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

The very concept of a blog is a little strange to me… The idea of recording your private thoughts as you would in a journal, but all the while knowing completely that there’s nothing private about the writing involved. It’s fixed up, polished, re-read and re-written several times over and then offered up to the public… Knowing this walking into it, it would be stupid to think that the writer isn’t just as worried about the ideas offered as they are of the personal impression left on the anonymous readers. It’s an imposed and developed ‘candid look’… So in that sense it can be incredibly hypocritical.

Though that would seem like an argument as to why people should leave blogs alone, it’s really the exact reason why I think that it complements the theater perfectly. It’s the same thing that we do for the stage.

We work and we work and we prepare and we discuss just how to make an impulse or a living breathing, and oftentimes very private moment ring true. Essentially we rehearse spontaneity, and the result is an applied truth. It’s biased. Polished… So in that sense the act of theater can also be hypocritical at times. (more…)