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

(Jamie is the School at Steppenwolf Coordinator)

One of Steppenwolf’s best kept secrets is The School at Steppenwolf. If you are an actor in town, you may have come across it. If you aren’t, chances are slim that you have. But even if you’ve never heard of the school, you’ve probably seen many of our alumni tearing up stages across Chicago or great productions at theatre companies founded by our students.

In the summer of 2009 we had the opportunity to cast six of our School at Steppenwolf alumni in our First Look Repertory of New Plays. I recently tracked down the six to see what they’ve been up to and how the School at Steppenwolf has had a lasting effect on their artistic lives.

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A few weeks ago, talking to a friend about my work reading scripts for Steppenwolf, I was asked probably the most common question I hear about the job: “Has anything you’ve read ended up in their season?” The short answer is “no,” or at least “not unless they finally take my advice to produce Fran Guinan in The Belle of Amherst this year,” but it struck me that it’s worth exploring how exactly the process works, and hopefully to articulate what I’ve been up to the past five years (give or take) as a reader.

In essence, how it works is this: I get a batch of five scripts every two weeks to read and evaluate. I’ll sit down and read through them (sometimes aloud, sometimes not), let them rest for a day or two, and then come back to write them up. The evaluations consist of a brief, action-driven plot synopsis (David Ball’s Backwards and Forwards provides a model here) and a “comments” section. The comments section is the meat of the evaluation, but it’s often informed heavily by the synopsizing: laying out the events of a play tends to expose its strengths and weaknesses as character motivations are held up to scrutiny and overall narrative structure gets rebuilt by the reader, often clarifying authorial intent along the way.

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Happy Thanksgiving from the Steppenwolf family!

So, Chicago was not selected as the host city for the 2016 Olympics. Whether one was an enthusiast for our hosting the Games, the effort produced a large and future vision for the city: infrastructure changes that would serve both the citizens of Chicago and our international visitors. The prospect of hosting the Games gave the city an opportunity to imagine what our city could be in 17 years. Absent that target, what big vision might we embrace for ourselves as a city in the next 20 years? In particular, to what should we aspire culturally? Our city is home to world-class artists and artistic institutions. What if we envisioned a collective arts-based movement over these next 20 years? What might that look like? What could we do, as a city, to feature the work of our artists and arts institutions and make our city a destination for the arts?

Rocco Landesman, the new chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, has little patience for the disdain with which some politicians still seem to view the organization.

In a recent New York Times profile Landesman, the new chair of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), generated controversy by declaring that it was the responsiblity of the NEA to reward excellence and that the recent history of the Endowment to democratize the arts needed to be tempered by a discrimination and recognition of artistic merit.

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