Hottest ticket in Chicago: Tracks

Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune

Hottest Ticket in Chicago - “You could see Milena Markovic's "Tracks" -- a disturbing and emotionally resonant play about disenfranchised and disenchanted Balkan youth -- as just another dramatization of the amorality and potential cruelty of post-adolescents.

Many such works have fed the nightmares of parents: Anthony Burgess' "A Clockwork Orange;" Larry Clark's "Kids;" Kenny Lonergan's "This is our Youth;" and Eric Bogosian's "SubUrbia." Change era and setting, and just fill in the callous blanks. But whereas most such works are about bored kids making, on some level, choices to get into mischief, this fine Serbian playwright is writing about a very different context. Her crew grew up during the civil wars that scorched the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, when the schoolroom and the frontline had a depressing kinship and proximity.

It's not so much a play about choices but consequences. And given the feminist sensibility that informs a drama with six aggressive young men and one bagatelle of a young woman, it's mostly a play about boys' choices and their consequences for a lively girl.

Strangely, "Tracks" also is a musical, albeit one set in an atonal landscape. From time to time, the suddenly unified youths all form (and just as quickly disband) a kind of impromptu live band, performing (with total seriousness) mostly American standards. In Zeljko Djukich's savvy and intensely acted production for his TUTA Theatre Chicago, these alienating segments infuse the show with both charm and sadness. As in the current movie "Once," the music indicates an intense longing for togetherness that proves impractical.

"Tracks" is a TUTA remount of a 2006 production (which I didn't see), but it's not to be missed by those who missed it the first time around and who crave theater with young guts, but shaped by a director with craft. The piece has certain resemblances with "Huddersfield," another play about Eastern European kids produced by TUTA, which I greatly admired. "Tracks" is a more episodic piece (it's really a collection of experiential vignettes), but it's also the more sophisticated of the two works. And Djukich's direction here is quite masterful -- even though he chooses to work in a simple and non-realistic environment, he still manages to continually confound spatial and tonal expectations.

You're surely kept on your toes for 90 minutes. Djukich has a mostly just-out-of-college cast that reminds me of the earlier days at the Next Theater Lab and beyond. The two standouts are a disarmingly charming young newcomer called Keith D. Gallagher, who seethes, smiles and sings with equal felicity, and the superb Alice Wedoff, who runs herself ragged fighting off young fools she still seems to need"