Broken Fences

There's a millisecond in the process of gentrification when the rich folks haven't all moved in yet and the poor folks haven't all been hustled out. Broken Fences suggests if that fraction of time were suspended just a bit longer, the two groups might be able to learn something from each other. It's a far-fetched notion, but even though Simoncic's undisciplined script lets plenty of pitches fly, it scores enough times (an unusually comfortable cast helps a lot) that we start to believe it.

The story—a couple of white-bread yuppie-pagans move into a teardown property on Chicago's West Side just in time to befriend their black neighbors, two third-generation neighborhood residents about to be forced into selling their grandmother's recently reassessed house—asks us to accept that the two couples could cozy up almost immediately with no resentment. But every time we're ready to write off Simoncic's naive presumptions, he inserts an extended bit of smart naturalistic dialogue that's so easy to watch you forget how sloppy the play is. These fine sequences make up more than half of the show, so by the end you're a little brainwashed.

While Broken Fences continually cancels itself out (an embarrassingly inappropriate hip-hop dance number starts the whole thing off, but a marvelous ten-minute scene in which a completely chill Singleton and his tightly wound neighbor Armstrong share a joint overrides it), it doesn't ask for praise for its intentions, and that alone probably warrants some.—Christopher Piatt