The (Edward) Hopper Project At Storefront Theater

By Ben Schuman Stoler in Arts & Entertainment on Feb 8, 2010 7:30PM

Sitting outside the café replicated from Edward Hopper’s famous "Nighthawks" at the beginning of the second act, a wife asks her husband about the people inside the café. “Don’t you ever wonder about people here?” she asks, gesturing towards a visibly upset woman being consoled by her husband/boyfriend, “Maybe she’s dying.” Her husband, busy eating his green beans, doesn’t care to pry. “It’s creepy,” he says. It's a particularly urban voyeurism that is prevalent in many of Hopper’s paintings.

Presented at Storefront Theater by WNEP Theater in association with Chicago DCA Theater, The (Edward) Hopper Project is a fan fiction-esque play of intertwined vignettes taking place in and inspired by some of Hopper’s urban paintings.

Because the play is essentially telling stories behind Hopper’s work, it erects for itself a lofty standard to meet. Not only with the narrative or the characters—Hopper’s work is packed with the kind of silent tension, drama, and poignancy that is inherently difficult to replicate with dialogue and movement—but with the set. In a long, narrow room in the Storefront Theater, the set satisfies expectations: it’s an excellent replication of the settings Hopper painted.

The set’s two floors are split into six rooms with window frames and support poles holding the (invisible) panes of glass through which we see the drama playing out. Just as in the Hopper paintings that peek within a bedroom or an office, the play gives us that glimpse by removing the tenement brick and glass exteriors and exposing the emotions within. The set’s colors, even as lighting changes throughout the play’s day (6AM to Midnight), have the same grime and rust as in the paintings.

Even though some of the vignettes and characters are perhaps not as well formed as others (there’s a 17 member cast), the themes within are clear. Even before the play starts, when you walk into the theater, you see a couple getting ready for bed in a room on the top floor of the set. You feel like you’re interrupting an intimate scene. Likewise, the characters don’t stop moving on with their lives during the intermission.

In fact, there are few if any breaks in the action. There is just the one set, but because it’s split into at least six separate spaces, the vignettes flow in and out of each other. As one is ending, another on the other end of the stage is ready to pick up again. Some, as you’d expect, overlap with each other—you know, like when you run into someone you know at a random bus stop somewhere.

With the L audible outside the theater just a bit west on Randolph, the play’s constant motion fits the urban paradigm that Hopper painted, but more, it fits the paradigm we’re all living.

Ok, so we’re a good half decade past Hopper’s time. But isn’t there always some kind of particularly urban drama happening, right now, even as you read this? The point isn’t that your neighbor worries over his taxes, that your boss worries about his daughter, or that your girlfriend is suddenly hard to reach. The point is that it’s all happening on top of each other. In the same building, even. You might live alone, but you’re not fooling anyone.

It’s that urban balance of nosiness and curiosity, apathy and ambivalence, company and congestion that have made Hopper’s paintings relevant to this day. The play, thankfully, does not overreach or take too many liberties with Hopper’s messages—it doesn’t have to.

You have to imagine that if Hopper ever saw it he’d tip his hat.

The (Edward) Hopper Project runs until February 21.