A Steppenwolf Good People event with Sudhir Venkatesh, contributor to the international bestseller Freakonomics, and Artistic Director Martha Lavey.
Synopsis
What does it take to make it to the top? Hard work? Pure luck? A trust fund?
Audiences are diving into these questions nightly at Steppenwolf's hit production of Good People by David Lindsay-Abaire, currently running in our Downstairs Theater. Two days before the 2012 presidential election, we invite you to join us for a deeper conversation about the relationship between class, privilege and success featuring Sudhir Venkatesh, an award-winning author and professor at Columbia University, who will share his insights with Steppenwolf Artistic Director Martha Lavey.
Sudhir Venkatesh
Sudhir Venkatesh has written extensively about American shadow economies and is an award-winning author of three books:
Gang Leader for a Day; Off the Books: the Underground Economy of the Urban Poor; and
The American Project: the Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto. All three of these books focus on Chicago’s urban poor and examine the creative ways people find to survive, including taking the law into their own hands. Venkatesh’s writings and stories have also appeared in
The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, Slate, National Public Radio, This American Life, WIRED, and The Washington Post.
Martha Lavey
Martha Lavey has been an ensemble member since 1993 and has appeared at Steppenwolf Theatre Company in
The March, Middletown, Endgame, Up, Good Boys and True, Love- Lies-Bleeding, Lost Land, I Never Sang for My Father, The House of Lily, Valparaiso, The Memory of Water, The Designated Mourner, Supple in Combat, Time of My Life, A Clockwork Orange, Talking Heads, SLAVS!, Picasso at the Lapin Agile, Ghost in the Machine, A Summer Remembered, Love Letters, Aunt Dan and Lemon and
Savages. Elsewhere in Chicago she has performed at Goodman Theatre, Victory Gardens Theater, Northlight Theatre and Remains Theatre and in New York at the Women’s Project and Productions. She has served on grants panels for the National Endowment for the Arts, Theatre Communications Group (TCG), 3Arts, USA Artists and the City Arts panel of Chicago. Lavey holds a doctorate in Performance Studies from Northwestern University, is a member of the National Advisory Council for the School of Communication at Northwestern and is on the board of TCG. She is a recipient of the Sarah Siddons Award and an Alumni Merit Award and honorary Doctorate of Arts from Northwestern University.