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

This past Tuesday evening after work, I had the pleasure of meeting Graeme Maley, Artistic Director of the Liverpool New Writer’s Theatre. Graeme was seeing our production of Love Song and I met him for a drink beforehand. Graeme’s theatre shares Steppenwolf’s commitment to supporting the work of playwrights and the development of new work. Graeme was visiting Chicago on his way to Appleton, Wisconsin to do research for a play he is developing with playwright Ronan O’Donnell about the life and art of Harry Houdini. The play will be performed in Liverpool in 2008, the year that Liverpool has been chosen to be the European Capital of Culture.

After a lively discussion with Graeme, I went to meet novelist Cormac McCarthy at the corner of Halsted and North Avenue to escort him to the first rehearsal of his play, The Sunset Limited. We entered the rehearsal hall and met the actors, Austin Pendleton and Freeman Coffey, the director Sheldon Patinkin, the stage manager and understudies. After general introductions and a welcome to the theatre, I left them to the business of the first table reading of the play.

I crossed the street from the rehearsal hall to the theatre and proceeded to the Upstairs Theatre where the production of Don Delillo’s play, Love-Lies-Bleeding was in technical rehearsals. Onstage were the actors - Martha Lavey, John Heard, Penelope Walker, Louis Cancelmi, and Larry Kucharik. The creative team was working on the transitions between scenes and finessing the timing of lights and sound with the movement of the actors. I watched for about 45 minutes as director Amy Morton and the designers worked with tremendous sensitivity to get the cues just right. I slipped out of the dark theatre and down the elevator to the Downstairs Theatre lobby. When the elevator doors opened the lobby was abuzz with pre-show activity as the audience moved into the theatre to watch the performance of Love Song.

As I stepped out into the spring evening, I was struck by the fact that I had just visited three productions of plays at three stages of development – beginning, middle, and end. The creative process was churning throughout the buildings of Steppenwolf. I recalled my conversation with Graeme and realized that the first step with all three of these new plays, was the commitment to new play development.

Best of luck, Graeme!

In post-show conversations, our audiences for Love Song have eagerly embraced the idea of love serving as a force interdependent with the power of the imagination.

Most of us likely think about love in some form almost everyday; whether about those we love or used to, those we want to love us, or even love in a more abstract way – be it spiritual, sexual, or relating to humankind.

But how often do we think about imagination?

At the theater, as a group of artists, we like to think of ourselves as particularly engaged with imagination. We read a play and imagine what it may be like on stage. Or we imagine how a particular sort of person might behave when faced in a particular situation and try to enact what we imagine in a truthful and compelling way. Or we imagine what the apartment of these people might look like and imagine a way to create that environment on a proscenium stage.

But often we are less aware of our daily acts of imagination. We imagine what the cheeseburger will taste like before we order it. We imagine what we will look like in the blue shirt before we put it on.

One way in which Love Song works on me is as a reminder of the importance of a more conscious exercise of imagination. If we can imagine a cigarette that gives us pleasure without ill-health effects, can’t we also imagine a world without hunger or violence, or with equality and justice and yes, love. And isn’t imagining it the first necessary step to making it possible?

Tomorrow: the staff run-through. (I’m writing this entry on Wednesday evening, 19 April) The staff run-through is the moment when the rehearsal process goes public. During the first three weeks or so of the rehearsal, the only people in the room are the cast, the director and his or her assistant, and stage management. On the Thursday before tech – the move from the rehearsal room and into the theater – the staff and designers attend a run-through of the show. It’s always a precarious-feeling moment for the cast – very exposing. A show is, variously, well-on-its-way to very much in-process. And as an actor in the show, it’s never entirely clear where on that continuum your show sits. The staff run-through becomes a kind of barometer of that progress.

The purpose of the staff run-through is to give, first, the designers, a chance to see the show in space and time. As to space: the set designer is watching the actors move through the space – observing transitions, calculating the traffic of the stage against the space s/he has created. The costume crew is plotting the costume changes (how much time do we have for each change; where are the actors during each change?). The lighting and sound designers and their technicians are watching both the geography of the stage movement and its timing. And the properties crew (part of the set design team), is tracking the use of furniture, hand props and consumables – food, drink, and whatever props (newspapers, envelopes, items that get broken) will need replacement or maintenance. None of this information should be coming as a terrible surprise to the designers or production crew – they have been receiving daily rehearsal reports from stage management that tracks all of these concerns – but it is the staff run-through that makes those notes visible and vivid.

For the theater’s non-production staff – artistic, marketing, and development – the staff run-through provides the feeling-tone of the play (which they have, thus far, received as a written text and in a single previous read-through of the play). They see the style of the play, the pitch of the performances, the abstraction of a play text and a roster of actors becomes a living, feeling reality. The performance of the play that they receive in this early run-through provides the information they need to talk about the show to their various constituencies – box office, press, patrons. The artistic staff, and whatever ensemble members are in town, watch the run-through and the following week and a half of previews in order to respond to the director – giving him/her notes in an effort to clarify and refine the production.

After the staff run-through, the actors leave the room (much relieved to have gotten through it) and the director sits down with the designers and the production staff to discuss what they learned and prepare themselves for tech. This meeting is orchestrated by our production manager (Al Franklin) who goes through questions from each department (sets, lights, costumes, sound) to understand their issues and concerns. The director answers their questions, clarifying intent, resolving questions. Again, these resolutions are abstract – it is in tech, when the show moves to the actual theater space, when the production is given body.

The passage from the rehearsal room to tech, through previews and on to opening night is an amazing transformation that involves scores of people, tremendous concentration, and hours of time. It’s ridiculously intensive in terms of the use of human resources. And it’s what makes the theater such a blast and so valuable a human endeavor. There’s just no way that the work of creating a production can be accomplished in the abstract, in virtual space or time. A lot of people have to spend hours together in a closed room, a darkened theater, working over and over the execution of tasks that will produce… magic! Be it the magic of human emotion, the magic of a 20-second costume change, the magic of a scene change that transforms one environment into another, the magic of rain on stage, the lighting that creates the passage of time, the magic of an emotional shift orchestrated through sound.

The most accurate metaphor is birth – a lot of labor and then… (if we’re lucky) a miracle: a beautiful being with a life of its own. The staff run-through begins that labor process – we go public with the pregnancy we have been nurturing in the privacy of our rehearsal room home. To give our play to the world.

On Saturday, April 8th, Steppenwolf celebrated its ensemble of 35 actors, directors, playwrights, and adaptors of text with the annual Black Tie Gala. The evening began with a performance of Love Song in the Downstairs Theatre and proceeded into the large tent that had been constructed over the parking lot for cocktails, a delicious dinner by Wolfgang Puck, and dancing to the rocking sounds of Gary Sinise and his Lt. Dan Band.

Before dinner, co-founder Jeff Perry addressed the assembled guests with typical feeling, humor, and wit. Here is what he said:

Like the majestic Statue of Liberty or the warming alcoholic glow of our dear Gaslight, or our never to be forgotten O’Rourke’s, may Steppenwolf continue to exclaim “bring me your self involved, your conspicuously talented, your thespians huddled in packs yearning to confront.”

Let these hallowed halls of courageous and shameless hammery always embrace audience and artists judging them not by the color of their skin or the peculiarities of their childhoods (see Pendleton, Malkovich and Metcalf to name but three), but by the content of their collaborative passion.

Like Leonard Cohen’s ‘birds on a wire or drunks in a midnight choir’ may we – in, please god, politically incorrect ways - try always to be free, of choice, of spirit, of voice.

May Steppenwolf always seek to create a more perfect union of artistic trust, respect and challenge so that ensemble work of the artists, by the artists and for the artists – sorry, the audience - shall not perish from this earth.

Dearest Steppenwolf may your efforts to borrow from dear William Saroyan add not to the sorrow and misery of the world, but help us all smile at the infinite delight and mystery of it.

Last year, Steppenwolf inaugurated a new program, the First Look Repertory of New Work. First Look is a play development process culminating in the presentation of three new plays in rotating repertory in our Garage space.

There are two truly exciting aspects of the program. First Look represents a unique model for the development of new work, emphasizing development of the play through the crucible of workshop and rehearsal for an actual, if small-scale, production. Rather than culminating in a staged reading, or exclusively producing the play and revising as best one can during the production process, First Look provides an environment in which the refining of the script is primary, but the result is what a play must have: performance before an audience. Our hope for these plays, in addition to the presumption they will be better plays at the end of the process than they were at the beginning, is that they will see further production, either at Steppenwolf or at other theaters. Second, we offer access to this unique process to a group of theater-lovers, but not practitioners. This group attends a reading of an early draft of each play, the first rehearsal, open rehearsal days, technical rehearsal, and sees the plays in production. We do not create events for the benefit of this group of people, but instead offer them an opportunity to observe and discuss what we actually do. Last year, the three month process proved invigorating and successful, and we are delighted to announce the program for this summer:

100 Saints You Should Know by Kate Fodor, directed by B.J. Jones. Kate is best known as the author of Hannah and Martin, which received its premiere at TimeLine Theater Company here in Chicago, before an Off-Broadway run. 100 Saints is a deeply moving story about the nature of faith and personal responsibility. A priest leaves his parish under mysterious circumstances and is followed by his cleaning woman, who brings her teen-age daughter in tow.

Spare Change by Mia McCullough, directed by Lisa Portes. This play, commissioned by Steppenwolf, was given a rehearsed reading as part of last year’s First Look Rep. In it, a man runs into a woman in need on the El, setting in motion a chain of events causing him to question the path his life has taken. You may remember Mia as the author of Taking Care, which we presented in our Garage space a couple of years ago.

The Butcher of Baraboo by Marisa Wegrzyn, directed by Dexter Bullard. Marisa’s play, commissioned by Steppenwolf, is a darkly comic look at a family in a small upper-midwestern town. Marisa, a recent graduate of the Washington University - St. Louis, has a bold and fresh voice.