December 23, 2019
Drain’s resonant debut tracks a community’s hardscrabble struggle in the Stateway Gardens housing project on Chicago’s South Side from the 1980s through the project’s closure in the early 2000s. Loosely connected stories revolve around Tracy—dubbed “the smart child” by his mother—and his older half-brother, Jacob (“the handsome one”), an eventual high school dropout who Tracy looks up to before choosing his own path and joining the Marines. “B.B. Sauce” introduces Tracy and Jacob and their working mom (“Nothing was more important than the way she looked. That was her moneymaker”), who strives to make ends meet. In “Solane,” a single mother of two other boys hopes for a better life for her younger sister, Stephanie, whom she lives with, while Jacob is humbled by a pregnancy scare in “Shifts,” and Tracy has a tender coming-of-age moment in “The Tornado Moat.” In “Love-able Lip Gloss,” Jacob, now a young adult, cheats on his wife with Stephanie, his first love from childhood and now a cocaine addict. An epilogue describes the actual project’s development and eventual demolition while commenting on the legacy of segregation and the area’s present-day gentrification. This bold outing vividly encapsulates a chapter of Chicago’s complex history.