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

What an exciting moment in our cultural life. We are on the precipice of a change in our national leadership. America is dreaming its future. Steppenwolf celebrates this moment with a season of the imagination. We offer five stories that feature the power of the imagination in shaping our identity, creating our future, determining our reality.

We begin with Frank Galati’s adaptation and direction of novelist Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, featuring ensemble members Francis Guinan and Jon Hill. Murakami’s powerful and popular novel is brought to theatrical life in Frank’s incisive adaptation. Kafka on the Shore is a young man’s coming of age story in contemporary Japan–a landscape in which cats talk, Johnnie Walker lives, and the world reveals itself in a series of dreams and memories.

We follow with Conor McPherson’s brilliant new play, The Seafarer, featuring John Mahoney. On Christmas Eve, in a disheveled basement flat in Dublin, the Devil walks in the door and challenges the motley group of men assembled there to a card game. At stake is the soul of Sharky, a middle-aged man in review of his life. With great humor and deep feeling, McPherson explores the horizon of our dreams and the power of personal transformation. (more…)