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

(Christina plays Marin and Rachel in The House on Mango Street)

I think The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros is about dreams. What it means to dream big, dream beyond your limitations, beyond your current situations. That’s something I’ve always related to. When I first read the book as a teenager, I remember identifying with Esperanza’s curiosity and tenacity and imagination. I, like Esperanza, always dreamed of growing up and making it “big” (whatever that means) and moving far way from where I grew up in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. And I, like Esperanza, have grown up to become fiercely proud of where I come from, no matter where the future has taken me.

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(Leslie is the understudy for Kate Arrington in Fake)

I love being part of an audience almost (I say almost) as much as I love being on the stage. It is therefore lucky for me that I am understudying, and have been a member of several dozen audiences over the past two months or so. It has allowed me the luxury of time in which to observe (and reinforce) my pet theory that each audience is a very definite, varied and extremely vivid personality.

It’s very common for an actor to come offstage and think to themselves about the mood of the audience that evening. It’s much as if that audience were a brand new person to the actor, sort of a first date. At least I think this is a common thing.

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Hello Steppenwolf blog-readers! I’m Safiya Nygaard, a member of the Steppenwolf Young Adult Council. The Young Adult Council is Steppenwolf’s after-school program for high school students who are passionate about the arts, and want to learn about the inner workings of professional theatre.

This past Saturday, a few hours before our big Night on Mango Street event, four of us Council members attended the matinee performance of The House on Mango Street. The Young Adult Council has been involved heavily with the show – we’ve met with Tanya Saracho (Mango Street’s adaptor) multiple times and had opportunity to read almost all the drafts of the script. We also listened to the first recordings of the music (off Tanya’s pink iPhone), observed both the audition process and the summer workshop and also a few hours of The House on Mango Street rehearsal. The culmination of our involvement came on Saturday – when we actually got to pull all of our knowledge of The House on Mango Street together and lead a post-show discussion.

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(Our next production, American Buffalo, is set in a junk shop and will be a very prop-heavy show. Properties Master Jenny DiLuciano took a quick break today to give us a glimpse of the early stages of their work on the play)

We are pretty early in the process. I have had several meetings with our set designer, Kevin Depinet, about the kinds of things he wants to see in this junk shop. He and I have walked through our prop storage together and he pointed out several things that he likes. I also have noted some things that we don’t have but he has in his model and in the research packet he gave me.

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Meatloaf cupcakes? England, the father of us all? Shop The Onion this holiday season?

On Friday, October 2, Steppenwolf hosted an EXPLORE event for Fake, featuring entertaining and informative discussions of fakes with Professor Robert Martin, curator at the The Field Museum, and Peter Alter, curator at the Chicago History Museum. Professor Martin has spent a significant part of his career studying brain size and brought slides of the Piltdown skull. In spite of scrutiny and skepticism at the time of its discovery, popular opinion as to its authenticity prevailed over science.

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