One morn­ing, when I was in Chicago, I woke up at 3 AM. It was one of those “crap… now I’ll never get back to sleep” sort of ways of wak­ing up. Since there was no hope for me get­ting back to sleep, I decided to go out to Lin­coln Park and get some sun­rise shots. It was cooooold that morn­ing. I think the tem­per­a­ture was 7 degrees. A few days before there was a crazy ice storm that hit Chicago. I have a bunch in the series but this one is one of my favorites.

The first pro­fes­sional job I had when I got out of grad­u­ate school was at Berke­ley Rep. My friend John gave me this lit­tle girl’s Care Bears charm chain as a joke. It orig­i­nally had a cou­ple of Care Bear charms with space to “col­lect them all”.

This is the only thing that I always have in my dress­ing room when I do a show. It has either a small piece of a cos­tume or the label tag from every pro­duc­tion I’ve done since grad­u­ate school.

I kept the green bear for luck.

I am glad that it worked out that I got to stay here in Chicago this week before head­ing home to New York on Sun­day. I got the chance to see two really great pro­duc­tions of two great Amer­i­can plays.

Who’s Afraid of Vir­ginia Wolf @ Steppenwolf

On Wednes­day I saw the Steppenwolf’s acclaimed pro­duc­tion of Who’s Afraid of Vir­ginia Wolf. This was my first encounter with the famous the­ater com­pany, and it seem like this was the per­fect show to serve as my “first”. I had actu­ally never seen a pro­duc­tion of Who’s Afraid… before. I had seen stu­dents do scenes in class­rooms, and I read it once upon a time, but I never saw a pro­duc­tion or watched the famous film ver­sion. The per­for­mance were so intri­cate, del­i­cate and dev­as­tat­ing. It reminded me what a great play Who’s Afraid… is. If you have a chance to see it — go! It was one of those punch-you-in-your-gut amaz­ing nights of theater.

Lobby Hero @ Redtwist

My friend Meg texted me with an invi­ta­tion to see Lobby Hero a cou­ple of hours before cur­tain. I had been cooped up in the library all day writ­ing and I was des­per­ate to get out in the chilly Chicago night air. I had seen the orig­i­nal pro­duc­tion at Play­wrights Hori­zons (actu­ally the first pub­lic per­for­mance, by pure acci­dent) so I knew the show pretty well. Lobby Hero is one of those shows that gets done by stu­dents all the time. It is full of great younger two-character scenes.

New York has off-off Broad­way, and Chicago has what it calls, “store-front” the­ater. Well, Redti­wst con­fig­ured their space so that the actual door to the build­ing was the main entrance to the stage. Because it takes place in a Lobby, it was a per­fect idea. There are also a hand­ful of scenes that are played on the street, right on  side­walk out­side. The audi­ence watches through the glass while a micro­phone out­side picks up the dia­logue. I usu­ally hate that kind of cute and clever stage trick­ery (like when actors play scenes in the audi­ence) but I really got on board with watch­ing these scenes through glass.

If you can make it … go see it.