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

Associate Artistic Director David New and Artistic Director Martha Lavey discuss the 2007-08 season at the Annual Fund Donors Cast Party for The Diary of Anne Frank.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about art and free speech. My thoughts have been influenced by recent events–some profound, some less so.

The profound: the recent tragedy at Virginia Tech. A student at the university murders 32 of his fellow students and kills himself. It is discovered that the young man had depicted disturbingly violent acts in writings he produced in his creative writing class–writing so disturbing that his professors brought the work to the attention of officials at the university.

The less profound: the city council of Chicago determines that the smoking ban it has enacted for restaurants and other public spaces should extend to the city’s stages. Lou Raizin, producer of Broadway in Chicago, appears before the City Council to argue for the exemption of our stage spaces in the no-smoking ban, citing freedom of speech as the more significant protection in the zone of artistic expression. (more…)

I am very excited to announce our 2007-2008 Steppenwolf for Young Adults season. Our season starts with The Elephant Man, a play by Bernard Pomerance, directed by Sean Graney. Sean directed Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis in the Garage Theatre in 2005, a Steppenwolf Visiting Company Initiative with The Hypocrites, for whom he serves as Artistic Director.

The Elephant Man tells the real-life story of John Merrick, a man suffering from extreme physical deformities and disabilities. Some may think this is an odd choice for young adults but this play raises a variety of themes that are well worth exploring for high school audiences such as: exploitation, identity, isolation, beauty, what society perceives to be normal and how we treat those who are unlike ourselves. The Elephant Man can be a starting place for a philosophical discussion around the idea of identity and illusion. What better place to start this discussion than at a theatre and in the classroom. (more…)

Even before reahearsals began, I often found myself preoccpied by the prospect of the most basic, fundamental element of this process upon which I was soon to embark. The thought that kept my mind anxiously racing, distracted me from my gleeful anticipation of the first rehearsal, tainted my excitement: How am I going to do eight shows a week for two and half months?

Soon after this concern first manifested itself in my mind I began to construct this highly dramatized anxious fantasy in which my inability to sustain exhuberance and dedication would lead to the downfall of the show. In this fantasy, I come into the green room, before maybe our 10th show and begin doing my hair and makeup, when I am suddenly struck by a wave of overwhelming exahaustion at the thought of doing the show again. Despite my best efforts to conjure up any little bit of enthusiasm, I find myself completely uninspired, unable to muster up the drive to go on. At this point my imagination would pan over to the faces of my fellow actors, staring at me, looking dejected and regretful. One of them would usually shake their heads sadly and then lead the cast away from me with a murmer of disdain. We would then do an awful show, after which the audience members would leave grumbing about the declining quality of theatre these days and the obvious shortage of good teen actresses, thus signifying that I had ruined Steppenwolf’s repuation as well as destroying any prospect of my future career as an actress. (more…)