Review: Ike Holter’s new audio play 'Put Your House in Order’ is a scary story set among Evanston’s lakefront liberals
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The leafy lakefront streets of Evanston, home to a mature community of highly educated liberals, aren’t the most likely seat of vigilantism. But in Ike Holter’s “Put Your House in Order,” a gripping new audio play from the Chicago theater company The Roustabouts that was released this week, those privileged blocks full of coffee houses, planning-committee watchdogs, diversity-seminar apologists and moralistic preservationists find themselves under attack.
Viral and otherwise.
Spoiler alert for anyone unfamiliar with how upper-middle class white liberals generally fare in Holter’s work when put under pressure: They don’t exactly live up to their stated ideals.
A blessed relief from screens, and 90 minutes of genuinely disturbing content, “Put Your House in Order,” has its origins in a 2017 “pop-up” production at A Red Orchid Theatre. But there was no coronavirus in 2017 and this newly adapted radio-type thriller from a massively talented Chicago writer long known for experimenting in different forms, drops on a week when some of the fears it exploits have an uncomfortably close relationship with potential reality.
Enough, certainly, to warn you that this experience will not quiet your current fears nor allow you to rest easier in your bed. Hey, it’s Halloween week. Not that you’d much notice out there right now.
“Put Your House in Order” is like a combination of the Jordan Peele movie “Get Out” and the deliciously dystopian Danish drama series known as “The Rain." As with the terrific latter Netflix-acquired show about lethal precipitation pushing humanity to the brink, “House in Order” is a play set as a virus rages, in this case through Chicago and its suburbs.
Holter has imagined an enemy more virulent than the one we currently face in that anyone who becomes infected can only count on a couple more hours before they drop dead. The localization of the setting only increases its intensity for Chicagoans: we hear of mass infections on the Blue Line, then the Purple Line, of the CTA; of the dying wandering around on Halsted Street and marauding, zombie-like, throughout Lincoln Park.
There are rats eating through the human decay to be found on Lake Shore Drive.
“It gets bored with your body,” Holter writes of his virus, “and then it wants to go someplace else.”
The mayor and governor have no idea what to do for the best.
It’s all a bit close to home, especially since the coming of the virus here is happening alongside an uptick in violence. In Holter’s work, vigilantism is not so much arriving in Evanston as consuming its soul. We experience all of this through the eyes of a young Chicagoan named Rolan (Tony Santiago) who has voyaged north to enjoy a date with Caroline (Aurora Adachi-Winter), who is living at her parents' home while they chill at their lakehouse. Down the block lives Josephine (Janice O’Neil), a seemingly lovely neighbor who has known Caroline since she was a little girl.
This date turns out to be a fateful choice for Rolan in all kinds of ways: Holter dramatizes the fear of an outsider entering a seemingly benign but ultimately hostile environment, one that’s rapidly descending into barbarism, even as all roads (and trains) out of the suburbs close down in Rolan’s face.
As you can guess, echoes with the present moment are uncomfortably pervasive. With the help of his fine actors and a full plate of sound effects, Holter is imagining a world where viral fears are amplifying present prejudices and primal fears, exposing past compromises made for comfort more than principal. He takes on how the media only intensifies an emergency, instilling panic in service of clicks and customers: “Seventeen times a day with the alerts and the dings and the breaking news. Everything is always on fire.”
Shudder.
His point, beyond the scares, is to warn of a decent into a kind of fascistic anarchy. Holter is a moralistic writer, and also a funny and poetic thinker, and he is arguing here that America crossed warning lines long ago and that too many of us have failed to hear the alarm bells.
Is it too late for us all? You’ll have to listen to find out.
“Put Your House in Order” is available for listening through Nov. 2 at pyhio.com. Free, but donations are encouraged.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
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