There was a time, before the proliferation of social media gave everyone a shortcut to some level of public notoriety, when getting your name in the local paper felt like a brush with fame. That feeling–the sensation that someone, somewhere has taken an interest in your life, no matter how ordinary–provides the impetus for Evanston Salt Costs Climbing. The play, written by Will Arbery, is being presented in a stylish and appealing production by First Floor Theatre at The Den Theatre. Although the play itself is somewhat undercooked, this staging more than makes up for its shortcomings with a game and feisty cast.

The play's action focuses on a team who drives a road-salting truck in the Chicago suburbs, and we meet them just after the publication of a newspaper article documenting the work of their small office. This serves as the jumping-off point for a look at the howling calamity of contemporary American life through the lenses of two vital but crushingly dull subjects: infrastructure and bureaucracy.

The plot follows Jane Maiworm, assistant head of the city's public works department, as she attempts to effect change in the city's de-icing policy and improve her community. Under her care are Peter and Basil, the two workers who drive the salt truck, and her troubled stepdaughter Jane Junior. They face problems small (funding issues) to large (possible human extinction and also a malevolent supernatural entity that's stalking them), all while trying to keep the roads driveable in the wintertime. The combination of banalities and planetary-level stakes provides the cast a broad canvas on which to work, finding emotions across the spectrum of human experience.

The single point of failure for a play is most often the actors. To that end, this production's crowning achievement is assembling a cast that works so well together and is so sharp that watching them is a pure joy. Ashley Neal plays Maiworm like a sort of funhouse mirror Leslie Knope. She plays the character with a wide-open, almost childlike guilelessness that makes her enthusiasm for the drudgery of her work captivating. Dano Duran brings a similar innocence to Basil, whose outward joviality belies a darkness he's fighting to contain. In contrast, Jelani West's Peter is a death-obsessed grouch who volubly spouts nihilistic fantasies that don't quite accord with his actions. Finally, Jacinda Ratcliffe invests Jane Junior, plagued by arrested development, with incredible pathos. Instead of a caricature of a young person, Ratcliffe finds enough levels to craft the character as a portrait of the effects of living in a dying civilization. Throughout the play, all four of the actors find incredible depth and subtlety in the characters, making them complex and joyous and sad and strange in the best ways. These people feel like people.

Arbery's strength as a playwright is his use of language, requiring impressive verbal dexterity on the actors' part. At its best, his writing crackles with intensity and wit, full of explosive laughs, evocative, dense imagery, and memorable turns of phrase. He sees a world perched on the brink of apocalypse, haunted both by history and ghosts, sometimes quite literally. And he's capable of delivering profound insight. Take, for instance, Peter's speech about the strangeness of his grief in the wake of losing his wife–the same wife whose murder he'd been contemplating not long before–mourning the loss of all the time they'd shared. Arbery lets the contradictions sit without hammering them, painting a vivid portrait of the duality of a long-term romantic relationship. West delivers the speech lightly but without rushing it, playing Peter as a man still in the blast corona of his grief but not really sure what that means yet. Evanston Salt Costs Climbing is full of small, finely wrought moments like these.

Still, the play as a whole doesn't quite work, to the detriment of its biggest ideas. For one thing, it's a bit too long (it could probably stand to have about 15 of its 100 minutes cut) and the final 20-ish minutes as we build to the climax and denouement are hopelessly muddled and imprecise. The structure is basically absurdist, with a cyclical plot. So it's not necessarily the case that Arbery needs to neatly resolve every single thread, and there's plenty of room for satisfying ambiguity. The problem is that, as it builds momentum toward some sort of climactic moment, it just kind of fizzles out. And that loss of power doesn't feel intentional or like it's the commentary; it just seems confusing. Some of the play's more mysterious and horror-influenced elements get resolved rather unsatisfyingly, but the big ideas recede, and it's hard to know what to make of the whole. This is especially true because the last scene lands with a thud, feeling like a relic of an early draft more than an important part of the story's resolution.

The stage is in an alley configuration and the action is staged primarily on the extreme ends. There are some moments of visual panache–the salt truck is staged in a cleverly theatrical way–but you're likely to end up with a crick in your neck no matter where you sit. I also couldn't help but feel as if there were some missed opportunities to move the truck around a bit more playfully, and I thought they missed a fun jump scare at one point.

Whatever the script lacks in cohesion or the direction may miss, however, the cast digs deep into Arbery's words and makes this an evening well worth your time. As Jane Jacobs tells Maiworm, "All you can do is discover people." These four are very fun discoveries indeed.

Evanston Salt Costs Climbing, a First Floor Theatre production, runs through June 14, 2025, at The Den Theatre, 1331 N. Milwaukee, Chicago IL. For tickets and information, please visit www.firstfloortheater.com/.