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

It’s a great pleasure to be on stage every night with my fellow cast members in Good Boys and True. Being on stage is a less frequent experience now that I am an artistic director and one that I tend to appreciate more as a result. (My appreciation is abetted, no doubt, by the reality that I still have a job when the show closes–not something that every freelance actor can enjoy.)

I conduct some of the post-show conversations for Good Boys and every time, I’m refreshed in the knowledge of what a smart, engaged audience we have at Steppenwolf. Our audiences are so discerning in their reading of the play and so generous in their willingness to review the play against their own experiences. It’s what all of us theater practitioners hope for–that our work provides a sort of reflecting pool, a way to discover and engage the underlying issues of our lives. And further, that the play, and its performance, provokes a conversation about those issues that is informed by the thematic integrity of the play and its author’s point of view.

One of the things that I find very interesting with Good Boys is that it produced a split in its critical reception. Both heartily endorsed and skeptically received. I love that–I love when a play takes the temperature of its audience and hits the mark with some and is resisted by others. It tells me that the play is doing its work–it’s issuing up a point of view about the world that some find convincing; others, not. I suppose it’s natural that the folks who stay for the discussion are ones who tend to find the work worthy of their continued engagement but I must say, the conversations we have about the play are far-reaching in their scope and passionately conducted.

If you haven’t seen Good Boys, I hope you’ll make the effort before we close on February the 16th. Stay for the discussion–it’s a very affirming experience to sit among really smart, perceptive people engaged in a discussion about class, privilege, parenting, personal responsibility, and how all of those issues feed our sense of ourselves as Americans. It’s an exercise of citizenship in the most easy, natural way–people talking about what matters to them in a generous, inclusive conversation.

This entry was posted by Martha Lavey on Friday, February 8th, 2008 at 12:33 am and is filed under Good Boys and True. 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.