Victory Gardens Biograph Theater
Chicago
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The tale of Sudan’s “lost boys” has never been told like this, said Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune. Numerous books and films have recounted harrowing stories of the many brave young men and women, orphaned during Sudan’s second civil war and relocated to the Midwestern United States after grueling treks to refugee camps in Kenya and Ethiopia. Here playwright Lonnie Carter uses forceful, poetic language to craft a unique stage narrative about a “wholly lovable Sudanese teenage trio” who leave a world of “elders and elephants” to navigate new lives in Fargo, N.D. Carter charts the course of two lost boys—and one lost girl masquerading as a boy—with “great tenderness, humor, and concern for their dignity.”
Carter’s play grips you in the first act, presenting the trio’s journey to Kenya as “a steady parade of horrors,” said Zac Thompson in the Chicago Reader. On the way, they “nearly go mad from hunger, cross a crocodile-infested river, and watch other children get picked off by lions, guerrillas, and despair.” But the play turns into a hokey “fish out of water” comedy in the second act, which depicts them “adjusting to Fargo’s subzero temperatures, American slang, and canned food.” Inexplicably, the playwright abandons his former intensity when depicting his characters’ new lives. Yet surely the experiences of the lost boys in America must have amounted to much more than simply “shaking their heads at our crazy American ways.”
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