Pill Hill

BEER COZY Roston, right, gets up close with Peeples.

Kelley’s 1990 play traces the struggles of a sextet of black Chicago men facing the disparities between hard, frequently demeaning work at a steel mill and their dreams of the posh, eponymous South Side ’hood. At its best, Pill Hill draws a corrosive picture of individual lives caught within merciless social systems. Racism haunts the men’s periodic get-togethers, most pointedly in a monologue (knocked out of the park by Adams) about a Southern excursion gone terribly wrong. But Kelley’s target is as much the exploitive economic relations that shape and frustrate his characters’ ambitions; writing at the height of the Reagan-Bush years, Kelley saw clearly the impact of right-wing policies on the urban working class.

Too often, though, Pill Hill sells the individuality of its characters short. Kelley wrote the play during his time in Yale’s M.F.A. program, and the work is neatly structured to a fault. When we first meet Joe (Roston), he’s planning to leave the mill behind for college. But as Ed (Peeples), newly enrolled at Northwestern, presses him, Joe hedges: He wants to keep his job for at least a few more weeks. As the same conversation repeats itself throughout the play, the pattern seems less a revelation about Joe’s fatal self-doubt than the mark of a heavy authorial hand. Douglas directs a solid ensemble. Roston, in particular, brings Joe to blazing life, capturing at once his optimism and the anxieties that sink him.

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