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

Dear Friends,

For Steppenwolf’s 2011/12 season, we are exploring what happens when everyday lives are touched by war. In each of our five plays, war exerts a pressure—sometimes centrally, sometimes obliquely—on the lives of the characters. Against the pressure of war is a great longing for home. This oscillation between the impulse for war and the search for home (site of our deepest loves) is enduring in the human psyche. Chris Hedges, the veteran of many wars as a correspondent has written a book, War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning. In it, he describes war as “a narcotic” of which he partook for many years. As he writes:

The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living.

In the case of each of our plays, war incites a purpose, an urgency in its characters and moves them to action. Poised against the uncompromising urgency of war is a search for home, a place of love and solace, an uncontested ground of clarity and comfort. We are moved to engage a conversation about the spectre of war because war is a deep presence in our contemporary life in America. Our country is engaged in two wars that have shaped our consciousness, guided government policy and reopened the wounds and emotions of previous wars. The events of 2001 gave new meaning to the word “homeland” —to be attacked is to be re-awakened to the enduring value of the safety of home.To the sanctity, the beauty and the utter elusiveness of home.

We are compelled by the urgency of these times. We are living with war and it is attendant upon us to mediate on the impact this hovering presence plays in our lives. A play allows us to consider war in the context of individual lives, in the context of the home. We are interested in what war brings to our psychological life, in how, as Chris Hedges says, war makes home unfamiliar, “The world we once understood and longed to return to stands before us as alien, strange and beyond our grasp.”

I am thrilled to welcome you to our 36th season and honored to bring you five plays animated by the big questions in our lives:

• Clybourne Park by Bruce Norris. Directed by ensemble member Amy Morton. Featuring ensemble member James Vincent Meredith.
• Penelope by Enda Walsh. Directed by ensemble member Amy Morton. Featuring ensemble member John Mahoney.
• Time Stands Still by Donald Margulies. Directed by ensemble member Austin Pendleton. Featuring ensemble members Francis Guinan and Sally Murphy.
• The March based upon the Novel by E. L. Doctorow. Adapted for the stage and directed by ensemble member Frank Galati. Featuring ensemble members Alana Arenas, Ian Barford, Tim Hopper, Martha Lavey, Mariann Mayberry, James Vincent Meredith, William Petersen, Yasen Peyankov, and Alan Wilder with Will Allan, Patrick Clear, Stephen Louis Grush, Michael Mahler and Shannon Matesky.
• Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov. Adapted by ensemble member Tracy Letts. Directed by ensemble member Anna D. Shapiro. Featuring ensemble members Ian Barford, Ora Jones and Sally Murphy.

These dispatches from the homefront are alive with the humor, the tenderness and the urgency of lives struggling to find home. Thank you so much for taking the time to read this and I look forward to embarking on another exciting season with you in 2011/12.

Sincerely,

Martha Lavey
Artistic Director

 
Confession: I like watching new play readings so much that I might actually like them more than seeing staged plays.  I found myself mulling over this heresy while sitting in on the readings that were part of Steppenwolf’s First Look Repertory, one of which (more disclosure) I dramaturged.  I was pretty nettled with guilt that such a thought had even crossed my mind, as if my own intense enjoyment of the readings could somehow be destructive to the cause of getting new works fully produced on a stage.  So I had to ask myself what it was about the genre of the new play reading that I found so pleasurable.  I already know the spiel about how exciting it is to see works in the process of development, getting to take a peek at them before they’re finished, self-contained creations.  And fair enough, that aspect of attending a new play reading can be really remarkable—revelatory, even.  But I’m not sure that that’s exactly the allure for me; I think it’s something less practical, more visceral.  For one, it’s just kind of sexy to watch actors work their magic from behind a music stand, as if conflating speech and song: modern-day Orpheuses with scripts for lyres, casting spells of theatrical narrative.  Even when their eyes are tethered to the text, the actors have me in their thrall with every throwaway choice they make, because the story is new and unfamiliar and I have no visual cues of design to guide me.  It’s theatre in the nude, and in that sense, the play we’re beholding is as vulnerable and endearing and appealing as any of us standing naked before an audience would be.

Part of the allure, too, is how neither-fish-nor-fowl the new play reading is, how it lives somewhere in between a cozy script perusal at home and a polished production on a stage.  And for anyone who works as a dramaturg, you have to revel in inhabiting perpetual states of in-between-ness.  We shuttle between playwrights and directors, between texts and stagings, between audiences and artistic directors; and once you’ve habituated yourself to answering the many questions about what it is exactly that you do (“You’re a what?  A drama-what?”), you begin to embrace unconditionally the betwixty, not-only-but-also nature of the work.  (For the curious, there’s more info here on the duties of a dramaturg.)

Ultimately, I think what I find so compelling about play readings is that I really, really love listening to words.  I love hearing how they tumble from actors’ mouths and organize themselves into complex people and unexpected stories.  At the reading, the playwright’s words are on a pedestal for our consideration, and we get to savor every color, contour, texture, and nuance.  The narrative architecture, unadorned by elements of design, is laid bare for us to readily grasp and weigh.  And I treasure visualizing the play on my own while still sharing laughs and gasps with a roomful of listeners.  In the end, it’s at the reading that I hear and even see, if only in my mind’s eye, the most direct and unmediated pronouncement of why this play matters, and it’s then that I feel the most intimate kinship with the playwright.

Eric Ziegenhagen is a theatre artist, a musician, and a man about town. He will be reporting from First Look Rep all weekend long at this blog and at our First Look Twitter feed.

A reading of a new play does not offer much to the eye.  One pretty much looks like another.  A group of actors sit in a line or semi-circle, a script perched on a music stand in front of each one, on the set of whatever show is currently running in the hosting theater.  (In yesterday’s case, the new play was Sarah Gubbins’s The Kid Thing and the set was To Kill A Mockingbird.)

Some of the most moving, compelling theater I’ve ever seen has been at actors-behind-music-stand readings (like The Kid Thing) or staged readings (in which the play is staged simply without scenery and the actors perform with scripts in hand).  It’s almost impossible to capture on film how this could be.  Reading performances are undesigned, unstaged, and unfinished, so it’s easy to see them as a necessity instead of an event in themselves, as a rough draft of something that will later be a “real” show.

What happens when a reading works—when the script is right, when the actors are well-chosen for the role—is theater at its rawest.  Not in the low-budget sense, or in the crude-and-incomplete sense, but in the sashimi sense.  How could a play be at its best without a full staging?  What’s the point of going to a theater (or a restaurant), if not to see something prepared?  How could a raw piece of fish be better than a piece of fish that has had a bunch of stuff done to it by professional chefs and sous-chefs and spice merchants?

Well, of course, it can be, if that piece of sashimi or that script doesn’t need a lot of fuss—and any good script can benefit from fuss but can also shine in raw form.  Mamet once (or many times) said that any good play works as a radio play, that the actors and the words alone can bring any good play to life.  The rest—the full production, the sets and lights, the stage business, the physical acting of a scene, the fulfillment of the playwrights’ scenic suggestions—can fulfill and highlight and make the best use of a play, but in the end the actors and the words—like quality raw materials—are where the essential quality of a show begins and ends.

Seeing actors perform in their simplest and most focused way—while absolutely still focused on their character’s role in the scene and responding to each other, their characters’ dilemmas and objectives, the same things they do in a “real” performance—and, simply enough, hearing a play without distraction (tasting the piece of fish without the distracting of added flavors and preparation) can, when chance and talent make a music-stand reading extraordinary, be theater as its holiest and most profound.

Have you been to an extraordinary reading—a script and actors in the raw?  If so, or if you have another point of view, please share a story or comment below.

(Jessica is the Events and Office Management Associate at Steppenwolf)

The annual Steppenwolf picnic takes place every summer, on some warm, humid Monday, when our production team is sans performance and the administrative staff is just glad for a day off in the sunshine. This year our picnic was held on Monday, July 26th in Linne Woods, a forest preserve in Morton Grove. The day was perfect: sunny, warm, not too humid, and full of the carefree, lazy summer breezes that make you want to eat watermelon and lay in a hammock. As one of the members of the Picnic committee, I had taken part in the planning and execution of the event, which is one of only a handful of times that our entire company comes together, spanning departments and buildings, artistic and administrative, backstage and front-of-house.

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It’s my last week at Steppenwolf.  I have that funny feeling in my stomach you get when you realize that date you’ve looked at many times- May 28th, final day of Apprenticeship- has appeared in your weekly planner.

A friend from school who works at a web design firm downtown met me at Steppenwolf’s office my first week of work.  “Books!” He exclaimed when he arrived at the desk where I work, surrounded by our play library, crisp copies of contemporary plays, leaning happily against hardcover anthologies so old their titles have worn away.  “Books,” he said more softly, running a finger down one’s spine. “I wish I worked near books.”

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