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The peas inside the spray cans rattled as Seven, JC, and Dose shook them.
“Jase, you finish. Your handstyle is cleaner,” Seven said.
“No, homie, this is all you tonight. This is what you’ve been dreaming about,” JC replied. “Make it legible, though, so the people can read it.”
The artists got to work, tracing forms on the wall in front of them. Little by little, color bloomed on the bricks, intensified, snapped into focus to reveal the pieces that each of the graffiti artists had already memorized from sketches they’d made not long ago. They stood back to admire their work.
This Is Modern Art — based on a 2010 incident in which graffiti artists painted a 50-foot-long piece on a wall of the Art Institute of Chicago — follows graffiti artists Seven (Tenisi Davis), JC (Constantino Fernandez), and Dose (Jhulenty Delossantos), who make up the LOH crew, a graffiti collective bristling with talent and ambition.
With Seven’s girlfriend Selena (Chelsea Dacey), who serves as their lookout, they hatch a plan, heist-movie style, to pull the biggest score they can think of. Will they succeed? What will the consequences be?
The play runs at Collective Consciousness Theater through April 17.
Singleton.
Director Dexter Singleton came across the play, written by Idris Goodwin and Kevin Coval, due to his serving as a board member for the nonprofit Theater for Young Audiences. He heard a reading of it at the Kennedy Center and “thought it was perfect for CCT.” It took on social issues. It was written by up-and-coming young playwrights who were gaining national reputations. And it served CCT’s mission of staging shows that would appeal to a range of ages.
It’s about disenfranchised young people who don’t start off with much, “but still want their American Dream like any kid wants it.” Singleton said. “When do they get their breaks?”
Though originally commissioned for Steppenwolf’s Theater for Young Audiences, it doesn’t read or perform that way. It dives into thorny questions about who decides what “high” and “low” art is, what does and does not end up in a museum, and what that means for defining culture and history. In some sense, Singleton said, the play calls for the kind of revolution that is “very timely, with all the revolution that is happening right now.”
CCT’s production of This Is Modern Art marks the second time the play has been performed since its controversial Steppenwolf debut. The play works beautifully in CCT’s Erector Square space, in which the company deftly uses lighting and projections (from lighting designer Jamie Burnett, set designer David Sepulveda, and graffiti artists Dooley‑O and James Capura) to employ every inch of floor and wall to tell the story. Singleton makes sure the action moves quickly, though not without sacrificing the audience’s chances to get to know the characters and what makes them tick. Davis’s Seven, on whose shoulders the play ultimately rests, is full of intensity and coiled intelligence as a young man who wants to make his mark. Fernandez plays JC almost as the crew’s detached spiritual force. Dacey capably takes Selena from wide-eyed enthusiasm to world-weary wisdom.
The most remarkable transformation might come from Delossantos, who, from the very beginning of the play, infuses Dose with a hyperkinetic energy that he and his friends can barely contain. In his final monologue, however, Delossantos lets us see Dose grow up in the space of a minute, his body language and the cast of his voice changing as he boils down his energy into confidence and resigned contentment. The play’s quietly surprising and extremely satisfying third act is worth the price of admission, as the consequences of the story break from the usual heist-movie conclusion to arrive at something more profound, complicated, and affecting.
At Tuesday night’s rehearsal, the previous six weeks had clearly come together to make the production ready for the public. Singleton and Assistant Director Jenny Nelson were down to some very small details. Should the music keep pumping from the end through the final bows, or was there something more poignant about ending it more quietly.
“Gotta keep that music up,” Singleton said. Nelson saw where he was coming from, but pushed back gently. “You know how much I like silence,” she said.
Meanwhile, Davis had a question about one of the props, a grocery bag that takes an unexpected beating in the play’s final moments and so is actually stuffed with pillows.
“Are there going to be two apples or one apple in the bag?” he asked.
“One apple,” Singleton said. “It’s got to be in between the pillows.”
“Got it,” Davis said. He tapped the side of his head with one finger. “It’s here now.”
This is Modern Art plays at Collective Consciousness Theater in Erector Square, 315 Peck Street (Studio D, Building 6 West, 2nd Floor). Performances run Thursday to Sunday. Tickets are $25 for adults, $10 for students. Discounts are available to groups of 10 or more.
