Where is Algren Today?

Ensemble member John Musial reflects on Chicago

From The Nelson Algren: For Keeps and a Single Day Issue of ArtAntica
Mentioned in this entry: John Musial

Reading Nelson Algren is always a revelation. I first came to his work ten years ago at the tremendous age of 32, thinking I had a right to brag about being a flag-waving Chicagoan. Well, Mr. Algren clearly got there first, and a long time before. It is easy to say that city he waved his flag for is gone or going, but not really. Now that we've got all these trees everywhere, the slums and the blight and the poverty aren't what they used to be. It's true, tearing down Cabrini-Green and gentrifying Greater Lincoln Park has made all that blight harder to see. Or rather, harder to look at. Algren forces us to look at Chicago's poverty, both physical and moral, and his purpose is to always humanize the person caught there, hidden behind the gleaming billboards of prosperity, to use his turn of phrase. Algren's Chicago isn't a Stallion Wild and all that, it's a complicated, contradictory place that he loved and struggled with. He may have been sentimental for the city, but he didn't romanticize it. He knew how brutal the place was. And if what we see when we look around are all these trees everywhere, then Algren still has something to reveal. The question isn't 'Why is Algren relevant today?', but 'Where is today's Algren?'

Taken from John Musial's director's note from the 2008 production of Nelson Algren: For Keeps and a Single Day