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

Psst. Hey. Hey, you. Theatre geek. Yes, you. I know you’re a theatre geek, or you wouldn’t be reading the blog on the Steppenwolf website. If you’re a hockey geek, you’d be looking at another website. I’ve got a little inside poop, something we “theatre ah-tists” aren’t supposed to share. And if you’re a fellow theatre ah-tist, stop reading this now; go read BJ Jones’s blog at the Northlight website today, cause this isn’t for you. This is for YOU, theatre geek.

Here’s the poop: actors aren’t always thinking about the play WHILE WE’RE PERFORMING IT. Sometimes we’re thinking about laundry. Sometimes we’re thinking about a hot dog. Sometimes we’re thinking about Sophia Loren. And sometimes we’re thinking about Sophia Loren eating a hot dog while she does her laundry. (more…)

Betrayal is painful. It hurts when someone you love is lying to you. But, sometimes confronting the “truth” proves too complicated and even more dangerous than lying. So…LET THE GAMES BEGIN !!! It’s interesting to me to hear what story people believe to be true. There are many lies told in this play and it’s fascinating to hear the variety of interpretations of “the truth”. In Pinter’s marvelously subjective puzzle, the audience gets to put the pieces together by catching a glimpse of the end of the story at the beginning of the play. This provides a kind of template of the story for them to fill in as the play moves forward - backward in time.

There is a great deal of stillness in the acting of this material. It’s essentially people sitting or standing and talking to each other. For me, one of the remarkable aspects of this is what you find in your partner’s EYES. How often we catch each other’s eyes in an arrested moment of truth and then cower away behind our manipulations and needs. (more…)

We opened our production of Betrayal on Superbowl Sunday. (Fortunately timed to precede kick-off). It’s been wonderful to sit outside of the production, watching it develop (and not have to be inside of it, acting and living the reality of its pain).

Any actor or director would know what I’m talking about. A weird thing happens when one invests deeply in a play as an actor or director. No matter how committed one is to keeping the play a play (and life, life), there is an unavoidable overlap. The phrase I always use is that one becomes “weathered under” the emotional atmosphere of the play. To become weathered under an atmosphere of betrayal is…rough sledding. Betraying a domestic partner is both wildly exciting (all of that sneaking around, all of that pressure of time for the stolen moments) and hugely heartbreaking (there is some fundamental disappointment fueling the entire enterprise). Awakening those peak experiences through the vehicle of the knife-like consciousness of a playwright like Harold Pinter is…rough sledding. (When I talked to the actors at the end of the first week of rehearsal they all said, “It’s great. It’s really hard.”) (more…)

Tech. The point in the process where lights, set, costumes, music, acting all meet up on the stage and have a rumble. This show has 9 scenes which means 8 transitions. Most directors will tell you that transitions can really kill a great play if not done well. Because it moves back and forth in time these transitions involve full costume changes which must be accomplished stupidly fast. So, in trying to get these transitions to look graceful and happen as quickly as possible, we must practice them over and over and over and over and over and over and over. At the end of last night I estimated that I had changed my clothes 27 times. I’m too old for this.

OK, enough of my bitch-fest.

The design elements are beautiful and Rick Snyder has done a masterful job of staging some very difficult transitions. This is a three character play with ten people working backstage making it all look like a snap. They are bloody great and we are very lucky to have them on this show. (more…)