way Arbery is attempting to shake us by the shoulders and waken us to the present and coming catastrophe. Or are we simply doomed to self-destruction?

Having said which, the four actors give us a superlative rendition of their roles, and the production values in this small but historic venue are very high. The audience kept their winter coats on all through the 95-minute show with the snow theatrically piling up around us, the wind howling, the temperature dropping, the prospects for the future positively chilling.

Evanston Salt Costs Climbing opened on January 25, and plays through March 9, with performances at 8 p.m. Fri., Sat., and Mon., and 3 p.m. Sun. (no performance on Feb. 10. Rogue Machine at the Matrix Theatre is located at 7657 Melrose Ave, Los Angeles 90046. For tickets and other information, go to the theatre website.

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CONTRIBUTOR

Eric A. Gordon

Eric A. Gordon, People’s World Cultural Editor, wrote a biography of radical American composer Marc Blitzstein and co-authored composer Earl Robinson’s autobiography. He has received numerous awards for his People's World writing from the International Labor Communications Association. He has translated all nine books of fiction by Manuel Tiago (pseudonym for Álvaro Cunhal) from Portuguese, available from International Publishers NY.