Pulling Off a Post-Show
Posted by Safiya Nygaard on 10/23/2009
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.
The vibrant performance exceeded all of my expectations. From the opening song to the ending monologue, the show was everything I’d hoped (I still have the songs stuck in my head…). Hallie Gordon’s artistic vision, the actors’ performances, and Tanya Saracho’s words really brought Sanda Cisneros’s coming-of-age-story to life.
We prepared for the post-show discussion by coming up with a few questions to ask the audience, just in case nobody from the audience said anything to start us off. Other than that, we were just relying on our knowledge of the show and our past experience leading post-show discussions during our MaTEENée Series. I don’t know about the rest of the Council, but I was a little nervous. What if the audience didn’t want to talk? What if they were reluctant to discuss a play with four teenagers?
As it turns out, I had nothing to worry about. The audience had a lot to say and were very receptive to our questions and prompts. And we actually knew what we were talking about! We answered questions about The House on Mango Street’s creative process, the role of women in the story, Cisneros’s role in the adaptation process, the music in the play, and whether or not it was fair for the three sisters to ask Esperanza to return to Mango Street at the end of the play (and what does it really mean to “return” anyway?) Members of the Steppenwolf Auxiliary Council also attended the show and stayed after the post-show discussion to talk to us. Speaking to them confirmed what I had hoped: we had actually pulled off a real Steppenwolf post-show and did it well.