Announcing a season is one of the most exciting times of year at Court Theatre, but the process leading up to that announcement is often one of the most complicated. There is no simple way to choose a successful season, and here at Court, we announced our 2013/2014 season with equal parts excitement and relief. We are thrilled to have put together such a diverse season featuring so many award-winning artists and plays – but we were also glad to reach the end of a difficult though rewarding process.

Assembling a season is like assembling a puzzle, except we often don’t know what the pieces are even supposed to look like. It’s not a matter of just choosing five shows that make a coherent season – though even accomplishing that alone would be difficult – but there are so many factors in the artistic process that also need to be considered. We may want to produce a show, but then discover the rights to that particular show are not available. We may choose a show with a particular actor in mind, but then learn that the actor in question has a contract elsewhere. A director might not be available. A script might not be ready. We managed to run into all of these difficulties and more as we tried to construct the 2013/2014 season, but it was ultimately these difficulties that helped us put together a season we are so thrilled to present.

Almost from the beginning to the end of the season planning process, we thought that the first show of the season was settled: Trouble in Mind by Alice Childress, directed by Artistic Director Charles Newell and featuring a favorite actor at Court Theatre. The actor had approached Newell about the show, and there was a verbal agreement from very early on that this is how we would be opening the season. But then we lost our actor to another production that was offered a second opportunity for performance, and as the show was chosen as a project for her and Newell, it was decided that Trouble in Mind was not the ideal fit for our season opener.

Fortunately, our executive director, Stephen Albert, had met Katori Hall, the author of The Mountaintop, in New York, and he had reported the enthusiasm for her work. Newell admired the play, and Court began a five month courtship to be able to produce the Chicago premiere. When the rights were secured, it became clear that it was the right choice to open our season, and Ron OJ Parson signed on to direct the show.

An Iliad may have been the simplest choice for the 2013/2014 season. When it closed as part of the 2011/2012 season, we knew there was still interest in seeing the show, and then we had an opportunity to slot it into next season. Newell and Timothy Edward Kane, respectively the director and the Poet of the original production, were available and interested, and we were thrilled to have the opportunity to bring this incredible performance back to our stage. Since An Iliad had such a successful run in 2011, Court has been actively working with authors Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare on their next play, The Good Book. That work, commissioned by Court, is hopefully being prepared for a forthcoming season.

By this time, it had basically been decided that the third slot of the season would be a revival of Crimes of the Heart by Beth Henley, which Ron OJ Parson had long wanted to direct. He also was interested in directing another an August Wilson play. When we inquired about rights, we discovered that another theater was holding the rights to many of Wilson’s works. And then began the negotiation – we went back to ask specifically for Two Trains Running or Seven Guitars, and ultimately received the rights to Seven Guitars. This is particularly exciting for Parson: as a prolific director of Wilson’s plays, he has directed many plays in the Century Cycle many times, but this marks his first production of Seven Guitars.

In mid-February, somewhere in the middle of the season planning process, David Auburn visited to take a look at our production of Proof, and was excited by what he saw. Auburn has a new play called The Columnist that has yet to make its Chicago debut, and after some conversation, Auburn and Newell decided that it would be a good fit for Court. Newell immediately had a particular actor in mind to take the lead in the show, and that actor turned out to be just as enthusiastic about the role as Newell.

For a while, The Columnist was set for the fourth slot in Court’s upcoming season – until the actor received another offer and had to drop out. It was then decided that it wasn’t the time to produce Auburn’s play, but Newell has not ruled out the possibility of a future collaboration with Auburn.

We were fortunate that another exciting opportunity to fill the fourth slot had already appeared – Water by the Spoonful, a Pulitzer Prize-winning new play by Quiara Alegría Hudes. This play was on the table for a large part of the season planning process, but we weren’t sure where it would fit until we heard from director Henry Godinez that he was also interested in doing the show. It turned out that his schedule matched ours, and we added Water by the Spoonful to the 2013/2014 season.

The final show of the 59th season was one of the more difficult to decide. There was a brief period of time when Newell was considering Eugene O’Neill’s A Long Day’s Journey into Night, but due to the rights being tied up by a Broadway producer, that show was impossible to consider for next season before the conversation really began.

David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly was a production that had been under consideration since Hwang visited the campus two years ago. Newell greatly admired the play, and then we learned that at the same time our final production of the season will go up, our colleagues at the Smart Museum of Art will produce an exhibit on Chinese art and performance. The timing was perfect. Newell was excited to direct a play that would offer such an interesting artistic challenge, and the show fell into place as our season closer.

It took several months and many possible plays, but we were finally able to announce the 2013/2014 season at the beginning of April. We hope you are as excited to share this journey as we are.

Court’s rehearsal hall is buzzing. With previews for The Misanthrope beginning in two weeks, the artistic team is deep into the rehearsal process, working on scenes, trying out some technical elements, and figuring out the shape of the show. The space has been made into an approximation of the set – the boundaries of the stage are marked in brightly colored tape, and the floor is scattered with an eclectic mix of furniture and half decorated dress forms. The audience in the rehearsal hall is much smaller than any audience the actors will have in the theater, but between sound designers, assistant directors, stage management, other actors, and production staff, the room feels very full.

It is this environment that Kamal Angelo Bolden, Patrese D. McClain, and Michael Pogue now enter for rehearsal every day, though recently they were playing very different roles: the three actors in the Molière Festival were Teaching Artists in Court’s Student Education Program. Instead of a rehearsal hall, they worked in Court’s high school partner schools on the South Side, and instead of working on their own lines, they coached students on monologues from August Wilson plays.

McClain was already working as a teaching artist before being cast in her first production at Court (Spunk, in the 2011/2012 season). She is a teacher through Pure Art Education, her own arts education program, and when Casting Director Cree Rankin—who also happens to be known as Artists-in-the-Schools Director Cree Rankin—saw that experience on her resume, he asked her if she’d like to work with the Education Program in addition to her contract as an actor. Bolden was similarly recruited during his first show when they needed artists to teach around the production of Home; he had taught in Nashville, and had actually worked for McClain through Pure Art when he came to Chicago. Spunk was also Pogue’s first show with Court and also led to him joining the Education Program, but he seems the most surprised to be a part of it—his teaching experience was further back on his resume, and focused in poetry rather than theater. This season, they all taught the August Wilson Monologue Competition residency, which focuses on preparing the students to present monologues in the nationwide contest.

The way the program is structured, the Teaching Artists are paired together (Pogue and McClain were a team) and work directly in existing theater or English classrooms at local high schools, collaborating with the full-time classroom teachers. All of them speak of this as a strength of the program: “Yes, you’re a teaching artist, but you’re not the teacher, it’s not your class,” says Pogue. “For me I think it’s grounding to know that you are a guest when you’re coming in, so you really have to adapt. You can’t come in and try to change the whole system. But coming in as a guest puts you in a place where you can be open.” Pogue also thinks that they’re a good fit to work with high schoolers: they’re all relatively young, early-career actors, so the students have an easier time connecting to them. “They see us in this big brother/big sister way instead of as older adults,” he says. McClain adds that because the students know them as professionals as well, it increases their credibility. “Because they’ve seen us onstage, they immediately respect what we say and honor it because they know that we do this for a living and they’ve seen us. It develops a level of trust.”

The Wilson residency focuses on monologue preparation, but the Teaching Artists strive to give their students a wealth of widely applicable skills. “Even if you don’t choose to go into theater, public speaking, text analysis, character development, learning how to read people and listen, all those things are tools in any industry and are invaluable,” Pogue points out. And then of course there are the particularly theatrical challenges of developing a character, memorizing a monologue, and unraveling Wilson’s difficult language. The Teaching Artists fully understand the difficulty of the students’ task; while they as professional actors make the work of speaking Wilson or Molière look easy, it’s only because they’ve put in the necessary work themselves, and try to communicate that to their students. “I wanted to express to them that when I pick up a classical work, I don’t know what they’re saying right away, either,” says McClain. “We have to do a lot to get to the point where we understand it and can communicate it. It’s the same journey.”

Bolden also talks about bringing his experience as an actor to the table. His favorite thing to coach is script analysis—thanks to his acting experience, he has a strong connection to Wilson’s plays, but many of his students don’t have much exposure to theater, let alone Wilson specifically. “The biggest challenge is to come in there and show them that there’s a possibility they can find something within his work that speak to them. In my work, I’m always working on analyzing the script and finding those things for myself, so there’s a joy to be able to come in and break apart a script to show them hey, this applies to you, too. You can find something in this that resonates with you. And when you’re reading anything from now on, you’ll be able to find these different connections.”

While the students are learning to connect themselves to their classroom work, the Teaching Artists are also connecting their acting work to their role in the classroom. When asked, they all say that they truly feel like “teaching artists,” with equal emphasis on both parts of their title. “That’s the great thing about coming into Court Theatre under Cree’s direction,” says Bolden. “We have the autonomy and the artistic freedom to go in and see what the kids would benefit from—going in and saying, ‘What are some of the skills or themes or ideas that would speak to these kids? What can they benefit from, what’s going to really appeal to them?’”

McClain echoes his appreciation for the way the program is structured, and adds, “You come in and you get a chance to be an artist. You can come in and play. That’s something that the kids are really yearning for. And I think they need us, because we’re able to offer them a fresh drink of water that they may not get every day. I find they’re more receptive to us because of that, and they surprise themselves a lot because of that, because they find themselves enjoying it, and then they find themselves working at it, and then they find themselves succeeding. And I feel that from every class that I’ve taught.”

Pogue offers a different perspective: “I’m here from this day to this day, and the days when I’m not in school, I have auditions, I’m trying to do a show, I’m trying to book a commercial, I do all these things as an artist. And then I come in and teach,” he says. “I’m not full-time faculty, and I’m not teaching all day long. I think a lot of the students really get a kick out of that. Coming in with the mind frame that you’re a teaching artist, and that you’re cool, and they’re going to like that you’re an artist and come in with that passion—a lot of them pick up on that energy.”

As actors, they also have an opportunity to learn and explore with their students, and their work in the classroom affects their work in the rehearsal room. “As an artist, what I’m working on may inform many of the things I’m going to teach in class that day,” says Bolden. “I get to reinforce some of the things I’m struggling with, and as an artist, teaching someone helps you understand what you’re trying to figure out for yourself.” And McClain points out that the head of the Education Program is also a professional casting director—so watching Rankin coach the students also offers her valuable advice in her own work as an actor.

In the rehearsal room for the Molières, the Teaching Artists had the chance to step back and be guided by director Charles Newell. “You feel like you are the student almost in the beginning—that shifts, as it’s the director’s show and it becomes the actor’s show,” says McClain. Bolden adds, “There was a period at the beginning of Charlie saying, ‘Here’s the vision I want to go for.’ But setting up the vision and executing that vision, shaping that vision, putting specificity to it, those are all different stages of the rehearsal process. And I think we’ve transitioned from setting up that vision to us being surveyors of that. We were sent into new territory, and now we’re making it our own land. From here on out, I think we’re really well equipped because of those first two weeks of Charlie setting up the vision.”

While they don’t know yet where Newell’s vision will carry them, they all seem to be enjoying the work that they so recently coached students to do. “I can take the pressure off myself, in thinking that I have to be an example,” says Pogue. “But using the experience thus far with the teaching—I can think of my students and can say, ‘Take your own notes.’ It’s kind of a short cut. It’s very relaxing, and I’m having a really, really good time. That’s one thing I kept reminding them: you’re going to struggle, it’s a process, you’re not going to get it right away. It’s a play. Have fun.”

Photos of Kamal Angelo Bolden, Patrese D. McClain, and Michael Pogue by Michael Brosilow.

When asked how he went from playing a balding old man in Jitney to a fashionable madame in Court’s production of The Misanthrope, Allen Gilmore laughs. “It’s a long story,” he says, “and I say it’s a long story because I first saw these friends of mine do the scene between Célimène and Arsinoé in probably 1977. I thought it was the funniest thing I’d ever seen in my life—granted, I wasn’t that old, but I always remembered it.” Gilmore recalls trying to play Arsinoé in that scene for a class a few years later, and calls it a “terrible disaster.” “I was just learning about Molière, so I think it was probably terribly overdone, and I was hamming it up in that dress.”

But when he heard that Court Artistic Director Charles Newell was planning to direct The Misanthrope, Gilmore remembered the passion he had for the role, the comedy, and the language, and decided he had to audition. He called Casting Director Cree Rankin and pitched the idea. Rankin was “taken aback” and took the idea to Newell, and they decided to see what Gilmore could do in an audition.

It was only after he was cast that Gilmore second guessed his decision. “Shortly after that, I was mortified, saying, ‘What have I gotten myself into?’ I was just fretting the whole time as we got closer and closer to rehearsal. Prior to starting rehearsal, I had a couple of meetings with Charlie. I was like, Charlie, this might really end my career.”

But the worry lessened as he got into rehearsals and came to understand Newell’s approach to the play. It wasn’t easy, though, and he recalls that it took several weeks of rehearsal time before Newell’s approach clicked for him. It certainly wasn’t for lack of experience: Gilmore is well versed in the French Baroque, but his practice with Molière prior to The Misanthrope was limited to the playwright’s lighter work. He distinguishes his previous experiences with Scapin and A Doctor in Spite of Himself from The Misanthrope and Tartuffe through the kind of comedy in the plays. “The way that I’ve done Molière has been broadly comic,” he says. “I’ve done those light, comic Molières, the ones that he wrote strictly for laughs in the commedia style by just creating a scaffolding on which to hang a lot of jokes.”

The Misanthrope is one of Molière’s more substantial pieces, he says, and isn’t just a scaffolding. While it is a comedy, the style is completely different. “When you get inside The Misanthrope, you see that the extreme behavior is the same as in the broader comedies, just that they are coming from a place of real depth and real truth. It’s coming from the gut.” Gilmore acknowledges that this doesn’t sound like the most comedic approach to a script. “A number of us said to each other regularly, ‘This is not funny,’” he says. “But that’s because you’re going into it and finding the reality of it, and then Charlie asks you to go further and further. You get into the reality, and then Charlie brings you into the extremity of the behavior.”

Gilmore as Turnbo in Jitney.

His challenge was finding that real depth for Arsinoé, and focused in on her first speech as the key to unlocking her character for himself and for the audience. Once he understood the first speech, the rest of the pieces started to fall into place. “The comedy—I call it ‘going under the bottom,’” he says. “Often what I do with the broad comedies is go what we call ‘over the top,’ and I can do that very easily. But this one was going under the bottom, getting really into the gut of the character and going psychologically to the deepest, sometimes darkest places, instead of going over the top in terms of manner and behavior. When I finally learned the depth and how to think in the way that Charlie was working, then it became clear to me. While I definitely have a comic muscle, it was just a different use of this comic muscle. It was almost like when you go to exercise. You’re sore maybe for the first few times you try the new move, but after a while you get it.”

Getting a handle on the comedy was only half of the battle for Gilmore, though—he still had to figure out how to play a woman. “I’m one who worries,” he laughs, “and I think that’s part of my process.” He always mentally prepares for a role before he gets into the rehearsal room, and approaching a female character meant that his preparation was focused on trying to feel female. “It wasn’t just about being feminine,” he says. “That was my hurdle. I remember I kept saying, ‘I don’t feel like a woman.’ I think it’s one of the greatest challenges an actor can have, trying to play the other gender. So mentally trying to climb inside the head of A) a woman, and B) this particular woman—it was definitely a different process for getting into character.”

Feeling female never “clicked” for him in the same way that Newell’s approach to the comedy did, he says. His challenge every time he takes the stage is to try to be true to the femaleness of the character. He hopes that knowing who she is, what she wants at all times, and how she goes about getting those things helps his “womanness.” The costume, he says, is helpful in that regard: “Going out there in that costume I’m always hyper aware of hey, these are shoes that I don’t necessarily feel comfortable in, and there’s a split in my skirt and if I move in a certain way, I’m going to look manly in this thing.”

He relates a hiccup in one of the previews when he was in the scene with Célimène, played by Grace Gealey. She said something that offended him, and he turned from her and stood to get off of the chaise. “I mentioned this backstage later: ‘Grace, how do you get up off the chaise?’” he laughs. “I had turned away from her on the chaise like a man. I opened my legs and I stood up. For that one moment, I was doing what A.C. [Smith] calls my Sharon Stone imitation.” Gealey assisted him throughout the production, helping him learn to move in costume and, on one occasion, taking him for a pedicure.

While playing Arsinoé will continue to be a nightly challenge for him, Gilmore has already gone into rehearsals for Tartuffe, in which he is playing Madame Pernelle. Before he auditioned, it had already been decided that the actor who played Arsinoé would double as Madame Pernelle. They hadn’t been considering casting a man in either role, but it turns out that there is some historical precedent for Madame Pernelle being played by a man. “It just worked out serendipitously, sort of, that I was a man and now playing Madame Pernelle because that’s a piece of traditional casting for Tartuffe.”

Gilmore is excited to have an opportunity to tackle another female role so soon after Arsinoé. Madame Pernelle is a very different type of woman, he explains. He based Arsinoé on the über feminine, 1950s characters in the film culture of the time, noting that she came from being the Célimène of her day and is very much a coquette at heart—though of course, she’s aged out of it. “Madame Pernelle is not that at all. There’s nothing dressed up about her, she’s not made up, she’s just something very different. What different, exactly, I’m going to have to find out in rehearsal. But it will be an interesting journey finding out this new character.”

Photography of Allen Gilmore and Grace Gealey by Michael Brosilow.

INSPIRATION

DESIGN

INSPIRATION

DESIGN
by Jacqueline Firkins

By Johnny Oleksinski

You can feel the jitters palpably in the Court Theatre rehearsal hall on Stony Island Avenue. Every time someone wanders into the wide-open space, the room’s eyes dart to the door like we’re the audience at a taping of “Three’s Company.” Who’s gonna come in? Do I know them? That person then meanders about and maybe dives into the snack table for some bagels and coffee; she says a few hellos. First rehearsals are always this way. There are introductions to be made, walls to break down, and, hopefully, fun to be had. But first, you have take your place around the big table.
The space has low, tiled ceilings and a florescent brightness. You could swear a cleaning crew had removed the impermanent cubicle dividing walls only a moment before you walked in, but the room is naturally this way. Artistic Director Charles Newell tells me that there might be a new rehearsal hall down the pike, but for now this one does the job all while oozing a cool, lived-in eclecticism. Walk over to the south wall of the hall and observe scribbled equations and other mathematic etchings on the wall, left over from Newell’s production of Proof.

The fourteen person repertory cast of Molière’s The Misanthrope and Tartuffe assembles around four long tables formed into a square. Donors and other interested parties sit in a semicircle of adjacent chairs, and the designers are mostly standing, (perhaps nervously) readying their presentations. Though this meeting is a first rehearsal for the actors, today is anything but the first day of this process. For months, Newell and his designers have been hard at work imagining, debating, and realizing the physical world that these actors are to eventually live in. When they speak about their designs, you can hear both a playfulness and intellect in their voice.

While this room is totally new territory for me, there are some serious Court Theatre veterans seated around the table. Nine members of the cast have appeared onstage at Court before: a staggering number for a theater without a set-in-stone ensemble. From this season’s roster alone, I can spot Philip Earl Johnson from Skylight and James Joyce’s ‘The Dead,’ Kamal Angelo Bolden, Allen Gilmore and A.C. Smith from Jitney and Erik Hellman from Proof: a veritable Court Theatre All-Star team. Even more of the cast has worked together here during other seasons or at various other theaters, so the mood is light and congenial.

“I’m Charlie Newell, and I’m so excited to be here!” says the director, kicking off the round of introductions. He asks everyone in the room to say their name and a little something about themselves. Following suit, there are a bunch of folks who are also “excited to be here,” but what strikes me rather profoundly is the number of people who call Court Theatre their “artistic home.” Actors don’t just throw that term around willy-nilly, especially in a city like Chicago with such a fluid theater scene. These talented people work all over the city, and yet, in referring to this company as their artistic home, they are saying that it’s where they feel their freest, their most comfortable, and their most creatively fertile.

Continuing around the circle is a happy blend of jokes and warmth. Allen Gilmore, playing Arsinoé in The Misanthrope and Madame Pernelle in Tartuffe, says he’s “been studying ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’” for research, and in an endearing moment, Desmond Gray shyly announces that this production is his first Equity show, which garners cheers and applause.

The most exciting portion of a first rehearsal, aside from the read-through, are the design presentations. As Newell puts it, this is the cast’s chance to see “what in heck we’re doing with these Molière plays!” The set model and costume renderings are the initial glimpses into this morally challenged, power-hungry universe these actors will inhabit over the next few months. John Culbert’s set makes physically tiny but tonally gargantuan changes from Misanthrope to Tartuffe—from elegant, sleek, and sensual to a landscape more domestic and familiar. He and Newell toured upscale homes in Kenwood for inspiration for the latter, and looked to celebrity and pop culture for the aesthetic of The Misanthrope.

Perhaps the most delectably shocking presentation though was from Jacqueline Firkins, the production’s costume designer. Her speech titillated, not because of the fabulous renderings that purposely evoke Dolce and Gabbana, but rather a video she displayed of music-star Beyoncé. The commercial for O2 mobile company in the UK portrays Beyoncé as a kind of Marie Antoinette, but with modern flair and sassy sensibility in a Baroque period French court. Newell and his design team have sought to incorporate the attitudes and publicity-entrenched values—particularly “the commoditization of female beauty”—of pop music and their stars, along with their heightened Gaga-Beyonce-Minaj looks, into this production. The designer humorously notes that, after seeing this video, she wonders if Beyoncé had secretively spied on their design meetings.

After we depart, the cast will gently read through the script and begin their adventure into Molière’s contorted world and hilariously vicious characters.

The role of the understudy is an unusual one, even for the theater world. The hope is usually that an understudy will never have to go on, and while they learn the lines and the blocking and must be constantly prepared to go onstage, many never do. Most theater-goers probably aren’t even aware that understudies exist for any given production, including the majority of our audiences for Proof. But for five performances, Chaon Cross, our Catherine, was too ill to perform, and her understudy faced the daunting task of taking the stage in her place. Molly Miller had the opportunity that understudies dream of (or dread), but she and her fellow understudy David Federman (u/s Hal) were uniquely prepared to work on Proof. They know the play as few others do—they both have played their roles before, and more than that, played them as students of the University of Chicago.

The University of Chicago’s Theater and Performance Studies program (TAPS) produces two shows per academic year with professional directors and designers, giving students in all areas of theater the chance to work with a professional artist in their field. Last fall, TAPS produced Proof as part of the opening ceremonies for the new Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, and brought in Audrey Francis to direct. Miller played Catherine and Federman played Hal in that production, working alongside a third student as Claire and a professional actor playing Robert.

Francis is the owner and co-founder of Black Box Acting Studio, a small boutique training studio that teaches a combination of Meisner and Viewpoints. The studio focuses on naturalistic methods, training students to bring themselves and their own experiences to text and roles. She was there to be a teacher as well as a director, Federman and Miller agree. They spent the first week of rehearsal just learning the kind of work she expected from them in the room, and then they got to the usual business of working on the script.

A few weeks after the show closed, they received an email from Cree Rankin, Court’s casting director, and found out that they might understudy the current production. Then they had to wait. “I had to tell myself don’t think about it, it may not happen, just go back to class,” says Federman. Even after they had been offered the positions, it didn’t seem official until they signed their contracts—which happened just before rehearsals started. “That’s when we knew it was real,” says Miller.

Miller was initially not sure if she would be able to understudy, but Francis encouraged her to take the job. Miller is very involved in Chicago’s improv scene but wanted to make the jump to theater, and this experience has been a perfect opportunity for her to watch a professional process. For Federman, it wasn’t a question—he had already stopped doing student theater to take classes at Black Box, so he saw it as an opportunity to jump start his post-college involvement.

Both of them describe the vast difference between doing shows in college and in the professional world. “For me, the biggest thing was watching the amount of preparation the actors do before they get onstage. Every single word—even the way they look at punctuation is mind blowing,” says Miller.

“Even the first day, they’re already half to three-quarters off book,” adds Federman. “That looks a lot like the week before we went up, and this is day one.”

“Watching them talk so specifically about what they meant with each line, I realized how hard it is and how hard they work,” says Miller. And while the professional actors are not also struggling with the notoriously heavy work load of the University of Chicago, they still have lives to maintain—they have children, or are looking for the next audition, or have teaching jobs. Participating in a professional production has been extremely valuable to Federman and Miller, but working as an understudy has made their involvement particularly educational.

Most of what they have learned comes from hours of observation. Federman and Miller put in a lot of hours in the rehearsal room before the show opens, but they are only present to watch and take notes. They observe the actors at work—Federman says his script is full of notes, both for blocking and acting—in order to replicate it later. After the show opens, they have specific understudy rehearsals, where all four understudies work and run the show on their own. Those rehearsals are their only dedicated time to work, and still do not reflect actual show conditions: it would be extremely unlikely for all four understudies to go on at once.

Then they wait. They have no way of knowing if or when they will go on. Sometimes, an understudy will know that their actor has a scheduled conflict, and can anticipate when they will go onstage. Not for this production. At the time of the interview, Federman and Miller both sound doubtful that they will ever take the stage for their counterparts, and know they will spend the next few weeks waiting for a call that may never come. For Federman, it never did, but for Miller, she found out mere hours before her first performance that she would be filling in for Cross.

When the call comes, understudies are expected to perform as their counterparts would. “What they told us the first day is that they want us to be representing the choices that they’ve made, besides the fact that we’re doing the blocking and the lines,” says Federman. “I feel like I’m supposed to be doing Erik [Hellman] doing Hal.” For actors who played these roles relatively recently, they face the challenge of not falling back on old habits. “I’m worried I’m going to freeze when I try to go back to the way we used to do it and have to stop myself,” Miller laughs. They both have learned enormous amounts from watching the professional actors tackle the roles, and are challenged to bring that interpretation to the stage when they perform. Miller explains how closely she has watched Cross’ emotional trajectory as Catherine in the hopes of emulating it, and Federman has the challenge of adopting Hellman’s particular physical presence. “I’m trying to get the physical vocabulary down,” says Federman.

After working with Audrey Francis, they found Court’s rehearsal room something of a surprise. Moments are crafted, certainly with an interest in being naturalistic, but the quintessentially UChicago qualities particularly of Hellman came from many rehearsal hours. The infamous social awkwardness of UChicago students is particularly prominent in the “morning after” scene, which Miller suggests might have been a little lost in their production because they were working so hard to be natural. “I think from the perspective of people outside of this bubble, that’s the direction you need to go to get there,” said Federman. “For us, starting from that place of being naturally awkward because we go here—we were never going to lose that because that’s who we are, so we needed to go more ‘normal.’”

“David is Hal, is the thing,” laughs Miller. “It naturally came out.” Both of them are finishing up theater degrees at the University of Chicago, but Federman is also a math major. “To be fair, I am not Catherine. I am definitely not Catherine. But there are little character quirks that we as UChicago students naturally have, probably.”

While Federman and Miller brought considerable experience and understanding of the play to the rehearsal room, they have been amazed by Charlie’s knowledge of and reverence for the text. “I learned more about this play in this rehearsal process than I learned since being cast in the show in May,” says Federman. “I’m always just amazed by how much he has in his head—he knows every little detail about the show.”

“He’s very personally invested,” adds Miller. “And he’s very kind to us. I think the way he treats his actors is amazing—there’s such respect.”

While they did not both have an opportunity to perform, Federman and Miller will be able to take their experience on Proof with them as they begin their own professional careers upon graduating in June. “This is such a great opportunity to come and watch an actual professional process and see if this is something I want to pursue,” says Miller. “And for it to be our senior year—it’s really a no risk situation for us. We’re not giving up jobs to do this. It is a time drain, but it’s a great opportunity for anyone in our situation.”

Photos of Molly Miller and John Henry Roberts by Drew Dir.

As a way of visually capturing that thrill, we recently had our photographer Joe Mazza do a photo essay on Hyde Park that I’d love to share with you in tandem with some excerpts from the script:

ROBERT
I don’t see the difference. I knew what I wanted to do and I did it.
If I wanted to work on a problem all day long, I did it.
If I wanted to look for information – secrets, complex and tantalizing messages – I could find them all around me. In the air. In a pile of fallen leaves some neighbor raked together. In box scores in the paper, written in the steam coming up off a cup of coffee. The whole world was talking to me.
If I just wanted to close my eyes, sit quietly on the porch and listen for the messages, I did that.
It was wonderful.

A quintessential front porch in Hyde Park

CATHERINE
After my mother died it was just me here. I tried to keep him
happy no matter what idiotic project he was doing. He used to read all day. He kept demanding more and more books. I took them out of the library by the carload. We had hundreds upstairs. Then I realized he wasn’t reading: he believed aliens were sending him messages through the Dewey decimal numbers on the library books. He was trying to work out the code.

The University of Chicago Library

ROBERT
Yes. What about a walk to the lake? You and me.

CATHERINE
All right.

ROBERT
I would love to go to the lake.

Promontory Point

ROBERT
Hal’s in our “Infinite” program. As he approaches
completion of his dissertation, time approaches infinity. Would you like a drink, Hal?

A UC student studying at night

HAL
You’re right. Okay. Here’s my suggestion. I know three or four guys at the department, very sharp, disinterested people who knew your father, knew his work. Let me take this to them.

The Math Department Building

More of these beautiful photos of Hyde Park will be up posted on ProofinHydePark.org soon!

When sitting down with Chaon Cross, it’s hard not to wonder if she’s found a way for a woman to have it all. A well-known actress in Chicago and mother of two, Cross has returned to Court after a few years’ hiatus to play the lead role in the upcoming Proof, her first major theater work after the birth of her second child. It’s been ten years since she first worked with Artistic Director Charles Newell in the Romance Cycle and she is thrilled to be back in the rehearsal room with him, though balancing hours of intense rehearsal with her family life seems exhausting.

It’s great that we now have an expectation that women can do it all, she says, but she found that in practice, she had to make her own choices. “There’s not enough time in the day or energy in one body to focus completely on family and work,” she says. “You’ve got to cut corners somewhere, so when I did have a baby it became very clear to me that I wasn’t cutting corners in that area, especially in that first year.” She counts herself lucky to have been able to choose her own work schedule around pregnancy and her children’s first years, waiting eight months to a year to book her first play after her children were born. To be the actor and the mother she wants to be, she realized quickly that she couldn’t do both, at least at first. But since she was able to give herself some time to just be a mother, she feels that she and her boys are ready for the balancing act as she goes back to work.

It became increasingly important to her to return to work, as well, and now that she has, she’s found the productivity in that balancing act. “I think every woman has a different capacity for how well they can just focus on home and kids,” she says. “Some people are built that way and some people are not, and I think I’m in between. There’s definitely a point where I start to bring my big way of experiencing things into the home and it’s not helpful. That’s when I need to go do what I like to do and what I’m good at.” The rehearsal and performance schedule is a boon in that case, giving her a schedule that changes every few weeks and allows her time to see her kids. While the transition into that schedule was not easy, she now finds it helpful: “The minute you walk out of your house, you’re looking at pictures on your phone, you’re thinking about the cute moments, whereas two hours before you were cleaning and serving and maintaining and going, ‘I have to get to work.’ It’s amazing how a little bit of perspective goes a long way—even just a few hours out of the house when you feel like you’re doing something productive, you’re doing your own thing. Coming back home, you have so much more to give.”

As much as having a job helps her when she’s home with her family, she’s also found that the balancing act makes her a more effective artist. Having such clear personal priorities has changed her work as an actor, she says. Anyone who is early in their career is probably familiar with the feeling that it’s necessary to be able to drop everything for the next opportunity, and actors particularly are required to uproot themselves to go where the next job is. Cross certainly knows what that feels like—after graduating from college, she spent two years touring the US and Canada with the American Shakespeare Center before she settled in Chicago. The willingness to go anywhere and do anything disappeared when she started a family. Getting a job isn’t the most important thing in the world, she says, and that’s a benefit in the audition and rehearsal room. “There’s no time for being worried about mistakes. There’s no time for worrying about who’s going to think what, or what is appropriate. There is an abandon,” she says.

Her first audition after the birth of her second child showed her how much that abandon would change her work. It was just before pilot season, and her agent had arranged an audition. “My agent’s calling me, I burst into the audition room, and I barely got there, I’m thinking about the baby who’s in the waiting room with some stranger,” she recalls. “The last thing on my mind is being nervous about the work that I’m doing, and I had the greatest success.” 

The audition process for her has been a further example of how her perspective change has impacted her work as an actor, but she’s also found the particulars of Proof to be eye-opening. Her relationship to her own parents changed when she had children and began to really understand what they went through to raise her, which has made the familial relationships in Proof particularly meaningful. “I’ve actually had a lot of epiphanies in this rehearsal process thinking about that kind of mother-daughter, father-daughter relationship,” she says.

Certainly, there are still more discoveries ahead, and as the show moves into tech and ultimately the performance schedule, Cross will have further adjusting to do. But we look forward to her return to Court’s stage and the unique perspective she brings to Proof.

Photo by joe mazza/brave lux inc.

“Google me,” says Paul Sally.

I had done so before I walked into his office, and his list of accomplishments would be a blog post unto itself: a tenured mathematics professor at the University of Chicago for almost fifty years; the director of the department’s undergraduate studies program; founder and head of the Seminars for Elementary Specialists and Mathematics Educators (SESAME) program, an outreach program for middle-grade CPS teachers; head of the Young Scholars Program (YSP), a free summer enrichment program for middle and high school students; creator of the Algebra Initiative, a targeted program for eighth grade math teachers; active in the Collegiate Scholars program. And that’s just the beginning of the list. He is the type of professor that all UChicago students know about, even if they haven’t taken a class with him—if not for his reputation as an excellent professor, then for his affectionate nickname: the “Math Pirate.” Sally wears an eye patch and has two titanium legs, all losses in his battle with diabetes.

There is one other thing a quick Google search will turn up: His hatred of cell phones is infamous. It’s well known to all his students that a phone that rings in class may end up being thrown out or stomped on. When I ask for permission to use my phone to record our interview, he says it’s fine—but if it rings, it will have to go out the window.

We are joined in Sally’s office by John Boller, Senior Lecturer and Assistant Director of Undergraduate Studies in the math department. Sally was Boller’s PhD advisor, and now they work closely in the classroom and on a number of Sally’s extra projects. Court’s patrons probably better know Boller as the dramaturg of Proof, which marks his third foray into dramaturgy with Artistic Director Charles Newell.

A few years ago, director John Madden also sat on Sally’s couch to consult with him about the movie version of Proof, which was filmed in small part in the math building. “They filmed an awful lot that they never showed,” recalls Sally. The movie crew spent days just down the hall from his office working on a few scenes with Jake Gyllenhaal; Sally met the main actors (he refers to them as “Gwynnie,” “Tony,” and “Jake”) in the process. But the actors and the crew overall seemed to have little idea what it meant to be a part of a major research university. “It was really dissociated,” he says. The University and Hyde Park function as a backdrop, but nothing in the movie works to distinguish the school from any other major research university. “The representation of some things—the seriousness of the mathematics, the prestige of the father, and so forth—that came across. But like I say—how do you distinguish that from Caltech?”

The play itself does have a sense of “locale,” he and Boller agree, with drives to Evanston and runs along the lake providing more color that residents of Hyde Park will recognize. “At the end, the University buys the house—that’s a very Hyde Park/U of C kind of thing,” Boller points out, and Sally laughs. The play provides a tour of the school and neighborhood and gets the details right, but Sally isn’t convinced that it’s distinctly Hyde Park. He says, “If somebody asked me what truly nailed it as the University of Chicago—the fact that it was mentioned.”

Boller asks Sally if the play seems realistic given his experience in the field. There is a long pause before Sally finally replies, “They don’t do anything really stupid.” The events of Proof would be incredibly unlikely to find in modern times, Sally says. For someone like Catherine, who had not even finished her undergraduate education, to complete a proof that well-trained mathematicians have worked on for decades, is extraordinarily unlikely. “But that’s why this is drama,” points out Boller. “Because it is at the edge of believability.”

“I guess what you can say is,” says Sally, “’Could it happen?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Have you known of a case?’ ‘No.’ ‘How long have you been around?’ ‘Eighty years.’ We’ve seen thousands of students of all ages, pre-K up to graduate school and beyond, and there are certain remarkable discoveries that just come out of nowhere, but they seldom come out of an environment like this.” Sally stresses that people may walk away with a sense that this kind of discovery could happen all the time, but that simply isn’t the case in mathematics. The proof that Auburn had in mind while writing the play was probably Fermat’s Last Theorem, says Sally: “If anyone realized what Andrew Wiles went through to actually prove Fermat, and the work that he had to do, and the mathematics that he had to draw on … extremely difficult.” That sort of genius doesn’t tend to just appear in the math world now. “It takes years of training, absolute isolation, and utter devotion,” says Sally. “And clearly the isolation and devotion may have been part of Proof.”

The life of the mathematician may explain why math professors in popular culture have a particular reputation for eccentricity that borders on mental illness. Sally has not observed his own field to be unusual, but he does feel that mathematics is a uniquely lonely occupation. “It is very difficult to talk about your professional work with people other than well-trained mathematicians. Not just people who understand mathematics a little bit, people who understand it a lot. And that in a certain sense isolates people.” He compares mathematicians to physicists and chemists, who can talk about applications of their research at a level that their audience might understand—most people have at least a basic knowledge of the Big Bang. But mathematicians talk about mathematics: there’s no “intervening flow of conversation” you can use to discuss the topic without getting to the details of the topic itself. Even talking to fellow mathematicians can be difficult if discussing your own specialization, as they may have a fundamental understanding but not the same expertise. “You learn to nod your head at other mathematicians,” says Sally. But the specialist can always do as Sally has done and diversify his interests, be they in basketball or education.

“We think of universities as places where scholars can come and exchange ideas,” says Boller, “this meeting of the minds and the life of the mind and so on. But it’s amazing how easy it is to get isolated in your own silo of study. And that’s particularly true in mathematics.” Even within the University of Chicago, they speak of a north-south campus divide between math and the sciences (north campus) and the humanities and social sciences (south campus), let alone the professional schools or institutions like Court.

The math department is only one piece of that enormous institution, but they suggest with some frustration that it does not receive the recognition it deserves. In the 1950s, it was the best in the world, attracting the best and the brightest - like Proof’s Robert. It is still highly regarded, but the playing field has widened, partly because the character of the school has changed. “This place is not as weird as it used to be,” says Sally. “In the 1970s, the student body was far more diverse in terms of quirky personalities, and yet it also had many more truly brilliant people than we do now.” Sally feels that the recent push by the University to improve the College and increase its national rankings has “normalized” the population of the school. For the University’s reputation to remain excellent, the College needed to excel, and the current administration has done a remarkable job in bolstering the undergraduate programs.

“Have you ever heard of the word schlimbesserung?” Sally asks, pointing to a corner of the chalkboard where it was written out. “It’s an improvement that makes things worse. That’s what happens at the University of Chicago these days, from a certain perspective.”

In spite of the changes, Sally has no plans to leave the University. “It’s one hell of a good job,” he says. “I’ve been at a number of universities, and this is far and away the best place to be for me.” And the unusual character of the school is far from gone - UChicago students still have a reputation for being extremely odd, if very bright, and Sally can still see that.

David Auburn saw it, too. “If there’s something quirky about Proof,” Sally says, “it’s because it happened at the University of Chicago. Let me put it this way: if a strange thing like this did happen, it would be more likely to happen at Chicago than elsewhere.”

Photos by Sharat Ganapati of the Chicago Maroon. Reproduced with permission.