Theatre Journal

Lottery Day is simultaneously a love letter to Chicago and a clarion call to the city’s denizens to recognize and acknowledge their complicity in the problems of their city and contemporary urban life. Lottery Day, the seventh and final work in playwright Ike Holter’s Rightlynd Saga, like the entire cycle, is set in the fictional 51st Ward of Chicago, called Rightlynd. The span of the septology underlined the necessity of community cooperation to confront the social and economic struggles facing Chicago. In its debut at the Goodman Theatre, Lottery Day leveraged the fiscal and cultural capital of its venue to demand the attention of a predominantly white, affluent audience and attempted to complicate their experience of life and the contemporary city.

The play revolves around a party thrown by local matriarch Tori, who has invited her friends and neighbors over to join a contest where she will bestow the winner—at first unbeknown to the assembled group—a large insurance payment she has received following the deaths of her husband and child in an episode of gun violence. While the play is plotted around Tori and her struggle to overcome her trauma, the production is ultimately interested in the story of a whole community. Holter’s world is deliberately diverse, featuring characters of a wide array of races, economic classes, and ages, emphasizing the vastly different experiences that make up the community. As the play unfolds, the various challenges the characters have faced emerge, and it becomes clear that the entire community hinges on Tori. Simultaneously, it is apparent how disruptive, and destructive, even those who come into the community with the intention of contributing to it and helping it to grow may be. The assortment of characters also helps Lottery Day draw attention to a multitude of problems and ideas related to contemporary urban life: most prominent are those of gun violence, homelessness, income inequality, political activism, gentrification, family, friendship, and changing understandings of home.

Perhaps the most apparent manifestation of the evolving nature of Rightlynd, and the numerous challenges this presents, is through the set. The stage is dominated by Tori’s foursquare home and her backyard. Opposite this sits a new, sleek, ultra-modern home—wildly out of sorts with the neighborhood. The homes instantly command the audience’s attention to the specter of gentrification. The juxtaposition of the two buildings encouraged questions regarding who is able to belong, what forces cause or demand change, and whether newcomers can ever truly ingratiate themselves into the existing community. This question of belonging was further emphasized through director Lili-Anne Brown’s use of speed and staging, which deliberately confused who was speaking to whom and denied the audience access to some conversations. Often the entire cast of ten spoke, yelled, or rapped over one another in simultaneity, making intelligibility next to impossible.

The themes expressed in Lottery Day also run across the other six plays that make up Holter’s Rightlynd Saga, which has had an ambitious rollout over the last five years in Chicago. The seven plays have been produced across five neighborhoods at a wide range of theatres. Three of these, Jackalope Theatre (Exit Strategy, 2014; Prowess, 2016), A Red Orchid Theatre (Sender, 2016), and Steep Theatre (Red Rex, 2019), are storefront companies. Another two, Teatro Vista (The Wolf at the End of the Block, 2017) and Victory Gardens (Rightlynd, 2018), were founded on the express goals of representation and diversity, and are the only two with missions dedicated to supporting the work of minority playwrights, performers, and artistic leadership. Finally, the Goodman (Lottery Day, 2019) stands as one of the best known and endowed regional theatres in the country. Across the saga, cast and creative often worked on multiple productions, as many of the characters appear in several plays and, while each work tells a discrete story, history is built...