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

Hello out there. This is Karin Freed, reporting to you from the Steppenwolf for Young Adults department. We’re steeped in work over here as we prepare for the opening of The House on Mango Street. Last week, we spent several days devising exercises and games with our teaching artists to use during our in-school residencies.

What’s an in-school residency, you ask? Well, it’s a 3-part event whereby teaching artists go into school classes before they see The House on Mango Street, and prepare the students for what they are about to experience at the theatre. Teaching artists get the students up on their feet exploring the themes and issues of the play through performance-based activities. These activities may entail forming tableaus, improvising scenes, engaging in debates, writing and performing monologues, or making music.

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Hello, readers. I’m Leslie Frame, understudying Kate Arrington in Fake.

“Tech” is an interesting time during a production. For the actors, crew and understudies (well, actually for everyone except the director and stage manager), there is a lot of down time, and - theatre people being the curious social animals that we are - a lot of down time means a lot of conversation.

Fake covers a lot of sacred ground; ideas and questions of belief, memory, veracity, mystery, loss and discovery. It is only natural that as we move back and forth from auditorium to green room, these questions come with us. And so it has been my experience that the backstage conversation of this production in particular has been extraordinarily personal, colorful and often quite deep. There have been conversations of fathers and mothers, ancestral migrations, the weight of a word, historical legislation and how it impacts us today (no, really!), the physical injuries that change our paths, religious backgrounds, experiences and beliefs.

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Greetings from the basement of Steppenwolf Theatre! I am Karyn, the 2009-2010 Downstairs Stage Management Apprentice. I am currently working on Fake, the new play written and directed by ensemble member Eric Simonson. This is the first world premier show I have ever worked on, and it is quite a change of pace for me!

One of the largest tasks that I work on is keeping track of all of the script changes. We started our rehearsal process on August 11th, and since then I’ve been keeping track of every change, no matter how small… and there are some small ones indeed! For example, a line went from “I didn’t think you’d remembered” to “I didn’t think you’d remember.” It was a change so small, but it matters!

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(Eric is the playwright and director of Fake)

Saturday, 2pm: Technical rehearsals started today for Fake. We joke and call it the fake tech rehearsal, but it’s very real, and hopefully all our expectations will be met. This is the first time the crew and cast get to see all the production elements together.

The initial hours of tech give me an indication of how the next three or four days will go. So far, so good. We’re about two hours in and moving along. The costumes look tremendous: we’re in the 1914 part of the play. Karin Kopishcke did a wonderful job supplementing what the actors have already developed with their characters. The mood of the play is coming together very nicely: very “Agatha Christie mystery.” Todd Rosenthal has created a very evocative and open design, and it fits nicely in the Steppenwolf space. Technical director Russell Poole oversaw the building of the set, and it all looks exactly like the model. I couldn’t have asked for better. Prop Master Jenny DiLuciano and her crew are bringing in a great assortment of archeological artifacts that add to what Todd has created. There’s a lot of detail here that reinforces collective design. Things are definitely coming together, but I’m already itching to get back to the play and the actors.

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Rocco Landesman, the new chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, has little patience for the disdain with which some politicians still seem to view the organization.

In a recent New York Times profile Landesman, the new chair of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), generated controversy by declaring that it was the responsiblity of the NEA to reward excellence and that the recent history of the Endowment to democratize the arts needed to be tempered by a discrimination and recognition of artistic merit.

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