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

Catherine plays the role of Nugget Gordon in Sideshow Theatre Company’s Heddatron, currently running in the Garage Theatre as part of Steppenwolf’s 2011 Garage Rep. 

As the youngest member and the only kid in the cast of Heddatron, I would love to be able to play with the robots in our cast in their Robotforest home. The sad thing is that my character, Nugget Gordon, is not even in the Robotforest scene. That’s OK though, because one of the best things about the show is the rest of the non-robot (human) cast. This is first time that I have been in a production with adults and I really enjoy working with them. Heddatron is a complicated show with the robots, a story that takes place in different time periods and locations, all onstage at once - and my character is doing a school report on Henrik Ibsen that tries to explain it all. I have learned a lot from everyone involved with the show. The director, Jonathan Green, and all of the cast and crew have really supported me during this process. They treat me like family and I couldn’t have done it without their help.

One of my favorite parts of the show is the dance that Nugget does which is put to the music of “Angel” by Shaggy. I got to choreograph the whole dance myself! It started as a simple jazz dance and then Jonathan thought we should change the style to hip-hop. He asked me if I knew any hip-hop moves and I showed him the coffee-grinder - where I crouch down and swing one straightened leg in a circle while jumping over it with the other leg. Jonathan loved it so much - he got down on his knees and said “Give me a hug!”  It felt really good to be part of the design of the play. I still change my dance a little from show to show, but the coffee-grinder will always be a part of it.

My second favorite part of the play is the transition where everyone in the cast dances and sings to “Total Eclipse of the Heart”. This scene took about 25% of our entire rehearsal time and we still run through it every night before the show. I really like how it turned out. It is the one of the most fun parts of the play and the audience always seems to enjoy it!

One of the questions that Jonathan has been asked in interviews is how he thought Heddatron playwright Elizabeth Meriwether had envisioned different parts of the play, and if he thought he had followed her vision. I have wondered about that too. We’ve all worked very hard and we always do our best each night for the audience. I really hope that Elizabeth Meriwether comes to see our show and what we’ve put into it - and I’d like to ask her; do you think we have a “well-made play?”

Madrid St. Angelo is the Co-Artistic Director of Urban Theater Company. He is also the director of SONNETS FOR AN OLD CENTURY by José Rivera, part of Steppenwolf’s 2011 Garage Rep.

Bringing SONNETS FOR AN OLD CENTURY to life is an illuminating experience. First of all the text is gorgeous. Rivera’s masterful language is richly textured and layered with nuance. One particular challenge, however, is that this is not a play in a traditional or conventional sense. Like Edgar Lee Masters’ SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY, SONNETS is a collection of afterlife reminiscences (monologues; i.e. sonnets). It’s a highly visceral book of poetry with an idea attached; there is no real skeletal form to work from. I knew all along that the core of our production would focus on Jose’s language, but I had an initial convention that I wanted to bring to the text. A world in which these sonnets lived.

Sweat, tears and sleepless nights accompanied our process as we worked and reworked, tweaked and re-tweaked nearly every single aspect of our textual and physical exploration of this work. I stand in admiration of my cast, truly one of the most passionate, talented, youthful and vibrant ensembles one is likely to see in our great city. As a director, I truly am only as good as my cast. I know this, I acknowledge their hard work, and I thank God for them. I bow in appreciation to our mentors at Steppenwolf, who created for us an exhilarating, painstaking challenge, but also a good learning experience. Going into this project, the day we sat at the table with Steppenwolf, I remember asking myself, “What do I, Madrid St. Angelo, want out of this partnership?” I wanted the bird’s eye view into SW’s process. I wanted an opportunity to be mentored. I got it.

With my partners Ivan Vega and Marilyn Camacho behind me, I manage to keep moving forward, excited by the hurdles and challenges of bringing this work to life. I am thankful for this incredible opportunity.

(Jeffrey is a director and dramaturg in Chicago, and the co-creator of the upcoming radio-play series Our Fair City.  He is also the dramaturg for Sideshow theatre Company’s Heddatron, part of Steppenwolf’s Garage Rep series this year.)

Let’s get this out of the way first:  Heddatron is kind of like dramaturg candy.  When Jonathan Green (Heddatron’s director and Sideshow’s Artistic Director) approached me about the piece, I couldn’t help but jump at it: how could I say no to spending the next three months reading about Robots, Henrik Ibsen, and the Singularity?  It’s been a grand time, and I’ve had the chance to read a lot of really fascinating things so I thought I’d share my reading list: the top three things you should read (or at least skim) before seeing Heddatron! (more…)

Delia Baseman is the costume designer for The Strange Tree Group’s THE THREE FACES OF DOCTOR CRIPPEN, part of Steppenwolf’s 2011 Garage Rep.

Hello Dear Friends!

This is Delia Baseman Resident Costumer and Associate Artistic Director for STG. I have been asked to write a little something about my experience costuming The Three Faces of Doctor Crippen. Crippen is one of those shows that as a costumer you both fear and covet. On one hand, there are amazing opportunities for creativity. The time period (1910) is wonderfully fertile, there is the heightened vaudeville aspect which means that things can be over the top and ridiculous without being too distracting and there are wonderful characters like Cora Crippen who, in real life, had extreme fashion tastes. A ton of photographic evidence exists as to what these people actually wore… however, these same things are also what make it terrifying. How do I possibly costume three actors to look like aspects of a single person’s personality when they are completely different sizes and have giant modern-day heads that refuse to fit into antique hats? Do we try to copy the historical aspects of these ensembles exactly or do we go more for an overall design aesthetic that fits in the heightened world we are creating? These are the types of tricky questions I have been faced with throughout our rehearsal process and what I’m hoping to achieve is a happy marriage of historical accuracy with the heightened aspects of our usual Strange Tree aesthetic. (more…)