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

The very concept of a blog is a little strange to me… The idea of recording your private thoughts as you would in a journal, but all the while knowing completely that there’s nothing private about the writing involved. It’s fixed up, polished, re-read and re-written several times over and then offered up to the public… Knowing this walking into it, it would be stupid to think that the writer isn’t just as worried about the ideas offered as they are of the personal impression left on the anonymous readers. It’s an imposed and developed ‘candid look’… So in that sense it can be incredibly hypocritical.

Though that would seem like an argument as to why people should leave blogs alone, it’s really the exact reason why I think that it complements the theater perfectly. It’s the same thing that we do for the stage.

We work and we work and we prepare and we discuss just how to make an impulse or a living breathing, and oftentimes very private moment ring true. Essentially we rehearse spontaneity, and the result is an applied truth. It’s biased. Polished… So in that sense the act of theater can also be hypocritical at times.

Dublin Carol speaks to me as a simple play that has just as equally simple truths… There’s no knock down drag out theatrics and the main tensions of the piece live in the characters and their relationships which unravel through conversation. Unfortunately for us up there on the stage, sometimes the simplest of ideas are the hardest to offer to you, the audience. The intricacies of people’s relationships, and the subtleties of real conversation are some of the hardest to nail down…because, quite simply, if it’s not grounded in truth the audience can smell your bullshit from a mile away.

I’m lucky, though, to be surrounded by such a group of people. Makes my job a little easier… Having a director with the tools and the knowledge that Amy does and knowing that there are a couple of actors like Billy and Nicole that have your back…we’re allowed to work on the smaller things…all the little details. At times it’s like surgery: the way Billy moves all his props around trying to figure out just exactly where all these inanimate things live in this world he’s created for himself. The focus of Amy’s notes and her vision of the play as a whole…it’s the details. We’re trying to find the truth here, right down to the brand of whiskey.

That’s the way that theater isn’t at all hypocritical, though. The ideas are very real… The effect of these ideas on an audience can be very real and sometimes even life changing. The world that we’re creating together is a complete and unique place… Perspective is an amazing and important thing, and true communication, honest communication and understanding can never be hypocritical…and that’s what we in the theater can offer. This is the goal at least.

This entry was posted by Stephen Louis Grush on Thursday, October 30th, 2008 at 5:14 pm and is filed under Dublin Carol. 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.