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          string(3238) "<img class="wp-image-12667 size-full" src="https://www.courttheatre.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/workingonwilson-800x300.jpg" alt="" width="800" height="300" />

<em>For many actors, working on an August Wilson play is a dream come true, a rite of passage, a profound honor. Read on to learn how members of this cast feel about performing Wilson’s work.</em>

To <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/people/kelvin-roston-jr/"><strong>Kelvin Roston, Jr.</strong></a> (Hedley), working on August Wilson is akin to working on Shakespeare — it requires a skill set that not every actor has. Roston observes that for black male actors, “we see an August Wilson play and see ourselves, our family members, our friends.” He says that watching Wilson’s plays exposed him to characters like Floyd Barton (<em>Seven Guitars</em>), Youngblood (<em>Jitney</em>), and Hedley (<em>King Hedley II</em>) and made him excited about the prospect of aging into these roles. “August Wilson has written us from the inside, unfiltered. He not only shows who we are, but also the why. It’s very specific; no matter the year it’s set, it remains relevant.”

Performing in an August Wilson play has been a lifelong goal of <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/people/kierra-bunch/"><strong>Kierra Bunch</strong></a> (Tonya). “Tackling King Hedley and being a part of this experience is exciting,” she says. “It’s exciting to actually get an opportunity to step into the work of a true visionary and great storyteller of our times. Wilson writes about the human condition and anyone can find their own story in this play.”
“We see an August Wilson play and see ourselves, our family members, our friends.”

<a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/people/dexter-zollicoffer/"><strong>Dexter Zollicoffer</strong></a> (Stool Pigeon) feels that acting in an August Wilson play is an artistic rite of passage. “When working on Wilson, you feel like you’re paying homage to the struggles and joys of being black in America,” he says. Dexter thinks that “by exploring the nuances of this specific community in 1985, it better prepares us for the racial and cultural dynamics at play today.”

One of the things that excites<a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/people/ronald-conner/"><strong> Ronald L. Conner</strong></a> (Mister) most about being in this play is the opportunity to showcase an unconventional family bound by blood, friendship, and proximity. “Working on an August Wilson play means an opportunity to give voice to the marginalized, working class of America,” he reflects. “It means I get to tell a universal story through a culturally specific lens.” To Ronald, the themes and issues raised in <em>King Hedley II</em> are quite timely. “Audiences need to see this play now, because it is ‘now!’”

<strong>Performances of <em><a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/season-tickets/2019-2020-season/king-hedley-ii/">King Hedley II</a> </em>begin September 12! <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/season-tickets/2019-2020-season/king-hedley-ii/">Save your seats →</a></strong>

Photo: A.C. Smith, Kelvin Roston, Jr., and TayLar in a promotional photo for KING HEDLEY II. (Mazza)"
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          string(7425) "<img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-12477" src="https://www.courttheatre.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/AugieMarchCriticsPraise800x300.jpg" alt="" width="1600" height="601" />

Throughout the country, critics are praising the world premiere of <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/season-tickets/2018-2019-season/adventures-augie-march/"><em>The Adventures of Augie March</em></a>. The Wall Street Journal's Terry Teachout called the play "a light-on-its-feet triumph," and Chris Jones of the <i>Chicago Tribune </i>awarded the production four stars and wrote that the production is “dazzlingly creative" and "intensely moving.” Audiences and critics alike agree that Charle Newell’s production is an epic theatrical event. See for yourself what the buzz is about — <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/season-tickets/2018-2019-season/adventures-augie-march/">get tickets to <em>The Adventures of Augie March</em></a><i></i>.

<hr />

“The resultant show is very clever, and Bellow, always a bit cleverer than his cleverest characters, deserved a clever show. It will hold your attention for all three of its acts...the performances in the show are of a thrillingly high level, Newell preferring innately theatrical actors, here equally rooted, like the novel they are performing, in the corporal as well as the intellectual."

<a href="https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/theater/ct-ent-augie-march-court-review-ttd-0521-story.html">—Chris Jones, <i>Chicago Tribune</i>, ★★★★ Highly Recommended</a>

<hr />

“Every bit as ambitious as the 600-page book on which it’s based. Staged with staggering éclat by Charles Newell, the Court’s artistic director, it is totally and triumphantly successful...If Tracy Letts’s “August: Osage County,” another big-boned play that started life on a Chicago stage before moving to New York, was capable of hitting big on Broadway, then I see no reason why this similarly proportioned show can’t pull off the same improbable feat—given a producer with vision who’s ready to roll the dice. Here’s hoping."

<a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-adventures-of-augie-march-review-chicago-kid-makes-good-11558460948">—Terry Teachout, <i>The Wall Street Journal</i></a>

<hr />

“As Augie, Mulvey brings a natural ease and charm that rarely seems to exist on the page: He bridges the gaps between the man himself and the attraction Augie holds to other people. Mulvey is supported by a fine ensemble, led by Cross and Judd, that likewise infuses the show with life. Using often little more than some chairs, some tables, a few white curtains and the bodies of those ensemble members, Newell and movement consultant Erin Kilmurray create a roiling sea of action, part modern dance, part devised theater, part clown show.”

<a href="https://chicago.suntimes.com/2019/5/20/18632894/adventures-of-augie-march-review-court-theater-saul-bellows-novel">—Alex Huntsberger, <i>Chicago Sun-Times</i></a>

<hr />

“Newell's 13 actors (all of whom except Mulvey play multiple roles) negotiate the shifts in vernacular and locale with precision and panache. John Culbert's gloomy black-beamed set and chiaroscuro lighting provide a somber counterpoint to the story's fantastical elements, while Manual Cinema's shadow puppetry enhances them...in Auburn's imagining and Mulvey's performance, he embraces the moment in which he is living with an open heart. Newell's staging also embraces each moment with a bold and refreshingly uncynical sense of theatrical flair.”

<a href="https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/the-adventures-of-augie-march-court-theatre/Content?oid=70448954">—Kerry Reid, <i>Chicago Reader</i></a>

<hr />

“Auburn collaborated with Court Theatre artistic director Charles Newell, who directs this world premiere, and took advantage of the university’s Special Collections Research Center, the repository of Bellow’s papers — Bellow attended the university and served on the faculty. The result is a theatrical triumph that celebrates the freewheeling spirit of the book.”

<a href="https://www.splashmagazines.com/index.php/2019/05/19/the-adventures-of-augie-march-review-saul-bellows-characters-boogie-off-the-pages-in-playwright-david-auburns-spirited-adaptation/#gsc.tab=0">—Leanne Star, <i>Splash Magazine,</i> Highly Recommended</a>

<hr />

“Once the house lights go down, Chicago’s immigrant ecosystem of the late 1920s and early 30s springs to life. Playwright David Auburn who adapted Bellow’s novel, director Charles Newell and movement specialist Erin Kilmurray convey this coming of age tale with rough and tumble vitality. The visual palette is somber enough but the story teems with a rainbow’s range.”

<a href="https://www.picturethispost.com/court-theatre-presents-the-adventures-of-augie-march-review-the-flow-of-youth/">—Susan Lieberman, <i>Picture This Post, </i>Highly Recommended</a>

<hr />

“Newell’s direction is brilliant here...Even Newell’s stage transitions happen so naturally that they simply seem a part of the ongoing action. Add to that the multitude of roles that the ensemble has to assume, and the director clearly had to work some magic to keep them all clear and distinct. And the performances he gets from members of the ensemble (especially Aurora Real de Asua as Augie’s platonic friend Mimi) are completely wonderful."

<a href="https://chicagoonstage.com/augie-march-is-a-complex-demanding-drama/">—Karen Topham, <i>Chicago on Stage</i>, Highly Recommended</a>

<hr />

“<span style="font-weight: 400;">Maybe the most ambitious single project in the theater’s long and innovative history...Director Charles Newell superbly pulls the complex project together, with my interest actually increasing as the play went on. The team of designers provides invaluable creative and artistic input—John Culbert (scenic and light design), Sally Dolembo (costumes), and Andre Pluess (sound). A special salute goes to Manuel Cinema Studios for its spectacular puppet designs, especially the most inventive shadow puppetry I’ve ever seen."</span>

<a href="https://chicagolandtheaterreviews.com/chicagoland-productions/augie-march/">—Dan Zeff, <em>Chicagoland Theatre Review</em></a>

<hr />

“Saul Bellow would approve of Court Theatre’s exhilarating production of <em>The Adventures of Augie March</em>...Patrick Mulvey is so right as Augie that one could almost believe he was created to play this part.”

<a href="https://thirdcoastreview.com/2019/05/21/review-court-theatres-the-adventures-of-augie-march/">—Nancy Bishop, <i>Third Coast Review,</i> Highly Recommended</a>

<hr />

“Labeling a work of art a “masterpiece” is a dangerous business, but on rare occasions there can be no doubt that such a tag is unavoidable. And Court Theatre’s world premiere production of <em>The Adventures of Augie March</em> – Pulitzer Prize-winner David Auburn’s ingenious stage adaptation of Saul Bellow’s nearly 600-page novel, which has been brilliantly directed by Charles Newell, and is being performed by a uniformly virtuosic cast – is an example of just such a case.”

<a href="https://news.wttw.com/2019/05/21/saul-bellow-adventures-augie-march-court-theatre-review">—Hedy Weiss, WTTW Chicago</a>

<hr />

<em>Photo by Michael Brosilow.</em>"
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          string(7025) "<img class="alignnone wp-image-12491 size-full" src="https://www.courttheatre.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/1200x630augiemarch.jpg" alt="" width="1200" height="630" />

<i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Casting an epic play like <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/season-tickets/2018-2019-season/adventures-augie-march/">THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH</a> was a huge task that called on the collaborative efforts of the play’s director, playwright, and casting director. Read on to learn more about the casting process for this world premiere production.</span></i>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">One of the first things that drew Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/people/david-auburn/">David Auburn</a> to the idea of adapting </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Adventures of Augie March</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">, Saul Bellow’s towering American novel, for the stage was the opportunity to hear Bellow’s words brought to life by actors. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">“There are hundreds of characters in the book, and they’re all indelible, and the language with which they speak is both realistic and earthy and sort of magical and poetic,” <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/about/blog/in-conversation-playwright-david-auburn-and-director-charles-newell/">Auburn recalled</a>, discussing what initially drew him to the book. “I think that the idea of that language in actors’ mouths was what excited me.”</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">While writing a theatrical play for the stage was Auburn’s task, finding actors to people the world of </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Augie March </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">was up to director <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/people/charles-newell/">Charles Newell</a> and Court’s Casting Director, <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/people/becca-mccracken/">Becca McCracken</a>. Before even calling in actors for auditions, McCracken spent time digging into the text of the play, learning the ins and outs of each character, as well as their motives and relationships with the other characters in the play. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">“Casting </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Augie March </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">was a whole different ball game because we were working on a script that’s been in development through multiple workshops,” McCracken muses on approaching such a massive play. “We were trying to discover how to cast a play that had 55 characters in it with a budget we could afford.”</span>

<img class="alignnone wp-image-12472" src="https://www.courttheatre.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/xtn-500_28center29travisturneraurorarealdeasuaandthecastoftheadventuresofaugiemarch.photobymichaelbrosilow.jpg.pagespeed.ic_.G1GGGZiCCB.jpg" alt="" width="800" height="533" />

<span style="font-weight: 400;">After compiling her initial thoughts, she scheduled a meeting with Newell to learn more about his vision of the play. From there, a breakdown of roles was released to agents, so that they could submit talent to be considered for the production.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">“I really like to invest in their submissions,” Becca shares, speaking about the wealth of talent in Chicago. “It’s important for me to consider all the options, looking for faces I don’t know and what training and special skills they might have that fit the play.”</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">With </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Adventures of Augie March</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">, it was clear that her job was as much to build an ensemble as it was to find the perfect fit for the play’s eponymous character. </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Augie March </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">also posed challenges to the creative team, since everybody knew that the play would still be evolving throughout rehearsals and previews. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">“Nobody was being cast in a particular role aside from Augie,” Becca reflects on the casting process. Instead, actors were contracted “As Cast,” meaning that they weren’t guaranteed a specific role until after work had been done in rehearsals to determine how characters would be distributed among the ensemble. In some ways this was very freeing, since this meant that there were no stipulations in a character breakdown to limit physical characteristics or identities; the casting would parallel the fluidity of the way Newell was planning to approach the storytelling.</span>

<img class="alignnone wp-image-12471" src="https://www.courttheatre.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/abbyaugie-e1558381075654.jpg" alt="" width="600" height="338" />

<span style="font-weight: 400;">The casting process also included many conversations with the playwright about his visions for the tone and demeanor of some of the characters. McCracken views listening as one of the key components of her job, making sure that every collaborator’s needs and ideas about the play are being met as a cast is being assembled. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">“We worked to make sure that the actors hired would represent the immigrant community of Chicago,” she said of the process. “And that each of the actors would be able to trust us when being asked to play a massive range of characters.” </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Thinking back to the caliber of auditions she saw, McCracken says that “</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">it was an insane privilege to be able to see so many actors dive into this difficult text with courage, creativity, wit, grace, and humor...the adjectives could go on and on.” </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">After almost four years in development, it’s thrilling for McCracken to be able to look at the production she had a hand in helping shape. “These actors had the opportunity to walk into the audition with brand new pages of an unpublished work-in-progress and bring to life characters and, in many cases, define the essence or specific moments of these characters for the production,” she said, crediting the caliber of Chicago’s acting community as pivotal to breathing life into </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Augie March</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. “I am incredibly thankful to get to see this diverse and magical cast tell this remarkable story together -- creating a world with their bodies, voices, and hearts.” </span>

<i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Performances of <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/season-tickets/2018-2019-season/adventures-augie-march/">THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH</a> continue through June 9. <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/season-tickets/2018-2019-season/adventures-augie-march/">Learn more →</a></span></i>

<em>Photos by Michael Brosilow.</em>"
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          string(3912) "[caption id="attachment_12441" align="alignnone" width="800"]<img class="wp-image-12441" src="https://www.courttheatre.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/augiebannerinterview.jpg" alt="" width="800" height="300" /> Patrick Mulvey at first rehearsal for THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH. Photo by Joe Mazza.[/caption]

<em><span style="font-weight: 400;">This Spring, Court’s World Premiere Production of "</span><a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/season-tickets/2018-2019-season/adventures-augie-march/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Adventures of Augie March</span></a>"<span style="font-weight: 400;"> brings a fresh new face to Court’s stage! Actor Patrick Mulvey makes his Court debut in the title role, portraying Augie at various ages and stages of life. Before you see him onstage, read on to learn a little bit more about Patrick, his connections to Chicago, and his excitement for this production! </span></em>

<strong><i>The Adventures of Augie March </i>is set primarily in Chicago, where novelist Saul Bellow spent much of his life, and where playwright David Auburn went to school at the University of Chicago. What’s your connection to the city? </strong>

<b>Patrick:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> I was born and raised in Joliet, IL, just 30 minutes south of Chicago. Growing up, my parents and I often came to the city to see shows and go out. After college, when I moved back from living in the UK for a few years, my very first show here was working at the Goodman Theatre on a show that Charlie Newell directed. Incidentally, that show is where I met my wife, and to this day Chicago will always be the place we call home.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>Why do you think that this is an important, relevant story to be sharing right now?</strong> </span>

<b>Patrick:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Whether it's today, last year, or ten years from now, I don't think there is a person who gets through life without questioning deeply who they are. Not to be morose, but I think we are all going through different stages of are we walking out of the woods, or are we walking further into them? I think anyone who sees this show can identify a parallel to their own journey, even if they haven't trained an eagle in falconry. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>What’s most exciting to you about playing Augie March in this world-premiere adaptation?</strong> </span>

<b>Patrick:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> I spent my last year in high school at Interlochen School of the Arts and I remember being jealous when a fellow classmate got to work on <em>Proof</em> in their scene study. So to be able to originate any role, let alone the title role in a new work of David Auburn's, means a lot. </span>

<strong>You’ve most recently worked on film and TV sets. What is the difference between preparing for a series versus preparing for your role as Augie March onstage?</strong>

<b>Patrick:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Well, an hour long television drama is anywhere from 50-70 pages, with the actor getting several takes to refine their performance and tell the story. I love working in film and television because there is a certain energy on set and the unknown about what the finished product will be. And in this show tonight, we perform over 200 pages of script, with no second takes. That brings its own kind of magic. I'll tell you, this ensemble has worked hard and collaborated in an extremely bold way to bring the show</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> to life. </span>

<strong>Performances of <em><a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/season-tickets/2018-2019-season/adventures-augie-march/">The Adventures of Augie March</a> </em>begin May 9! <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/season-tickets/2018-2019-season/adventures-augie-march/">Save your seats →</a></strong>

&nbsp;"
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          string(8130) "[caption id="attachment_12431" align="alignnone" width="800"]<img class="wp-image-12431 size-full" src="https://www.courttheatre.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/daveauburninterviewwide.jpg" alt="" width="800" height="300" /> Photo of David Auburn and Charles Newell at first rehearsal for THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH. Joe Mazza.[/caption]

<em><span style="font-weight: 400;">Marilyn F. Vitale Artistic Director Charles Newell sat down with Pulitzer Prize-winner David Auburn to discuss what drew him to Saul Bellow’s novel. The following discussion is curated from their conversation, detailing Auburn’s approach to adapting this towering American classic for the stage.</span></em>

<b>CHARLES NEWELL:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> When did you first encounter Saul Bellow’s work, particularly this novel, </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Adventures of Augie March</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">?</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>DAVID AUBURN: </strong>I think </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Seize the Day </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">was the first Bellow I ever read. I read </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Herzog </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">before </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Augie March</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">, but </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Augie </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">was the one I connected to most strongly, at least as a 20-something person. It’s an accessible novel for a young person; it’s a picaresque tale of a young kid coming-of-age in Chicago, and it traces his life until, very roughly, the time of the book's publication, which is the early 50s. It’s Augie telling his story, and he encounters seemingly everyone in Chicago—it’s the great Chicago novel in many ways, and it’s a very easy book to sort of get lost in, to be swept up in. There’s this vast canvas, and it’s immensely likeable and loveable. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>CN:</strong> Can you explain what it is about the novel that you first thought about when adapting it? </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>DA:</strong> Before I proposed it to you, I had a number of impulses. One, just love of the work, and also the feeling that it was overflowing with great roles for actors. There are hundreds of characters in the book, and they’re all indelible, and the language with which they speak is both realistic and earthy and sort of magical and poetic. I think that the idea of that language in actors’ mouths was what excited me. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>CN:</strong> And you’ve chosen select characters from the hundreds that Augie encounters. How did you make the choice of which characters, and how does that help tell the story that you want to tell in the play? </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>DA:</strong> One of the hardest things about this has been having to forego using so much wonderful stuff, and I have a feeling that a lot of people will say “Why didn’t you include...?” because there are so many wonderful characters. It ultimately became a question of selecting the ones that I thought served the point of each individual episode with the most narrative or dramatic force, and occasionally combining characters in the book into single figures, elements of them into single figures, but I still lie awake at night wondering if I’ve made a mistake in leaving out this episode or wondering how we can get this other bit in, because there are so many wonderful pieces. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>CN:</strong> Let’s talk about the Bellow language. You can spend so much time on a single page just digesting it and understanding it. How did you bring the heightened language into characters’ voices? </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>DA:</strong> There are a number of mute or semi- mute characters in the book. So I thought, let’s let these characters very occasionally and strategically voice the insights or the descriptions that Augie is coming to but doesn’t quite have the language to say himself, because he’s young, he's still in formation. His brother Georgie, for example, who’s all but mute, can suddenly speak with the eloquence that Augie himself is kind of reaching for, aspiring to. It’s a device that I’m really excited about. I think it will be thrilling because you feel the complexity of the language, it incorporates it in a way that doesn't make it a roadblock to the dramatic action, and it helps us see how Augie is understanding his circumstances. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>CN:</strong> Going back to the early drafts that you first sent us, take us through a little bit of that journey. Were there moments when the adaptation seemed either unlocked or locked up? </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>DA:</strong> It was very hard to begin, because there are no scenes as such in the book. There are countless incidents, but you might have what amounts to a full scene or episode spread out across a hundred pages. If you go looking for a discreet scene that defines the relationship between Simon and Augie, for example, you’re not going to find one. It took a while, but I eventually got a sense of at least the kinds of pieces that should be in the play. I wanted a big piece about Augie’s childhood, a big piece that takes place when he’s in this sort of young adult period and hanging out with students, you want a big piece in Mexico, you want a big piece post-Mexico. At a certain point, having a mental map of what the play could become helped a lot. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>CN:</strong> How about the journey you took to understand Bellow the man, and Bellow the writer? </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>DA:</strong> I saw Bellow occasionally when I was in school here, I would see him working around campus. There’s a new biography by Zachery Leader, which is very comprehensive. The material about his childhood is especially useful, since many of the characters in Augie are based at least in some part on people that he knew, and it’s illuminating to know a bit about the real people he supposedly drew from. The book keeps pitting Augie, who is a kind of searcher, against these people of great certainty, these characters who have these sort of monumental worldviews, and are convinced of the direction that their life and other people’s lives should take. Bellow’s real brother was the prototype for the character Simon. The energy in that figure, and Augie's relationship to him, informs the dynamic of the whole book, and of the play—that dilemma of a questing, questioning person being drawn into and resisting, or not, the pull of a very powerful personality. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>CN:</strong> If you could ask Bellow a question when adapting, what would you want to ask him? </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>DA:</strong> What does there have to be an eagle for? [Laughs] I'm joking. That's a line from the book. I love the eagle, the outrageousness and craziness and power of that whole sequence. It's key to the book and we wanted to make certain it was central to the play.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>CN:</strong> How do you think Bellow would respond to the stage adaptation of his novel? </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>DA:</strong> Bellow did write a play and he liked the theatre, so my hope is he'd be receptive to what we've done. I’ve certainly done it with every intention of being true to his sensibility as I understand it. </span>

<strong>Performances of <em><a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/season-tickets/2018-2019-season/adventures-augie-march/">The Adventures of Augie March</a> </em>begin May 9! <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/season-tickets/2018-2019-season/adventures-augie-march/">Save your seats →</a></strong>"
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          string(11987) "[caption id="attachment_12423" align="alignnone" width="800"]<img class="wp-image-12423 size-full" src="https://www.courttheatre.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/bellowblogwide.jpg" alt="" width="800" height="300" /> Bellow’s US Passport | Saul Bellow Papers | Special Collections Research Center | University of Chicago[/caption]
<ol>
 	<li><b>Immigrant</b></li>
</ol>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Saul Bellow arrived with his family in Chicago on July 4, 1924, smuggled by bootleggers across the border from Canada. He was nine years old. He would remain an “illegal alien”—we would now say, “undocumented immigrant”—until the age of 27.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Bellow was born in 1915 in Lachine, Quebec. His parents were Russian Jews. They had originally come to Canada to flee anti-Semitic violence and political persecution in their home city of St. Petersburg, Russia. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">The Bellow family arrived on American soil two short months after the U. S. Congress passed the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act, a drastic and sweeping revision of federal immigration policy. The new law slammed the door on a tide of humanity that had been flowing to America since the late 19th-century, ending the greatest era of mass migration to the United States in its history. From 1880 to 1924, waves of newcomers, primarily from Southern and Eastern Europe. powered the rapid growth of Chicago. The city’s population quadrupled in thirty years’ time, growing from 500,000 residents in 1880 to over 2 million in 1910. By 1924, when Bellow took up residence with his family in the Russian Jewish enclave of Humboldt Park, 70% of Chicago residents were foreign-born or the children of foreign-born parents.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">His whole life, Bellow retained a vivid impression of the first day he spent in America: July 4, 1924. He recalled his nine-year-old self thinking the fireworks, flags, bunting and parades of Independence Day were for him, meant to hail the promise of his new life in America.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">But the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act told a less welcoming story. The law was informed by the burgeoning eugenics movement, which maintained that peoples from Southern and Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa were genetically inferior to those from Northern and Western Europe. The 1924 Act accordingly slashed immigration rates from targeted nations by 98%, barring admission to Russian Jews, Poles, Hungarians, Bulgarians, Italians, Greeks, Chinese, Turks, Armenians, Lithuanians and Africans, among many others. Conspicuously, the 1924 Act left the door open to migrants from Great Britain, Ireland, Denmark, Germany, Sweden and Norway. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Eugenicists celebrated the 1924 Act as a measure that would “preserve the purity of American stock” by welcoming immigrants only “of higher intelligence,” who thus presented “the best material for American citizenship”. The now-excluded categories of people, it was believed, had “made an excessive contribution to our feeble-minded, insane, criminal and other socially inadequate classes.” A related federal act prohibited entry to “epileptics, and insane persons; paupers; professional beggars; persons likely to become a public charge; persons afflicted with a loathsome or dangerous disease; and persons who have committed a felony or other crime involving moral turpitude.” Polygamists, prostitutes and those with “mental or physical defects which might affect their ability to earn a living” were also banned.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">A natural reading of </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Adventures of Augie March</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> views it as Bellow’s artistic response to the contradictions inherent to the historical moment of his arrival in this country,. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">The story Bellow scrawled, beginning in 1947,in a succession of battered notebooks—notebooks now housed in the University of Chicago archives—charts the coming of age of a young undocumented immigrant amidst the foreign-born multitudes of Chicago,. Augie, Bellow’s narrator, struggles amongst the plenty and poverty of the city toward self-knowledge. He achieves it at last in discovering his identity as an American writer.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Bellow’s novel offers a rejoinder to the premise that a person’s country of origin, physical form or natural endowments determine their fitness for American life. . The characters peopling </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Adventures of Augie March</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> hail from the countries of origin marked for exclusion by the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act: they are Russian Jews, they are Mexican, they are Hungarian and Polish, they are Czech and Italian. They may be paralyzed, blind, physically disabled, or “insane”. They are relegated to the poverty-stricken and criminal margins of the city’s teeming social world. Invariably they are the “socially inferior.” But they are unmistakably American, and they contribute to the vibrant day-to-day of an unmistakably American city.</span>
<ol start="2">
 	<li><b> Writer</b></li>
</ol>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Augie is not quite Bellow’s alter ego. But his life echoes aspects of Bellow’s life, and his impressions and experiences are often artful silhouettes of Bellow’s own. Above all, the language Bellow uses to recount Augie’s adventures bears the unique and unmistakable stamp of the city that shaped him. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">As a child coming of age on the streets of Chicago, Bellow absorbed a rich inheritance. His earliest spoken languages were Russian and Yiddish. Hhe picked up English on Chicago’s West Side, where he played alongside the children of recently-arrived Poles, Italians, Swedes, Greeks, Hungarians, Czechs and Romanians. Bellow remembered these immigrant youths being as eager as he was to talk about distinctly American things:“baseball, prizefights, speakeasies, graft, jazz, crap games, gang wars.” As an adolescent, Bellow drew inspiration from soapbox preachers on Division Street, vendors hawking wares in the Maxwell Street Market, and speeches by orators, labor leaders and poets who assembled for debates in Bughouse Square, the park beside the Newberry Library. He haunted the stacks of multiple branches of the Chicago Public Library, where classic texts of world literature were freely available to him, the son of a low-wage employee at a kosher bakery on Augusta Avenue. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">These multitudinous influences are evident in the language Augie March uses to tell his story. Inflected with Yiddish rhythms, salted with slang and idiomatic speech, packed with interludes of heightened poetic phrasing and allusions to high culture, Augie’s narrative voice immerses readers in the colloquial language of the Chicago streets. One of the signal achievements of </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Adventures of Augie March</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">, according to the writer Philip Roth, was how the novel raised “the language you spoke, the American argot you heard on the street,” to the level of high literature.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Augie’s narrative voice even keeps pace with the evolution of Chicago street speech over three decades. As the chapters proceed the music of the language shifts from the rhythms of the Prohibition-era vernacular, to the minor key changes of the Great Depression in the 1930s, to the grander tones of the 1940s heralding the post-war economic boom.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">The idea for the novel came to Bellow when he was living in Paris in 1947. Watching city workers opening the valves of hydrants to allow gushing water to sweep clean the pavements, he asked himself, “why not have as much freedom of movement as this running water?” The flowing hydrants conjured the sudden memory, Bellow said, of “a handsome, freewheeling kid from childhood whose surname was August, and who used to yell when we were playing, ‘I got a scheme!’” Recreating the exuberance and brio of this long-ago Chicago friend was the start of </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Augie March</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">: “Subject and language appeared at the same moment—I was enriched with words,” Bellow recalled.  “I found myself with magical suddenness writing the first paragraph. It rushed out of me.” The novel’s language came to his mind so swiftly, he remembered, “All I had to do was be there with buckets to catch it.”</span>
<ol start="3">
 	<li><b> Mythologist</b></li>
</ol>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">While Bellow transmuted the phrasings and cadences of Chicago’s immigrant residents into a new kind of heightened literary language, he also likened their personhood to figures of myth and history. The cast of characters populating Augie’s street-level world are compared to gods and heroes of Greek mythology, or heroes from the annals of world history.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Simon, Augie’s body-building older brother, is afflicted with bouts of insanity like his mythological correlate, Hercules. The orating, wheelchair-using real estate broker William Einhorn is at once equated with Hephaestus, the blacksmith God of Invention, and President Franklin Roosevelt. Grandma Lausch, physically infirm but ruthlessly tyrannical, is compared to Emperor Timur, the 14th-century conqueror of Asia and heir to Genghis Khan. Rebecca March, Augie’s blind, incapacitated mother stands with the many mortal women in Greek mythology who, seduced and abandoned by Zeus, give birth to demigods. Augie himself is likened to Alcibiades, legendary orator of 5th-century B.C.E. Athens, beloved by the gods for his charisma and gift of self-expression. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Bellow suggests gods and geniuses walk the streets of Chicago, reincarnated as immigrants and workers. With immigrants from the “old world” no longer free to enter America, this promise is forestalled. Bellow begins the novel with a quote from Heraclitus, the 5th-century B.C.E. philosopher: Heraclitus says that “a man’s character is his fate”— not race, ethnicity or physical endowments. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">The publication of </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Adventures of Augie March</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> in 1953, when he was 38 years old, launched Saul Bellow’s reputation as a novelist and established the future Nobel Laureate’s literary renown. Congress, meanwhile, would not end the exclusionary quota system imposed by the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act until 1965. The opening lines of </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Augie March</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> --</span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, freestyle, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent—</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">stand</span> <span style="font-weight: 400;">as Bellow’s testament to the city that shaped him as a writer, and to thee liberating potential of the American immigrant experience.</span>

<strong>Performances of<em> <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/season-tickets/2018-2019-season/adventures-augie-march/">The Adventures of Augie March</a> </em>begin May 9! <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/season-tickets/2018-2019-season/adventures-augie-march/">Save your seats →</a></strong>"
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          string(5227) "<img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-12412" src="https://www.courttheatre.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/nambi-wide-blog.jpg" alt="" width="800" height="300" />

Court Theatre and playwright Nambi E. Kelley have received the Prince Prize for Commissioning Original Work for 2018. Prince Charitable Trusts makes an award of $75,000 each year to a major Chicago dance, music, visual arts or theater company. When the Trust approached Court Theatre about projects that might fit their vision for the Prize, it was only natural to ask playwright Nambi E. Kelley to create an original play based on the story of Stokely Carmichael’s activism and legacy for the stage. In 2014, Kelley had adapted Richard Wright’s <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/season-tickets/2014-2015-season/native-son/"><i>Native Son</i></a> for Court Theatre in a co-production with American Blues Theatre that garnered great critical and popular acclaim. Another collaboration would build upon these successes.

Kelley shares, “I am thrilled to be receiving the Prince Prize for 2018 to develop a new play based upon such a transformative activist as Stokely Carmichael. His fearless approach to constant and perpetual self-reinvention is something that I am excited to share with Court Theatre's audiences. Equally, what a gift to return to Court Theatre to work with scholars, artists, and the community to birth a new play that the late Stephen Albert called ‘his last gift to the American Theatre.’”

Charles Newell, Marilyn F. Vitale Artistic Director, comments, “Nambi is an immense talent, and Court Theatre couldn’t be more honored to be collaborating with her again. Thanks to Prince Charitable Trusts, we will have the opportunity to deepen our relationship with this gifted playwright and share her work with even more artists and audiences across Chicagoland.”

Benna Wilde, Program Director at Prince Charitable Trusts, adds, “We are delighted to make this award to Court Theatre, an important cultural resource on the South Side of Chicago, and to Nambi E. Kelley, a great young Chicago talent whose work we are proud to support.”

Stokely Carmichael, a pivotal activist in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, was one of the original freedom riders in 1961. Nambi E. Kelley will explore the transformational journey Carmichael’s activism took, starting with an alignment with Martin Luther King, Jr. on non-violence, evolving into Black Power as articulated by Malcolm X, and then transforming a third time into a unique articulation of Pan Africanism. Newell’s father worked with Carmichael at New York Avenue Presbyterian Church while Carmichael was a student at Howard University and Carmichael frequently stayed with Newell’s family, adding to Newell’s passion for sharing this story.

Under the guidance of Court’s late Executive Director, Stephen J. Albert, a renewed focus on commissioning began in 2011 with a new adaptation of Ralph Ellison’s <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/season-tickets/2011-2012-season/invisible-man/"><i>Invisible Man</i></a> written by Oren Jacoby. Court has long been developing and producing new work including the aforementioned <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/season-tickets/2014-2015-season/native-son/"><i>Native Son</i></a> written by Nambi E. Kelley, <i>Man in the Ring</i> written by Michael Cristofer, <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/season-tickets/2014-2015-season/the-good-book/"><i>The Good Book</i></a> written by Denis O’Hare and Lisa Peterson, and Court’s upcoming production of Saul Bellow’s <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/season-tickets/2018-2019-season/adventures-augie-march/"><i>The Adventures of Augie March</i></a>, written by David Auburn.

In its years of commissioning work, Court has learned how to support playwrights with different needs and desires during the development process, while leveraging relationships with the University and community organizations that enhance productions for not only the playwrights, but also for audiences. To support the development of her play, Kelley will have access to the resources of Court Theatre and the University of Chicago. The University of Chicago is home to a large and engaged faculty, multiple libraries, and world-class research facilities, and Court will leverage its University connections to bring Kelley together with any resources she may desire when working on her play about Carmichael.

Prince Charitable Trusts makes an award of $75,000 each year to a major Chicago dance, music, visual arts or theater company. The Prince Prize will commission a promising mid-career artist chosen by the performing or visual arts institution and must be at least one-third of the award. The remainder of the grant may be used by the company to help underwrite development and initial performance of the commissioned work. The intent of the Prize program is to serve as a catalyst for creative collaboration between promising artists and Chicago’s highest caliber arts organizations. Their goal is to provide an opportunity to showcase both the artists and Chicago’s great performing arts companies to the Chicago public and the nation."
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<span style="font-weight: 400;">Press throughout Chicago praise Ntozake Shange's </span><a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/season-tickets/2018-2019-season/for-colored-girls/"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf</span></i></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, with most critics unanimous in their decision to Highly Recommend the production</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">. Audiences and critics alike agree that <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/people/seret-scott/">Seret Scott</a>'s direction and the work of the ensemble is powerful, moving, and compelling. See why Shange's cherished work belongs in the canon of classic plays — <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/season-tickets/2018-2019-season/for-colored-girls/">get tickets</a> to </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">For Colored Girls</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span>

<hr />

<span style="font-weight: 400;">“...the entire cast feels carefully curated. Rich inner lives reside in a public space. How stories are heard here is as important as how they are told, listening being both a rare and radical act.</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">"</span>

<a href="https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/theater/reviews/ct-ent-colored-girls-review-0326-story.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">—Chris Jones, </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Chicago Tribune, </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"><b>★</b></span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><b>★</b></span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><b>★</b></span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><b>★ </b></span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Highly Recommended</span></a>

<hr />

<span style="font-weight: 400;">“</span>This production makes clear exactly why “for colored girls…” skyrocketed to prominence: Shange’s dramatic sense of language that when performed feels so deeply evocative and true. Read the play, and it’s impressive but distant. Performed here, the language is urgent and real and consistently compelling. The performances are all terrific, filled with spunky individualism<span style="font-weight: 400;">”</span>

<a href="https://chicago.suntimes.com/entertainment/for-colored-girls-who-have-considered-suicide-when-the-rainbow-is-enuf-review-court-theatre-chicago/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">—Steven Oxman, </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Chicago Sun-Times, </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Highly Recommended</span></a>

<hr />

<span style="font-weight: 400;">“It is impossible to overstate how talented this entire cast is... <em>for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf</em> is one of the top productions of this theater season. Shange's words cradle you and linger long after the final curtain. Laugh, cry, and be soothed by the full and beautiful soulful voices.”</span>

<a href="https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/for-colored-girls-court-theatre/Content?oid=69245564"><span style="font-weight: 400;">—Sheri Flanders, </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Chicago Reader</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">,</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Highly Recommended</span></a>

<hr />

<span style="font-weight: 400;">“The meld of fine performance and staging with Shange’s writing and concept are irresistible. The commitment of the cast was visible at the curtain call, with several of the performers in tears. The show obviously meant much to them personally as well as artistically. A most rewarding evening for everyone in the theater.”</span>

<a href="https://chicagolandtheaterreviews.com/chicagoland-productions/colored-girls/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">—Dan Zeff, </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Chicagoland Theatre Reviews</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">, </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">★★★★ Highly Recommended</span></a>

<hr />

<span style="font-weight: 400;">“In Seret Scott's searing and soaring production of <em>For Colored Girls</em> at Court Theatre, Shange's words weave a tapestry of pain, defiance, joy and renewal, all delivered by a cast of eight women who not only occupy the space but reclaim it for Black women whose voices have been ignored or disparaged...Shange's piece and Scott's staging remind us that Black women in the United States have been fighting their own battles for centuries. It's not their job to save us—but we damn well better start listening to them.”</span>

<a href="http://www.windycitymediagroup.com/lgbt/THEATER-REVIEW-For-Colored-Girls-Who-Have-Considered-Suicide-When-the-Rainbow-Is-Enuf/65694.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">—Kerry Reid, <i>Windy City Times</i></span><span style="font-weight: 400;">, </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Highly Recommended</span></a>

<hr />

<span style="font-weight: 400;">“Even after forty years, this play still resonates profoundly with women and audience alike. It's a magnificent story about the soul and depth of African American women who tell the unapologetic black truth....the ladies at Court Theater makes this version a MUST-SEE!</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">”</span>

<a href="http://www.chicagonow.com/lets-play/2019/03/for-colored-girls-who-have-considered-suicide-when-the-rainbow-is-enuf/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">—Rick and Brenda McCain, </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Chicago Now Let's Play</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">, </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Highly Recommended</span> - Critics Pick</a>

<hr />

<span style="font-weight: 400;">“There are many moments during the performance where the audience grew so quiet that it seemed like there were only eight women in the building… the girls on stage.</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">”</span>

<a href="https://www.chicagotheatrereview.com/2019/03/the-more-things-change-the-more-they-stay-the-same/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">—Shelly Berry and Scott Kirshenbaum, </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Chicago Theatre Review,</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Highly Recommended</span></a>

<hr />

<span style="font-weight: 400;">“Sharply defined in terms of character, language and overall narrative drive. Scott and her highly individualistic cast of eight (including the balladeer who has been added to the usual cast of seven), has tapped into the verbal music of the play in a wholly fresh way.</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">”</span>

<a href="https://news.wttw.com/2019/03/27/ntozake-shange-for-colored-girls-court-theatre-review"><span style="font-weight: 400;">—Hedy Weiss, </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">WTTW Chicago</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">, </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Highly Recommended</span></a>

<hr />
<p class="caption">Photo by Michael Brosilow.</p>"
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Looking back at 2018, many may argue that it was a year of and about women. Women broke their silence, and spoke out about what matters to them. Women ran for office in record numbers, and held influential and powerful men accountable in cases of sexual harassment and assault with the #MeToo Movement. Women everywhere—white, yellow, red, brown, and black alike—used their voices to fight against sexism, racism, classism, ableism, and ageism. Using various platforms like music, movies, literature, poetry, and speeches, women unapologetically, truthfully, and boldly expressed themselves.

Women like Michelle Obama, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Beyonce, Nikki Minaj, Reese Witherspoon, Amy Poehler, Meryl Streep, Sandra Oh, Emma Stone, Stacey Adams, Tamika Mallory, Angela Davis, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison made their voices heard and inspired others to do the same. Even Oprah Winfrey’s speech at the Golden Globes touched on issues of sexual abuse and empowered women to call out their abusers. In the midst of all of this amazing female power, one who embodies the spirit of all of these women, Ntozake Shange, made her transition from this life. In the African tradition, as well as in other cultures, some may say Shange is now one of the ancestral elders who will continue to guide and inform us.

To this end, Shange’s death is inspiring many to reflect and revisit the genius of and in her work. While Shange’s literary oeuvre is quite extensive, she is best known for <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/season-tickets/2018-2019-season/for-colored-girls/"><em>For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf</em></a> (1975). This play received an Obie Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award, and the AUDELCO Award as well as Tony, Grammy, and Emmy Award nominations. In 2010, director Tyler Perry adapted the choreo-poem into a feature-length film. Furthermore, on the Poetry Foundation’s website, <em>For Colored Girls</em> is characterized as:
<blockquote>[a] unique blend of poetry, music, dance and drama called a “choreopoem,” it “took the theatre world by storm,” noted Jacqueline Trescott in the Washington Post, as it “became an electrifying Broadway hit and provoked heated exchanges about the relationships between black men and women. ... Its form—seven women on the stage dramatizing poetry—was a refreshing slap at the traditional, one-two-three-act structures.”</blockquote>
Mel Gussow, writing in the New York Times, stated that “Miss Shange was a pioneer in terms of her subject matter: the fury of black women at their double subjugation in white male America.”

Shange’s fury and insight brought fire, drama, and excitement to the stage and has been voiced by others, particularly black, female playwrights. For example, in the posthumously written New York Times article, “Seven Flames Kindled by the Focused Fire of Ntozake Shange,” Laura Collins-Hughes shares how playwright and spoken word artist Aleshea Harris pays homage to Shange in her work: “She’s given me so much permission—to be unapologetic, to talk about my pain and my joy. I’ve certainly been a colored girl who’s considered suicide, so just the title, everything, it feels like ‘You are here, I affirm you, you exist and you should exist loudly.’” These very sentiments are also connected to the movement of women today. In viewing this play, particularly in the city of Chicago, women--particularly black women--who choose to voice their concerns and bring themselves to the forefront of the American landscape will see themselves reflected in Shange’s work.

Although<em> For Colored Girls</em> first appeared on the stage in 1975, its themes permeate our current American conversation. Simultaneously, Shange’s text is laced with key historical references, including Willie Colon, Toussaint L’ouverture, and Claude McKay’s poem “Harlem Dancer.” The women express feeling excluded from critical places and spaces in cities like St. Louis, New York City, Chicago, Houston, Baltimore, Detroit, and San Francisco. This notion of “being on the outside as a woman,” particularly a black woman, contributes to its timeliness as women continue to fight for a seat at the table.

In the forward of the 2010 second publication of her play, Shange beautifully articulates: “<em>for colored girls</em> continues to resonate so profoundly almost forty years after I first set pen to paper. It is bittersweet for me. Though we have achieved many milestones, the stories and struggles of our lives as women, and in particular, women of color, are still not granted the full address due. But, then, perhaps that is part of the fuel that moves me to continue writing.” Parallel to Shange’s guiding words here, <em>For Colored Girls</em> continues to resonate as we examine the stories and struggles of women today. Witnessing these powerful stories will inevitably move us all to empathize with women beyond Court Theatre’s stage, supporting their march to be heard throughout America and across the world.

<hr />

<em>Dr. Khalilah T. Watson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communications English at Olive-Harvey College-One of the City Colleges of Chicago. Her areas of specialization are composition, twentieth century African American fiction, and literary theory, particularly Toni Morrison. She holds a Ph.D. in English from Georgia State University, a master’s degree from Eastern Michigan University, and a bachelor’s degree from Albion College.</em>"
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In conjunction with our production of Ntozake Shange’s<a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/season-tickets/2018-2019-season/for-colored-girls/"> <em>For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf</em></a>, Court Theatre is presenting <strong><em>beyond the rainbow: Court Community Conversations</em></strong>, a series of curated, community-focused events allowing participants to engage with the themes in Shange’s work in a variety of ways.

<hr />

<b>a laying on of hands: An Opening Ritual | March 14 from 5:30 - 7:00pm | McCormick Theological Seminary (</b><b>5460 S University Ave, Chicago, IL 60615)</b>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">An opening ceremony preceding our first preview with spiritual leaders from the South Side in partnership with McCormick Theological Seminary and the Lutheran School Theological Seminary. <strong>Free and open to the public.</strong> <strong>Online registration coming soon.</strong></span>

<hr />

<b>dark phrases of womanhood: Dramatists Guild Panel | March 24 at 4:30pm | Court Theatre (</b><b>5535 S Ellis Ave, Chicago, IL 60637)</b>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Members of the Dramatists Guild will discuss Ntozake Shange’s influence on their own work as female playwrights of color in this post-show discussion. <strong>Free and open to the public.</strong></span>

<hr />

<b>sing your song: An Open Mic Night | April 1 at 7:00pm | Court Theatre (</b><b>5535 S Ellis Ave, Chicago, IL 60637)</b>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">An open mic on the set of </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">For Colored Girls</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> celebrating original work and personal anecdotes about the play by women of color. <strong>Free and open to the public. Online registration coming soon.</strong></span>

<hr />

<b>there wuz no air: A Community Conversation | April 5 at </b><b>9:15pm</b><b> | Court Theatre (</b><b>5535 S Ellis Ave, Chicago, IL 60637)</b>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">A post-show panel discussion for men and boys to discuss the trauma of men in the black community, in partnership with 100 Black Men. <strong>Free and open to the public.</strong></span>

<hr />

<b>Spotlight Reading Series: A Tribute to Ntozake | April 8 at 6:30pm | Experimental Station (</b><b>6100 S Blackstone Ave, Chicago, IL 60637)</b>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">A reading of Shange’s play, </span><a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/season-tickets/spotlight-reading-series/spotlight-reading-boogie-woogie-landscapes/"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Boogie Woogie Landscapes</span></i></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, about the dreams and memories of a young, black woman as part of Court’s Spotlight Reading Series. Light refreshments catered by Exquisite Catering. <strong>Free and open to the public. <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/season-tickets/spotlight-reading-series/spotlight-reading-boogie-woogie-landscapes/">Learn more →</a></strong></span>

<hr />

<b>Exelon South Side Youth Performance Fest Presents “FCGirls Project” | April 9 at 7:00pm | Court Theatre (</b><b>5535 S Ellis Ave, Chicago, IL 60637)</b>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">The second act of the annual Exelon South Side Youth Performance Fest will be dedicated to student work engaging with </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">For Colored Girls </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">as part of Court’s FCGirls Project. A post-show reception at the Smart Museum of Art will include catering by Piccolo Mondo. <strong>Free and open to the public. <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/community-engagement/education-initiative/high-school-performance-festival/">Learn more →</a></strong></span>

<hr />

<b>loving her fiercely: A Day of Wellness for Women of Color | April 13th from 11:00am - 4:00pm | Location To Be Announced</b>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Meditation, visual art, and wellness techniques combine for this day-long wellness event for women of color, featuring massage, reiki, and a vendor fair of female-run businesses promoting a holistic and healthy lifestyle. <strong>Free and open to the public. Online registration coming soon.</strong></span>
<table border="0" width="“100%”" cellpadding="0">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td align="center" valign="center" width="33%">
<p class="caption"><em>For Colored Girls</em> is sponsored by</p>
</td>
<td align="left" valign="center" width="33%">
<p class="caption"><a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/ntozake-shange" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><img class="size-full wp-image-10791 aligncenter" src="https://www.courttheatre.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/POETRY_1C_PRIMARY_RGB_P-100wide.png" alt="" width="100" height="182" /></a></p>
</td>
<td align="center" valign="center" width="33%"><a href="https://www.sidley.com/en/us/" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><img class="size-full wp-image-4857 aligncenter" style="text-align: start;" src="https://www.courttheatre.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/sidley_200.jpg" alt="The Sidley Austin Foundation" width="200" height="29" /></a></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p class="caption">Photo of Alexis J. Roston, Patrese D. McClain, Melissa DuPrey, Angelica Katie, and Melody Angel by Joe Mazza.</p>"
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<em>For many actors, working on an August Wilson play is a dream come true, a rite of passage, a profound honor. Read on to learn how members of this cast feel about performing Wilson’s work.</em>

To <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/people/kelvin-roston-jr/"><strong>Kelvin Roston, Jr.</strong></a> (Hedley), working on August Wilson is akin to working on Shakespeare — it requires a skill set that not every actor has. Roston observes that for black male actors, “we see an August Wilson play and see ourselves, our family members, our friends.” He says that watching Wilson’s plays exposed him to characters like Floyd Barton (<em>Seven Guitars</em>), Youngblood (<em>Jitney</em>), and Hedley (<em>King Hedley II</em>) and made him excited about the prospect of aging into these roles. “August Wilson has written us from the inside, unfiltered. He not only shows who we are, but also the why. It’s very specific; no matter the year it’s set, it remains relevant.”

Performing in an August Wilson play has been a lifelong goal of <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/people/kierra-bunch/"><strong>Kierra Bunch</strong></a> (Tonya). “Tackling King Hedley and being a part of this experience is exciting,” she says. “It’s exciting to actually get an opportunity to step into the work of a true visionary and great storyteller of our times. Wilson writes about the human condition and anyone can find their own story in this play.”
“We see an August Wilson play and see ourselves, our family members, our friends.”

<a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/people/dexter-zollicoffer/"><strong>Dexter Zollicoffer</strong></a> (Stool Pigeon) feels that acting in an August Wilson play is an artistic rite of passage. “When working on Wilson, you feel like you’re paying homage to the struggles and joys of being black in America,” he says. Dexter thinks that “by exploring the nuances of this specific community in 1985, it better prepares us for the racial and cultural dynamics at play today.”

One of the things that excites<a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/people/ronald-conner/"><strong> Ronald L. Conner</strong></a> (Mister) most about being in this play is the opportunity to showcase an unconventional family bound by blood, friendship, and proximity. “Working on an August Wilson play means an opportunity to give voice to the marginalized, working class of America,” he reflects. “It means I get to tell a universal story through a culturally specific lens.” To Ronald, the themes and issues raised in <em>King Hedley II</em> are quite timely. “Audiences need to see this play now, because it is ‘now!’”

<strong>Performances of <em><a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/season-tickets/2019-2020-season/king-hedley-ii/">King Hedley II</a> </em>begin September 12! <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/season-tickets/2019-2020-season/king-hedley-ii/">Save your seats →</a></strong>

Photo: A.C. Smith, Kelvin Roston, Jr., and TayLar in a promotional photo for KING HEDLEY II. (Mazza)"
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      string(3238) "<img class="wp-image-12667 size-full" src="https://www.courttheatre.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/workingonwilson-800x300.jpg" alt="" width="800" height="300" />

<em>For many actors, working on an August Wilson play is a dream come true, a rite of passage, a profound honor. Read on to learn how members of this cast feel about performing Wilson’s work.</em>

To <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/people/kelvin-roston-jr/"><strong>Kelvin Roston, Jr.</strong></a> (Hedley), working on August Wilson is akin to working on Shakespeare — it requires a skill set that not every actor has. Roston observes that for black male actors, “we see an August Wilson play and see ourselves, our family members, our friends.” He says that watching Wilson’s plays exposed him to characters like Floyd Barton (<em>Seven Guitars</em>), Youngblood (<em>Jitney</em>), and Hedley (<em>King Hedley II</em>) and made him excited about the prospect of aging into these roles. “August Wilson has written us from the inside, unfiltered. He not only shows who we are, but also the why. It’s very specific; no matter the year it’s set, it remains relevant.”

Performing in an August Wilson play has been a lifelong goal of <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/people/kierra-bunch/"><strong>Kierra Bunch</strong></a> (Tonya). “Tackling King Hedley and being a part of this experience is exciting,” she says. “It’s exciting to actually get an opportunity to step into the work of a true visionary and great storyteller of our times. Wilson writes about the human condition and anyone can find their own story in this play.”
“We see an August Wilson play and see ourselves, our family members, our friends.”

<a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/people/dexter-zollicoffer/"><strong>Dexter Zollicoffer</strong></a> (Stool Pigeon) feels that acting in an August Wilson play is an artistic rite of passage. “When working on Wilson, you feel like you’re paying homage to the struggles and joys of being black in America,” he says. Dexter thinks that “by exploring the nuances of this specific community in 1985, it better prepares us for the racial and cultural dynamics at play today.”

One of the things that excites<a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/people/ronald-conner/"><strong> Ronald L. Conner</strong></a> (Mister) most about being in this play is the opportunity to showcase an unconventional family bound by blood, friendship, and proximity. “Working on an August Wilson play means an opportunity to give voice to the marginalized, working class of America,” he reflects. “It means I get to tell a universal story through a culturally specific lens.” To Ronald, the themes and issues raised in <em>King Hedley II</em> are quite timely. “Audiences need to see this play now, because it is ‘now!’”

<strong>Performances of <em><a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/season-tickets/2019-2020-season/king-hedley-ii/">King Hedley II</a> </em>begin September 12! <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/season-tickets/2019-2020-season/king-hedley-ii/">Save your seats →</a></strong>

Photo: A.C. Smith, Kelvin Roston, Jr., and TayLar in a promotional photo for KING HEDLEY II. (Mazza)"
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        string(90) "Critics highly recommend this epic world premiere from Pulitzer Prize-winner David Auburn."
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      string(7425) "<img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-12477" src="https://www.courttheatre.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/AugieMarchCriticsPraise800x300.jpg" alt="" width="1600" height="601" />

Throughout the country, critics are praising the world premiere of <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/season-tickets/2018-2019-season/adventures-augie-march/"><em>The Adventures of Augie March</em></a>. The Wall Street Journal's Terry Teachout called the play "a light-on-its-feet triumph," and Chris Jones of the <i>Chicago Tribune </i>awarded the production four stars and wrote that the production is “dazzlingly creative" and "intensely moving.” Audiences and critics alike agree that Charle Newell’s production is an epic theatrical event. See for yourself what the buzz is about — <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/season-tickets/2018-2019-season/adventures-augie-march/">get tickets to <em>The Adventures of Augie March</em></a><i></i>.

<hr />

“The resultant show is very clever, and Bellow, always a bit cleverer than his cleverest characters, deserved a clever show. It will hold your attention for all three of its acts...the performances in the show are of a thrillingly high level, Newell preferring innately theatrical actors, here equally rooted, like the novel they are performing, in the corporal as well as the intellectual."

<a href="https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/theater/ct-ent-augie-march-court-review-ttd-0521-story.html">—Chris Jones, <i>Chicago Tribune</i>, ★★★★ Highly Recommended</a>

<hr />

“Every bit as ambitious as the 600-page book on which it’s based. Staged with staggering éclat by Charles Newell, the Court’s artistic director, it is totally and triumphantly successful...If Tracy Letts’s “August: Osage County,” another big-boned play that started life on a Chicago stage before moving to New York, was capable of hitting big on Broadway, then I see no reason why this similarly proportioned show can’t pull off the same improbable feat—given a producer with vision who’s ready to roll the dice. Here’s hoping."

<a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-adventures-of-augie-march-review-chicago-kid-makes-good-11558460948">—Terry Teachout, <i>The Wall Street Journal</i></a>

<hr />

“As Augie, Mulvey brings a natural ease and charm that rarely seems to exist on the page: He bridges the gaps between the man himself and the attraction Augie holds to other people. Mulvey is supported by a fine ensemble, led by Cross and Judd, that likewise infuses the show with life. Using often little more than some chairs, some tables, a few white curtains and the bodies of those ensemble members, Newell and movement consultant Erin Kilmurray create a roiling sea of action, part modern dance, part devised theater, part clown show.”

<a href="https://chicago.suntimes.com/2019/5/20/18632894/adventures-of-augie-march-review-court-theater-saul-bellows-novel">—Alex Huntsberger, <i>Chicago Sun-Times</i></a>

<hr />

“Newell's 13 actors (all of whom except Mulvey play multiple roles) negotiate the shifts in vernacular and locale with precision and panache. John Culbert's gloomy black-beamed set and chiaroscuro lighting provide a somber counterpoint to the story's fantastical elements, while Manual Cinema's shadow puppetry enhances them...in Auburn's imagining and Mulvey's performance, he embraces the moment in which he is living with an open heart. Newell's staging also embraces each moment with a bold and refreshingly uncynical sense of theatrical flair.”

<a href="https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/the-adventures-of-augie-march-court-theatre/Content?oid=70448954">—Kerry Reid, <i>Chicago Reader</i></a>

<hr />

“Auburn collaborated with Court Theatre artistic director Charles Newell, who directs this world premiere, and took advantage of the university’s Special Collections Research Center, the repository of Bellow’s papers — Bellow attended the university and served on the faculty. The result is a theatrical triumph that celebrates the freewheeling spirit of the book.”

<a href="https://www.splashmagazines.com/index.php/2019/05/19/the-adventures-of-augie-march-review-saul-bellows-characters-boogie-off-the-pages-in-playwright-david-auburns-spirited-adaptation/#gsc.tab=0">—Leanne Star, <i>Splash Magazine,</i> Highly Recommended</a>

<hr />

“Once the house lights go down, Chicago’s immigrant ecosystem of the late 1920s and early 30s springs to life. Playwright David Auburn who adapted Bellow’s novel, director Charles Newell and movement specialist Erin Kilmurray convey this coming of age tale with rough and tumble vitality. The visual palette is somber enough but the story teems with a rainbow’s range.”

<a href="https://www.picturethispost.com/court-theatre-presents-the-adventures-of-augie-march-review-the-flow-of-youth/">—Susan Lieberman, <i>Picture This Post, </i>Highly Recommended</a>

<hr />

“Newell’s direction is brilliant here...Even Newell’s stage transitions happen so naturally that they simply seem a part of the ongoing action. Add to that the multitude of roles that the ensemble has to assume, and the director clearly had to work some magic to keep them all clear and distinct. And the performances he gets from members of the ensemble (especially Aurora Real de Asua as Augie’s platonic friend Mimi) are completely wonderful."

<a href="https://chicagoonstage.com/augie-march-is-a-complex-demanding-drama/">—Karen Topham, <i>Chicago on Stage</i>, Highly Recommended</a>

<hr />

“<span style="font-weight: 400;">Maybe the most ambitious single project in the theater’s long and innovative history...Director Charles Newell superbly pulls the complex project together, with my interest actually increasing as the play went on. The team of designers provides invaluable creative and artistic input—John Culbert (scenic and light design), Sally Dolembo (costumes), and Andre Pluess (sound). A special salute goes to Manuel Cinema Studios for its spectacular puppet designs, especially the most inventive shadow puppetry I’ve ever seen."</span>

<a href="https://chicagolandtheaterreviews.com/chicagoland-productions/augie-march/">—Dan Zeff, <em>Chicagoland Theatre Review</em></a>

<hr />

“Saul Bellow would approve of Court Theatre’s exhilarating production of <em>The Adventures of Augie March</em>...Patrick Mulvey is so right as Augie that one could almost believe he was created to play this part.”

<a href="https://thirdcoastreview.com/2019/05/21/review-court-theatres-the-adventures-of-augie-march/">—Nancy Bishop, <i>Third Coast Review,</i> Highly Recommended</a>

<hr />

“Labeling a work of art a “masterpiece” is a dangerous business, but on rare occasions there can be no doubt that such a tag is unavoidable. And Court Theatre’s world premiere production of <em>The Adventures of Augie March</em> – Pulitzer Prize-winner David Auburn’s ingenious stage adaptation of Saul Bellow’s nearly 600-page novel, which has been brilliantly directed by Charles Newell, and is being performed by a uniformly virtuosic cast – is an example of just such a case.”

<a href="https://news.wttw.com/2019/05/21/saul-bellow-adventures-augie-march-court-theatre-review">—Hedy Weiss, WTTW Chicago</a>

<hr />

<em>Photo by Michael Brosilow.</em>"
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      string(7025) "<img class="alignnone wp-image-12491 size-full" src="https://www.courttheatre.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/1200x630augiemarch.jpg" alt="" width="1200" height="630" />

<i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Casting an epic play like <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/season-tickets/2018-2019-season/adventures-augie-march/">THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH</a> was a huge task that called on the collaborative efforts of the play’s director, playwright, and casting director. Read on to learn more about the casting process for this world premiere production.</span></i>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">One of the first things that drew Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/people/david-auburn/">David Auburn</a> to the idea of adapting </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Adventures of Augie March</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">, Saul Bellow’s towering American novel, for the stage was the opportunity to hear Bellow’s words brought to life by actors. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">“There are hundreds of characters in the book, and they’re all indelible, and the language with which they speak is both realistic and earthy and sort of magical and poetic,” <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/about/blog/in-conversation-playwright-david-auburn-and-director-charles-newell/">Auburn recalled</a>, discussing what initially drew him to the book. “I think that the idea of that language in actors’ mouths was what excited me.”</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">While writing a theatrical play for the stage was Auburn’s task, finding actors to people the world of </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Augie March </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">was up to director <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/people/charles-newell/">Charles Newell</a> and Court’s Casting Director, <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/people/becca-mccracken/">Becca McCracken</a>. Before even calling in actors for auditions, McCracken spent time digging into the text of the play, learning the ins and outs of each character, as well as their motives and relationships with the other characters in the play. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">“Casting </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Augie March </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">was a whole different ball game because we were working on a script that’s been in development through multiple workshops,” McCracken muses on approaching such a massive play. “We were trying to discover how to cast a play that had 55 characters in it with a budget we could afford.”</span>

<img class="alignnone wp-image-12472" src="https://www.courttheatre.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/xtn-500_28center29travisturneraurorarealdeasuaandthecastoftheadventuresofaugiemarch.photobymichaelbrosilow.jpg.pagespeed.ic_.G1GGGZiCCB.jpg" alt="" width="800" height="533" />

<span style="font-weight: 400;">After compiling her initial thoughts, she scheduled a meeting with Newell to learn more about his vision of the play. From there, a breakdown of roles was released to agents, so that they could submit talent to be considered for the production.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">“I really like to invest in their submissions,” Becca shares, speaking about the wealth of talent in Chicago. “It’s important for me to consider all the options, looking for faces I don’t know and what training and special skills they might have that fit the play.”</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">With </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Adventures of Augie March</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">, it was clear that her job was as much to build an ensemble as it was to find the perfect fit for the play’s eponymous character. </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Augie March </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">also posed challenges to the creative team, since everybody knew that the play would still be evolving throughout rehearsals and previews. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">“Nobody was being cast in a particular role aside from Augie,” Becca reflects on the casting process. Instead, actors were contracted “As Cast,” meaning that they weren’t guaranteed a specific role until after work had been done in rehearsals to determine how characters would be distributed among the ensemble. In some ways this was very freeing, since this meant that there were no stipulations in a character breakdown to limit physical characteristics or identities; the casting would parallel the fluidity of the way Newell was planning to approach the storytelling.</span>

<img class="alignnone wp-image-12471" src="https://www.courttheatre.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/abbyaugie-e1558381075654.jpg" alt="" width="600" height="338" />

<span style="font-weight: 400;">The casting process also included many conversations with the playwright about his visions for the tone and demeanor of some of the characters. McCracken views listening as one of the key components of her job, making sure that every collaborator’s needs and ideas about the play are being met as a cast is being assembled. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">“We worked to make sure that the actors hired would represent the immigrant community of Chicago,” she said of the process. “And that each of the actors would be able to trust us when being asked to play a massive range of characters.” </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Thinking back to the caliber of auditions she saw, McCracken says that “</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">it was an insane privilege to be able to see so many actors dive into this difficult text with courage, creativity, wit, grace, and humor...the adjectives could go on and on.” </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">After almost four years in development, it’s thrilling for McCracken to be able to look at the production she had a hand in helping shape. “These actors had the opportunity to walk into the audition with brand new pages of an unpublished work-in-progress and bring to life characters and, in many cases, define the essence or specific moments of these characters for the production,” she said, crediting the caliber of Chicago’s acting community as pivotal to breathing life into </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Augie March</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. “I am incredibly thankful to get to see this diverse and magical cast tell this remarkable story together -- creating a world with their bodies, voices, and hearts.” </span>

<i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Performances of <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/season-tickets/2018-2019-season/adventures-augie-march/">THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH</a> continue through June 9. <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/season-tickets/2018-2019-season/adventures-augie-march/">Learn more →</a></span></i>

<em>Photos by Michael Brosilow.</em>"
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      string(3912) "[caption id="attachment_12441" align="alignnone" width="800"]<img class="wp-image-12441" src="https://www.courttheatre.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/augiebannerinterview.jpg" alt="" width="800" height="300" /> Patrick Mulvey at first rehearsal for THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH. Photo by Joe Mazza.[/caption]

<em><span style="font-weight: 400;">This Spring, Court’s World Premiere Production of "</span><a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/season-tickets/2018-2019-season/adventures-augie-march/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Adventures of Augie March</span></a>"<span style="font-weight: 400;"> brings a fresh new face to Court’s stage! Actor Patrick Mulvey makes his Court debut in the title role, portraying Augie at various ages and stages of life. Before you see him onstage, read on to learn a little bit more about Patrick, his connections to Chicago, and his excitement for this production! </span></em>

<strong><i>The Adventures of Augie March </i>is set primarily in Chicago, where novelist Saul Bellow spent much of his life, and where playwright David Auburn went to school at the University of Chicago. What’s your connection to the city? </strong>

<b>Patrick:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> I was born and raised in Joliet, IL, just 30 minutes south of Chicago. Growing up, my parents and I often came to the city to see shows and go out. After college, when I moved back from living in the UK for a few years, my very first show here was working at the Goodman Theatre on a show that Charlie Newell directed. Incidentally, that show is where I met my wife, and to this day Chicago will always be the place we call home.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>Why do you think that this is an important, relevant story to be sharing right now?</strong> </span>

<b>Patrick:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Whether it's today, last year, or ten years from now, I don't think there is a person who gets through life without questioning deeply who they are. Not to be morose, but I think we are all going through different stages of are we walking out of the woods, or are we walking further into them? I think anyone who sees this show can identify a parallel to their own journey, even if they haven't trained an eagle in falconry. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>What’s most exciting to you about playing Augie March in this world-premiere adaptation?</strong> </span>

<b>Patrick:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> I spent my last year in high school at Interlochen School of the Arts and I remember being jealous when a fellow classmate got to work on <em>Proof</em> in their scene study. So to be able to originate any role, let alone the title role in a new work of David Auburn's, means a lot. </span>

<strong>You’ve most recently worked on film and TV sets. What is the difference between preparing for a series versus preparing for your role as Augie March onstage?</strong>

<b>Patrick:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Well, an hour long television drama is anywhere from 50-70 pages, with the actor getting several takes to refine their performance and tell the story. I love working in film and television because there is a certain energy on set and the unknown about what the finished product will be. And in this show tonight, we perform over 200 pages of script, with no second takes. That brings its own kind of magic. I'll tell you, this ensemble has worked hard and collaborated in an extremely bold way to bring the show</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> to life. </span>

<strong>Performances of <em><a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/season-tickets/2018-2019-season/adventures-augie-march/">The Adventures of Augie March</a> </em>begin May 9! <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/season-tickets/2018-2019-season/adventures-augie-march/">Save your seats →</a></strong>

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<em><span style="font-weight: 400;">Marilyn F. Vitale Artistic Director Charles Newell sat down with Pulitzer Prize-winner David Auburn to discuss what drew him to Saul Bellow’s novel. The following discussion is curated from their conversation, detailing Auburn’s approach to adapting this towering American classic for the stage.</span></em>

<b>CHARLES NEWELL:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> When did you first encounter Saul Bellow’s work, particularly this novel, </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Adventures of Augie March</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">?</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>DAVID AUBURN: </strong>I think </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Seize the Day </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">was the first Bellow I ever read. I read </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Herzog </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">before </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Augie March</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">, but </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Augie </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">was the one I connected to most strongly, at least as a 20-something person. It’s an accessible novel for a young person; it’s a picaresque tale of a young kid coming-of-age in Chicago, and it traces his life until, very roughly, the time of the book's publication, which is the early 50s. It’s Augie telling his story, and he encounters seemingly everyone in Chicago—it’s the great Chicago novel in many ways, and it’s a very easy book to sort of get lost in, to be swept up in. There’s this vast canvas, and it’s immensely likeable and loveable. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>CN:</strong> Can you explain what it is about the novel that you first thought about when adapting it? </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>DA:</strong> Before I proposed it to you, I had a number of impulses. One, just love of the work, and also the feeling that it was overflowing with great roles for actors. There are hundreds of characters in the book, and they’re all indelible, and the language with which they speak is both realistic and earthy and sort of magical and poetic. I think that the idea of that language in actors’ mouths was what excited me. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>CN:</strong> And you’ve chosen select characters from the hundreds that Augie encounters. How did you make the choice of which characters, and how does that help tell the story that you want to tell in the play? </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>DA:</strong> One of the hardest things about this has been having to forego using so much wonderful stuff, and I have a feeling that a lot of people will say “Why didn’t you include...?” because there are so many wonderful characters. It ultimately became a question of selecting the ones that I thought served the point of each individual episode with the most narrative or dramatic force, and occasionally combining characters in the book into single figures, elements of them into single figures, but I still lie awake at night wondering if I’ve made a mistake in leaving out this episode or wondering how we can get this other bit in, because there are so many wonderful pieces. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>CN:</strong> Let’s talk about the Bellow language. You can spend so much time on a single page just digesting it and understanding it. How did you bring the heightened language into characters’ voices? </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>DA:</strong> There are a number of mute or semi- mute characters in the book. So I thought, let’s let these characters very occasionally and strategically voice the insights or the descriptions that Augie is coming to but doesn’t quite have the language to say himself, because he’s young, he's still in formation. His brother Georgie, for example, who’s all but mute, can suddenly speak with the eloquence that Augie himself is kind of reaching for, aspiring to. It’s a device that I’m really excited about. I think it will be thrilling because you feel the complexity of the language, it incorporates it in a way that doesn't make it a roadblock to the dramatic action, and it helps us see how Augie is understanding his circumstances. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>CN:</strong> Going back to the early drafts that you first sent us, take us through a little bit of that journey. Were there moments when the adaptation seemed either unlocked or locked up? </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>DA:</strong> It was very hard to begin, because there are no scenes as such in the book. There are countless incidents, but you might have what amounts to a full scene or episode spread out across a hundred pages. If you go looking for a discreet scene that defines the relationship between Simon and Augie, for example, you’re not going to find one. It took a while, but I eventually got a sense of at least the kinds of pieces that should be in the play. I wanted a big piece about Augie’s childhood, a big piece that takes place when he’s in this sort of young adult period and hanging out with students, you want a big piece in Mexico, you want a big piece post-Mexico. At a certain point, having a mental map of what the play could become helped a lot. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>CN:</strong> How about the journey you took to understand Bellow the man, and Bellow the writer? </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>DA:</strong> I saw Bellow occasionally when I was in school here, I would see him working around campus. There’s a new biography by Zachery Leader, which is very comprehensive. The material about his childhood is especially useful, since many of the characters in Augie are based at least in some part on people that he knew, and it’s illuminating to know a bit about the real people he supposedly drew from. The book keeps pitting Augie, who is a kind of searcher, against these people of great certainty, these characters who have these sort of monumental worldviews, and are convinced of the direction that their life and other people’s lives should take. Bellow’s real brother was the prototype for the character Simon. The energy in that figure, and Augie's relationship to him, informs the dynamic of the whole book, and of the play—that dilemma of a questing, questioning person being drawn into and resisting, or not, the pull of a very powerful personality. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>CN:</strong> If you could ask Bellow a question when adapting, what would you want to ask him? </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>DA:</strong> What does there have to be an eagle for? [Laughs] I'm joking. That's a line from the book. I love the eagle, the outrageousness and craziness and power of that whole sequence. It's key to the book and we wanted to make certain it was central to the play.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>CN:</strong> How do you think Bellow would respond to the stage adaptation of his novel? </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>DA:</strong> Bellow did write a play and he liked the theatre, so my hope is he'd be receptive to what we've done. I’ve certainly done it with every intention of being true to his sensibility as I understand it. </span>

<strong>Performances of <em><a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/season-tickets/2018-2019-season/adventures-augie-march/">The Adventures of Augie March</a> </em>begin May 9! <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/season-tickets/2018-2019-season/adventures-augie-march/">Save your seats →</a></strong>"
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<ol>
 	<li><b>Immigrant</b></li>
</ol>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Saul Bellow arrived with his family in Chicago on July 4, 1924, smuggled by bootleggers across the border from Canada. He was nine years old. He would remain an “illegal alien”—we would now say, “undocumented immigrant”—until the age of 27.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Bellow was born in 1915 in Lachine, Quebec. His parents were Russian Jews. They had originally come to Canada to flee anti-Semitic violence and political persecution in their home city of St. Petersburg, Russia. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">The Bellow family arrived on American soil two short months after the U. S. Congress passed the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act, a drastic and sweeping revision of federal immigration policy. The new law slammed the door on a tide of humanity that had been flowing to America since the late 19th-century, ending the greatest era of mass migration to the United States in its history. From 1880 to 1924, waves of newcomers, primarily from Southern and Eastern Europe. powered the rapid growth of Chicago. The city’s population quadrupled in thirty years’ time, growing from 500,000 residents in 1880 to over 2 million in 1910. By 1924, when Bellow took up residence with his family in the Russian Jewish enclave of Humboldt Park, 70% of Chicago residents were foreign-born or the children of foreign-born parents.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">His whole life, Bellow retained a vivid impression of the first day he spent in America: July 4, 1924. He recalled his nine-year-old self thinking the fireworks, flags, bunting and parades of Independence Day were for him, meant to hail the promise of his new life in America.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">But the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act told a less welcoming story. The law was informed by the burgeoning eugenics movement, which maintained that peoples from Southern and Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa were genetically inferior to those from Northern and Western Europe. The 1924 Act accordingly slashed immigration rates from targeted nations by 98%, barring admission to Russian Jews, Poles, Hungarians, Bulgarians, Italians, Greeks, Chinese, Turks, Armenians, Lithuanians and Africans, among many others. Conspicuously, the 1924 Act left the door open to migrants from Great Britain, Ireland, Denmark, Germany, Sweden and Norway. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Eugenicists celebrated the 1924 Act as a measure that would “preserve the purity of American stock” by welcoming immigrants only “of higher intelligence,” who thus presented “the best material for American citizenship”. The now-excluded categories of people, it was believed, had “made an excessive contribution to our feeble-minded, insane, criminal and other socially inadequate classes.” A related federal act prohibited entry to “epileptics, and insane persons; paupers; professional beggars; persons likely to become a public charge; persons afflicted with a loathsome or dangerous disease; and persons who have committed a felony or other crime involving moral turpitude.” Polygamists, prostitutes and those with “mental or physical defects which might affect their ability to earn a living” were also banned.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">A natural reading of </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Adventures of Augie March</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> views it as Bellow’s artistic response to the contradictions inherent to the historical moment of his arrival in this country,. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">The story Bellow scrawled, beginning in 1947,in a succession of battered notebooks—notebooks now housed in the University of Chicago archives—charts the coming of age of a young undocumented immigrant amidst the foreign-born multitudes of Chicago,. Augie, Bellow’s narrator, struggles amongst the plenty and poverty of the city toward self-knowledge. He achieves it at last in discovering his identity as an American writer.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Bellow’s novel offers a rejoinder to the premise that a person’s country of origin, physical form or natural endowments determine their fitness for American life. . The characters peopling </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Adventures of Augie March</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> hail from the countries of origin marked for exclusion by the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act: they are Russian Jews, they are Mexican, they are Hungarian and Polish, they are Czech and Italian. They may be paralyzed, blind, physically disabled, or “insane”. They are relegated to the poverty-stricken and criminal margins of the city’s teeming social world. Invariably they are the “socially inferior.” But they are unmistakably American, and they contribute to the vibrant day-to-day of an unmistakably American city.</span>
<ol start="2">
 	<li><b> Writer</b></li>
</ol>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Augie is not quite Bellow’s alter ego. But his life echoes aspects of Bellow’s life, and his impressions and experiences are often artful silhouettes of Bellow’s own. Above all, the language Bellow uses to recount Augie’s adventures bears the unique and unmistakable stamp of the city that shaped him. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">As a child coming of age on the streets of Chicago, Bellow absorbed a rich inheritance. His earliest spoken languages were Russian and Yiddish. Hhe picked up English on Chicago’s West Side, where he played alongside the children of recently-arrived Poles, Italians, Swedes, Greeks, Hungarians, Czechs and Romanians. Bellow remembered these immigrant youths being as eager as he was to talk about distinctly American things:“baseball, prizefights, speakeasies, graft, jazz, crap games, gang wars.” As an adolescent, Bellow drew inspiration from soapbox preachers on Division Street, vendors hawking wares in the Maxwell Street Market, and speeches by orators, labor leaders and poets who assembled for debates in Bughouse Square, the park beside the Newberry Library. He haunted the stacks of multiple branches of the Chicago Public Library, where classic texts of world literature were freely available to him, the son of a low-wage employee at a kosher bakery on Augusta Avenue. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">These multitudinous influences are evident in the language Augie March uses to tell his story. Inflected with Yiddish rhythms, salted with slang and idiomatic speech, packed with interludes of heightened poetic phrasing and allusions to high culture, Augie’s narrative voice immerses readers in the colloquial language of the Chicago streets. One of the signal achievements of </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Adventures of Augie March</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">, according to the writer Philip Roth, was how the novel raised “the language you spoke, the American argot you heard on the street,” to the level of high literature.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Augie’s narrative voice even keeps pace with the evolution of Chicago street speech over three decades. As the chapters proceed the music of the language shifts from the rhythms of the Prohibition-era vernacular, to the minor key changes of the Great Depression in the 1930s, to the grander tones of the 1940s heralding the post-war economic boom.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">The idea for the novel came to Bellow when he was living in Paris in 1947. Watching city workers opening the valves of hydrants to allow gushing water to sweep clean the pavements, he asked himself, “why not have as much freedom of movement as this running water?” The flowing hydrants conjured the sudden memory, Bellow said, of “a handsome, freewheeling kid from childhood whose surname was August, and who used to yell when we were playing, ‘I got a scheme!’” Recreating the exuberance and brio of this long-ago Chicago friend was the start of </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Augie March</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">: “Subject and language appeared at the same moment—I was enriched with words,” Bellow recalled.  “I found myself with magical suddenness writing the first paragraph. It rushed out of me.” The novel’s language came to his mind so swiftly, he remembered, “All I had to do was be there with buckets to catch it.”</span>
<ol start="3">
 	<li><b> Mythologist</b></li>
</ol>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">While Bellow transmuted the phrasings and cadences of Chicago’s immigrant residents into a new kind of heightened literary language, he also likened their personhood to figures of myth and history. The cast of characters populating Augie’s street-level world are compared to gods and heroes of Greek mythology, or heroes from the annals of world history.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Simon, Augie’s body-building older brother, is afflicted with bouts of insanity like his mythological correlate, Hercules. The orating, wheelchair-using real estate broker William Einhorn is at once equated with Hephaestus, the blacksmith God of Invention, and President Franklin Roosevelt. Grandma Lausch, physically infirm but ruthlessly tyrannical, is compared to Emperor Timur, the 14th-century conqueror of Asia and heir to Genghis Khan. Rebecca March, Augie’s blind, incapacitated mother stands with the many mortal women in Greek mythology who, seduced and abandoned by Zeus, give birth to demigods. Augie himself is likened to Alcibiades, legendary orator of 5th-century B.C.E. Athens, beloved by the gods for his charisma and gift of self-expression. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Bellow suggests gods and geniuses walk the streets of Chicago, reincarnated as immigrants and workers. With immigrants from the “old world” no longer free to enter America, this promise is forestalled. Bellow begins the novel with a quote from Heraclitus, the 5th-century B.C.E. philosopher: Heraclitus says that “a man’s character is his fate”— not race, ethnicity or physical endowments. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">The publication of </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Adventures of Augie March</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> in 1953, when he was 38 years old, launched Saul Bellow’s reputation as a novelist and established the future Nobel Laureate’s literary renown. Congress, meanwhile, would not end the exclusionary quota system imposed by the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act until 1965. The opening lines of </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Augie March</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> --</span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, freestyle, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent—</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">stand</span> <span style="font-weight: 400;">as Bellow’s testament to the city that shaped him as a writer, and to thee liberating potential of the American immigrant experience.</span>

<strong>Performances of<em> <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/season-tickets/2018-2019-season/adventures-augie-march/">The Adventures of Augie March</a> </em>begin May 9! <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/season-tickets/2018-2019-season/adventures-augie-march/">Save your seats →</a></strong>"
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Court Theatre and playwright Nambi E. Kelley have received the Prince Prize for Commissioning Original Work for 2018. Prince Charitable Trusts makes an award of $75,000 each year to a major Chicago dance, music, visual arts or theater company. When the Trust approached Court Theatre about projects that might fit their vision for the Prize, it was only natural to ask playwright Nambi E. Kelley to create an original play based on the story of Stokely Carmichael’s activism and legacy for the stage. In 2014, Kelley had adapted Richard Wright’s <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/season-tickets/2014-2015-season/native-son/"><i>Native Son</i></a> for Court Theatre in a co-production with American Blues Theatre that garnered great critical and popular acclaim. Another collaboration would build upon these successes.

Kelley shares, “I am thrilled to be receiving the Prince Prize for 2018 to develop a new play based upon such a transformative activist as Stokely Carmichael. His fearless approach to constant and perpetual self-reinvention is something that I am excited to share with Court Theatre's audiences. Equally, what a gift to return to Court Theatre to work with scholars, artists, and the community to birth a new play that the late Stephen Albert called ‘his last gift to the American Theatre.’”

Charles Newell, Marilyn F. Vitale Artistic Director, comments, “Nambi is an immense talent, and Court Theatre couldn’t be more honored to be collaborating with her again. Thanks to Prince Charitable Trusts, we will have the opportunity to deepen our relationship with this gifted playwright and share her work with even more artists and audiences across Chicagoland.”

Benna Wilde, Program Director at Prince Charitable Trusts, adds, “We are delighted to make this award to Court Theatre, an important cultural resource on the South Side of Chicago, and to Nambi E. Kelley, a great young Chicago talent whose work we are proud to support.”

Stokely Carmichael, a pivotal activist in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, was one of the original freedom riders in 1961. Nambi E. Kelley will explore the transformational journey Carmichael’s activism took, starting with an alignment with Martin Luther King, Jr. on non-violence, evolving into Black Power as articulated by Malcolm X, and then transforming a third time into a unique articulation of Pan Africanism. Newell’s father worked with Carmichael at New York Avenue Presbyterian Church while Carmichael was a student at Howard University and Carmichael frequently stayed with Newell’s family, adding to Newell’s passion for sharing this story.

Under the guidance of Court’s late Executive Director, Stephen J. Albert, a renewed focus on commissioning began in 2011 with a new adaptation of Ralph Ellison’s <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/season-tickets/2011-2012-season/invisible-man/"><i>Invisible Man</i></a> written by Oren Jacoby. Court has long been developing and producing new work including the aforementioned <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/season-tickets/2014-2015-season/native-son/"><i>Native Son</i></a> written by Nambi E. Kelley, <i>Man in the Ring</i> written by Michael Cristofer, <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/season-tickets/2014-2015-season/the-good-book/"><i>The Good Book</i></a> written by Denis O’Hare and Lisa Peterson, and Court’s upcoming production of Saul Bellow’s <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/season-tickets/2018-2019-season/adventures-augie-march/"><i>The Adventures of Augie March</i></a>, written by David Auburn.

In its years of commissioning work, Court has learned how to support playwrights with different needs and desires during the development process, while leveraging relationships with the University and community organizations that enhance productions for not only the playwrights, but also for audiences. To support the development of her play, Kelley will have access to the resources of Court Theatre and the University of Chicago. The University of Chicago is home to a large and engaged faculty, multiple libraries, and world-class research facilities, and Court will leverage its University connections to bring Kelley together with any resources she may desire when working on her play about Carmichael.

Prince Charitable Trusts makes an award of $75,000 each year to a major Chicago dance, music, visual arts or theater company. The Prince Prize will commission a promising mid-career artist chosen by the performing or visual arts institution and must be at least one-third of the award. The remainder of the grant may be used by the company to help underwrite development and initial performance of the commissioned work. The intent of the Prize program is to serve as a catalyst for creative collaboration between promising artists and Chicago’s highest caliber arts organizations. Their goal is to provide an opportunity to showcase both the artists and Chicago’s great performing arts companies to the Chicago public and the nation."
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<span style="font-weight: 400;">Press throughout Chicago praise Ntozake Shange's </span><a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/season-tickets/2018-2019-season/for-colored-girls/"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf</span></i></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, with most critics unanimous in their decision to Highly Recommend the production</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">. Audiences and critics alike agree that <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/people/seret-scott/">Seret Scott</a>'s direction and the work of the ensemble is powerful, moving, and compelling. See why Shange's cherished work belongs in the canon of classic plays — <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/season-tickets/2018-2019-season/for-colored-girls/">get tickets</a> to </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">For Colored Girls</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span>

<hr />

<span style="font-weight: 400;">“...the entire cast feels carefully curated. Rich inner lives reside in a public space. How stories are heard here is as important as how they are told, listening being both a rare and radical act.</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">"</span>

<a href="https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/theater/reviews/ct-ent-colored-girls-review-0326-story.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">—Chris Jones, </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Chicago Tribune, </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"><b>★</b></span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><b>★</b></span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><b>★</b></span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><b>★ </b></span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Highly Recommended</span></a>

<hr />

<span style="font-weight: 400;">“</span>This production makes clear exactly why “for colored girls…” skyrocketed to prominence: Shange’s dramatic sense of language that when performed feels so deeply evocative and true. Read the play, and it’s impressive but distant. Performed here, the language is urgent and real and consistently compelling. The performances are all terrific, filled with spunky individualism<span style="font-weight: 400;">”</span>

<a href="https://chicago.suntimes.com/entertainment/for-colored-girls-who-have-considered-suicide-when-the-rainbow-is-enuf-review-court-theatre-chicago/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">—Steven Oxman, </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Chicago Sun-Times, </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Highly Recommended</span></a>

<hr />

<span style="font-weight: 400;">“It is impossible to overstate how talented this entire cast is... <em>for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf</em> is one of the top productions of this theater season. Shange's words cradle you and linger long after the final curtain. Laugh, cry, and be soothed by the full and beautiful soulful voices.”</span>

<a href="https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/for-colored-girls-court-theatre/Content?oid=69245564"><span style="font-weight: 400;">—Sheri Flanders, </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Chicago Reader</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">,</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Highly Recommended</span></a>

<hr />

<span style="font-weight: 400;">“The meld of fine performance and staging with Shange’s writing and concept are irresistible. The commitment of the cast was visible at the curtain call, with several of the performers in tears. The show obviously meant much to them personally as well as artistically. A most rewarding evening for everyone in the theater.”</span>

<a href="https://chicagolandtheaterreviews.com/chicagoland-productions/colored-girls/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">—Dan Zeff, </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Chicagoland Theatre Reviews</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">, </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">★★★★ Highly Recommended</span></a>

<hr />

<span style="font-weight: 400;">“In Seret Scott's searing and soaring production of <em>For Colored Girls</em> at Court Theatre, Shange's words weave a tapestry of pain, defiance, joy and renewal, all delivered by a cast of eight women who not only occupy the space but reclaim it for Black women whose voices have been ignored or disparaged...Shange's piece and Scott's staging remind us that Black women in the United States have been fighting their own battles for centuries. It's not their job to save us—but we damn well better start listening to them.”</span>

<a href="http://www.windycitymediagroup.com/lgbt/THEATER-REVIEW-For-Colored-Girls-Who-Have-Considered-Suicide-When-the-Rainbow-Is-Enuf/65694.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">—Kerry Reid, <i>Windy City Times</i></span><span style="font-weight: 400;">, </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Highly Recommended</span></a>

<hr />

<span style="font-weight: 400;">“Even after forty years, this play still resonates profoundly with women and audience alike. It's a magnificent story about the soul and depth of African American women who tell the unapologetic black truth....the ladies at Court Theater makes this version a MUST-SEE!</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">”</span>

<a href="http://www.chicagonow.com/lets-play/2019/03/for-colored-girls-who-have-considered-suicide-when-the-rainbow-is-enuf/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">—Rick and Brenda McCain, </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Chicago Now Let's Play</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">, </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Highly Recommended</span> - Critics Pick</a>

<hr />

<span style="font-weight: 400;">“There are many moments during the performance where the audience grew so quiet that it seemed like there were only eight women in the building… the girls on stage.</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">”</span>

<a href="https://www.chicagotheatrereview.com/2019/03/the-more-things-change-the-more-they-stay-the-same/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">—Shelly Berry and Scott Kirshenbaum, </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Chicago Theatre Review,</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Highly Recommended</span></a>

<hr />

<span style="font-weight: 400;">“Sharply defined in terms of character, language and overall narrative drive. Scott and her highly individualistic cast of eight (including the balladeer who has been added to the usual cast of seven), has tapped into the verbal music of the play in a wholly fresh way.</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">”</span>

<a href="https://news.wttw.com/2019/03/27/ntozake-shange-for-colored-girls-court-theatre-review"><span style="font-weight: 400;">—Hedy Weiss, </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">WTTW Chicago</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">, </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Highly Recommended</span></a>

<hr />
<p class="caption">Photo by Michael Brosilow.</p>"
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      string(5749) "<img class="alignnone wp-image-12311 size-full" src="https://www.courttheatre.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/ntozake800x300.jpg" alt="" width="800" height="300" />

Looking back at 2018, many may argue that it was a year of and about women. Women broke their silence, and spoke out about what matters to them. Women ran for office in record numbers, and held influential and powerful men accountable in cases of sexual harassment and assault with the #MeToo Movement. Women everywhere—white, yellow, red, brown, and black alike—used their voices to fight against sexism, racism, classism, ableism, and ageism. Using various platforms like music, movies, literature, poetry, and speeches, women unapologetically, truthfully, and boldly expressed themselves.

Women like Michelle Obama, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Beyonce, Nikki Minaj, Reese Witherspoon, Amy Poehler, Meryl Streep, Sandra Oh, Emma Stone, Stacey Adams, Tamika Mallory, Angela Davis, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison made their voices heard and inspired others to do the same. Even Oprah Winfrey’s speech at the Golden Globes touched on issues of sexual abuse and empowered women to call out their abusers. In the midst of all of this amazing female power, one who embodies the spirit of all of these women, Ntozake Shange, made her transition from this life. In the African tradition, as well as in other cultures, some may say Shange is now one of the ancestral elders who will continue to guide and inform us.

To this end, Shange’s death is inspiring many to reflect and revisit the genius of and in her work. While Shange’s literary oeuvre is quite extensive, she is best known for <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/season-tickets/2018-2019-season/for-colored-girls/"><em>For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf</em></a> (1975). This play received an Obie Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award, and the AUDELCO Award as well as Tony, Grammy, and Emmy Award nominations. In 2010, director Tyler Perry adapted the choreo-poem into a feature-length film. Furthermore, on the Poetry Foundation’s website, <em>For Colored Girls</em> is characterized as:
<blockquote>[a] unique blend of poetry, music, dance and drama called a “choreopoem,” it “took the theatre world by storm,” noted Jacqueline Trescott in the Washington Post, as it “became an electrifying Broadway hit and provoked heated exchanges about the relationships between black men and women. ... Its form—seven women on the stage dramatizing poetry—was a refreshing slap at the traditional, one-two-three-act structures.”</blockquote>
Mel Gussow, writing in the New York Times, stated that “Miss Shange was a pioneer in terms of her subject matter: the fury of black women at their double subjugation in white male America.”

Shange’s fury and insight brought fire, drama, and excitement to the stage and has been voiced by others, particularly black, female playwrights. For example, in the posthumously written New York Times article, “Seven Flames Kindled by the Focused Fire of Ntozake Shange,” Laura Collins-Hughes shares how playwright and spoken word artist Aleshea Harris pays homage to Shange in her work: “She’s given me so much permission—to be unapologetic, to talk about my pain and my joy. I’ve certainly been a colored girl who’s considered suicide, so just the title, everything, it feels like ‘You are here, I affirm you, you exist and you should exist loudly.’” These very sentiments are also connected to the movement of women today. In viewing this play, particularly in the city of Chicago, women--particularly black women--who choose to voice their concerns and bring themselves to the forefront of the American landscape will see themselves reflected in Shange’s work.

Although<em> For Colored Girls</em> first appeared on the stage in 1975, its themes permeate our current American conversation. Simultaneously, Shange’s text is laced with key historical references, including Willie Colon, Toussaint L’ouverture, and Claude McKay’s poem “Harlem Dancer.” The women express feeling excluded from critical places and spaces in cities like St. Louis, New York City, Chicago, Houston, Baltimore, Detroit, and San Francisco. This notion of “being on the outside as a woman,” particularly a black woman, contributes to its timeliness as women continue to fight for a seat at the table.

In the forward of the 2010 second publication of her play, Shange beautifully articulates: “<em>for colored girls</em> continues to resonate so profoundly almost forty years after I first set pen to paper. It is bittersweet for me. Though we have achieved many milestones, the stories and struggles of our lives as women, and in particular, women of color, are still not granted the full address due. But, then, perhaps that is part of the fuel that moves me to continue writing.” Parallel to Shange’s guiding words here, <em>For Colored Girls</em> continues to resonate as we examine the stories and struggles of women today. Witnessing these powerful stories will inevitably move us all to empathize with women beyond Court Theatre’s stage, supporting their march to be heard throughout America and across the world.

<hr />

<em>Dr. Khalilah T. Watson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communications English at Olive-Harvey College-One of the City Colleges of Chicago. Her areas of specialization are composition, twentieth century African American fiction, and literary theory, particularly Toni Morrison. She holds a Ph.D. in English from Georgia State University, a master’s degree from Eastern Michigan University, and a bachelor’s degree from Albion College.</em>"
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In conjunction with our production of Ntozake Shange’s<a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/season-tickets/2018-2019-season/for-colored-girls/"> <em>For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf</em></a>, Court Theatre is presenting <strong><em>beyond the rainbow: Court Community Conversations</em></strong>, a series of curated, community-focused events allowing participants to engage with the themes in Shange’s work in a variety of ways.

<hr />

<b>a laying on of hands: An Opening Ritual | March 14 from 5:30 - 7:00pm | McCormick Theological Seminary (</b><b>5460 S University Ave, Chicago, IL 60615)</b>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">An opening ceremony preceding our first preview with spiritual leaders from the South Side in partnership with McCormick Theological Seminary and the Lutheran School Theological Seminary. <strong>Free and open to the public.</strong> <strong>Online registration coming soon.</strong></span>

<hr />

<b>dark phrases of womanhood: Dramatists Guild Panel | March 24 at 4:30pm | Court Theatre (</b><b>5535 S Ellis Ave, Chicago, IL 60637)</b>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Members of the Dramatists Guild will discuss Ntozake Shange’s influence on their own work as female playwrights of color in this post-show discussion. <strong>Free and open to the public.</strong></span>

<hr />

<b>sing your song: An Open Mic Night | April 1 at 7:00pm | Court Theatre (</b><b>5535 S Ellis Ave, Chicago, IL 60637)</b>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">An open mic on the set of </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">For Colored Girls</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> celebrating original work and personal anecdotes about the play by women of color. <strong>Free and open to the public. Online registration coming soon.</strong></span>

<hr />

<b>there wuz no air: A Community Conversation | April 5 at </b><b>9:15pm</b><b> | Court Theatre (</b><b>5535 S Ellis Ave, Chicago, IL 60637)</b>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">A post-show panel discussion for men and boys to discuss the trauma of men in the black community, in partnership with 100 Black Men. <strong>Free and open to the public.</strong></span>

<hr />

<b>Spotlight Reading Series: A Tribute to Ntozake | April 8 at 6:30pm | Experimental Station (</b><b>6100 S Blackstone Ave, Chicago, IL 60637)</b>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">A reading of Shange’s play, </span><a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/season-tickets/spotlight-reading-series/spotlight-reading-boogie-woogie-landscapes/"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Boogie Woogie Landscapes</span></i></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, about the dreams and memories of a young, black woman as part of Court’s Spotlight Reading Series. Light refreshments catered by Exquisite Catering. <strong>Free and open to the public. <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/season-tickets/spotlight-reading-series/spotlight-reading-boogie-woogie-landscapes/">Learn more →</a></strong></span>

<hr />

<b>Exelon South Side Youth Performance Fest Presents “FCGirls Project” | April 9 at 7:00pm | Court Theatre (</b><b>5535 S Ellis Ave, Chicago, IL 60637)</b>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">The second act of the annual Exelon South Side Youth Performance Fest will be dedicated to student work engaging with </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">For Colored Girls </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">as part of Court’s FCGirls Project. A post-show reception at the Smart Museum of Art will include catering by Piccolo Mondo. <strong>Free and open to the public. <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/community-engagement/education-initiative/high-school-performance-festival/">Learn more →</a></strong></span>

<hr />

<b>loving her fiercely: A Day of Wellness for Women of Color | April 13th from 11:00am - 4:00pm | Location To Be Announced</b>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Meditation, visual art, and wellness techniques combine for this day-long wellness event for women of color, featuring massage, reiki, and a vendor fair of female-run businesses promoting a holistic and healthy lifestyle. <strong>Free and open to the public. Online registration coming soon.</strong></span>
<table border="0" width="“100%”" cellpadding="0">
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<p class="caption"><em>For Colored Girls</em> is sponsored by</p>
</td>
<td align="left" valign="center" width="33%">
<p class="caption"><a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/ntozake-shange" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><img class="size-full wp-image-10791 aligncenter" src="https://www.courttheatre.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/POETRY_1C_PRIMARY_RGB_P-100wide.png" alt="" width="100" height="182" /></a></p>
</td>
<td align="center" valign="center" width="33%"><a href="https://www.sidley.com/en/us/" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><img class="size-full wp-image-4857 aligncenter" style="text-align: start;" src="https://www.courttheatre.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/sidley_200.jpg" alt="The Sidley Austin Foundation" width="200" height="29" /></a></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
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<p class="caption">Photo of Alexis J. Roston, Patrese D. McClain, Melissa DuPrey, Angelica Katie, and Melody Angel by Joe Mazza.</p>"
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  <h1>Blog</h1>
  
      <article class="blog-teaser">
      <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/about/blog/working-on-wilson-bringing-august-wilsons-words-to-life/"><img class="blog-teaser__img" src="https://www.courttheatre.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/workingonwilson-200x200.jpg" alt="" /></a>
      <div class="blog-teaser__body">
        <h3 class="title"><a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/about/blog/working-on-wilson-bringing-august-wilsons-words-to-life/">Working on Wilson: Bringing August Wilson&#8217;s Words to Life</a></h3>
        <p>Several cast members of KING HEDLEY II discuss what it means to be performing in a play by August Wilson.</p>
      </div>
    </article>
      <article class="blog-teaser">
      <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/about/blog/critics-agree-the-adventures-of-augie-march-is-a-journey-worth-taking/"><img class="blog-teaser__img" src="https://www.courttheatre.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/AugieCriticsThumbnail200x200.jpg" alt="" /></a>
      <div class="blog-teaser__body">
        <h3 class="title"><a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/about/blog/critics-agree-the-adventures-of-augie-march-is-a-journey-worth-taking/">Critics agree: THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH is a journey worth taking!</a></h3>
        <p>Critics highly recommend this epic world premiere from Pulitzer Prize-winner David Auburn.</p>
      </div>
    </article>
      <article class="blog-teaser">
      <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/about/blog/casting-an-epic-how-court-theatre-assembled-an-ensemble-of-13-actors-for-the-adventures-of-augie-march/"><img class="blog-teaser__img" src="https://www.courttheatre.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/augie200x200.jpg" alt="" /></a>
      <div class="blog-teaser__body">
        <h3 class="title"><a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/about/blog/casting-an-epic-how-court-theatre-assembled-an-ensemble-of-13-actors-for-the-adventures-of-augie-march/">Casting An Epic: How Court Theatre Assembled An Ensemble of 13 Actors for The Adventures of Augie March</a></h3>
        <p> Casting an epic play like THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH was a huge task that called on the collaborative efforts of the play’s director, playwright, and casting director.</p>
      </div>
    </article>
      <article class="blog-teaser">
      <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/about/blog/meet-augie-march/"><img class="blog-teaser__img" src="https://www.courttheatre.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/augiethumbnailinterview.jpg" alt="" /></a>
      <div class="blog-teaser__body">
        <h3 class="title"><a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/about/blog/meet-augie-march/">Meet Augie March!</a></h3>
        <p>An interview with Patrick Mulvey, who makes his Court debut in the title role, portraying Augie at various ages and stages of life.</p>
      </div>
    </article>
      <article class="blog-teaser">
      <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/about/blog/in-conversation-playwright-david-auburn-and-director-charles-newell/"><img class="blog-teaser__img" src="https://www.courttheatre.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/daveauburninterviewthumb.jpg" alt="" /></a>
      <div class="blog-teaser__body">
        <h3 class="title"><a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/about/blog/in-conversation-playwright-david-auburn-and-director-charles-newell/">In Conversation: Playwright David Auburn and Director Charles Newell</a></h3>
        <p>Charles Newell, director of THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH, sat down with Pulitzer Prize-winner David Auburn to discuss what drew him to Saul Bellow’s novel.</p>
      </div>
    </article>
      <article class="blog-teaser">
      <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/about/blog/first-to-knock-first-admitted-the-adventures-of-saul-bellow/"><img class="blog-teaser__img" src="https://www.courttheatre.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/bellowblogthumb.jpg" alt="" /></a>
      <div class="blog-teaser__body">
        <h3 class="title"><a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/about/blog/first-to-knock-first-admitted-the-adventures-of-saul-bellow/">First to Knock, First Admitted: The Adventures of Saul Bellow</a></h3>
        <p>Resident Dramaturg Nora Titone shares how author Saul Bellow's upbringing as a Jewish Russian immigrant in Chicago influenced the writing of his novel, THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH.</p>
      </div>
    </article>
      <article class="blog-teaser">
      <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/about/blog/court-theatre-and-playwright-nambi-e-kelley-receive-the-75000-prince-prize-for-commissioning-original-work/"><img class="blog-teaser__img" src="https://www.courttheatre.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/nambi-200x200.jpg" alt="" /></a>
      <div class="blog-teaser__body">
        <h3 class="title"><a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/about/blog/court-theatre-and-playwright-nambi-e-kelley-receive-the-75000-prince-prize-for-commissioning-original-work/">Court Theatre and Playwright Nambi E. Kelley Receive the $75,000 Prince Prize for Commissioning Original Work</a></h3>
        <p>Court and playwright Nambi E. Kelley have received the Prince Prize to craft a play about activist Stokely Carmichael.</p>
      </div>
    </article>
      <article class="blog-teaser">
      <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/about/blog/powerful-for-colored-girls-praised-by-critics-and-audiences/"><img class="blog-teaser__img" src="https://www.courttheatre.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/fcg-200x200.jpg" alt="" /></a>
      <div class="blog-teaser__body">
        <h3 class="title"><a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/about/blog/powerful-for-colored-girls-praised-by-critics-and-audiences/">Powerful FOR COLORED GIRLS praised by critics and audiences</a></h3>
        <p>Chicago critics are raving about Court's production of Ntozake Shange's cherished classic.</p>
      </div>
    </article>
      <article class="blog-teaser">
      <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/about/blog/paying-homage-to-ntozake-shange/"><img class="blog-teaser__img" src="https://www.courttheatre.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/for-colored-girls-200sq.jpg" alt="" /></a>
      <div class="blog-teaser__body">
        <h3 class="title"><a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/about/blog/paying-homage-to-ntozake-shange/">Paying Homage to Ntozake Shange</a></h3>
        <p>Dr. Khalilah Watson chronicles the impact Ntozake Shange's work has had on women over the past four decades.</p>
      </div>
    </article>
      <article class="blog-teaser">
      <a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/about/blog/beyond-the-rainbow-court-community-conversations/"><img class="blog-teaser__img" src="https://www.courttheatre.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/beyond-the-rainbow-200x200.jpg" alt="" /></a>
      <div class="blog-teaser__body">
        <h3 class="title"><a href="https://www.courttheatre.org/about/blog/beyond-the-rainbow-court-community-conversations/">beyond the rainbow: Court Community Conversations</a></h3>
        <p>In conjunction with our production of Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf, Court Theatre is presenting beyond the rainbow: Court Community Conversations, a series of curated, community-focused events.</p>
      </div>
    </article>
  
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