Joshua Allen’s “The Grand Boulevard Trilogy,” a series of three plays set on different floors of the same apartment building on Chicago’s South Side, has taken some three years to unspool at the Raven Theatre; too long, perhaps, for audiences to easily feel the connective tissue. What should happen next is a further production of all three of these fine new plays about Black family life in 20th-century Chicago; they could also, I think, become three acts of the same highly substantial evening and, as such, would be a formidable addition to the legacy of Chicago-raised writers telling Chicago stories both universal and specific. In the first two plays, and there were vistas of life in 1921, 1939 and 1960.
But the final installment, “The Prodigal Daughter,” reaches back to the so-called Red Summer of 1919, when the drowning death of a 17-year-old Black boy, Eugene Williams, who was stoned by white youth after he inadvertently crossed an invisible race line within the waters of Lake Michigan, caused riots in the Grand Crossing neighborhood and throughout the South Side. But even as that conflict rages outside, the Bass family is trying to get on with their lives and save themselves from potential economic ruin. The work, directed by Jerrell L.
Henderson, centers on the unmarried Virginia Bass (Stephanie Mattos), who has secured a job for herself as a vacuum cleaner salesperson, partnering with a white guy, named George Oakley (Stefan Brundage) to the chagrin of her f.
