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

(Jamie is the School at Steppenwolf Coordinator)

One of Steppenwolf’s best kept secrets is The School at Steppenwolf. If you are an actor in town, you may have come across it. If you aren’t, chances are slim that you have. But even if you’ve never heard of the school, you’ve probably seen many of our alumni tearing up stages across Chicago or great productions at theatre companies founded by our students.

In the summer of 2009 we had the opportunity to cast six of our School at Steppenwolf alumni in our First Look Repertory of New Plays. I recently tracked down the six to see what they’ve been up to and how the School at Steppenwolf has had a lasting effect on their artistic lives.

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Hi blog readers. I’m David Perez. I am the Artistic Director of Pavement Group, and will be directing our production of punkplay this February as part of Steppenwolf’s Garage Rep. We are a three year-old company formed out of Steppenwolf’s Apprenticeship program, so needless to say we’re REALLY REALLY EXCITED.

In preparations for punkplay, I have been thinking a lot about choice and agency as a means to navigate the future. punkplay is a ferocious examination of identity and youth, and the people we pretend to be as we passage into becoming the people we want to be. It’s also about participation and chance. It’s about giving yourself to the world without fear of consequence.

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A few weeks ago, talking to a friend about my work reading scripts for Steppenwolf, I was asked probably the most common question I hear about the job: “Has anything you’ve read ended up in their season?” The short answer is “no,” or at least “not unless they finally take my advice to produce Fran Guinan in The Belle of Amherst this year,” but it struck me that it’s worth exploring how exactly the process works, and hopefully to articulate what I’ve been up to the past five years (give or take) as a reader.

In essence, how it works is this: I get a batch of five scripts every two weeks to read and evaluate. I’ll sit down and read through them (sometimes aloud, sometimes not), let them rest for a day or two, and then come back to write them up. The evaluations consist of a brief, action-driven plot synopsis (David Ball’s Backwards and Forwards provides a model here) and a “comments” section. The comments section is the meat of the evaluation, but it’s often informed heavily by the synopsizing: laying out the events of a play tends to expose its strengths and weaknesses as character motivations are held up to scrutiny and overall narrative structure gets rebuilt by the reader, often clarifying authorial intent along the way.

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(Seth Bockley is co-director and co-deviser with Devon de Mayo on The Twins Would Like To Say, part of the Visiting Company Initiative Garage Rep)

Ashleigh and Paige are flapping their hands—they seem to be saying ‘ta-ta for now’, or maybe they are pretending to pat the shoulder of someone in front of them, or maybe bouncing a ball, or flicking water off of their hands.

It just looks like two girls flapping their hands.  But it’s a coded language.

We are rehearsing for The Twins Would Like To Say, a world premiere play produced by Dog & Pony Theater Co., devised and directed by Devon de Mayo and myself (alongside an army of extraordinary artists), and opening at the Steppenwolf Garage in February 2010.

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I was deeply moved by Tarell McCraney’s work the first time I read it. As a freshman at DePaul when Tarell was a senior, I was fortunate enough to be apart of a staged reading of Without/Sin. His play sang to me and made me want to move: there was undeniable electricity. By the end of that first reading, I was a McCraney disciple ready to testify. So I waited, and then came The Brother/Sister Plays.

Fast forward: I have been cast as Egungun, Oshoosi and Terrell, and it’s the night before the All-Staff Reading (All-Staff Readings at Steppenwolf are staged readings for the administrative and theatre staff, so they have a better feel for the plays before rehearsals begin). It’s 6:59pm Monday evening, and I check my inbox to find an email from director Tina Landau to the actors. She’s compiled a message sharing some thoughts on our first reading as an ensemble. She talks specifically about how The Brother/Sister Plays are difficult to fully imagine in a staged reading because of how greatly music and movement contribute to the scripts. She prepares us for the challenge of the reading and encourages us to embrace the lyricism and musicality, even if we may not understand it fully, because the meaning will reveal itself as we follow the map of the text. Tina mentions that Tarell says the plays should be read “fast and loose,” and that they must have a real pace, speed, turns, and abandon.

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