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

I’m playing with Freeman Coffey in The Sunset Limited again now, in New York. We did it this spring and early summer in the Garage at Steppenwolf. Then I came back to New York and within a couple of weeks Martha (Lavey) called me and asked if I’d want to do it in New York. I assumed she meant with Freeman; I also assumed she meant with our same director, Sheldon Patinkin. And of course she did. Which was great because I would have been loathe to do it without them. I would have loved to the play again certainly — it’s one of the most exciting plays I’ve worked on in many years — but it’s a two-character play, and it moves along through the chemistry that happens between these two men, and when you feel the kind of chemistry I felt with Freeman from our very first rehearsal, one evening back in April, you can never assume that will happen with anybody else. And Sheldon understands exactly how to direct this play. He understands actors; he also knows how to conduct this play, as if it were a piece of music, which in a way it is. And the play is so rich that when you approach it again it’s good to be able to climb up on top of the pile of work you’ve already done on it, and keep building from there.

And it’s good to be able to make changes. We made a radical change this time. In the spring the playwright, Cormac McCarthy, who is not only a very major writer but as close to a perfect gentleman as anybody I’ve ever met in the theatre, asked if we could play the play, Freeman and I, for virtually its entire 90-minute or so length, seated at a kitchen table, talking. We were frightened to do that. We’d never even heard of anything like that in the theatre, and we couldn’t imagine we could hold an audience that way. So we moved it around a lot. The (brilliant) set is a confined area, but we found many ways and many oppoturnities to keep it physically flowing in that space. And it worked fine. The audience really liked the play (even if the critics didn’t, particularly) and we felt fine. Even Cormac didn’t seem to get too concerned about all our movement. But I guess we were haunted by his original suggestion. So when we came back together again for a week in Chicago to rehearse it again for this New York run we found ourselves eliminating much of that movement and finally eliminating all of it, except for the two or three specific times that Cormac calls for it in the script. And it works! The play itself got much better reviews in NY than it did in Chicago. And people who saw it in Chicago and are seeing it again in New York say it’s more powerful here because of it. I never in a million years would have thought this would happen. Even apart from the thrill of doing this play again, with this group of people, there is a thrill to finding something about the power of stillness that I hope won’t ever fully leave my awareness. Of course this wouldn’t work at all without a director as good at bringing out the inner dynamics of a script as Sheldon is. And Sheldon, in a slightly different context, has talked about how a performance of a play can only be fully powerful in its refined state if it’s been refined down from something much more expansive, whether emotionally or physically.

Anyway, this play, this production, is a trip. It always has been. Read Cormac’s novels, by the way. Every one of them.

This entry was posted by Austin Pendleton on Thursday, November 16th, 2006 at 10:30 am and is filed under The Sunset Limited. 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.