Urban Removal: Westside Chicago is an excellent play

UK USA CDN AU

Reviewed by Opal Freeman from Windy City Reviews

Urban Removal: Westside Chicago is an excellent play written about the facts and figures of Westside Chicago. Using a historical platform, John Robert Bland creatively connects the elements of Chicago’s history, people, events, music, and education into an engaging and fun experience. The succession of each scene in the play captures the reader’s attention and embraces the views and values of long-time residents as they share individual life experiences of the neighborhood and surrounding communities.

Bland’s five characters are a unique blend of people who respect and admire each other a great deal. Their daily meeting place, a local bus shelter, provides an environment where the characters are able to have an open forum about any and every subject. The various conversations are filled with passion and pride, and they provide the reader a non-traditional education of the community where the characters live. In discussing the economic, demographic, and financial challenges of their neighborhood, this group of characters is able to provide solutions to matters that touch their hearts and sustain themselves with a spirit of survival.

John Robert Bland has written a play that allows the reader and audience to not only reflect on decades of the rise and fall of Westside Chicago, but he also confirms, through the creation of the play, the existence of humankind and community spirit. Thanks for the history. I really enjoyed the play.

See previous posting for more about: Urban Removal

UK USA CDN AU

Urban Removal

UK USA CDN AU

“It's interesting how you have these very lively and charismatic characters congregate at a bus stop talking 'barbershop trash'. But in fact they're very bright by the very nature of their well grounded and insightful commentary on the state of world affairs.” Dr. Roland Jefferson - Psychiatrist and Author

Book Description:

Urban Removal is an engaging play based on the degrading life on the Westside of Chicago, a place where both population and communities have gradually but surely disappeared to be replaced with a different demographic and upscale real estate.

Meanwhile, long time residents and survivors Can Man, the colorful self-anointed neighborhood mayor; Ili, the entrepreneur; Fenny, the commonsense blind guitarist; god fearing Alberta, and young Jamal join wits at a daily ritual bus stop corner encounter to discuss the neighborhood’s events and problems of the world.

This work is good story telling based on both fact and fiction.

“It goes a step beyond "The Help." in that it is contemporary and universal.” Doug Casement - UIC Project Upward Bound English Teacher

Author: John Robert Bland

MUP, city planner, playwright, songwriter, and poet.

Excerpt (written in a play format and so this is a line from character Can Man)

Can Man
But let me tell you something. This here drugs they got on the streets ain’t like reefer. This is the knockout punch and it will destroy all of us whether you use it or not. You gonna lose your children, your house, your money, and your mind. You better listen to me.

*****

“Thanks for the journey back to our youth because this is the only way we will have to remember it since the neighborhood and soon our old high school will be no more, so the written and spoken word is the vehicle we will use to pass our legacies on and though you can remove the buildings they will never be able to touch the memories of those times.” Ernest Pettis - Chicago's Crane High School Basketball Standout

Urban Removal

UK USA CDN AU