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

What an exciting moment in our cultural life. We are on the precipice of a change in our national leadership. America is dreaming its future. Steppenwolf celebrates this moment with a season of the imagination. We offer five stories that feature the power of the imagination in shaping our identity, creating our future, determining our reality.

We begin with Frank Galati’s adaptation and direction of novelist Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, featuring ensemble members Francis Guinan and Jon Hill. Murakami’s powerful and popular novel is brought to theatrical life in Frank’s incisive adaptation. Kafka on the Shore is a young man’s coming of age story in contemporary Japan–a landscape in which cats talk, Johnnie Walker lives, and the world reveals itself in a series of dreams and memories.

We follow with Conor McPherson’s brilliant new play, The Seafarer, featuring John Mahoney. On Christmas Eve, in a disheveled basement flat in Dublin, the Devil walks in the door and challenges the motley group of men assembled there to a card game. At stake is the soul of Sharky, a middle-aged man in review of his life. With great humor and deep feeling, McPherson explores the horizon of our dreams and the power of personal transformation.

Sitting at the heart of our season is Yasmina Reza’s Art. This incisive drama of three men explores the fantasies and projections out of which we construct our friendships and love. How delightful that an object of art is the site for the most vivid projections of feeling and value.

In our fourth offering of the season, we present Steppenwolf’s first production of a Shakespeare play, The Tempest. Tina Landau brings her signature artistry to Shakespeare’s last, great, and profound meditation on the imagination. Frank Galati returns to the Steppenwolf stage to play Prospero, the magician sorcerer at the heart of this glorious, touching drama.

We complete the season with a new play by Bridget Carpenter, directed by Anna D. Shapiro. Up is the story of one man’s dream of flying. How do we rise above our own lives? How do we dream ourselves into a future? Up explores the heartbreaking journey of our wishes and dreams.

Join us for the season of our imagination. Explore the dream of your life. Share the story of another. Thank you, again, for your generosity in bringing your open mind, your deep curiosity, and your appetite for thought-provoking work to Steppenwolf. We are the luckiest theater in the world–we have you, imagining with us. I look forward to seeing you at Steppenwolf for our 2008-2009 season.

This entry was posted by Martha Lavey on Thursday, March 6th, 2008 at 11:04 pm and is filed under 2008-2009 Season, Kafka on the Shore, The Seafarer, Art, The Tempest, Up. 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.