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

This past Tuesday evening after work, I had the pleasure of meeting Graeme Maley, Artistic Director of the Liverpool New Writer’s Theatre. Graeme was seeing our production of Love Song and I met him for a drink beforehand. Graeme’s theatre shares Steppenwolf’s commitment to supporting the work of playwrights and the development of new work. Graeme was visiting Chicago on his way to Appleton, Wisconsin to do research for a play he is developing with playwright Ronan O’Donnell about the life and art of Harry Houdini. The play will be performed in Liverpool in 2008, the year that Liverpool has been chosen to be the European Capital of Culture.

After a lively discussion with Graeme, I went to meet novelist Cormac McCarthy at the corner of Halsted and North Avenue to escort him to the first rehearsal of his play, The Sunset Limited. We entered the rehearsal hall and met the actors, Austin Pendleton and Freeman Coffey, the director Sheldon Patinkin, the stage manager and understudies. After general introductions and a welcome to the theatre, I left them to the business of the first table reading of the play.

I crossed the street from the rehearsal hall to the theatre and proceeded to the Upstairs Theatre where the production of Don Delillo’s play, Love-Lies-Bleeding was in technical rehearsals. Onstage were the actors - Martha Lavey, John Heard, Penelope Walker, Louis Cancelmi, and Larry Kucharik. The creative team was working on the transitions between scenes and finessing the timing of lights and sound with the movement of the actors. I watched for about 45 minutes as director Amy Morton and the designers worked with tremendous sensitivity to get the cues just right. I slipped out of the dark theatre and down the elevator to the Downstairs Theatre lobby. When the elevator doors opened the lobby was abuzz with pre-show activity as the audience moved into the theatre to watch the performance of Love Song.

As I stepped out into the spring evening, I was struck by the fact that I had just visited three productions of plays at three stages of development – beginning, middle, and end. The creative process was churning throughout the buildings of Steppenwolf. I recalled my conversation with Graeme and realized that the first step with all three of these new plays, was the commitment to new play development.

Best of luck, Graeme!

Tomorrow: the staff run-through. (I’m writing this entry on Wednesday evening, 19 April) The staff run-through is the moment when the rehearsal process goes public. During the first three weeks or so of the rehearsal, the only people in the room are the cast, the director and his or her assistant, and stage management. On the Thursday before tech – the move from the rehearsal room and into the theater – the staff and designers attend a run-through of the show. It’s always a precarious-feeling moment for the cast – very exposing. A show is, variously, well-on-its-way to very much in-process. And as an actor in the show, it’s never entirely clear where on that continuum your show sits. The staff run-through becomes a kind of barometer of that progress.

The purpose of the staff run-through is to give, first, the designers, a chance to see the show in space and time. As to space: the set designer is watching the actors move through the space – observing transitions, calculating the traffic of the stage against the space s/he has created. The costume crew is plotting the costume changes (how much time do we have for each change; where are the actors during each change?). The lighting and sound designers and their technicians are watching both the geography of the stage movement and its timing. And the properties crew (part of the set design team), is tracking the use of furniture, hand props and consumables – food, drink, and whatever props (newspapers, envelopes, items that get broken) will need replacement or maintenance. None of this information should be coming as a terrible surprise to the designers or production crew – they have been receiving daily rehearsal reports from stage management that tracks all of these concerns – but it is the staff run-through that makes those notes visible and vivid.

For the theater’s non-production staff – artistic, marketing, and development – the staff run-through provides the feeling-tone of the play (which they have, thus far, received as a written text and in a single previous read-through of the play). They see the style of the play, the pitch of the performances, the abstraction of a play text and a roster of actors becomes a living, feeling reality. The performance of the play that they receive in this early run-through provides the information they need to talk about the show to their various constituencies – box office, press, patrons. The artistic staff, and whatever ensemble members are in town, watch the run-through and the following week and a half of previews in order to respond to the director – giving him/her notes in an effort to clarify and refine the production.

After the staff run-through, the actors leave the room (much relieved to have gotten through it) and the director sits down with the designers and the production staff to discuss what they learned and prepare themselves for tech. This meeting is orchestrated by our production manager (Al Franklin) who goes through questions from each department (sets, lights, costumes, sound) to understand their issues and concerns. The director answers their questions, clarifying intent, resolving questions. Again, these resolutions are abstract – it is in tech, when the show moves to the actual theater space, when the production is given body.

The passage from the rehearsal room to tech, through previews and on to opening night is an amazing transformation that involves scores of people, tremendous concentration, and hours of time. It’s ridiculously intensive in terms of the use of human resources. And it’s what makes the theater such a blast and so valuable a human endeavor. There’s just no way that the work of creating a production can be accomplished in the abstract, in virtual space or time. A lot of people have to spend hours together in a closed room, a darkened theater, working over and over the execution of tasks that will produce… magic! Be it the magic of human emotion, the magic of a 20-second costume change, the magic of a scene change that transforms one environment into another, the magic of rain on stage, the lighting that creates the passage of time, the magic of an emotional shift orchestrated through sound.

The most accurate metaphor is birth – a lot of labor and then… (if we’re lucky) a miracle: a beautiful being with a life of its own. The staff run-through begins that labor process – we go public with the pregnancy we have been nurturing in the privacy of our rehearsal room home. To give our play to the world.

We’ve just completed our second week of rehearsals. Our rehearsal schedule was a little wonky. We backed up our first day to the Friday before March 28th to accommodate the schedule of one of our actors. After he was cast in Love-Lies-Bleeding, John Heard was cast in an episode of 20 Questions that was scheduled to shoot March 28th through March 31st. Not wanting to lose John from our cast, we added the extra rehearsal days before his shoot so that we could all start rehearsals together with the playwright, Don DeLillo. Then John would go away for his TV shoot and those of us remaining would continue to rehearse scenes in which he does not appear.

What originally appeared to be a blip in our plans turned out to be a perfect adaptation to the play’s needs. John plays Alex, a character who has suffered a stroke and appears in the present tense of the play in a compromised physical state, and, in flashback, in a state of wellness. So he is both a presence and an absence in the play. Our revised rehearsal schedule accommodated this reality of the play: we began rehearsals with John present and then, like the characters of the play, we experienced his disappearance. With John gone, we, the remaining actors, worked on the scenes in which his character is incapacitated (and in which condition, is played by another actor). By the time that John returned to rehearsals, those of us playing his family members (referred to in the play, aptly, as “the three survivors”), had formed a bond among ourselves. Somehow, this rehearsal dynamic appropriately feeds into the psychological dynamic of the play. (We have our secrets and he has his mystery.)

I think the experience that we are all having of the play is one of ever-deepening discovery. Because Don is such a thoughtful, skilled, and profound writer, the play disclosed itself in surprising (and hugely gratifying) ways. We find ourselves stitching back and forth between the situation of the play and our personal life experiences upon which the play touches. This is pretty standard practice for a rehearsal process – an enormous amount of self is disclosed in building the connection between the actors and director of the play and the text. The more comfortable the room, the more willing the collaborators are to be searching in their connection to the play, and the more personal and specific the work becomes. This, in the end of all, is the real value of our actor-based, ensemble theater. The culture of repeated creative relationships that foregrounds the actor in the theatrical process produces a rehearsal room that is collectively owned, that is fundamentally democratic and embracing.

Something else I want to mention in regard to the dynamic of the rehearsal room: as you would expect, present in the room are the actors and the director. The director generally has an assistant, in this case, Brant Russell who himself is a young director. The understudies for the cast come to rehearsals when they can (there is a designated minimum attendance to which they are contracted).

Perhaps less known to those of you who have not experienced a rehearsal process is the presence of the stage managers. Steppenwolf is hugely fortunate to have a group of stage managers who work regularly at our theater and have done so for many years. The stage managers are crucial in setting the tone of the room. In the case of Steppenwolf productions (and we are hugely fortunate in being able to provide this), we have a Production Stage Manager (PSM), an Assistant Stage Manager (ASM), and a Stage Management apprentice. In rehearsal, these three folks sit behind a table (with the director usually sitting nearby) and they manage all of the physical realities of the show. Before rehearsals begin (the “pre-production” week), they tape out the set (to its precise dimensions) on the rehearsal room floor. Throughout the rehearsal process, they fastidiously track the use of every prop, they orchestrate the physical reality of every scene change, and they track every costume change (and its timing). It is their responsibility to provide the link between the magic of the imaginary space of the play into the physical reality of the stage. Every stage manager on earth has a stopwatch around his/her neck and a tackle box full of tape measures, spiking tape, and a host of tools (and pain relievers). Stage managers are the amazing link – the folks who keep grounding the ephemera of theater to the space and time of the theater. Their personalities and their style – the way they “call the show” – are fundamental components in the making and the maintenance of the theatrical act. Steppenwolf is blessed to have stage managers so sensitive to the artistic process and so committed to the ensemble process. To our stage managers on Love-Lies-Bleeding: Malcolm Ewen, Christine Freeburg, and Kathleen Petroziello, all hail. And thanks.

We’ve just completed our third day of rehearsal for Don DeLillo’s new play, Love-Lies-Bleeding. Don is here in town with us for these first days of rehearsal. Amy Morton is directing, with John Heard, Louis Cancelmi, Penelope Walker, Larry Kucharik, and myself in the cast.

For the first two days, we read through the script at the table. On the first day, as is customary, we read the play straight through. After the first read-through, again, as customary, we begin reading through the play, stopping and starting to ask questions, clarify intentions, query meaning. With a new play, if one is lucky as we are, to have the writer present, we can go directly to the source. The trick for the actors is not to feel inhibited – not to worry that one’s questions are stupid or obvious or totally off the point. (the trick for the writer, (my guess), is to neither despair at the learning curve required nor feel marginalized by this group who suddenly seem to feel an ownership over what had felt to be one’s own work). Don is modest and generous in the task – and also clear and strong in his point of view.

The great gift for me, in walking into a rehearsal room at Steppenwolf, is feeling like I am at home. I’ve never been directed by Amy but I have acted in plays with her numerous times (the first time, in a Remains Theatre production of Keith Reddin’s Big Time, in 1986. So, Amy and I have known one another as actors, for 20 years). Don and I met originally when he visited Steppenwolf for our production of Libra which John Malkovich adapted and directed for the stage. I came to know him better when I acted in his play Valparaiso, which Frank Galati directed on the Steppenwolf stage in 2000. So I feel a comfort in communicating with him.

Louis went through the School at Steppenwolf and then acted in our Garage production of Until We Find Each Other. Penelope, I had met before but not worked with. I’d not met John Heard before but I’d seen him act – most memorably, for me, in the movie After Hours. So in that weird (and wonderful) way that the acting community provides, we had a language, right at the jump.

Today, Amy began staging. This is always a woozy moment. Somehow, the move from the table to the rehearsal floor (on which the stage managers tape out the dimensions of the stage) feels huge. (”ooooow, What do I do with my body?”) I’m sure that anybody watching would think, “what’s the problem? Just move around, do the play.” But the inhabitation of the play, in body and voice and amid the real objects of a world, changes everything. Where one stands while saying line X utterly colors the nature of an exchange. (If I’m looking at my scene partner, I feel one thing. If I’m avoiding looking at him, I feel another). I feel incredibly lucky to have Amy as our guide. She is unerring in her nose for how to make the work active. Underlying all of her direction is the query, “what do you want?” What do you want and what are you willing to do to get it? That’s the drama.