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

First off, a quick introduction. Hi! I’m Patrick Holland. I’m a freelance theater director, and I’m serving as the Assistant Director on Fake. My job is basically to support and observe Eric Simonson, the director and playwright.

At this point in the process, we have left the cozy confines of our rehearsal hall. Back there, the set was imaginary. Instead of actual walls, pieces of tape were placed on the floor to indicate where the walls would be onstage. Think Les Nessman on WKRP in Cincinnati. Some of the props used in the rehearsal hall were real. The Piltdown Man skull we rehearsed with is the exact same prop the actors will use onstage in performance. Other props we used were simply stand-ins for the real ones. At one point, the actor Larry Yando ended up using a necktie as a camera strap while his real prop was being constructed. We all found him very silly wearing this temporary prop.

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Hi, I’m Gary Simmers and, for the upcoming production of Fake, I have the honor of understudying Francis Guinan and Alan Wilder. So this begs the question: what does an understudy do?

If you’ve been to prior productions, you may remember seeing a few non-descript people slipping in the back of the theatre just before the lights go down. You may also remember seeing these same folks disappearing quickly after the show is ended. Congratulations! You have seen an understudy in the wild!

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(Larry plays Charles Dawson and Henry Billings in Fake)

Every five or six years, Eric Simonson’s path and my own manage to cross. Just out of The Theatre School, Eric cast me in a project he was doing with Harry Lennix, The Kiss of the Spider Woman. Time passed. Roy Cohn in his Angels in America. Time. Mother Courage and Her Children at this theater… now, here again, Fake. And he wrote this one, too. Eric times x2. Exciting.

But any sense of the “familiar” or of a “history” on this project ends there.

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(Joy is Steppenwolf’s Literary Manager)

One of the things I love about my job is that it continually provides me with opportunities to learn about worlds I never would have seen otherwise. Yesterday morning was a perfect example: I accompanied a group of artists from Fake (director/playwright Eric Simonson, actor Al Wilder, and dramaturg Rebecca Rugg) to the Field Museum, where John McCarter, the museum president, took us on a two hour behind-the-scenes tour as research for the play. Al plays two different museum directors in Fake, so he had a number of questions for Mr. McCarter about his day-to-day responsibilities and the joys and stresses of the job.

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While I’ve always known the acting at Steppenwolf was marvelous, I’ve never worked on a project with any of the ensemble members. As I wrote in my last blog entry, I’m working as production dramaturg on Eric Simonson’s play, Fake, and it’s been such a pleasure. Today I want to write about one aspect of it that has surprised me, which is what it’s like to be in the rehearsal room with people who’ve logged a lot of hours there together over the years.

I’ve worked with ensemble companies who devise work together, but that’s a little bit of a different process from actors taking on characters who are already written when rehearsal begins. In working on a new play, the actor’s challenge is to discover and embody these people who previously have existed only on the page, in the author’s imagination. It’s so great to watch these people begin to move in space and become embodied.

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