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

It might seem like a stretch for any audience member under twenty. After all, Art centers on three middle-aged men approaching mid-life crises - and talking about the complexities of modern art while they’re at it. What could a group of high school students possibly relate to in this production?

And yet, just like the time I worried about our teens grasping the depth of The Seafarer or the unconventionality of Kafka on the Shore, the students proved my worry to be completely unnecessary. The group of 50 high school students who attended Art were not only engaged during the show, but also actively posed questions about the production after the curtain went down. I, once again, stood corrected. (more…)

If you plan to attend Steppenwolf’s production of Art, I suggest you be alert to a few clues provided by the playwright concerning the three friends who appear in the play:

1. Their professions: Serge is a dermatologist, Marc is an engineer, and Yvan is newly employed in a stationery business having worked in textiles his whole life. They are respectively involved with “the surface,” “the structure,” and “the feel.” These professions inform their world view.

2. Their art: Serge has just purchased the controversial piece of modern art at the center of the play – essentially a white canvas with subtle white lines. In Marc’s apartment hangs a traditional painting depicting a landscape seen through a window. And Yvan has a pleasing yet simple painting of geometric shapes and botanicals – notably painted by his father.

3. Their relationships: Serge is divorced from his wife and shares custody of their child, Marc is in a relationship with a woman named Paula, Yvan is engaged to be married to a woman named Catherine. Three various stages of a relationship: finished, ongoing, and beginning.

The play is deceptively simple, but Yasmina Reza layers in the indicators which help us understand the dynamics the three men are exploring.

I returned on Monday from London where we had brought a group of Steppenwolf supporters on a London theater tour. On our final day in London, we saw the Sunday matinee performance of August: Osage County at the National Theatre. It was remarkable. The cast was so fluid, so expressive and the play emerged with such clarity and intensity. Their time together has served the production mightily and I was impressed, once again, with the power of ensemble.

I had a similar experience recently when I returned to our production of The Seafarer. I have returned to the production during the course of its run and as time goes by, the ensemble grows tighter and the relationships grow deeper. I hear something new every time I see it because the actors are always subtly shifting in their emphases of character and language. (more…)

I was speaking recently to a class of college students, not surprisingly, about drama. I began by asking them, “What is theater?”

Dead silence.

“Okay, how many of you have ever been to a play?”

Mercifully almost all in the room raise a hand.

“Well, how did you know?”

Laughter and then ah, a light goes on, and the floodgates open “-there was a stage” “-there were actors” “-there was a story” “-it was live, not filmed”.

Before you know it we’ve come up with a reasonable working definition. Perhaps not heavy competition for Aristotle, but insightful nonetheless. Two things were of particular interest: First we agreed theater, and all art, is not an absolute, but part of a spectrum. That the question is not so much “what is theater”, as “when is theater”. We have a set of criteria, and at some point an event meets enough of those criteria to be classified as theater rather than as stand–up comedy, a concert, or a basketball game. Art is relative. Second, our criteria are heavily influenced by our own personal experience, opinions, and expectations, which may have little to do with the piece of art in front of us. (more…)

A month ago my feelings about delving into the research packet for Art mirrored the white expanse of the canvas Serge prizes in the play. As far as I could tell the idea of modern art, postmodern art, abstract expressionism and minimalism all ran together, a varied pallet of styles and philosophies that muddied into an inscrutable gray in my mind. I harbored a gentle frustration about such things from my college days, when a boyfriend of mine would be late to meet me because he was busily dragging a discarded toilet into the middle of a Chicago alley and filling it with tree detritus in the name of art. Sufficed to say Duchamp’s revolutionary work Fountain (a urinal decontextualized and signed by the artist, transforming the object into art) did not strike me. I probably was not alone in feeling secretly validated by Marc’s stance on Serge’s extravagant purchase. But research is thankfully neutral and so I’ve learned a number of things that have created an entirely new perspective for me on art, modern and otherwise.

Looking at the work of Robert Ryman, a style of painting very close to that of the fictional Antrios, I’ve come to appreciate the conversations the artist is having with the past. Ryman and other artists like him are instigating debates with their predecessors through the careful choice and implementation of their artistic tools. Ryman focuses on three things: the canvas stretcher, the textures of paint and the signature. With these tools he makes a statement about the essence of painting and reflects on its history. It struck me as I was reading about minimalists like Ryman that these pieces are an exciting multifaceted and active conversation, the kind of conversation we hope to have in the theater. Ryman’s work is bold and unique, his monochromatic paintings are iconoclastic. Yet through clear and definitive choices his paintings also conjure up the past. The earlier painters Ryman’s work responds to is brought into sharp focus, as he simultaneously nullifies what we think is true about painting while exploring its essential components. In the theatre we strive for the same things, hoping to make our mark as innovators while connecting with the work that’s come before us and helping to tell the story of what comes next. (more…)