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

I had the pleasure of conducting The Well-Appointed Room post-show conversation last Sunday. A focus of our conversation was the idea of “story.” We noted the way in which the play foregrounds the telling of stories. In the first half of the play, “Nostalgia,” the central character is a playwright, the creator of stories. He is, as well, a person who maintains a personal journal in which he writes the “story” of his life. In the second half of the play, “Prolepsis,” the central character acts as a narrator: he tells the story of his life directly to the audience. Within “Prolepsis,” two characters arrive to tell their life stories.

By foregrounding the act of storytelling, Richard Greenberg is drawing our attention to the “stories” we tell ourselves – our personal stories (in the form of journals and personal narratives); our cultural stories (in the form of plays); and, given the centrality of September the 11th, 2001 to the play, the story of our nation (our history). By interweaving these various strands of storytelling, and by bringing the storytellers into collision with one another, Richard is not only foregrounding story – he is problematizing storytelling. Which story, which stories are the truth? Which storytellers are reliable? Which form of the story is the most convincing?

We acknowledge, in our conversation, that The Well-Appointed Room, by presenting this dense network of stories (by, itself, offering itself up as a single play, but told as two separate stories), provides an interpretive challenge.

A woman in the audience, taking part in the post-show conversation, related that she is a frequent theater-goer. In addition to The Well-Appointed Room, she had recently seen two other new plays at other Chicago theaters: Caryl Churchill’s A Number at the Next Theatre, and Craig Wright’s Grace at Northlight Theatre. All three of these productions have received very good reviews (and having seen all three of the productions, I can happily endorse their quality). This woman was honest to say that all three of the plays in question were challenging. Just at the level of “what happened?,” the plays required interpretive effort. She was clearly a sophisticated theater-goer but she evinced a kind of wistfulness for a time when one could receive a story “with a beginning, a middle, and an end.” It felt less like a complaint, a corrective, than an acknowledgement that telling the contemporary story is necessarily complex (and, perhaps, less comforting).

I was grateful for her observation – I think it’s dead-on. As Richard Greenberg is proposing in The Well-Appointed Room, our narratives – of ourselves, of our world, and through our art – have been disrupted. It’s harder to tell who’s “right,” it’s harder to believe what we’re told, it’s harder to discern “the truth.” If we, as a theater, are to take seriously our role as a site for stories and storytelling, we will necessarily participate in the complexity of our collective narrative.

One of the things that emerged for me, in this conversation, was the uniqueness of live theater to both tell a story and to provide an interpretive community for story. At the theater, we can hang around afterwards and talk about what we just saw. You can talk with some of the folks who picked the plays, or acted in the plays, or work in the artistic department that makes the decision about how the plays are chosen and produced. In other words, you have direct access to the point of view from which the story issues.

This is why we have increased the opportunity for post-show conversation from two times a week to, next season, eight times a week (after every show). We are modest enough to know that we, at Steppenwolf, cannot make our collective story easier – a big part of our commitment, as a theater, is to the inventiveness of new artists. We are committed to relating the stories of how we live now, in the language of our most innovative artists.

What we can do is offer you an interpretive community. We can invite you to talk about what you have seen, to construct meaning with the input from the artists and staff responsible for the work. It’s been a great pleasure to engage in conversation with you. As an audience, you are so smart, so adventuresome, and so candid – it’s enormously fortifying to listen to you, in response to the work. I invite all of you to participate in the conversation. Stay for the post-show conversation, respond on the blog, send me an email. Take advantage of what Steppenwolf so happily offers to you – our best effort at starting a conversation about the way we live now and a great eagerness to entertain your engagement.

Watching the opening night performance of The Well-Appointed Room, I was struck by a phrase of dialogue found toward the end of each act, in each case uttered by the character played by Amy Morton, the essence of which is “in the unlikely event of a future.” It seemed at once a daring and sad thing to have characters say, and no doubt speaks to some of the urgency and anxiety Martha refers to in her previous posting.

But it also struck me as an extraordinary thing for a playwright to postulate. I have always thought of the creative act as one marked by ultimate optimism. If one believes the world is beyond hope, why create anything? I was struck by the irony that in theatre, except for closing night, there is always a future. The play will be performed on Friday, then again on Saturday, and again on Sunday and so on. So I wonder, do others find this play, and the storytelling contained in it, acts of optimism? How do you read the end of the play?

A brief note, in response to the question from Justin Palmer, we expect to announce our plays for this summer’s First Look Rep within the next month. For those unfamiliar with the Rep: we present developmental productions of three brand new plays in rotating rep in the Garage. Last year, we offered unprecedented access to the development/rehearsal process to the members of our First Look Council. We expect to expand this in the coming year to give others the same opportunity. Watch these pages for details in the next month or two.

It’s very exciting to have after the quake and The Well-Appointed Room running at the same time at Steppenwolf and be able to participate in the post show discussions for both shows. The plays are very different from one another – in tone, in production style, in their treatment of language and character – and yet the discussions they create share common themes.

The stories in after the quake were motivated by the Kobe earthquake in 1995. The two plays that comprise The Well-Appointed Room were written in response to the events of September the 11th, 2001. Both works register the after-shocks of these large cultural events on individual lives of those who have endured their disruptive force. Not insignificantly, both after the quake and The Well-Appointed Room use the crucible of a love relationship to examine the deepest tremors of these massive world events. And, not insignificantly, both works contain the presence of a child – the impressionable and innocent consciousness, the next chapter of the story.

The resonances of these two plays – especially striking, given their concurrent runs – begins to echo back to our opening production, Last of the Boys. Here, too, a central cultural event – the Vietnam War – is the instigating event for what becomes an examination of the effects of that war on individual lives. And here, too, that examination is cast in multi-generational terms: both a daughter and a son represent the living legacy of a culture torn asunder.

This is fascinating to me – to discover a set of themes and motifs in this season’s work. When we designed this season, our dedication was to present new work, to mark the 30th anniversary of Steppenwolf by looking forward. We did not thematize the work itself – we just wanted to find rich, fresh voices that spoke to the way we live now. Compelling, then, that in doing so, we discover stories of a great disruption – a great disruption and its afterlife. All of the plays display a profound sense of urgency, a sense that something has been broken and needs repair (or at least address) for the story to continue. And the story, very importantly, is the story of human connection.

I would love to hear your thoughts about this theme – a theme that is emerging in our post-show discussions. Is this the story of ALL time? Would we find ourselves discussing the quake/the attack/the war 20 years ago? Was this the sensibility of America in 1986? Would the story-of-the-times have been this common anxiety? What would the story have been in 1966? (I choose those 20-year intervals because 20 years is typically cited as “a generation” and, typically, cultural trends are said to recur every 20 years).

I guess one of the questions I am asking is: do we learn? Is “progress” a story we tell ourselves? (or do the permutations in the way the story plays out represent real change?) I don’t know the answers to these questions – I simply find them provoked by the work on stage and your engagement with it. I would love to hear your thoughts.