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

Next weekend, on Saturday, October the 27th, Steppenwolf is presenting two new plays as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival. The theme of this year’s Festival is The Climate of Concern. About two years ago, Ren Weschler, the Artistic Director of the Festival convened a group of people–scientists, journalists, scholars, policy makers, and artists–to brainstorm about programming for the Festival around this idea of climate change. It’s incredibly interesting to have that benchmark of two years ago–the collective attention to climate change has increased dramatically since then. Perhaps the most visible indicator of that growing consciousness is the recent awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Albert Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. To have granted the Peace Prize to these people, who have dedicated their public lives to the issue of climate change, is to acknowledge how urgently our environmental well-being is tied to our every aspect of our political, social, and cultural well-being. The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to two parties–a scientific panel and an individual who had won an Academy Award for his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth–speaks to Ren’s prescience in convening both scientists and artists to a discussion of climate change. As Ren said at the time of our convening, it is the artists who provide the vision for our urgent social issues. The research that science and scholarship produce is the foundation of our collective knowledge; the crafting of that knowledge into image and language is the task of the artist. Those images, those metaphors provide story for hard science. They humanize and make vivid the story of science.

Ren approached Steppenwolf with the idea of enlisting several Chicago theaters to commission playwrights to write about the issue of climate change. Ed Sobel, our Director of New Play Development, and I enlisted two of our colleague theaters and we each partnered with another Chicago theater company to commission plays of both nationally-known and local playwrights. So: three theaters–Steppenwolf, the Goodman, and Next Theatre, and their partners, Teatro Luna, Congo Square, and Rivendell–and six playwrights.

Steppenwolf commissioned Don DeLillo, three of whose works we have produced: John Malkovich’s adaptation of Don’s novel, Libra; and Don’s plays, Valparaiso and Love-Lies-Bleeding. Our partner, Teatra Luna, commissioned their ensemble member and co-founder, playwright and actor Tanya Saracho. Tanya has appeared on the Steppenwolf stage in our production of Our Lady of 121st Street and she is under commission by Steppenwolf to write for our Steppenwolf for Young Adults program. We loved the idea of commissioning two playwrights of such disparate perspectives and aesthetic to write on a single topic.

The plays, Don’s The Word for Snow and Tanya’s Surface Day, will be presented twice on Saturday (at 3pm and 7:30pm) in a reading format. The plays are both approximately 20 minutes in length and at both performances, the plays will be followed by a discussion, conducted by a scholar. Ren Weschler will conduct the Saturday afternoon discussion and the evening discussion will be anchored by Ann Bradlow, a linguist from Northwestern University.

One of the things that I have found most intriguing about the commissioning of these two works by playwrights so different in their sensibilities, is that both playwrights seemed to have focused on language. Both playwrights, in their wildly different ways, have seized upon the fact that what we know (and what we refuse to know) is deeply reflected in the language we produce (and avoid) to describe our experience. This concentration on language is very reminiscent for me of George Orwell’s novel, 1984. Orwell’s great message in 1984 was that a totalitarianism of thought begins with the ownership of language–what we call stuff is essential to our freedom, to our social agency, and artists are a key component in the production of that language.

So, we get back ’round to Ren’s insistence that our artists are crucial in getting the message out, and to the Nobel committee’s designation of both a scientific body and an art-making spokesman as the agents for consciousness-raising about climate change.

I encourage all of you to attend the plays about climate change–at Steppenwolf, at the Goodman, at Next Theatre. But more, go to the website of the Humanities Festival–www.chfestival.org–and check out the incredible variety and depth of the Festival’s programming from October the 27th through November the 11th. The Chicago Humanities Festival is one of Chicago’s unique treasures. The Climate of Concern. As Ren says, what better a place for this festival than in Chicago, already famous as one of the nation’s greenest cities?

This entry was posted by Martha Lavey on Wednesday, October 24th, 2007 at 11:13 am and is filed under General. 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.