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

According to recent article in the Chicago Tribune, 27 public school children have been murdered in Chicago this year.

This begins to approach the number of students killed at Virginia Tech in April. While our media was saturated with the Virginia Tech incident, the Tribune is the first major news outlet to cite these Chicago deaths en masse.

No, this posting will not be a diatribe about the prevalence of violence nor the debate over the right to bear arms in our culture. We are merely a theater site, after all. (more…)

Ensemble member and director of The Diary of Anne Frank Tina Landau and associate artistic director David New in conversation with guests at an event on May 6 co-sponsored with Gerber/Hart Library, the Midwest’s largest and most extensive library documenting the LGBT struggle.

The day that we staged and ran the ending of the play for the first time was a turning point for me. On that day I understood the story that we were telling and the Holocaust in a way that I had never understood it before. I remember standing in the rehearsal hall, looking at the pretend mess of a pretend home strewn across the boundaries of our pretend Secret Annex and I was overwhelmed by the thought that this was once real. The thought slammed into me, and nearly knocked me to the ground. I was overwhelmed by this terrifying awareness of the closeness of death, by the understanding that these people were so alive and then in a moment all promise of their future was torn from them. And then there was this literally unbelievable fact of history that there are people in the world who can do this to other people. There are thousands and thousands of individuals who WOULD and DID willingly inflict this unimaginable suffering on so many. I can’t fathom it. I can’t comprehend it as a truth. The thought literally won’t settle as fact in my mind, and thus keeps bouncing around, this haunting shadow, this menacing threat of reality. It haunts me, dark and foreboding, the way trying to imagine the death of my family members haunts me.

This was the experience that led me past my almost scientific “understanding” of the Holocaust, written in my mind in textbook figures of tragedy, horror and suffering. Since that day, I feel that I Understand it in a way that I never could have had it not been for this show. (more…)