Evanston teen band revisited in compelling, rockin’ ‘Verböten’

It may be hard to imagine a preteen punk band playing a set at the Cubby Bear, if one is only familiar with the fancied-up, upscaled Wrigleyville of the Ricketts era.

But in 1983, the neighborhood surrounding Wrigley Field was the epicenter of Chicago’s punk-rock scene. The Cubs were still exclusively playing day baseball; it would be five more years before the team installed lights at the park. At night, young punk fans streamed in from the suburbs to hang out around Clark and Belmont, at The Alley and the “Punkin’ Donuts” (now replaced by a Target store). The Cubby Bear, just across the street from Wrigley, hosted all-ages shows.

And at one of those shows, opening for Naked Raygun, was a four-piece band of Evanston middle-schoolers who called themselves Verböten.

“With an umlaut over the ‘O,’” the 14-year-old lead singer tells her parents, huffily, in the House Theatre of Chicago’s sweet and sardonic new musical of the same name. “Like Hüsker Dü, but with one umlaut instead of two.”

It’s possible that Brett Neveu, the prolific local playwright who penned the book for “Verböten” (enjoying its world premiere at the Chopin Theatre) inserted the Hüsker Dü reference as a bit of an Easter egg for those in the know. His co-writer is Jason Narducy, who became Verböten’s original guitarist at the age of 10, and has spent much of his grown-up music career playing and touring with Hüsker Dü’s Bob Mould, who produced the 1997 major-label debut of one of Narducy’s later bands, Verbow.

Narducy, who still makes his home in Evanston, also plays regularly these days with the band Superchunk and with his own project, Split Single. He wrote all of the songs for “Verböten” the show, just as he wrote all the songs for Verböten the band back in the day. And he’s the central character in the play’s semi-fictionalized narrative, which has young Jason (played by Kieran McCabe) and his bandmates dealing with all sorts of fraught family situations in the run-up to their Cubby Bear gig.

Michael Brosilow

Jason’s parents have divorced, and he’s chosen to live with his dad (Ray Rehberg) so he can stay in the same school, but he’s also bottling up more resentment than he can long contain. (Curiously, we don’t meet Jason’s mom, but we do get a few glimpses of his new stepfather, played by Jimmy Chung as a well-meaning mensch.)

Tracey (Krystal Ortiz), the lead singer, is mildly embarrassed by her own well-meaning parents (Paul Brian Fagen and Jenni M. Hadley), and possibly dealing with some stronger angst about being adopted. Bass player Chris (Matthew Lunt) doesn’t see much of either of his parents, but has a depressive older sister (Marika Mashburn) who’s doing her best to turn her teenage brother into an alcoholic. And drummer Zack (Jeff Kurysz) seems to be taking out his feelings about his missing mother on his loving father (Marc A. Rogers).

Neveu’s script, written with input from and the blessing of Narducy and his real-life former bandmates Tracey Bradford, Chris Kean and Zack Kantor, smartly supports and subverts its young characters’ points of view. You can recognize the gentle absurdity of the kids’ outsized suburban ennui — the real-life adult versions of these young musicians are probably a little embarrassed by how embarrassed they were of their own parents at this age.

But it’s also easy to remember, as adults, that time in your life when it wasn’t cool to like your own parents, but you might have really needed a hug from your friends’ parents.

Punk rock, like so many subcultures, was about finding a chosen family when you couldn’t relate to the family you were given. Neveu and Narducy’s play suggests the rear-view perspective of those who’ve grown old enough to recognize that you need both kinds.

Narducy’s songs find a nearly perfect balance between the anarchic spirit of early punk and the narrative-moving character work of musical theater. It’s among the rare “rock musicals” that genuinely sounds like rock music, instead of a theater composer’s shiny approximation of rock (looking at you, “Rent”).

Nearly every actor (including those playing the parents and siblings) plays multiple instruments, which fits nicely into the House Theatre’s artifice-free aesthetic; if an actor is needed onstage to play an instrument, they simply show up out of character, and it all makes sense in the world director Nathan Allen has constructed.

It helps that said universe has been imagined by scenic and lighting designer Lee Keenan as a multi-level universe of infinite shag-carpet basements. And if this cast were to go into the studio to record a cast album? I would be there to buy the first pressing.

Kris Vire is a local freelance writer.