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 [...]

Taking a break (for the moment)

Spinning into Butter had its last performance the Sunday before last - we didn’t have a post-show discussion since we had to take the set apart and vacate our temporary home.
We’ll be back soon though - rehearsals start in just over a week for Boy Gets Girl, and the blog will be back as well [...]

Post-show discussion - Sunday, August 27

We invited guest panelists to join us for Sunday’s post-show discussion; it’s a trend we’re hoping to continue and to build on in an effort to bring in people who have a professional and/or personal connection to the stories we’re telling and the issues they raise. On Sunday we welcomed Nicole Woods, formerly the Director [...]

Post-show discussion - Sunday, August 20

We had a wonderful group in attendance on Sunday - our good friend and advisor Sandra invited everyone she knows to fill the house and join us for a reception before the show and discussion afterwards (including another backstage tour - Anish is demonstrating the lighting effects on the back of the cyc in the [...]

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 - Saturday, August 12

We passed the “seat of the pants” test, according to the first comment from an audience member after Saturday’s show (I think that’s what she called it, anyway - if someone else heard her differently please correct me): She told us that she never squirmed, never felt uncomfortable in her seat, and (although she may [...]

Nuyorican???

This is my first post on the blog, so this seemed to be a perfect topic for me to start with: what is a Nuyorican?  It’s probably one of the most asked questions by audience members at the post-show Q & A discussions.  Understandably, many audience members had never heard of the term (I must [...]

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 [...]

How do you memorize all those lines??

I asked the cast of “Spinning Into Butter” to respond to a question that is asked frequently in many post-show discussions:  “How do you memorize all those lines????”  I think you’ll find lots of similar themes here - we hope you find it illuminating!
LARRY BALDACCI (Dean Burton Strauss)
Ah, yes…lines.  I’m not really sure what my [...]

Post-show discussion - Saturday, August 5

A few quick notes from Saturday’s discussion - it was a smaller group that stuck around after the show, but it was one of our best conversations so far.
An audience member asked Anish how he was able to work with the actors to create the “covert insecurities” each character seems to have. As a director, [...]

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 [...]

Performances added

Anish announced at last night’s performance that we’ll be adding two shows during the run of Spinning into Butter - Wednesday, August 23 at 8 p.m., and Wednesday, August 30 at 8 p.m. Visit Eclipse Theatre’s Web site or call 773-871-3000 to reserve tickets.
The reason we’re adding shows, of course, is that the ones we’ve [...]

Sun-Times blog: Why I talk about race

Mary Mitchell, columnist for the Sun-Times, recently joined the blogosphere with brave honesty: her first post, “Why I talk about race,” opened a dialogue between herself and her readers (including me, now that I’ve found her blog) that explores racism from all sides. An excerpt from her post, describing a panel discussion at DePaul University [...]

Hey, we’re on TV!

 
StageChannel has a clip two clips from Spinning into Butter currently running here.
If the link doesn’t take you right to the video you may need to search for “Spinning into Butter” on the StageChannel site.
This is Gerardo Cardenas and Kerry Richlan, playing Patrick Chibas and Sarah Daniels, talking about Patrick’s scholarship and financial aid problems.

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 [...]

Before the first discussion

I’m sitting in the lobby of Victory Gardens Theater right now (live blogging, if you like), as the cast is performing Spinning into Butter in front of a sold-out house. We’ll have our first post-show discussion of the run tonight, and I’m excited to see what the folks I just met on their way into [...]

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 [...]

Opening night

Spinning into Butter opened last night at Victory Gardens. We had a great crowd, a strong show, and a fantastic party afterwards at John Barleycorn just up the street. We’ll have our first official post-show discussion this Sunday (July 30) after the matinee performance; I’ll try to post some thoughts and questions here in anticipation of that, [...]

Drama-who?

The question came from one of the back rows of my freshman level intro to theatre class in response to the first discussion of the dramaturg’s role in the theatrical process. The tone was a mixture of confusion and disbelief (that can’t be a real word, it seemed to say): “Drama-who?”
It is a real word, and [...]

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 [...]

Opening the discussion

In a little more than two weeks, we’ll be opening Rebecca Gilman’s Spinning into Butter. As always, we’ll invite audiences to join us after most Sunday shows to talk to the cast and crew.
We’ve been doing this for years, and they’ve always been a lot of fun - sometimes it’s just a few people talking about [...]