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Writers get 'First Look' at their new plays
Nothing is more valuable to a playwright than to see what happens when his or her words make that gargantuan leap from the page to the stage, with audiences providing essential feedback. Affording playwrights that opportunity is the main objective of First Look Repertory of New Work, Steppenwolf Theater's summertime showcase of plays staged in rotating rep at the Merle Reskin Garage Theater. Here's a look at the three writers whose plays will be on view beginning next week:
KEITH HUFF: "PURSUED BY HAPPINESS" (July 23-Aug. 10)
(Courtesy)
'Gershwin's Greatest Hits" is the title of the free Grant Park Festival program to be performed at 6:30 tonight and 7:30 p.m. Saturday in Millennium Park.
Chicago-bred guest conductor Kevin Stites returns to town to lead the Grant Park Orchestra, with the acclaimed young Russian-born pianist Kirill Gerstein playing "Rhapsody in Blue," and Broadway vocalists Harolyn Blackwell, Marin Mazzie, Jason Danieley (Mazzie's husband) and Norm Lewis running through some of the many "standards" that George Gershwin penned during his short but meteoric career.
"Gershwin stunningly embraced Broadway, Hollywood, the concert hall and, with 'Porgy and Bess,' the opera house," Stites said. "I've grouped songs from each of these many sides of him together so you can really hear the different sound he brought to each. Of course, no one sounds more American than Gershwin. But listen closely and you also can hear the Hebraic-Jewish inflections and harmonies right alongside the African-American spirit he captured so eloquently."
Stites, incidentally, is heading back to Broadway this season for the world premiere of a new musical, "A Tale of Two Cities."
Keith Huff already has one hit on his hands. He is the author of "A Steady Rain," the very adult, red-hot Chicago cop drama that began life at Chicago Dramatists, was remounted at the Royal George cabaret, and is sure to have a New York production next season -- though whether it will be Off Broadway, or have a starry Broadway cast, is still an open question. Though his agent advised him to keep all future work "on hold" until a New York opening, his new play, "Pursued by Happiness,'' kind of slipped through the cracks. Written during the run of "A Steady Rain," and given a reading at the American Theater Company, it promises to reveal a far lighter side of this Wisconsin-bred, Chicago-based playwright.
"It's a comedy with a genuinely happy ending," said Huff, who is married, the father of a seven-year-old daughter, and works as a medical editor by day. "I'm telling the story of two fortysomething scientists who take each other to meet their respective sets of parents [who are played by the same pair of actors]. And while there's no romantic glossing over or fairytale-like ending, I think it's real. It has something of a 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner' quality to it, and I think you can easily see why these two people might not have married before now."
JASON WELLS: "PERFECT MENDACITY" (July 24-Aug. 10)
Without any particular game plan in mind, Jason Wells alternates between acting (he was recently at the Goodman Theatre as the father in Horton Foote's "Talking Pictures"), and writing. It was acting that first brought the St. Louis native to Chicago in 1988; it was two years spent in Los Angeles ("a big mistake," he says) that propelled him to write. Back in Chicago, while acting in "Sideman," he was encouraged to submit a play to the First Look project; it turned out to be the explosive macho drama, "Men of Tortuga."
The catalyst for "Perfect Mendacity," a play set in motion by the leak of a top secret internal memo from a scientific research facility, was Wells' self-professed tendency to "get fixated on esoteric things for no particular reason." In this case it was polygraphs and lie detectors, and Wells began wondering about how they work and if they can be beat. The Manhattan Theater Club (MTC) suggested Wells apply for a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which funds plays about science and technology. He got the grant, and after MTC took a pass on the play, Steppenwolf's Ed Sobel picked it up.
Directing the play will be David Cromer ("Our Town," "Adding Machine"), who Wells praises for his "appreciation of realism and his terrific ear."
SARAH GUBBINS: "FAIR USE" (July 25-Aug. 10)
After graduating from Northwestern University about a decade ago, Sarah Gubbins took jobs as a literary manager and dramaturg, working on several plays at Steppenwolf, including a few that were part of earlier First Look programs. So when her own play, "Fair Use," was selected this year, she already had "the big picture about what needs to be accomplished, the amount of time available, and how you can ask the actors to help you."
A romantic comedy that homes in on a plagiarism case being handled by a high-power Chicago law firm, "Fair Use" was written during the past two years as Gubbins earned a masters degree at Northwestern as part of a newly established multidisciplinary program in writing for the stage, screen and television.
"The idea for the play came from life experience," said Gubbins. "I've got a long line of lawyers in my family, including my father and both grandfathers. And I worked for six years for Leon Despres, the great Chicago civil rights lawyer who turned 100 in February, who loves theater, and has even told me stories about meeting George Bernard Shaw. I knew I wanted the lawyer's viewpoint in my play because lawyers are good at juggling ideas, and at parsing both sides of an argument."