By Brian Hieggelke

The first thing you notice when you meet Martha Lavey is her hair. She’s a very petite woman, but you realize that later. Her hair is epic, a nest of swirling, curling grays and blacks that give her visage an otherworldliness, a sense of supernatural wisdom, like Mother Earth. Mother Steppenwolf. She’s been artistic director since 1995, far longer than anyone else in that role, and she’s presided over the maturation of the company from a troubled, supremely talented teenager into an institution likely to outlive its founders. She’s one of the most powerful people in Chicago theater, yet she’s as gentle a spirit as you’re likely to meet. One of the powers she wields, or at least holds the secret to, is ensemble membership, the Holy Grail of Chicago theater for many.

There are forty-three ensemble members, many of them dating back to the early days of the company. Since Steppenwolf’s formal inception in 1975, the cumulative total, including those (rarely) lost to attrition, is forty-eight. Lavey says there’s no formulaic way in choosing ensemble members, no set number of engagements required. “It’s more that the desire to have an individual in the ensemble is generated out of—this person brings something unique to the ensemble,” she says, “be that a casting niche—age, type, etcetera. Then there’s the feeling of whether this person is a good community member. Do we feel like that person has an ensemble sensibility? And it’s fairly easy to pick up on that.” Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Dave Rentauskas

By Benjamin Rossi

The premiere of The New Colony’s “So Many Days,” the young theater company’s first short film, feels unmistakably like a gathering of friends. A live band made up of company members croons bluegrass tunes about Oriental lovers and drinking till you die; everyone seems to know the words. Someone in the company had sent out an email encouraging people to wear flannel shirts in homage to the short’s early sixties Deep South setting, but it’s difficult to distinguish those who complied from the rest of the hipster crowd.

A makeshift bar set off in a corner of host Collaboraction’s small space serves whiskey and PBR in Solo cups as company members greet people in the Flat Iron Arts Building’s third floor landing, asking, “So who’s your friend in the company?”

With “So Many Days,” the barely three-year-old New Colony is taking a novel, if not entirely unprecedented, step towards filmmaking. It’s just one more in a series of remarkable moves for the theater group. And while it is a modest beginning, New Colony members say its latest effort is a harbinger for things to come. But as its projects become more ambitious, the company may come up against obstacles that bedeviled other attempts by Chicago theaters to jump from stage to screen. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

A depressed, pregnant housewife in Ypsilanti reads “Hedda Gabler” and cleans her Beretta; she’s later kidnapped by robots and forced to perform the play in an Ecuadorian robot forest before being rescued by her husband, her 10-year-old daughter Nugget, who’s doing a school report on Ibsen, and her small-arms-dealing brother-in-law. And that’s only part of the plot—the competing story pits Ibsen and his slatternly maid against Ibsen’s dominating wife and his oddly filthy, strung-out archrival Strindberg. The play, while thematically somewhat cohesive (women’s lib = robot revolution?), is disorganized and incoherent as a whole—but joyfully and contagiously so in Sideshow’s production. Elizabeth Meriwether’s “Heddatron” is an oddly paced, disorderedly plotted, “badly made play” (as, we learn from Nugget’s school report, “Hedda Gabler” is), and this show is as successful as one can imagine a staging of “Heddatron” to be, with exuberant performances, gorgeous technical theater and, yes, mesmerizing remote-controlled robots made for the performance that make the spectacle more important than the illogical, disjointed, occasionally completely garbled story. When the entire cast bursts into a delirious song-and-dance rendition of “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” it’s impossible not to be charmed. (Monica Westin)

Sideshow Theatre Company at Steppenwolf Garage, 1624 North Halsted, (312)335-1650. Through April 24.

Here’s the press release from Steppenwolf:

Steppenwolf Theatre Company Announces 2011/12 Subscription Season

CHICAGO (March 2, 2011) – Steppenwolf Theatre Company is pleased to announce its 2011/12 Subscription Season.  Season subscriptions go on-sale to the public on Wednesday, March 2 at 11 am.   Read the rest of this entry »

Sally Murphy, Stephen Louis Grush/Photo: Michael Brosilow

RECOMMENDED

The playwright strives to create work for the ages, but Laura Eason’s “Sex With Strangers” is so topical it should have an expiration date.

Ethan, played with charismatic ferocity by Stephen Louis Grush,  chronicles his sexual conquests in masochistic detail on his popular blog, which he’s parlayed into a bestelling book and a movie deal. (Tucker Max, anyone?) He meets Olivia, a technophobic almost-forty literary novelist,  who’s trying to crank back up her long-stalled career. He repulses her with his story but charms her with praise of her story and before long he’s in her pants and in her business, helping her plug into the magical marketing power of the internet. The play, which I saw in a 2009 developmental incarnation as part of Steppenwolf’s “First Look Repertory of New Work,” is a study of the effects, both positive and negative, of the living-life-in-public phenomenon that the internet has fueled, through blogs, social media and so on. Ethan reads email and texts on his phone while in the middle of an intensely personal conversation with Olivia, behavior so common nowadays it almost seems beyond parody. Read the rest of this entry »

As the economy slowly lifts us back to our feet and we look around, we see a remarkable sight: a performance industry in Chicago that survived the worst recession since the Great Depression wholly intact. Sure, we had a few brushes with death, and no doubt a few very small, very new theater companies threw in the towel, as they do even in good years, but unlike many other cities across the country, we’re in pretty good shape. How good? The League of Chicago Theatres issued a press release last week proclaiming our town as America’s theater leader, with more than 250 professional theaters, including four Regional Tony Award winners, and a combined annual budget of $250 million serving five million audience members. Add in our thriving dance community, a comedy scene that’s the envy of the nation and two world-class opera companies and you’d have to say we’re doing pretty damn good. But neither the economy nor any cultural organization is fully out of the water yet, and the dramatic uncertainty injected into the political sea by Mayor Daley’s decision to call it a day means Chicago’s performance community will need some steady hands at the wheel these next few years. Accordingly, for this edition of The Players, we’ve broadened our horizon and taken a closer-than-ever look at the individuals in charge of the financial fitness of our local institutions. Read the rest of this entry »

Krapp's Last Tape/Photo: Liz Lauren

Top 5 Shows
“The Brother/Sister Plays,” Steppenwolf
“August: Osage County,” Broadway In Chicago
“Hughie”/”Krapp’s Last Tape,” Goodman
“1001,” Collaboraction
“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Steppenwolf
—Brian Hieggelke

Top 5 Play Revivals
“A Streetcar Named Desire,” Writers’ Theatre
“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Steppenwolf
“To Kill a Mockingbird,” Steppenwolf Young Adult
“Private Lives,” Chicago Shakespeare Theater
“After the Fall,” Eclipse Theatre
—Dennis Polkow

Top 5 Performances
Brian Dennehy, “Hughie”/”Krapp’s Last Tape,” Goodman
Karen Janes Woditsch, “To Master the Art,” TimeLine
Tracy Letts, “American Buffalo,” Steppenwolf
Amy Morton, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Steppenwolf
Mary Beth Fisher, “Seagull,” Goodman
—Brian Hieggelke

Read the rest of this entry »

Amy Morton, Tracy Letts/Photo: Michael Brosilow

RECOMMENDED

Edward Albee’s iconic play from 1962, which won the Tony Award for Best Play and soon after became an acclaimed movie starring Elizabeth Taylor and her frequent husband Richard Burton, is a boxing match for acting heavyweights, where the fighters spar with words.

George and Martha, just home from a faculty party, are engaged in playful but barbed repartee that at first recalls the likes of Tracy and Hepburn and other savage wits of Hollywood lore. A new young professor Nick and his wife Honey have been invited over for cocktails after the party, though they are really just prey for George and Martha. The entire play unfolds, as the war between George and Martha escalates into something far too ugly for the silver screen, in the increasingly claustrophobic confines of their home—designed with appropriate New England academic shagginess by Todd Rosenthal—in the wee wee hours of morning.

After two decades of marriage, Martha and George are despicable creatures, or as George tells Nick, who is alarmed by the unfettered hostility, “we’re merely walking what’s left of our wits.”

Tracy Letts’ George is a worn-out shell of a man, beaten down by the one-two punch of professional disappointments suffered in the face of a father-in-law who rules the kingdom as president of the university where George toils in the history department, and a wife who seems to define her existence by letting George know what a failure he is compared to her father. “A simp,” she calls him. George half-heartedly amuses himself with social swordplay,  slicing up anyone in his range with an effortless nonchalance. Letts skillfully gives his George an air of perpetual disengagement that suggests that even this verbal gamesmanship bores him, that he’s using a mere fraction of his wit. Read the rest of this entry »

"The Etiquette of Vigilance": Alana Arenas, Alfred H. Wilson/Photo: Peter Coombs

RECOMMENDED

Each fall, Steppenwolf puts on three “developmental productions” of new work under the “First Look” rubric. Seeing all three in one day and evening, as is the custom for the press, makes for one of my favorite days of theater each year. Developmental for Steppenwolf means stage them in the Garage space, with a fairly minimal shared set framework; it does not mean skimp on world-class directors and actors.

In “The Etiquette of Vigilance,” playwright Robert O’Hara contemplates the life led by Travis, the 10-year-old boy who slept on the couch in Lorraine Hansberry’s classic “A Raisin in the Sun.” Now he’s an old man, with a grown daughter and a life spent believing in the dream, even as the realities of living in a violently segregated Chicago kept beating him down. Read the rest of this entry »

Robert O’Hara, Jason Wells and Sam Marks/Photo: Brian McConkey

Steppenwolf’s sixth annual “First Look Repertory of New Work” includes readings of plays about family values in contemporary life—lesbian parenthood, recession mentality—but the three full productions running in rep are most striking for the way they look backwards to past history and plays. Robert O’Hara’s “The Etiquette of Vigilance” imagines the Younger family’s contemporary history in an updating of Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun.” Jason Wells’ “The North Plan” imagines an anarchic, not-so-distant American future that combines archetypal American dystopian elements with web 2.0 technology; a bureaucrat and an administrative assistant hack into a database that lists who will be persecuted by the new world order. And Sam Marks takes up the theme of artistic fame and the ironies of posthumous fame that have long been touchstones of American theater. We spoke with Marks about this year’s festival the week before it opened. Read the rest of this entry »