Friday photo rescue

Spinning into Butter, from the 2006 Rebecca Gilman season.

Searching for meaning

One of the fun things about having a blog is that I get to see what search terms people use to find us - sometimes we’re what they’re looking for (”eclipse theatre blog” is a pretty frequent one, for example), and sometimes, well, maybe we’re not (”night sky backdrop for plays” brought someone here last week, and [...]

A backstage tour of Spinning into Butter

Gerardo Cardenas, who played Patrick Chibas in our production of Spinning into Butter this past summer, shared with me a collection of pictures he took during the final week of rehearsals.
His pictures are beautiful - they’re intimate moments with the cast and crew as they make their final preperations. Take a look through the photo [...]

Blue Surge reading

We had a casual reading of Rebecca Gilman’s Blue Surge last Saturday - we read through the play with scripts in hand, and invited subscribers to join us to listen and discuss the play. That’s me on the right, going over lines that morning.
More pictures and a brief summary of the discussion below the fold.

Post-show discussions - November 25-December 3

Sorry for the delay - we’ve had a busy couple of weeks, with some great discussions, a reading of Blue Surge, a trip to see Suzan-Lori Parks’s 365 Days / 365 Plays (which we’ll be working on next September), and a performance without lights. I’ll try to catch up quickly here, and write about all [...]

Blue Surge Reading Dec 2

We’ll be reading Rebecca Gilman’s Blue Surge on Saturday, December 2 - in addition to the three full productions each season, we also like to give our audiences the opportunity to explore as much of the playwright’s work as possible. It’s a free event, starting at 3 pm in the upstairs studio at the Victory Gardens [...]

Post-show discussion - Saturday, November 18

We spent a good part of Saturday night’s post-show discussion talking about Rebecca Gilman - who she is, what her plays are like, and why we decided to spend a year telling her stories.
A few people were interested in our process of choosing each season’s playwright - we start with recommendations from company members, audiences [...]

Theatre Thursday - November 9

I’m running a little behind here - our first post-show disussion for Boy Gets Girl was one week ago tonight, and I’m finally finding a moment to write a post. I was away from the show for a few days (my sister had an absolutely beautiful wedding in New York last weekend, and James Joseph played [...]

Opening Night

Boy Gets Girl opened Sunday night after a great weekend of previews. We got a lot of feedback - from the surveys we give our preview audiences, from conversations in the lobby after the show, and from the energy in the theatre each night.
Tomorrow is our first post-show discussion - the League of Chicago Theatres‘ [...]

An evening at the Newberry Library

CeCe and I visited Maren’s class at the Newberry Library the other night, and joined her students in a discussion of the theatrical process in general and Boy Gets Girl in particular. The course description explains the focus of the class like this:
We seek to break “the fourth wall” and establish discussion between those who see theater [...]

So you’re being stalked…

We performed a scene from Boy Gets Girl at an ITA conference in Arlington Heights last weekend, and along with the sneak peek of the show we also had a conversation between director Steve Scott and playwright Rebecca Gilman. Steve led Rebecca through a wonderful informal interview, talking about her process in writing this script [...]

Greetings from the guy playing Howard

Hello.  I’m Gary Simmers.  I’ve been an ensemble member of Eclipse since the 99 season.  It is my privilege to be playing Howard in the upcoming production of Boy Gets Girl.
I’m really looking forward to the group discussions following this show.  This is a tough subject to wrap your mind around.  I think that men [...]

The Newberry Library looks ‘Behind the Scenes”

Eclipse company member, dramaturg and actor Maren Robinson will be teaching a course at the Newberry Library this fall, giving students an incredible opportunity to see how and why small theatre companies in Chicago do what we do.
This is going to be a fantastic class - Maren’s enthusiasm and curiosity are contagious, and she’ll be [...]

Post-show discussion - Sunday, August 13

We had a fantastic discussion Sunday, with a majority of the audience sticking around to ask questions. It was one of those discussions that could have gone on for hours, although I’ll try to keep the summary here short.

Post-show discussion - Sunday, August 6

This is what I think constitutes good art, one audience member told us towards the beginning of Sunday’s discussion. It’s not preachy, it doesn’t give concrete solutions - Spinning into Butter puts different perspectives on a complicated issue on stage and leaves it to the audience to wrestle with the morality of those perspectives.
That’s a [...]

Theater Thursday - August 3

The League of Chicago Theatres joined us for Theater Thursday this past week, and we spent some time talking to to the audience over some pretty good pizza before the show. Pretty good delivered pizza, since it’s a show set on a college campus (we had hot dogs and cracker jacks for The Sweetest Swing [...]

Post-show discussion - Sunday, July 30

The post-show discussion started off on Sunday with the director, Anish Jethmalani, talking about the importance of the discussions that took place during the premiere run of Spinning into Butter at the Goodman Theatre in 1999. Rebecca Gilman explained at the time that they were like a third act of the play.
The conversations we’ve had [...]

Post-show discussion - Saturday, July 29

The cast of Spinning into Butter returned to the stage a few minutes after the show had ended last night, sitting down to talk to the audience for the first time. I sat on stage with them, perched on the corner of Dean Daniels’s desk, and we had a great conversation with twenty or so audience [...]

Discussion topics

A post-show discussion can go in any direction an audience wants to take it, but there are some specific questions and topics I expect will be a part of the Spinning into Butter discussions, and I want to mention them here briefly as we approach the first of those discussions this Saturday and Sunday.
Some topics are general; questions we’ve been [...]

A quick thought after the dress rehearsal

I watched the final dress rehearsal of Spinning into Butter last night - the first preview is tonight, and we open on Monday. There’s a structural rhythm that Gilman consistently uses in her writing - not just the fact that most of her plays are episodic, meaning that they’re made up of short, contained scenes, but [...]

Common threads

One of the things that attracted me to Eclipse back in 1999 when I started working with this fine group of folks was the ability to see common threads between the plays written by each individual playright. I came on board late in the Cocteau season, so I really experienced this for the first time when [...]