Even though some of the vignettes and characters are perhaps not as well formed as others (there’s a 17 member cast), the themes within are clear. Even before the play starts, when you walk into the theater, you see a couple getting ready for bed in a room on the top floor of the set. You feel like you’re interrupting an intimate scene. Likewise, the characters don’t stop moving on with their lives during the intermission.

In fact, there are few if any breaks in the action. There is just the one set, but because it’s split into at least six separate spaces, the vignettes flow in and out of each other. As one is ending, another on the other end of the stage is ready to pick up again. Some, as you’d expect, overlap with each other—you know, like when you run into someone you know at a random bus stop somewhere.

With the L audible outside the theater just a bit west on Randolph, the play’s constant motion fits the urban paradigm that Hopper painted, but more, it fits the paradigm we’re all living.

Ok, so we’re a good half decade past Hopper’s time. But isn’t there always some kind of particularly urban drama happening, right now, even as you read this? The point isn’t that your neighbor worries over his taxes, that your boss worries about his daughter, or that your girlfriend is suddenly hard to reach. The point is that it’s all happening on top of each other. In the same building, even. You might live alone, but you’re not fooling anyone.

It’s that urban balance of nosiness and curiosity, apathy and ambivalence, company and congestion that have made Hopper’s paintings relevant to this day. The play, thankfully, does not overreach or take too many liberties with Hopper’s messages—it doesn’t have to.

You have to imagine that if Hopper ever saw it he’d tip his hat.

The (Edward) Hopper Project runs until February 21.