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

I want to tell you about my love affair with Chicago actors.

Madison– the magician musician. I loved Madison the minute I heard him play guitar. Madison is tall and lanky. I love a tall man. He takes his shirt off in the play, and he’s all sinew. He plays guitar. Of course I love him. He is soulful and sad, and he plays Tommy who is soulful and sad. Madison makes music all the time—you can just say, Madison, play something, and he can. In the rehearsal room, he’s restless and unsatisfied, and only comes to stillness when he traces his long fingers over the strings.

Judy Blue is my love. Judy is soft where Madison is solid. Strawberry blonde with alarmingly blue eyes, she is genteel as a Tennessee Williams heroine—and just as tough. She’s shy when she steps up to the microphone to sing her solo—I don’t know why because her voice is powerful and full of truth and pain—but her modesty is so disarming that I love her for it. She never stops working on the character she plays. She never hurries. She has the dignity of royalty. I bet she makes a great pie. (more…)

Melinda Lopez’s blog (posted July 19) re her play Gary certainly was timely. It allows me to riff on her comments about creating a play and the music in it — where things are more improv than planned.

For me, as she wrote/mapped the play, the importance of music became a planned element, no longer improv.

When we 101ers heard the first reading of Gary on June 4, Ed read the stage directions, “Fugue. Scene 1. The Beginning.” Then the actors spoke…

Along about Scene 8, I started recognizing that the scene titles weren’t the traditional kind — a location and the time of day and or season — and that some also were musical terms. I began writing them down. At the same time, I realized that “Fugue” might be the play’s subtitle (if you will). (more…)

Lauren Katz and ensemble member Kate Arrington in rehearsal for When the Messenger Is Hot.

I studied piano for twelve years, but I can’t play. I mean, I can read music. If you put music in front of me, I can read it — I know how to get it to sound like music, but I can’t create music. I can’t play. I can’t cook. I am great with a recipe, even adventurous if I have one to follow. I’m great at following directions. But I can’t cook. I always follow maps. I check off the signposts, and always get to where I am supposed to — the waterfall, the landmark, the city. But I don’t explore, and I don’t make my way.

I love adventurers. I married one. My husband has been known to pull the map out of my hand and shout — “Look around! See where you are! Read the landscape.” Once he told a forest ranger in Yosemite, “I don’t need a guide book. I’ll write the guidebook.” He isn’t afraid of making his way. He isn’t afraid of anything. Not being lost, not cooking a bad meal. He listens to the land; he smells the spices. He creates something new. (more…)

Steppenwolf’s Director of New Play Development Ed Sobel was recently presented with the Elliot Hayes Award by the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas for outstanding contribution to the field of literary management and dramaturgy in recognition of his work on our First Look Repertory of New Work. What follows is an excerpt from his acceptance speech.

I’ll freely confess to being enough of an artist, or having sufficient ego, that when someone gives me a platform, I feel a responsibility to say something worthwhile, or at least mildly provocative and not tranquillizing…

I am not the first to point out we have to recognize there has been a fundamental change in our culture in the last 15 or 20 years, primarily due to technological and economic forces: the rise of the internet, YouTube, Tivo, DVDs, cell phones, fluctuations in the GNP, competition for sparse dollars and flitting attention for the social good, hurricanes, acts of terrorism and acts of war, the almost complete lack of arts education in schools for the last twenty-five years. Rail against as many of these we wish, they are facts of life. And we ignore them at our peril. (more…)