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

This week we entered week 3 of rehearsals. Normally this would seem like a luxurious amount of time, but because of our casting issues (we didn’t have a full cast until week 2) and since we are currently missing Amy Morton from our midst (due to her moving the play Love Lies Bleeding - of which she is the director - to the Kennedy Center in D.C.)… we’ve needed all the time we can get.

I have a fairly high metabolic rate - people tell me that I give off a lot of heat, that my body temperature seems to run a little too high, and I have a tendency to sit in the rehearsal room and twitch with impatience. When I write, I do so partly from the perspective of the actor, hoping that the way that I have heard something in my head will be instinctively understood by them, so when that does not occur - when I seem to have made myself obscure rather than clear and the actors are valiantly struggling to decode my meaning - I feel hapless and impotent and make life in the rehearsal room a living hell with my irritable, squinting presence. That is why I pity our actors and Anna, our director, this week. As they get off book (lines memorized) and approach a real performance of the play things begin to jell, and those parts that don’t jell quite as quickly become fixations for me. (more…)

I have just returned from Washington DC where the Steppenwolf production of Don DeLillo’s Love-Lies-Bleeding opened at the Kennedy Center last night. The cast and crew had a two week hiatus after the production closed in our Upstairs Theatre at the end of May. The set was shipped down to Washington and reconstructed on the stage of the Center’s Terrace theatre. The director, Amy Morton, the designers, the stage management team, and the actors then arrived to begin rehearsals in the new space. At the opening performance last night, it was interesting to see the show performed in a different theatre space. The terrace theatre has a seating capacity of 500 as opposed to our Upstairs Theatre’s 300. It is difficult to describe, but the dimensions and dynamics of the space effect how a play is received. In this case, the production is very well matched to the space. You can take a virtual tour of the theatre here and see where our actors are performing. We wish them a good run.

We begin the final weekend of performances for Love-Lies-Bleeding at Steppenwolf today. Tech rehearsals at the Kennedy Center start on June the 15th, and we open the show in the Terrace Theatre at the Kennedy Center on Sunday, June the 18th. We will do eight shows the following week, closing on Sunday June the 25th. I’ll be very interested to see if audiences in Washington respond to the show differently in any way from our Steppenwolf Chicago audiences.

Over the years, we have taken a number of shows to other cities, nationally and internationally. The venues have ranged from the large commercial houses on Broadway; to large, subsidized theaters like the National Theatre and the Barbican Theatre in London; to international festivals in Ireland and Australia; to the smaller houses of off-Broadway; to other regional theaters in the United States like the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, or most recently, the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut. (more…)

We opened Love-Lies-Bleeding last Sunday night, May the 7th, so we’ve just finished our first week of our regular run. It’s great to be playing for audiences and to engage in post-show conversations about the play. This is a play that provokes rich conversations – deeply felt, philosophically complex conversation. I have been enlightened about aspects of the play by comments from our audience. As much as I have been engaged with the play, the insights of people receiving the play for the first time in performance can show me connections that have eluded me.

I find this delightful. One obvious fact of this dynamic is that an audience sees the play in a way that I cannot, being in it. You see the entire trajectory of the play, you watch connections between characters (and add those up) in a way that I cannot. You see the entire impact of the show’s design – the play of light, the geometry of the stage picture, the orchestration of sound, light and movement. For heaven’s sake: you see what I look like (in my costume, in my body language and movement) in a way that I cannot. And you see that for each of the actors (in a way that I cannot, and in a way that they cannot). So while I may know the text of the play more intimately than you, having lived with it for longer, you know the total theater of the show better than I, because you are sitting in the cat bird’s seat. (more…)

We just finished our first weekend of previews. We’ll rehearse again on Wednesday and Thursday with previews beginning again Thursday evening. We may have a rehearsal call on Friday as well. We open on Sunday, May the 7th.

Don saw the show for the first time on Saturday night. It’s always nerve-wracking to perform with the playwright in the audience. One wants to get the words right. (So of course, I flubbed a couple of lines that I never muffed previously.) When Don returned for Sunday’s show, I was less burdened by the force of his presence. If the pressure of the playwright’s presence is heavy on the actors, it is more so for the director. Amy was admittedly nervous about Don seeing the show. Don is an incredibly gracious person but my goodness, he’s Don DeLillo, honored American writer. And because he is a novelist more prominently than he is a playwright, he is accustomed to being the sole author of his work. A play requires the interpretive community of the director, the actors, and the production staff. He releases the play into our hands – will our work please him? (more…)