Friday photo rescue

Four Jeff-Nominated performances, from 2008/2009:
Jon Steinhagen in Plaza Suite:
Nora Fiffer in The Autumn Garden:

Nathaniel Swift in Blue Surge:

Laura Coover in Blue Surge:

A look back at 2008

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 [...]

The Autumn Garden: a story in images

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.
Our photographer Scott Cooper, who has a [...]

Watch scenes from 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.

A conversation with the director

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 [...]

Autumn Garden Previews start Wednesday

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 [...]

Ten years older

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 [...]

Browse the dramaturgical research

I’m almost done uploading all of the dramaturgical research for The Autumn Garden – from the Pompano fish that Constance offers to prepare for Nick, to the heavy Isotta that Crossman drives through Pass Christian, it’s all here (or will be soon). This is the information that Sarah put together for the cast and crew [...]

Planting a garden

Throughout the first two weeks of rehearsals for The Autumn Garden, we’ve been working mostly on the blocking – figuring out how all twelve actors move around the set and what the overall shape of the play looks like. In the last few days we’ve started going back through the script, asking questions and talking [...]

Friday blog rescue

Yes, it’s a little more urgent this morning than the usual photo, but I’ll start with that: this is from our upcoming production of Lillian Hellman’s The Autumn Garden.
We’ve been in rehearsals for two weeks now, and it’s been months since my last visit to the blogosphere. I’m adding the dramaturgical research for The Autumn [...]