An Extra Special Event: Teachers & Sonia Flew
Posted by Robin Chaplik on 1/03/2007
On Saturday I meet with my students again. I can’t wait. They are special people, and I’ve missed them terribly over the Holiday Break. My “students” are teachers. Every season we invite a group of fifteen or so from the Chicago Public Schools to participate in our Teacher Theater Immersion Course offered through Steppenwolf for Young Adults.
This group spends many months with us, learning new theatre-based techniques to take back to their English, Social Studies, History, and sometime even, Science and Math classrooms. They study and attend our plays and bring their students, as well.
Many of the teachers also become enchanted with the ensemble experience we offer – and for which we are so well known. They bond with their colleagues – learning and creating together – and ultimately become a kind of family. To bring this idea forward, we’ve taken FAMILY as our central theme this year. It is one of the major tropes coursing through our season’s offerings (i.e., Sonia Flew, The Diary of Anne Frank, Huck Finn, The Bluest Eye).
When the group last met in December, we were joined by my old friend associate artist Jessica Thebus, director of Sonia Flew, and two of her terrific actors - Sandra Delgado and Andrew Perez for an afternoon of food and discussion. The teachers had read the play. Heck, they’d been studying its themes of family, war, and country for weeks. One teacher even brought some of her students to see the production’s dress rehearsal a couple of weeks prior. She was keen to share with our guests her students’ impressions of the production as well as her own. Our guests, in turn, spoke openly of their artistic processes and personal connections to the play. Questions and observations flew around the room. It was a wonderful exchange.
A few examples:
Teacher #1: I was two weeks out of my parents’ house on September 11th - and so reading the play, I was remembering and relating to Zak’s feeling of ‘What do we do?’ and needing that energy to go somewhere. I was wondering how much of the concept and character you drew from personal experience and how much came from the research?
Andrew (Zak): It’s an interesting question. It has been a little bit of both. You look at a character like Zak who has a real, tangible goal that is grounded in an actual event - and I was actually 18 years on 9/11 and I was leaving for Northwestern when it happened. We watched a 9/11 DVD [during rehearsal] and we went back and recalled what that experience was like and what we were going through - our fear and gut responses at the time. Now we have a whole different perspective on the war and how we handled the situation, and so it was important to go back to that place of when it happened. I definitely have become much more sensitive to the event and it still breaks my heart.
Teacher #2: I was curious about the opportunity to work with Melinda Lopez – what was that like? Have you gotten to work with a playwright in the past, and how is that process different?
Jessica: For this play it was really great – this play is about unlocking the secrets of the play. And Melinda’s voice and her experience is part of that, and I really liked that collaboration. But I think it is totally different in every case.
Sandra (Jen & Young Sonia): Melinda is an actor and you can tell she is an actor. She is so generous. We would ask her questions and she would say she doesn’t know. That was really liberating. Her words are so open to you bringing your personality to the character.
Teacher #3: In my classroom I spend a lot of time talking about and teaching story. And my students always ask what comes next. Do you guys ever spend anytime talking about what comes next in the story after the curtain, or do you just focus on the two acts? Do you ever talk about where the characters’ relationships go from there?
Jessica: That’s a good question. But not so much – there are two reasons for that. One, what came before is so important to the process and there is a lot of what came before. And it is always hard when you are telling a story not to tell the end. I think what you are always trying to do is stay in the moment. To allow yourself to be surprised is a challenge. As a director you are always playing against the end, and so because of that there is not a lot of discussion of where it goes after.
We, however, did go somewhere after…to see the show! Thanks so much to Jessica, Sandra, and Andrew for their generosity and willingness to engage with us.
Next up for our examination: Huck Finn directed by Ed Sobel, Steppenwolf’s Director of New Plays.