Always Subtly Shifting
Posted by Martha Lavey on 1/22/2009I returned on Monday from London where we had brought a group of Steppenwolf supporters on a London theater tour. On our final day in London, we saw the Sunday matinee performance of August: Osage County at the National Theatre. It was remarkable. The cast was so fluid, so expressive and the play emerged with such clarity and intensity. Their time together has served the production mightily and I was impressed, once again, with the power of ensemble.
I had a similar experience recently when I returned to our production of The Seafarer. I have returned to the production during the course of its run and as time goes by, the ensemble grows tighter and the relationships grow deeper. I hear something new every time I see it because the actors are always subtly shifting in their emphases of character and language.
Both experiences–attending August and attending The Seafarer–produced a kind of strangeness of seeing. I know these actors, I am an actor myself, and yet I felt, “how do they do that?” There’s a mystery to it–all of those glancing, overlapping exchanges; those moments when the actors are moving with each other in such easeful cooperation. A sixth sense.
On February the 3rd, Chicago actor Brad Armacost will replace Fran in the role of Sharky in The Seafarer. Fran will, at that point, be starting his evening rehearsals for Art, playing in our Upstairs Theatre. You may have seen Brad years ago in another Irish play, Brian Friel’s Faith Healer, which played in our Upstairs Theatre. It was the first time I had ever seen Brad on stage and I was galvanized. You may have seen him at Steppenwolf in our production of the great Irish playwright, John Synge’s Playboy of the Western World. Clearly, Brad has a special instinct for Irish work. I look forward to his forging his place in the ensemble of The Seafarer. I’ll be back, watching the play shift and change again as it absorbs its new ensemble. No matter how many plays I’ve watched or in which I act, I think I will always experience an amazement about live theater. Watching human beings negotiate each other in and through a play is just…a refreshment and a joy.