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

While Bruce Norris is braving the wilds of Africa, a new Steppenwolf playwright has landed here in Chicago. His name is John Kolvenbach, author of Love Song, which opens on April 9th. We began rehearsals for this world premiere yesterday, and we’ve asked John to give us a little insight into his own terra incognita.

Writing a play involves a kind of willed insanity. You talk to yourself. You hear voices. You hope to remove yourself from the everyday, inhabit a world of your making. You are passionate about things that don’t exist, you would stake your life on the middle name of a made-up friend.

And you’re a bore to the actual people you’re with. You’re terribly tedious. You slip into daydream mid-conversation, you’re distracted and impatient, you make impassioned pronouncements about fictional friends. You find necessary everyday concerns beneath you. You cease to bathe.

You become, when you are really working well, someone who seems to require a long hospitalization. And this is the goal. Any less, and you feel you’ve cheated, feel you’ve done the work from the outside, from a perch of dispassion. You hope with all your being that you’ve gone a little nuts with it.

So, when you’re asked to make a rational judgment about your play, you are unable. You’re unqualified. Does it make sense? Who knows. Might an audience enjoy it? You have no idea.

So when you arrive, as I did yesterday, at the first day of rehearsal, there is some fear. There is a story by Ray Bradbury that takes place on Mars, in a Martian insane asylum. If you’re on Mars and crazy, apparently you are able to create visual hallucinations that other people can see. If you imagine that a green dog follows you everywhere, other people can see the dog. So, what you hope, is that other people can see your green dog. I am here to report, happily, that Molly and Fran and Ian and Mariann, and Austin are all nuts. They saw my green dog. They named him. They scratched him behind the ears.

This entry was posted by John Kolvenbach on Tuesday, March 7th, 2006 at 9:38 am and is filed under Love Song. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.