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

Dear Chicago family, it has been ages since I wrote, but here’s a slightly belated postcard from London…

Reflections on an amazing, unforgettable trip…never say never, but I believe the Steppenwolf ensemble may never be able to deliver August: Osage County more powerfully than we did in London…as a group we felt a sublime reward for toiling so long in this particular vineyard…

We actors felt it internally as a growing force. Here and there we whispered grateful backstage sentiments about it. Then it was simply a fact.

It required many months of practice in this play and it was a condition decades of accumulated practice with each other can sometimes bring about. But what we achieved during the London run of Osage is something I had never quite felt before, perhaps because these particular conditions had never existed in our theatre’s history before…because of all that came before it, because of Tracy’s and Anna’s deep understanding of us, because of a million lucky circumstances, we managed in London an alchemy of craft and absence of craft that still feels rare and mysterious and precious.

Here’s what I mean…In our art, and it is especially true when you are working in the kind of ‘naturalism’ that exists in August: Osage County, you are continually engaged in dichotomy. The play you are serving is an act of rigorous selection, instinctive and conscious, involving tens of thousands of synapse firings, calculations and trials and errors. The actor’s task in service of the play inevitably needs to follow a similar exhaustive, exploratory path. The beautiful dichotomy about acting in an aggressively naturalistic form is that you are constantly trying to render invisible all of your design and labor. We actors live in divine hope that thousands of hours of practice will, now and again, free us from all signs that we’ve rehearsed. I remember walking home from the fourth preview in London and writing down, “tonight’s performance was the least ‘performed’ our play has ever been” in my 11 or 12 months experience with it…It felt then, and for the rest of the run, as if we had gotten to that place where we could mostly just “be.”

August in London was a daily thrill basket of being in a great theatre town doing what we adore at a national theatre we have looked up to forever.

The faces of young actors and directors, glowing with inspiration, that we invariably met after our shows. Amy Morton and I sat in the pub at The National, mostly nodding yes to two young men desperately, joyously alive with their plans to start an ensemble company inspired by ours they insisted. Later in the run I visited with five other young artists representing the hopeful birth of yet three more ensemble based theatres all inspired by Tracy’s play, Anna’s direction and Steppenwolf’s overall ethos of tribal collaboration.

Two aspects of our visit that reverberate deeply…

One is that for all of our familiarity with each other’s culture, even given our co-mingled DNA, the Brits are still sometimes surprised by our emotionally based naturalism. The goal of creating the illusion of “voyeurism” for the viewer that our art traffics in is still, it seemed to me by their almost amazed reaction to our efforts, something they don’t often or perhaps even naturally “go after” in their theatre. Literally, flocks of twenty-something, native-born theatre students were singular in their reaction of how “foreign” and “exciting” the ensemble-based naturalism was to them. This is not about any boast of something we can do that they can’t. Lord knows their artists can and do achieve any and every sublime height that we ever have or could and usually outrace us instantly in verse-based work. It’s simply that I was reminded of a British theatrical art whose deep ties to verse lead to somewhat different and more presentational ends.

Another is THANK GOD FOR TRAVEL!…it refreshes your eyes, your brain, your heart…and inevitably it clarifies your vision of home…Through London eyes I had constant opportunity to re-appreciate something that I suppose I have never taken for granted but that still knocks me out…Steppenwolf represents a particular kind of hope to fellow artists…the hope that you can once in awhile on this earth create a place to do what you love doing with artists you love doing it with and you can thrive and survive and endure…

Sooo, Tracy, Anna, everyone at Steppenwolf, Deb Styer, our actor family in three or more cities by now, the National Theatre and its wonderful people…bless and thank you for that chapter…’Twill ne’er be forgotten…

This entry was posted by Jeff Perry on Wednesday, February 11th, 2009 at 3:22 pm and is filed under General, August: Osage County. 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.