Welcome to the New Leaf Theatre blog!  I’m glad you’re here.  This is a place where we’ll keep you up to date on what we’re thinking about and how things are going – and I’ll hope you’ll keep us up to date on your thoughts as well.

The following was printed in the program for The Dining Room and talks about the impetus for our first officially “themed” season.  I hope you’ll let me know what you think, either via e-mail or in comment form.

In putting together our current season, I asked the company to think about what we wanted to say, what themes or ideas were on our minds and that therefore might be things other people in our city were also thinking about and searching for a way to explore.  The thing we kept coming back to – as we often do when thinking about ourselves as a group – was the idea of family.  What does it mean to be a family?  How is that term even being defined in a world so full of changes in the ways we self-identify? 

Since moving away from my “real” family in Nebraska and coming to Chicago almost three years ago, I’ve become more and more fascinated by these questions of family.  Another phenomenon that’s been fascinating me is the idea of the urban family; more and more young people moving to big cities are amassing these families of choice – groups whose ties seem to run deeper than “friendship” to form a support network of the sort many of us received at home, but that some of us are experiencing for the first time. 

We began to talk about The Dining Room as a perfect show to explore these ideas.  In this play we have 18 different chances to explore 18 sets of very different relationships that all nestle under the umbrella of some kind of family.  As we began our exploration, we also realized that this is a memory play that explores those subtle moments – illuminated by hindsight – in which things changed, those points of impact that direct the paths our lives will follow.  This became an even more fascinating idea to me – the idea of family as explored through the lens of memory. 

In the spring, we’ll present the Chicago premiere of another play that explores these themes – Girl in the Goldfish Bowl by Morris Panych.  In the play’s first moments, Iris – a disturbingly precocious 10-year-old – announces that we are about to witness the last few days of her childhood.  Through her memory, we take a look into a family that wants to disintegrate but is held together by something none of them can define. 

Memory isn’t always a reliable source – and family isn’t always a reliable structure.  Colors are brighter or dimmer in our memories of them; events happen in slow motion or more quickly when we look at them in hindsight; maybe our memory shows us what could have happened instead of what did.  Regardless, at the end of things, sometimes our memories are all we have to prove we’ve moved through the world and had an impact. 

We hope you’ll join us in our explorations this season.  If you’d like to talk more about the show or the season, I hope you’ll contact me at Jessica@newleaftheatre.org.