Steppenwolf Theatre Company Blog – Chicago Theater, World-Class Ensemble

An excerpt from Hello Beautiful on Chicago Public Radio – February 12, 2006 Host Edward Lifson with Next Theatre Artistic Director, Jason Loewith, TimeLine Theatre Artistic Director, PJ Powers, and Chicago Sun-Times Theatre and Dance Critic, Hedy Weiss

JL: …I think that we artists are keenly aware of the unique phenomenon that theatre provides of getting a group of people into a room live together… the excitement of that, the potentiality of that, the thrill of getting people in a room… you can have a conversation about stuff. People love, certainly in my theatre, the post-show discussions following our Sunday matinee. It enfranchises them. It gives them an opportunity to have their voices heard, which I think is why we feel compelled to put on plays that discuss difficult issues.

EL: But this does seem to be a growing trend, these after-performance discussions…

PP: It is. It’s something that I know Jason is doing a lot more of at Next. It’s something that we’ve increased a lot this year at TimeLine. Other theatres are doing it. And a new trend that a lot of theatres have started in the past couple months – we just launched ours two weeks ago – is a blog on our website… hoping to get people after they’ve seen the show to share their thoughts about it.

EL: So people can write in on the internet and say what they’re thinking?

PP: Right. And it’s also a place where we can provide resources – if you want to read more, here’s some links to things.

EL: Hedy Weiss, what do you think of this trend?

HW: I have to say that I think if a piece of theatre works, the last thing I want to do is stay after the performance and hear ordinary people talk. I was thinking, the one play that we didn’t mention today which I think is superb at Victory Gardens is I Have Before Me a Remarkable Document Given to Me by a Young Lady From Rwanda. And the last thing I would want to do is sit there and have a conversation about what went on in Rwanda. I know from the very emotional interaction of these two characters – and this is not at all a documentary play – I know what the result of that was. And I want to walk away from the theatre and stay in that mood. I don’t want chitchat.

You can listen to the entire program here.

After attending the closing matinee of Next Theatre’s excellent production of A Number yesterday I stayed for the post-show discussion. Jason Loewith led the conversation which was intelligent and illuminating. Far from chitchat, it was an investigation into the themes of a challenging play.

Next season, Steppenwolf has committed to offering post-show discussions after every performance in the subscription series. This commitment has come out of the positive response and sense of engagement expressed by our audiences.

How do you feel about post-show discussions? Are you someone who wants to stay and take advantage of the “public square” dynamic to discuss the play? Do you want to leave and discuss it with the person you attended the theatre with? Does it depend on the production?

The thing I most enjoy about this particular form of engagement is not only the opportunity of artists and artistic staff to have a conversation with audience members, but also, for our audience members to have a conversation with each other.

Some parts you can’t make up. So it turns out that, little did I know, I have been in Benin in the middle of the International Beninese Theatre Festival (!!??!!); or FITHEB. I saw a poster one day and no one at the hotel knew anything about it and finally after asking around a woman at a bookstore directed me to the CCF (Centre Cuturel Francais) where I found out that last night’s performance, and this is possibly TOO weird, was RICHARD III, that’s right (Maintenant c’est l’hiver du nos discontent…. etc.), performed in French with an entirely West African cast (and one hambone of a white Swiss guy), outdoors, in modern-dress with a kind of “gangster” theme, accompanied by a live musician playing traditional instruments. I managed, basically through sign language, to get a ticket. Remarkable, in a way - and let’s not get TOO misty here - to see how a play travels through huge distances of space and time. I can’t say it was the absolute best theatre I have ever seen, but absolutely the most interesting theatre story. And now I can write off my trip on next year’s taxes.

This morning I took a bush taxi into Lome, Togo, and experienced a tiny bit of a hassle at the border. Luckily, two of my cabmates were from Ghana (where they speak English!!) and they helped me through the whole thing. I can’t see much to make me stick around in Togo, so tomorrow I’ll press on to Ghana. This whole experience continues to be a lesson for me in how not to be a complete coward. As the border guard was going through my luggage I felt the urge to panic (my default move in many unfamiliar situations) and checked it. Must remember that back home.

I’m finding it hard to leave my little room at the hotel. Each day is sort of an ordeal in one way or another.

Yesterday, after several hours spent arguing (or rather, being yelled at) by the woman at the bank window who insisted that she would not cash my traveler’s check because I had written the date 02/17/06 instead of 17/02/06 and after making her very angry by saying in my fractured French, “Mais, Madame, n’est existe pas un mois (month) le dix-septieme!” (seventeenth), I finally took a scooter over to the Grande Marche again to get a “bush taxi” to Porto Novo, the capital. A bush taxi, in this case, means a broken-down, rattling Peugeot 404, whose driver, after much shouting and grabbing at me, insisted that I get in and pay him 4000 CFA (approx. 9 dollars) for the 45-minute ride. I discovered on the return that this was roughly ten times the going rate, but whatever.

Porto Novo is a much smaller town than Cotonou, situated on the farther shore of Lac Nokoue, and fringed by small homes that stand on stilts above the surface of the lagoon. The town still bears the traces of its colonial past - the buildings are older, crumbling in a more picturesque way as opposed to the molded-concrete featurelessness of Cotonou. When you arrive by taxi, the drivers again manhandle you and vie for who will take you to your local destination. I took a zemi to the Musee Ethnographique (you can translate) like the good little student I am. The museum, which was no more than a few rooms of dusty cases of artifacts, was explained to me by a very nice man who spoke the first English I’ve heard in many days. The cases had masks, costumes, fetish items. I explained to him that I worked in theatre in the US so the masks were particularly interesting to me. He was more interested in whether I had a wife and children. I said something like, “C’est une histoire plus grand”. Ha ha ha. On the way out I was greeted by about 50 schoolchildren in uniforms and I had the sneaking suspicion that what I had been so interested in was really a museum for children. Hmm.

After another tour of a 19th century tribal palace (and a very economically motivated guide) I returned in another crowded fume-spewing taxi to Cotonou.

One of the strangest and most dislocating things here is televison. I sit in my room watching coverage of Dick Cheney’s shotgun story or the rising fortunes of some European company and wonder, is this what the Beninese see on TV? There is, to be fair, a Benin channel. But mostly it is reruns of “the Gilmore Girls” dubbed in French or (seriously) “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” with Arabic subtitiles. The sneaky thought “no wonder people hate us” creeps into your head. Oddest of all was a BBC documentary all about the history of Shaw’s play “Pygmalion” and the musical “My Fair Lady” with various people offering their opinions on the genius of a play in which a poor street vendor is turned into a quasi-duchess. I sat there watching this thinking of the hundreds of “guttersnipes” (Shaw’s word) that I had walked past that afternoon with no Professor Higgins (myself included) to offer them “lots of chocolates for me to eat”. Loverly indeed.

Bruce Norris is the author of this season’s upcoming play The Unmentionables and four other plays produced at Steppenwolf. We asked Bruce to send some postings during his current venture, a trip to Africa taken in conjunction with his work on The Unmentionables. But we should let Bruce explain…

So, the first and most obvious question is, why go?

I had finished the first draft of a new play called “The Unmentionables” sometime in the Spring of 2005, shortly before going into rehearsal for Steppenwolf’s production of my play “The Pain and the Itch”. The new play, which Steppenwolf had commissioned me to write, is set in a fictitious “third-world” country in western equatorial Africa and concerns a disparate group of white Americans whose simplistic notions of themselves are tested when they become more deeply involved with the local population than they had intended. And sitting in my lovely, comfortable, little apartment in Brooklyn, bent over my tiny computer, reading the newspaper every morning and drinking iced tea, I had concluded that it was my perfect right as someone who makes up stories for a living, to create a fictional story which took part in another part of the world, a real part in which I had never set foot and in which very real, which is to say non-fictitious, people, lived. Of course, this is what writers do all the time. But, at a time in which international sensitivities (justified or not) about how we Americans characterize the rest of the world are easily inflamed… Well, you know, I got to thinking.

There is a Danish filmmaker named Lars Von Trier - whose work I have sometimes very much admired - who has written several films which are set in America. Perhaps it is wholly beside the point, but it is worth mentioning that Mr. Von Trier himself has never set foot in America. His position, as I understand, is that he doesn’t need to. These films (Dogville, in particular as well as Dancer in the Dark and, more recently, Manderlay) take place in a “mythical” America, not a real one, and many American critics have gotten themselves twisted up in knots that a foreigner, a European, for god’s sake, is issuing negative proclamations about us from across the Atlantic without the benefit of so much as a layover in the departure lounge at O’Hare. Was he promulgating uninformed clichés about us? Maybe so, but of course this never troubled me one way or the other since his pessimistic vision of us gratified my own morbid sense of humor and love of a knock-down-drag-out fight. Furthermore, I thought, haven’t some of the most trenchant observations about Americans been made by foreign writers? I thought of Nabokov and his giddy/nauseating America in Lolita, not to mention Tocqueville, etc. But of course, those writers had been here. They had managed to avoid cliché, partly because of experience. And here I was, writing a story set in a part of the world to which I had never been, and wasn’t it more than likely that I was reinforcing some stereotypical – not to mention racist – clichés which may have no basis in fact other than those second-hand facts I read in my daily copy of the New York Times? What kind of creepy, ignorant blowhard was I becoming?

So, I bought a plane ticket to Africa. Friends said to me, “I see, so will you re-write the play based on what you learn?” Well, actually no. The play is an act of the imagination, an analogy for something else, besides which, I never intended to write about Africans per se – if I’m going to insult anyone, I’d prefer to insult Americans. Then they said, “So, will you go there to help people and make the world a better place?” God, no. I’m not arrogant enough to think I have anything to offer anyone, or for that matter, that a play ever changed the world. I write my little plays to amuse me, not to improve the world. Finally they said, “So, if you’re not going to rewrite the play, nor are you going to help people, then why the hell are you going?”

Good question.

So then… oh, no. Is the answer… guilt? The guilt that we, as supposedly uber-sensitive, globally-conscious theatre-attending lefties feel? The shame of having unintentionally trodden on some toes in a less-fortunate corner of the world? Is it to expiate me from the sins of American privilege and boorishness? Or simply to indemnify myself against the charge that I have no idea what I’m talking about and therefore might be talking out of a less-than-respectable orifice? Isn’t it possible I’m just taking a trip because I love to travel? Are you insane? I hate to travel. And it’s a sixteen-hour plane trip.

Perhaps at the start of a trip (since you can’t anticipate the point of a journey until it is under way) you can, with modesty, simply hope to find out what it is you don’t know. And besides, it’s not like I’m going to the South Pole with a team of sled dogs. I’m going for a few days to a nice hotel in a part of the world I never expected to visit, and maybe I’ll have a nice time and maybe I won’t. So, we’ll see…

February 14.

Packing. Panicking. Took my malaria pills. Sprayed clothes with mosquito repellent. I leave from JFK at eleven p.m., and by eight o’clock tomorrow night I land in Cotonou, Benin. If all goes well – and I think we all suspect, in fact hope that it won’t – I should at that point be in my bed at the Hotel du Lac, east of downtown Cotonou, sound asleep. Benin, I’ve been told, is a perfectly lovely country, with none of the violent political upheaval of Ivory Coast (to the West) or the craziness of Nigeria (to the East). But perhaps I ought to mention at this point that, in Benin, they speak French. And I don’t speak French. Which could be a problem.

Our production of Lady Madeline opened this past weekend. Lady Madeline is being presented through our Steppenwolf for Young Adults program, performing on weekdays for Chicago-area school students, and for the general public on weekends. Lady Madeline, commissioned by Steppenwolf from Chicago writer Mickle Maher, is based upon the story “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe. The run of this show, overlapping with our Subscription Season run of after the quake, made me think about the nature of adaptation. With after the quake, we see an example of Frank Galati’s approach to the task, with nearly all of the text being taken directly (via translator Jay Rubin) from Haruki Murakami’s writing. Lady Madeline, on the other hand, uses Poe’s work as a jumping off point for an entirely different kind of exploration, with most of what appears on-stage issuing in Mickle’s voice. I imagine most of us have had the experience of reading a book and then seeing a movie or theatrical version of it (or vice-versa) and arguing afterwards with our friends about which we preferred. How much of the way in which we receive an adapted work is dependent upon our knowledge and appreciation of the source material? If you’ve read Poe and/or Murakami and seen Lady Madeline or after the quake, I wonder where did you stand on that question.