The chamber at Theater Wit where this Timeline Theater play premiered just three months ago is so small that you could fit at least four of them into the Goodman Theater's Owen auditorium, making it lucky indeed that its Loop-district hosts found themselves with an empty slot on their calendar and proposed its occupation by the show that the Tribune's Chris Jones declared ready for its own miniseries on Netflix.
The Relentless story spans the pivotal half-century leading to the sisters Covington, Janet and Annelle, discovering their late mother's diaries following her death in 1919. After much hesitancy, their curiosity brings them to learn of the mysterious events responsible for their education, employment, propertied and comfortable lives in Northern cities. The past is revealed to us in flashbacks spurred by their parent's accounts of her youth in Maryland, where pre-Emancipation racial and gender relations are more complex than anticipated.
The physical alterations necessitated by the transfer of venue mandate Jack Magaw's gilded-age parlor walls unfolded more expansively to accommodate the wider stage, Christine Pascual's hoopskirts in the antebellum scenes are unhampered by furniture and Christopher Kriz's cello-based incidental music can snake its way beneath the dramatic action.
To be sure, the larger interior dimensions also require the actors to exchange their three hours of swift-paced repartee in more operatic fashion than in a cozy Lakeview studio, but playgoers quickly caught up in the potential secrets promising revelation likewise acknowledged the necessity of listening carefully, so that by the final moments, the dialogue slices cleanly with razor-clarity through a silence broken only by the whispery rumble of a passing El train outside on Lake Street.
