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Ar t ist i c D i re ct o r CHA R L E S N E W E L L
E xe cu t iv e D ir ec t or S T E PH EN J . A LB ER T
Dear Court family, Producing a world premiere is no small undertaking, particularly when the work is adapted from one of the most important novels of the twentieth century: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. The challenges are immense in bringing this work to the stage, including meeting the high expectations of legions of readers in whose imaginations Invisible Man already exists, fully realized. More than a year ago, we received a draft of the Invisible Man adaptation and immediately agreed to explore its potential. Artistic Director Charlie Newell had sought permission to adapt the novel years ago, but Ralph Ellison’s estate was not yet prepared to release the rights. However, in the past few years, playwright and filmmaker Oren Jacoby had gained the estate’s trust and admiration. He was given the license to climb this mountain, equipped with the counsel of John F. Callahan, Ralph Ellison’s friend and literary executor. Director Christopher McElroen, who had also pursued the rights, soon joined him. Chris’s remarkable work founding and leading the Classical Theatre of Harlem was well known. It was an intriguing team. In November 2010, the University of Chicago’s Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture supported a reading of the script at Court Theatre, which confirmed its potential as a theatrical work. We were hooked. The artistic team began to refine the narrative through a series of workshops, sponsored by various universities and cultural organizations including Pace University, New York University, University of North Carolina Wilmington, University of Iowa, the August Wilson Center for African American Culture, and the New York Theatre Workshop. As the expression goes, we are standing on the shoulders of giants, and indeed, this play has benefited from the participation of many artists and scholars. Invisible Man marks the latest installment in Court’s exploration of the history of the African American experience, and we expect this adaption to be performed on stages throughout the nation in the years to come. This production has also enabled us to deepen our relationship with the DuSable Museum of African American History, the site of a new exhibit on Invisible Man; the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture, who will co-sponsor a symposium on Ralph Ellison led by Professor Kenneth Warren in February; our relationship with our community’s high schools, who have joined us in an essay contest; and, hopefully, with you, our audience. This work has also been supported by a generous collection of sponsors and patrons, all willing to underwrite this risk. We are grateful to all. Sincerely,
Charles Newell, Artistic Director
Stephen J. Albert, Executive Director Court Theatre 1
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INVISIBLE MAN WORLD PREMIERE
Adapted for the stage by OREN JACOBY Based on the novel by RALPH ELLISON Directed by CHRISTOPHER McELROEN January 12 - February 19, 2012
Troy Hourie* Scenic Design Jacqueline Firkins* Costume Design John Culbert* Lighting Design Josh Horvath* Sound Design Alex Koch Projection Design
Jocelyn Prince Production Dramaturg Sarah Fornace Fight Choreographer Tammy Mader Choreographer Sara Gammage Production Stage Manager Jonathan Nook Stage Manager
Invisible Man is produced in association with Christopher McElroen Productions. This production is made possible by The Ralph and Fanny Ellison Charitable Trust. Special Thanks to John Callahan, Literary Executor. Additional casting by Laura Stanczyk Casting. The Director and Choreographer are members of the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers, Inc., an independent national labor union. *Denotes a member of the Designers and Scenic Artists are members of United Scenic Artists, I.A.T.S.E. Local USA829, AFL-CIO, CLC. The Stage Managers are members of Actors’ Equity Association, the Union of Professional Actors and Stage Managers in the United States.
Sponsored by Prince Charitable Trusts
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CAST Lance Stuart Baker*............. MC, Emerson Jr., Brother Jack, Ensemble Kimm Beavers..................................Mattie Lou, Old Woman, Ensemble Tracey N. Bonner*................................................. Miss Mary, Ensemble Teagle F. Bougere*............................................................. Invisible Man Chris Boykin.............................................. Tatlock, Sylvester, Ensemble Kenn E. Head*...................Grandfather, Burnside, Yam Man, Ensemble Bill McGough*.........................Jackson, Mr. Norton, Marshall, Ensemble Paul Oakley Stovall*.....................................Trueblood, Ras, Ensemble A.C. Smith*...................... Preacher, Big Halley, Barrellhouse, Ensemble Julia Watt*†. ..................... Stripper, Nurse, Secretary, Emma, Ensemble Understudies: Brandy Brooks, Bethany Carol, Wardell Julius Clark, Steve Schine Fight Captain, Dance Captain
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*Denotes a member of Actors’ Equity Association, the Union of Professional Actors and Stage Managers in the United States.
SETTING Act I: The South
Acts II & III: Harlem
Invisible Man was developed with support from the August Wilson Center; University of Iowa; University of North Carolina Wilmington; New York University; Pace University; Professor Kenneth Warren; Avon Kirkland; the University of Chicago Office of the Provost; the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture at the University of Chicago; Peter Altman; Michael Rogers; Phil Schaap; John Silberman; Gordon Skinner; The Tribeca Film Institute; Joe Urla; and Donn Zaretsky. Cover art for Court Theatre’s production of Invisible Man by Lauren Nassef. Court Theatre performs in the intimate Abelson Auditorium, made possible through a gift from Hope and Lester Abelson. The use of cameras, videotape recorders, or audio recorders by the audience during this performance is strictly prohibited. Please turn off all phones, pagers, and chiming watches. Court Theatre operates under an agreement between the League of Resident Theatres and Actors’ Equity Association, the Union of Professional Actors and Stage Managers in the United States. Productions are made possible, in part, by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency; a City Arts grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events; and the Cultural Outreach Program of the City of Chicago. Court Theatre is a constituent of Theatre Communications Group, the national organization for the American Theatre; the League of Resident Theatres; the Illinois Humanities Council; Arts Alliance Illinois; and the League of Chicago Theatres.
Professional Theatre at
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PLAY NOTES: RALPH ELLISON In a 1960 interview, Ralph Ellison argued that the power of the American writer lies in his or her ability to “tell us about the unity of the American experience beyond all considerations of class, of race, of religion.” His Invisible Man, published in the late 1940s, provided a critical intervention in black literature of the time in both style and substance. A noted departure from the realistic protest literature of his contemporary Richard Wright, Ellison’s novel draws on French Existentialism, African American folklore, and American jazz. Invisible Man ranges wildly in tone, in a jazz-like improvisational style, from realism to surrealism, heartbreaking tragedy to biting satire and slapstick comedy. In his personal life, Ellison’s hobbies were as multifaceted as his literary imagination. He was an accomplished sculptor, jazz trumpeter and composer, and photographer. He also enjoyed fishing, hunting, repairing car engines, and assembling radios and stereo systems. Ellison was born and raised in Oklahoma, to a construction worker father and a domestic servant mother who named him after Ralph Waldo Emerson, the acclaimed nineteenth century American poet and essayist. Critics argue that his upbringing in a frontier state, with no legacy of slavery, influenced his exploration of a fluidity between the races, a seeming impossibility in the rural South and urban North. Like the protagonist in Invisible Man, Ellison attended Tuskegee Institute on scholarship in the 1930s, before moving to NYC and settling in Harlem. His novel introduced a new kind of protagonist to the landscape of African American literature: an educated, self-aware, and complex figure with an expansive, intellectual curiosity. Invisible Man is an allegory for black Americans’ struggle for recognition in a racist, pre-war society. In the midst of the black nationalist and black arts movement, Ellison forced Americans to see race through a different lens via a black everyman character with a universal story. Ellison created a nameless and invisible figure who struggles for identity and to find his place in a chaotic society amid strong forces that seek to pigeonhole him based on racist assumptions about black men. Ellison spent seven years writing Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1952. Invisible Man remains one of the central texts of the American experience. Although Ellison never completed his second novel, he published other highly acclaimed and transformative essays and short stories. After teaching at various universities, including Rutgers and Yale Universities, he became the Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities at New York University in 1970. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1969 and died in 1994 at the age of 80. Biographer Arnold Rampersad, the first scholar to be given complete access to Ellison’s materials, argues that Invisible Man is a landmark work and “as long as race is a problem in America, the book will offer some guide to the minefield of race relations.” His life and legacy lives on today. -Jocelyn Prince, Production Dramaturg Sources: pbs.org, Spark Notes: INVISIBLE MAN by Ralph Ellison, biography.com, npr.org, Ralph Ellison: A Biography by Arnold Rampersad, wikepedia.org Court Theatre 5
PLAY NOTES Still on the Lower Frequencies
Invisible Man at Fifty
by Kenneth Warren
Professor Kenneth Warren wrote this essay in 2002 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Ellison chronicled the painful, sometimes humorous journey of a young southern black man going north to 1930s Harlem at a time when respectable scholars could give due consideration to the possibility of innate black inferiority. The novel thoroughly dismantled such ideas. It succeeded as an enduring and powerful artistic brief on behalf of Negro humanity (Ellison generally used the term Negro even through the 1970s and 1980s), grounded in Ellison’s first-rate artistry and informed by the best aspects of literary modernism. Ellison’s philosophical ambition and political acumen signaled that Negro fiction, and perhaps the Negro himself, had come of age. What made the novel so effective was that it did not plead, cajole, or harangue its audience on behalf of that humanity. Instead, Ellison took his people’s humanity for granted and derived the lineaments of the common human condition from the particulars of Negro experience. The novel’s concluding, and perhaps most memorable, words—“Who know but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?”—were, in reality, its starting point. Yet however much Invisible Man had spoken for me over the years since I’d first read it as a senior in high school, I had not actually heard Ellison speak until earlier this past spring, when scholars and writers gathered at a Washington and Lee University symposium to commemorate Invisible Man’s fiftieth anniversary. During a break, one of the conference organizers played an audiotape of Ellison reading. Largely as the result of having hundreds of pages of his second novel destroyed by a fire, Ellison had recorded himself reading from his incomplete second novel (published posthumously as Juneteenth in 1999), which he obsessively wrote and rewrote for over forty years. Hearing Ellison’s voice caught me off-guard. It was dry and flat, not high, although more of a tenor than a baritone, with a timbre evoking the Oklahoma of Ellison’s youth. Because I was familiar with his life story, the sound of his voice should have come as no surprise. His essays and interviews consistently remind us that he grew up at a time and in a part of the country when the idea of the frontier was still meaningful, especially for blacks attempting to escape the hardships of white supremacy in the South, and for whom Oklahoma promised the freedom of the West. Yet, in part because of Ellison’s considerable skill at rendering the sonorous tones of southern black oratory in his fiction, it was easy to expect him to do vocally what his written words had done so well imaginatively. The difference between expectation and sound brought home to me the incongruity of the way that his own perfectly unremarkable voice had been dramatically amplified, deepened, and nuanced by the novel that had brought us together. Incongruity is a word that Ellison often used to describe his understanding of an American society that sometimes seemed equally committed to democracy and racial hierarchy. If the idea of American equality could somehow accommodate the day-to-day practices of racial prejudice, then negotiating the strange terrain of the American psyche required a complex map with a legend warning the traveler to expect a surprise—and not necessarily a pleasant one—around every corner. Ellison found the pieces of that map in his family history, his encounter with modern American and European literature, his experiences with the American Left at midcentury, and his ongoing appreciation of Negro folk culture. On the upside, grufftalking Negro coal-heavers working in the basement of the Metropolitan Opera could turn out
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PLAY NOTES to be expert in their knowledge of operatic performance, as they do in Ellison’s essay “The Little Man at Chehaw Station,” thus startling the observer schooled in American assumptions about racial difference. On the downside, as Ellison remarked in “The World and the Jug,” his sharp response to socialist editor and critic Irving Howe, the proper tones of one’s white, northern allies on the Left might suddenly deliver words of racial condescension. In fact, so distressed was Ellison by Howe’s pronouncements in “Black Boys and Native Sons” that he claimed to find their implications more alarming than the social order of the state of Mississippi before 1964. This charge might have been hyperbolic, but not by much. What Ellison found most detestable in the social criticism of his era was any assumption that you could know a person simply by knowing how some sociologist might categorize that person. Reality, as Ellison knew by experience, was more fluid and unpredictable than the sociologist assumed. To recognize this truth, all one had to do was listen to the radio. Perhaps no piece of technology was as formative of, or as representative of, Ellison’s political beliefs and cultural optimism as the radio, because of what it had meant to an intelligent, inquisitive, yet economically impoverished, young boy. Inexpensively available, the radio could bring the immense cultural riches of the world, whether Beethoven symphonies or the latest jazz innovation, into the poorest home or community. If whites in Oklahoma City were trying to bring the social order of the plantation to the southwestern frontier, the modern world was undermining their attempt. The radio, Ellison told Richard Stern in a 1961 interview, demonstrated that while it may have been possible to segregate human beings physically, it had always been impossible to restrict absolutely an entire group’s access to culture. Twentiethcentury technology was only making plain what had been a cultural reality since the nation’s founding. Even more personally, as Ellison told Stern, his interest in building crystal radio sets accounted for his first important friendship across the color line—an acquaintance with a white boy who shared Ellison’s passion for radios. Ellison met the youth, whom he knew at the time only by his nickname, Hoolie, while both were scouring the trash for ice cream cartons to use in making radios. Although his friendship with Hoolie was brief because Ellison soon moved away, it was nonetheless “a very meaningful experience” because “it had little to do with the race question as such,” and because it had prompted Ellison “to expect much more of myself and of the world.” As Ellison recalled this encounter, it had been a crucial source for his view of American life as defined by possibility rather than limits. Here was a bit of reality that sociology typically overlooked—a moment between individuals when the color line had hardly mattered. The brief friendship gave Ellison an important glimpse of white humanity behind the mask of race and predisposed him against accepting any of the easy stereotypes about whites or blacks. And yet Ellison’s life and art never presumed that he or any honest American could proceed as if racial stereotypes did not exist. As painful as the racism of the past had been, it was part of us. Many of Ellison’s literary and musical heroes—Mark Twain, Louis Armstrong, William Faulkner—earned his admiration not because they avoided the demeaning masks of racial caricature, but rather because they had recognized the importance of manipulating those masks for ethical ends. In an essay titled “Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity,” Ellison expressed qualified admiration for Faulkner’s willingness “to start with the stereotype, accept it as true, and then seek out the human truth which it hides.” Portraying humanity was an ongoing struggle against what the stereotype represented: those forces that sought to narrow and flatten individuals by compressing them within stock generalizations about group identity. Yet on the other hand, to run away from all aspects of group identity merely because some of them resembled dreaded stereotypes was to find yourself, like the nameless protagonist of Invisible Man, afraid even to order your favorite breakfast because doing so might betray what, if not who, you are. Court Theatre 8
PLAY NOTES
“The Invisible Man” sculpture stands in front of the longtime home of acclaimed author Ralph Ellison in New York’s West Harlem Thursday, May 1, 2003. (AP Photo/Frank Franklin II)
What then did it mean to be a Negro? The question resounded throughout Ellison’s novel and his essays, gathering depth and volume because Ellison saw that in answering it he had to answer the same questions about American and human identity. In fact, because the Negro represented the intersection of the highest hope for human freedom and the most salient example of this freedom’s absence, resolving the riddle of humanity, of America, and of oneself required resolving the question of black identity in its many guises. And to see these guises for what they were, Ellison dedicated himself to canvassing the range of cultural expression from Negro folk and blues tunes to the great works of modernist literature for the truths they held. At either end of this spectrum were great works of art—great because they always acknowledged the constraint of the pattern before making it possible for the human voice or the democratic word to escape, if only by a hair’s breadth, the confines of the pattern. Such an interplay of constraint and escape defines the narrative movement of Invisible Man. The novel’s shape has often been described as circular, perhaps even dialectical, although some scholars demur at the latter term because of Ellison’s well-known dissatisfactions with the American Communist party. These dissatisfactions, which were long in evidence before the novel’s publication, emerge in Invisible Man as the cold-hearted willingness of Brother Jack and the Brotherhood to sacrifice lives in Harlem for the presumed greater good of the party. The promise of brotherhood turned out to be no more noble than the promise of success offered by Mr. Bledsoe, the unscrupulous president of the college from which the protagonist gets expelled. In moving from southern black cronyism to New York scientific historicism, all the Invisible Man appears to have done is trace a circle. Yet it would be a
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PLAY NOTES mistake to see Ellison’s encounter with the American Left in the thirties and forties as a mere dalliance. Nor was it a headlong dive into uncritical advocacy that would later require an ignominious scramble back to shore. The true picture, like most of the important facts about Ellison, reveals not quite one thing and not quite the other, and what lies between tells us a lot about Ellison and the shape of the one triumphant novel he did manage to complete. As Lawrence Patrick Jackson’s biography, Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius, confirms, in the summer of 1936, Ellison, much like the protagonist of his novel, arrived in New York City planning to earn enough to pay for another year at Tuskegee Institute, where he had been enrolled for three years as a music student. His ambitions to become a performer and composer, however, had been shaken by some less-than-stellar accomplishments in key classes, the uncertain status of the music program at Tuskegee, and a growing interest in literature, kindled in part by the various classes he had taken with Morteza Sprague, chair of the Tuskegee Institute’s English department. The difficulty of finding a decent-paying job in depression-era New York City—and the headiness of meeting, and impressing, Langston Hughes on only his second day in the city—further determined Ellison’s taking a course into left-wing literary circles that would cause him to abandon his previous career plans in favor of a life as a critic and writer of fiction. This new direction was initially enabled by the New York City Federal Writers’ Project, but was highlighted by an intense relationship with Richard Wright, who, at the time of their initial meeting, was still a few years away from publishing Native Son. According to Jackson, Marxism and literary criticism were so closely linked for Ellison during these early years of Ellison’s apprenticeship that he remained “loyal to the New Masses and the Communist-backed League [of American Writers] into the 1940s.” In spite of the importance of these early left-wing intellectual connections for Ellison, their significance has often been downplayed. In fact, the largely negative cast of Ellison’s experiences on the Left derives from two sources: the depiction of the Brotherhood in Invisible Man and Ellison’s criticisms of Wright in his famous response to Howe’s “Black Boys and Native Sons.” Of the two, the response to Howe was the most definitive. Howe’s essay had taken issue with the attack James Baldwin, in articles like “Everybody’s Protest Novel” (1949) and “Many Thousands Gone” (1951), had mounted against Wright’s portrayal of black humanity as overly sociological. Wright’s novel, Baldwin charged, had merely presented a version of the Negro “as a social and not a personal or a human problem” defined by “statistics, slums, rapes, injustices, [and] remote violence.” Wright had failed, according to Baldwin, on both the political and aesthetic planes. In countering Baldwin, Howe acknowledged some of Wright’s artistic shortcomings but insisted that while the narrowness, anger, and “militancy” of Native Son may have been aesthetic problems, they were nonetheless true to the experience of the Negro. Howe argued that if the more artistic novels by Ellison and Baldwin could afford to be more “American” and less racial, it was only because Wright had come before them and directly taken on the demons of Negro experience. As a result, he concluded, the younger writers had been freed to take on race more obliquely or perhaps not at all. Howe’s remarks were aimed primarily at Baldwin. The appearance of Ellison and Invisible Man was necessary only to substantiate the clash-of-generations cast Howe had given to his argument. Even so, Ellison’s secondary role in Howe’s essay did not deter him from seizing the occasion to openly challenge Howe’s judgment. In “The World and the Jug,” Ellison offered definitive, if not exactly new, statements on the Negro’s undeniable connection to society as a whole, the responsibility of the novelist to be first and foremost an artist, his own place in the lineage of Western literature, the failure of liberal social science when it came to the Negro, and the inadequacy of Marxism as a tool for understanding the reality of Negro life. In making the final point, Ellison lamented, “How awful that Wright found the facile answers of Marxism before he learned to use literature as a means for discovering the forms of American Negro humanity.”
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PLAY NOTES The clear implication was that for Ellison the sequence of events had been just the reverse, with the younger man enjoying the advantage of having known American Negro humanity before engaging Marxism. For Ellison, a childhood in which he recalls himself and his playmates aspiring to be Renaissance men was an effective inoculation against doctrinaire ideologues. Yet we must consider that Ellison’s mother, Ida, to whom he dedicated Invisible Man, was a socialist who supported Eugene Debs. She was also not at all shy in conveying her political views to her son. This being the case, the line between representing Negro humanity and deploying leftist social critique is not so easily asserted—certainly not in Ellison’s novel, the harsh portrait of Brother Jack notwithstanding. The eviction scene that brings Invisible Man’s protagonist to the attention of the Brotherhood is a case in point. The sight of an old woman crying while the meager possessions she shares with her husband are ignominiously dumped in the street triggers in the protagonist an intensely, almost embarrassingly, personal response. He admits, “The old woman’s sobbing was having a strange effect upon me—as when a child, seeing the tears of its parents, is moved by both fear and sympathy to cry. I turned away, feeling myself being drawn to the old couple by a warm, dark, rising whirlpool of emotion which I feared.” The bits we know of the young man’s past, a personal history that Ellison makes available to his reader only in glimpses, does not explain fully the intensity of his reaction. In fact, for a time his reaction puzzles him almost as much as it does the rest of us, for, throughout the novel, the meaning of the Invisible Man’s past confronts him as a riddle. In this case, however, the depth of emotion welling up from this scene of dispossession might have found its source not only in the character’s past life but also in Ellison’s own life, which in the years after his father’s death (Ellison was just three years old) became, as Jackson describes it, a “ragtag pilgrimage . . . from house to house across Oklahoma City.” Jackson records no evictions, but the frequent carting in and out of one’s worldly possessions could only make apparent how little the Ellison family had—how little, after all her hopes and aspirations, Ida Ellison had. Likewise, the novel’s catalog of the old couple’s possessions strewn in the street—the knocking bones, High John the Conqueror nuggets, a tintype of Abraham Lincoln, and cracked china—were themselves evidence of Negro dispossession. Ellison, as Jackson observes, generally maintained a reticence about his childhood poverty, but his silence makes sense: he was more interested in highlighting the possibilities and not the limitations of straitened circumstances. Against this code of Hemingwayesque grace under pressure, the eviction scene permitted an outpouring of feeling that reveals the anguish of a boy sympathetic and helpless before his mother’s struggles with day-to-day drudgery. The narrator—and perhaps Ellison himself—wonders, “And why did I, standing in the crowd, see like a vision my mother hanging wash on a cold windy day, so cold that the warm clothes froze even before the vapor thinned and hung stiff on the line, and her hands white and raw in the skirt-swirling wind and her gray head bare to the darkened sky. . . .” The demands of the scene and its recollection require giving rein to individual feeling while not succumbing completely to it. And the partial control that the protagonist gains in the scene is effected through a Marxism-laced dialogue on dispossession. Speaking of the eighty-seven-year-old husband, who has told the crowd that he has worked all his life as a day laborer, the narrator asks, “Where has all his labor gone? Is he lying?” The crowd then responds to his call like a Baptist-church congregation offering up a profane rejoinder (“Hell, no he ain’t lying”) instead of the obligatory “Amen.” The narrator then repeats his question—“Then where did his labor go?”—before continuing his impromptu speech, never quite certain of what he’s trying to do, but inspiring the crowd nonetheless to protest the injustice of the eviction by moving the old couple’s possessions back inside. The strangers appear willing to see themselves and their own mothers and fathers in the evicted elderly couple. It is a response that seems to answer in the affirmative the question the Invisible Man asks himself later at the funeral for Tod Clifton: “could politics ever be an expression of love?”
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PLAY NOTES What Marxism provided Ellison in the years of his apprenticeship was not merely conceptual rigidity or easy answers, but another way of fulfilling his intent to connect individuals to the larger society, the past, and the present, without sacrificing their individuality. Ellison and others grew keenly disappointed with the American Left because the promise of finding a politics that might be an expression of love had once seemed so real. Thus, the true virtue—aesthetic and ethical, even if not quite political—of the path that Ellison took with him from the late 1930s and early 1940s is measured by his capacity to transform the inevitability of disappointment into a saving grace. At the very least, to be disappointed is to have hoped in the first place. If anything makes the protagonist of Invisible Man better than the host of characters around him, it is his refusal to give up the possibility of hope. From a distance of fifty years, the voice of democratic hope that still speaks from Invisible Man, especially from the novel’s epilogue, can sometimes sound tinny or naively patriotic. When I teach the novel and focus my students’ attention on the narrator’s concluding assertions that we must not only “affirm the principle on which the country was built,” but also take “responsibility” even for those who had violated the principle in pursuing inequality, I can see the impatience in their eyes. To them the words seem to keep the burden where it has always been—on those who have been the most victimized by this nation’s failures. Even though the world inhabited by my students offers greater possibilities than those that greeted Ellison’s southern migrant in the 1930s, they often respond to it as if the amplitude of human potential has been diminished rather than expanded. Perhaps to some degree they are right. Once upon a time, a youthful Ellison and his compatriots felt no compunction in identifying themselves as Renaissance men and letting others deal with the incongruity of their gesture. If you were taken aback by the idea of a young black boy in Oklahoma envisioning himself as a composer of classical music, the problem was yours, not his. By contrast, recent terms of group identity that specify generational, sexual, racial, or other categories arguably constrict rather than multiply choices. This is not because they signal an unwillingness on the part of those who identify themselves in such terms to join broader movements; young people today seem as politically active as ever. Rather, these categories of identity suggest an inclination for individuals to make broader identifications only in terms of acceptable demographic intersections—not, say, as a Renaissance man, but as a straight, black, southwestern Renaissance man. If something is perhaps gained by way of precision, something also seems lost. Ellison’s novel resists such pressure. Not merely adding new words, but making old words new was part of his aesthetic and political agenda. The title of his novel is a case in point: at the time of its publication the words invisible man were more likely to bring to mind H. G. Wells and science fiction than the plight of the Negro in America. Ellison’s success can be measured by the fact that it is his book, not Wells’s The Invisible Man, that modern literary types think about when they think about invisibility. In his 1981 preface to a reissue of the novel, Ellison recalled his attempt “to create forms in which acts, scenes and characters speak for more than their immediate selves.” Why else write a novel? Why read one? Invisible Man is hardly the last word on the American experience, and today it is no longer clear that the novel as a medium can fulfill the democratic hopes that Ellison pinned to his own as he launched it into the world fifty years ago. It is good from time to time to be reminded that things were not always this way. To reread Invisible Man on its fiftieth anniversary is to feel how much the contemporary American novel once mattered to the way we understood ourselves. If it doesn’t quite speak for us as well as it once did, it reminds us how hard we must work to find the words and forms that do. Copyright © 2002 The Common Review. Reprinted with permission from the author. KENNETH WARREN is a professor of English Language and Literature and the Deputy Provost for Research and Minority Issues at the University of Chicago. He specializes in African-American literature and 19th- and 20th-century American literature and critical theory. Warren is the author of So Black and Blue: Ralph Ellison and the Occasion of Criticism and Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism. He has been at University of Chicago since 1991. Court Theatre 15
PLAY NOTES
Invisible Man Essay Contest Last fall, Court Theatre invited local high school students to submit essays responding to the themes of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Essay prompts were provided by University of Chicago Professor Ken Warren. Out of many submissions, we chose the following essay by Breianna Bonds from Kenwood Academy to be the winner. Congratulations, Breianna!
TIMELESS STRUGGLES In the novel Invisible Man, the struggles faced by the narrator are timeless. With the repetition of events, Ralph Ellison illustrates that, no matter what setting or time period, citizens who are considered minorities face the same challenges. It is painfully clear that generations, geographical settings, and the origin of certain problems—all of which are presented in the novel, and all of which are relevant in today’s society—do not restrict the problem of minorities being treated as second class citizens from recurring. One main element illustrated in the novel was the notion of how the struggles are timeless. The advice of the narrator’s grandfather—“…Live with your head in the lion’s mouth. I want you to overcome ‘em with yeses, undermine ‘em with grins, agree ‘em to death and destruction, let ‘em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open”—is proven correct generations later (Ellison, 16). The relevance of this advice is that it symbolizes how to conquer the adversities that minorities, especially those of the African American culture, faced in times close to slavery and in times when racism was supposedly over. The notion of history repeating itself comes about, and that when times change hardships tend to be parallel. As George Orwell states in the work 1984, “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past” (Orwell, 35). This statement ultimately means that the fate of the future was determined in the past. The hope of ending struggles for black Americans ended generations ago. Court Theatre 16
PLAY NOTES Another factor that does not eliminate sufferings for African Americans is their physical geographical setting. In the novel, the narrator begins his journey in the American South and ends it in a northern state. This instance evokes the notion that the setting has nothing to do with facing struggles. Black Americans around the nation are facing the same problem in today’s society, being undermined by other cultures. Thus, the struggles that the narrator faced were not specific to his environment, but these struggles persist everywhere, and this concept is relevant today. Lastly, the origins of problems do not restrict them from occurring in different times, places, or situations. Recall the happening in the epilogue, when the narrator is reunited with Mr. Norton. He states, “…seeing him made all the old life live in me…” (Ellison, pg. 577) This is a symbolic example of how struggles do not stay put in their beginnings. This also represents how adversity seems to stay with black Americans, Mr. Norton symbolizing the struggle and the narrator the black American. This highlights how the struggles the narrator faced did not stay within his era. The struggles of black Americans are not completely eliminated. Not only are the struggles faced by the narrator in Invisible Man non-specific to his era or his environment, they also show the larger scheme of how these same struggles are pervasive in today’s society. The same adversities recur in new generations and in different geographical settings, and the origin of that adversity will never be the place where it is terminated. —Breianna Bonds, Kenwood Academy Works Cited Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage International, 1995. Orwell, George. 1984: A Novel. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949. Second place: Brandii Hill, Kenwood Academy Third place: Kendale Johnson, Kenwood Academy Special Thanks to ... Alphawood Foundation Cultural Outreach Program, City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events Polk Bros. Foundation Professor Kenneth Warren, University of Chicago Hyde Park Chamber of Commerce, Wallace Goode, Executive Direcortor And the following members who donated prizes: Hyde Park Chamber of Commerce Alian’s Restaurant pH7 Interactive Seven Ten Lounge & Lanes Hyde Park Print Lounge Chaturanga Holistic Fitness Court Theatre 17
PROFILES LANCE STUART BAKER (MC, Emerson Jr., Brother Jack, Ensemble) is in his twelfth production at Court Theatre, having appeared in Thyestes, Travesties, The Importance of Being Earnest, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Guys and Dolls, Cymbeline, Pericles, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Piano, and The Invention of Love. He recently received a Jeff nomination for his performance as Charlie in Speed-The-Plow at American Theater Company. Other recent credits include Becky Shaw at A Red Orchid Theatre (where he is an ensemble member), Lookingglass Theatre Company’s production of Around the World in 80 Days at Kansas City Repertory Theatre, Amadeus at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, and Mauritius at Northlight Theatre. Film credits include Unsettled, Public Enemies, The Express, and Road to Perdition. KIMM BEAVERS (Mattie Lou, Old Woman, Ensemble) is honored to be making her Court Theatre debut. She studied theater at Clark Atlanta University and was last seen in eta Creative Arts Foundation’s The Trip (BTA Award–Best Ensemble). Film Credits: Lost Ones, Molly’s Gift, and Love Shorts. Voiceover/television: Sprint, Coca-Cola, Whirlpool, Walgreens, and JCPenney. As a poet, Kimm performed at Clear Channel’s Big Jam Slow Jam, opened for Sonia Sanchez, produced the spoken word album Prose & Cons of a Love Affair, and the chat book A Peace of My Soul. Always excited to share the stage with great performers, Kimm believes the best way to grow is to surround yourself with people to learn from and evolve with. TRACEY N. BONNER (Miss Mary, Ensemble) is honored to be returning to the Court Theatre stage. Her theatre credits include Off Broadway: Home (Signature Theatre Company); Regional: Radio Golf (Virginia Stage Company), Jitney (The Alliance Theatre), Home (Madison Repertory Theatre); Chicago: Jackie and Me (Chicago Children’s Theatre), Home (Court Theatre), Brothers of the Dust, The Talented Tenth, and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (BTA Award–Best Play, Congo Square Theatre Company), How the Kanye’ West Was Won and Six Degrees of Reparation (Second City). She holds an MFA from The Theatre School at DePaul University and is an ensemble member of Congo Square Theatre Company. TEAGLE F. BOUGERE (Invisible Man) Broadway: A Raisin In The Sun (Asagai); The Tempest (Caliban). Selected OffBroadway: Macbeth, Henry V, Timon of Athens, Antony & Cleopatra directed by Vanessa Redgrave, and Space written and directed by Tina Landau (The New York Shakespeare Festival Public Theater); Wings and A Soldier’s Play (Second Stage Theater); A Fair Country (Lincoln Center Theater); and Last Dance For Sybil with Ruby Dee (New Federal Theater). Selected regional: Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (Loomis) and Blue Door, both directed by Delroy Lindo (Berkeley Repertory Theater); The Good Negro (Goodman); Of Mice and Men (Seattle Repertory); Gee’s Bend (Hartford Stage); Blue/Orange (The Old Globe Theater, San Diego); and Othello with Patrick Stewart (Shakespeare Theater, Washington D.C.). As a Company Member for five seasons at Arena Stage, Washington D.C, he appeared in over thirty productions. Film: Hill and Gully (spring 2013), A Night At The Museum, The Imposters, The Pelican Brief, Two Weeks Notice, and What the Deaf Man Heard. Television: A Gifted Man, Conviction, Cosby, The Job, Third Watch, Law and Order (seven episodes), and Murder In Black and White. Court Theatre 18
Court Theatre thanks its generous sponsors for bringing the worldpremiere production of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man to life:
Professio
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Prince Charitable Trusts
The University of Chicago Office of the Provost The University of Chicago Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture Court Theatre 19
PROFILES CHRIS BOYKIN (Tatlock, Sylvester, Ensemble, U/S Invisible Man) is excited to be walking the boards at Court Theatre for a second time this season, after playing Slang Talk Man and Joe in Spunk. A recent graduate from the Master of Fine Arts/Acting program at The Theatre School of DePaul University, Chris would like to give thanks and love to Professor Katz, Ed, Unc, Dad, Ma, and M, for everything. Represented by Marisa Paonessa at Paonessa Talent Agency. KENN E. HEAD (Grandfather, Burnside, Yam Man, Ensemble) is proud to be returning to Court Theatre after previously being seen in Spunk. A veteran actor, he is a familiar face on many Chicago stages, having appeared in Romeo and Juliet (Chicago Shakespeare Theater), The Lost Boys of Sudan (Victory Gardens Theater), The Overwhelming (Next Theater), Seven Guitars (Congo Square–Jeff Awards for Best Ensemble and Best Play), as well as productions at Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Goodman Theatre, American Theater Company, and Yale Repertory Theatre. His television credits include ER, Early Edition, and various commercials. BILL MCGOUGH (Jackson, Mr. Norton, Marshall, Ensemble) returns to Court Theatre where he was last seen in The Importance of Being Earnest. He most recently appeared in The Front Page (Jeff Nomination–Ensemble) and The Farnsworth Invention (Jeff Award–Ensemble) at TimeLine Theatre Company. He has performed with The Hypocrites, Next Theatre Company, Writers’ Theatre, Cleveland Play House, Collaboraction, Goodman Theatre, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Raven Theatre, and many others. He was nominated for a Jefferson citation for his performance as Willy Loman in Sean Graney’s production of Death of a Salesman. Television appearances include The Chicago Code and Shameless. PAUL OAKLEY STOVALL (Trueblood, Ras, Ensemble) is thrilled to be back at Court Theatre, where he has appeared in The Little Foxes, La Bete, The Mystery Cycle, Frida: The Last Portrait, and Pantomime. Goodman Theatre: Play On! (Jeff nomination), The Odyssey, Black Star Line, Drowning Crow, Journey to the West, Good Person of Setzuan, and Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. Steppenwolf Arts Exchange: Words on Fire. National tours: Rent and Once on This Island. International: Otonari No Dasso-Hei (Tokyo–world premiere.) New York: Dessa Rose (Lincoln Center–world premiere). Film: Shortbus and The Company. As a playwright, his musical Clear has been seen in NYC at Dixon Place, at the Eugene O’Neill National Music Theatre Conference, and at About Face Theatre, where he is an artistic associate. He is a resident writer at Dog and Pony Theatre Company, where his plays Ape and As Much As You Can premiered, the latter also staged at L.A.’s Celebration Theatre. This June, his play Immediate Family will premiere at the Goodman Theatre. For the past three years, Mr. Stovall has proudly served as an Advance Associate for the Obama administration. He is making his solo debut at Pritzker Pavilion’s Cabaret with a View on March 12. A.C. SMITH (Preacher, Big Halley, Barrellhouse, Ensemble) is always and forever grateful to be back at Court Theatre. This production marks his fifth show with this wonderful company— Fences (Jeff Award–Actor in a Principal Role), The First Breeze of Summer, The Piano Lesson, and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Smith, a Chicago native, has performed in many theaters here, including Victory Gardens Theatre, Timeline Theatre Company, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Goodman Theatre, Chicago Center for the Performing Arts, Illinois Theatre Center, Court Theatre 20
PROFILES Second City, and Chicago Shakespeare Theater. Smith has also performed in many regional theatres all across the country. When not in Chicago, he can often be seen performing at the St. Louis Black Repertory Company, where he has been a member for over seventeen years, and is a nine-time Woody King Jr. Award winner. God bless. JULIA WATT (Stripper, Nurse, Secretary, Emma, Ensemble) is honored to be a part of Invisible Man at Court Theatre. Regional credits include The Master Builder, Othello, Love’s Labour’s Lost (A Noise Within, Los Angeles); The Taming of the Shrew, Titus Andronicus, As You Like It, Noises Off, Beauty and the Beast (Alabama Shakespeare Festival); The Tempest, How to Succeed in Business (PCPA Theaterfest, CA). Julia is a founding member of The American Vicarious, a Brooklyn based company whose inaugural production, Living in Exile, premiered at the Public Theater’s 2011 Under the Radar Festival. Upcoming film: Gertrude Stein’s Brewsie and Willie. BA, University of Southern California; MFA, Alabama Shakespeare Festival. CHRISTOPHER McELROEN (Director) is a New York-based producer and director. He cofounded the Classical Theatre of Harlem and served as the organization’s Executive Director from 1999–2009, where he produced forty-one productions yielding 18 Audelco Awards, 6 Obie Awards, 2 Lucille Lortel Awards, a Drama Desk Award, and CTH being named “1 of 8 theatres in America to Watch” by the Drama League. Christopher has directed over thirty professional productions, including four world premieres and The Blacks: A Clown Show, which received four 2003 Obie Awards and was named one of the ten best Off-Broadway productions of 2003 by The New York Times. Alongside visual artist Paul Chan and Creative Time, Christopher co-produced and directed Waiting for Godot in New Orleans, a community development through the arts initiative that staged Waiting for Godot outdoors in the Lower Ninth Ward and Gentilly communities of post-Katrina New Orleans. The New York Times listed the project as one of the top ten national art events of 2007, and the archives from the production have been acquired into the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art. Christopher has directed or guest lectured at Stanford University, Duke University, Purdue University, New York University, Dartmouth College, The Contemporary Arts Center Boston, The Walker Arts Center, and The Museum of Modern Art, among others. His work has been recognized with the American Theatre Wing Award (Outstanding Artistic Achievement), Drama Desk Award (Artistic Achievement), Edwin Booth Award (Outstanding Contribution to NYC Theater), Lucille Lortel Award (Outstanding Body of Work), and two Obie Awards (Sustained Achievement and Excellence in Theatre). OREN JACOBY (Adaptor) Theater, Director: Theater for the New City, Westbeth Theater, and Williamstown Theater Festival. Dramaturg: Trinity Rep and Dallas Theater Center. Film/TV, Director/Producer/Screenwriter: Sister Rose’s Passion, (Oscar nominee–Best Documentary Short Film, winner–Tribeca Film Festival, HBO), Constantine’s Sword with James Carroll (First Run Features); Lafayette: The Lost Hero (PBS); Topdog Diaries with Suzan-Lori Parks, Don Cheadle, Jeffrey Wright; Shakespeare Sessions with John Barton, Kevin Kline, Charles Dutton; Sam Shepard: Stalking Himself with Ethan Hawke, Ed Harris; the PBS series The Irish in America with Jason Robards, Clair Bloom; Swingin’ with Duke; Benny Goodman Adventures in the Kingdom of Swing; The Beatles Revolution (ABC); and 3 films for the BBC series The Second Russian Revolution, winner of the Dupont/Columbia Gold Baton for Best Documentary Series. He is a graduate of Brown University and the Directing Program of the Yale School of Drama and lives with his wife and daughter in New York City. RALPH ELLISON (Author, 1914–1994) was an American novelist, literary critic, scholar, and writer. Ellison is best known for his novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953. He also wrote two collections of essays, Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986). In contrast to his contemporaries such as Richard Wright and James Baldwin, Ellison created characters that are dispassionate, educated, articulate, and self-aware. His Court Theatre 21
PROFILES awards and distinctions include the Presidential Medal of Freedom, being made a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France, election to The American Academy of Arts and Letters, the dedication of the Ralph Waldo Ellison Library in his hometown of Oklahoma City, New York City College’s Langston Hughes Medal, the National Medal of Arts, and a special achievement award from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. After his death, more manuscripts were discovered in his home, resulting in the publication of Flying Home and Other Stories in 1996. In 1999, five years after his death, Ellison’s second novel, Juneteenth, was published. It was a 368-page condensation of more than 2000 pages written over a period of forty years. All the manuscripts of this incomplete novel were published collectively in 2010 under the title Three Days Before the Shooting. TROY HOURIE (Scenic Design) has designed over 275 productions for various off-Broadway, regional, and opera companies across the USA; including New Victory Theater, New York Theatre Workshop, Cherry Lane Theatre, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Classical Theatre of Harlem (resident designer for 22 productions), Epic Theatre Ensemble, Juilliard, Guthrie Theater, Bay Street Theatre, Westport Country Playhouse, New York Stage and Film, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Berkshire Theatre Festival, Syracuse Stage, Studio Arena Theatre, Geva Theatre, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Pioneer Theatre, and Sarasota Opera. Awards include: 2007 Henry Hewes Nomination, 2005 Audelco Award and six nominations, 2003 Drama Desk Nomination, and 2005 Ford Foundation Artist Grant. Troy’s design for Waiting for Godot was selected to represent the United States in an exhibition “From the Edge” in the Prague Quadrennial 2011. He is currently an MA Scenography candidate at Central School of Speech and Drama. JOHN CULBERT (Lighting Design) recently designed Court Theatre’s productions of The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, The Illusion (for which he received a Joseph Jefferson award), The Year of Magical Thinking, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and Caroline, or Change, Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s Romeo and Juliet, Timeline Theatre Company’s The Farnsworth Invention (he is a Timeline Associate Artist), Northlight Theatre’s Civil War Christmas, and Lyric Opera of Chicago’s Regina. He also designed Lookingglass Theatre’s Argonautika, Goodman Theatre’s Rock ‘n’ Roll and Mirror of the Invisible World, and Long Wharf Theatre’s Hughie. He has designed productions for the Singapore Repertory Theatre, Opera National du Rhin, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, McCarter Theatre, and the Shakespeare Theatre. He serves as the dean of The Theatre School at DePaul University. JACQUELINE FIRKINS (Costume Design) is pleased to return for her seventh season at Court Theatre. She also designed costumes for last season’s production of Porgy and Bess. Design work includes: sets and/or costumes for Victory Gardens Theater, TimeLine Theatre Company, House Theatre of Chicago, Marin Theatre Company, Hartford Stage, Dallas Theater Center, Portland Center Stage, Goodman Theatre, Shakespeare Festival of St. Louis, Idaho Shakespeare Festival, Westport Playhouse, Shakespeare & Company, Shakespeare Festival of Tulane, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Yale Repertory Theater, New Jersey Shakespeare Festival, Brave New Repertory, About Face Theatre, Northlight Theatre, Yale School of Drama, and Dorset Theatre Festival. Jacqueline is a recipient of a 2001 Princess Grace Award and heads the design program at Loyola University Chicago. JOSH HORVATH (Sound Design) Court: Spunk, Porgy and Bess, The Illusion, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Wait Until Dark, Caroline, or Change, First Breeze of Summer, Carousel, Titus Andronicus, Arcadia, Flyin’ West, Raisin, Lettice and Lovage, Fences, Man of La Mancha, and Endgame. Chicago credits: Goodman Theatre, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Northlight Theatre, Next Theater, TimeLine Theatre Company, The House Theatre of Chicago, Eclipse Theatre Company Chicago, Lifeline Theatre, and Shattered Globe Theatre. Regional: Lincoln Center, Kennedy Center, Hartford Stage, Long Wharf Theatre (New Haven), Baltimore Center Stage, Kansas City Repertory Theatre, Milwaukee Repertory Theater, First Stage Children’s Theater (Milwaukee), Milwaukee Shakespeare, Court Theatre 22
Rockefeller Memorial Chapel presents... SALEM BAPTIST CHURCH CHOIR: A Celebration of Black History FRIDAY FEB 17, 7:30 pm
AS THE INCENSE: A MIDWINTER MEDITATION SUNDAY FEB 26, 7:30 pm
The famed gospel choir of the Salem Baptist Church of Chicago, directed by Walter Owens, offers a joyous concert of dynamic spirituals and contemporary gospel music, featuring the landmark choral work Shout for Joy by African American composer Adolphus Hailstork. Tickets online and at the door, $10 general, free for students w/ID. Hear the Decani, the professional chamber group of the Chapel Choir, sing mystical music of Thomas Tallis and his contemporary, Robert White, in addition to modern selections sung by the full choir. The program includes Lamentations of Thomas Tallis, Robert White, and Alberto Ginastero, and Tallis’ iconic masterpiece Spem in Alium for forty voices. Tickets online and at the door, $25 general, $5 for students w/ID.
THE FIFTH SUN: 2012
A Staged Playreading
FRIDAY MARCH 30, 7:30 pm SATURDAY MARCH 31, 7:30 pm
On March 24, 1980, Archbishop Oscar Romero of San Salvador was assassinated. This powerful play presents the story of the people and the forces that transformed an ordinary man into a courageous leader. It combines elements of rituals and Mayan temple drama. Tickets at the door, $20 general, free to students w/ID. With playwright Nick Patricca and director Cecilie Keenan; produced by Elizabeth Davenport
Rockefeller Memorial Chapel Phone: 773.702.2100 5850 S. Woodlawn Ave. Web: rockefeller.uchicago.edu Chicago, IL 60637
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PROFILES Madison Repertory Theatre (WI), Illinois Shakespeare Festival, Great River Shakespeare Festival (MN), California Shakespeare Theater (Berkeley), and Center Theatre Group (LA). Mr. Horvath is a four-time Jeff Award winner and eleven-time nominee. He teaches sound design for theatre and film at Northwestern University, and is an artistic associate at Lookingglass Theatre Company. Current and upcoming shows: The Pitmen Players (TimeLine), The Great Fire, Mr. Ricky Calls a Meeting, and Eastland (Lookingglass Theatre Company), Follies (Chicago Shakespeare), and Angels in America (Court Theatre). ALEX KOCH (Projection Design) creates narrative film, video installations, and theatrical projections. Upcoming projects include Goodbar, a rock opera performing in Under the Radar at the Public Theater, and Chaos Manor, a site-specific work next seen in Marciac, France in 2012. Broadway: Irena’s Vow. Off-Broadway with: the Woodshed Collective, the Director’s Company, Urban Stages, Repertorio Espanol, Little Opera Theater, Ensemble Studio Theatre, TerraNOVA Collective, Theater Mitu, Ma-Yi, the Assembly, Electric Pear, and SummerStage. Please visit www.alexkochdesign.com. JOCELYN PRINCE (Production Dramaturg) recently served as the Artistic Associate at The Public Theater in New York City where she produced the Public LAB Speaker Series and numerous new play readings and workshops. She also coordinated the selection process and helped facilitate the 2010 Emerging Writers Group. Dramaturgy credits include A Raisin in the Sun (Juilliard School of Drama); Black Diamond: The Years the Locusts Have Eaten (Lookingglass Theatre Company); Raisin and The First Breeze of Summer (Court Theatre); The MLK Project (Writers’ Theatre); My Julliard, Kingdom and Eyes (eta Creative Arts Foundation); Teibele and Her Demon (European Repertory Company); Daughters of the Mock, Spunk, King of Coons, and The House that Jack Built (Congo Square Theatre Company); and Intimate Apparel and Harriet Jacobs (Steppenwolf Theatre Company). Jocelyn has directed at the Bailiwick Repertory Directors Festival, Around the Coyote Art Festival, and 20 Percent Theatre, and has assisted Mary Zimmerman on Mirror of the Invisible World (Goodman Theatre), Eric Rosen on Wedding Play (About Face Theatre), and Hallie Gordon on The Bluest Eye (Steppenwolf). Jocelyn is an Artistic Associate at Victory Gardens Theater and is the Artistic Director of Sankofa Theatre Company. Her social justice and political work includes positions with the YWCA of Metropolitan Chicago and Obama for America. She holds an MA in Performance Studies from Northwestern University and has written for TimeOut Chicago, TimeOut New York, The Chicago Reporter, and The African American Review. SARA GAMMAGE (Production Stage Manager) is delighted to return to Court Theatre. Previous Court Theatre credits include Flyin’ West, What the Butler Saw, The First Breeze of Summer, Wait Until Dark, The Mystery of Irma Vep, The Illusion, Sizwe Banzi is Dead, Home, Orlando, Porgy and Bess, Spunk, and An Iliad. Other Chicago credits include productions with Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Greenhouse Theater, Theatre at the Center, Marriot Theatre, Apple Tree Theatre, and Redmoon Theater. She spent several seasons at Peninsula Players Theatre in Door Country, WI; credits there include A Little Night Music, Comic Potential, Wait Until Dark, Is He Dead?, Rumors, and The Lady’s Not for Burning. Sara is a proud graduate of Northwestern University. JONATHAN NOOK (Stage Manager) is excited about returning to Court for a fifth season, where he has worked on productions of: Orlando, Sizwe Banzi is Dead, The Year of Magical Thinking, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and The Piano Lesson. Other stage management credits include: Want, No Sugar Tonight, Animals Out of Paper, The North Plan, Sex with Strangers, and The 3rd and 4th Annual First Look Repertory of New Work (Steppenwolf Theatre Company), Waiting For Lefty (American Blues Theater), and Radio Macbeth (Court/SITI). He has also worked with American Players Theatre and Milwaukee Chamber Theatre. TONY MICOCCI (Associate Producer) has lead Micocci Productions since 1992, representing productions in development and on tour. In addition to Christopher McElroen, Micocci is associated with artists such as Lee Breuer and Basil Twist, and producing companies including Court Theatre 24
PROFILES Mabou Mines and Ireland’s Abbey Theatre. Upcoming to Chicago is Poland’s Teatr ZAR with The Gospels of Childhood at the MCA in late March. Another significant literary adaptation: Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle premiered at the 2011 Edinburgh International Festival. Tony also teaches in the Graduate Arts Management Program of the University of New Orleans. He has published a textbook on international tour booking: Booking Performance Tours (Allworth Press, 2008) and holds an MBA from Columbia University. Micocci is honored to associate with the creative team and renowned Court Theatre in bringing Ralph Ellison’s classic novel to stage life, and to represent the production for future engagements. www.micocci.com. CHARLES NEWELL (Artistic Director) has been Artistic Director of Court Theatre since 1994, where he has directed over 40 productions. He made his Chicago directorial debut in 1993 with The Triumph of Love, which won the Joseph Jefferson Award for Best Production. Directorial highlights at Court include An Iliad, Porgy & Bess, Three Tall Women, The Illusion, The Year of Magical Thinking, The Wild Duck, Caroline, Or Change, Titus Andronicus, Arcadia, Man of La Mancha, Uncle Vanya, Raisin, The Glass Menagerie, Travesties, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Hamlet, The Invention of Love, The Little Foxes, Nora, and The Misanthrope. Charlie has also directed at the Goodman Theatre (Rock ‘n’ Roll), the Guthrie Theater (Resident Director: The History Cycle, Cymbeline), Arena Stage, John Houseman’s The Acting Company (Staff Repertory Director), the California and Alabama Shakespeare Festivals, Juilliard, and New York University. He is the recipient of the 1992 TCG Alan Schneider Director Award and has served on the Board of Theatre Communications Group, as well as on several panels for the National Endowment for the Arts. Opera directing credits include Marc Blitzstein’s Regina at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, and Rigoletto at Opera Theatre of St. Louis. Charlie is a multiple Joseph Jefferson Award nominee and recipient. His production of Caroline, or Change at Court was the recipient of 4 Joseph Jefferson Awards, including Best Production and Best Director. Most recently, he received a Jeff Award for Best Direction for Porgy and Bess. This spring at Court Theatre, he will direct both parts of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. STEPHEN J. ALBERT (Executive Director) is a founding Partner in Albert Hall & Associates, LLC, a leading arts consulting firm. Prior to forming the consulting practice, Albert was recognized as a leading arts manager. He has led some of America’s most prestigious theatres, including the Mark Taper Forum/Center Theatre Group, Alley Theatre, and Hartford Stage Company. Albert began his career with the Mark Taper Forum/Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles where he worked in senior management positions for over a decade, rising to Managing Director. He went on to become Executive Director of Houston’s Alley Theatre where he led a turnaround that stabilized the organization, enabling the Alley to return to national standing and drove a capital campaign that secured the organization’s future. At Hartford Stage, his partnership with Mark Lamos resulted in some of the theatre’s most successful seasons and reinforced Hartford Stage’s position at the forefront of the regional theatre movement. During his tenure in Hartford, Mr. Albert led the initiative to create a 25,000 square foot, state-of-the-art production center, securing the donation of the facility and the funding for its renovation. Albert has served as both President and Vice President of the League of Resident Theatres (LORT) and as a board member of Theatre Communications Group (TCG). He has also written and produced a variety of productions for television, is an ACE award nominee, and has been an associate producer of numerous acclaimed Broadway productions. He is a Senior Fellow with the American Leadership Forum, a graduate of the University of Southern California, and holds an MBA from the UCLA Graduate School of Management. Court Theatre 25
BOARD OF TRUSTEES
Chair Virginia Gerst
Vice Chairs Barbara E. Franke Margaret Maxwell Zagel
Secretary Mary Anton
Treasurer Roland Baker
Trustees Honorary Trustee
David Bevington Leigh Breslau Jonathan Bunge James Chandler James E. Clark Martha Clinton Joan Coppleson Kenneth Cunningham Joan Feitler Lorna C. Ferguson David Fithian Karen Frank Timothy Goodsell
Ex-Officio
Stephen J. Albert Charles Newell Larry Norman D. Nicholas Rudall
Mary Louise Gorno Philip Gossett Jack Halpern Kevin Hochberg Thomas Kallen Dana Levinson Michael Lowenthal Linda Patton Jerrold Ruskin Karla Scherer Marilyn Fatt Vitale Leon I. Walker
Stanley Freehling
PRODUCTION STAFF Assistant Director Assistant Company Manager Assistant Projection Designer Animation Assistant Assistant Sound Design Floor Manager Wardrobe Supervisor Wardrobe Crew Stitchers Assistant Technical Director Assistant Master Electrician Assistant Lighting Designer Properties Assistant Scenic Artists Carpenters
Will Bishop Amber Johnson Claire Karoff Lucia J. Lee Christian Gero Joshua Kaiser Samantha Holmes Alexia Rutherford Erin Gallagher, Samantha Holmes, Alexia Rutherford, Emily Waecker Adina Weinig Erik Parsons Ron Seeley Meredith Miller Scott Gerwitz*, Julie Ruscitti* Jack Birdwell, Brian Claggett, Justin D’Argenio, Kevin Decker, Erik Tylkowski *Denotes a member of the United Scenic Artists union (USA).
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STAFF
Artistic Director Charles Newell Executive Director Stephen J. Albert
Resident Artist Resident Dramaturg Dramaturgy Interns Casting Director and Artists-in-the-Schools Director Teaching Artists Kemper Casting Fellow Casting/Education Assistant
Director of Production Assistant Production Manager and Company Manager Technical Director Properties Manager Costume Shop Manager Master Electrician Sound Engineer
Director of Advancement Advancement Consultant Assistant Director of Development for Institutional Relations Assistant Director of Development for Individual Giving Assistant Director of Development for Special Events Kemper Grant Writing Fellow Kemper Development Fellow
Ron OJ Parson Drew Dir Evan Garrett, Izzy Olive Cree Rankin Tracey N. Bonner, Melanie Brezill, Kevin Douglas, Kam Hobbs, Ashley Honore, Tony Lawry, Patrese McClain, Mechelle Moe, Michael Pogue Jason Shain Izzy Olive Marc Stubblefield Laura Dieli Ray Vlcek Lara Musard Erica Franklin Marc Chevalier Sarah Ramos Christopher Schram Elaine Wackerly Jennifer Foughner Melissa Aburano-Meister Rebecca Silverman Erin Kelsey Alexis Chaney
General Manager Heidi Thompson Saunders Business Manager Zachary Davis Management Assistant Gretchen Wright
Director of Marketing and Communications Associate Director of Marketing and Communications / Graphic Designer Assistant Director of Marketing for Group Sales and Community Relations Kemper Marketing Fellows Public Relations
Adam Thurman
Box Office Manager Associate Box Office Manager and Database Admininstrator Customer Relations Manager Box Office Assistants House Manager Concessionaires Volunteer Ushers
Diane Osolin
Traci Brant Kate Vangeloff Will Bishop, Jamie Mermelstein Cathy Taylor Public Relations, Inc.
Heather Dumdei Milan Pejnovich Jenna Blackburn, Kareem Mohammad, Alice Tsao Matthew Sitz, Bartholomew Williams Alex Colborn, Calen Cole, Jason McCreery, Bobby Morales Courtesy of The Saints Court Theatre 27
SPONSORS Court Theatre is grateful to the following corporations, foundations, and government agencies, which generously support our productions, outreach programs, and general operations. Season Sponsor Hyde Park Bank Production Sponsors Allstate Insurance Co. The Elizabeth F. Cheney Foundation The Chicago Community Trust Grant Thornton LLP Kirkland & Ellis LLP National Endowment for the Arts The Rhoades Foundation The University of Chicago Women’s Board Winston & Strawn LLP Student Education Program Sponsors Alphawood Foundation Michael D. and Jolynn Blair Family Foundation The Crown Family Cultural Outreach Program, City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events The James S. Kemper Foundation Polk Bros. Foundation Target General Operating Sponsors City Arts IV, City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events The Julius Frankel Foundation Illinois Arts Council The Irving Harris Foundation Navigant Consulting Northern Trust Nuveen Investments Prince Charitable Trusts* Shubert Foundation Sidley Austin LLP University of Chicago Special Initiatives Sponsors Boeing Company Harper Court Arts Council Illinois Humanities Council The Joyce Foundation *Denotes special project support in addition to general operating support. Court Theatre 28
The Producers Circle, Court Theatre’s premier donor society, is comprised of generous patrons who contribute $2,500 or more annually to the theatre. Members of the Producers Circle receive a host of benefits that offer extraordinary access to Court Theatre’s artists, creative team, and artistic process. Select benefits include: • Opening Night subscriptions • Private dinners with artists • Concierge service for theatre tickets around Chicago • Backstage tours • Group entertainment opportunities ... and much more.
For more information, visit www.CourtTheatre.org or contact Melissa Aburano-Meister, maam@uchicago.edu or 773.834.0941.
PRODUCERS CIRCLE The following individuals and institutions have made major gifts to the Producers Circle, Court’s premier giving society, and we are deeply grateful for the generosity of these donors. The list reflects gifts received through December 14, 2011. If you have a correction or would prefer to remain anonymous, please call (773) 834-5293.
Crown Society ($100,000 and above) Virginia and Gary Gerst
Royal Court ($50,000-$99,999) Barbara and Richard Franke Linda and Stephen Patton
Distinguished Patrons ($25,000-$49,999) Mr. and Mrs. Robert Feitler Mr. and Mrs. James S. Frank Robert and Joan Rechnitz Karla Scherer Mr. and Mrs. David J. Vitale+
Grand Patrons ($15,000-$24,999) Helen N. and Roland C. Baker Martha and Bruce Clinton Lorna Ferguson and Terry Clark
Directors ($10,000-$14,999)
Joyce Chelberg James E. Clark and Christina Labate Tom and Esta Kallen
Benefactors ($5,000-$9,999)
Kevin Hochberg and James McDaniel Lawrence E. Strickling and Sydney L. Hans Margaret Maxwell Zagel Mr. and Mrs. James Reynolds Mr. and Mrs. Stuart Townsend Sarita I. Warshawsky+
Stephen and Terri Albert Mary Anton and Paul Barron Richard and Ann Carr Stan and Elin Christianson Martha and Bruce Clinton, in memory of Zylpha Kilbride Clinton Joan and Warwick Coppleson Paula and Oscar D’Angelo Shawn Donnelley Mr. and Mrs. Paul Finnegan
Mary Louise Gorno Mr. and Mrs. Robert Helman Gayle H. Jensen Bill and Jan Jentes Mr. and Mrs. Robert Kopecky Anne Kutak James Noonan and Dana Levinson Ann Marie Lipinski and Steve Kagan Earl and Brenda Shapiro Foundation Al Stonitsch and Helen Witt
Patrons ($2,500-$4,999)
Mr. Michael C. Litt Michael Lowenthal and Amy Osler William and Kate Morrison Irma Parker Lynne F. and Ralph A. Schatz Joan and James Shapiro Elaine and Richard Tinberg Anne and William Tobey Mr. and Mrs. James Tonsgard Fidelis and Bonnie Umeh Leon and Rian Walker Thomas and Barbara Weil Joan E. Neal and David Weisbach Paul and Mary Yovovich
Jonathan and Gertude Bunge Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Cruise Ginger L. Petroff and Kenneth R. Cunningham Judith Barnard and Michael Fain
Sylvia Fergus and David Cooper Mr. Harve Ferrill Dr. and Mrs. Willard A. Fry Mr. and Mrs. Richard Gray Jack Halpern Dr. and Mrs. Peter T. Heydemann Mrs. Leonard J. Horwich Mr. and Mrs. Jack Karp, in honor of Karen Frank Ms. Nancy A. Lauter and Mr. Alfred L. McDougal +
Includes gifts designated for Court’s Student Education Program. Court Theatre 29
ANNUAL SUPPORT The following individuals and institutions have made gifts to Court Theatre, and we are deeply grateful for their generosity. This list reflects gifts received through December 14, 2011. If you have a correction or would prefer to remain anonymous, please call (773) 834-5293.
Leaders ($1,000-$2,499) Anonymous Ms. Sandra Chui and Mr. Graham Atkinson Jay R. Franke and Pamela Baker Jean and John Berghoff Mrs. Edwin A. Bergman David and Peggy Bevington Mr. and Mrs. Richard Black Leigh S. Breslau and Irene J. Sherr Gloria Callaci Russell and Suzy Campbell Mr. and Mrs. James K. Chandler Ms. Marcia S. Cohn Ms. Patricia Cox Mr. Charles F. Custer Daisy A. Driss Philip and Phyllis Eaton Eileen and Richard Epstein Mrs. Zollie S. Frank Timothy G. Goodsell Mr. Jan Grayson Ms. Dawn-Marie Guthrie Mr. and Mrs. William Landes
Mr. and Mrs. Thomas A. Lasinski Barry Lesht and Kay Schichtel, in memory of Jack D. Shannon Bernard and Averill Leviton Charlene and Gary MacDougal Mr. and Mrs. John W. McCarter, Jr. Robert McDermott and Sarah Jaicks McDermott Mr. David Moes Brooks and Howard Morgan Kathleen Picken Mr. and Mrs. James M. Ratcliffe Thomas Rosenbaum and Katherine Faber Ms. Martha Roth and Mr. Bryon Rosner David and Judith L. Sensibar Scott Showalter Bill and Orli Staley Nikki and Fred Stein Mr. James Stone Mr. and Mrs. R. Todd Vieregg Elaine and Patrick Wackerly Ms. Gretchen Winter Charles and Sallie Wolf
Beth and Howard Helsinger Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Hill Anonymous Douglas and Lola Hotchkis Mrs. Geraldine S. Alvarez Diane and William Hunckler Drs. Andrew J. and Iris K. Aronson Ms. Kineret Jaffe Brett and Carey August Mr. and Mrs. Robert Kallen Eugene L. Balter and Judith R. Phillips Jean A. Klingenstein Ms. Catherine Bannister Mr. and Mrs. Martin J. Koldyke Sharon and Robert Barton Mr. and Mrs. Charles Laff Mr. and Mrs. Alvin Bell John and Jill Levi Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Berry Ms. Nancy Levner Maurice J. and Lois R. Beznos Phoebe R. and John D. Lewis Family Foundation Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Block Mr. and Mrs. Robert Lewis Phyllis Booth Bill Mulliken and Lorna Filippini-Mulliken Dr. and Mrs. Kevin Boyd Mr. and Mrs. William Navin Mary and Carl Boyer Dr. Larry Norman Ms. Janet V. Burch and Mr. Joel R. Guillory Messrs. Robert Ollis and Richard Gibbons Mr. and Mrs. Michael Corey Ms. Grayce Papp Henry Crown & Company Mr. and Mrs. Denis Rogers Eloise DeYoung Ms. Yolanda Saul Nancie and Bruce Dunn Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Scott Kent S. Dymak and Theodore N. Foss Dr. Salvador J. Sedita and Ms. Pamela L. Owens Mr. and Mrs. Scott Epstein Susan H. and Robert E. Shapiro Mr. and Mrs. Richard Feitler Mr. and Mrs. Charles Shea Mrs. Adrian Foster Paul E. Freehling, in honor of Edna, William, and Alison Tim Burroughs and Barbara Smith Dorie Sternberg Jacqueline and Howard Gilbert Otto and Elsbeth Thilenius Philip and Suzanne Gossett The Ultmann Family, in loving memory of John Mrs. Lester Guttman Gene and Nancy Haller Mrs. Iris Witkowsky
Supporters ($500-$999)
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ANNUAL SUPPORT Contributors ($250-$499) Elizabeth Adkins Mr. and Mrs. Paul F. Anderson John Archambault, in honor of Peggy Zagel Catharine Bell and Robert Weiglein Joan and Julian Berman Mr. James Bernal, in honor of Peggy Zagel Ms. Kathleen Betterman Mr. and Mrs. Adrian Beverly Henry and Leigh Bienen Gregory and Rosalie Bork Catherine and Addison Braendel Mr. Scott Brickwood Brady and Geraldine Brownlee Mr. Tim Bryant Karen A. Callaway Bob and Peggy Cassey Judy Chernick Lydia G. Cochrane Barbara Flynn Currie Frederick T. Dearborn Quinn and Robert Delaney Lisa and Rod Dir Mr. and Mrs. Robert Douglas Adam M. Dubin Edie and Ray Fessler
B. Ellen Fisher Ms. Virginia Fitzgerald Paul Fong Dr. and Mrs. James L. Franklin Dr. Thomas Gajewski and Dr. Marisa Alegre Joan M. Giardina Gerry and Stan Glass Ethel and Bill Gofen Mr. and Mrs. Robert B. Hartfield Mary J. Hayes, DDS Richard and Marilyn Helmholz Dr. and Mrs. Andrew Hendrix Mr. and Mrs. Arnold Hirsch Mr. Anthony Hirschel Carrie and Gary Huff Robert Kapoun Ms. Anne Van Wart and Mr. Michael Keable Mr. Brian Cogan and Ms. Robin Keller, in honor of Peggy Zagel Ms. Merrillyn Kosier and Mr. James Kinoshita, in honor of Marilyn Vitale Nancy and Richard Kosobud Ms. Carol L. Kutak Richard L. Landau Lemme Insurance Group, in honor of Peggy Zagel Steven and Barbara Lewis
Chant is proud to be a Dining Partner of Court Theatre
1509 E. 53rd Street, Chicago, IL 60615 Mon Noon-10pm | Tues-Thurs 11:30 to midnight | Fri & Sat 11:30 to 1am | Sun 11 to 10pm Minutes away from the Court Theatre, validated parking at 54th and Lake Park Avenue
Asian-inspired Global Cuisine and Full Service Bar
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ANNUAL SUPPORT Mr. and Mrs. Joe Madden James and Katharine Mann Mr. and Mrs. Richard L. Marcus Mr. and Mrs. Michael Masterson Mr. and Mrs. Frank D. Mayer, Jr. Dr. Alice Melchor Renee M. Menegaz and Prof. R. D. Bock Dorism and Glenn E. Merritt Dr. and Mrs. Ernest Mhoon Mr. and Mrs. Robert Moeller Lisa Kohn and Harvey Nathan Ms. Sara Paretsky Mr. and Mrs. Harvey Plotnick Elizabeth M. Postell Louise Lee Reid Mr. and Mrs. H. P. Davis Rockwell Bruce Rodman Nuna and Ennio Rossi Ms. Ann M. Rothschild
Carolyn O. Rusnak Sharon Salveter and Stephan Meyer Dr. Jacquelyn Sanders Ilene W. Shaw Joan and Lynn Small Elizabeth and Hugo Sonnenschein Ms. Isabel Stewart George P. Surgeon Edward and Edith Turkington Russell and MarleneTuttle Brady Twiggs Ms. Christy Uchida Sharon and John van Pelt Daina Variakojis and Ernest Frizke Virginia Wright Wexman and John Huntington Russell and Sindy Wieman, in honor of Peggy Zagel Nicholas Weingarten and Cynthia Winter Joseph Wolnski and Jane Christino
Associates ($150-$249)
Filomena and Robert Albee The Amoroso Family Mr. and Mrs. Cal Audrain Ms. Enriqueta Rodriguez and Mr. Ronald G. Bauer Mr. Melvin Belton
Anonymous Mr. Sam Adam Sr. Mr. and Mrs. Steven A. Adelman Ms. Roula Alakiotou and Mr. Alvin Burenstine
February 16 – June 10, 2012 smartmuseum.uchicago.edu Admission is always free
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ANNUAL SUPPORT James Bishop Mr. Nathanial Blackman Mr. and Mrs. David L. Blumberg Mr. Aldridge Bousfield Jim and Sandy Boves Douglas Bragan Ralph and Rona Brown Olga and John Buenz John and Sally Carton Mr. Richard Clark and Ms. Mary J. Munday Elizabeth Fama and John Cochrane David and Suzanne Cooley Mr. and Mrs. David Crabb Katherine and John Culbert Susanne and David Cyranoski Bruce Davidson Sidney and Sondra Berman Epstein Mr. Stephen Fedo Dale and Marilyn Fitschen Mr. and Mrs. Julian Frazin, in honor of Virginia Gerst Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Friedmann Dr. Sandra Garber Judy and Mickey Gaynor Paul B. Glickman Natalie and Howard Goldberg
Mrs. Ethel F. Goldsmith Ken Green and Holly Wathan Ms. Mary Grimm Mr. and Mrs. Steven Gryll Joel and Sarah Handelman Lynn Hauser Carrie L. Hedges Dorthea Juul Gloria Kearney Dr. Lauren Kern Neil and Diana King Mr. Norman Kohn Ms. Anne Lang, in honor of Peggy Zagel Mr. and Mrs. Emmet Larkin Mr. and Mrs. Donald Larsen Bill and Blair Lawlor Charles and Fran Licht Michelle Maton and Mike Schaeffer Mrs. Ann Maxwell, in honor of Peggy Zagel Stacey and Patrick McCusker David E. McNeel Joanne Michalski and Mike Weeda Janet and David Midgley Dean Miller and Martha Swift Mr. and Mrs. Jack Mitchell Ms. Regina Modestas
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ANNUAL SUPPORT Ms. Donna Moore Marianne Nathan and James Hugunin Drs. Donald E. and Mary Ellen Newsom Margaret and William J. O’Connor Mr. Gary Ossewaarde Irving and Vivian Paley Mr. Doug Peck Mr. Milan Pejnovich Carolyn and Peter Pereira Ms. Dolphine Pierce Ms. Jane Grady and Mr. Alan J. Pulaski Mr. Michael Raftery Mr. and Mrs. Norman Raidl Mr. Cree Rankin Mrs. Marelen F. Richman Pearl Rieger Dr. Lya Dym Rosenblum and Dr. Louis Rosenblum Carol Rosofsky and Robert Lifton Cecilia and Joel Roth Drs. Donald A. and Janet Rowley
Manfred Ruddat Mr. Kenneth Schug Mr. Steven Schulze Drs. Michele Seidl Mr. Michael Shapiro Roberta and Howard Siegel Mr. John Sowinski Dr. Donna Spaan Dr. and Mrs. Eric Spratford Ms. Jane Stone Gary Strandlund Mrs. Josephine N. Strauss Prof. and Mrs. Lester Telser Heidi Thompson Saunders and David Saunders Mr. and Mrs. John Turner Ms. Martha Van Haitsma Ms. Linda Vincent Anna Mary and David Wallace Howard S. White Dr. Willard E. White
SPECIAL THANKS National Archives (Maryland Staff), Geoffrey L. Brackett, Norman Bemelmans, Linda Chapman, Una Chaudhuri, Brian D. Coats, André Kimo Stone Guess, Lena Hill, Michael Hill, Jaymes Jorsling, Shaunda Miles, Jim Nicola, Walter Raubicheck, Courtney Reilly, Charles Swanson, Raphael Nash Thompson
Share the magic of Court Add a line or two of simple language to your will and keep Court performances running for generations to come.
For more information about bequests and other planned gifts, please contact Heather McClean in the Office of Gift Planning at 773.834.2117 or giftplan@uchicago.edu.
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SPECIAL GIFTS Endowment Support and Planned Gifts Court Theatre greatly acknowledges the generous individuals and institutions who have supported Court’s artistic excellence by contributing to our endowment or making a planned gift. Hope and Lester Abelson Family The Michael and Lillian Braude Theatre Fund Joan S. and Stanley M. Freehling Fund for the Arts The Helen and Jack Halpern Fund The William Randolph Hearst Foundation Anne Kutak Marion Lloyd Court Theatre Fund Michael Lowenthal Carroll Mason Russell Fund The Martha Paine Newell Fund for Emerging Artists An endowment established by Timothy, Patricia, and Charles Newell in honor of their mother, Martha “Matt” Newell, will allow Court Theatre to support the work of early-career theatre artists. Court Theatre is grateful to the following donors for their inaugural gifts to The Martha Paine Newell Fund for Emerging Artists. Mrs. Edwin A. Bergman Ms. Isabelle P. Middendorf Mrs. Daisy Driss Mr. and Mrs. F. Ward Paine Mr. Daniel E. Efner Mr. Ted Walch For information on how to leave a legacy of support by making a planned gift or contribution to Court ’s endowment, contact Melissa at (773) 834-0941 or maam@uchicago.edu. Facility Support The University of Chicago
High School Performance Festival Sponsor Hyde Park Bank
In-Kind Contributions The following companies and individuals support Court Theatre through the donation of goods or services: Stephen J. Albert Helen N. and Roland C. Baker David Bevington Elizabeth Brackett Leigh Breslau Suzy Campbell James Chandler Chant Chicago q James E. Clark Joan Feitler Lorna Ferguson and Terry Clark Karen and James Frank The Gage Virginia Gerst Goodman Theatre Timothy Goodsell and Susan McGee Mary Lou Gorno Harris Theatre
Helaine and Peter Heydemann J. Hilburn Kevin Hochberg and James McDaniel KAP Graphics Tony Kushner Limelight Catering… food illuminated Mary Mastricola and La Petite Folie Brian Meister Daniel Minter David Moes Brooks and Howard Morgan Lester Munson Charles Newell and Kate Collins Northlight Theatre Oregon Shakespeare Festival Park 52
Linda and Steve Patton Piccolo Mondo Julie Purdum, Prairie Moon Creations Ritz Carlton Chicago Ritz Carlton New York Russian Pointe Dance Boutique The Saints Michael Sheerin Patrick Sheerin Sidley Austin LLP Jason Smith Photography Spoleto Festival Union League Club of Chicago The University of Chicago David and Marilyn Vitale Rian Walker Kenneth Warren Margaret Maxwell Zagel and Judge James Zagel Court Theatre 35
DINING SPONSORS Receive 10% off at Court Theatre’s Hyde Park Dining Sponsors. Only one discount per ticket. Not valid with any other offers.
Asian fusion 1509 E. 53rd St. (773) 324-1999
Casual Italian 1642 E. 56th St. (773) 643-1106
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American Bistro 5201 S. Harper Ave. (773) 241-5200