The Life and Times of Merle’s Place
Posted by John Zinn on 1/11/2010
(John is the Marketing Director of Steppenwolf Theatre Company)
I HATE it when you find a cool bar to hang out at and it then it closes! HATE IT. You find the perfect place: not too yuppie, not too dirty hipster, just Chicago enough - with cool people and cheap drinks. Merle’s Place was like that. And now it’s closed. And it was only open one night. Uh… let me start a couple steps back: in our Explore series of events - five times a year, one for each play in the subscription series - we construct an immersive environment, so our audience can explore more deeply an aspect of the show. In the past, we have built a festival of fakes for Fake, an (attempted) wire walk across the roof of the garage for Up, and a hip art gallery in the Garage Theatre for Art. For American Buffalo, we turned that same Garage Theatre into a Chicago dive bar circa December 1975: a place where Teach and Donny might have hung out, drank cheap beer, played a lot of Skynyrd on the jukebox and bothered the other customers.
We try to set a vibe that gets people into the mindset of the show, ready to receive it with an open mind and all cylinders firing. I think this was our best one yet. I enlisted the help of three talented, energetic and totally fun scene design students from my alma mater, The Theatre School at DePaul, to create our dive bar, “Merle’s Place” - named, as is the Garage Theatre itself, in honor of Merle Reskin, a Steppenwolf board member and one of the strongest supporters around of Chicago theatre (we saved the Merle’s Place sign for her).
Merle’s had: a big old wooden, working bar (from the set of Steppenwolf’s Carter’s Way), awesomely mismatched tables and chairs (thanks to Jenny DiLuciano from the Steppenwolf prop shop - it’s so cool to walk around in there - it’s like Filene’s Basement on a lot of really good drugs), a ping pong table (we swiped the one that shows up from time to time around the rehearsal hall, depending on who is working on the show), crazy old Steppenwolf pictures on the walls (found in the marketing “cage”: an actual locked cage in the basement that has everything from photos to a poster comparing the socio-economic facts of Cuba & Minnesota - Sonia Flew, anyone? - to a couple of really heavy metal poles for the aforementioned wire walk that almost fell on me), AND The Jeffersons playing on the bar TV. And best of all, a hilarious walk-through of Mamet’s language, emceed by my pal Erica Daniels, Steppenwolf Casting Director with two amazing Chicago actors David Pasquesi and Kurt Ehrmann (Fran & Tracy’s understudy for American Buffalo). Not to mention the cheapest beer around… and a whole bunch of fun people who showed up that night. That WAS a cool place. So, keep your eyes open for Explore: The World of The Brother/Sister Plays. Until then, I gotta find a new place to hang.