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

(John is the Marketing Director of Steppenwolf Theatre Company)

I HATE it when you find a cool bar to hang out at and it then it closes! HATE IT. You find the perfect place: not too yuppie, not too dirty hipster, just Chicago enough - with cool people and cheap drinks. Merle’s Place was like that. And now it’s closed. And it was only open one night. Uh… let me start a couple steps back: in our Explore series of events - five times a year, one for each play in the subscription series - we construct an immersive environment, so our audience can explore more deeply an aspect of the show. In the past, we have built a festival of fakes for Fake, an (attempted) wire walk across the roof of the garage for Up, and a hip art gallery in the Garage Theatre for Art. For American Buffalo, we turned that same Garage Theatre into a Chicago dive bar circa December 1975: a place where Teach and Donny might have hung out, drank cheap beer, played a lot of Skynyrd on the jukebox and bothered the other customers.

(more…)

When the director, Amy Morton, and I first met to discuss the costumes for American Buffalo, we talked about keeping the play within the period that it was written (the late 1970s). Technology has changed our world so much with cell phones and computers that plays like American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross can’t realistically be updated to contemporary dress. This is not to say the plays don’t speak to their audiences today… they do! The themes are universal and powerful even if the costumes the actors are wearing represent the world 20-30 years ago.

(more…)

Ensemble members Amy Morton, Tracy Letts and Francis Guinan with Patrick Andrews

See more rehearsal photos here.

Credit: Mark Campbell

One of the best parts of my job as Steppenwolf Literary Apprentice is creating Actor Research Packets. What is an actor research packet? Good question! An Actor Research Packet is research compiled to support and contextualize the world of the play for the actors. This research can be excerpts from stories, articles, films, photos, oral histories: anything that helps to add detail to the physical landscape and the themes of the play.

The American Buffalo research hunt was a wild ride full of twists, turns and surprises. I researched topics that ranged from pig iron to Mamet-speak to Thorstein Veblen. But by far my favorite research discovery was a quote from James Earle Fraser, designer of the Buffalo nickel, explaining why he chose this particular symbol:

(more…)

(Rehearsals for our next production, American Buffalo, started last week. Set Designer Kevin Depinet took a moment to share some of his research for the show, as well as a model of the set it inspired.)

During the design process for American Buffalo, we visited several junk and thrift stores across the city.  These two photos are of a junk Shop in Rogers Park called Lost Eras.

(more…)