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

(James is the Lighting Designer for A Parallelogram. He shared with us his schedule and what he does at each stage of the production process when working on a Steppenwolf show)

Pre-production (February through late June): Lighting design is the alchemic member of the design department. Unlike scene, costume and sound designs, you can’t draw or make models of it, construct mock-ups, or hear it ahead of the actual time in the theatre. So in the pre-production phase, it’s important to assemble as much information about the play and how we are going to do it as we can.

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(Maria is a member of Steppenwolf For Young Adults‘ Young Adult Council)

Every year, TCG conference-goers have a discussion on how to better engage the next generation of theatre audiences, and much to their credit, they’ve come up with some great ideas (including Steppenwolf’s Young Adult Council). But not too long ago, Hallie Gordon, the Director of Steppenwolf for Young Adults, along with Rachel Fink, the Associate General Manager and Director at Berkeley Rep School of Theatre, and Willa Taylor, the Director of Education and Community Engagement at Goodman Theatre, came up with an idea: why not cut out the middleman and ask young adults directly what brings them to the theatre? For the first time this past June, there were teens in attendance at the TCG National Conference in Chicago. And I was one of them.

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(Claire is a member of Steppenwolf For Young Adults‘ Young Adult Council)

In October, the idea to send a teen delegation to the annual TCG conference was brought up by Hallie Gordon, the Director of Steppenwolf for Young Adults. The fact that we were eventually allowed to attend and had the privilege of leading a breakout session was a tremendous feat that I do not credit to us teens at all.

In the weeks leading up to the conference, I began obsessively Googling TCG and the conference. I memorized the schedule and labored over which breakout session I was going to attend (the amazing diversity of those breakout sessions and the affinity groups from which to choose didn’t make the decision easy).

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