Open Rehearsal: The Court Theatre Blog
Artist Post
March 8, 2010
Announcing Court’s 56th Season of Classic Plays
Friends and loyal readers of Open Rehearsal, I’m pleased to announce Court Theatre’s fifty-sixth season of classic plays for 2010-11. I couldn’t be prouder of this new slate of plays, which promises to continue taking Court to the next level as a center for classic theatre. Allow me to take you on a short tour of the season.
William Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors
Directed by Sean Graney
September 16, 2010 - October 17, 2010
Sean Graney has directed two classic farces at Court Theatre, 2007’s What the Butler Saw and 2009’s The Mystery of Irma Vep. In both productions, I saw Sean challenge himself and push his craft to find a solution for each new problem that these deceptively difficult plays posed for him. Now, as a next step in Sean’s exploration of comedy, as well as his playful inquiry into themes of identity and disguise, he’ll be taking on William Shakespeare’s classic farce about two sets of twins separated at birth, The Comedy of Errors. As a formal challenge to himself, Sean intends to perform the play with only six actors, requiring each actor to play three different characters—often at the same time!
Home by Samm-Art Williams
Directed by Ron OJ Parson, Resident Artist
November 11, 2010 - December 12, 2010
Our resident artist Ron OJ Parson (directing Sizwe Banzi is Dead this spring at Court Theatre) returns to direct a modern classic, Home. First produced by the Negro Ensemble Company in 1981, Home tells the story of Cephus Miles and his life’s journey out and back from his small town in North Carolina. Spanning the tumultuous decades of the 50s, 60s, and 70s, Williams’s play is an intimate, enduring story told with charm and poetry. Based in part on his early life in North Carolina, and inspired by his longing for home while living in New York, Williams envisioned the play’s form as something simple, something that could be performed in the street “if push comes to shove.” Ron OJ Parson directed Home at Signature Theatre Company to critical and popular acclaim in New York in 2008, for which he won New York’s Audelco Award.
Play Three
Directed by Charles Newell
January 13 - February 13, 2011
I can’t tell you any details just yet, but we’re finalizing the plans for me to direct a classic play in our third slot of the season. I’m very excited about what this is going to be. Check this blog in the next few weeks for updates!
Virginia Woolf’s Orlando
Adapted by Sarah Ruhl
Directed by Jessica Thebus
March 10, 2011 - April 10, 2011
For some time now I’ve been fascinated by Virginia Woolf’s gender-bending novel Orlando, the story of an English nobleman who falls asleep and wakes up as a woman. An “imaginative biography” of Woolf’s intimate friend Vita Sackville-West that takes place over four centuries and different continents, Orlando seemed to me impossible to adapt to the stage until I discovered acclaimed American playwright Sarah Ruhl’s treatment of it. Her adaptation captures Woolf’s biting whimsy while rendering the story of Orlando energetically theatrical. I’m overjoyed that we’ve been able to invite Jessica Thebus to direct for the very first time at Court Theatre. Jessica has directed a number of Ruhl’s plays (Dead Man’s Cell Phone, The Clean House), and I can’t wait to see her staging of Orlando.
The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess
By George Gershwin, DuBose and Dorothy Heyward, and Ira Gershwin
Directed by Charles Newell
Music Direction by Doug Peck
Artistic Consultant Ron OJ Parson
May 12, 2011 - June 19, 2011
Considered to be George Gershwin’s magnum opus, Porgy and Bess is a “folk opera” with a score that features unforgettable songs like “Summertime,” later recorded time and again by pop, blues, and jazz musicians. Similar to Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, Porgy and Bess was meant to combine the “high” and “low” idioms of classical opera and contemporary jazz and blues, this time to tell DuBose Heyward’s story of Porgy, a disabled man living in a slum of Charleston, South Carolina who falls in love with an itinerant woman named Bess. In 1935, the opera premiered on Broadway with an all-African-American cast, still rare at the time. Since then, it has risen in status as a legitimate American opera while diminishing as a legitimate piece of African-American theater, in large part due to charges of insensitivity in its romanticizing portrayal of poor African-Americans. In collaboration with Doug Peck (Caroline, or Change) and resident artist Ron OJ Parson, we will address the checkered past of Porgy and Bess and return to the original intentions of the authors to create a “true serious picture” of the inhabitants of Catfish Row. A longstanding Everest in my mind, the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess is a new and exhilarating challenge for me as a director.
It’s time now for me to disappear back into technical rehearsals for The Illusion (opening March 11), but I hope you’ll join me for all five of next season’s plays by becoming a subscriber to Court Theatre. It’s the best and cheapest way to get the most out of what Court has to offer. Until then, see you at the theater!
January 19, 2010
Preview Weekend
What a difference an audience makes! We just finished our first weekend of preview performances for The Year of Magical Thinking, and so far I’ve learned so much from our audience’s reaction. Each night, in talk backs, I get the chance to listen directly to audience feedback, to hear some of our artistic choices validated, to hear some called into question. I’ve been stunned by the number of people who are staying to talk to us about this show. I can’t remember the last time I saw an audience so hungry to verbalize their experience and share their own personal memories. It’s a play that actively encourages a response.
This week, Mary Beth and I are still working most closely on the last quarter of the play. It’s a difficult section. Without giving too much away, the character of Joan has a subtle but distinct change of intention three-quarters into the play, and we’ve been taking our time figuring out what that new intention really is. Joan Didion, who has been enormously helpful in talking openly about the play with Mary Beth and I, took the time to email me a few responses to some questions I’d asked of her play. I’m thrilled to put some of these new thoughts to action in our next few nights of previews. Please join us as we continue to discover the complexities of this piece!
January 8, 2010
The Year of Magical Thinking Rehearsals
Welcome to Court Theatre’s blog, Open Rehearsal! I’m Artistic Director Charlie Newell, and I’ll be chronicling my rehearsal process of The Year of Magical Thinking all the way up through our first preview on January 14 and beyond. The process for this upcoming show has been so unusual and personally challenging that I thought it worthwhile to share it here.
The Year of Magical Thinking is Joan Didion’s dramatic adaptation of her own memoir. It is a moving but piercingly honest account of the death of her husband, John, and the year of disorientation that followed. The play also chronicles the death of Didion’s daughter, Quintana, less than two years later. Written for only a single actor, it is an Everest of dramatic writing.
Despite the unexpected pleasure of getting my wisdom teeth removed last month, Mary Beth Fisher and I began rehearsal on The Year of Magical Thinking in early December and continued all the way up to our holiday break. Because this play is written for only one actor, our rehearsals have been more flexible, though not less focused. Mary Beth and I are free to test-drive new ideas, thoughts, and instincts about Joan Didion’s text as they crop up, and the dead ends we discover are equally important to the breakthroughs. A constant concern of ours, of course, is to modulate the tone of the piece. We face two pitfalls: on the one hand, sentimentality, and on the other, cold detachment. Every day, like frontier surveyors, we discover a little bit more of the emotional truth of the text.
This week we finished up our time in the rehearsal hall with a full-blown run-through of the show for our design team, and I’m thrilled with how far the piece has come. Today we move into the theater to begin tech, but even as my immediate attention turns to lights and sound and space, I still haven’t completed my work with Mary Beth. Just this week the two of us discovered a new understanding of the last third of the show, and I’m eager to try out our new ideas!
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!
May 14, 2009
The Ever-Evolving Preview Process
What a whirlwind week we have had here at Court Theatre! We are thick into the preview process for The Piano Lesson, and enjoying our ever-evolving process as we look forward to our opening weekend. One of the things that makes Court unique is the way our preview process is structured. At many theatres there are one or two previews before opening. At Court, we have nine previews that take place over two weeks, culminating with our two openings—one for the press, one for our Court Board and staff, in addition to our patrons. This length of preview process allows us to continue our explorations in front of our spectators, to listen and respond to feedback, and to really hone all aspects of our production en route to the official début.
After every one of our previews we host a post show discussion, moderated by the dramaturg and usually with the show’s director and members of the design team. As both Resident Dramaturg at Court, as well as the Production Dramaturg for The Piano Lesson, I really enjoy hosting these conversations, and getting to know our audiences throughout this preview process. For The Piano Lesson previews, Director Ron OJ Parson has been onstage for each preview, and he has invited the cast onstage each night as well. Last night in addition to Ron and myself, Assistant Director Logan Vaughn, Set Designer Keith Pitts, Costume Designer Christine Pascual, and nearly all the cast congregated onstage to field questions, listen to comments, and engage in discussion about the production. Sound designer Nick Keenan even fielded questions from the back of the theatre. It felt like a warm and wonderful family gathering, and we so enjoyed talking with U of C students, long-time subscribers, and first-time theatergoers. We tackled subjects from a deconstruction of The Century Cycle, to magical realism and the role of spirituality in the play, to a comparison of August Wilson and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, to how the carved piano onstage was made.
We look forward to our final two previews, to opening weekend, and to seeing you at the show very soon.
-Kate Bredeson, Resident Dramaturg
