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Razor-sharp dramatics and an air-tight production from Teatro Vista bring a complicated, slippery world to life.
With his consuming 85-minute drama The Wolf at the End of the Block, given a compelling Teatro Vista world premiere under Ricardo Gutiérrez's air-tight direction, Chicago playwright Ike Holter shows he's gloriously out of step with current trends among big-name, award-winning American playwrights. While like many of them he writes about pressing social issues, here the debilitating effects of police oppression on a majority-nonwhite community like Humboldt Park, he never wastes a moment, never lets his characters dawdle through extended demonstrations of their quirks, never diddles around the edges of his story in search of "interesting" but dramatically irrelevant encounters.…