We’ve described plays in all of Steppenwolf’s past and present performance spaces: the Downstairs Theater,
the cabaret-style, flexible 1700 Theater,
and their newest Ensemble Theater, the only in-the-round theater space in Chicago. (The Ensemble Theater replaced the previous 299-seat Upstairs Theater.)
Our very first professional gig was describing the play “Black Top Sky” (Theatre Seven of Chicago) in Steppenwolf’s small, flexible Garage Theater space in 2013. The play traces the dance of love, pain and longing between three damaged survivors of an urban housing project.
In 2016, we described “Richard III” in the Garage, the Gift Theatre‘s groundbreaking staging produced in partnership with the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago and starring Michael Patrick Thornton in the titular role.
A full list of audio-described Steppenwolf Theatre Company productions is available here.
Contact us to explore Live Audio Description for your next event.
Shows
Here are a few samples of our pre-show narratives for selected productions:
Noises Off
By Michael Frayn, Directed by Anna D. Shapiro.
In the living room proper, along a stone wall at the left, a winding, wooden staircase leads from the living room up and around to the right, to an open walkway with wooden railings along the back wall of the second floor. Moving up the stairs from the living room, a large, eight-foot tall, arched, wood-framed window, with opaque, diamond-shaped panes, perforates the stone wall, alongside a woven tapestry on the wall.
Seagull
By Anton Chekhov, Directed by Yasen Peyankov. The premier production in the Ensemble Theater, the description had to make sense to everyone, seated in many different locations in the round.
In the center of the stage, a six-foot diameter, circular wood rose with large, ray-like petals of wood parquet expands out in a kaleidoscopic pattern of squares, triangles, arrows, and beams across the entire floor to the edges of stage.
Animal Farm
By George Orwell, Steppenwolf for Young Adults’ World Premier adaptation by Althos Low, Directed by Hallie Gordon. The description had to be as rich in detail as the characters in their meticulously designed animal costumes and makeup as they moved about the scrupulous sets of Mr. Jones’s farm.
From where you are sitting, at the far right of the stage is the interior of a farm house library. The outline of the room is defined by four, vertical steel support beams standing out from and equally spaced along the left-hand wall. Against the rough, wood-paneled right side wall, a tall, square wooden bookcase sits filled with thick tomes. On the wall on either side of the bookcase, two small candlestick light sconces with small white shades appear beneath a reproduction of Grant Wood’s American Gothic hanging on the wall above the center of the bookcase.
Audio-Described STC productions include:
- 1919
- A Home What Howls
- Animal Farm
- Bald Sisters
- Domesticated
- Last Night and the Night Before
- Noises Off
- Russian Transport
- The Compass
- The Herd
- Seagull
- The Thanksgiving Play
- The Wheel
- This is Modern Art
Contact us to explore Live Audio Description for your next event.