The Sparrow

Written by Chris Mathews, Jake Minton, and Nathan Allen
Directed by Nathan Allen
Produced by The House Theatre of Chicago

The Sparrow centers around an accident, an accident involving a school bus and a train stop, an accident that happened years ago but has haunted a small Illinois town for a very long time.

A high school girl returns to the town, to the school, to be the only senior at that school. A dark, brooding girl by the name of Emily Book. A girl with secrets, a girl with special abilities.

Many of the characters are archetypal, familiar sketches from other stories: the blond cheerleader, the "cool" teacher, the upright Midwestern parents who take Emily into their home. And sometimes the story itself seems overly familiar: The Sweet Hereafter meets Heroes meets Carrie, only here the characters occasionally break into song and dance to a Postal Service-type electronic score.

About a third of the way in you pretty much know how everything is going to play out, how it's all going to end, but it doesn't matter, because watching the story get there is the best part. What makes The Sparrow so original, so joyful to watch at times is the way the tragic-yet-hopeful comic-book story mashes up so well with the sounds and the visions to create something youthful and daring and new.

The company of players behind the five-year old House Theatre seems to be somewhere in the transition between Generation X and Gen Y, where irony was left behind and sincerity became the new black. That same path where Kurt Cobain became Sufjan Stevens.

No need for knowing winks at pop culture references or jaded commentary on society. In the show, high school is presented, for the most part, as a semi-positive place to be, where the small-town kids are decent to each other because, in the end, they know they're all in it together.

The House writes all their own stuff, with cheery titles like Dave DaVinci Saves the Universe, or they take fresh looks at those old archetypal classics like The Wizard of Oz. (I talked to them a while back about getting the rights to their original production The Terrible Tragedy of Peter Pan, and of course it wasn't available for production by anyone else.)

Before the show started the actors wandered in from backstage, in costume but not in character, chatting with friends or former teachers in the audience, reminding everyone that this is a shared experience, live theatre, and that all of us in the house that night, watching this story, were in it together.


The Sparrow has been extended until April 21st and will be presented at Steppenwolf's Garage Theatre. Go see it: I'd catch it again in a minute.

A 10-day run of The Great and Terrible Wizard of Oz will be presented at The Northlight Theatre in Skokie starting March 1st.

The House also has a Flickr site, featuring photos from past productions. No photos of The Sparrow are currently available, which kind of sucks.