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

Back home. Nasty intestinal distress from some African pathogen, but more or less safe and sound. And if you’ve read this far you’re even more of a glutton for punishment than I am. (I should point out that writing a blog was Steppenwolf’s idea, not mine, so please wait until AFTER my play to cancel your subscriptions.)

In May we begin rehearsal for “The Unmentionables”, the play which motivated my undertaking this trip. And as I anticipate the start of that process I’d of course like to believe that I didn’t go all the way there and back for nothing. It’s all still a bit of a blurry fever dream and yet as I’ve spoken to friends in the last twenty-four hours I feel myself rapidly trying to anecdotalize the experience, to fashion amusing little vignettes that I can share with people - the verbal equivalent of snapshots - but the fact is that the experience truly unnerved and disoriented me, and that feels difficult to share. I don’t want that to be the story of my trip.

A few days ago, standing on the ramparts at Cape Coast castle, as I held my digital camera in place of my ancestors’ whip, and looked down on the locals below, and the lives that they lead, so seemingly alien to my own, I had a horrible feeling come over me. The feeling was contempt. And momentarily, I felt better, as I stood there - afraid thousands of miles from the life I know - feeling this contempt for people because they happen to use the beach as a toilet. How disgusting, I thought, and I felt better, safer, because the contempt allowed me to cling more tightly to my own narrow life as I condemned theirs. Part of what “The Unmentionables” is about is how we behave in a crisis, and why. There are some people, and we all know them, who you’d love to have around in a crisis; self-assured people, the people who always seem to know exactly what to do. But I’m not one of those people. I’m an actor, so I like to give the impression that I am, but internally I churn with self-doubt. I secretly curse and vilify the people who have caused me distress, who have robbed me of control. And luckily the worst I encountered on my trip was temporary confusion and the occasional sneers of the locals. Thank god nothing truly dreadful happened. Because if it had, I don’t like to imagine the kind of person I’d become or what I’d be capable of. Actually, I have imagined it, and the result was the writing of “The Unmentionables”. I’m interested in what kind of people we become when panic (especially the panic of a political and cultural crisis) arises. In recent years I feel like I’ve seen some displays of the worst that humans can do to each other. Okay, I know, I know… we go to the theater for a good time, not to flagellate ourselves. But I happen to be a pessimist. It’s my nature. I focus on what is UN-heroic and IG-noble in myself and am naturally suspicious of optimists and those who talk about the great things that we Americans are capable of. I don’t feel like I’ve earned the right to be an optimist - it’s a luxury I can’t afford. Pessimism doesn’t mean defeatism. It just means looking realistically at what we DO, instead of what we like to SAY we do. And the nice part is, we pessimists are rarely disappointed. Sometimes we’re even pleasantly surprised.

Thanks for reading. See you at the play.

It’s my final day here. I made it back to Benin in one piece which, given the high-speed, foul smelling bush taxi ride that got me here, coupled with the customs officer at the Togolaise border bribing me for admittance to Benin… (”What do you have for me?” is how they put it, and I got through for about two dollars) plus having to pay the driver extra to stop the fistfight he was in with another driver; etc… well, it was a rough return.

Of course, who am I to complain, really, after spending the previous day touring the forts where slaves departed, in chains, for the West? It’s a little bit, uhh… unpersuasive for me to go on about the difficulty of MY travels, I guess. Visiting the forts of Cape Coast and Elmina is surreal. Not unlike my expierience at a concentration camp outside Prague last May (do I know how to have fun on vacation, or what?) I find myself having a complicated response. First to the fact that, at least during my visit, the white visitors seem to outnumber the black. What have we all come to see? And also to the strange behaviour of pulling out my camera to take pictures of the fantastically decrepit colonial architecture - in the face of overwhelming historical significance my response is still that of the prancing aesthete. While there you are led through the structures in a guided tour that culminates, dramatically, with your passage through the “door of no return” through which slaves boarded European ships. But on the other side, when you do pass through, impoverished locals are waiting to sell you hand-made trinkets, and below the walls, kids and fishermen use the area as a free public toilet. (I watched as one young man dropped his pants and unloaded onto the rocks.) The whiplash of sensations is too fast; trying at once to be at one with the tragedy of history and not to recoil at the smell.

Look, I know what a shitty person I sound like by even raising these questions. But that, to me, IS the nagging question: I can’t figure out how NOT to be myself at these moments. Like the moment while traveling back to Accra when a man offered to sell us what they call a “grasscutter” (a two-foot long BUSH RAT, fresh or, if you prefer, smoked) for my dinner. Now of course, I have friends who would, with great sophistication, place their fingertips together and say to me “Well, have you ever TRIED bush rat?” And it must be lovely to have that degree of openness to experience; to not cling to the same dreary particulars of your life when the opportunity for change arises. There are all sorts of platitudes that would apply and you know, god help me, maybe bush rat is absolutlely delicious. I feel fairly certain, though, that I will not be finding out. (Although I did try the local speciality known as kenkey - congealed fermented corn meal and very nearly threw up.) So what the hell is my problem? Is it fear? Sure. I’d accept that. Is it insufficient acceptance for the other? Yes, guilty of that as well, and I wish I wasn’t like this sometimes, but I’m now forty-five years old and the signs don’t seem to point in the direction of my changing.

So. Tonight, back on a plane. In-flight movies. Headphones. Back to the life I know. No bush rat on the menu. And by tomorrow back in my own little bed. Does the pleasure I will take in my comfortable routine make me smug? Am I limited? Yes, I think I am, and closed-off to experience. I wasn’t redeemed by my experience. I haven’t been transformed. And as a STORY, that is deeply unsatisfying. We like stories to conclude with the rebirth of the protagonist (It’s a Wonderful Life!). But what do you do when you are the protagonist of your own story and you can’t seem to bring yourself to a satisfying conclusion? What if, at the end of Dickens‘ “A Christmas Carol” Scrooge said, “Ahhh screw it, I don’t WANT to change”? Would you take your kids to see it? I don’t know. All I know is I’m ready to go home.

I had the pleasure of conducting The Well-Appointed Room post-show conversation last Sunday. A focus of our conversation was the idea of “story.” We noted the way in which the play foregrounds the telling of stories. In the first half of the play, “Nostalgia,” the central character is a playwright, the creator of stories. He is, as well, a person who maintains a personal journal in which he writes the “story” of his life. In the second half of the play, “Prolepsis,” the central character acts as a narrator: he tells the story of his life directly to the audience. Within “Prolepsis,” two characters arrive to tell their life stories.

By foregrounding the act of storytelling, Richard Greenberg is drawing our attention to the “stories” we tell ourselves – our personal stories (in the form of journals and personal narratives); our cultural stories (in the form of plays); and, given the centrality of September the 11th, 2001 to the play, the story of our nation (our history). By interweaving these various strands of storytelling, and by bringing the storytellers into collision with one another, Richard is not only foregrounding story – he is problematizing storytelling. Which story, which stories are the truth? Which storytellers are reliable? Which form of the story is the most convincing?

We acknowledge, in our conversation, that The Well-Appointed Room, by presenting this dense network of stories (by, itself, offering itself up as a single play, but told as two separate stories), provides an interpretive challenge.

A woman in the audience, taking part in the post-show conversation, related that she is a frequent theater-goer. In addition to The Well-Appointed Room, she had recently seen two other new plays at other Chicago theaters: Caryl Churchill’s A Number at the Next Theatre, and Craig Wright’s Grace at Northlight Theatre. All three of these productions have received very good reviews (and having seen all three of the productions, I can happily endorse their quality). This woman was honest to say that all three of the plays in question were challenging. Just at the level of “what happened?,” the plays required interpretive effort. She was clearly a sophisticated theater-goer but she evinced a kind of wistfulness for a time when one could receive a story “with a beginning, a middle, and an end.” It felt less like a complaint, a corrective, than an acknowledgement that telling the contemporary story is necessarily complex (and, perhaps, less comforting).

I was grateful for her observation – I think it’s dead-on. As Richard Greenberg is proposing in The Well-Appointed Room, our narratives – of ourselves, of our world, and through our art – have been disrupted. It’s harder to tell who’s “right,” it’s harder to believe what we’re told, it’s harder to discern “the truth.” If we, as a theater, are to take seriously our role as a site for stories and storytelling, we will necessarily participate in the complexity of our collective narrative.

One of the things that emerged for me, in this conversation, was the uniqueness of live theater to both tell a story and to provide an interpretive community for story. At the theater, we can hang around afterwards and talk about what we just saw. You can talk with some of the folks who picked the plays, or acted in the plays, or work in the artistic department that makes the decision about how the plays are chosen and produced. In other words, you have direct access to the point of view from which the story issues.

This is why we have increased the opportunity for post-show conversation from two times a week to, next season, eight times a week (after every show). We are modest enough to know that we, at Steppenwolf, cannot make our collective story easier – a big part of our commitment, as a theater, is to the inventiveness of new artists. We are committed to relating the stories of how we live now, in the language of our most innovative artists.

What we can do is offer you an interpretive community. We can invite you to talk about what you have seen, to construct meaning with the input from the artists and staff responsible for the work. It’s been a great pleasure to engage in conversation with you. As an audience, you are so smart, so adventuresome, and so candid – it’s enormously fortifying to listen to you, in response to the work. I invite all of you to participate in the conversation. Stay for the post-show conversation, respond on the blog, send me an email. Take advantage of what Steppenwolf so happily offers to you – our best effort at starting a conversation about the way we live now and a great eagerness to entertain your engagement.

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.

So, things go from bad to.. a different kind of bad.

Accra is huge and steaming hot and pretty overwhelming, the most overwhelming part being that, by virtue of it being a big city and by virtue of my sticking out like the sorest of thumbs, I have been subjected to a sort of relentless hustle today. (I should mention that I did leave the grotesque Novotel after one fabulous night; it felt a little like eating an entire cheescake in front of a starving child or something - the contrast between inside and outside was just a little too surreal.) Every street I walk down I meet a new “friend” such as the good friend I just met outside this filthy internet cafe who approached me with all sorts of laudatory comments for my country, how much he loved it, and so forth. I asked, “what country do you think I’m from?” “England?”, he asked. I corrected him and he assured me that his compliments applied equally to the US. In short order it became clear that there was a certain package that I, as his new friend, could carry to America for him…

And that’s about the tenth such encounter I’ve had today. The saddest of all… well, sad for what it says about me, actually, was the young man (and it’s always a young man) named Johnson whom I met yesterday. He trailed me for blocks and blocks, telling me about his gospel singing (Ghana is CRAZY with Christianity) and how he wants to coninue his course of study in… two guesses. Well, of course, in each of these encounters I could just be a hardened, jaded New Yorker by way of Chicago, dulled to the potential beauty of a rare human encounter. Could be. But if so, why did I know so well where it was going? As I turned to the bio-dome, aka the Novotel, he took my hand and requested my email address to help him obtain his US Visa. What would you do? How many different internet scams arise from this part of the world. So, and believe me, I feel like shit about this, completely, but… well, I made up a fake email address. Maybe I just avoided a scam. Maybe. Or the other possibility is that I just deliberately fucked over a poor young man in Africa who was simply looking for a way out. And of course, I’m certain that’s exactly what I did. And as a PS, I ran into him again today and told me how much he looked forward to corresponding.

Tomorrow I’m paying an African man about $150 USD to take me on a private tour of some of the forts and castles from which my ancestors undoubtedly bought and sold some of his ancestors. Feel free to take note of the irony.