Richard Cotovsky and Gracie Wallace Photo by Chris Popio

Trap Door Theatre, a company that has, for a third of a century, specialized in presenting unusual foreign stories in an avant-garde style in its tiny Wicker Park space, is opening its 33rd season with Belarusian playwright Andrei Kureichik's adaptation of Márquez's story, translated by John Freedman, called The Man Who Fell with the Rain. It's a needed title change, for despite specific references to them throughout the play, the wings here are anything but "enormous." We need to use our imaginations, aided by Oskar Westbridge's clever sound design, even to see them as wings at all.

Directed by Kay Martinovich, this version, like the original story, focuses far more on the reactions of the all-too-human townspeople who discover something they cannot comprehend, only to subject the man, played here by long time Chicago theatre figure Richard Cotovsky, as humans too often do, to treatment that ranges from veneration to ridicule and even threats of violence. The man who first sees him, called Pelayo by Márquez but simply Husband here and played by Dan Cobbler, at first comes after the odd intruder with a club, and his Wife, played by Laura Nelson, muses several times that he probably should have beaten the man to death. It's a sign of ... something ... that her line often comes across as comic. (A group of masked villagers also pummel the supposed angel with rocks; the violence is clearly part of being human.)

The absurd, satirical play invites us into a world dominated by superstition. (In a Trap Door pre-show staple , Martinovich has several villagers onstage reading stories from newspapers about inexplicable occurrences.) This is a town in which crabs overrun the streets and yards, girls randomly turn into spiders for disobeying parents, and no one really questions the presence of what one know-it-all neighbor (Emily Lotspeich) confidently declares to be an angel–one she claims must be a refugee from a heavenly insurrection. Instead, Husband and Wife put the poor man on display, charging an ever-increasing line of pilgrims $5 just to see him. Some come to satisfy their curiosity, others to see if the angel can cure them of their ailments, as word has spread that Husband and Wife's new baby, desperately ill before his arrival, has had a miraculous recovery.

Keith Surney plays a local priest, pompous enough to need to stand on a platform to deliver speeches but uncomfortable enough in his vocation to need to get confirmation from "the Pope himself" before he will take a stand. His repeated letters to Rome, routed through local parishes and districts, are both a plot device and a means of satirizing religion: they are replied to with such trivial queries as whether the angel has a navel and if he can fit on the head of a pin (which the neighbors actually try to find out).

Husband and Wife grow richer and therefore more prominent in the town–an especially timely notion in today's America–but eventually the angel becomes merely a part of the town's background, no longer a curiosity like the spider woman (Gracie Wallace's physical performance of which is a highlight here), who is now traveling with a circus. But, as the years go on and the angel fades deeper into obscurity, his ragged wings grow new feathers and give him hope that, finally, he can fly away.

Márquez subtitled the story "A Tale for Children," perhaps as an ironic counterpoint to the inhumanity of the adults in the village; maybe, in a world in which those who are misunderstood are so mistreated, it is up to the children to change adult minds. But that hope is quite possible misplaced. Even its small comfort is shut down by the selfish actions of the child of the main couple, now grown to school age, who has learned from his parents that the only value the angel has is what he can do for him: in this case, provide feathers to woo new girlfriends. As Rodgers and Hammerstein famously wrote in the musical South Pacific, such human indifference to suffering has to be "carefully taught."

I love Márquez's short story. Indeed, it was once a favorite of my English classes, eliciting significant discussion of both its fantastic elements and its human ones. This version, however, is not as good. Kureichik's script is not without its charms, nor without its humor, but ultimately, this story may not support a full stage version. This one, which only lasts eighty minutes, feels way too long. Many of its beats just end up feeling repetitive. Martinovich and the Trap Door cast have a lot of fun with it, but it does not really provide them with enough to do. Even Cotovsky, stuck in a chicken coop for most of the show in a mostly silent role, can only liven things up via occasionally sharp and comic facial expressions. Márquez understood that: his story is an ultra short four pages long, a witty, fast-paced, and very critical examination of the worst instincts of humanity. This valiant effort to put the story on a stage only underscores how, sometimes, the written word should just stay on the page.

The Man Who Fell with the Rain runs through September 26, 2026, at Trap Door Theatre, 1655 W Cortland St, Chicago IL. For tickets and information, please visit trapdoortheatre.comwebsite or call 773-384-0494.