Join us for Steep's 8th Gala!

Help us celebrate Steep's 8th Season at our annual Gala & Silent Auction!

Go to SteepTheatre.com to purchase a ticket!

Enjoy a fun-filled evening of dancing, drinks and appetizers, all the while placing your bids on some exciting lots. The past two Galas were huge successes and this year's celebration promises to be more of the same!
	Open bar, dancing, appetizers and silent auction
	Saturday, November 15, 2008 from 8pm - 12am
	The Swedish American Museum 5211 N. Clark St in the Andersonville neighborhood of Chicago

Our 1st Production in the New Space: "SEVEN DAYS"

Steep Theatre Company opens its 2008-09 season and its new theater with an original and daring work by company member Egan Reich. Seven Days is a tantalizing blend of political intrigue, sultry romance, and biting social commentary.

This season opener, conceived and written specifically for the Steep ensemble, showcases the majority of Steep members who helped contribute to the final draft in a first-ever company workshop. Steep's Jim Poole directs. Many firsts to be celebrated for the rapidly expanding Steep Theatre: new space, new works, and new techniques.



Join us November 15 in congratulating Steep Theatre on eight great years in Chicago theater at Steep's 8th Anniversary Gala!

WE'VE MOVED to 1115 W. Berwyn Avenue, Chicago, IL 60640!

Heavy Equipment On Board!

Steep Theatre Heavy Equipment was installed on Oct 9!
At one point traffic was completely stopped on Berwyn Avenue... and 3 CTA busses were stacked up waiting for our 20 ton crain's counter weight to swing out of the street.


All mechanical systems: Heat, A/C, Lighting, and Bathrooms are complete and functional. (Yes! that was plural for bathrooms! and yes - AIR CONDITIONING!!!



All THANKS to DAVE BARTUSEK of Prairie Home Builders

GREAT JOB, DAVE!

Greensboro, A Requiem

Click To Play

More on Greensboro

Jeff Recommended!
Greensboro: A Requiem Steep Theatre Company

Chicago Tribune's Chris Jones
"...a sincerely performed and quite provocative show from one of Chicago's up-and-coming theater companies, and it includes some moving moments, many from superb ensemble cast member Lily Mojekwu. Steep co-founder Peter Moore is dangerously charming as the notorious David Duke; Brendan Melanson fleshes out the most horrible kind of Klansman; and, as police informant Edward Dawson, Steep's Alex Gillmor superbly evokes one of those glib double-dealing sleezeballs who remain a dangerous pox on the American social landscape."

Chicago Reader, Kerry Reid
"...a threnody of sorrow, rage, and regret runs through the script, and Akin's cast captures it with grace and power."

ChicagoCritic.com
"Alec Gillmor, as the sociopath Edward Dawson, aptly depicts the coldly cruel methods of the Klan, the Nazi and the police and the FBI."

TimeOut's 4 STAR Review

Time Out Chicago / Issue 168 : May 15–21, 2008

Greensboro: A Requiem By Emily Mann. Dir. Brad Akin. With ensemble cast.

---

On November 3, 1979, an anti–Ku Klux Klan rally was held in Greensboro, North Carolina, by members of the Communist Workers Party; with TV news cameras rolling, the protesters were attacked by members of the Klan and the American Nazi Party, who shot 13 people, killing five. On November 4, 1979, the Iranian hostage crisis began and the Greensboro massacre disappeared from the nation’s front pages. Mann’s docuplay attempts to give the incident the respect it deserves, and she’s largely successful.

Mann builds her play out of courtroom transcripts, news accounts and her own interviews with survivors, participants (Alex Gillmor plays both a Klan member and law-enforcement informer) and personalities like David Duke. A projection at the top of the show states that every word of dialogue was spoken by a real person.

The playwright makes a compelling case for the complicity of Greensboro police and the local FBI, but her best work is in laying out the human complexities and regrets. Survivors rue their naïveté and mourn their youthful idealism; a preacher notes the difference between the church and the divine; a Klan speaker says Louis Farrakhan should be a model for the KKK.

Akin’s fluid, minimalist staging allows the ensemble to shine, most in multiple roles; highlights include Peter Moore ranging from blithely bigoted Duke to a paralyzed survivor, and Lily Mojekwu’s nuanced takes on four women. But the play’s heart, oddly enough, is Gillmor’s chillingly straightforward, very human turn as its most unsympathetic character.

— Kris Vire

Greensboro Runs Thru June 14th

"Something happened in Greensboro, North Carolina,
I think you should know about."
November 3rd, 1979. Five demonstrators are shot and killed by members of the Nazi party and the KKK. The entire event is televised. No attacker is ever convicted. This is a story about violence, injustice, and the politics of race. This is the story of an American Tragedy.

This will be the first Chicago producction of Emily Mann's Greensboro: A Requiem and Steep Theatre's final production at their space on Sheridan until they move to their new location in the Fall.

Next Exit: Greensboro!

We Made It In The Edgewater Newsletter!

Edgewater Welcomes Steep Theatre
EDC is pleased to announce that Steep Theatre Company has chosen Edgewater for it's new home. We were pleased to work closely with Steep to find a home in Edgewater and add another amenity to the revitalizing Berwyn business district. In addition, EDC is helping Steep to identify sources of financial assistance to support the costs of building-out the space for their new home on Berwyn.

Peter Moore from Steep Theatre provides the following story about the move:

"After launching our search for a new theater in November 2007, Steep has signed a lease on a storefront space. Our new home is located at 1115 West Berwyn in the Edgewater neighborhood of Chicago. Plans are in place to open our 2008-2009 season in our new theater this Fall.

The Edgewater Development Corporation was a huge help in finding us a home in Edgewater. We're looking forward to continuing to work with them as we become part of the neighborhood.

The new site is nearly the twice the size of our current theater and will offer the sort of comfortable and professional performance space that our audience and artists deserve, while not sacrificing the intimacy that has been the trademark of Steep productions for years. We are very excited about this space and the growth we are poised to make in our new theater.

The space was formerly a small grocery store and has been vacant for years. While we have made great strides towards reaching our fundraising goals, there is a lot of work left to be done in order to realize the vision we have for our new theater."

To contribute and be a part of the new Steep Theatre, please click on the donation button to the right or send your donation to Steep Theatre Company, 5343 North Paulina, Chicago, IL 60640. We will also have some great fundraising events in the coming months. We hope you will be able to join us.

In the meantime, work continues at our Sheridan theater. We will conclude our 2007-2008 season and our tenure at 3902 North Sheridan with our production of Greensboro: A Requiem. This docu-drama by Tony Award winning playwright Emily Mann brings light to the events surrounding an anti-Ku Klux Klan rally that left 5 protesters dead in 1979. The show opens Thursday, May 8th and runs through Saturday, June 14th.

Watch what we do next!

Review Redux

At Windy City Times, Jonathan Abarbanel reviews Breathing Corpses.
Here's the good parts (why read anything else?):

"Breathing Corpses is grim—although sprinkled with quirky humor—but it's never tragic, ...[Laura Wade's] crisp dialogue technique shines.

Fortunately, Steep is deep in talented actors guided by the experienced director Robin Witt. Scene Three is the prime showcase, in which Lucy Carapetyan and Jonathan Edwards portray an attractive young couple bound by mutually inflicted physical violence, both sexual and asexual. The fury of their self-centered characters is both terrifying and titillating. Julia Siple opens and closes the play as a whimsical hotel housekeeper a bit too fascinated by the bodies she finds in the beds. In the final scene she meets a live one at last, yet despite their flirtation the play closes on an ambiguous note: Is her glow of happiness one of joy or merely excitement and potential danger?

Marcus Stephens' beige-and-yellow scenic design creates four distinct playing areas lined up across the wide but shallow stage, surrounded by corrugated steel panels—a la storage lockers—to suggest the constricting box-like rooms referenced by several characters. It's good-looking...

The company use rather good British accents...

If you must read the entire review, you can see it here.

Appreciating Our Gritty Gestalt

THEATER REVIEW

Steep Theatre earns its buzz
90-minute, arresting drama from British playwright Laura Wade
By Chris Jones | TRIBUNE CRITIC
March 3, 2008

Because we all have to die some place, corpses inevitably intrude into everyday life. People encounter dead bodies in bushes, storage units, hotel rooms. But what of the people who make such discoveries? Do their jolting rubs against tangible mortality destroy them? Excite them? Change them for good?

Such disturbing questions are the core of Laura Wade's arresting 90-minute contemporary drama from Britain, "Breathing Corpses," currently in a provocative Chicago premiere at the tiny Steep Theatre. But the 30-year-old Wade, long a staple of the "most promising young playwrights" critics' lists in London, doesn't even leave it there.

She has said she took her title from a line by Sophocles: "When a man has lost all happiness, he's not alive. Call him a breathing corpse." Thus in Wade's 2005 play -- which follows three sets of characters running into dead bodies -- the notion of what constitutes a corpse is most assuredly up for debate.

This is a juicy, tightly packed and exceedingly smart play, and the fast-growing, buzz-heavy Steep Theatre Company had packed its little Sheridan Road storefront to the gills Friday night. If you attend this theater on a Friday or Saturday night, you'll probably have to listen to actors compete with a cover band seeping through the walls from the bar next door. You therefore get an unofficial sound design: For part of Friday's show, it was Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire," which had a certain unctuous resonance.

Weirdly, the bleed doesn't kill the experience. On the contrary, it adds to the gritty gestalt and gives the actors more to fight against.

Wade's play demands an intensely visceral production. Director Robin Witt and her cast deliver it intermittently. There are sags in the action, problematic casting, some unnecessary intrusion of fussy realistic details and an occasional deficit of sexual tension where the script wants us to be squirming in our seats.

But when this show is on the boil (as distinct from when it falls to an overly surly simmer), it's hot. The scene between actors Lucy Carapetyan and Jonathan Edwards, who play a couple immersed in heat and violence, sizzles deliciously on that dividing line between normal marital tensions and mutually assured destruction. As a chambermaid obsessed with death, the terrific Julia Siple skillfully navigates a repressed, nervous character who both horrifies us and yet seems as normal as the English provinces she -- and those dead and alive -- inhabit.

Check out the article here.

What's Happening to the Boy's Club?

NEW CITY'S Tip of the Week
by William Scott

Steep Theater's "Breathing Corpses" belongs to the women of the tight ensemble this company has created. Be sure that the men involved are unfailingly spot on, but I am taken with the women. Laura Wade's script is funny and frightening. Unwitting characters stumble upon dead bodies and become the corpses themselves of scenes to follow in the time-bending chronology. The work unfolds as a well-crafted psychological thriller. Chicago is lucky this heralded writer from across the pond has come at last. Robin Witt's nimble and often quiet treatment of the material feels just right. She has a steady hand, but just as any great director she seems to barely touch the material, letting the story of death and violence unfold like real life. Julia Siple, Franette Liebow and Lucy Carapetyan anchor the show with honest portrayals of large characters. They embody their roles with specificity and dynamism. The show flies by leaving you hungry for more.


"Breathing Corpses" runs at Steep Theater, 3902 North Sheridan, (312)458-0722, through March 22. (2008-02-26)
link to the article here.

Breathing Corpses Trailer

Video compliments of Jim Poole Creative Productions
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"By turns darkly comic and harrowing, the one-act nails the anguish of dysfunctional relationships in which trust and passion have turned into tedium and rage."
- Chicago Reader

"Recommended: A Must-See Show!"
- Center Stage

"FOUR STARS!"
- Time Out Chicago

"Steep is deep in talented actors guided by the experienced director Robin Witt."
- Windy City Times



Now playing at Steep Theatre
Thurs., Fri., Sat. @ 8PM

thru March 22
312 458-0722

This Brisk Steep Production

Christopher Piatt weighs in on Breathing Corpses

It’s a mean trick, really. The five out-of-sequence scenes in Laura Wade’s clever dread-mystery Breathing Corpses fit together like the large, chunky pieces in a harmless jigsaw puzzle for infants. Once you’ve assembled them, however, the doomsday picture you see is grisly enough to make adults look away. Like Schnitzler's La Ronde with murder where the sex should be, Wade ties a daisy chain of tangentially related encounters into a single loop, showing us that the average joe's subconscious despair is knotted up in everybody else's. (Imagine a chart tracing how a virus gets transmitted from stranger to stranger, only with angst.) And yet in this brisk Steep production, director Robin Witt handles the material by young British scribe Wade the way British mysteries are best delivered: tart and lively, even with all the dead bodies lying about.

We first encounter a welcome stereotype; Julia Siple is keen as usual, playing a plucky chambermaid with low self-esteem who discovers a dead body in one of her rooms. (It gets her down, doncha know, because it seems like she’s the only girl on staff who ever finds cadavers on the job.) But in the next scene, Wade’s comic voice subsides with a look into the domestic life of a man panicked by the putrid stench wafting from one of the storage units he rents out, and uglier still when the play then cuts to a violent squabble between a yuppie couple (dynamic work from Jonathan Edwards and Lucy Carapetyan) whose weekend routine has been shattered when they discover a murdered girl’s body in the park. The playwright then winds us back to where we started, demonstrating en route how laughs, terror and grief often grow from the same root. With nary an underqualified actor, and a creepily impersonal wrap-around aluminum-siding set from Marcus Stephens, Steep takes us on a journey that’s also something of a trip.

We Made USA TODAY

Check out the "10 Tips for Chicago Tourists" article here.

WE ARE GROWING!

We are proud to welcome three new members to our ensemble:

Caroline Neff - actor - A recent graduate of Columbia College, Caroline most recently captivated audiences at Steep as Gwen in Coronado,and as Curley's Wife in Of Mice and Men. Her charisma and charm have cast her in numerous productions in Chicago and abroad, among them Mary-Arrchie Theater and Infamous Commonwealth.

Egan Reich - actor and playwright - Recently Egan's play, The Most Liquid Currency in the World was produced by Pinebox at the Building Stage in November, 2007, and General Desdemona (originally produced at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2004) is being produced at Proctor's in Albany, NY, in the spring of '08. At Steep, he was seen as Judas in The Last Days of Judas Iscariot and Boyd in Book Of Days.


and
Melissa Riemer - actor - Trained at the Drama Studio London, Melissa has performed in Jeff Nominated Book Of Days as Martha Hoch, in Catch - 22 as Luciana, and the Steep Family Reunion in a variety of hilarious roles. She brings dynamic skill and experience working throughout Chicago Theater, including the Griffin Theater, Piven, Side Project and Backstage.

We are very excited about our future together at Steep and invite you to join us this year.

Watch what we do next!

In The Press

Steep Sets First Capital Goal

BY Jonathan Abarbanel

At its annual fundraiser last November, 5-year old Steep Theatre Company launched its first-ever capital campaign, aiming to raise $30,000. It’s a modest goal, but it will be enough to build out a new home space for the troupe, says executive director Peter Moore. At present Steep occupies a storefront on Sheridan Road near Irving Park, but Moore says the sound bleed from the live bands playing at the next door bar is driving them bonkers. He said Steep would be happy to pick up a few more seats and a little more lobby and backstage room, but essentially they want to duplicate what they have now. Steep is looking north of Irving Park Road and east of Lincoln, which covers a large swath of Chicago’s North-Northwest Side. Ideally, Steep will open its 2008-2009 in the new home come September.

From the 2/1/08 issue of Perform Ink in the Behind the Curtain column.

Steep Scores on "Best of '07" Lists!

From On The Fringe column in the Chicago Tribune:

Nina Metz picks Coronado at #3: A mystery about past indiscretions and betrayals unspooled in this play by novelist Dennis Lehane ("Mystic River"), but it was the performances here that I loved. The actors swerved from playful seduction to cat-and-mouse anxiety, and I bought it every step of the way.

At the very top of Kerry Reid's list is The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui at #1 : Steep delivered a stunning version of Bertolt Brecht's Hitler-as-Capone allegory, bolstered by a dazzling performance by Yosh Hayashi in the title role and directed with verve and intelligence by Jonathan Berry.

Up next for STEEP THEATRE: Laura Wade's time-bending thriller "Breathing Corpses" in February.
Read the article here: http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/stage/chi-0104_bestofthefringejan04,1,1327194.story?ctrack=1&cset=true


TIME OUT's Most Wanted Top Ten list puts The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui at #6:

Just when we thought both ribald satire and serious analysis of Adolf Hitler’s ascent had lost all currency, Steep’s revival of Bertolt Brecht’s 1941 Hitler allegory, set by the author in gangland Chicago, showed us otherwise. Jonathan Berry’s live-wire period staging—a major step forward for storefront Steep—put its finger smack-dab on how despots can rise in times of economic panic. And as the hunchbacked title character, writhing Yosh Hayashi turned out the non–Osage County performance of the year.
Read the article here.

Over at the Sun Times, Hedy Weiss also named us on her "things I really dug this year" list. Don't pin her down to a number, she won't have it....
*The epic proportions of the tiny Steep Theatre revival of Bertolt Brecht's "The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui," with a star turn by Yosh Hayashi as a Chicago mob boss.