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

We have begun rehearsals for Bruce Norris’ play The Unmentionables. Following his series of postings on his journey in Africa, Guilt Trip, we’ve asked him to continue sharing some thoughts during the process.

June 4

Putting a new play together often becomes a form of crisis management, and when things go well you always have to remind yourself not to get too cocky since the next big tumble is just waiting to happen.

I don’t often write plays with particular actors in mind. Usually I’m composing something out of voices that arrive from some strange region of my brain, but in some cases - and this is particularly true with The Unmentionables - I hear the sounds of certain actors’ speech. In this case, since the play was being written as a commission for Steppenwolf, and since I have had the luxury of working with a number of those actors over the last few years (some for much longer), it is those particular voices that rattled around in my head. Well… and I don’t want to make too much of it, but as we’ve grown closer to the start of rehearsals (today is day 3) we began experiencing some… attrition… of the Steppenwolf ensemble members who had originally chosen to participate. These choices were made by the actors for wholly understandable reasons (health, family, financial), so one can’t hold it against them, exactly, but nine days before we began we lost another actor from the company after already having lost one some months ago, and then yesterday, the second day of rehearsal, we lost another. We now have a superb replacement, (Rick Snyder) but it takes a bit of confidence (which I lack) to try to figure out just how adaptable a play is or whether its success was dependent on the actors available at a moment in time. So this week, I’ve been in a bit of a panic.

That being said, - and today will be our first day with the new, replaced cast, I feel slightly optimistic. And for me, a pessimist by nature, that is saying something. The actors got up on their feet yesterday after several days of reading and discussion (and re-casting) and the play, thus far, seems to be coming, gradually, to life.

Questions that you, as the writer, have lingering in your head about a script can often be answered by submitting the play to the test of staging and yesterday - our very first attempt - questions started to be answered. Today we will go back to the table with Rick to bring him up to speed. Although he and I have never worked together, the ooohs and aaahs that issued from the cast when it was announced that he was joining us are highly reassuring. So, his new voice will be incorporated along with all of the other new voices (we have a cast member from Nigeria who speaks French and is a big help with pronunciations and accents) and the play, having suffered a couple of blows, will hopefully stagger back to its feet for Round 2.

More to follow.

This entry was posted by Bruce Norris on Thursday, June 8th, 2006 at 9:37 am and is filed under The Unmentionables. 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.