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

I am looking forward to starting rehearsal on March 2nd for Endgame with Frank Galati directing. Frank is a hugely important influence in my life and, now, a dear friend. Some of my most singular experiences in the theater as an actor have been with Frank. When I was a graduate student in the Performance Studies department at Northwestern where Frank was a professor, he cast me in an adaptation he had created of Gertrude Stein’s novel, Ida. It was a wonderful experience. Frank has some kind of uncanny affinity for Stein’s voice and, since that production of Ida, he has adapted Stein’s work for the theater several times, to marvelous effect: She Always Said Pablo at the Goodman Theatre and Loving Repeating, first at Northwestern and then with About Face Theatre at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

My second experience with Frank was playing Lemon in Aunt Dan and Lemon at Steppenwolf. That play and production remain for me, magical. Marvelous ensemble members in the cast - Molly Regan, Rondi Reed, Tom Irwin, Al Wilder - and Frank, leading us all into the heart of Wallace Shawn’s strange, intense vision. The play is politically very provocative and the audience got… provoked. It was an experience of theater as an intense and meaningful place.

Next was a production of The Winter’s Tale at the Goodman Theatre. First to say, it’s a sublime play - so mysterious and beautiful, and to be given the opportunity to play Hermione under Frank’s direction was a remarkable gift. I remember so clearly one of the things Frank said about the play - and which I take to be deep instruction into the magic of the stage. If you remember, in The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare sets up an impossible theatrical demand: a “statue” of Hermione comes to life before Leontes’ (and the audience’s) eyes. The actress playing Hermione sits for a long time as the statue before being coaxed back into life. Rather than try to obscure that moment, Frank moved the action downstage, into closest proximity to the audience, to, as Frank put it, “pressurize” the tension between stillness and life, to push to the fore the question of belief. Frank used the vocabulary of the stage to amplify the truth that Shakespeare was proferring in the play: we believe what we see.

Finally, I played a role in Frank’s production of Don DeLillo’s Valparaiso. Valparaiso is one of thse Steppenwolf productions about which I have had people say both “that was my favorite play” and “I hated that. I had no idea what it was about!”

I love this about Frank: he takes on work that is intense, strange, beautiful, deep and he always assumes the highest intelligence in his audience. He believes in the theater as a place where we uncover our mysteries and he demands of himself the passion and highest craft to respect those mysteries.

I so look forward to starting rehearsal with him on Endgame. I get to be in the room with three other actors - Billy Petersen, Ian Barford, and Fran Guinan - whom I have known for over 20 years. To be together, with Frank, in contemplation of Endgame, this crazy profound play about the human comedy, is our next adventure.

This entry was posted by Martha Lavey on Monday, February 22nd, 2010 at 11:33 am and is filed under Endgame. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.