Chase Community Giving is using Facebook to determine which 200 non-profit organizations nation-wide will receive donations of $250K, $100K or $20K.
Eclipse is in the top 200 now, and we need your help to stay there!
If you’re on Facebook, visit Chase Community Giving and cast a vote for Eclipse Theatre Company!
If you’re not on Facebook, please pass this message along to someone who is!
And once you’re there, you can keep right on supporting the Chicago theatre community … you can cast up to twenty votes, and help secure funding for all your favorite Chicago theatre companies! Use the links below to support our friends in the community:
It has been a difficult and tragic week within the Eclipse family; our good friend and ensemble member Kat Saari passed away on Monday, leaving our hearts broken and our souls aching. Kat’s passion, intelligence and artistic vision will be missed as much as her friendship. The outpouring of support and love from throughout our extended family in the Chicago theatre community has been nothing short of amazing, and a wonderful reminder about the lives she touched.
Her family has created a page on Facebook dedicated to sharing memories and photos celebrating her life and our fortune in being a part of it. For those who knew Kat, please follow the link at right to Eclipse’s Facebook page, and from there you can leave your own thoughts and memories. She will be in our thoughts and prayers always, and we miss her terribly.
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
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!
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…
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 …
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.
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.
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
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 …
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” ….
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.
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.
I was interviewed yesterday by a student at DePaul University, who is preparing a presentation for an Intro to Theatre class and chose to present the history of Eclipse Theatre Company.
Before the interview, she emailed me a quick list of the questions she wanted to focus on. The first question on that list set the tone for a great conversation:
Does the production of Candles to the Sun have any special significance to the history of Eclipse Theatre Company?
I’ve told this story before, but it’s always a fun one to tell – starting with that production of Confessional in 1999, where six of the current ensemble met for the first time, and that whole 1999 season, when we brought Eclipse back from the ashes (literally!) by spending the year exploring Tennessee Williams. When we started talking about the idea of the Celebration Series, I don’t think we could have imagined a better show to kick it off – not only do we get to return to our roots as a company, but also to Tom Williams’ roots as a writer.
This Saturday we’ll be checking in with another one of our past featured playwrights; Jean Cocteau, who kicked this party off back in 1997/98. That was the first season of Eclipse’s “One Playwright – One Season” mission statement, and the beginning of a new direction for us.
I first worked with Eclipse as the lighting designer for The Infernal Machine, the final production of the Cocteau season (and the last show in the old Bucktown theater, which was destroyed in a fire after the first weekend of performances, but more on that later).
As part of our two-year celebration of the first ten playwrights we’ve featured, ensemble members and guest artists will be reading scenes from Cocteau’s plays, discussing his novels and films, and playing some music. In this picture, Cheri Chenoweth and Nina O’Keefe rehearse a scene from The Holy Terrors as Josh Venditti and Kevin Scott look on.
The event – Exploring’s Cocteau’s World – will be this Saturday at 2pm at the Victory Gardens Greenhouse Theater at 2257 N Lincoln in Chicago. It’s a free event for Eclipse subscribers ($5 suggested donation for everyone else); call us at 312-738-0704 to reserve a seat.
This is a busy week, so blogging might be a little light (and I brilliantly managed to get sick just as we started loading the set into the theater, which isn’t helping), but we’ll have pictures and videos of the load in process and tech rehearsals for Candles to the Sun as I can find time to post.
Thanks to all who attended the Total Eclipse 2008 Benefit – it was a great party and a great opportunity to meet subscribers and supporters.
Still looking for somewhere to go for brunch this Sunday? Join us at the Bluewater Grill (520 N Dearborn) from 12 pm – 3 pm for Total Eclipse 2008, our annual benefit and celebration of the upcoming season.
Along with a great brunch (mimosas or bloody marys included, of course), you’ll also have the chance to help us craft the 2009 season. Ensemble members will perform scenes from plays we’re considering from our 2009 featured playwrights (Pearl Cleage, Rebecca Gilman, John Guare, Romulus Linney and Keith Reddin), and you can let us know which ones you’d like to see us explore next year.
There’s also a raffle – with prizes including restaurant gift certificates; Cubs, Sox and Bulls tickets; original artwork; theater and symphony tickets; and more. And yes, you can buy tickets for the raffle online even if you can’t make it to the party Sunday. But then you’ll miss out on some great door prizes, including signed scripts from all five 2009 featured playwrights.
As we were closing out last year’s Pearl Cleage season, and as I was getting ready to step into the role of Eclipse’s new Artistic Director, I sat down for a long interview with ensemble member Cecil Averett. Here’s a short clip from that conversation – Cecil had asked me to talk about our mission statement and how it informs our approach to the work we do:
I’ll be posting more clips from this video, and more interviews with more artists, soon. Keep up with the growing collection at YouTube.
The Victory Gardens Greenhouse Theater, our home for five years now, is having an Open House tonight – it’s a free event with food, drinks, and performances from Eclipse, Shattered Globe, MPAACT and Victory Gardens. We’ll be presenting a scene from Candles to the Sun, which is now a week into rehearsals.
The “Speed Theater” format – a Valentine’s Day play on Speed Dating – means you’ll have the chance to meet and flirt with all four companies in under two hours, and decide who you’re interested in seeing again. And unlike most speed dating events, polygamy is encouraged here.
In the spring of 1999, I played a young boy in Tennessee Williams’s Confessional (I think the character’s name was actually YOUNG BOY, or maybe just BOY) who was on the last legs of a bike ride from Iowa to Mexico. I wore ridiculously short shorts and a T-shirt that said, in big block letters on a brown background, IOWA TO MEXICO. I had a short scene late in the play where I got picked up by a young man (YOUNG MAN, as I recall) played by Steven Fedoruk.
That was the beginning of the 1999 Tennessee Williams season, and it was really the beginning (or maybe re-beginning) of Eclipse Theatre Company; seven members of that cast became ensemble members that year – myself included – and we dove into Williams with a passion that would set the tone for the next nine years.
It seems natural to start this ride the same way that one began – by exploring a little-known, rarely-seen play by one of the best and most prolific writers in American history.
We’re just over two weeks away from the first rehearsal for Candles to the Sun (directed by YOUNG MAN Steven Fedoruk), which hasn’t been produced professionally since its 1937 debut in St. Louis. The design team has been bouncing around ideas for a few months now, the cast is ready to run, and we’ll have a lot to share as we go along.
You can watch a clip from last Saturday’s Playwright Scholar Series event, From the Page to the Stage:
This is Steven Fedoruk reading part of “Monogamy Blues,” from The Brass Bed and Other Stories.
Ensemble members read excerpts from What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day, Deals With the Devil and Other Reasons to Riot, and The Brass Bed and Other Stories in a great afternoon enjoying the side of Pearl Cleage’s writing that we can’t present on stage.
A few weeks ago, director Ron OJ Parson and I sat down with Dr. David Unumb, host of Northeastern Illinois University‘s Vantage Point radio show (which airs Sunday mornings at 6:30 on WTMX), for an in-depth interview about Bourbon at the Border, Pearl Cleage and Eclipse Theatre Company in general.
In case you weren’t up early enough on Sunday morning, you can listen to the full half-hour interview by clicking here (the link will open a file you can play on your media player).
I should note that because we had not found our fantastic lighting designer, Gina Patterson, at the time we prepared a press release for this interview, Dr. Unumb refers to me as the lighting designer. Thankfully, Gina joined us shortly after that so I was able to focus on producing instead of trying to wear multiple hats.
Last summer Time Out Chicago had a feature article discussing the race barrier in Chicago. Prior to the articles publication Eclipse had already announced their 2007 season playwright, African American writer Pearl Cleage. A mostly white theater company producing an entire season of theater by an African American playwright. Could this work? Eclipse has had success with the first two production Blues for an Alabama Sky brought home 5 Jeff citations alone. Since the article several Chicago theatres have followed suit, whether it was the Time Out article or the plan was in the works prior to publication. Steppenwolf added 6 new ensemble members, 4 out of 6 are African American, in addition to the daring color blind casting used in their current production of The Crucible. Did Time Out strike a nerve with Chicago theatre companies or did they just recently become aware of the color barrier?
Read on to see what prolific African American playwrights think about the subject:
Check out the calendar – you can save events to your own Outlook calendar, set a reminder for yourself so you don’t forget about a show, discussion or Playwright Scholar Series event – and buy your tickets now so you don’t miss out.
2 by Pearl opened Sunday night after a couple of great previews – we were working on the technical elements and directors Chuck Smith and Thomas Jones were giving notes to the actors through the weekend as we got ready for the opening performance.
One of the most interesting things to see (for me, anyway) is how a show evolves after opening night – all of the major choices have been made, and actors will stay true to the work they’ve done with the director through the rehearsal process, but things always change slightly as actors settle into roles and the stage manager gets more comfortable with the sound and light cues.
I don’t know what Chuck or Thomas plan to do, but I always like to stop by a show that I’ve directed a couple of weeks after it’s opened – not to give notes or criticism (as some directors do), but just to enjoy. Sometimes the rhythm gets sharper, sometimes the characters feel more fully explored, sometimes a new discovery has happened that changes the tone of a moment.
That’s one of the main things that attracts me to theatre – unlike film, where your work is locked into a specific moment in time, a play grows and changes over the time it’s running, and each individual performance is a completely unique event and an unrepeatable work of art.
2 by Pearl is an especially interesting night of theatre to revisit – since the two actors in Late Bus to Mecca are alternating roles through the run, you can watch two different interpretations of the same characters evolve as Frances and Alana explore their own work and watch and listen to each other’s. Hospice, which focuses on a complex and layered relationship between mother and daughter, will grow as well, as Tanya and Noelle continue exploring the subtle nuances lying underneath the surface of their dialogue.
This is not to say that these shows aren’t fantastic now – of course they are, and I hesitate to say that they’ll be “better” as they go along – just that they’ll be different, and it’s worth coming back to see how those little differences change the overall experience.
First up is Alfred Kemp, who barely had a chance to settle in before getting called up on stage to accept a Supporting Actor Citation for playing Guy in Blues for an Alabama Sky.
Scroll through the list on the right to watch all the speeches – Charlette Speigner, Michelle Courvais and Steven Fedoruk all take the podium for their roles in Blues for an Alabama Sky and Boy Gets Girl, and Artistic Director Anish Jethmalani echoes Pearl Cleage herself in accepting the Citation for Outstanding Production.
I spent most of my time in two places in the summer of 1998 – the standing room only section at Wrigley Field, where I watched my new neighbors chase the Wild Card and Sammy Sosa chase history; and a little black box theater in Bucktown, where I designed the lights for Eclipse Theatre Company‘s production of The Infernal Machine, the last show in the Jean Cocteau season.
Two things happened to me that summer – I became a die-hard Cubs fan, and I fell in love with Eclipse’s playwright-driven approach to telling stories.
I’m still hoping the Cubs fan thing works out.
I became a company member with Eclipse during the 1999 Tennessee Williams season, and since then I’ve had the opportunity to be a part of yearly explorations of some of the best playwrights in theater. Ten of them, to be precise.
Now that we’ve hit this milestone – Pearl Cleage is the tenth playwright we’ve featured since adopting this mission statement – we thought it would be fun to take some time to celebrate the journeys we’ve taken as artists and audiences over the last ten seasons.
Throughout 2008 and 2009, we’ll be revisiting all ten playwrights with mainstage productions, staged readings, discussions, films and events that build on the experience of past seasons and dig even deeper into the worlds each playwright has created. I’m starting to go through the pictures, dramaturgical research and design notes that we’ve saved from past productions, and we’ll be sharing that (don’t worry, we’ll leave the boring stuff in storage) as we go along.
The celebration kicks off in March with Candles to the Sun, the first play written by a 25-year old college senior named Thomas Lanier Williams in 1937. We know him by a different name now, but we recognize the poetic style, technical skill and brilliantly drawn characters that will define Tennessee Williams‘s plays throughout his career.
Through the rest of 2008 we’re planning productions of Neil Simon‘s Plaza Suite and Lillian Hellman‘s The Autumn Garden, a Jean Cocteau film festival, and readings and discussions of Lanford Wilson‘s full length and one act plays.
It’s going to be a fun ride, and we’re all excited to have the chance to come back to some of the stories that we didn’t get to do the first time around, and explore them with the advantage of having already spent a full year with the storyteller.
It’s definitely going to be more fun than revisiting the last ten Cubs seasons.
Congratulations to everyone who was honored with nominations and Citations from the Joseph Jefferson Committee this past Monday night, and especially to those we were fortunate enough to have the chance to work with – Eclipse finished the evening with five Citation Awards:
Outstanding Production: Blues for an Alabama Sky
Outstanding Direction: Steven Fedoruk, Blues for an Alabama Sky
Oustanding Performance by an Actress: Michelle Courvais, Boy Gets Girl
Outstanding Performance by a Supporting Actor: Alfred Kemp, Blues for an Alabama Sky
Outstanding Performance by a Supporting Actress: Charlette Speigner, Blues for an Alabama Sky
Also nominated and deserving much recognition were Steve Scott (Outstanding Direction for Boy Gets Girl) and TayLar (Outstanding Performance by an Actress for Blues for an Alabama Sky).
Congrats to all, and thanks to friends, family and fans for supporting us.
It’s a fun month (and year) for Pearl Cleage fans in Chicago – our production of Blues for an Alabama Sky opens tonight at the Victory Gardens Greenhouse Theater, Flyin’ West opened at Court Theatre yesterday, and Ms. Cleage herself will be in town next weekend, attending performances of each production and public discussions of her writing.
She’ll be joining us for a post-show discussion next Friday night, and on Saturday we’re hosting our second One Playwright symposium – Ron OJ Parson (who directed the current production of Flyin’ West and will be directing Bourbon at the Border with us in the fall) will moderate an interview and discussion with Pearl Cleage as selections of her writings are performed.
Both events are at the Victory Gardens Greenhouse (2257 N Lincoln) – Friday’s show is at 8 pm, Saturday’s symposium is at 1 pm, and you can call the box office at 773.871.3000 for show tickets and call Eclipse at 312.409.1687 for symposium tickets.
The Chicago Tribune recently pointed out Pearl Cleage’s description of the stage as a “hollering place.” There’s a lot of hollering going on in the city these days.
Our second annual Total Eclipse Benefit at the Bluewater Grill is going to include a new twist in the entertainment – a sneak peek at the next two seasons and a chance to tell us exactly what those two seasons should be.
In addition to celebrating the beginning of the 2007 Pearl Cleage season, we’ll be announcing a two-year retrospective of our first ten playwrights in 2008 and 2009. The ensemble (myself included) will be performing scenes from their plays during the party, and we’ll be asking guests to help us decide which plays to explore in the multi-season celebration.
We’ll also be celebrating Pearl Cleage – Blues for an Alabama Sky opens a week from tonight (March 18), and we’re excited about Late Bus to Mecca, Hospice and Bourbon at the Border later this year.
Oh, and there’ll be cocktails, food, music, and a raffle with prizes including theater, ballet and sports tickets, restaurant and hotel packages, original artwork, and more. The party’s at 2 pm on Sunday, March 25 at the Bluewater Grill, 520 N Dearborn. You can order tickets online or visit our Web site for more information. Hope to see you there.
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 gallery, or watch the collection as a slide show by clicking the link at the top of the gallery.
Much thanks to Gerardo for letting us share these.
Our run of Boy Gets Girl ended just before the holidays, wrapping up a great season working with Rebecca Gilman’s exhilarating scripts.
As we prepare for Blues for an Alabama Sky, the first in our 2007 season featuring Pearl Cleage, I’ll be sharing some of my thoughts about her plays and novels, my research in designing lights for the show, our dramaturgical research and the post-show discussions throughout the run.
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 Greenhouse (call the box office at 773.871.3000 to reserve a seat), on the set of Boy Gets Girl.
During the symposium we held back in the spring, Rebecca explained that part of the inspiration for Blue Surge was the song Jackson Cage by Bruce Springsteen. As a big Springsteen fan myself, I instantly saw the connection – it’s a play that explores the confinement of class, focusing on a couple of small-time cops in a small town and a couple of prostitutes trying to make a decent living. Like all of Rebecca’s plays, the issues are complex and the situations have an uncomfortable truth to them.
Bruce puts the truth bluntly for his characters:
You can try with all your might
But you’re reminded every night
That you been judged and handed life
Down in Jackson Cage
Join us on Saturday at 3 for a reading of Blue Surge and a discussion with Eclipse company members following the reading.
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 and friends, and we have a four-person Artistic Committee that’s charged with the task of reading through the works of over a dozen playwrights and narrowing the field to four finalists. Once we’ve got our final four, we read a play or two from each playwright out loud read all the plays on our own, discuss, argue and vote.
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 the role of Mercer for three performances – he did a fantastic job from what I’ve heard, and I’ll probably write more about the process of working with an understudy soon), and life and work have been interfering with blogging time. But I’m back, and looking forward to having some great conversations with audiences after kicking things off right last Thursday.
It was a Theatre Thursday performance – a wonderful program that the League of Chicago Theatres offers in conjunction with Theatres all over Chicago (about a League worth, I’d imagine). The evening began at Kendall’s, a comfy sports bar next door to the theatre with great pizza and music that frequently finds its way into our theatre during quiet moments of plays. Patrons, who were encouraged to bring blind dates “in the spirit of Boy Gets Girl” (a suggestion they probably felt less comfortable with after seeing the show), had the opportunity to mingle with Eclipse Company members before the show, have a discussion with us after the show, and take a quick backstage tour.
The discussion covered a wide range of topics, many of which I expect to come up again as we along.
We talked a lot about Rebecca Gilman’s works in general – an audience member said he was unfamiliar with her plays and asked for a quick summary of her career. This sparked an energetic discussion of all of her plays, and a few comments on the consistent elements of her writing that we’ve seen this year. Gilman doesn’t shy away from any subject matters, and she seems to enjoy most the issues that are complex and unresolvable. We talked about the lack of a “solution” in Boy Gets Girl, Spinning into Butter and The Sweetest Swing in Baseball(it’s also true of The Glory of Living, Blue Surge, Dollhouse … ). It’s one of the things I loved about Gilman’s style when we started thinking about featuring her as our 2006 playwright; she explores difficult issues without pulling punches, and she doesn’t try to tell audiences how they should feel about those issues. Her plays are the kinds of plays you leave the theatre still talking about, the kinds of plays that demand a stop at a bar or coffeehouse on the way home so you can keep talking about them, the kinds of plays your mind returns to months later because those issues aren’t easy, and they’re not easily solveable, and there’s more thinking and talking to be done.
We had our first audience last night for Boy Gets Girl (well, our second, really) – about ten or twelve people, mostly friends of the cast and crew, came in to watch our dress rehearsal. We’re still making minor adjustments, but the show’s pretty much as it will be when we open on Sunday.
It was great to have the energy of an audience, and especially an audience unfamiliar with the story – we’ve had designers and Eclipse company members watching the last few technical rehearsals, but most of the folks last night were seeing this for the first time. This is a tricky play in a lot of ways, and I’m learning that the trickiest element may be the tone. The story starts very much like a romantic comedy – we open on Tony and Theresa meeting for the first time for a blind date. Just like all first dates, (I assume) there are awkward moments, hopeful moments, and a lot of funny moments. As the play goes on, the tone changes dramatically. I don’t want to spoil anything, but we’ve got dramaturgical research about stalking posted up in the lobby for audiences to read, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that the play ultimately becomes something very different than a romantic comedy (although not so different, really – more on that later).
For the audience last night, there was a sense of surprise, and it was interesting to hear some big laughs in the first few scenes, some nervous giggles towards the end of the first act, and a lot of quiet through most of act two. There were some responses we didn’t expect, and there are probably some moments that will change, consciously or unconsciously, now that we have a sense of how an audience might react to those moments, but for the most part the responses were what we anticipated and what the play needs.
We’ll probably have a larger audience tonight, as we begin our formal previews, and I know we’re all excited to have a few more chances to feel that energy before opening night. Preview tickets are cheap ($5 for folks in the theatre industry), so give a call to the box office (773.871.3000) to come out, see the show, and help us build up to a fantastic opening.
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 and those who create it, and the larger implications theater has as a lens for viewing the human condition.
We broke that fourth wall pretty well the other night – most students in the class had read and studied the script and watched a full run through at one of our rehearsals last weekend, and Maren led them and us through a fantastic discussion, some of which I’ll try to recap below the fold.
We have a brand-new myspace page (www.myspace.com/eclipsetheatre, or just “/eclipsetheatre” as the cool kids would say it) – it’s about time we caught up with the hottest online trend of seven years ago. The coolest thing about it, aside from the ability to network and announce events easily, is the new slide show we put together for the page – it’s a great collection of images from the last ten years worth of playwrights’ works:
[ed note: I thought I’d be able to post the actual slide show here. Apparently not. Maybe this is why we’re seven years behind. I’ll keep trying; in the meantime, click on “View Slideshow” above to see the pictures.]
Check out the page, let me know what you think, and, if you’ve got a myspace page of your own, be our friend.
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 in the audience particularly will find themselves reflecting on past “unfortunate” situations. I know that as I’ve worked through the production during the rehearsal process and seen what women encounter in the great ritual of mate selection, I’ve been made more and more aware of how aggressive and frankly, unsettling my own behavior has been in a few past events.
Over the course of the run I hope to share…..full disclosure….of these events. It is my hope that this will in some small way start a more open discourse on these matters. Some items you may agree with…some may bother you tremendously… some may make you look inside your own past and say “I’ve been that guy. I never realized that I was doing that.” I know all three of these have been places I’ve visited during this process.
I think at the end of the day, I’m a pretty normal person who has ended up in a few unanticipated life situations. I also think that is normal. I look forward to chatting with some of you over the next few months.
I just got a press release and a great picture promoting the Greenhouse Open House taking place this coming Tuesday, August 29 at the soon-to-be-former Victory Gardens Theater (the official new name: the Victory Gardens Theater Greenhouse). I’ll let the release speak for itself; come join us on Tuesday night for a great party.
Representatives from the 2006/07 resident companies at the Victory Gardens Theater Greenhouse display the banners that now identify their companies on the refreshed facade of Victory Gardens’ longtime home at 2257 N. Lincoln Avenue.
These Victory Gardens Greenhouse 2006/07 resident companies are joining up to celebrate the venue’s new name at a free Open House, Tuesday, August 29 from 6 to 8 pm. Come sample the variety of companies and plays that will be seen at the Victory Gardens Theater Greenhouse on any given night. Check out an open up rehearsal, participate in a free Victory Gardens Greenhouse Training Center class, or watch companies perform sneak peeks from their upcoming seasons — on the half-hour, on both floors, and in all four Greenhouse spaces.
Free food and refreshments will be served. Enter to win free tickets, subscriptions, T-shirts, and classes. The first 150 people through the door will go home with a free plant. Reservations are recommended. To rsvp or for more information, call (773) 549-5788 ext. 102 or send email to soneill@victorygardens.org.
Prompting the new Greenhouse name is Victory Gardens’ recent $11.3 million purchase and renovation of Chicago’s historic Biograph Theater, two blocks north at 2433 N. Lincoln Avenue. Victory Gardens’ new Biograph mainstage opens in late September, transforming the company into a two-venue creative campus along Lincoln Avenue.
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 leading students through an exploration of several plays and the process of producing them. The class will include trips to see the plays being studied and discussions with the artists involved for a comprehensive look into this crazy world we live in.
One of the plays included in the curriculum is Boy Gets Girl, our final play in the Rebecca Gilman season. I’ll be acting in the show, and I’m looking forward to joining Maren in some great discussions at the Newberry Library (which is a beautiful place to visit for any reason). Here’s the full info:
Eclipse Theatre’s fall production Rebecca Gilman’s Boy Gets Girl,is being featured in a course on small theaters in Chicago at the Newberry Library.For more information view the course description on line or below or contact course instructor Maren Robinson at marensr@cs.com.
Why is Chicago theater known for being challenging and engaging? We will examine theater’s role in interpreting world events, using productions by four award-winning theaters. We will read the plays, attend performances, and discuss them with directors and artists who created the productions. We seek to break “the fourth wall” and establish discussion between those who see theater and those who create it, and the larger implications theater has as a lens for viewing the human condition.Maren Robinson is a freelance dramaturg with an M.A. in humanities from the University of Chicago.
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 have put it more delicately) that her butt never fell asleep. It’s a pretty rigorous test, and a great compliment to hear that we passed.
We’ll be presenting a scene from Spinning into Butter and talking about the future of Eclipse Theatre Company and the Greenhouse in general. The other resident companies will be performing scenes from their current or upcoming productions as well.
In just over a month, Victory Gardens Theater will be celebrating their new home, just up the road at the Biograph Theater. They’ll be leaving behind a group of small, young and passionate theatre companies (including us, of course) to continue working in the building at 2257 N Lincoln (and it’ll still be their building, so I guess we’ll have to keep it clean – or at least be ready to hide all the beer when they drop by unannounced).
Before they go, they’re throwing us a little party to introduce audiences to the new incarnation of this wonderful space that started off as a home for The Body Politic back in the 60s.
We’ll be celebrating the birth of The Greenhouse (because they’re a Garden, see?) on Tuesday, August 29 at 6 p.m. Stop by to see a reading from Spinning into Butter at this free event, as well as performances by Shattered Globe, MPAACT, Remy Bumppo and About Face. I’ve heard there’ll be some food and drink there too.
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, you can’t really focus directly on those insecurities (or any other character traits) – instead Anish described the process of what we call table work; he spent the first week or two of rehearsals sitting down with the actors and picking through the script line by line, finding the truth and reality underneath the dialogue and the relationships. By exploring the dynamics of those relationships and the motivations behind specific lines, that quality that this audience member identified as “insecurity” develops organically.
An interesting question came up that we’ve been wrestling with as a theatre company for some time now – how do we convince our audiences to think outside of the normal approach to theatre, to commit to this season-long journey of a playwright’s works with us. For those audience members who have done this, I think it’s been a rich and rewarding experience; we’ve had a few instances of people who have been at post-show discussions for all three productions in a season, and they’ve talked about the joy they’ve found in exploring a playwright in such a comprehensive way. Each playwright attracts a different audience for this journey, and we’re working on ways to encourage audiences to “think outside the box,” as this audience member put it, and join us each season for each journey. If anyone has ideas, by all means, let us know.
I’m headed back to the theater now, so I’ll have to cut this short – we also talked about Simon’s non-presence on stage, the oversimplification of talking about race and not talking about class, culture, education, etc., the structure of short scenes, and more. I’ll try to come back to some of these issues later.
One comment I do want to make sure I don’t miss: an audience member summarized the play by saying that the “universal failure [of these characters] is their inability to deal with issues as being complex.” An interesting thought.
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 got are selling out – so get your tickets soon if you haven’t already.
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 exploring with audiences for years:
What is the history of Eclipse Theatre Company?
Why do we focus on one playwright for an entire season? What do we gain through this long-term focus?
How do we choose our playwrights and our productions?
The artistic process of the director, actors and designers
This season, we’ve also been discussing our featured playwright for 2006, Rebecca Gilman:
Production history of her plays
Similarities and differences in the stories and characters she writes about
Our experiences as artists exploring her work
Spinning into Butter, like many of Gilman’s plays, raises complex issues and explores them from multiple perspectives. A few that I’m looking forward to exploring further with audiences:
How do we define and confront racism within society and within ourselves?
How can a community (like the one at Belmont College in this script) have an open and honest dialogue about racism?
How do the characters in this story respond to the public and private discussions on race and identity?
These are just a few of the questions we’ll spend time with in post-show discussions over the next month and a half. Add your own questions and issues to explore here in the comments or at the theatre, and let’s see what direction this conversation takes us in.
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 I worked on all three shows in our Tennessee Williams season, and I didn’t fully get it until I shifted from onstage to off, designing the lights for Eccentricities of a Nightingale and Suddenly Last Summer.
Reading a script as a lighting designer is very different than reading it as an actor (or from any other perspective, really) – I’m looking for a sense of tone, a sense of rhythm, a sense of aesthetic style. In taking this approach to two very different scripts by the same playwright (after acting in another, Confessional), I discovered elements of tone, rhythm, style that were common to each. Williams is soft. Williams is welcoming, comfortable, elegant, but there’s an almost manic element of fear or urgency underneath that surface.
Maren, who is now an Eclipse company member, talked to me about her experience watching the Romulus Linney season – she found herself making connections as an audience member between the three pieces, and discovered that Linney tells stories that are, in essence, trials. In 2 the trial is obvious (much of the script comes from transcripts of the Nuremberg trials), but Maren noticed the way Ada interrogated her poet father in Childe Byron, and the mutiple layers of characters putting one another on trial within the larger trial of the nameless woman’s life in A Woman Without a Name.
I just directed The Sweetest Swing in Baseball, a Midwest premiere of a new play by Rebecca Gilman. It felt to me at first to be very different from the rest of her plays; it feels much more personal and at the same time more consciously theatrical than her earlier works. After spending months with the script, though, I started noticing some of the things that drew me to her writing in the first place, things that I hope to continue exploring as we go through this season.
Gilman’s characters, for the most part, are very intelligent people. Even the dumb hick characters in The Glory of Living and Blue Surge carry with them a thoughtfulness and awareness that must be honored. Her characters frequently play with words and language (Theresa’s obsession with Kuala Lampur in Boy Gets Girl may be my favorite), and their choices are, for the most part, intelligent and reasoned. As a director, this was an element of the script I was interested in exploring fully with the actors, and I’m looking forward to seeing it from an actor’s point of view myself in the fall.
Our audiences have the opportunity to see a full season of plays by a single playright, and they have the same opportunity I have and love as an artist; the opportunity to see the common threads between the stories, the subtle elements of the plays that distinguish the playwright as storyteller and artist.
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 the performance they just saw, sometimes it’s a heated debate on the psychological nuances of the script, sometimes it’s a discussion of the artistic world of the playwright – it’s always a good conversation, and I hope audiences have enjoyed them as much as I have.
This time out, we’re raising the bar – we’re adding Saturday post-show discussions, tossing in a Thursday or two, inviting some guests to help us explore our plays and our playwrights, and starting this blog right here.
This may not be the first post you read on this site, but it’s the first one I’m writing, so let me say welcome – thanks for joining us here, thanks for joining us at the theatre, and thanks for supporting the idea of exploring one playwright each season.
Chase Community Giving is using Facebook to determine which 200 non-profit organizations nation-wide will receive donations of $250K, $100K or $20K.
Kat’s passion, intelligence and artistic vision will be missed as much as her friendship. The outpouring of support and love from throughout our extended family in the Chicago theatre community has been nothing short of amazing, and a wonderful reminder about the lives she touched.
The Victory Gardens 
2 by Pearl
Representatives from the 2006/07 resident companies at the Victory Gardens Theater Greenhouse display the banners that now identify their companies on the refreshed facade of Victory Gardens’ longtime home at 2257 N. Lincoln Avenue.
one playwright. one blog. 