Review: Celine Song's weird and morbid ‘Tom & Eliza' has its Chicago premiere at TUTA Theatre

Chicago Tribune

01-07-2025

A librarian who develops an obsessive habit of burning books. A historian who loses his memory and begins to believe he's an oyster. With this odd couple as its title characters, Celine Song's 'Tom & Eliza,' now playing at TUTA Theatre, is a dark, sometimes absurd portrait of unraveling. In just over an hour, we witness the breakdown of one relationship, two individual minds and an entire society.
Song, a Korean Canadian playwright and filmmaker, is best known for writing and directing the 2023 film 'Past Lives,' which was nominated for Academy Awards for best picture and best original screenplay. With this directorial debut and her recent sophomore film, 'Materialists,' she is developing a reputation for nuanced reinterpretations of the romantic drama and rom-com genres.
While 'Tom & Eliza' also centers on a romantic relationship, it's more eccentric and experimental than Song's budding film canon. Nearly a decade after it premiered in New York, TUTA co-artistic director Aileen Wen McGroddy stages the play's Chicago premiere with Clifton Frei and Seoyoung Park starring in this two-hander. With striking design work and deft delivery of the play's unconventional dialogue, TUTA's production offers an intriguing yet confounding experience that puts up literal and figurative barriers between characters and audience.
The play opens with Frei and Park perched on stools in the center of Tatiana Kahvegian's deceptively simple set, a black light box with a transparent scrim forming a visible fourth wall. The off-white costumes (also designed by Kahvegian) reflect the harsh uplighting by Keith Parham, and the combined effect makes Tom and Eliza seem like specimens in a museum display, allowing the audience to peer into their messy lives.
Despite this visual sense of exposure and the confessional style of Song's writing, Tom and Eliza remain enigmatic. They begin by narrating their third date, and already, the play is concerned with existential questions. Tom muses, in graphic detail, about his parents' actions that led to his conception, birth and growing up to enter this particular restaurant on this particular date. Later, he is both baffled and horrified by his and Eliza's children, whom he loves but finds somewhat alien.
Song writes repetitive dialogue that the two characters volley back and forth, reinforcing and contradicting each other with simple syntax that could be mistaken for a children's storybook if not for its adult themes. Sometimes narrating different perspectives on the same events and sometimes splicing together two unrelated monologues, the actors direct most of their dialogue toward the house rather than each other. Park develops an especially strong rapport with the audience, her wry delivery belied by a mischievous twinkle in her eyes.
Although they both reveal disturbing elements of their inner lives, I came away from this play feeling like I didn't fully understand these characters and their motivations. For Eliza, an innocent work assignment — disposing of books being phased out of her library's system — leads to an insatiable desire to burn books, an obsession that eventually engulfs her children and her community, with global consequences. Why would a librarian want to burn books, you might ask? Eliza never explains. They simply must be burnt, she says. Meanwhile, Tom has a quieter crisis, increasingly spending his days submerged in a bathtub and declaring in a singsong voice that he's a little oyster.
Frankly, it's difficult to understand how this couple ever got together. There's little palpable chemistry between them from the start, and they only grow further apart as time goes on. While the limited character development is frustrating, the disconnect between these two lovers tracks with Song's interest in the unexpected consequences of mundane actions (also a theme of 'Past Lives'). Just as their parents' past decisions set into motion their own fates, a tryst behind a cheap pizza joint forever changes Tom and Eliza's lives. Though they may be as different as fire and water, their destructive paths run on parallel tracks from this point forward.
One final note: Kahvegian and Parham's designs really pay off toward the end of the play, culminating in some delightfully atmospheric images. Last year, Kahvegian's scenic design for the Broadway adaptation of 'The Outsiders' earned her a Tony Award nomination, and it's a treat to see her work up close in one of Chicago's storefront theaters. If you like your plays a bit morbid and weird, 'Tom & Eliza' is worth a look.Review: 'Tom & Eliza' (3 stars)
When: Through Aug. 17
Where: TUTA Theatre, 4670 N. Manor Ave.
Running time: 1 hour, 5 minutes
Tickets: $20-$60 at tutatheatre.org