“New plays, baby,” shouted Definition Theatre artistic director Tyrone Phillips as I headed out the door onto 55th Street Thursday night, following the world premiere of “An Educated Guess” by Juan José Alfonso, a former media executive who has written his first play.
Not just a first play, but, in fact, a most promising work further developed by this growing theater company and produced with the kind of fast-paced, high-stakes staging for which Definition is gaining a reputation in Hyde Park and beyond. “An Educated Guess” is a sprawling, ambitious work that did not strike me as finished and maybe even more suited to a screenplay than a work of theater. Still, what a compelling night, thanks in no small measure to a knockout lead performance from Claudia Quesada in the role of an immigration agent whose decisions catch up to her.
Alfonso, an immigrant himself, is interested in many things here, beginning with the professional lives of those who conduct immigration interviews, such as Alba Guerrero (Quesada) and her sidekick Nilda Jackson (Maya Vinice Prentiss). The play, which is set around the turn of the 21st century, draws from the historical referent wherein the Sept. 11 hijackers all had been approved for visas at some point by consular officials who, in hindsight, clearly missed some things. As an official government report noted: “Three of the 19 hijackers submitted applications that contained false statements that could have been proven to be false at the time they applied.”
In exploring whether such (perhaps inevitable) errors keep immigration officials awake at night, Alfonso imagines a case where approval had been given to a mass shooter in Harlem and how that decision haunts the interviewer. There is one blistering scene here where the nightmares become so intense that Alba even decides to confront the imprisoned guy, played with Hannibal Lecter-like intensity by Mehmet Can Aksoy, who creeped me out in a big way. Then there’s the flip side to that, as immigration officials become dehumanized and hardened to their jobs and are so worried about making mistakes that they are unkind to decent people like Father Romelio Ospina (Miguel Cohen) who actually ends up helping the official as she goes through her crisis of conscience.
That’s probably plenty for a 90-minute play, but Alfonso also wants to explore the U.S. immigration system in a broader way, interspersing the narrative with short, experiential monologues coming from immigrants of different ages and from different places. I wasn’t always entirely convinced by how everything hangs (or does not hang) together and sometimes the end result is to dissipate the narrative tension of the main story. That’s also the impact of a series of radio news broadcasts that I don’t think the play really needs.
But whatever the structural things still to be sorted out, this is very rich and lovely writing, nuanced and humanistic and looking at this fraught topic in a very fresh way. For its part, Definition has become a place to see intense, Chicago-style acting, up close on 55th Street, and this uniformly excellent cast really throws itself into this project. You’ll be pretty gripped, I think, by a passionate work at the beginning of its journey.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
Review: “An Educated Guess” (3 stars)
When: Through May 26
Where: Definition Theatre, 1160 E. 55th St.
Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes
Tickets: $30 at www.definitiontheatre.org
