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

After going to the Anne Frank House this morning, I went next to the Rijksmuseum, which was… under renovation. But thankfully, due to the restoration of the main building, the museum is displaying the “crème de la crème” of its permanent collection in one newly furnished wing and I therefore had the unique opportunity of being able to view all the highlights of the Golden Age in one place! It turned out to be a wonderful way to see the work. And what began for me as a somewhat compulsory visit quickly blossomed into a delightful lesson on the design possibilities for ANNE FRANK. Which I was definitely not expecting. It was great that the Anne Frank House was so immediately fresh in my memory for I’m sure it was this immediacy which provided me with a lens through which to view the artwork at the museum – and lent it a tremendous relevance for me today.

The majority of the art is from the 17th century, a Golden Age for the Netherlands when the power and wealth of the Dutch Republic was at its height. In the Eighty Years’ War (1568-1648 – can you imagine being at war for eighty years?) the Dutch expelled their Spanish rulers and established an independent state. While the country grew rich on trade and shipping, art and culture flourished here. From this time, and in the museum today, are such artists as Rembrandt, Vermeer, Frans Hals, Jan Steen.

What impressed me first this afternoon were the PANORAMAS.

Seascsapes, landscapes, and even interiors which I would deem “panoramic.” A frame in which the lens is cast wide and the canvas is broad enough to include a variety of scenes, seemingly disparate but played out simultaneously and therefore finding relationship through juxtaposition. This is how I imagine the staging for ANNE FRANK. We are able to watch several areas, or rooms, at once – each with its own specific and continuing life.

I’m very drawn to this kind of “canvas”, both in art and in the theater. It implies a visual and temporal approach that I’ve explored in various other productions at Steppenwolf, most notably I’d say in Saroyan’s TIME OF YOUR LIFE, where most of the 24 member cast stayed on stage in some fashion throughout the entirety of the evening. My attraction to this came from studying the American muralists of the 1930s and today I found an obvious kinship between the Dutch masters and their distant American cousins. In both cases, there is a generosity which I find so admirable – a sense of inclusion, as the artist seems to welcome people from all stations and walks of life into the frame.

Some of the paintings that stayed with me from today include Willem van de Weld’s battle scenes and seascapes, an outrageous depiction of war in “The Explosion of the Spanish Admirals’ Ship” by C.C. van Wieringen, and the dozens of active figures in “Winter Landscape with Ice Skaters” by Henrick Avercamp. These all express a vision that locates the individual within a group of people, or a society, and that society within an even larger cosmos… and this is something I hope to achieve with ANNE FRANK: the ability to portray Anne, as well as Anne within the group, as well as the group within its historical and cultural context, and if we are very lucky and successful, that history and culture within an even larger view of time and humanity…. But certainly, to keep the lens wide enough to constantly include an ENSEMBLE of characters, and not just the individual.

Next, there were the INTERIORS.

It seems that many new genres burst on the scene during this period in the Netherlands, but the one that impressed me today was the “interior,” which became a typical Dutch genre during the 17th century here.

Think of Vermeer. As great as his painting are, however, it was not Vermeer that caught my attention today in terms of the production but rather a painter named Pieter de Hooch, with whom I was not previously familiar. Vermeer is so much about light that emanates from the outside, through windows, so that the outdoors becomes an active, albeit unseen, presence in the paintings. Of course this is completely contrary to the lighting one would find in the Annex in a production of ANNE FRANK. The windows are closed, concealed. The characters are not lit by exterior sources such as sunlight filtering through an open window, but by the interior sources of candlelight and lamplight.

So today, instead of focusing on Vermeer, I spent a lot of time with de Hooch whose work gives dominance less to light than to space – and, specifically, to rooms. In these painting, we look through windows or corridors into other, distant rooms, such as in his painting called “Interior with Women Beside a Linen Chest.” The point of view is focused and yet we are aware of other spaces, figures, activities. There is depth more than width (as in the panoramas.) This is very much how I imagine the physical space of the production: a central foreground focus, with other partially revealed spaces that recede in various directions and imply additional ongoing life. For instance, while we need to see fully into Anne’s room and the shared common room in the Annex where the bulk of main action takes place, we do not need to see as fully into Peter’s bedroom (or the toilet…) where little primary action takes.

I also loved some of the interiors of Jan Steen who is best known for “his paintings of families in disorderly interiors with all kinds of activities taking place. This is what gave rise to the Dutch phrase ‘a Jan Steen household.’” These seem to vibrate, to move. They have some of the messiness of real life and what I hope to capture with a group of eight people in an enclosed space. Not the claustrophobia or the stasis but, at times, the robustness, the movement, the chaos.

These reminded me of one of the placards today at the Anne Frank exhibit that quotes from Anne’s diary in describing a night when Mr. Van Pels convinced everyone to let him cook a variety of different sausages (this was before they ran out of certain foods and were reduced to a diet of mostly kale…) “He was hired (in father’s business) for his knowledge of spices,” writes Anne, “and yet, to our great delight, it’s his sausage talents that have come in handy now… Mr. Van Daan decided to make bratwurst, sausages and mettwurst.” She goes on to describe the glorious, celebratory mess made in the kitchen on this night.

Then there were the DOLLHOUSES at the Rijksmuseum.

I have never known about this art which apparently played an important role in the lives of the 17th century burghers. But one look today convinced me that these are a great model for how our set might look, as well as the relationship between the viewer and the subject.

These amazingly complete rooms are arranged inside of architectural shells which allow you not only to see the detail of interior life but also the frame in which it is enclosed. They ask the viewer to “look in”, to peek, to peer, to enter. As a viewer today I found myself surprisingly active in my engagement with these “doll’s houses”; I could not sit back, detached, but rather was required to lean forward, participating in an act of highly intentional viewing.

These dollhouses were a popular hobby among the wealthy women in 17th century Amsterdam. They are basically a large cupboard (many as tall as 6-7 feet) which contains a miniature version of the owner’s own world, replicated with extraordinary detail, down to the same materials, objects, even scratches, to be found in the life-size original. The museum explains, “This was not a toy, but a prize exhibit that its owner would show off to visitors. Dolls’ houses were expensive. Petronella Oortman paid the price of a modest canalside house in Amsterdam for hers. For that money she had all the objects made to scale and even ordered some pieces specially from Asia.” Astonishing attention to DETAIL, which is what I loved most about them in reference to ANNE FRANK. I hope we can make little rooms, within an Annex, within a set, within a theater, that are that lovingly constructed and brought to life.

And last but not least, I came today to REMBRANDT.

And it was only halfway through his paintings that I remembered that on Anne’s wall of images in her Annex bedroom were not only the movie stars, the postcards, the advertisements, but also clippings of famous art works and, in particular, a portrait of Rembrandt. Anne must have loved this artist.

Looking at his work today I realized that I want to light the production with this kind of contrast between dark and light – “between fine detail and coarse, unpolished areas.” So that the Annex can be as dark as it needs to be and yet we, as an audience, can focus on particular objects or expressions or gestures that seem to glow, to pop, to transcend the darkness which surrounds. It is a subjective kind of seeing, as if we are being led through the space via a camera’s eye and clarity of focus. This, I believe, is what makes the panorama work in the theater: focus. The wide perspective AND the close-up.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in Rembrandt’s painting THE NIGHTWATCH. In this painting (the first to portray subjects in a group portrait in motion, I learned today), a captain orders a lieutenant to prepare his company to march and we view the men gathering into formation. While there must be a dozen or so figures in the painting, Rembrandt uses LIGHT brilliantly to focus on salient details such as the captain’s hand gesture and the young girl in the background (she is the company mascot.) It’s as if there is another mysterious source of light making these elements glow as if from within. And yet the whole composition appears utterly natural and organic.

I also loved Rembrandt’s “Self Portrait at an Early Age”, painted when he was 22 years old and, in my estimation, a fairly radical use of light. In this portrait, Rembrandt’s face is almost invisible as he has represented himself entirely in raking light. The light streams in only from above and behind him, and yet… how distinct and expressive he seems to me. Is it that I am straining harder and therefore seeing more – the contours and minutia of face in fact more discernible through shadow…? Or is it that my imagination is so actively engaged that the mind’s eye makes up for what the body’s eye cannot see…?

In either event, I look forward to working with this kind of daring in how we light the production. (And you can remind me of this, Scott. I’m talking here to Scott Zielinski, our lighting designer for ANNE FRANK, and almost every other production I’ve directed at Steppenwolf. Scott and I always end up doing a dance around how dark or light to make a production. I turn into a predictable bundle of contradiction as I first encourage in him to create strong atmosphere, sense of architecture and texture, through shadow, contrast in intensity, etc. And then, inevitably comes the time, usually after a first preview or two, when I tell him that I “need to see the actors better” and start asking for every light cue to be brighter. It is always a fine line we have to find between creating the ambience of a world on stage and ensuring that an audience can see (and hear) enough to remain engaged. Part of what I am loving about the Rembrandt approach is that the “canvas” can remain relatively dark and atmospheric because such intense, clear light is focused in specific places. It’s part of why I have grown so fond of “follow spots” in the work that Scott and I do, although “spots” are traditionally used more in musicals and overtly theatricalized styles. But for me, if they are used with great subtlety and precision of focus, they are wonderful tools for creating the kind of “glow” I saw today in Rembrandt – a more subliminal but utterly necessary focus – and in the most seemingly naturalistic of works.)

So, that’s it for now:

PANORAMAS. Wide lens, inclusion, and multiple, simultaneous action.

INTERIORS. Doors, rooms, hallways: depth. Sometimes mess.

DOLLHOUSES. Directed focus into a frame, and detail, detail, detail.

REMBRANDT. Light and dark.

If you want to look at any of this yourself, go to the Rijksmuseum website at: www.rijksmuseum.nl. Or come to Amsterdam! I think I am in love with this city. It’s been a great day.

This entry was posted by Tina Landau on Monday, October 23rd, 2006 at 1:53 pm and is filed under The Diary of Anne Frank. 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.