Man, it’s been close to two weeks since the last blog post. That’s the longest I’ve gone in between posts since From the Ledge began in October 2007. Yep, it’s been as busy as I expected it to be, if not more so. Being on the road for business is a young person’s game, and folks my age struggle to keep up with all the physical and lifestyle demands it makes. But I’m hanging in there, since the end is quite near, with the Buckeye project officially set to close at the end of August, and everyone can finally heave a sigh of well-deserved relief! On the other hand, with the weekly commute, summer has flown by and I nearly missed one of my regular arts and culture summer events of the past several years – seeing all three new plays being developed at Steppenwolf Theater’s amazing playwriting incubator program, First Look Repertory of New Work. Because of time constraints and admittedly poor planning on my part, I only managed to see two of the three plays this year. I’ve been kicking myself for missing Laura Jacqmin’s sold out Ski Dubai, especially since that play was the last opportunity to see James Vincent Meredith and Cliff Chamberlain before their Broadway debuts in the Superior Donuts transfer opening next month in New York. I thought Laura Eason’s Sex with Strangers, which got a head-scratching (at least on my part) rave from Chris Jones, and Steppenwolf ensemble member Eric Simonson’s Honest, both still needed a significant amount of development, clarification, and tightening. I liked Honest, about a James Frey-like best-selling writer whose memoir seems to be more fiction than fact, a little bit more, since it had surprising narrative twists and communicated its central thesis-what constituted truth and could someone live a life of lies without being morally disturbed by it- more clearly. Although Sex with Strangers felt so contemporary, I thought there were a lot of themes that needed to be sorted out and clarified better – was it primarily about the generational differences in the notion of intimacy? was it about the generational differences in the definition of success? was it about the difference between a traditional writer’s creative process and a blogger’s? was it a play about all of these? and if it was, could the intersections have been tightened and smoothed out more effectively? The plays though were noteworthy in that they both boasted starmaking performances from their male leads – Stephen Louis Grush, whose onstage electricity could provide power for the entire Mid-Atlantic region, was sexy, cocky, vulnerable, and gutsy as the promiscuous twentysomething blogger who fell in love with an older woman in Sex while Erik Hellmann, who I’ve seen mostly play weaker-willed characters in the past, was astounding and utterly believable as Honest’s emotionally disturbed writer who had made lying a way of life, able to shift from charming to unsympathetic in a half beat. I would love to see these guys with Blackbird’s Mattie Hawkinson in a play soon!
Tags: Steppenwolf Theatre
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