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

We completed our run of Love-Lies-Bleeding at the Kennedy Center on Sunday, June the 25th. In total, we did 11 performances – from Saturday, June the 17th through our closing on Sunday, the 25th. We were there at the invitation of the Kennedy Center as the inaugural production in their New Fund for American Plays initiative. We performed in the Terrace Theatre, a 472-seat proscenium on the Rooftop level of the Center.

I had a terrific time doing the Kennedy Center run. For one thing, it’s been awhile since I have had the experience of centering my days around the day’s performance(s). When I am in a play at Steppenwolf, my day is split between life as the artistic director, and my life as an actor. That split life is an enormous privilege – and a deep pleasure – but there is a particular charm in thinking exclusively as an actor. This is especially true when the site of the performance is a city as rich in urban and cultural life as Washington, D.C. We stayed at the George Washington University Inn in Foggy Bottom, close to the Kennedy Center and so strolled by the Watergate Hotel on our walk to the theater every night. Georgetown was a short walk away and it was an easy hop onto the Metro to reach the Mall (with all of its great memorials and museums). (more…)

This weekend we began technical rehearsals for The Unmentionables. This is the painstaking but satisfying process during which all of the design elements (lights, sound, set, costumes) are brought together with the actors, as the production begins to take on the full life it will have in front of an audience.

For a new play, it is a particularly unpredictable process. Imagine trying to drive a car that has been designed but no one has ever driven before. Will the ignition actually fire the engine? Will the brakes work? (more…)

As the cast of The Unmentionables spends their last day in the rehearsal hall before moving over to the theatre, the technical crews for that show are busy onstage having just completed running a forty-minute rain sequence. Actual rain - onstage. Even as the exciting preparations for The Unmentionables move forward, this weekend three Steppenwolf productions will have their final performance. Sunday will mark the closing of The Sunset Limited in our Garage Theatre, Red Light Winter at the Barrow Street Theatre in New York City, and Love-Lies-Bleeding at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. Both Red Light Winter and Love-Lies-Bleeding were produced here in Chicago before moving on to their out of town runs. So as we gear up for our conversations about The Unmentionables – and given the way Bruce Norris writes plays, they should be exciting – I offer any of our blog readers out there to comment on any the three closing productions. Did any of our readers see the same production in two cities? Any final thoughts? Memories? Highlights?

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…)

We have begun rehearsals for Bruce Norris’ play The Unmentionables. Following his series of postings on his journey in Africa, Guilt Trip, we’ve asked him to continue sharing some thoughts during the process.

June 4

Putting a new play together often becomes a form of crisis management, and when things go well you always have to remind yourself not to get too cocky since the next big tumble is just waiting to happen.

I don’t often write plays with particular actors in mind. Usually I’m composing something out of voices that arrive from some strange region of my brain, but in some cases - and this is particularly true with The Unmentionables - I hear the sounds of certain actors’ speech. In this case, since the play was being written as a commission for Steppenwolf, and since I have had the luxury of working with a number of those actors over the last few years (some for much longer), it is those particular voices that rattled around in my head. Well… and I don’t want to make too much of it, but as we’ve grown closer to the start of rehearsals (today is day 3) we began experiencing some… attrition… of the Steppenwolf ensemble members who had originally chosen to participate. These choices were made by the actors for wholly understandable reasons (health, family, financial), so one can’t hold it against them, exactly, but nine days before we began we lost another actor from the company after already having lost one some months ago, and then yesterday, the second day of rehearsal, we lost another. We now have a superb replacement, (Rick Snyder) but it takes a bit of confidence (which I lack) to try to figure out just how adaptable a play is or whether its success was dependent on the actors available at a moment in time. So this week, I’ve been in a bit of a panic. (more…)