Steppenwolf Theatre Company of Chicago


Book Description

In 1974, a group of determined, young high school actors started doing plays under the name of Steppenwolf Theatre Company, eventually taking residence in the basement of a church in Highland Park, a suburb of Chicago. Thus began their unlikely journey to become one of the most prominent theatre companies in the world. Steppenwolf Theatre Company has changed the face of American Theatre with its innovative approach that blends dynamic ensemble performance, honest, straightforward acting, and bold, thought-provoking stories to create compelling theatre. This is the first book to chronicle this iconic theatre company, offering an account of its early years and development, its work, and the methodologies that have made it one of the most influential ensemble theatres today. Through extensive, in-depth interviews conducted by the author with ensemble members, this book reveals the story of Steppenwolf's miraculous rise from basement to Broadway and beyond. Interviewees include co-founders Jeff Perry, Gary Sinise and Terry Kinney, along a myriad of ensemble, staff, board members and others.




Treatise on the Steppenwolf


Book Description




Pure Colour


Book Description

Winner of the 2022 Governor General’s Literary Award in Fiction Shortlisted for the 2023 Rathbones Folio Prize in Fiction Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vulture, The Times Literary Supplement, and more Pure Colour is a galaxy of a novel: explosive, celestially bright, huge, and streaked with beauty. It is a contemporary bible, an atlas of feeling, and an absurdly funny guide to the great (and terrible) things about being alive. Sheila Heti is a philosopher of modern experience, and she has reimagined what a book can hold. Here we are, just living in the first draft of Creation, which was made by some great artist, who is now getting ready to tear it apart. In this first draft of the world, a woman named Mira leaves home to study. There, she meets Annie, whose tremendous power opens Mira’s chest like a portal—to what, she doesn’t know. When Mira is older, her beloved father dies, and his spirit passes into her. Together, they become a leaf on a tree. But photosynthesis gets boring, and being alive is a problem that cannot be solved, even by a leaf. Eventually, Mira must remember the human world she’s left behind, including Annie, and choose whether or not to return.




Ensemble


Book Description

This definitive history brings Chicago’s celebrated theater and comedy scenes to life with stories from some of its biggest stars spanning sixty-five years. Chicago is a bona fide theater town, bursting with vitality that thrills local fans and produces generation after generation of world-renowned actors, directors, playwrights, and designers. Now Mark Larson shares the rich theatrical history of Chicago through first-person accounts from the people who made it. Drawing from more than three hundred interviews, Larson weaves a narrative that expresses the spirit of Chicago’s ensemble ethos: the voices of celebrities such as Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Ed Asner, George Wendt, Michael Shannon, and Tracy Letts comingle with stories from designers, composers, and others who have played a crucial role in making Chicago theater so powerful, influential, and unique. Among many other topics, this book explores the early days of the fabled Compass Players and the legendary Second City in the ‘50s and ‘60s; the rise of acclaimed ensembles like Steppenwolf in the ‘70s; the explosion of storefront and neighborhood companies in the ‘80s; and the enduring global influence of the city as the center of improv training and performance.




Steppenwolf


Book Description

To celebrate 25 years of extraordinary achievement by the legendary Steppenwolf Theatre Company of Chicago, acclaimed photographer Victor Skrebneski has created an impressive photography book featuring historical production highlights and exclusive portraits of America's most gifted ensemble of artists. Steppenwolf at 25 also contains personal essays penned by several notable American authors and playwrights, including Kurt Vonnegut, Sam Shepard, Don DeLillo, Richard Christiansen, Terry Johnson and Charles L Mee.




The Birthday Party


Book Description

Stanley Webber is visited in his boarding house by strangers, Goldberg and McCann. An innocent-seeming birthday party for Stanley turns into a nightmare.The Birthday Party was first performed in 1958 and is now a modern classic, produced and studied throughout the world.




Poems


Book Description

Few American readers seem to be aware that Hermann Hesse, author of the epic novels Steppenwolf and Siddhartha, among many others, also wrote poetry, the best of which the poet James Wright has translated and included in this book. This is a special volume—filled with short, direct poems about love, death, loneliness, the seasons—that is imbued with some of the imagery and feeling of Hesse's novels but that has a clarity and resonance all its own, a sense of longing for love and for home that is both deceptively simple and deeply moving.




Siddhartha


Book Description

Siddhartha (first published in 1922) is a novel based on the early life of Buddha, inspired by the author's visit to India before the First World War. The novel is about the young Brahmin Siddhartha's search for self- realization. His quest takes him from a life of decadence to asceticism, from the illusory joys of sensual love with a beautiful courtesan, and of wealth and fame, to the painful struggles with his son and the ultimate wisdom of renunciation




Sex with Strangers


Book Description

How far will you go to get what you want? Will you be the same person if you do? When twenty-something star sex blogger and memoirist Ethan tracks down his idol, the gifted but obscure forty-ish novelist Olivia, he finds they each crave what the other possesses. As attraction turns to sex, and they inch closer to getting what they want, both must confront the dark side of ambition and the trouble of reinventing oneself when the past is only a click away.




Exploring the Divided Self


Book Description

"Seen at the time of its publication in 1972 as an embarrassment by some of his friends and a disappointment by many of the admirers of his earlier romantic and idyllic works, Der Steppenwolf is now generally considered to be Hermann Hesse's most innovative and influential novel, comparable in its modernity, according to Thomas Mann, to James Joyce's Ulysses and Andre Gide's Les Faux Monnayeurs. What offended early readers, namely the author's willingness to explore and attempt to come to terms with dark side of his self and of a society in transition, is precisely what appealed to rebellious readers in the turbulent sixties and seventies and helped make Steppenwolf the most widely read German novel of the twentieth century. Ironically, this story of a fifty-year-old man, which Hesse thought younger people would not understand, has been and continues to be a favorite of college students." "After briefly tracing the extraordinary development of Hesse's popular reception, David G. Richards surveys the critical writing on Steppenwolf, from Hugo Ball's remarks in the first biography of Hesse, which was published the same year as the novel, and the other primarily biographical studies of the prewar period, through the exploration of important facets of the work in mostly German dissertations of the fifties and the explosive expansion of scholarship in the boom years of the sixties and seventies to the more modest achievements and the consolidating studies of the eighties and nineties."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved