We’re getting ready for a fantastic event this coming Sunday – we’re offering audiences a fun way to explore our current production Democracy through the spectacular Opera version … This is a free event, and it’ll be a lot of fun – don’t miss it!
Scott Wheeler (Composer of Democracy: An American Comedy) will join actors from Eclipse Theatre Company and singers from VOX 3 Collective to explore the stage and opera versions of Romulus Linney’s story. This unique event will include performed scenes from Eclipse’s production of Democracy and selections from Mr. Wheeler’s opera, followed by a discussion with the artists.
Eclipse Theatre Company's "Democracy"
Democracy: Opera and Drama
Sunday, November 22nd at 7:00 pm
Greenhouse Theater Center
2257 N Lincoln
A suggested donation is encouraged for non-subscribers. Please contact us at 773-325-9655 for more information or to reserve your seats for these exciting events!
From our current production of Democracy, which opened last night, Baron Jacobi (Larry Baldacci) has an old-fashioned plan to stop Madeleine Lee (Rebecca Prescott) from marrying the ambitious Senator Silas Raitcliffe in the scene below from The Stage Channel:
In the opening scene of Democracy, Baron Jacobi introduces us to the characters in the play. As President Grant and his wife Julia walk by, Jacobi notes her crossed eyes and explains:
When they came to the White House, she wanted an operation. The President said no! He could not bear his great burden without the cross-eyed girl he had loved all these years.
I was thinking about this line as I was setting up the links on the Democracy Dramaturgy page – included in the research prepared by Sarah Moeller and Katie Vandehey, co-dramaturgs on the production, is a comprehensive biography of Julia Boggs Dent Grant, including this photo of the cross-eyed girl that Ulysses loved.
We spent the first two days of rehearsal going through this information, giving all of the actors, designers and the director the background information they needed before creating the world of this play. It’s here on the blog for them – and for you – to browse. Enjoy!
I’ll be back for the regular Friday rescue later in the day – first I wanted to share this beautiful photo of Senator Raitcliffe (Jon Steinhagen) courting Madeline Lee (Rebecca Prescott) in Romulus Linney’s Democracy:
I wish I had taken a few “before” photos – it’s difficult to describe the chaos here at the Eclipse space three weeks ago, when every square foot was stacked to the ceiling with three shows worth of theatrical debris. We’ve been steadily chipping away, and we’re almost ready for a party…
I took a break from setting up last night to take some “during” photos – there’s still more decorating and cleaning to be done before Saturday, but our rehearsal space is almost fully transformed into a hip, funky party pad. There are more photos of the space on our Flickr page – and there will be more (with a lot of people having fun) after Saturday.
Come on out and see what we’ve done to the place, help us celebrate the current season and look ahead to the 2010 Arthur Miller Season …
Artistic Director Nathaniel Swift in Plaza Suite. Photo by Scott Cooper.
Come celebrate & network with all of us at Eclipse as well as our colleagues and friends from the theatre community, as the Chicago theatre fall season begins and Eclipse’s 2-year Celebration Series concludes.
The night kicks off at 7:00 pm at our swanky digs with beer, wine & food, live DJ & dancing, a little Wii Bowling, and your chance to mingle with some of the coolest people in Chicago theatre!
If you are in a show that evening, please come by afterwards!
Actors, Designers, Directors – feel free to bring your pic/resume!
$15 suggested donation or whatever you can donate at the door.
At the Eclipse Space: 4001 N Ravenswood, Chicago, IL 60613
My apologies for being late this week – I was sneaking in a quick vacation visiting family in Maine. Here’s the view from the boat on Friday as we headed out past the point:
On the first day of tech rehearsals for our current production of Six Degrees of Separation, I handed my digital camera to Eclipse ensemble member Stephen Dale, who plays Ben in the show. Take it backstage, I told him – have some fun, shoot anything you want back there, and maybe we’ll be able to create a quick montage of what it’s like to be backstage during tech.
With a cast of sixteen, there was a lot of down time for actors as we went through tech rehearsals – as we spent time planning and practicing the timings of light and sound cues, the actors were backstage spending their time … well, I’ll let Stephen show you:
It’s no longer a secret … I’m very excited to announce that we are returning to our One Playwright, One Season format next season with a year-long exploration through the works of legendary American playwright Arthur Miller.
With a career that spans over seven decades, and a body of work that includes some of the most well-known and most frequently produced dramas in the world, Arthur Miller may be this country’s greatest storyteller. His plays range from realistic psychological dramas to abstract dreamscapes; exploring social dynamics, personal connections and political conflict.
The 2010 Arthur Miller Season is an ambitious and exciting journey through Miller’s remarkable vision, offering audiences a truly unique opportunity to immerse themselves in the world of Arthur Miller for a full season. On behalf of everyone here at Eclipse, I’d like to invite you to join us on this unique journey, including:
After the Fall, opening March 2010
This deeply personal 1964 play, which Miller says “takes place in the mind, thought, and memory of Quentin,” explores personal relationships and political loyalties through one man’s examination of his life.
Resurrection Blues, opening July 2010
Miller’s penultimate play, published in 2002, humorously and powerfully satirizes the strength of faith – religious, political and personal – as a repressive dictatorship prepares to crucify a possibly divine prisoner in front of American television audiences.
A View From the Bridge, opening November 2010
This 1955 classic, set in a close-knit Italian-American neighborhood in Brooklyn, explores a father’s response as his safety and family are threatened by his decision to protect his cousins from immigration officials.
Playwright Scholar Series Events Throughout the 2010 Arthur Miller Season, join us for intimate readings and discussions from works throughout Miller’s canon.
Also, don’t miss productions of Arthur Miller’s most well-known plays at some of Chicago’s best theaters this fall and spring:
All My Sons at Timeline Theatre, running August 31 – October 4, 2009 at the Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln. Details at www.timelinetheatre.com. 773-281-8463.
Death of a Salesman at Raven Theatre, running October 6 – December 5, 2009 at Raven Theatre, 6157 N. Clark. Details at www.raventheatre.com. 773-338-6547.
The Crucibleat Infamous Commonwealth Theatre, running March 27 – May 2, 2010 at Raven Theatre. 6157 N. Clark. Details at www.infamouscommonwealth.org. 312-458-9780.
It’s an exciting season for fans of Arthur Miller! I look forward to seeing you at the theater throughout 2010!
The Black Theatre Alliance Awards announced their 2009 nominations, and we were excited and proud to see two actors from A Song for Coretta among the talented artists being honored:
The Ethel Waters Award – Best Performance In An Ensemble (Actress)
Kierra Bunch – From The Mississippi Delta – eta Creative Arts Foundation Kristy M. Johnson – A Song For Coretta – eclipse theatre company
Ashlee Olivia – Radical Hearsay…Stories at Sixty One – MPAACT
Carla Stillwell – Radical Hearsay…Stories at Sixty One – MPAACT TayLar – A Song For Coretta – eclipse theatre company
The awards ceremony will be held Monday, October 5th. Congratulations and best of luck to all the nominees – especially Kristy and TayLar!
Continuing Stephen Dale’s ongoing series of interviews with the cast & crew of Six Degrees of Separation, here’s a part of his conversation with Eric Leonard (Flan) and Karen Yates (Ouisa), talking about their characters and their approach to this complex script.
There’s more on the way, including some fantastic backstage footage from tech rehearsals – if you haven’t subscribed to our YouTube channel yet, now’s a pretty good time…
Eclipse puts on several Playwright Scholar Series events each season to give the audience a deeper look into each writers canon.
This Saturday, August 1st at 2pm, we will be exploring the prose, poetry and essays of Pearl Cleage.
Ensemble members JP Pierson and Sarah Moeller selected inspirational excerpts out of her writing and brought these pieces to the table at the first rehearsal for the Playwright Scholar Series last night.
It was a great rehearsal. A group of six actors (male and female) assembled to read selected pieces. They were given some time to read through the pieces themselves and then choose the piece each actor felt strongest about. After hearing each piece out loud we discussed more about Pearl Cleage, what inspires her, what inspires us about her and then dismissed for the evening to take some time to reflect on the insightful pieces we had heard over the evening.
Tonight we will meet for rehearsal number two and revisit each piece that was read last night and then work more on how the pieces will be read and presented Saturday afternoon.
We hope you can join us for this event!! It is free for subscribers and $5 suggested donation for non-subscribers.
We had our first audience last night – a surprisingly large crowd for a Final Dress Rehearsal before we start Previews tonight (there are still $5 Industry tickets available for all three Previews at 773.404.7336). The show is in great shape – we’re putting the final touches on the design elements, and the cast is having a lot of fun …
We also had a photo shoot with Scott Cooper on Tuesday, and now have a few more beautiful photos in our Flickr set, including the one below of Ouisa (Karen Yates) as she dreams about Paul (Michael Pogue):
Michael Gonring (left, playing Trent in Six Degrees of Separation) and Michael Pogue (right, playing Paul) take a break during the first day of tech rehearsals to mug for the camera.
Ensemble member Stephen Dale sat down recently with Michael Pogue, who plays Paul in our upcoming production of Six Degrees of Separation. It will be a two or three part interview – here’s part one, where Michael talks about playing a character he’s had his eye on for a long time:
I dropped a hint yesterday that we’ll be announcing our next playwright soon, and as I said, we are all excited to get back to the year-long focus on a single writer, but for now we’re trying to keep up with a busy summer schedule that has us exploring three playwrights over the next three weeks:
2007 featured playwright Pearl Cleage is on stage now – A Song for Coretta runs through July 26th in the first floor studio at the Greenhouse Theater.
2002 featured playwright John Guare is just up the stairs – I’m sitting in the dressing room of the second floor studio at the Greenhouse right now, where I should really be helping get the space ready for Six Degrees of Separation, which opens July 26th.
2003 featured playwright Neil Simon is waiting in the wings – last year’s production of Plaza Suite will be back for one weekend at the Chicago Park District’s annual summer festival Theatre on the Lake, on Lake Shore Drive at Fullerton, August 5-9.
And we still have two more to go – we just finished casting 2001 featured playwright Romulus Linney’s Democracy, which opens in November, and we’re planning an extended Playwright Scholar Series event this fall exploring 2004 featured playwright Keith Reddin.
After that, the Celebration will be complete, and we’ll turn our full attention to – but I’m not allowed to say yet.
Yeah, okay, it’s a tease – I don’t want to scoop ourselves, but I am very excited that the ensemble has just completed the selection process, which began late last year, and we have reached a decision on our next featured playwright. We will have a press release out very soon, and we will post the season here before it hits the papers anywhere else.
There’s a special buzz to this one – although the Celebration Series has been, and will continue to be, a fantastic journey, I think we’re all excited about getting back to the One Playwright, One Season format. And I think audiences will be excited too – but that’s enough teasing for now…
A Song for Coretta has less than three weeks left, Six Degrees of Separation opens in less than two, and Plaza Suite is at Theatre on the Lake the week after that. And if that’s not enough, we’ve got a big announcement coming up very soon about our 2010 season featured playwright. I’ll do my best to keep up with the blogging.
This is a new photo - from Six Degrees of Separation, which opens July 26th. Ouisa (Karen Yates), Flan (Eric Leonard) and Paul (Michael Pogue) pose for a family portrait. Much thanks to our fantastic photographer Scott Cooper for capturing this loving and creepy family.
From Total Eclipse 2009 (our annual benefit), this is a reading from Jeffrey Sweet’s play The Action Against Sol Schumann, presented as part of the 2010 featured playwright selection process and featuring ensemble members Steven Fedoruk, CeCe Klinger, Nora Fiffer and myself.
The process is almost complete – we’ll have some exciting news to announce by mid-July …
In preparation for our forthcoming show SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION, now in rehearsals, I had gone through many reviews of the John Guare play; and many had referenced THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES by Tom Wolfe. “Transcendent…magical…a masterwork that captures New York as Tom Wolfe did …” as Frank Rich wrote in his review of the play. So, I set forth to my local bookstore and picked up a copy of the Wolfe satire. There is maybe a difference of a few years between when both plot lines take place, but the main themes and ideas are shared. The issue of class, race, status, identity, sexuality, and connection are all burned in the pages. The other thing they share is the New York pace, the quickness, the whirlwind, the speed, the thrill.
In early discussions of how we wanted to put our mark on this play, the theme of isolation and disconnection kept coming up. There is an excerpt from BONFIRE, they captures an element these themes:
“Insulation! That was the ticket. If you want to live in New York, you’ve got to insulate yourself from these people. The cynicism and the smugness of the tide struck as very au courant. If you could go breezing down the FDR in a taxi, then why file into the trenches of the urban wars?”
Steve had said that in many ways SIX DEGREES and BLUE SURGE share an equal fate: BLUE SURGE is about the insulation and isolation of the poor and their inability to break out of that world, and SIX DEGREES is about the same thing, only with the upper class, the rich.
A major difference I find in Tom Wolfe’s book and John Guare’s play is that Wolfe has no mercy, sympathy, admiration, doesn’t find or give many redeeming qualities in the menagerie of characters he has created. Guare, on the other hand, has tremendous love for his characters. It is very important, as Steve said at our reading of the play, with the full glorious cast assembled, that we like these characters. And there is the trick of the play, I think. If we as the audience, the cast, the crew, the reader, genuinely like all of these characters despite their flaws and status and attitudes, then we have succeeded in delivering the power of this piece; a very timely piece when it first premiered as it is now.
Perhaps that is why the famous actors of the movie THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES, speak ill of the film. Wolfe passed judgement on them through his story telling, instead of leaving it to the reader to cast the stone.
From the currently-running, Jeff-RecommendedA Song for Coretta by Pearl Cleage – I promise the whole show isn’t this sad, but this moment between Keisha (Kristy Johnson, left) and Mona Lisa (Kelly Owens) is beautiful:
Eclipse ensemble member TayLar plays Helen, giving an interview to Zora (Niccole Thurman) about her memories of Coretta Scott King, in Pearl Cleage's A Song for Coretta
The last few nights of previews for Pearl Cleage’s A Song for Coretta have been great – so great, in fact, that I haven’t been able to get a seat since Thursday. So I’ve been listening from the lobby and talking to audiences after the show as the cast and crew make the final push before the big show tonight.
It’s been a fun week – we’ve had fun and responsive audiences who have really loved the show, and we’ve had our share of weirdness and then some. In the last few days, we’ve seen a doll get accidentally beheaded on stage, an actor lose her footing in the rain, and a trolley of drunk partiers that parked just on the other side of the thin theater wall for half a show. And then there was the naked bike ride, which rolled by the front doors a few minutes after the show ended last night. I think we’ve gotten all the weirdness out of the way, though – and the show is strong and beautiful and ready to rise above whatever else pops up during the run.
I’ve never been all that good at tooting my own horn, and maybe that’s why I’ve been so slow to blog about the fantastic night we – and I – had on Monday. The 2009 Non-Equity Jeff Awards were held at the Park West, and two of the night’s awards went to myself (Actor in a Supporting Role) and Laura Coover (Actress in a Principal Role) from Blue Surge. The full list of nominees and winners is at www.jeffawards.org.
Jeff Award Winners Laura Coover and Nathaniel Swift in Blue Surge
I think the acceptance speeches will be posted soon at www.stagechannel.com – I’m excited to see them, since I have no idea what I actually said. I’ll tell that story when I link to the video, though.
I forgot to post a photo yesterday, but here’s an action shot from today – from about twenty minutes ago in our tech rehearsal for A Song for Coretta, here’s Sound Designer Adam Smith working on a sound cue:
I’ve spent the last few days creating an Eclipse Intranet for our office staff to use (with great thanks to the fine folks at Google), and I had a moment of total disbelief when I set up a tool that counts down the days to each production. I put in the date of Opening Night for A Song for Coretta (June 14th), and it told me that that’s only 16 days away. 16 days? And that was yesterday, so now it’s telling me that we have 15 days left until the show opens. 15 days.
Niccole Thurman, Ebony Wimbs, TayLar, Kelly Owens and Kristy Johnson in Pearl Cleage's A Song for Coretta
Time does have a habit of moving way too fast, especially when we’ve got a lot of great projects in the works. And fortunately not everyone is as surprised as I am – I watched a run through at rehearsal a few days ago, and the cast definitely looks ready to go. Sarah is already working tiny little moments; work that directors sometimes don’t have time to get to. Clearly she and her actors have been doing their homework and aren’t feeling the time crunch the way I am. We start loading into the theater on Monday, we have tech rehearsals next weekend, and then we’ll have audiences before we know it.
And, although I miss the great projects we were working on, there’s not a lot of time to look back. The fancy new gadget tells me that we’ve got 57 days until Six Degrees of Separation and 67 days until Plaza Suite. There’s still 169 days until Democracy, so that’s like forever away. Right?
Hey everyone! As a production assistant for A Song for Coretta, part of my job was to set up a pre-production photo shoot. After having a lot of luck with scheduling, we were able to get the photographer, the actors, the costumer, and a few others to come and take some great photos! This one is one of our favorites. We have more photos uploaded on our Flickr site. You can find them at our flickr set. Enjoy!
We just completed the third day of rehearsal for “A Song for Coretta”
To recap Day 1 was the first read through in which we invite subscribers, ensemble members and other friends of the company to hear designer presentations and hear the actors read the script aloud together for the first time. Day 2 was a wonderful dramaturg presentation from Katie, dramaturg and ensemble member. She gaves the cast, management team and director insights into Pearl Cleage, Coretta Scott King, the civil rights movement, the war in the middle east, teenage pregnancy, Hurricane Katrina and other information pertinent to having a deeper understading of the world of the play. Day 3, today, our first chance to really dive into the script. This is really the day I, as the director, have been waiting for. The first chance to get the actors in a room together and talking about the world of the play, the characters, what drives them, where they came from, why are they here.
I had a wonderful evening. We have assembled a fine, beautiful cast of women ready and excited to tell the stories Cleage puts forth in her script. We spent the evening reading through the script at a large conference table and stopping many times to discuss points in the script intertwined with our thoughts, feelings, inclinations regarding motives, intentions and using our own personal experience and knowledge to lead to new discoveries. I am excited to continue the process tomorrow as we go through the last third of the script as over the course of this evening I was reassured that I am working with a group of incredibly intelligent, hard-working, thoughtful and inquisetive women. Just the type that need to be in a room together to bring Cleage’s brilliant work to life. OK, maybe I sound a bit like a marketing person at the moment, I just have to express my excitment and pleasure in bringing this piece to life and I am more than excited to continue on this journey over the course of the next few weeks!
Laura Coover and Nat Swift, Jeff-nominated actors in Blue Surge, sat down with ensemble member Steve Dale before the final performance to talk about their characters, their process, and the nudity:
After almost 24 hours of free time (we had our last performance of Blue Surge on Sunday), we’ve already started to work on the next project – the Chicago Premiere of Pearl Cleage’s new play A Song for Coretta.
There was a lot of energy at last night’s First Rehearsal – the cast was ready to go, we had a great turnout of subscribers and friends, and director Sarah Moeller had just had a wonderful phone conversation with Pearl Cleage, who sent her love and support to all.
There’s a lot to talk about as we start to work on this play, but what jumped out at me last night was the musicality of the play as a whole. Sarah brought together a group of actors with beautiful and distinct voices, and they quickly understood and embraced the rhythms of Pearl’s writing, and the harmonies they can create with one another. The result was a rich musical quality that rode underneath and shaped the powerful stories these five women tell throughout the play.
The nominations for this year’s Non-Equity Jeff Awards were announced this morning, and Eclipse was honored with four nominations, including myself and Laura in our current production of Blue Surge:
Laura Coover, Actress in a Principal Role – Play (Blue Surge)
Nathaniel Swift, Actor in a Supporting Role – Play (Blue Surge)
Jon Steinhagen, Actor in a Supporting Role – Play (Plaza Suite)
Nora Fiffer, Actress in a Supporting Role – Play (The Autumn Garden)
Congratulations to all the nominees!
There’s still one weekend left to catch the now Jeff-Nominated show – tickets are available online here.
We still have two weeks left in our run of Rebecca Gilman’s Blue Surge (and there are some tickets left!), but we’re already starting to get excited about revisiting 2007 featured playwright Pearl Cleage.
In less than two weeks, we’ll begin rehearsals for A Song for Coretta, a beautiful play about five women who gather in the rain outside the Ebenezer Baptist Church to pay their respects for the late Coretta Scott King. As each woman shares her reasons for being here, Pearl Cleage explores the impact that Mrs. King had on their lives, and the connections that they build with one another through her memory and legacy.
The rehearsal process begins with an Open First Rehearsal – a unique, behind-the-scenes that includes a few words from Artistic Director Nathaniel Swift (that’s me) and Director Sarah Moeller, presentations from the technical design team, and the cast’s first read-through of the script. This is a free event, and a great opportunity to meet the artists and hear their ideas.
Here are the details – I hope you can join us and help us kick off this journey!
A SONG FOR CORETTA
Open First Rehearsal
Monday, May 4th at 7:00 pm
Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N Lincoln
Cost: Free
For more information or to reserve seats, please call 773.325.9655
Sorry I’m late – I’ve started adding photos taken by our lighting designer, Seth Reinick, to our Flickr set. It’s taking longer than I expected (the man takes a lot of pictures), but it’s well worth the time – from the first batch, here’s Kevin and I arguing about who screwed up the massage parlor raid in Blue Surge:
2:04 – I just arrived at the theater a few minutes ago. We’re sold out and then some today, so I need to keep the producer hat on for a few more minutes. Warmups, notes and fight call start in six minutes – I’ll be back soon.
2:28 – The box office chaos is (mostly) under control, I’ve had a chance to practice getting punched in the face, and now I’m off to make sure my props and costumes are set where I’ll need them to be during the show. The first things I need, for a quick change after my first scene: socks, underwear and a gun. It’s a fun show …
2:42 – The house is open – I can hear only a few people out there right now, but we’re waiting on the group from MSU, so it’ll get a lot louder any minute. I just finished my warmups – pushups, situps, and some stretching, and now I just wait for the house lights to dim.
2:51 – Yeah, it just got a lot louder out there. I hope everybody got a seat.
2:57 – We’re holding for five minutes. I guess they’re trying to find seats for everyone. “Holding” is the right word for us as we’re backstage – we’re ready to start the show, and now we need to keep that energy and focus as we wait. Which means I probably shouldn’t be blogging right now, but what the heck.
3:00 – I just overheard the organizer of the MSU group tell her students that there’s no photography allowed during the show. Considering my first costume, I appreciate that.
3:10 – We’re off and running, a few minutes late. I’m not in the first scene, so I still have a few minutes to let my jittery nerves run their course. I think I’ll pace around the dressing room.
3:29 – Finished the nude scene and the first quick change. We’re in scene three now. The show’s going well, and this audience is giving us a lot of energy. Days like this are a lot of fun.
3:33 – I was just backstage waiting to do the set change after scene three. At the end of that scene, Curt tells his girlfriend not to be jealous of the prostitute he tried to arrest in the first scene. “It was just work,” he says. “I can’t even remember what she looked like.” From somewhere in the audience, as the lights were going down, we could hear someone say “Yeah, right.” Yeah, it’s going to be a fun day …
3:57 – Just did the fight scene. The package claims that the blood packs I use are “pleasant-tasting.” The package lies.
4:09 – Intermission. Lots of energy and noise from out in the house. I wonder if they know – Michigan State just beat Louisville 64-52. They’ll play Connecticut next week in the Final Four.
4:26 – This is probably the last time I have enough of a break to blog until the end of the show. This play moves fast, especially act two, and I need to stay focused so I don’t miss an entrance. I’ll be back if I can.
4:46 – My work here is done. Just waiting for the curtain call now. And the post-show discussion, which I’m really looking forward to. Kevin and Laura are in the final, heartbreaking scene on stage right now. It sounds like it’s hitting well – a great finish to a strong show.
I guess technically I’m live blogging right now (we’re in act two, scene three of Blue Surge right now, and I have about five minutes before I’m back on stage), but this is just a quick post to say that I’ll be blogging throughout the show from backstage this Sunday. The show starts at 3:00 pm. Stop by the blog between 3-5pm to ask me what things are like in the dressing room …
We have our first of many post-show discussions coming up after Sunday’s show, and we’re kicking it off with a group that I’m really looking forward to talking to – joining us for Sunday’s performance is a group of students from Michigan State (which means they’ll probably be checking NCAA tournament scores on their phones during intermission) who are in a program called MRULE – Multi-Racial Unity Living Experience. According to their website, the group encourages students to “contribute to positive race relations” by providing a community and forum for discussion:
Through open and frank discussions on controversial issues, informative presentations, interactive exercises and a variety of experiences that encourage the development of genuine friendships, students create and cultivate the experience of multiracial unity.
This makes us, I suppose, an “informative presentation,” but I’m looking forward to being informed by the students.
Blue Surge is a story about class, wealth and identity – in my mind, it’s about the way we see ourselves in the context of our own background, and the way that sense of identity can limit or destroy us if we allow it to. It’s not a play about race (it takes place in a small midwesten city, and all five actors in our production, myself included, are white), because the issues it digs into are not specific to any particular skin color or heritage.
That being said, I think it’s naive to think that class and race are unrelated - especially in America, with our long national history of intertwined -isms and the cultural identity issues that come with that history. So more than anything else, I’m excited to listen to the students from MSU tell me what this play is about – and I’m guessing that many will see it in a different light than I do.
This Sunday’s show is already sold out, but we’ll have discussions after all of the Sunday matinees through the run except the final performance on May 3rd. I’m excited about this week’s discussion now, but each week will bring a new group of people with a new way of thinking about the ideas Rebecca Gilman has given us to kick around. Join us if you can – the matinees begin at 3pm, and the discussion starts at about 5pm after the show ends (and yes, feel free to join us for the discussion even if you’re not seeing the play that day). There’s a link to buy tickets on your right …
This past Sunday, we ran the show for the first time with full costumes – which, for me, included full lack of costumes. My character, Doug, is an undercover cop who arrests a prostitute early in Blue Surge. To keep his cover, he strips completely when he asks for a “massage.”
This is a first for me, and not something I really thought I’d ever do. But I love this show, and I love playing Doug, and the story just doesn’t go forward if he doesn’t make the arrest. And that means the play doesn’t go forward if I don’t get naked.
So, for the last five weeks in rehearsals, I’ve been getting ready. I’ve had a lot of help from the cast and crew, who have been supportive and professional (and yes, cracking immature jokes, but that’s part of the process too). Sasha Gioppo, who plays Heather and shares the stage with me (and has slightly more of a costume than I do, but not much), has been particularly fantastic. I know it’s a weird experience for her too, and I hope she feels as comfortable with it as she’s helped me feel.
Last night, performing in front of an audience for the first time, I realized that – for me at least – there’s no such thing as being “ready.” It feels weird if I slow down enough to think about it, and it will probably keep feeling weird until the last show on May 3rd, but it also feels exhilarating and liberating. It’s a quick, active scene at the beginning of the play, and there’s not much time on stage to think about that weirdness (there’s plenty of time for that before and after the show, of course).
Instead of feeling uncomfortable during the scene, I’ve found myself feeling more free – since I would never ever get naked in public, I have no choice but to let the character of Doug take over. He, of course, is totally fine with it. So while I’m on stage, I feel like I am Doug in a way that I’ve never really felt before – I have no inhibitions, no doubts, and none of the usual voices in my head that analyze my performance while I’m in the midst of it. Simply put, it’s not me on stage. It can’t possibly be me. It’s Doug, and I can trust him to be himself and get me through the scene. And if things are going well, as they were last night, that feeling carries over through the rest of the play. So in an odd way, this is actually making me feel more comfortable as an actor than I’ve ever been.
So now I can cross this off my list of things to do before I die. And now that I’ve done it in front of a packed house (a nice surprise for a Dress Rehearsal), why not do it again?
I’m adding Scott Cooper’s fantastic new photos of our current production, Blue Surge, to our Flickr set now – here’s Sandy and Curt (Laura Coover and Kevin Scott) playing darts:
I shared a video a few weeks ago of Kevin and I (playing Curt and Doug in Blue Surge) running a fight scene in an early rehearsal. At the time, we hadn’t worked with our fight choreographer, ensemble member Thomas Jones. Kevin and I did spend a few minutes figuring out what we were going to do, and it worked out pretty well.
A few weeks later, we had reblocked the scene, memorized our lines, and choreographed a punch, a fall, and a couple of smacks with a newspaper. Take a look below:
Last night was the final rehearsal before we move into our home at the Greenhouse. The mania and fun that is Tech week is now upon us, and it’s odd to think that so much time has passed since the very first read through.
So, like most nights after rehearsal, I get home and wind down; I am so amped up during rehearsals, I need a good hour to relax and come down. I usually pop on The Daily Show after I have returned e-mails and gotten some business done. If any of you who are reading this have not seen Thursday night’s episode, watch it NOW!
I will provide the basic gist of the episode: Jon Stewart had been all week and last tarnishing and slamming CNBC for their lack of reporting and possible negligence and complacency in this whole market trouble. So, enter Jim Cramer of Mad Money, to be the kind of buffer for the network and Jon’s jabs at their failures. This is a great interview and speaks to what I think most Americans are feeling right now: anger, confusion, completely baffled and a sense of betrayal.
Blue Surge is a brave piece of writing that is deeply relevant for our times right now, and I imagine will remain a powerful piece of writing and theatre about the present state of The American Dream. And, all of these elements that I listed above, anger, confusion, bafflement, betrayed, and frustration are all apart of this piece. There is an almost eerie echo going on in this play. All week, with what the headlines have been blowing up, and what we are doing in rehearsals this is coming so much closer to home. And that is exciting! That is what is amazing. Rebecca Gilman has written something that is almost ten years old and speaks to our present moment loud and clear and with such depth, intelligence and concern and love for the people that this crisis and event is really slamming. There is something wonderful, humbling, and honoring in producing a play that speaks for people and understands that sometimes the choices are not many, that sometimes you are left with two options.
There is a touching anger throughout Blue Surge . I know that that seems like an oxymoron, but there is something moving about an emotion, be it sadness, joy, desperation, etc.. that everyone universally feels. Who among us can deny that there is an element of universal anger in all of us at what is going on. There is unity in that, and in being apart of this play, hearing the words and seeing this cast really grab hold of these characters and their predicaments with such grace, truth, and thunder, this play has spoken to many of my concerns of what is going on right now in this country. That is something remarkable.
So, here is the assignment: Watch The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, the march 12th episode and come out and see Blue Surge.
Stephen Dale, one of our fantastic new ensemble members, has been sitting down with the cast and crew of Blue Surge to talk about the show, the rehearsal process, and whatever else happens to come up when you put creative people in front of a digital video camera. We’ll be posting more interviews with actors and designers as the show rolls along – the first is Sasha Gioppo, who plays Heather in Blue Surge – watch the video below:
We’ve been working on a series of video interviews and rehearsal scenes that we’ll start posting today, and I’ve got a lot of writing to catch up on as we head into tech rehearsals this weekend, but for now – it’s Friday, and that means our regular weekly look back …
This picture comes courtesy of lighting designer Seth Reinick, who was nice enough to let me add his photos to our Flickr set. Seth is with us again now, designing lights for Rebecca Gilman’s Blue Surge. Which means we’ll have lots of great pictures…
This is from a tech rehearsal – that’s director Steven Fedoruk in the foreground, giving notes to TayLar and Alfred Kemp on stage. I designed the lights for this show, and I was as suprised as anyone by the way TayLar’s robe catches the blues and purples here.
It doesn’t seem that long ago that 2010 was the stuff of sci-fi fantasy stories; a year when cars would fly, robots would live among us, and we would make contact with a giant baby floating through space. Or something like that.
And yet there it is, sitting just over the horizon in the very real and non-fantasy way the immediate future always sits there. Maybe we will have flying cars and indestructible cyborgs in the next nine months, but it’s probably more realistic to assume that next year will be mostly like this one, and get to the work of planning what we’ll do then.
For us, that means choosing a new playwright. After a two-year celebration of our mission statement, we’re ready to dig back in to a full year-long exploration of a single storyteller. And although 2010 still feels a long way off, it’s getting closer every day, and we’re well on our way through the process of finding the next artistic voice to embrace.
The process started months ago, when we formed a five-person Artistic Committee within the ensemble and started reading. A lot. We had a list of over a dozen playwrights to consider – recommendations from ensemble and board members, subscribers, friends and playwrights (and yes, many of those groups overlap). The committee spent months reading plays by everyone on the list, discussed, argued, and narrowed the list to four. There are a lot of things to think about as we decide which writers to include on this list, but in the end it comes down to a search for stories that we feel a connection to – stories that we feel we need to tell.
The first public part of this process is only a couple of weeks away: we’ll be performing scenes from the four playwrights at the Total Eclipse Benefit on Sunday, March 8th (and yes, tickets are still available). We’ll be looking for feedback from the audience there, and we’d love to hear your thoughts here as well. Here’s the lineup for the Total Eclipse performance:
The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh Broken Glass by Arthur Miller The Action Against Sol Schumann by Jeffrey Sweet The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek by Naomi Wallace
Rehearsals have been remarkable! As I have posted before, this is my first time being on the other side of the table, the first time I have sat through the gruelling decisions steeped in auditions, call backs and now rehearsals; helping guide the vision of the playwright. It’s quite the change for me, and there are times watching this company of players, where I am so invested in what they are doing, I want to leap up on the stage and work with them as an actor. I wonder how actor/directors are able to do that? It’s something that I am continuing to look into, as directing becomes more and more a challenge I am interested and frightened to take. These are very gifted artist’s and watching them discover new elements in themselves, the script and the world we have made together is that of watching an orchid fully bloom. It is quite simply astonishing.
Last night’s rehearsal was no different. In applying our mission to every show we produce, every actor really becomes aware of language and how the emotional truth is set for us in trusting what the text provides us with. Last night , some amazing choices were made due to trusting what Rebecca Gilman has written. Now, there is always something we actors do that helps us grasp a deeper understanding of what these characters experience and that is investigation of behaviour that may or may not be a part of who we are as individuals. So, we took an inspired Field Trip to the Admiral Club to further our understanding of what these two girls, Sandy & Heather go through on a daily basis, being hookers.
Now this is not to say that the ladies who work the stage of the Admiral Club are to be equated with prostitution, but the sense of a “Fantasy” world, a surreal existence in which women strip to Full Monty and bump up and down among the men in the audience and for money can be safely accessed.
The Admiral is unlike many strip clubs. It’s furnished like a grand cabaret theatre of the fifties, very posh decor, mood lighting, and “body guards” surrounding the place dressed to the nines. There is an element of privilege almost. Everyone is cordial and welcoming and yet the clientele are as varied as college frat boys, businessmen, you’re Joe Six-Packs, and the group of us actors doing research on this Field Trip.
Throughout the house there are ladies clad in their stockings and such, offering up and giving lap dances. Every now and again we saw one of these dames taking her customer to a back room area, and there is a performer on the stage. There is a lot of action going on and all of it is flirtation. We had two lovely ladies, Natalie and Valarie, approach us and start up some friendly conversation. A bit flirtatious. A bit provocative. A bit interested. And then, you’re hit with the bottom line: How would you like a dance?
There are two scenes in the play that go through this exact break down. A little friendly chit-chat to warm up the customer and then pleasantly, dropping all guard and dropping the act, getting to the point: So, what do you want to do?
Both of these girls were very good at their work. Both times they spoke directly to Sasha & Laura, while having some kind of direct physical contact with me, but not looking at me or speaking to me. There was the occasional smile and checking in on me, but there wasn’t any inclusion. Not until both Sasha and Laura turned down the offer of a dance, then I was all they wanted. And why not? My red hair is gorgeous, and red heads are a dying breed so this just very well may be the last Chance that Natalie and Valarie have to give a lap dance to a dapper little gent with red hair like myself.
All of it though was brilliantly exercised. There is the approach to the two people who don’t pose a threat, and who are easier to talk to. Follow all of that with the direct approach to me. All of it is a build up to courting us and to make us feel comfortable with the fact that a more than half-naked woman is standing before us, and then in a moment will be completely fully nude.
We were wondering, when they were on stage what they think about? Grocery listing, their day tomorrow, politics, what shade of green works best? This was a genuine interest. What does one think about when performing like this, knowing that a room of people are watching with dirty thoughts, clean thoughts, maybe one of the guys in that audience has a vision of falling in love with one of these strippers, and he saves her from this life of exploitation and they run off into the snow covered streets of Chicago, hand in hand together for always?
No insight was given on this, except for Valarie. She had asked us how we all knew each other, was this our first time to a strip club, what did we do, etc..?
“We are actually doing a show together.” “Really!? What kind of show?” ” A Play. Theatre.” “Do you guys ever do comedy?” ” Sometimes.” ” I do comedy too.”
This piqued our interest; was it possible that this could be one of our very own thespians? A member of the club?
“You do? Where?” “Here.” “You must have a lot of fun with it.” “Oh yeah. I get to mess around with people’s heads. It’s lots of fun. How do you feel about a dance?”
Right when we thought we had a connection, the bottom line smacks you bacross the face. At least she had a great sense of humor.
Landscape of the Body, from the 2002 John Guare season. Kerry Richlan (left) is currently playing Beth in Blue Surge. Anish Jethmalani (right) is currently directing Blue Surge. The dress (right) is currently in between gigs, but hopefully we’ll see it on stage again someday.
Kerry Richlan and Anish Jethmalani in Landscape of the Body
The phrase “the American Dream” is part of the show description of Blue Surge on our website. So, as I’m looking around for inspiration for the dramaturgically driven lobby display, what do I do, I turn to google…..I mean isn’t that where we all turn when we are looking for inspiration? Either google or facebook, one of the two will surely have the answer.
I divert, back to the story, I googled the American Dream and thought I should share some of my results.
There is actually a Wikipedia article regarding “The American Dream” the classic story of “life, liberty and the pursuit of hapiness”…..the opporutunity to make choices without the restrictions of race, class, color or creed.
I also got the lyrics to Lil’ Wayne’s song “The American Dream” which include:
Mr.Mike Tyson flow,uppercut all yawl
step into my ring bitches,ding ding bitches
click clack pow pow ping ping bitches
im the Dream machine i mean keen vision
fuckin right imma monster
Which if I’m interpreting correctly, I think describe a different American Dream….I’ll let you link to the lyrics to interpret for yourself.
And….the newest addition to the story about the American Dream
“We have begun the essential work of keeping the American dream alive in our time,” he [Obama] said, before affixing his signature to the $787 billion stimulus bill passed by Congress on Friday.
So it leads me to no actual conclusion……What is the American Dream?
There is one scene in which Duke Ellington’s poetic, heartbreaking, & illuminating “Blue Serge” is played and talked about. If you haven’t heard this particular tune, or any of Ellington’s music, run to your nearest itunes provider and get some. Music has always played a very vibrant, essential role in my work, my life and my art…. that sounds cheesy! But, it is true. The music of the 30’s & 40’s captures the themes and events of that time so devastatingly; songs with lyrics & without. Some of my personal favorites have been Johnny Mercer, Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, to name a few. This is also true of the sound of the fury that was the 60’s & 70’s; the show also mentions some great classic rock icons.
I find that when I am working on any show, the music of that show is a major source of inspiration, imagination, and emotionality. Sometimes the music that helps me the most is not of the era the show may or may not be placed in. Luckily with Blue Serge we are in the present and so the music that has come to me and has helped me has been really interesting.
There have been the obvious choices, I feel, given what the story of Blue Sergeis : Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, a little Ani DiFranco. But the biggest surprise for me has been the desire and the effect of the haunting Nina Simone. Songs like “Feeling Good”, “Wild is the Wind”, “Four Women” she even has a wonderfully deranged version of Weill’s “Pirate Jenny”, all have this quality of solitude, weariness, brutal honesty and a Delicious sense of irony, that are all very much alive and well in the world of our show.
Music, like any kind of performance art, is a beast that holds nothing back. To hear Nina sing a love song about being together forever, the flowers, the birds, there is always that sense of doubt in her voice. It is a voice that forces you to look and hear beyond the words written, and let the interpretation take hold and float away. And all we have to do is float along and see where the ride takes us.
It’s only a few weeks now until our big annual benefit, Total Eclipse 2009. The party this year will be at Rockit Bar & Grill (22 W Hubbard), with performances from ensemble members, silent and live auctions, a 50/50 raffle, and the first annual Eclipse Corona Award (the link is there to explain the reason for the name – hint: it’s not the beer), presented to Jane Alderman.
I’ll write more soon about the great new venue we’ll be partying at, the performances we’ll be presenting (samples from the playwrights we’re considering for the 2010 season) and Jane’s impact on Eclipse’s growth in the early days. If you’re already excited, though, you can get your tickets now …
So, this is the first time I have ever done this as myself, JP, that is. An alter ego of mine wrote during Plaza Suite: Wally the bellhop.
This is my first outing with assistant Directing and the thought was at once thrilling and somewhat terrifying. What was expected of me? What will I be taking charge of, if anything? What if Anish doesn’t like my cologne? What if the actors thought I was trying to conduct my own little casting couch on the sly?
In all seriousness though, I was nervous because I didn’t know what I was doing. It was a challenge that I had not attempted since school. I am very happy to report that this has been a great experience so far. This is very much a collaboration of some wonderful artists bringing forth all their ideas and points of view. It’s the processing, assessing and seeing what works and doesn’t that proves to be the challenge. Thankfully with this imaginative cast and under the leadership of Anish things are falling into place beautifully.
Blue Surge is a very timely story, perhaps more so than when it first premiered almost ten years ago here in Chicago. There is a story of struggle and a feeling of helplessness that this country is facing right now. A sense of “I’m not sure what to do. I feel stuck.” I don’t know where to go, or how to really fix it.” This is a part of what our story is about. This confusion and frustration when feeling stuck in a hole and there is no one to help.
Thankfully a bunch of people have leaped into the hole and a few know the way out.
We’re just over a week into rehearsals for Blue Surge, and last night we ran through all of act one twice. We’re all still carrying scripts and exploring choices at this point in the process, and there’s still a long way to go before we open, but things are starting to take shape.
In the clip below, Kevin Scott (Curt) and I (Doug) are discussing our relationships with the prostitutes we failed to arrest:
This is a great part of the rehearsal process – we’re starting to get comfortable with the characters, we’re starting to remember our lines and our blocking, and there’s a lot of time to play.
My favorite bit of dramaturgical research so far – according to urban legend debunker snopes.com, it is not actually true that an undercover cop has to answer honestly when asked “Are you a cop?”
As we start the new season, we’re also welcoming seven new artists into the Eclipse ensemble. They’ve all been working with us over the last few years, and we’re really lucky to have each one of them in our family.
We’ll be posting photos, bios and interviews of each new ensemble member over the coming months (and maybe some of us old folks, too, while we’re at it), so you can get to know all of us. For now, you can get a sneak peek at Eclipse’s newest faces by clicking “read more” ….
From the brand spankin’ new Blue Surge set on Flickr, here’s me and Kevin (Doug and Curt in the play) cooling our heels in the alley, waiting for the Captain to give the signal to start an undercover operation.
This past Monday night at the Greenhouse Theater, the cast and crew of Blue Surge got together for the first time to kick around ideas and read the script out loud. With a small audience in the upstairs studio theater that included a few subscribers, friends, and playwright Rebecca Gilman, we got our first taste of the journey we’ll be taking over the next few months.
We read this play out loud for the first time in 2005, in an ensemble member’s living room, as we were planning the 2006 Rebecca Gilman season. We read it again in 2006, as part of the Playwright Scholar Series. We read a scene from the play at our Total Eclipse Benefit last year.
Clearly, something about this play has been calling us.
At our first ensemble meeting of the new year, one of the agenda items was to look back at the 2008 season and talk about how we did – what worked, what didn’t, what lessons to take into the second half of the Celebration Series.
We weren’t sure what to expect as we started the Celebration Series in 2008 – this would the first time in ten years that we had produced a season with more than one playwright, and there was some concern about the “departure” from our mission statement. The idea of celebrating our unique relationship with all of our featured playwrights gave us some pretty spectacular gifts in 2008, though:
Bubba Weiler, CeCe Klinger and Stephen Dale in Candles to the Sun
In the spring, we got a truly unique opportunity: to be the first professional theatre company – ever – to produce a play written by a young college student named Tom in the mid-1930s. Candles to the Sun disappeared for over almost years, but Tom became a legend in American theatre. This was the perfect (and unexpected) beginning of our journey through the Celebration Series – the chance to reconnect with our roots by exploring the roots of the playwright who brought us all together.
Cheri Chenoweth and Jon Steinhagen in Plaza Suite
In the summer, we dove headlong into silliness with a return to the world of Neil Simon. We had consciously avoided the most well-known comedies when we featured Simon in 2003, and we all had a blast discovering what we had been missing - mugging our way through the three stories in Plaza Suite, each one more absurdly funny than the last (and we will get to take one more swing at them; the Chicago Park District has invited us to remount Plaza Suite as part of their 2009 Theater on the Lake lineup). As in 2003, though, it was Simon’s suprisingly compassionate and tragic characters who stuck with us after the laughs died down.
John Fenner Mays and Nora Fiffer in The Autumn Garden
The fall gave us a chance to make up for a missed opportunity – in 1999, we all fell in love with The Autumn Garden, and we all decided we were simply too young to do justice to the mature stories Hellman mixes together in this complicated script. It’s been an itch waiting to be scratched for almost ten years, and a pleasure to finally get back to it.
Along the way, we also dipped our toes in the immense waters of Jean Cocteau’s career, and spent an afternoon with Lanford Wilson’s fictional family, the Talleys. We dug up pictures from old seasons, we found the old dramaturgy binders, and mostly we had fun rediscovering why we had so much fun with these writers the first time around.
On Monday, we start a new journey – the second year of the Celebration Series, and a return to our 2006 featured playwright, Rebecca Gilman. We presented Blue Surge as a staged reading in 2006, but decided not to include it in our season. But this one has been itching at us too, and we’ll have the next three months or so to scratch that itch.
In the last two days, I’ve written posts about video scenes from the show and an audio interview with me, so I thought I’d continue the media trend this morning by sharing some of the wonderful photographs we have to help us tell the story of The Autumn Garden.
Chuck Spencer and Millie Hurley in The Autumn Garden
Stephen Dale, Julie Partyka and Judith Hoppe in The Autumn Garden
The photos we use are primarily for the press – ideally, we like to give them five or six good photos for them to use in print and online with reviews and articles. They need to showcase the actors, engage the audience, and tell a story.
Scott knows this script well, and he was able to join us for a rehearsal to watch a run through and get to know the actors. He had clear ideas of the moments he wanted to capture and the stories he wanted to tell.
Millie Hurley, Julie Daley and John Fenner Mays in The Autumn Garden
The sleek, newly redesigned STAGE Channel has two video clips of scenes from The Autumn Garden – click on the image above to watch Ned Crossman and General Griggs examine their lives, or the image below to watch Nick Denery try to convince Constance Tuckerman to pose for a new portrait.
If you haven’t discovered Theatre in Chicago’s podcast interviews, you’ve missed a lot of great conversations with Chicago’s best artists. And now’s a great time to discover them – I sat down for my first interview last week, and it was posted yesterday.
It’s a 30 minute or so conversation that wanders around through our current Jeff Recommended production of The Autumn Garden, the upcoming second half of our Celebration Series, Eclipse’s elaborate and chaotic process of choosing a playwright for the season, and how the fact that the theater burnt down in my first show with Eclipse convinced me that this was the theatre company for me.
We have a full run through tonight – our final rehearsal before the actors move in to the Greenhouse Theater this weekend. We’ve been working and running each act individually over the last few nights, and I’m looking forward to putting the pieces back together again tonight.
The Autumn Garden is filled with stories that weave in and out and over one another, and each story is thick with detail and truth.
Nora Fiffer and Stephen Dale in The Autumn Garden
The young adopted niece from German-occupied France longs to return home but accepts an arranged marriage with a wealthy young gay man who needs to marry to retain his family’s social standing. The veteran of two World Wars rallies his energy for one final battle for his own personal freedom while his childish wife fights to keep her world from collapsing. The struggling owner of a summer resort, one short generation removed from the wealth and status of her family’s past, searches for answers to her life’s emptiness in the opportunity she missed when the man she loved left twenty years ago. Or the other side of that story: the self-centered artist who returns to his childhood home to insinuate himself into the lives of the people he left twenty years ago …
And this only scratches the surface – the brilliance of this script is the richness of each individual story and the beauty of the whole.
We have preview performances next Wednesday, Thursday and Friday – tickets are only $5 for industry folks (which includes blog readers; just ask the box office for the “industry” discount when you call them at 773-404-7336). The previews are our last opportunities to explore and play with these stories and make sure they’re all being told clearly, so we’d love to hear what you think as we get ready for Opening Night next Saturday.
In 2000, Eclipse Theatre Company chose Lillian Hellman as our featured playwright. We explored the roots of the Hubbard family in Another Part of the Forest, Hellman’s political voice in Watch on the Rhine, and her adaptation of Jean Anouilh’s The Lark.
The Autumn Garden was, of course, on the short list of plays under consideration that season. It was a script that many of us felt a strong connection to, and one that I felt a strong itch to direct. But I knew I wasn’t ready to tell the stories of mature relationships and self-reflection that Hellman weaves together in this beautiful play. I wasn’t the only one: I remember a few ensemble members saying that it would be a great choice – if only we were ten years older.
And now here we are, almost ten years later, with the opportunity to continue our journey with Lillian Hellman. We’re all a little older, a little more mature, and a little more ready to tell this story.
With a career that spans over seven decades, and a body of work that includes some of the most well-known and most frequently produced dramas in the world, Arthur Miller may be this country’s greatest storyteller. His plays range from realistic psychological dramas to abstract dreamscapes; exploring social dynamics, personal connections and political conflict. 
I received an email yesterday morning from the 
In less than two weeks, we’ll begin rehearsals for A Song for Coretta, a beautiful play about five women who gather in the rain outside the Ebenezer Baptist Church to pay their respects for the late Coretta Scott King. As each woman shares her reasons for being here, Pearl Cleage explores the impact that Mrs. King had on their lives, and the connections that they build with one another through her memory and legacy.
