Chicago-Steppenwolf Theatre Company presents the world premiere of The Well-Appointed Room by Richard Greenberg, directed by co-founder Terry Kinney and featuring ensemble members Tracy Letts and Amy Morton, with Kate Arrington and Josh Charles. The production, part of Steppenwolf’s 30th season devoted entirely to new work, begins performances on January 12, 2006 in the Steppenwolf Downstairs Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted.
Tony Award-winning playwright Richard Greenberg (Take Me Out, The Violet Hour, The Dazzle and Three Days of Rain) returns to Steppenwolf with this world premiere work. In two distinct moments in time, yet in the same well-appointed room, two different couples struggle to find and keep each other in the midst of their anxious, everyday lives. This wry look at modern relationships contains Greenberg’s trademark wit, compassion and insight.
“Steppenwolf is proud to present, for the fifth time, a play by one of American theater’s most engaged and inquiring playwrights,” notes Steppenwolf artistic director Martha Lavey. “The Well-Appointed Room maintains a deep fascination with the passage of time; with the slippery relationship between event and memory, with the present as an elusive experience shaped, always, by narratives of the past and a projected future.”
In addition to the world premiere of The Well-Appointed Room at Steppenwolf, Richard Greenberg will see a number of his plays produced this year. Both A Naked Girl on the Appian Way and The House in Town debut in New York under the direction of Doug Hughes, who directed Hedda Gabler and The Playboy of the Western World at Steppenwolf. Film stars Julia Roberts and Paul Rudd headline the Broadway debut of Three Days of Rain in the spring of 2006. Outside of New York, Bal Masque premieres at Washington D.C.’s Theater J, while a revival of The American Plan is expected in London’s West End in the fall.
Steppenwolf co-founder Terry Kinney last directed Greenberg’s The Violet Hour at Steppenwolf, as well as the Off-Broadway productions of Beautiful Child and After Ashley. Kinney most recently completed the short film Kubuku Rides (This Is It), a production for Steppenwolf Films.
Ensemble member Tracy Letts recently appeared with ensemble members Amy Morton and Mariann Mayberry in Steppenwolf’s production of Last of the Boys. His Pulitzer Prize-nominated play, Man From Nebraska, first produced at Steppenwolf, receives its West Coast premiere at South Coast Repertory in March.
Ensemble member Amy Morton will direct the world premiere of Don DeLillo’s Love-Lies-Bleeding, featuring ensemble member Martha Lavey in the Upstairs Theatre in May. The production will travel to the Kennedy Center as part of the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays.
Kate Arrington (Greenberg’s The Violet Hour) teamed with Letts in last summer’s The Pain and the Itch. Josh Charles (Four Brothers, Dead Poets Society, TV’s Sports Night) makes his Steppenwolf debut. He was part of the Drama Desk Award-winning ensemble of The Distance From Here which played Off-Broadway.
The designers of The Well-Appointed Room are Robert Brill (set), James Ingalls (lights), Laura Cunningham Bauer (costumes), Robert Milburn and Michael Bodeen (sound) and Sage Marie Carter (projections). Robert F. Satterlee is the stage manager and Michelle Medvin is the assistant stage manager.
Previews for The Well-Appointed Room are January 12-21, 2006. The production opens Sunday, January 22, 2006 at 6:00 p.m., and runs until March 12, 2006. Curtain times are as follows: Tuesday through Sunday at 7:30 p.m., Saturday and Sunday matinees at 3:00 p.m. Wednesday matinees on February 22, March 1 and 8, 2006 at 2:00 p.m. There will be no Sunday evening performances February 26, March 5 and 12, 2006.
Tickets are $20-60. For tickets, visit www.steppenwolf.org or call 312-335-1650.
There will be free post-show discussions offered daily throughout the run.
Committed to the principle of ensemble performance through the collaboration of a company of actors, directors and playwrights, Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s advances the vitality and diversity of American theater by nurturing artists, encouraging repeatable creative relationships, and contributing new works to the national canon. The company, formed in 1976 by a collective of actors, is dedicated to perpetuating an ethic of mutual respect and the development of artists through on-going group work. Steppenwolf has grown into an internationally renowned company of thirty-five artists whose talents include acting, directing, playwriting, filmmaking and textual adaptation.
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