If being a subscriber and financial supporter of Steppenwolf qualifies me as “a self-professed patron”–I stand gulity as charged. As for looking forward with glee, you have misinterpreted my comment. Closing will be sad, sort of like when Old Yeller gets shot.

If they did have only 3 rehearsals, that’s certainly indicative of a lack of care on the part of Steppenwolf to preserve their production when the original cast members left.

I saw what I believe was Pendleton’s second performance of his role. My husband and I discussed the possibility that he was deliberately playing Danforth as weak and confused, trying to hide his incompetence behind the authority of his position. So I turned to this blog to see if I could find out more about the conception of the role. What I found was other patrons complaining and Martha Lavey apologizing. Nowhere does Martha Lavey say that Pendelton was playing the role as conceived by the director, thus explaining some of the meandering and stumbling that some people interpreted as the results of drinking.

For what it’s worth, I’m a long term Steppenwolf subscriber (over 20 years with an occasional break) and I’m certainly not going to base my opinion of the company on one problematic performance.

As to the other performances: for one thing, different actors and different minds will have different takes on roles, especially within iconic pieces of theatre such as The Crucible. Those different takes will create different responses in their fellow performers, and some adjustment simply must be made. That can be extremely difficult to accomplish in front of five hundred judgmental audience members with only three rehearsals under their belts, regardless of how well they know their lines. (You all did read that part of Martha Lavey’s initial response: three, count ‘em three rehearsals. In comparison with five six-day weeks of rehearsals for all the other performers with whom they were working.) Secondly, I’m not sure that these criticisms, or ones like them, wouldn’t have been leveled at the original cast members. In fact, I read reviews in which members of the original cast were called “badly mis-cast”. That ends up being a difference of opinion with the director, rather than justification for comparing the work of a professional actor to “community theatre” (which, by the way, is an American cultural institution in its own right, and the source of many of our great theatre artists, including a number of the Steppenwolf ensemble, if I remember correctly, which got its start in a church basement. So let’s not go bashing it either.)

I do not know the script of the Crucible intimately enough to know what lines were paraphrased and which were dropped, but the performance I saw tonight was thought-provoking and engaging, and the performances of the individual actors were variously intriguing, unsettling because of the contemporary resonances, profound, and enlightening. I’m glad I was not too familiar with the script, because it allowed me to experience the living, breathing performance unfolding before me.

I hope that other audience members have the experience I did; I am sorry for those who didn’t. Perhaps reading this blog before seeing the show would help: they would go expecting to see a disaster and end up seeing a good show with actors who semed to me to be at least in control; and if they weren’t, they were certainly able to think on their feet well enough that I wasn’t aware of it.

And I think it problematic that a self-professed patron of any theatre would look forward with glee to the closing of a show at that theatre. Wishing ill on the arts seems redundant in a culture that is slowly trying to destroy them. But then again, if you’re not for them, I guess you have to be against them.