Last year, Lyric Opera presented Missy Mazzoli’s The Listeners, in which a woman besieged by a low-grade “hum” that interrupts her sleep and haunts her waking hours finds a community (or cult, if you prefer) headed by a guru who claims to help sufferers. Something similar is at work in Hanna Kime’s The Targeted, now in a world premiere with A Red Orchid Theatre under Grace Dolezal-Ng’s direction.
The title refers to people who call themselves “targeted individuals,” or TIs for short. These are people who believe that they are being subjected to persecution from a variety of sources: the government, the medical establishment, their own families. In some cases, as in Tracy Letts’s Bug, they believe they have implants under their skin put there by nefarious forces. Once targeted, they also believe that they’re being “gang-stalked,” or followed, harassed, and surveilled.
The Targeted
Through 6/14: Thu–Fri 7 PM, Sat 3 and 7 PM, Sun 3 PM; industry night Mon 6/1 7 PM; Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division, 312-943-8722, aredorchidtheatre.org, $55, arts for all $75 (helps underwrite discounted tickets), $17.50 access tickets
In Kime’s play, a group of TIs have gathered at a Catholic sleepaway camp that they’ve rented for a weekend conference, led by Jeff (Lawrence Grimm), who claims to have a PhD in biochemistry and to have worked for Purdue Pharma. He greets the believers by assuring them that they are not alone. “There are 170,000 Targeted Individuals in the U.S. alone, and one million of us worldwide.”
Among the handful that have gathered at the camp is newbie Sherry (Sadieh Rifai), who has had unexplained pain since getting a flu shot. She shares a cabin with hardcore true believer Rhonda (Kirsten Fitzgerald), who declares early on, “I refuse to see someone suffering and not do something. I am a doer. That’s why I’m being targeted in the first place,” and the kindly Didi (Natalie West), who sells what she claims are lead-lined raincoats and hats to help thwart electromagnetic attacks. (Rhonda’s biggest claim to fame is that she apparently tried to rescue/kidnap Amanda Bynes.)
In another cabin is Eric (Glenn Obrero), who, like Chuck McGill in Better Call Saul, sleeps under a space blanket and lines his hat with tinfoil, and his sister, Mia (Stephanie Shum), a doctor who has been taking care of Eric since their mother gave up on trying to help him. The fact that Mia is an “outsider” marks her for suspicion early on from Rhonda, who also packs her own ersatz surgical kit for helping remove implants from other people.
Kime’s play dances with great dexterity between horror and sympathy for these people whose lives have been destroyed by what seems to us at least to be delusional thoughts. Yet it’s also undeniable that conspiracies are believable because of what we actually know about the world. As Rhonda says early on, “Someday, everyone’s gonna realize that the whole system is run by a bunch of pedophiles and sex pests, but everyone who tries to point it out now is ‘crazy.ʼ” References to MK Ultra, Cointelpro, and the Tuskegee syphilis study also crop up, reminding us that there have in fact been many times when the government and other authorities have colluded to abuse, control, and thwart people and movements in the U.S.
There is a major offstage drama clouding the weekend: Nathan, one of the people under Jeff’s sway, killed a nurse in the psych ward where he was being held and then ended his own life. In Jeff’s view, “His torturers drove him to suicide.” Mia starts out skeptical, and then, as she sees more of how identifying as TIs is shaping their lives (Rhonda urges Sherry to leave her husband and children, Didi moves around living in various storage lockers to shut out the waves), she becomes more anguished and confrontational.
Kime is a rising Chicago playwright whose past work includes 2024’s The Best Damn Thing and DOGS. This is the first play of hers I’ve seen, and it’s a remarkably assured and empathetic piece that knows when to draw humor from the absurdity of the TI claims, and when to prod the deeper voids and losses that help those claims burrow in under their psyches in the first place. Dolezal-Ng has staged the 90-minute piece with a solid mix of quiet encounters and painful outbursts, neither of which ever feels forced or self-conscious.
The cast includes several Red Orchid ensemble members in roles that feel tailor-made for them. Fitzgerald’s tough but warped by life Rhonda and West’s warmhearted but slightly alien Didi mesh beautifully, balanced by Rifai’s questioning but vulnerable Sherry. Grimm adeptly nails Jeff’s avuncular tone when he’s addressing the conference participants—they’re seated in benches in the front row, which effectively makes the audience at the Chopin mainstage part of the action.
But it’s the relationship between Eric and Mia that forms the real wounded heart of The Targeted. Shum shows the pain of trying to understand something that, as a doctor, she finds difficult to give credence to, and she’s also palpably terrified for her brother’s life after what happened to Nathan. Obrero is at times heartbreaking as a guy who knows what he’s doing is causing trouble for the sister he loves, but who doesn’t know how to break away from the obsessions that have shaped his life for so many years.
Kime doesn’t offer easy answers, but it’s obvious that somewhere between Rhonda’s “trust no one” approach and the growing doubts that Mia and Jeff both share about what they’ve seen, there’s a world of fearful impulses and pain that needs to be negotiated. The easy answers, while initially soothing, won’t save any of us.
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