“There is a vicious circle of babies having babies having babies,” says Luther Goins, whose play Love Child premieres this weekend at Live Bait Theater. “I believe that there are people who should not be allowed to have children, and I believe there are people born who shouldn’t be here. I believe it; I grew up with it….I’ll read about some horrible crime: rape, shooting people, murder. Whether it’s black, white, Hispanic doesn’t matter–you see the same type of background, and my mind goes to: ‘Should not have been born.’”
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Goins has all the warmth and cheerful enthusiasm of a child himself, but he doesn’t pull punches, and neither does Love Child, the story of four teen mothers (ShaWanda, DaWanda, TaWanda, and LaWanda) taking parenting classes at a social services agency. Like the old TV show In Living Color, the play uses hyperbolic ethnic humor to soften its harsh subject matter. By focusing on one particularly destructive relationship involving a young mother, her daughter, and her daughter’s daughter, Goins hopes to drive home the fact that the problems of the poor are the problems of society as a whole. “This particular situation is black girls. But it could be white, it could be Italian. It doesn’t matter. It’s a situation that touches all of us.”
Like those projects, Love Child gives voice to people rarely heard in the theater. It was inspired by the conversations Goins overheard while commuting to the south side from his home in Rogers Park. “All of these black women walking around, there is so much humor there,” he says. “A lot of stuff that I got I just put together from taking the train every day. When the kids were coming home after school, usually I would sit back there with them, writing it all down. Were they always loud? Yes. Were they usually pretty ignorant? Yeah. But they were funny as shit.”
–Eric Rosenblum
