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

(Lynette is a writer living in Chicago. Her column, The Scheme of Spaces, appears monthly at isgreaterthan.net)

“…Where there is a cleavage that is sharp, the thing and its outside are distinct entities - they function individually as wholes - but they do not function together as a larger whole. In this case the world is split… where there is ambiguous space between them, the two entities are individually entire, as before, but they are also entire together as a larger whole. In this case the world is whole.” - “Pattern 249 Ornament,” from A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander

The set design of Lisa D’Amour’s timely and darkly comedic play Detroit at Steppenwolf Theatre consists of the backyards of two houses. One house is brick, one clapboard. There are leaves in the gutters and a torn storm door screen at one house. The other has a stuttering sliding glass door and a cement pad patio that is pulling up from the edges. One house is lived in, the other has been vacant and is recently newly occupied. The grass is maybe a little more beat up at the brick house, but at first glance the differences between the two structures are not dramatic. The set is realistic and meticulously crafted. I saw the play with my niece who was visiting from St. Louis, “It looks like a street in your neighborhood,” she said about the set.

(more…)

(Tony is the Assistant Dramaturg of Detroit)

Locusts saw through the sound system in Yondorf Rehearsal Hall. Afternoon light falls. And when the play begins, neighbors engage each other with atypical small talk at a dinner beside a burning backyard grill. We’re in week three of rehearsal for Detroit, a stunning new play by Lisa D’Amour.

The play reminds me so much of growing up in the Midwest. I am a Chicago transplant from Omaha, Nebraska. Detroit is set in such a place: not necessarily Detroit, but the “first ring” suburb outside a mid-sized city, to be exact. Omaha is such a place: in fact, the city is ring upon ring of suburban sprawl. The city is a time capsule of urban planning and architecture. As you move from downtown to the suburbs - yes, I know, as ridiculous as it sounds, Omaha has a downtown - you encounter various time-zones: the brownstone houses of the ’40s, the ranch-style homes of the ’50s jet age, the dead malls from the ’70s, the dead malls from the ‘80s, the dead malls from the ’90s, etc. Omaha, like so many mid-sized cities, is a place of boom architecture.

(more…)