EVANSTON SALT COSTS CLIMBING

by WILL ARBERY, directed by MICAH FIGUEROA*

CHICAGO PREMIERE

May 15 - June 14, 2025

Winters keep getting worse in Evanston, IL, where salt truck drivers Peter and Basil battle the ice and snow and pass the time with jokes and stories. But what’s with this creeping sense of dread? Is it because their boss Maiworm has noble visions of new green technology that would make their jobs obsolete? Or is there a more terrifying warning calling out from under these roads? At least they have each other, right?

 

PRESS

“This tiny play about love and loss and betrayal in a dying Middle America is something everyone should see and then talk about.”
— Variety
“Arbery is one of the theater’s greatest listeners, able to hear and reproduce the subtle and deeply specific ways individuals reveal themselves and their relationships to others with language”
— The New York Times Magazine
“Surreal touches lend mystery to the mundane in this teasingly existential comedy-drama.”
— TheaterMania

PRODUCTION TEAM

*denotes First Floor Theater company member

  • Will Arbery is a playwright and screenwriter from Texas. Within television, Willmost recently wrote on the fourth season of Succession for which he won the WGA Award for Episodic Drama. He has feature projects in development with filmmakers including Romain Gavras and Derek Cianfrance. As a playwright, he is best known for Heroes of the Fourth Turning, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama in 2020, and won the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play, the Obie Award for Playwriting, the John Gassner Award, and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play. Arbery also won the Whiting Award for Drama in 2020. He had two acclaimed theatrical productions in 2022 – Evanston Salt Costs Climbing (The New Group) and Corsicana (Playwrights Horizons). Current commissions include: The Met Opera, Manhattan Theater Club, and Jeffrey Seller Associates.Texas Monthly flagged him as one of the most influential cultural figures of the past 50 years out of Texas and The New Yorker has called him the playwright of the moment; and he has recently been profiled by The New York Times Magazine and the LA Times. 

 

  • Micah Figueroa (He/Him) is a Chicago based Director, Actor, Choreographer, Teaching Artist, and First Floor Theatre Company Member. His most recent directing credit include In His Hands at First Floor Theater, Associate Directed A Year With Frog and Toad at Chicago Children's Theatre, Adapted and Directed The Distance for The Actor’s Gymnasium Spring Youth Circus, Directed the zoom recording of Makasha Copeland’s Fabuloso! at Sideshow Theatre Company, Peter and the Wolf by Rachel Copel at Odradek Theatre, and Asst. Directed of Act(s) of God by Kareem Bandealy at Lookingglass Theatre. He has been a combination of Fight, Intimacy, Movement, and/or Circus Director variously at First Floor (Mike Pence Sex Dream, Plano, Botticelli in the Fire), Remy Bumppo, Writer’s, Actor’s Gymnasium, TimeLine, Steep, Haven, Northwestern University, UIC, Texas Christian University, and Northbrook Theatres as well as Dallas Theatre Center, and Shakespeare Dallas among others. Micah holds a degree in Theatre Studies (Directing and Playwriting) from Southern Methodist University and attended the British American Drama Academy in London, England.