Before the interview, she emailed me a quick list of the questions she wanted to focus on. The first question on that list set the tone for a great conversation:

Does the production of Candles to the Sun have any special significance to the history of Eclipse Theatre Company?

I've told this story before, but it's always a fun one to tell - starting with that production of Confessional in 1999, where six of the current ensemble met for the first time, and that whole 1999 season, when we brought Eclipse back from the ashes (literally!) by spending the year exploring Tennessee Williams. When we started talking about the idea of the Celebration Series, I don't think we could have imagined a better show to kick it off - not only do we get to return to our roots as a company, but also to Tom Williams' roots as a writer.

I first worked with Eclipse as the lighting designer for The Infernal Machine, the final production of the Cocteau season (and the last show in the old Bucktown theater, which was destroyed in a fire after the first weekend of performances, but more on that later).

As part of our two-year celebration of the first ten playwrights we've featured, ensemble members and guest artists will be reading scenes from Cocteau's plays, discussing his novels and films, and playing some music. In this picture, Cheri Chenoweth and Nina O'Keefe rehearse a scene from The Holy Terrors as Josh Venditti and Kevin Scott look on.

The event - Exploring's Cocteau's World - will be this Saturday at 2pm at the Victory Gardens Greenhouse Theater at 2257 N Lincoln in Chicago. It's a free event for Eclipse subscribers ($5 suggested donation for everyone else); call us at 312-738-0704 to reserve a seat.

Thanks to all who attended the Total Eclipse 2008 Benefit - it was a great party and a great opportunity to meet subscribers and supporters.

Along with a great brunch (mimosas or bloody marys included, of course), you'll also have the chance to help us craft the 2009 season. Ensemble members will perform scenes from plays we're considering from our 2009 featured playwrights (Pearl Cleage, Rebecca Gilman, John Guare, Romulus Linney and Keith Reddin), and you can let us know which ones you'd like to see us explore next year.

There's also a raffle - with prizes including restaurant gift certificates; Cubs, Sox and Bulls tickets; original artwork; theater and symphony tickets; and more. And yes, you can buy tickets for the raffle online even if you can't make it to the party Sunday. But then you'll miss out on some great door prizes, including signed scripts from all five 2009 featured playwrights.

Give us a call at 312-738-0704 for more information, or click here to purchase tickets online. See you Sunday!

I'll be posting more clips from this video, and more interviews with more artists, soon. Keep up with the growing collection at YouTube.

Be careful - I'm starting to realize it's very addictive ...

The "Speed Theater" format - a Valentine's Day play on Speed Dating - means you'll have the chance to meet and flirt with all four companies in under two hours, and decide who you're interested in seeing again. And unlike most speed dating events, polygamy is encouraged here.

The doors open at 6:00 tonight at 2257 N Lincoln.

That was the beginning of the 1999 Tennessee Williams season, and it was really the beginning (or maybe re-beginning) of Eclipse Theatre Company; seven members of that cast became ensemble members that year - myself included - and we dove into Williams with a passion that would set the tone for the next nine years.

It seems natural to start this ride the same way that one began - by exploring a little-known, rarely-seen play by one of the best and most prolific writers in American history.

We're just over two weeks away from the first rehearsal for Candles to the Sun (directed by YOUNG MAN Steven Fedoruk), which hasn't been produced professionally since its 1937 debut in St. Louis. The design team has been bouncing around ideas for a few months now, the cast is ready to run, and we'll have a lot to share as we go along.

This is Steven Fedoruk reading part of "Monogamy Blues," from The Brass Bed and Other Stories.

Ensemble members read excerpts from What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day, Deals With the Devil and Other Reasons to Riot, and The Brass Bed and Other Stories in a great afternoon enjoying the side of Pearl Cleage's writing that we can't present on stage.

In case you weren't up early enough on Sunday morning, you can listen to the full half-hour interview by clicking here (the link will open a file you can play on your media player).

I should note that because we had not found our fantastic lighting designer, Gina Patterson, at the time we prepared a press release for this interview, Dr. Unumb refers to me as the lighting designer. Thankfully, Gina joined us shortly after that so I was able to focus on producing instead of trying to wear multiple hats.

Read on to see what prolific African American playwrights think about the subject:

In an interview Cleage states:

"a lot of white theaters that do our work don't do it in an environment that encourages us to come. White theatres mights do one play a year, and it's always A Raisin in teh Sun or an August Wilson play, and it's usually during Black History Month."

In a keynote address at Princeton August Wilson targeted the concept of "colorblind casting" as "an aberrant idea." "

He continued: "We want you to see us. We are black and beautiful. We have an honorable history in the world of men... We do not need colorblind casting; we need some theaters to develop our playwrights."

Suzan Lori Parks in an interview regarding her being the first African American female in drama to win the Pulitizer Prize:

"African-Americans in drama, right. I think it opens a door, but I also think that it's everyone's responsibility to walk through a door. If one person opens a door or one person could be said to be the door opener or the doorman or the doorwoman, it's your...everyone's responsibility to walk through that door."

Check out the calendar - you can save events to your own Outlook calendar, set a reminder for yourself so you don't forget about a show, discussion or Playwright Scholar Series event - and buy your tickets now so you don't miss out.

2 by Pearl

One of the most interesting things to see (for me, anyway) is how a show evolves after opening night - all of the major choices have been made, and actors will stay true to the work they've done with the director through the rehearsal process, but things always change slightly as actors settle into roles and the stage manager gets more comfortable with the sound and light cues.

I don't know what Chuck or Thomas plan to do, but I always like to stop by a show that I've directed a couple of weeks after it's opened - not to give notes or criticism (as some directors do), but just to enjoy. Sometimes the rhythm gets sharper, sometimes the characters feel more fully explored, sometimes a new discovery has happened that changes the tone of a moment.

That's one of the main things that attracts me to theatre - unlike film, where your work is locked into a specific moment in time, a play grows and changes over the time it's running, and each individual performance is a completely unique event and an unrepeatable work of art.

2 by Pearl is an especially interesting night of theatre to revisit - since the two actors in Late Bus to Mecca are alternating roles through the run, you can watch two different interpretations of the same characters evolve as Frances and Alana explore their own work and watch and listen to each other's. Hospice, which focuses on a complex and layered relationship between mother and daughter, will grow as well, as Tanya and Noelle continue exploring the subtle nuances lying underneath the surface of their dialogue.

This is not to say that these shows aren't fantastic now - of course they are, and I hesitate to say that they'll be "better" as they go along - just that they'll be different, and it's worth coming back to see how those little differences change the overall experience.

First up is Alfred Kemp, who barely had a chance to settle in before getting called up on stage to accept a Supporting Actor Citation for playing Guy in Blues for an Alabama Sky.

Scroll through the list on the right to watch all the speeches - Charlette Speigner, Michelle Courvais and Steven Fedoruk all take the podium for their roles in Blues for an Alabama Sky and Boy Gets Girl, and Artistic Director Anish Jethmalani echoes Pearl Cleage herself in accepting the Citation for Outstanding Production.

Two things happened to me that summer - I became a die-hard Cubs fan, and I fell in love with Eclipse's playwright-driven approach to telling stories.

I'm still hoping the Cubs fan thing works out.

I became a company member with Eclipse during the 1999 Tennessee Williams season, and since then I've had the opportunity to be a part of yearly explorations of some of the best playwrights in theater. Ten of them, to be precise.

Now that we've hit this milestone - Pearl Cleage is the tenth playwright we've featured since adopting this mission statement - we thought it would be fun to take some time to celebrate the journeys we've taken as artists and audiences over the last ten seasons.

Throughout 2008 and 2009, we'll be revisiting all ten playwrights with mainstage productions, staged readings, discussions, films and events that build on the experience of past seasons and dig even deeper into the worlds each playwright has created. I'm starting to go through the pictures, dramaturgical research and design notes that we've saved from past productions, and we'll be sharing that (don't worry, we'll leave the boring stuff in storage) as we go along.

The celebration kicks off in March with Candles to the Sun, the first play written by a 25-year old college senior named Thomas Lanier Williams in 1937. We know him by a different name now, but we recognize the poetic style, technical skill and brilliantly drawn characters that will define Tennessee Williams's plays throughout his career.

Through the rest of 2008 we're planning productions of Neil Simon's Plaza Suite and Lillian Hellman's The Autumn Garden, a Jean Cocteau film festival, and readings and discussions of Lanford Wilson's full length and one act plays.

In 2009, we'll be celebrating John Guare, Romulus Linney, Keith Reddin, Rebecca Gilman and Pearl Cleage.

It's going to be a fun ride, and we're all excited to have the chance to come back to some of the stories that we didn't get to do the first time around, and explore them with the advantage of having already spent a full year with the storyteller.

It's definitely going to be more fun than revisiting the last ten Cubs seasons.

Outstanding Production: Blues for an Alabama Sky

Outstanding Direction: Steven Fedoruk, Blues for an Alabama Sky

Oustanding Performance by an Actress: Michelle Courvais, Boy Gets Girl

Outstanding Performance by a Supporting Actor: Alfred Kemp, Blues for an Alabama Sky

Outstanding Performance by a Supporting Actress: Charlette Speigner, Blues for an Alabama Sky

Also nominated and deserving much recognition were Steve Scott (Outstanding Direction for Boy Gets Girl) and TayLar (Outstanding Performance by an Actress for Blues for an Alabama Sky).

Congrats to all, and thanks to friends, family and fans for supporting us.

She'll be joining us for a post-show discussion next Friday night, and on Saturday we're hosting our second One Playwright symposium - Ron OJ Parson (who directed the current production of Flyin' West and will be directing Bourbon at the Border with us in the fall) will moderate an interview and discussion with Pearl Cleage as selections of her writings are performed.

Both events are at the Victory Gardens Greenhouse (2257 N Lincoln) - Friday's show is at 8 pm, Saturday's symposium is at 1 pm, and you can call the box office at 773.871.3000 for show tickets and call Eclipse at 312.409.1687 for symposium tickets.

The Chicago Tribune recently pointed out Pearl Cleage's description of the stage as a "hollering place." There's a lot of hollering going on in the city these days.

In addition to celebrating the beginning of the 2007 Pearl Cleage season, we'll be announcing a two-year retrospective of our first ten playwrights in 2008 and 2009. The ensemble (myself included) will be performing scenes from their plays during the party, and we'll be asking guests to help us decide which plays to explore in the multi-season celebration.

The 2008 season will focus on Tennessee Williams, Lillian Hellmann, Neil Simon, Lanford Wilson and Jean Cocteau. That puts a lot of fantastic plays on the table, and we'd love to hear your opinion about them.

We'll also be celebrating Pearl Cleage - Blues for an Alabama Sky opens a week from tonight (March 18), and we're excited about Late Bus to Mecca, Hospice and Bourbon at the Border later this year.

Oh, and there'll be cocktails, food, music, and a raffle with prizes including theater, ballet and sports tickets, restaurant and hotel packages, original artwork, and more. The party's at 2 pm on Sunday, March 25 at the Bluewater Grill, 520 N Dearborn. You can order tickets online or visit our Web site for more information. Hope to see you there.

Gerardo Cardenas, who played Patrick Chibas in our production of Spinning into Butter this past summer, shared with me a collection of pictures he took during the final week of rehearsals.

His pictures are beautiful - they're intimate moments with the cast and crew as they make their final preperations. Take a look through the photo gallery, or watch the collection as a slide show by clicking the link at the top of the gallery.

Much thanks to Gerardo for letting us share these.

Our run of Boy Gets Girl ended just before the holidays, wrapping up a great season working with Rebecca Gilman's exhilarating scripts.

As we prepare for Blues for an Alabama Sky, the first in our 2007 season featuring Pearl Cleage, I'll be sharing some of my thoughts about her plays and novels, my research in designing lights for the show, our dramaturgical research and the post-show discussions throughout the run.

Stick around.

During the symposium we held back in the spring, Rebecca explained that part of the inspiration for Blue Surge was the song Jackson Cage by Bruce Springsteen. As a big Springsteen fan myself, I instantly saw the connection - it's a play that explores the confinement of class, focusing on a couple of small-time cops in a small town and a couple of prostitutes trying to make a decent living. Like all of Rebecca's plays, the issues are complex and the situations have an uncomfortable truth to them.

Bruce puts the truth bluntly for his characters:

You can try with all your might
But you're reminded every night
That you been judged and handed life
Down in Jackson Cage

Join us on Saturday at 3 for a reading of Blue Surge and a discussion with Eclipse company members following the reading.

A few people were interested in our process of choosing each season's playwright - we start with recommendations from company members, audiences and friends, and we have a four-person Artistic Committee that's charged with the task of reading through the works of over a dozen playwrights and narrowing the field to four finalists. Once we've got our final four, we read a play or two from each playwright out loud read all the plays on our own, discuss, argue and vote.

We chose Rebecca Gilman as our 2006 playwright after an informal reading of The Glory of Living - the strength of her language and her boldness as a storyteller are on full display in this dark love story, and we started getting excited about spending the year with Rebecca.

The Glory of Living got everyone excited about Rebecca Gilman when it was first produced at Circle Theatre in Forest Park in 1996. The show, produced just outside Chicago city limits after unsuccessful attempts to find a company in the city, tells the story of 15-year old Lisa, who, along with her husband, seduces, rapes, and murders young women who accept rides from strangers along America's southern highways.  Robert Falls, Artistic Director at the Goodman Theatre, recognized the importance and uniqueness of Rebecca's voice quickly, and started commissioning her to write new works. This relationship resulted in Spinning into Butter, followed by Boy Gets Girl and Blue Surge, and, most recently, her updated retelling of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House.

As we were first reading Rebecca's plays, we started talking about some of the elements we were seeing as being common to her writing; a sense of style or morality or theme that informed all her work. Chris Jones described it well:

As you read the burgeoning Gilman oeuvre, other common themes emerge. She’s fascinated by crime but is determined that her perpetrators’ actions are never seen as isolated from societal forces. She fights objectification but seems to understand its hold on modern consciousness. She’s never crudely polemical; there’s always a sense of life’s ironies and ambiguities.

We've had discussions after all three productions this season where the conversation has turned to the surprising complexity of the issues in the play, and the lack of an offered solution for those issues. The last line of the Jones quote above really gets me - every one of Rebecca's plays is filled with irony and ambiguity, and that means things are frequently too real and too messy to be solved in any satisfying way in two hours.

From that first reading we did of The Glory of Living, we understood that this was a playwright who was telling stories that audiences talk about at bars after the show, on cab rides home from the theatre, over the dinner table two weeks after the play ... They're stories that provoke thought and debate and exploration, and it's been a treat for us as a theatre company to send a full year with them, and to spend as much time as we do talking to audiences about them. 

It was great to have the energy of an audience, and especially an audience unfamiliar with the story - we've had designers and Eclipse company members watching the last few technical rehearsals, but most of the folks last night were seeing this for the first time. This is a tricky play in a lot of ways, and I'm learning that the trickiest element may be the tone. The story starts very much like a romantic comedy - we open on Tony and Theresa meeting for the first time for a blind date. Just like all first dates, (I assume) there are awkward moments, hopeful moments, and a lot of funny moments. As the play goes on, the tone changes dramatically. I don't want to spoil anything, but we've got dramaturgical research about stalking posted up in the lobby for audiences to read, so it shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that the play ultimately becomes something very different than a romantic comedy (although not so different, really - more on that later).

For the audience last night, there was a sense of surprise, and it was interesting to hear some big laughs in the first few scenes, some nervous giggles towards the end of the first act, and a lot of quiet through most of act two. There were some responses we didn't expect, and there are probably some moments that will change, consciously or unconsciously, now that we have a sense of how an audience might react to those moments, but for the most part the responses were what we anticipated and what the play needs.

We'll probably have a larger audience tonight, as we begin our formal previews, and I know we're all excited to have a few more chances to feel that energy before opening night. Preview tickets are cheap ($5 for folks in the theatre industry), so give a call to the box office (773.871.3000) to come out, see the show, and help us build up to a fantastic opening. 

We seek to break “the fourth wall” and establish discussion between those who see theater and those who create it, and the larger implications theater has as a lens for viewing the human condition.

We broke that fourth wall pretty well the other night - most students in the class had read and studied the script and watched a full run through at one of our rehearsals last weekend, and Maren led them and us through a fantastic discussion, some of which I'll try to recap below the fold.

We began with a question about the rehearsal they sat in on - Maren asked us to explain where in the process we were on that day, and what our focus was, and goals were, for that run through. I wrote a few days ago that we weren't ready for an "audience" at the time (which isn't to say we didn't like having the students there; everybody understood that they were there to see a rehearsal, and not a performance, and it was pretty cool as an actor to have the energy of a small group of very interested people in the room at that early point in the process.) - we're still finding our way through the landscape of the play, and we're okay with things not being "right." For myself, these rehearsals are about trying new things and trying to clarify the things that seem to be working. This can take some time, so I'm consciously not worrying about the pace of scenes - we'll connect things together and start picking up speed again soon, but for now I think it's more important to take time and not rush the connections between actors that we need to find and explore.

We talked about a few specific characters - there was a great question about the characters of Linda and Sarah, who never appear on stage but are mentioned several times. One of the students in the class had formed some strong opinions about these characters, and she was curious to know how actors and directors treat offstage characters. We did have some interesting discussions about Linda and Sarah in the first few rehearsals - what they're like, how onstage characters feel about them, etc. - and from those conversations we make choices that allow those characters to be real for all of us. The same goes for Mark (Theresa's ex-boyfriend, who left her to go work in Kuala Lampur), Tony's mom (who made him little pasties for his school lunch as a boy), and so on - anyone who's mentioned in the script is a real person in the world of the play, and it's important and fun to imagine those characters fully, even though the audience is never going to meet them. We saw in Spinning into Butter just how important an unseen character can be to a story.

Students were also curious about the process of revising scripts. They're reading a version of Boy Gets Girl that's slightly different from the one we're producing, and they were interested in the changes that they noticed watching rehearsal. This is a script that's gone through several revisions; we're using what's now the final and official version, revised during a production in London (the class is reading the version that was produced at the Goodman Theatre recently). It's the same story, and most of the script is identical, but there are some cuts and changes which make this a stronger and more focused telling of this story, and we talked about some of those specific changes. One student noticed that CeCe and I both lost some of the backstory of our characters (Detective Madeleine Beck and Mercer Stevens, respectively) in this newer version - of course, we didn't really lose that backstory, we just have to find a way to act it instead of having the opportunity to talk about it. In the earlier version, for example, Mercer explains that he doesn't wear a wedding ring because he has contact dermatitis and wearing a ring gives him a rash. That explanation has now been cut, helping the scene move more quickly and keeping the focus on Theresa - but in my mind, I've still got dermatitis that prevents me from wearing my wedding ring.

Figuring out how all these choices become a part of the work we're doing on stage takes time, and that's the part of the process we were able to share with Maren's class. It was fun to have them in the rehearsal space with us last weekend, and it was really fantastic to join them for a discussion the other night - I told Maren afterwards that I was kind of surprised to find myself disappointed when she stopped the conversation to tell us we had run out of time.

Get Your Own! | View Slideshow

[ed note: I thought I'd be able to post the actual slide show here. Apparently not. Maybe this is why we're seven years behind. I'll keep trying; in the meantime, click on "View Slideshow" above to see the pictures.] 

Check out the page, let me know what you think, and, if you've got a myspace page of your own, be our friend. 

I'm really looking forward to the group discussions following this show.  This is a tough subject to wrap your mind around.  I think that men in the audience particularly will find themselves reflecting on past "unfortunate" situations.  I know that as I've worked through the production during the rehearsal process and seen what women encounter in the great ritual of mate selection, I've been made more and more aware of how aggressive and frankly, unsettling my own behavior has been in a few past events.

Over the course of the run I hope to share.....full disclosure....of these events.  It is my hope that this will in some small way start a more open discourse on these matters.  Some items you may agree with...some may bother you tremendously... some may make you look inside your own past and say "I've been that guy.  I never realized that I was doing that."  I know all three of these have been places I've visited during this process.

I think at the end of the day, I'm a pretty normal person who has ended up in a few unanticipated life situations.  I also think that is normal.  I look forward to chatting with some of you over the next few months.

Gary