Superb ‘Tiny Beautiful Things’ a potent dose of reality

I grew up reading the American advice columnists of the 20th century in my hometown newspaper. Syndicated names like “Dear Abby” and “Miss Manners” appeared like beacons of certitude on the page opposite the comics; as a kid, I didn’t always understand every grown-up conflict or predicament that advice seekers wrote in about.

But I understood on some level why people came to these columnists — they offered the appearance of objective moral authority. Whether they were asked to settle “who’s right” in a dispute between family members or to advise a letter writer with some internal struggle they could hardly put into words, these judges would render a verdict.

Sometimes the verdict would be that the letter writer’s predicament wasn’t that big a deal, really. The Sun-Times’ own Ann Landers could wield her no-nonsense opinions as a blunt instrument. In a column I pulled up at random from her archive, Landers (a pen name created by Ruth Crowley but most associated with her successor, Eppie Lederer) diagnosed a despondent correspondent with depression, and after advising him to seek professional attention, suggests he also do some volunteering: “When you encounter people with real problems, yours won’t look so serious.”

“Dear Sugar,” one senses, would never so minimize the issues her readers took the time and emotional energy to write to her about. What made this online advice column, written anonymously by the author Cheryl Strayed in the years before the publication of her bestselling memoir “Wild,” so compelling was its author’s wide-open empathy and, in her words, “radical sincerity.” Sugar often began responses to her letter writers with stories of mistakes and heartaches from her own life, and presented her advice not as pronouncements from on high but as products of lived experience.

That profound compassion radiates from the stage in “Tiny Beautiful Things,” the theatrical adaptation of Strayed’s “Dear Sugar” columns that’s receiving an enthralling Chicago premiere at Victory Gardens. Just as Lederer was theatricalized by playwright David Rambo in the solo play “The Lady With All the Answers,” “Tiny Beautiful Things” could be alternately titled “The Lady With Just as Many Questions as You.”

The play — conceived by Second City alum Nia Vardalos, “Hamilton” director Thomas Kail and journalist Marshall Heyman and written by Vardalos (“My Big Fat Greek Wedding”) — actually takes its title from the collected edition of Strayed’s columns that was published following the success of “Wild.” (Strayed revealed herself as Sugar at a “coming out party” ahead of the publication of “Wild” in 2012.)

Liz Lauren

It’s smartly simple in its construction: The cast of four remains onstage throughout, with Sugar (Janet Ulrich Brooks, her inherent frankness well deployed here) listening and responding as the three other actors (August Forman, Eric Slater and Jessica Dean Turner, each terrific) embody her letter writers. Vardalos opens with a brief exchange establishing how Strayed took on the column, and uses its readers’ speculation about her identity as a mild through line. (Like Lederer and Ann Landers, Strayed inherited the mantle of Dear Sugar from a previous writer.)

It’s not immediately clear whether there will be more dramatic arc than that, as each letter and its response seem to stand alone on the page (or on the screen, as “Dear Sugar” was originally hosted on the literary website The Rumpus). But Vardalos arranges these voices wisely, grouping some letters into thematic choruses, finding necessary moments of comic relief, and allowing subtle gear-shifts in intensity.

Director Vanessa Stalling sets her cast to work in a coffee shop as anonymous as Dear Sugar herself, rendered in cool teals and grays by scenic designer Courtney O’Neill that let costume designer Theresa Ham’s reddish-brown tones pop.

As the lights come up, Brooks’s Sugar is seated at center stage, alone at a table with her laptop, a tote bag and a bottle of water when she receives the email offering her the column. Turner and Forman are similarly isolated behind their computers at other tables, while Slater’s barista scrolls through his smartphone.

It’s a stark acknowledgment of how little we know of what’s going on inside those around us, or the turmoil, brokenness or confusion our neighbors might be wrestling with deep down. Anyone might be Sugar’s pseudonymous letter writers.

But while they embody Sugar’s multitude of fans, each of the actors get powerful solo moments as well: Turner as a woman who’s unable to “get over” her miscarriage as quickly as her loved ones would like; Forman as a transgender man who’s reluctant to accept an olive branch extended by the parents who cut off contact with him years earlier; and Slater, in the play’s emotional crescendo, as the letter writer Living Dead Dad, a man who’s paralyzed by his grief and rage at the loss of his only son to a drunk driver.

Through it all, Brooks’s Sugar listens generously and responds not with airs of authority, but with her own pain and anguish, and the lessons she’s taken from them. “My grief has taught me things,” Sugar says, and Stalling’s direction makes sure the actors always include the audience in the conversation. You’re likely to see yourself in Strayed’s reflections.

Kris Vire is a local freelance writer.