Therefore it’s with mixed emotions that I tell you that New Leaf will be closing when we finish the run of Arcadia.

Endings always bring mixed emotions.

I want to give space for the sadness that this announcement might bring.

I want to be sure this announcement doesn’t overshadow the outstanding work being done on our current production of Arcadia.

I want to embrace the feeling of excitement I have about what comes next for each member of the New Leaf family. Endings are, of course, also beginnings.

I want to assure you that this decision was reached over a long period of time and was not the result of a calamity. We are not bankrupt, we are not imploding or exploding, we hope to work together in the future.

I want to celebrate everything New Leaf has been for anyone who has ever worked with us or seen a show with us. It’s been eleven incredible years of theatre.

That is a lot of feelings to fit into one email, and I won’t be successful in addressing all of them, I know.

Sometimes I talk about New Leaf as if it were another person. A person I can have conversations with. We have meetings and it’s like there are eight of us at the table – seven producing ensemble members and the company, New Leaf, as a whole separate presence. That eighth character has desires, expectations, needs, and (sometimes it seems like) opinions. It insists that we apply for grants, maintain a brand identity, plan next season, seek an expanded audience, and articulate our contribution to the community. We should probably have an active board, too. Phew!

Any theatre company experiences the ongoing tension to balance those necessary company needs against the delicate needs of making a beautiful and effective play on stage. That work is really hard. I don’t mean that as an excuse or answer, but anyone working in a small company will, I’m sure, relate to that.

We’ve decided that Arcadia will be our last effort at striving for that balance in this particular incarnation. Like any play we’ve ever done – if you’re looking for a neat simple answer you won’t find it here. This work is complicated, nuanced, and challenging. New Leaf succeeded at that balancing act for the last eleven years. I am so proud to have been able to be part of that for the time that I was. Like other artists who’ve worked with New Leaf have said before me – I leave this experience a different person than I was when I started it.

You will notice that this is a letter from me. (Hello, Theatre. It’s me, Eleanor.) As we break this news, I wanted to have a chance to talk to you about it, but this is my story of what’s happening here. There are, of course, many facets of any story and I won’t pretend I can summarize them all in one short letter. Everyone involved with the company will have their own story and their own mixed emotions. Some of those stories will come out on our blog over the next few weeks. Some will come out over brunch or beers. If you’d like to talk to us about it, please do.

Thanks for all you’ve given New Leaf over the years. I will see you next time! All the best,

Eleanor Hyde
Managing Director
New Leaf Theatre

P.S. You can read Kris Vire’s conversation with us here.

Sometimes you have to disappear to make a difference. In 1957 a crusading reporter named Amelia “Molly” Zelko vanished in the middle of night from her—and my—hometown of Joliet, Illinois. She would never be seen again, despite interest in her case from the FBI and a Rackets Committee attorney named Robert F. Kennedy.

Joliet in 1957 was living in a Technicolor dream, one slowly eroding from corruption and besotted by rust. Mob bosses and their wives were fixtures of the society pages in the Joliet Herald-News. The old-world values of the Irish, Italian, Polish and Slovenian immigrants were being eaten away by television commercials and a creeping sense of imminent doom that was America’s regularly-scheduled programming. The war in Korea, a war seemingly ignored even while it was being fought, was over: Joe McCarthy was dead and the airwaves were ruled by Milton Berle and Mickey Mouse, but something dangerous was in the air. The wonders of the atomic age had left some of the more hopeless residents shaking in their churches and basements, afraid to come outside and face death. Some turned to drugs. Some tried, foolishly, for love. A few, like Molly Zelko, tried to create a legacy. A Perfect Shade of Skyline Gray is a story about that legacy, a fictional story where all the most unbelievable parts are true: Bobby Kennedy swinging a shovel at a convict in the dirt, the firing of ninety-one employees of the US State Department for “sex perversion,” a woman forcefully occupying a position of power in a time when that made her a target and a threat…all these ludicrous examples of reality are what attracted me to the age-old stories that I heard throughout my youth and during my brief career as a Joliet newspaper columnist. The fantasies were real, and the fears worse than anything you could experience in your tepid little nightmares. An era of heightened romance (weddings in hundred-year-old churches, Frank Sinatra singing Gershwin melodies, Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson watching a deer come up to the window at the end of All That Heaven Allows) died in September 1957 as surely as another era died on June 6, 1968.

Last night we had our first read-through of the play with the inspired and inspiring cast, under the watchful eye of director Ronan Marra and New Leaf Artistic Director Jessica Hutchinson, and it was a revelation. The notion of “critical mass,” of finding the moment where everything changed, that had been the prompt and subject of this year’s Treehouse Series finally hit me with full force, as the impressive actors made these weird and wild characters their own. Paige Smith as heroin-addicted Korea vet Strickland Troy found humor and horror in every line. Amy Katherine Rapp, playing lesbian advice columnist Audrey Popplestone, skipped grimly from secret to secret with a deceptive but alluring innocence. John Zinn, embodying blacklisted ex-cowboy star Jerry Dickens, had a grim twinkle in his eyes and a desperate charisma even in his self-deceptions. Joe McCauley quickly captured the arrogance, intelligence and cadence of future Attorney General Bobby Kennedy. Our captivating ensemble trio of Pat King, John Stovkis and Emily Casey commandingly played dozens of characters, shifting effortlessly from blind French-Canadian newspaper publishers to disfigured jazz singers to hired killers and whipping cult leaders, turning an isolated little world into an epic one. And Lindsay Leopold, stepping into the worn-out heels of Zelko stand-in Margaret “Maggie” Krolyak, threw open every locked door, laughing with a weary voice that tells us her bold, brave and passionate stories that soon will be all that’s left of her after she vanishes in the dark of night.

There are dark places in the world of Skyline Gray, places that not every theatre company is comfortable going. That’s why it’s been anunbelievable blessing to work with New Leaf, the thoughtfulness and enthusiasm of this company has been a boon to creativity at every level: Signal Ensemble Theatre Co-Artistic Director Ronan Marra is an ideal director for this piece, in touch with the dialogue, the music and the spirit at every level, it’s been a dream working with him so far and I hope we have may such opportunities in the future. And talking about the play and its possibilities with Jessica and Josh Sobel has taught me how devoted New Leaf really is to new work. It’s not just lip service, it’s dedication to art and story bordering on religious and for a business like theatre, it’s both refreshing and inspiring. Because if Molly Zelko and Bobby Kennedy have taught me anything, it’s that story is everything…and they should know. They died for theirs.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Mark Mason is a former newspaper columnist from Joliet, Illinois. A graduate of The Theatre School at DePaul University, Mark has had staged readings of his work at A Red Orchid Theatre, Chicago Dramatists and The Den. His play Hurrah for the Next Who Dies, a tragedy about the murder of Chicago Tribune reporter Jake Lingle in 1930, was selected by DePaul as their annual New Playwrights Series production in 2008, where it was directed by former American Theatre Company Artistic Director Damon Kiely. Dracula: A Tragedy, a new adaptation of Bram Stoker’s classic horror novel, premiered at Redtwist Theatre in 2010. He has had his one-acts Make Your Visit as Inconspicuous as Possible and Intangible Assets produced by The Inconvenience, and this April his play Rest for the Weary Spirit (co-written with Ellen Chambers) will premiere in a production by The Smiley Face and the Frown Entertainment Group at the Archway Theatre in Los Angeles.

In Burying Miss America, Jean talks about all the work that her mother’s funeral requires. The text is full of references to the arrangements, the food, the thank you notes. I did my homework, and I had a pretty good idea of Jean’s day before the play starts. Get up, pack snacks and hand wipes and crayons, and probably tissues, get myself dressed, maybe curl my hair, get the kids up and dressed and fed but make sure they don’t get food on their nice clothes and pile them into the car but make sure the sitter is on call to take them home when they get tired and thaw one of the casseroles for them for dinner and of course, start the list of thank you notes that will take up most of tomorrow and the next day. In short, I thought I was ready.

And then came tech.

I like to think of theatre as the epitome of a collaborative art — the acting, writing, direction, design, all working together to tell a story.  We invite the design team to rehearsals so they can see where the show is going and make sure the design world and the acting world all occupy the same place on the planet.  I will admit my own actorly bias here and say that I usually think of this as the design being informed by the rehearsal.  But not anymore.

On the Tuesday of tech week, Jess talks me through the opening moments of the show.  I stand wrapped in Rachel’s pitch-perfect costume,  In the blackout, I walk to Michelle’s dazzling white casket, surrounded by glorious and vibrant flowers.  Nick’s music evokes open plains and empty rooms in my head.  And then Jared’s lights stream through the windows and it hits me hard — like a ton of bricks, like a punch in the gut: THIS is the moment before.  Yes, Jeanie had a busy day, full of all those tasks, but underneath it all this is the current that’s been running since she got the news.  This loud silence, this overflowing emptiness.

When we say New Leaf is a Producing Ensemble, this is what we mean.  We’re telling the story to and with each other in rehearsal so we can tell it to and with you in performance.

And I’ll tell you one more thing: I will hold on to this particular moment before long after we close.

I was walking home from some meeting or rehearsal, fighting the desire to give up and catch the bus, when I realized I was no more than a couple blocks from my first Chicago apartment. About the time I had this thought, my day’s consumption of coffee caught up with me, and using the bathroom as soon as possible became urgently necessary. Without thinking, I wandered in to the familiar coffee shop where, for a dark year or two, I probably spent more time than in any other place in the city – answering emails, playing online poker, starting a theatre company, writing (not really, although I pretended) and uncorking the incredible time-wasting powers of the internet.

I used the bathroom (new automatic soap dispenser – good for them) and after that, after ordering a coffee and pleasing myself by correctly answering the “ten cent discount” trivia question written daily on the blackboard menu, I stood in the middle of the place, looking at the new, artful wall design and gazing at the armada of two-top and four-top tile tables. As I began to remember that I’d sat there to conduct interviews for a certain position on my staff, and over there when I had lunch many years ago with so and so, a question began to nag me – was the feeling I was experiencing good or bad?

We live in an evaluative culture. Our most loved forms of entertainment no longer involve tragedy or comedy, but judgment. On television, a panel of experts/“the rest of the house”/a super-sexy bachelor hands out scores so that one singer/housemate/super-sexy bachelorette goes home, and another returns next week. In sports, our love for the mythology of achievement (he hit the ball a mile!) has, in the last decade, been, if not replaced, consumed by an obsession for the cold statistics and managerial power of controlling our own fantasy teams (he’s averaging 18.4 touches per game!). On the internet, countless websites have risen to fame by offering no more than the opportunity to judge – this girl or that girl, thumbs up or thumbs down, “rate your experience”, this or that.

Some feelings, though, aren’t good or bad. They just are. My play, Burying Miss America, which the astounding New Leaf Theatre opens tonight, is, in a way, about the ambiguity of those kind of emotions. For me, coming home – whether to the house and town in southeast Iowa where I lived the first eighteen years of my life, or to a coffee shop that still carries the ghosts of a previous version of myself – is one of those feelings. Coming home is too good, too incandescent, too joyous and sentimental and hopeful and safe to be bad. And it is, at the same, too anxiety-filled, too claustrophobic, too alien, too distant, too no-longer-me to be good. It is both. It is neither. It just is.

Brian Golden is the playwright behind Burying Miss America and is artistic director of Theatre Seven of Chicago.

Our commitment to playwrights and the development of the next wave of new theatrical work comes to fruition with BURYING MISS AMERICA, but this is only the beginning of something incredibly special. And it continues on with this season’s slate of six new plays, selected to be part of the 2011-2012 Treehouse Readings Series.

This round of Treehouse began with a call for scripts addressing our chosen thematic element: “CRITICAL MASS.” We encouraged writers to explore all of the possibilities and meanings that this phrase held, and we are proud to announce six rousing plays that rose to the challenge, from playwrights inside and outside of Chicago. Here’s what we have coming up this Fall:

We kick off in September with a darkly comic look at the line between faith and fanaticism with D.W. Gregory’s biting play SALVATION ROAD, directed by Sideshow Theatre Company’s Megan Smith. We are thrilled to welcome Ms. Gregory, a much admired and well-travelled playwright based in Washington D.C., to the Treehouse roster as we delve into her troubling yet humorous journey that begs the question: How do you rescue someone who doesn’t want to be saved?

Come October we welcome two new voices to the New Leaf playground: Jessica Hinds and Krista D’Agostino! Ms. Hinds’ soulful play, WHAT DIES INSIDE US WHILE WE LIVE, introduces us to a world run dry, a bleak future Earth presented in a fashion that I am thrilled to say that I have never quite experienced before! Director Krista D’Agostino, a recent Chicago transplant from the great city of Boston, helps explore the choice of whether to face adulthood head-on, or to run away as fast as possible.

November welcomes back a great friend of New Leaf, Emily Dendinger, with her play UNTRAINED IN GEOMETRY, helmed by our very own Artistic Director Jessica Hutchinson. We were all both thrilled for Emily and sad to see her go, as she recently began her MFA in Playwriting at University of Iowa Playwrights Workshop, but Chicago gets her back as we feature her wildly entertaining screwball romantic comedy about fate, farce and fidelity.

With that we wrap up our Fall Treehouse Readings, and begin to prepare for our Spring readings, which include A PERFECT SHADE OF SKYLINE GREY by Mark Mason, RADIO GHOSTS by Greg Romero (last season’s reading DANDELION MOMMA), and STILL LIFE OF A MOVING PICTURE by David Strattan White. (Keep your eyes peeled for more info on each of these fabulous new works!)

But that’s not all! We are days away from announcing the thematic element for our next call for scripts, to be considered for the 2012-2013 Treehouse Readings Series, so stay tuned – same Leaf time, same Leaf place, same Leaf channel.

“While I was waiting for you before, I made this list. All the people that brought food. Or flowers. Or anything. The ordinary, average, worshiped her from all the pageants people. They get a note.”

I’ve gotten to know this person called Jean Russell pretty well over the last few weeks, diving into the words she says, delving in to her life story. What began as painting in broad strokes has evolved into more detailed brushwork, and as we get ready to welcome our first preview audiences on Thursday, I find my mind occupied with the minutia of Jean’s day-to-day world.

Rachel brought in the perfect bag for Jean — big enough to be a “mom” purse, but small enough to be appropriate for a special occasion — and I’ve been contemplating what lives in Jeanie’s purse besides the obvious wallet and keys. A book? Mints? Gum? Tissues? Hand wipes? Snacks for the kids? All of the above.

And the thank you notes – part obligation, part expression of gratitude. I asked Michelle if I could pick out the notes Jean uses, and so I took myself shopping. I found the perfect notes: elegant but not frivolous, sold in bulk quantities because goodness knows Jean has a lot of notes to write and not a lot to spend. And while I was in the stationery aisle, I started looking at sympathy cards. Of course Jean received tons of them, from her mother’s admirers, from all the people in Nebraska’s fourth largest town that knew and loved her. Some of them were lovely – heartfelt and simple, offers of support, expressions of love and concern. And some of them were Just. So. Awful. Saccharine, flowery, simpering eulogies overflowing with gushing praise and bad poetry. And just like that, in the middle of Target, I had a new understanding of what the past few days had been like for Jeanie. She must have opened and read dozens, maybe hundreds of these cards. Some would have made her cry with their sincerity, some would have made her gag with their syrupy sweetness. But all of them would be from people she knew, people reaching for the right words to convey their own feelings of sadness, people trying to connect in the face of unexpected loss.

I know most audience members won’t notice or think about the cards. But now you will. Won’t you?

One of my favorite parts of any design process is the shape search. This typically takes place once the basic storytelling concepts are down, but we’re still looking for the specifics of what the world of the play looks, sounds, and feels like.

The first thing I’m usually thinking about is the basic presence of the set in relation to the story we’re telling and how we’re telling it. Is it looming? Is it sensual? Is it quiet and unassuming? Audacious? Commanding? What role does the environment play in getting this story across to the audience? How do the characters interact with it? How do they feel about it? When asking these questions, I find myself searching for its shape in everything; obviously in my research, but also while I’m commuting, while I’m at work, while I’m watching a movie, or walking around Home Depot. When I’m in this stage, I look at everything to see its shape and line first. I stare at the way the sun hits the bricks on a building on Grand Avenue. I look at bikes, trains, a pile of trash, trees, mailboxes, searching for the shadowy shape I’m looking for. Sometimes I don’t know what it is, but I know I’ll know it when I see it.

Every design is like a puzzle. It’s often like a Nick Bantock puzzle, which takes days and maybe weeks to crack, but the answer is there if you stay with it long enough. I have to push and work at it, and eventually I get so frustrated that I almost give up, and then my mind relaxes, and a large part of the solution suddenly surfaces. A lot of times I’ve found the answer, or the key to the series of rooms that leads to the answer, in completely unexpected places.

I recently visited the architecture exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and as architecture is tough to present in a gallery, what they presented instead was process pieces. This was completely awesome. Crayon sketches by Mies van der Rohe, huge scale models of commercial buildings, sketches of suggestions for the new World Trade Center Memorial building, scribbles and hand-scrawled notes. There was a model of the Mercedes-Benz museum in Stuttgart, Germany, and there were process sketches in which the architect is clearly trying to find the unique shape that the museum eventually takes. There are sketches, paper cutouts, and finally a white dinner plate drawn on with a black marker. The dinner plate captures the curves the architect was looking for. And they hung it on a museum wall.

Lighthousekeeping has been an especially challenging shape search. What is the shape of loss? What is the shape of fear? What is the physical appearance of being completely and suddenly unmoored? What is the shape of love? Which of these shapes do I show, and which do I let the audience find on their own?

When I first read Jeanette Winterson’s Lighthousekeeping, I knew I would read it again. And again. And again.

I read the book in waves and cycles. I reached for it with each major change in my life. I returned to the lighthouse when I needed to cope with isolation, loss, grief, and distance.

As I read and re-read, the book’s characters began to inhabit my mind and unfurl their secrets. The more I read, the more I wanted to know them intimately, first-hand, through a live experience. I wanted to meet them. In other words, I wanted my literary experience to be enriched by performance.

Performance Studies scholar D. Soyini Madison has written that “Performance opens the secrets of a literary text…[and] this is a political enterprise. It involves unearthing the subtext in literature and the unearthing of subtext in experience. But the archeology of unearthing is never neat.”

Through writing plays based in literature, I strive to unearth the secrets that Madison describes. It is not that I want my plays to be messy. Indeed, I want them to be well structured, with very precise language. But I do want them to question core assumptions, to dig up the (sub)text that has been buried by everyday life. I want to tell stories that are open-ended, cross the boundaries of the fourth wall, and insist upon an active, questioning audience.

This is never neat. It is unsettling and demanding, and these very qualities draw me to performance. Theatre requires that I abandon my individual reality and join with others in a shared truth: the world of the play. As audiences and artists, we must agree to a precarious collective, lasting only a few hours, where our assumptions about life can be shaken. In the best theatrical experiences, both audiences and artists leave with questions—about how we interact with others, how we shape our realities, and how we tell our own stories. These questions change us.

When I fall in love with a literary text, as I have fallen in love with Lighthousekeeping, I use performance as a tool to study it. The process changes me too; theatrical adaptation is my lens to clarify the text, therefore I become a playwright. Once the text is embodied, it reveals more about itself and, subsequently, I learn more about myself. This learning process has had a profound impact on the way I see the world. It is my goal that my audiences also gain insight into the literary texts I explore, and into the subtext of their own experiences.

The Fine Arts Building on South Michigan Avenue was established as an artists’ haven in 1885, and housed – among other artistic institutions – the Little Theater of Chicago, by some measures the city’s first storefront theatre. The building is ten stories tall, one of two buildings in Chicago that still employs elevator operators, and alive with the echoes of vocal and instrumental artists, working away in their separate studios.

Working in one of those studios – Malcolm Ruhl’s new rehearsal space at Final Score Music – during the Lighthousekeeping rehearsal has been a gift. Downtown, its location has prepared us for the neighborhood in which we’ll be performing, and the size and feel of the building itself has a lot to say to the scope of the story we’re telling. This physical space has certainly informed our work.

Part of what we’ve always valued about the New Leaf rehearsal process in the LPCC is rehearsing and performing in the same place, a luxury that allows us to bake the show and its life into the walls. During this process, I think the reverse has happened; the walls, steeped as they are in a creative history, have baked themselves into us.

In Lighthousekeeping, a cave is discovered in the mid-1800’s that is lined and framed with fossils. So to, the stories we tell, the records we make of our own lives are framed as our personal fossil records, “cumulative deposits,” the individual images frozen in time that make up our lives.

On Saturday, we took the day to really inhabit our Fine Arts Building home, and see what it had to teach us about waking up a space with so much history living in its walls. Our cast broke into two groups and was given a menu of elements the original 3-act pieces they were to create should contain – things like 15 consecutive seconds of stillness, a moment of everyone looking up, music from an unexpected source. And the best one – the perfect use of space, any space they could access in the building. They were given 30 minutes, and titles for the three acts: The World As It Was, The World As It Is, The World As It Could Be.

The moments the actors created were stunning, beautiful images, the creation of which opened our ensemble’s eyes and minds to wonder about the other people who inhabited these rooms and walked these halls before us. These moments are hard to describe in words – they were pictures that blended into other pictures, made up of benches and clocks and dark hallways and arias. There were staircases and elevators and rewards for each audience’s willingness to take risks in spaces that weren’t comfortable at first.

Excited as we are to move to the DCA space this week, there is something magical, almost mystical about the Fine Arts Building that I’m reluctant to leave behind. My hope is that, like our story suggests, nothing can be left or forgotten, that we carry our fossil caves with us, adding to them, making room for more, still holding to what came before, and letting what we learn in one journey transform our experience of the next.

Synopsis

A classic American coming-of-age tale with a unique hip-hop treatment: domestic suburban life remixed. The Selector, our DJ/Narrator, samples and loops us through the lives of three Midwestern teen rappers who have yet to discover the power of harmony over discord.

About Idris Goodwin
Idris Goodwin is an award-winning playwright, poet and performer who uses hip hop arts to create original genre defying performances. From Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater to Minneapolis’ Pilsbury House Theater to Albuquerque’s Kimo Theater, Goodwin’s innovative work is showcased across the nation. In 2005, the NNPN New Plays Showcase at Stanford featured his play Braising; since then, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Ford Foundation, The Hip Hop Theater Festival and The Illinois Arts Council have supported his writing. He has performed on HBO, The Discovery Channel and garnered praise from The New York Times and National Public Radio. These Are The Breaks, his debut collection of hip hop prose will be widely released in March. Currently, Goodwin is a member of the Playwrights Workshop at the University of Iowa.