LINCOLN PARK — Perhaps Tony Fitzpatrick doesn't really want to pack up his Ukrainian Village brownstone and Western Avenue studio and fly south to study birds and make art in the Big Easy.
Still, the tough-talking artist, renegade poet and actor insists he’s leaving behind the big city he loves — the town that's served as inspiration for his artwork since he was a punk kid terrorizing the nuns to get kicked out of Catholic school.
And when I teasingly tell Fitzpatrick that I'm not sure he's got what it takes to leave Chicago behind, he's quick with the truth.
“Oh, I have the guts," Fitzpatrick said. "I just haven't found the right house."
But Fitzpatrick's search isn't just for the perfect Crescent City pad. What he said he's facing is a post-midlife crisis and the inevitable struggle that comes when a man must come to terms with his pending mortality as he inches closer to that certain fate.
And that stands at the heart of the 55-year-old's final Chicago stage play, "The Midnight City," a foreboding epilogue to the trilogy of plays he wrote and performed — "This Train," "Stations Lost" and "Nickel History: The Nation of Heat" — inspired by his greatest muse, Chicago.
“It’s about the end. The big adios,” Fitzpatrick said before the show. “When you turn 55 you realize there’s more road behind you than ahead, and how much the city has changed. How do you make the best of the time you have left? Do you stay in one place the rest of your life? Just watch the show. It has all the answers.”
On Wednesday, Fitzpatrick took the stage at the Steppenwolf Garage theater with his pal — artist and Wrigley Field usher Stan Klein, a man of multiple alter-egos — to answer a question straight out of a song by The Clash that he's been wrestling with for a long time now, "Should I stay or should I go?"
On stage, Fitzpatrick and Klein discuss how far they've come on their own artistic journeys — and debate the best route for Fitzpatrick to take to, well, the end of the line.
For Fitzpatrick, the coming winter has him planning a life away from Chicago.
On stage, Klein asks why his pal has developed such a fondness for hurricanes.
"I just want to be warm and draw birds," Fitzpatrick says.
In a series of eloquent, funny and sometimes crudely blunt monologues — told to the rhythm of John Rice's guitar strumming and the soulful voice of Anna Fermin — Fitzpatrick contemplates a coming crossroads against a surreal backdrop of his artwork sliced into a psychedelic video collage.
It's like sitting in a corner of Fitzpatrick's living room listening to the aging artist convince himself that it's time to leave Chicago, as you secretly hope that the warm place he finds to draw his birds this winter is next to a whistling radiator in a Ukrainian Village brownstone.
If you go:
"The Midnight City"
Where: The Steppenwolf Garage, 1624 N. Halsted St.
When: 5 p.m. and 8 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays, 6 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays (No performance Sept. 14)
Tickets: $25 at the box office, steppenwolf.org or by phone at 312-335-1650
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