Our Success is Yours
Posted by Martha Lavey on 11/01/2006I attended the New York opening of our production of The Sunset Limited at the 59E59 Theatre this past Sunday with our Executive Director, David Hawkanson, and our publicist, Will Nedved. Written by Cormac McCarthy, Sunset, you’ll remember, played in the Steppenwolf Garage Theatre this past summer and it moved to 59E59th with its creative team intact: director Sheldon Patinkin; the actors, Austin Pendleton and Freeman Coffey, and the design team of Scott Neale, Tatjana Radisic, Martha Wegener, and Keith Parham.
59E59th is a complex of three theaters. located, naturally enough, at 59 East 59th Street in Manhattan. The Sunset Limited plays in the 99-seat theater of the complex through November 19th. I’m happy to report that the play has been well received and that the theater is a very fit setting for the production–an intimate, focused space for a play that turns on an engagement with a complex text and the intricate, layered performances of the actors.
How fun to sit in the theater with the author in attendance and to be seated next to three of our playwrights from Steppenwolf’s past season: Don DeLillo, (whom I had the pleasure of introducing to Cormac McCarthy–these two outstanding American novelists), and whose play, Love-Lies-Bleeding we premiered at Steppenwolf and took to the Kennedy Center this past summer; Bruce Norris, five of whose plays have received Steppenwolf productions and one of which, The Pain and the Itch, opened in New York at Playwrights Horizon earlier this Fall; and John Kolvenbach, whose Love Song opened at Steppenwolf this past Spring and which is currently in production in London for a West End opening in December. An embarassment of riches. Knowing that Steppenwolf had a hand in introducing these plays that have gone on to future life is a great honor and a fulfillment of our mission to contribute to the canon of American theater.
In a happy coincidence, another Steppenwolf production, Lydia Diamond’s adaptation of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, begins previews in New York at the Duke Theatre on 42nd Street this Wednesday, November the 1st after its successful Steppenwolf run in the Upstairs Theatre. We will have two Steppenwolf productions running in New York simultaneously–both of which feature the same artists who created the productions here in Chicago.
I hope that you share the pride we feel in featuring these works to new audiences. You are, like the creative teams that built them, an integral part of the success of these plays. It is your appetite and receptiveness to new work that has given this work its viability–producers witness the success of these plays with our Chicago audiences and they are willing to take the risk of produce them again, for new audiences. Chicago is a great place to premiere new work–because of YOU, an audience sophisticated and savvy enough to appreciate innovation and creativity. Cheers–our success is yours.