In 2020, NPR’s Cheryl Corley reported that the City of Chicago had paid out more than half a billion dollars the previous decade for police misconduct, according to an analysis of city law department data. But what’s it like to be on the receiving end of that offer of blood money? Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Windfall, now in a world premiere at Steppenwolf under Awoye Timpo’s direction, takes that premise as its starting point. 

Windfall
Through 5/31: Tue–Thu 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM; also Wed 5/20 2 PM; no performances Tue 4/28, Tue 5/5, Sat 5/9, or Tue 5/26; open captions Sat 5/16 3 PM and Thu 5/21 7:30 PM, audio description and touch tour Sat 5/24 3 PM (touch tour 1:39 PM), ASL interpretation Fri 5/29 7:30 PM; Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted, 312-335-1650, steppenwolf.org, $20-$148.50

But rather than a stark documentary story, McCraney’s play nimbly combines music, ghosts, satirical social commentary, and a family drama. In other words, McCraney has done what he’s always done so well: surprised us by making us see the familiar in a new light—one richly suffused with love and empathy as well as generational pain.

A 2003 graduate of the Theatre School at DePaul (I happened to be at that commencement, where he made a memorable address), McCraney has since gone on to win an Oscar for best adapted screenplay for 2016’s Moonlight (cowritten with director Barry Jenkins and based on McCraney’s play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue). His triptych, The Brother/Sister Plays, (produced in 2010 at Steppenwolf, where he is an ensemble member), explored West African spiritual practices in the context of a Black family living in a Louisiana bayou. In Choir Boy, McCraney used music as the backdrop for exploring a young gay man’s struggle to find his identity in the stifling world of a private (and deeply homophobic) prep school. Queer Black lives are central to McCraney’s vision. In 2019’s Ms. Blakk for President (cowritten with Tina Landau), he stepped into the heels of former Chicago drag artist Joan Jett Blakk (aka Terence Alan Smith), who did indeed run for president in 1992.

The victim of the police shooting that serves as the fulcrum for the drama in Windfall is Eli (Esco Jouléy), the nonbinary child of Henri “Mr. Mano” Tamaño (Michael Potts, familiar to fans of The Wire as Brother Mouzone). Eli and their friends, Cori (Jon Michael Hill) and Brother 1 (Namir Smallwood) were camping out and peacefully protesting at a “black site” (presumably the infamous Homan Square CPD facility). The cops came in to break up the encampment, and shot Eli in the process. 

During the course of the play, Henri is visited by three different (and increasingly sinister) women, all played by the luminous and hypnotic Alana Arenas, who tries to convince him to just take the settlement check. He’s also haunted by the ghost of his adopted son, Marcus (Glenn Davis), who also thinks Henri should take the money for the pain of his loss.

A plot twist that we won’t divulge here casts a different light on the settlement, but doesn’t change the essential question raised by McCraney: Does taking money from the very systems that caused your loss compound it? Or, as Marcus insists, is all money blood money? Along the way, McCraney works in observations on gentrification, parenting, and the keen bonds that form among committed activists who see a better world in the darkness.

The show erases the fourth wall as Marcus directly addresses us. Early on, Eli urges us to turn on the lights on our phones (even though we’ll of course be asked to shut them off during the show), reminding us that cell phones have been a tool for documenting police brutality and other injustices. That moment will recur (beautifully) later in the show, which echoes the famous story of the opening night in 1935 of Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty, when the audience began stomping and chanting “Strike! Strike! Strike!” along with the actors. Yes, here it is prompted by the actors, rather than arising organically, but that doesn’t mean it’s not exhilarating to see.

McCraney isn’t interested in excavating the whys and wherefores of police violence, though Smallwood has a monologue as the cop who shot Eli that seems to point to a system built on fear and power, rather than individuals. But he and the stellar cast of Windfall make us care deeply about Henri, Eli, Marcus, and the supporting characters. Timpo uses the in-the-round space at Steppenwolf’s Ensemble Theater to keep us connected with the story and each other. Potts’s performance is excoriating, Jouléy (who I’ve never seen before) makes Eli resolute and loving, Davis is both comic and sad as a dead man trying to reconnect with the living, and Smallwood and Hill flesh out their smaller roles with great wit and empathy. And Arenas, whose women move from seemingly flustered bureaucrat to scheming city planner to avatar of the darkness underpinning all systems of oppression, is simply a marvel to behold. 

Windfall feels very much a play about Chicago, filled with references to local settings such as Rainbow Beach. But as the activists take up the cry of “Eli is everywhere” after the shooting, so too does McCraney’s heartfelt and imaginative drama feel like it could unfold in any world where money is the go-to balm for systemic wrongs. It manages the tricky balancing act of being both clear-eyed about what we’re up against, and hopeful that we can collectively find ways of fighting back.

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