SPARE CHANGE | STAGE LEFT THEATRE
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McCullough also wondered what was really behind the caller’s apparent altruism. As she writes, she considered whether it was another case of “the white man help[ing] the poor ‘colored’ girl.” That was the germ of Spare Change, receiving its world premiere in a sharp, efficient staging by Stage Left. What responsibility, McCullough asks, do privileged whites have toward underprivileged nonwhites in their community? Why are poor nonwhites imagined to be needier than poor whites? Is a multiracial victim of domestic violence an exoticized poster child for today’s “white man’s burden”? But though McCullough aims to attack thorny issues of race and class politics, the play’s strong suit is the intense, conflict-ridden relationship she creates between a middle-class couple.
That night Brad has an exhausting fight with his stern, impatient advertising exec wife, Claire, who argues among other things that it was selfish of someone to kill himself in front of a rush hour train. Later Brad calls a domestic-violence hotline hoping to reach the shelter where Michael Ann is staying, telling himself he just wants to let the people in charge know she has a legitimate reason for returning late. In the first of many noncredible moments, Brad reaches a hotline worker who sharply reprimands him for nearly giving Michael Ann’s name to her, though there would be no conceivable repercussions if he had. The worker insists that if he calls other shelters to deliver the same message, he’ll put Michael Ann at risk of being kicked out.
Through 11/3: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Stage Left Theatre, 3408 N. Sheffield, 773-883-8830, $20-$25.
