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

(Polly is the Director of Artistic Development at Steppenwolf)

Recently I got obsessed with Dexter, that cable show about a serial killer who kills bad guys. After watching four seasons in about two weeks (I said obsessed), I found myself stressed out, worrying about Dexter, would he get away with it? I was rooting for him. Good storytelling will often put us in surprising emotional and intellectual states. I find it even more powerful when this happens in theater, when we imagine ourselves in places we’ve never been or identify with outsiders completely unlike us. In theater, I like to think of those emotions as almost tactile: we feel them because we’re in such close proximity to the living, breathing actor.

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(Seth is co-director and co-deviser with Devon de Mayo on The Twins Would Like To Say, part of the Visiting Company Initiative Garage Rep)

In the above photo, Brandon is manipulating a puppet on an overhead projector as Kasey looks on, laughing, and Millie diligently watches the screen. It is a literally “behind-the-scenes” look at Dog & Pony’s The Twins Would Like To Say, which I co-directed and co-wrote with Devon de Mayo, and which opened on Sunday.

Kasey prepares the next puppet to enter the frame, while Brandon aligns his body to carefully lift a cutout heart, as Millie gets ready for a transition to blackout which she accomplishes with two pieces of cardboard.

It’s a dance of paper and light, made with hands and eyes in rigorous synchronicity.

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(Aaron is the Lighting Designer of The Twins Would Like to Say, part of the Visiting Company Initiative Garage Rep)

In designing the lights for The Twins Would Like to Say, the co-directors and I focused on the two worlds where the play takes place. The voluntarily mute twin girls, June and Jennifer Gibbons, grew up in Wales, in the 1960s and ‘70s, isolated from everyone but each other. But they were also prolific writers, creating vast stories and novels set in an idealized United States. From the twins’ perspective, Wales was sleepy and drab, it’s always fall, always chilly, always boring. Contrast this with their vivid imagination, vibrant and colorful, their dreams of a California life full of energy and excitement.

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(David is the Costume Designer for punkplay, a part of the Visiting Company Initiative Garage Rep)

It’s almost 2am, and I find myself sitting on the floor of my apartment, surrounded by half-empty cans of spray paint, a roll or two of duct tape, a defaced Beatles t-shirt, what appears to be contents of at least three “junk drawers” and something that fell off of a streetlight that I’m using to create a makeshift leg brace for an expatriate of French Canada. When I wake up tomorrow, I will insert zippers in the side seams of a pair of blue jeans so that the actor can remove his pants without taking off his roller skates during a simultaneous costume-and-hair quick change that needs to clock in at five seconds or less.

punkplay tech begins in four days.

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(Stephen is the Artistic Director of XIII Pocket; he is writing and directing Adore as part of the Visiting Company Initiative Garage Rep)

Over the last few years, I’ve been lucky enough to work here at Steppenwolf as an actor several times, and now because of their new Garage Rep series, I’ve been given the chance to tell this particular story from the other end, as both a writer and a director. I couldn’t be more grateful for the opportunity, and I couldn’t think of a bolder and more volatile story to come out swinging with…

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