Open Rehearsal: The Court Theatre Blog
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July 21, 2009
Rooftop Construction
When this old world starts getting me down
And people are just too much for me to face
I climb way up to the top of the stairs
And all my cares just drift right into space
On the roof, it’s peaceful as can be
And there the world below can’t bother me
Let me tell you now
When I come home feelin’ tired and beat
I go up where the air is fresh and sweet (up on the roof)
I get away from the hustling crowd
And all that rat-race noise down in the street (up on the roof)
On the roof, the only place I know
Where you just have to wish to make it so
Let’s go up on the roof (up on the roof)
At night the stars put on a show for free
And, darling, you can share it all with meI keep a-tellin’ you
Right smack dab in the middle of town
I’ve found a paradise that’s trouble proof (up on the roof)
And if this world starts getting you down
There’s room enough for two
Up on the roof (up on the roof)
Up on the roo-oo-oof (up on the roof)
Oh, come on, baby (up on the roof)
Oh, come on, honey (up on the roof)Everything is all right (up on the roof)
July 20, 2009
Le Voyage Dans La Lune
Forty years ago, an American man landed on the moon. But the French got there way before us:
That’s Le Voyage Dans La Lune, created in 1902 by Georges Méliès. It’s remarkable to see how film in the early century was produced in such a theatrical, proscenium-conscious paradigm. Méliès himself was a former stage magician at the Theatre Robert-Houdin in Paris.
July 14, 2009
The Devil and Daniel Burnham
I’ve been reading Carl Smith’s The Plan of Chicago, the current “One Book, One Chicago” selection about architect Daniel Burnham’s 1909 Plan of Chicago, a document largely credited for re-engineering the city’s lakefront as we know it today. Smith demonstrates how Chicago’s geography was also its fate:
Modern Chicago owes its origins to its location at the southwestern edge of the Great Lakes near a convenient portage to the Mississippi Valley and the heart of the continent. The most distinctive feature of the setting was, paradoxically, its lack of distinctive features. The level prairie that stretched in all directions away from the lake invited the most ambitious conceptions by offering few obvious natural obstacles to their realization. The prairie and the lake, the Plan observes, “each immeasurable by the senses,” dictated the scale of possibility in Chicago. “Whatever man undertakes here,” it continues, “should be either actually or seemingly without limit.”
In its first fifty years Chicago saw an explosion in its population, as if all that prairie void was racing to fill its limitless vacuum. It reminds me of the kind of building that is happening today in Dubai, and those weird images of skyscrapers rising up from undeveloped desert. Smith’s account underscores the nascent quality of the city, hard to appreciate today:
In ways that transcend any individual example, the planning idea is deeply ingrained in the nature and character of Chicago. The city’s lack of a long history, at least from the point of view of those not of Native American ancestry, both invited and demanded planning. One of the things that distinguished Chicago from other leading American cities that, with the exception of New York, it surpassed in population by 1890 was the comparative brevity of its past. What history Chicago did possess its residents commonly ignored because they felt little connection to it. Through the nineteenth century, Chicago’s population consisted overwhelmingly of those who, if not from somewhere else themselves, were children of parents born and raised in other places.
This quote made me think of all the twenty-something theater artists who perennially pour into Chicago from Big Ten schools and elsewhere. Some of them—especially improvisers—are here to launch themselves into further careers in New York and LA, cities that offer a validating terminus, an “if I can make it here, I can make it anywhere” promise. But to stay in Chicago is to take on a never ending, lifelong project of self-creation, because the city itself is forever involved with the task of self-consciously making and remaking itself into a city (a spirit of self-invention captured in local literature by, most memorably, Saul Bellow). Maybe the lack of any natural geographic obstacle awakens a desire to make our own coordinates planned and plotted. Is the incessant company-founding of Chicago theater artists perhaps a symptom of this restless spirit? Even our off-loop theater mission statements—a dozen newly minted mission statements each year—draw on the vistas of manifest destiny. Even Court Theatre’s vision—“to be the national center for classic theater”—sports a Burnham-like spirit of planning, and our mission—“to discover the power of classic theater”—almost seems naïve in its scope (hasn’t that power already been discovered, by someone, somewhere else?...in New York maybe?). The accomplishments produced by this furious desire to self-invent are often spectacular—the Sears-Willis Tower is a constant big-shouldered reminder of the fruits of our ambition. There’s a lot of big talk about what the essential character of Chicago theater is, but maybe the essential character is the big talk, driven by a deep, self-conscious questioning of our uncertain position out here on the prairie.
Guerin/Bennett, Plan of Chicago
July 6, 2009
(re)Introductions
Greetings and salutations, Courtiers! My name is Drew, and I’m the new Resident Dramaturg for Court’s 2009-10 season. In addition to the work I’ll be doing on our five plays this year, I’ll also be contributing to this blog as often as I’m in front of the Court Theatre Dramaturgy Computer (which, until rehearsal starts, will be uhh-lot). You’ll be hearing from other Court artists and staffers as well. Frankly, we’re doing a little experimenting with this blog and trying to really push it as a forum for thinking out loud about Court Theatre’s work and its place in our community: in the university, in the neighborhood of Hyde Park and the South Side, in the city of Chicago, and even the nation. Sometimes it can feel for us like our thoughts are being jettisoned into the vasty deep of the Internet, so we welcome and encourage and indeed pine for your comments on all our posts, so please: join the conversation!
