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

(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.

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(Stephen is the Artistic Director of XIII Pocket; he is writing and directing Adore as part of the Visiting Company Initiative Garage Rep)

Over the last few years, I’ve been lucky enough to work here at Steppenwolf as an actor several times, and now because of their new Garage Rep series, I’ve been given the chance to tell this particular story from the other end, as both a writer and a director. I couldn’t be more grateful for the opportunity, and I couldn’t think of a bolder and more volatile story to come out swinging with…

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