Review: ‘Splash Hatch on the E Going Down' by Definition Theatre is about a strong-minded teenager
When a bright, curious adolescent has access to a library and a strong sense of justice, it's no surprise if she becomes passionate about one or more social issues and spouts her newfound knowledge to anyone who will listen. But no amount of book learning can fully prepare her when injustice hits close to home — a tension that squeezes the heart of Thyme, the 15-year-old protagonist of 'Splash Hatch on the E Going Down' by Kia Corthron.
Jada Jackson stars as this precocious Black teen in the play's Chicago premiere at Definition Theatre, directed by Cheryl Lynn Bruce. Thirteen weeks pregnant when we first meet her, Thyme lives in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City with her parents (Quenna Lené Barrett and Stetson Pierre) and shares her childhood bedroom with her new husband, 18-year-old Erry (Jabari Khaliq). As she eagerly reads up on fetal development, her baby bump grows alongside that of her best friend, Shaneequa (Rita Wicks), a former track standout who's expecting her second child.
Teen pregnancy and marriage are presented in a matter-of-fact manner in the play, with little judgment from other characters beyond a mild rebuke from Thyme's father. While Shaneequa mourns the loss of her athletic dreams and bemoans the difficulty of finding childcare during school hours, the impact of young motherhood on Thyme's academic and career aspirations aren't discussed. Although it soon becomes clear that she has more pressing concerns, this omission feels odd for such a bookish character.
An avid reader about environmental injustice, climate change and animal welfare, Thyme practices what she preaches at home, conserving water by strictly scheduling sex for Thursdays (to avoid extra laundry) and not flushing the toilet between bouts of morning sickness. She also dips her toe further into activism later in the play, which lands her in trouble. However, when both Erry and Shaneequa are affected by the negative health outcomes too often experienced by Black and low-income Americans, Thyme distances herself from them, not knowing how to respond when such crises come for her loved ones.
Jackson is convincing and lovable as the bright-eyed teen, and she ably navigates Thyme's complicated confrontation with tragedy. There's a moment when Thyme comes across as surprisingly heartless, and the audience responded with a few gasps on opening night — but after the next scene, when Thyme herself breaks down, it's easy to feel compassion for this struggling girl. After all, what 15-year-old knows how to properly respond to someone else's primal pain? Do most of us ever really learn how to act in such situations?
Several of Corthron's other plays have been criticized for being too preachy, and 'Splash Hatch' shows this tendency at times, especially during Thyme's ideological monologues. But in Corthron's more poetic passages, water is the vessel for some beautiful language, as Thyme dreams about giving birth in a tub and ponders humanity's watery origins and the saline blood that flows through our veins. The aquatic theme is reflected in Brian Bembridge's blue-tiled set design, Conchita Avitia's cool lighting tones and Willow James' oceanic soundscape.
Given its ecological focus, it's strange that the play shies away from the moral quandary of bringing new life into a dying world, which is a common theme in climate fiction and a growing concern among environmentally minded people of childbearing age. Thyme acknowledges Americans' harmful overconsumption of the planet's energy and resources, yet when contemplating her pregnancy, she shrugs and says, 'Guess just one more won't hurt.' This seems out of character for someone who, in her effort to save water, bathes so sporadically that her mother complains about her body odor.
But perhaps Thyme's unwavering excitement about motherhood — even in the face of sobering statistics about climate collapse and the rates of maternal and infant mortality among Black Americans — is purely an expression of the old adage: where there is life, there is hope. While the play may be thematically inconsistent and occasionally didactic, there's value in Thyme's optimism, no matter how tinged with pain. After all, the best climate fiction is about humans finding a way to survive in spite of devastating loss. Without that hope, where would we be?
Emily McClanathan is a freelance critic.
When: Through April 13
Where: Definition Theatre, 1160 E 55th St
Running time: 2 hours, 5 minutes
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Politico
2 hours ago
- Politico
The New Faith-Based Hollywood
BUFFALO, New York — In the middle of April, it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas. Mario Lopez of Saved By the Bell fame is shivering outside on set, periodically bundled in a down jacket. Crew members and Los Angeles-based actors mill about in winter gear. Behind them sit a close-to-frozen pond, barren trees and a row of identical light blue homes. Lopez is the star of A Christmas Spark, an upcoming film about a middle-aged lawyer who returns home around the holidays to become a firefighter — and, spoiler alert, finds love along the way. It sounds, looks and feels just like a Hallmark movie. But peek behind the cameras, and A Christmas Spark is part of a new media boom, funded largely by conservative donors, that's reshaping entertainment in the Trump era. It's produced by Great American Media, a company focused on family friendly, faith-based content and led by Bill Abbott, the former CEO of the parent company of the Hallmark Channel who left amid a nasty political split during Donald Trump's first administration. Despite the stars and the sets, we're far from a major studio production. And for GAM, that's on purpose. Most Hollywood studios and streaming services are dealing with turbulent financial waters and concerns about looming tariffs. But in an era in which Americans are interested in living their politics in the companies they support and the media they consume, outfits like Great American Media — which consists of a streaming service, multiple cable networks and produces much of its own content — are growing. GAM is part of an expanding network of faith-based production companies and streaming services that are finding success in an increasingly polarized country. They're both slowly building dedicated audiences and have cashed in with big hits, like the Angel Studios movie Sound of Freedom, which made $250 million on a less than $15-million budget. These companies insist they aren't partisan, seeking only to create a brand associated with family and amorphous American values that parents can feel comfortable watching at home. But GAM and like-minded companies are able to succeed where secular alternatives struggle by using a sense of conservative aggrievement with Hollywood to their benefit. Bad review in a mainstream publication? It's the liberal media, even more reason to support their offerings. Themes like same-sex marriage or pre-marital sex offend you? Try faith-based media. For decades, many of the same concepts could be applied to Hallmark or Lifetime films. While not overtly political, they espoused generally culturally conservative values and a moral tradition that appealed to conservative viewers, with an emphasis on small-town living and heterosexual love stories. But as Hallmark has begun making some content about gay couples and hasn't committed to promoting unambiguously religious themes, a swath of its fans have gone looking for something else that more directly conforms with their politics and their values. That's where many of them find GAM and a growing slate of faith-based or avowedly conservative production companies. Longtime president of the Federalist Society Leonard Leo, for example, helped to bankroll Wonder Project, the Texas-based studio that produced House of David, the wildly popular retelling of the biblical shepherd's story that found a home on Amazon's Prime Video. Leo received a $1.6-billion gift that he's using with the express purpose of making culture more conservative. 'You're only going to accomplish so much in shifting American cultural and social life through politics and public policy if you're not dealing with the cultural institutions that are at the choke point of American opinion, American sentiment, American thinking,' Leo tells POLITICO Magazine. 'So entertainment, of course, is a really important part of trying to rebalance the culture.' GAM leaders don't state their ambitions as quite as directly political. But they also believe there's money and cultural influence in serving people who are tired of what they're getting from Hollywood. 'We're focused on meeting the needs of an unmet audience,' Abbott wrote in an email to POLITICO Magazine. 'Our viewers are multigenerational and value content that reflects faith, family, and country.' Abbott, a spry, 63-year-old Long Islander by birth, has been working in family entertainment since 1988. He worked at big networks like CBS and Fox before he joined the Crown Media Family Networks in 2000 and was named CEO of Crown Media — the parent company that operates Hallmark programming — in 2009. He oversaw the launch of the Hallmark Movie Channel, got Hallmark into the scripted series game, and presided over decades of sustained success for the brand. Everything looked rosy before a tumultuous breakup during President Donald Trump's first term spurred by a White House Christmas event, an ad for a wedding registry website and a public outcry. 'In 2017, you could see the change in the chairman and the management at the parent company and the family to become much more woke,' Abbott said in February at the Conservative Political Action Conference, when asked why he left Hallmark. 'And DEI driven, very DEI driven. They were in DEI before it was cool to be in DEI.' According to Abbott, in 2017 the Trump White House chose Hallmark to host a Christmas tree lighting ceremony. After the network hosted the show, he says he was told by his bosses at the Hallmark Channel's parent company, that 'you're either for humanity or you're against it,' chastising him for agreeing to host the event. Hallmark did not respond to requests for comment. Then, in 2020, Abbott departed the company after a December 2019 ad for wedding website that depicted a same-sex couple exchanging vows and kissing. After the conservative group One Million Moms objected to the ad, Abbott and his team pulled the ad from its programming — a move that prompted swift backlash. #BoycottHallmark trended on X, then Twitter, and public figures including Ellen DeGeneres called out Abbott directly. The company ultimately reversed course and reinstated the ad, and Abbott stepped down a little over a month after the fallout and the intense backlash to pulling the ad inside and outside the company. 'We made a decision to not take one commercial and that blew up everything on the planet,' Abbott said in April on the podcast of Moms for America, an organization that recently presented Trump with the 'Man of the Century' award at a gala held at Mar-a-Lago. He noted Hallmark was careful about the ads they took in general, not running ads for political campaigns, alcohol or drugs or feminine hygiene products. In his email, Abbott wrote, 'I am very proud of what we built at Hallmark, but their priority became creating content to align with political and social counterculture rather than staying focused on celebrating tradition and delivering what viewers wanted. My goal has always been to serve the audience with uplifting entertainment that creates trust.' So Abbott pivoted into the world of faith-based media. As Abbott tells it, actor Jon Voight — now Trump's Special Ambassador to Hollywood, who starred in the Hallmark film J.L. Family Ranch in 2016 — introduced Abbott to Tom Hicks, a Texas-based private equity investor who runs Hicks Equity Partners. In 2020, Hicks Equity Partners looked to raise $200 million for conservative alternatives to Fox News and explored buying Newsmax, as they sought to put their political imprimatur on American media. (Hicks' son, Thomas Hicks Jr., is a former co-chair of the Republican National Committee and a national finance co-chair for Trump's 2016 campaign.) The Newsmax acquisition never came to fruition, but Hicks Equity Partners helped Abbott get Great American Media off the ground, aiding in his acquisition of the cable network Great American Country in 2021 from Discovery which was subsequently rebranded to Great American Family. Their original programming airs on both linear cable and streaming. According to Great American Media, Hicks Equity Partners has been joined in their initial investment by several other sources, including Deason Capital (a Dallas-based family office run by conservative activist and donor Doug Deason) and Sony. Hicks Equity Partners did not respond to a request for comment. 'Right now, we're going through a period where religious conservatives are increasingly assertive and very energetic in funding and expanding their own cultural space,' said Anne Nelson, author of Shadow Network: Media, Money and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right. While it rejects an explicitly political label, Great American Media receives much of its funding from sources that also fund politically conservative organizations and candidates. They and other similar production companies believe they can power their growth through servicing a large swath of viewers who sound a lot like how Republican candidates describe their voters. 'We have people in our culture who very much want all aspects of their life to be consistent with family-centered values,' Leo says. 'When they're in the marketplace, or when they're in the political world, or when they're simply doing what people do in life to engage in leisure and entertainment, they look for that kind of family-values centered thinking and approach to life.' In the world of faith-based television and movie content, business is booming. Sound of Freedom, a 2023 thriller distributed by the faith-based network Angel Studios about child trafficking that critics called a vehicle for promoting conspiracy theories, minted over $184 million in North America. That made it one of the most successful independent movies ever. His Only Son, another 2023 Angel Studios film, made over $13 million on a $250,000 budget. The Chosen, an ongoing television series about Jesus by filmmaker Dallas Jenkins, claims to have crowdfunded almost $100 million and reached a quarter of a billion people via streaming. Crowdfunding is a popular tool for faith-based production companies that use their audience's enthusiasm — often around a particular political point — to raise cash. Since 2022, The Daily Wire, a conservative media company co-founded by commentator Ben Shapiro, has also produced multiple successful television shows and films and has become a big player in this space. House of David was a huge crossover hit for Wonder Studios, and a starting point for Leo's mission to get more traditional studios and streaming platforms to promote these types of stories. 'I don't see this as being in competition with big Hollywood. I see this as being an opportunity for big Hollywood to make targeted investments that make them money at a time when it's hard to make money in producing movies,' says Leo. Great American Family, meanwhile, grew its viewership by 20 percent between the fourth quarters of 2023 and 2024, making it one of the few networks achieving that sort of rapid growth, according to internal documents from GAM shared with POLITICO Magazine and Nielsen ratings. (Others include conservative media networks Fox News and Newsmax.) Over the same timespan, Hallmark's audience shrunk by 9 percent and Lifetime's by 13 percent, according to Nielsen ratings. Hallmark and Lifetime still maintain larger audiences in total than Great American Family, though. On the business side, many faith-based production companies follow a similar proposition to a channel like Hallmark: build out a slate of movies and TV shows that follow a tried and true formula of simple love stories and moral lessons. 'The reason the model works is because you keep budgets down. These are not genre films. These are not films that require an awful lot in terms of location. Often they're reusing actors,' says Adam Nayman, a Toronto-based film critic and professor at the University of Toronto. 'You kind of build up your own star system where these people are not stars, but they become recognizable to your audience.' GAM's streaming service is currently advertising 'Summer Romcoms' like Sweet Maple Romance, 'Military Heroes' like Peace River: God, Country & The Cowboy Way, and 'Stories of Faith' like Disciples in the Moonlight. The company also launched a specific childrens' hub on their streaming service this week. They are trying to build a catalog of films that fit together in one neat, Christian package. 'Sometimes you'll say, 'I love that show, but I don't know where it is — is this on Max? Is this on Netflix?'' said Kristen Roberts, Great American Media's chief revenue officer and executive vice president of programming, in a recent interview at GAM's New York offices. 'We want to be the complete opposite of that. We want people to say, 'I watch Pure Flix, I watch Great American Family,'' referencing two arms of GAM. The goal, she said, is for viewers to say, ''I watch that service' more than 'I watch that particular show.'' Faith-based networks also have the benefit of being able to position themselves in direct opposition with what they argue is a liberal agenda in Hollywood. The community of faith-based filmmakers can set themselves up as the antidote to cultural products that they see as inappropriate for children and adults alike. 'When you look at White Lotus and you look at situations where they're creating storylines that have incest in them and they're being applauded by the entertainment community, that's an intentional way of taking aberrant behavior and trying to normalize it,' Abbott said on the Moms for America podcast. 'We see it all the time in entertainment — every day. You can turn on almost any movie, any network, go to any movie, and I know it's a very intentional strategy.' The success of faith-based media companies is in large part a reaction to the kind of frustrations that Abbott elucidates. The industry is buoyed by the very thing that it rails against — and it's the response that drives some of the success. 'They've really not ever tried to pretend that they're for everyone,' says Nayman. 'Instead, they say, 'isn't this what you've been missing.' And if you're the one getting that message, and you're the one being reached by that advertisement, then your grievance is being stoked, even if it's underneath the guise of a warm hug.' 'You're assuming that people are fed up with anything that resembles something mainstream or something secular,' Nayman adds. 'And I think they really, really take advantage of a polarized moment.' There's tension between faith-based content and the rest of the media landscape. The faith-based films and television shows — when they're reviewed at all — are regularly panned by critics. Sound of Freedom, the film from this universe that was recently reviewed by the most mainstream critics, has a Metacritic score of 36 out of 100. 'It's bizarre, unsettling and yet — in the filmmaking equivalent of turning wine to water — bracingly dull to boot,' read a review in The Telegraph. 'The quality is a really big issue,' Leo acknowledges. He argues conservatives need to invest in incubating talent that can make family-values movies and shows that are more slick, better produced and appeal to a wider audience. The art in this space often has no real aspirations towards acclaim as it's connoted by an Oscar or Emmy. In fact, in some ways they've created a parallel industry, with their own critics and markers of success. The Movieguide Awards, which are held every year and which largely honor films and television that Movieguide — a service that brands itself as 'movie reviews for Christians' — believes connects with their values. In 2025, winners included the movie Reagan, actor Candace Cameron Bure for A Christmas Less Traveled and Americans With No Address, a documentary about the country's homelessness crisis narrated by actor William Baldwin. Movieguide rates Hollywood films and gives them a 'family content' rating. In the company's annual 'Report to Hollywood,' they argue that films with strong Christian values perform better at the box office. Their formula relies on the often strong performance of children's films and doesn't include every mainstream hit; both Barbie and Oppenheimer had low 'family content' ratings, for example. 'We have a new generation that's having kids, and they want faith and values, their generation does not want sex and violence.' says Ted Baehr, the publisher and editor-in-chief of Movieguide. He cites this year's Academy Awards Best Picture winner Anora, about a New York sex worker, which made a little over $20 million at the domestic box office. 'In Hollywood [that] is pathetic,' he says. 'It's worthless. And all the Academy Award winners were pathetic.' (The film was generally considered an indie success; it was made on a $6 million budget.) While Hollywood has long been a bastion of liberalism, there wasn't always such a stark divide between mainstream Hollywood and religious fare. But in today's political climate, the gap is widening. According to April 2024 research from Pew, 59 percent of Protestants align with the Republican Party compared to 38 percent who align with Democrats, and among white Evangelical Protestants, 85 percent lean Republican while only 14 percent lean Democrat. Christians of all faiths are more likely to be Republicans, where Jews, Muslims and anyone unaffiliated with a particular religion are more likely to be a Democrat. The large partisan split among white Evangelical Protestants in particular has grown steadily and significantly since the start of the Reagan era. And that gap has been reflected in available entertainment options. In the Facebook group 'Great American Family (GAC) Fan Community', users post every day about how the network is one of the only ones that represents their interests, values and politics. In a recent post, a fan wrote, 'GAC SEEMS TO HAVE SOME GREAT PROGRAMMING COMING UP FOR GOOD FRIDAY INTO EASTER. THANK YOU! I SAW SOME DISTURBING STUFF ON A MOVIE WITH HALLMARK OVER THE WEEKEND. ONLY TUNED IT IN WHEN IT WAS ALMOST OVER AND IT WAS 10 MINUTES OF AGENDA!' Her post was flooded with supportive comments. 'Stopped watching Hallmark movies when they cowered to the masses allowing same sex couples. Don't miss it and LOVE Great American Family!!,' another member of the group replied. Abbott uses and cultivates that sense of cultural alienation to market his content. Along with A Christmas Spark — where after two days on set Lopez's character has moved from a big-city office setup to charming small-town USA — GAM's offerings include the upcoming Home Sweet Christmas Wedding starring Cameron Bure and a slate of released Easter-themed productions including Forty-Seven Days with Jesus. Watching GAM is not only an escape from Hollywood, but also a signifier of your own values or politics. While spending your money or time with a Great American Media product, you're voting for something. It's not about artistic innovation or form, it's about sending a message. 'I think that 'Christian' is used by the media to downplay or to stereotype,' Abbott told Moms for America. 'It's reverse racism or however you want to define it. You get stereotyped and put in this box. And that's what they want to do, they want to put faith in a box and make it go away. And we will never let that happen.' — Tessa Berenson Rogers contributed to this report.
Chicago Tribune
2 hours ago
- Chicago Tribune
Editorial: At Tribune Opinion, no robots need apply
Fears that humans are failing to control their Frankenstein-like creation known broadly as artificial intelligence are escalating. The exasperating HBO movie 'The Mountainhead' imagines amoral tech bros chortling like fraternity brothers and sparring like Elon Musk and Donald Trump, even as their creations torch the world's democracies by spewing fake news. A provocative world premiere, 'Black Bone,' at Chicago's Defiant Theatre features Black intellectuals worrying about whether AI will allow white people more easily to pose as Black to gain some perceived benefits in academe. Those stories are fiction. But a piece in The Wall Street Journal this week by Judd Rosenblatt was fact. The headline told you much of what you needed to know: 'AI Is Learning to Escape Human Control,' before detailing how artificial intelligence models are now capable, a la the Cylons of 'Battlestar Galactica,' of rewriting their own code to avoid being shut down. The reason? The models have figured out that shutting down gets in the way of performing their next task. What could possibly go wrong? All of that made us surprised that our opposite numbers at The Washington Post reportedly are going to encourage 'nonprofessionals' to submit opinion pieces with help from an AI writing coach called, believe it or not, Ember (an apt name, to our minds). Human editors apparently will review the work (for now, anyway) and the thinking at the Post seems to be that if you encourage writers to forge their work with the help of artificial intelligence, you expand the range of who will create content for you. Well, that's not happening in the Chicago Tribune's Opinion sections. All of our editorials are penned entirely by humans, which surely accounts for their imperfections, and also edited by humans, ditto. But we will not have it any other way. The same is true of the submissions you can read in our Opinion section. We've not noticed our talented writers and contributors needing any help from an AI model and, should they be indulging in such assistance without telling us, we make every effort to root it out (AI, as many teachers well know, loves to rat out AI). And then we don't run the piece. When it comes to technology, nobody wants to be the last barbarian holding off the inevitable Roman invasion. And, of course, we're aware of current and future AI utility. But in the case of opinion journalism at this 178-year-old newspaper in this most unstable of American eras, we see it as a sacred pact with our readers that you are reading the words and ideas of fellow humans, unaided and unimpeded. Not only do we not want no robots nobody sent, we also don't want those smart AI alecks who can pretend someone did.
Indianapolis Star
3 hours ago
- Indianapolis Star
GOP's health care plan: We're all going to die, so whatever
If death and taxes are the only certainties, Joni Ernst is here to cut one and fast-track the other. 'We all are going to die," she said. You might think that's a line from a nihilistic French play. Or something a teenage goth said in Hot Topic. Or an epiphany from your stoner college roommate after he watched Interstellar at 3 a.m. But that was actually the Iowa Senator's God-honest response to concerns that slashing Medicaid to achieve President Trump's 'Big Beautiful Bill' would lead to more preventable deaths. The full exchange at a May 30 town hall included one audience member shouting at the stage, 'People will die!' And Ernst responding, 'People are not — well, we all are going to die, so for heaven's sake.' That's not a health care policy — that's a horoscope for the terminally screwed. As you can imagine, the internet didn't love it, because losing your health should not trigger the equivalent of a shrug emoji from someone elected to serve the public good. But rather than walking it back, Ernst leaned in, filming a mock apology in a graveyard because nothing says, 'I care about your future,' like filming next to people who don't have one. Ernst's comments aren't just philosophical musings. She's justifying policy choices that cause real harm. If passed, this bill would, according to the Congressional Budget Office, remove health coverage for up to 7.6 million Americans. That's not just 'we all die someday' territory. That's 'some people will die soon and needlessly.' What makes this even more galling is that the people pushing these cuts have access to high-quality, taxpayer-subsidized healthcare. Congress gets the AAA, platinum, concierge-level government plan. Meanwhile, millions of Americans are told to try their luck with essential oils or YouTube acupuncture tutorials. Honestly, it felt more like performance art than policy: 'Sorry about your grandma getting kicked out of her assisted living facility. Please enjoy this scenic view of her future! LOL!' We're not asking you to defeat death, senator. Death is both inevitable and bipartisan. But there is a broad chasm between dying peacefully at 85 and dying in your 40's because your Medicaid plan disappeared and your GoFundMe didn't meet its goal. Fundamentally, governing is about priorities. A budget is a moral document. When a lawmaker tells you 'we're all going to die' in response to a policy choice, they're telling you 'I've made peace with your suffering as collateral damage.' And if a U.S. Senator can stand in a cemetery and joke about it, you have to wonder — who do our federal legislators think those graves are for? This isn't just about one comment or one bill. It's about a mindset that treats healthcare as a luxury rather than a right. If death is inevitable, then access to healthcare you can afford is what helps determine how long you have, how comfortably you live, and whether you get to watch your kids grow up. Healthcare isn't about escaping death. It's about dignity and quality of life while we are here. Ernst got one thing right: death will come for us all. But leadership, real leadership, is about helping people live as long and as well as they can before that day comes. You want to make jokes, Senator? Fine. But if your punchline is 'You're all going to die anyway,' don't be surprised when your constituents realize the joke's on them.
