Playwright Marcia Jablonski was working as a freelancer in California when she realized she’d need to write the play that would become The Last Hotel; it will make its debut this Friday as part of World Premiere Wisconsin, courtesy of Mineral Point’s Shake Rag Alley.
“I would be walking in San Francisco and see all the homeless people living on the streets,” Jablonski recalled, during a recent phone conversation. “I thought about how future Americans will be so ashamed that we let this happen. The play is my way of suggesting that as a society, we can choose differently.”
Set in Chicago during the winter of 1982, The Last Hotel revolves around Bailey Whitlock, a homeless woman who is loosely based on acclaimed Outsider artist Lee Godie. For nearly 25 years – including her most prolific period as a painter in the 1970’s and 1980’s – Godie lived on the streets of Chicago, sleeping outside even in subzero temperatures.
Today, her work hangs in museums all over the world, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Milwaukee Art Museum.
Jablonski’s Bailey is still toiling in obscurity when The Last Hotel opens under a viaduct during a 1982 Chicago blizzard. A clearly addled Bailey rages at the storm much like Lear on the heath; during the course of the play, we’ll watch her fend off the “invisibles” who torment her. She’s clearly not well and needs help.
Making War on the Poor
Jablonski’s decision to set the play in 1982 wasn’t fortuitous.
The recently elected Ronald Reagan had just repealed former President Carter’s comprehensive Mental Health Systems Act, which had sought to provide coordinated care and rehabilitation to the mentally ill by investing in community-based mental health support systems.
“Reagan repealed Carter’s law and launched a war on drugs,” Jablonski said. “Instead of helping the mentally ill and drug addicts, he criminalized addiction. Instead of providing money for treatment, he used that money to put people in jail.”
And on the streets.
Jordan Neely was recently murdered on an F train in New York City, where more than 13,000 people with severe mental illness are unhoused; as Adam Iscoe notes when citing this statistic in a sobering new essay in The New Yorker, many of them wind up sleeping in the street or on the subway because there aren’t nearly enough shelters.
When our government won’t take care of the poor, what should the rest of us do?
That’s one of the big questions confronting the three remaining characters in Jablonski’s play. Jane is a student at a prestigious art school, where she’s also a TA for Carol, Bailey’s onetime art school classmate.
David is the manager of the Chicago Four Seasons where, as the blizzard continues, all four characters will find themselves; because Bailey has been banned from so many hotels and because of the storm, the posh Four Seasons is the only remaining refuge.
Having tried and failed for years to find housing for Bailey, the financially comfortable Carol is bankrolling Bailey’s periodic hotel stays during inclement weather; when she’s not grading papers, it’s Jane’s job to find Bailey and convince her to come in from the cold.
“Every one around Bailey is living a comfortable life,” Jablonski said. “And Carol has reached the point in her career where she just wants a paycheck. A lot of people get to that point; that’s when we need to really start questioning what it is we’re doing.”
The Art We Need
“Artists bec[o]me creatures of the university,” writes William Deresiewicz in “We’re All Bored of Culture,” a new essay that underscores one of the big themes in his recent book The Death of the Artist (2020). Artists are “produced there and more and more often employed there, which mean[s] socialized and homogenized there,” Deresiewicz continues.
In Carol’s case, the result isn’t just boring art; she’s well aware that her career is stalled and that Bailey is creating much more meaningful work. But Jablonski’s play suggests that Carol is also hardening as a human being, even toward Bailey, her onetime boon companion.
The Last Hotel traces the resulting tension between Carol and the younger, more idealistic Jane – increasingly inclined to question what she’s doing with her life and whether being an artist will allow her to make a difference.
It’s a quandary that hits home – or should – for any artist; it certainly resonates with Jablonski, whose play prompts one to wonder whether there’s a correlation between Carol’s mediocre art and atrophying capacity for empathy.
“I wouldn’t be spending the time I do writing plays if I didn’t feel that I had a message I wanted to communicate with an audience,” Jablonski said – simultaneously noting that the older she gets the more she thinks about what that message is and why it matters.
“I have lofty goals with this play,” she admitted. “I want people to walk out really asking themselves, ‘what are we doing with people who need help?’”
Will audiences listen hard enough or reflect long enough to ask such questions?
Jablonski worries that we’re in a moment when it’s becoming more difficult for audiences to hear what playwrights like her want to say; she noted that on the other side of the pandemic, many theatergoers “want to see plays that are entertaining and don’t make them think.”
“Theaters are stuck,” she said to me. “They need to fill seats; challenging plays often don’t.”
And yet.
The very existence of The Last Hotel reflects Jablonski’s ongoing belief that vacuous entertainment need not be a playwright’s last resort. Especially when, as is the case with her play, hard truths and probing questions are seasoned with comedy. Even on the page, The Last Hotel is often funny.
“I don’t want to make light of what Bailey is going through; she’s mentally ill and she needs help,” Jablonski said. “But I also don’t want to preach at people. Comedy provides a way to reach them.”
“I hope the audience takes the same journey that David does, as he gradually reaches the point where he says, ‘we’ve got to do something about this.’”
“Bailey has been living on the streets for some time now,” David says to Jane at one point. “And it’s not just Bailey,” he continues. “What about the others who don’t have a TA whose job it is to track them down and keep them safe and warm? It seems as a society we should come up with a workable situation for all the Baileys out there.”
The reading of The Last Hotel is this Friday, May 26, at 4:00 pm at the Alley Stage, 18 Shake Rag St., Mineral Point. For more information, visit https://worldpremierewisconsin.com/event/the-last-hotel/.
