Now in its second year, Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s Next Up repertory showcases productions staged by a few newly graduated directors and designers from Northwestern University’s MFA program. You may think of it as a cool-kids-only recital. Or a coming-out gala for theater-world debs. And you may say to yourself, Fine for them. They get to be mentored by high-functioning pros at an important American theater—and, maybe more useful in the short run, pick up a Steppenwolf credit for their resumes. But what’s in it for me?
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Except that in Chicago we’re always seeing shows by people who were in school last month. This is the town where kids go to test their chops after leaving college, whether the college happens to be Northwestern or Podunk Community. And nobody regards the productions those kids put on as anything but professional, unless of course they stink. In a weird way, Next Up may actually devalue the work of its participants by framing that work as the outcome of a training program. In fact, the Next Up directors and designers are no different from hundreds of others who’ve enrolled in the ongoing training program that is Chicago—just, considering the Steppenwolf imprimatur, luckier.
Director Emily Campbell took on a unique formal challenge when she decided to stage Keith Reddin’s Life and Limb. Ever since its 1984 opening at South Coast Repertory, critics have been commenting on the schizoid nature of this play about poor Franklin Clagg, who goes off to fight the Korean War and comes back lacking both his right arm and his optimism. The thing is part love story, part vicious Swiftian satire, and part cracked, postmodern conflation of It’s a Wonderful Life and Dante’s Inferno.
Like South of Settling (and Life and Limb, too, for that matter), The Glass Menagerie is the product of youth. Tennessee Williams was 33 in 1944, when it premiered here in Chicago. But where Schwend’s youth has yielded a script that’s vague at its core, Williams’s drove him to a fierce specificity. In his enthusiasm, he even gave us a narrator, Tom, to make sure we know exactly what he wanted us to see in this “memory play” about the Wingfields, a family of painfully fragile souls trying to weather the Great Depression. The result is stunning in its heart-on-its-sleeve power.
Through 6/24: Tue-Fri 8 PM, Sat 1, 5, and 9 PM, Sun 4 and 8 PM, contact theater for repertory schedule, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Merle Reskin Garage Theatre, 1624 N. Halsted, 312-335-1650, steppenwolf.org, $15-$20.
