Goodman cooks up hearty personal drama in 'Soups, Stews'

A laughably stereotypical 1970s kitchen greets audiences for Rebecca Gilman's world-premiere drama “Soups, Stews, and Casseroles: 1976” at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. Complete with an avocado-green stove and goldenrod-yellow fridge, designer Kevin Depinet's perfectly dressed suburban set suggests that Gilman is serving up a nostalgic Bicentennial kitchen-sink drama.

The play tosses those assumptions out the window. With “Soups, Stews, and Casseroles: 1976,” Gilman skillfully crafts a personal-as-political drama that explores corporations' aggressive pushes to stifle the power of unions. In light of the nearly yearlong budgetary standoff between Illinois' Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner and the Democrat-controlled General Assembly in part over anti-union legislation, “Soups, Stews, and Casseroles: 1976” feels unsettlingly contemporary.

Gilman sets her drama in the fictional Wisconsin company town of Reynolds, home to the family-owned Farmstead cheese factory (think Swiss Colony). When the company is bought out by a Chicago-based conglomerate called Consolidated Foods, union allegiances get severely tested. That's particularly true of the Durst family: 17-year Farmstead factory employee Kim (a beaten-down Cliff Chamberlain), his wife, Kat (an enterprising Cora Vander Broek), and their high school-aged daughter, Kelly (an idealistic Lindsay Stock).

The Dursts have plenty of quiet resentments against many of their neighbors, who have previously shunned them over “moral reasons,” so they're tempted by the financial possibilities and status offered by Consolidated Foods. Kim is soon promoted, causing friction among his co-workers.

Meanwhile Kat and Kelly befriend the sophisticated corporate wife Elaine Marcus (Angela Reed). Elaine misses her Highland Park mansion, but finds pleasure in latching onto the Dursts and sharing loads of encouragement drawn from self-help books of the era.

Two longtime family friends, however, are wary of the changes in town and among the Dursts. The first is the amusingly tart JoAnne (Ann Whitney), who opens the play with comically rigid views on the cookbook she and Kat are compiling for Reynolds' annual Cheese Days Festival. Then there's the young union president Kyle (a laid-back Ty Olwin), whose long hair provides plenty of jokes about his likeness to Jesus.

JoAnn and Kyle make the Dursts question their shifting allegiances and serve as the play's moral, if blunt, voices of conscience. As more revelations come to the fore over Consolidated's maneuvering to crush the union, Kim becomes torn between the promised benefits to his family and the collective livelihoods of his longtime co-workers.

“Soups, Stews, and Casseroles: 1976” moves along at a slow simmer, when Gilman and director Robert Falls could have injected more tense conflicts and outbursts. But the comic detail and quiet dilemmas allow audiences to fit more comfortably in the Durst family's shoes as they weigh whether to get ahead at the expense of their neighbors - or stand with them.

Despite the '70s setting, the play is timely, especially in light of Republicans' success in making Wisconsin a “right-to-work” state. With “Soups, Stews, and Casseroles: 1976,” Gilman adroitly looks back to the past to explain where we are today.