Stephen Sondheim wrote the music and lyrics for Company, collaborating with George Furth who wrote the book, and it first appeared on Broadway in 1970. It was one of the first “concept musicals” in American musical theatre, a collage of scenes and songs organized around exploring an idea – in this case, marriage and commitment. The legendary director Harold Prince directed that first production, and together, the three men agreed on what Sondheim called a “secret metaphor” for the production.

The show compared the 1970 definition of marriage with the island of Manhattan, which Sondheim called “the handiest local for the inhumanity of contemporary living and the difficulties in making relationships.” Scenic designer Boris Aronson’s set (which won a Tony Award in 1971) conveyed the attitude of Manhattanites – emotionally detached, efficient, and gleaming. Throughout the performance, slides were projected onto the set, highlighting the emotions in the scenes or suggesting specific locations. With over 600 different images projected onto the set, most audience members were probably unaware of the nuanced changes throughout the play. However, moments like the one below, in a nightclub, surely made an impression.

Critics immediately picked up on the “secret” metaphor that Sondheim referred to, the comparison of marriage to the island of Manhattan. One critic expanded on the notion: “Company makes Manhattan a metaphor for marriage. Manhattan is an island of anguish and delight; so is marriage. Manhattan is an incessant roar of competitive egos; marriage is a subdued echo of the same. Manhattan is a meeting of strangers; marriage is a mating of strangers. Manhattan is a war of nerves; marriage is a ferocious pillow-fight battle of the sexes. The links do not stop there. The tempo of Manhattan is a kind of running fever; modern marriage runs a fever and the partners are always taking its temperature. It simply is not the placid old heaven-ordained, till-death-do-us-part, for-better-or-for-worse institution it used to be.”

Company‘s opening song was written AFTER Sondheim saw Aronson’s design for the set, rather than the song inspiring the design, as future productions would work. This first set allowed the married couples to each have their own spaces up above Bobby, and to comment on his contemplation of marriage, all the while remaining oblivious to each other.

There have been numerous revivals, including a 1995 revival at the Roundabout Theatre and another the next year in London at the Donmar Warehouse, which was notable for its casting of Adrian Lester, the first black actor cast as Bobby in a major production of the show.

The most recent Broadway revival, however, was in 2006, directed and choreographed by John Doyle. Doyle’s approach to Company was similar to his 2005 approach to another Sondheim musical, Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. In both productions, Doyle employed the actors themselves as the orchestra – the actors sing and play instruments throughout the performance, which gives them all a kind of voyeur status. The set for the 2006 revival, designed by David Gallo, is almost the exact opposite of the 1970 debut – it feels intimate and loft-like. We feel like we are inside an apartment, and maybe even Bobby’s thoughts, rather than outside. (Should you be interested in more about this, the production was filmed for PBS and is available for instant streaming on Netflix.)

So…what will Geva’s production look like? Our set, designed by G.W. Mercier, also takes inspiration from Manhattan, but not in such a direct way. It also builds on the notion of compartmentalization and isolation – if only we can keep different parts of our lives boxed up, we can keep ourselves separate from others and attempt to disprove the notion that we need people to share in our lives. In this illustration here, you can see both of these inspirations at play – the boxes, when taken together, suggest the skyline of New York City.

Well…

Donuts have been around FOREVER. In ancient Rome and Greece, cooks would fry strips of pastry dough and coat them with honey or fish sauce.  In Medieval times, Arab cooks fried unsweetened yeast dough and drenched them in a sugary syrup. In 15^thcentury Germany, fritters were filled with meat or mushrooms. Paczki, the traditional Polish pastry akin to a jelly donut, have been eaten in Poland since the Middle Ages. Paczki are eaten especially on Ostatki, or Fat Tuesday, a tradition which was originally meant to use up all of the sugar, lard and eggs before Lent.

The first cookbook to mention donuts was an 1803 English cookbook with an appendix of American recipes. In 1809, Washington Irving’s History of New York described “balls of sweetened dough, fried in hog’s fat, called doughnuts, or olykoeks.” American donuts became increasingly popular in the 1920′s – especially in theatres.  I was surprised to learn (although maybe I shouldn’t have been) that the origin of the American style ring-shaped donut is clouded in controversy.

One story claims that early colonial settlers accidentally discovered the joy of fried dough one day when a cow kicked a pot of boiling oil onto some pastry mix, creating fried cake. But the settlers didn’t share the culinary inspiration with their overseas counterparts.

Other stories give credit to Dutch traditions (rather than the accidental inspiration from a cow), which claim that the Pilgrims brought olykoeks – or “oily cakes” – with them to the colonies. These were sweet balls of dough fried in pork fat, frequently filled with apples, prunes or raisins. The only problem with them was that the centers never cooked fully.

So how did the donut get the hole?

In 1847, Elizabeth Gregory sent her 16 year old son, Captain Hanson Crockett Gregory on a sea voyage with several dough-nuts and the recipe to make more. As one story goes, unable to hold the dough-nut and steer the ship at the same time, he impaled the dough-nut on a spoke in the wheel, creating a hole in the center. Pleased with himself, he ordered the ship’s cook to prepare dough-nuts with holes in the center for ease.

The traditional American donut has an important place in the history of the armed forces, too. During World War I, the Salvation Army sent women to France to lift the spirits of the soldiers – and to serve them comfort food. Their food of choice? Hot donuts. The women became known as “Doughnut Girls,” and the soldiers, “doughboys.” During World War II, women from the Red Cross also served donuts to soldiers – earning them the nickname “Doughnut Dollies.” During the Vietnam War, the Red Cross again sent women to assist with troop morale. While they were still called “Donut Dollies,” their main purpose was to create recreational programs for the soldiers.

According to legend (and I LOVE that there are legends about donuts…), dunking donuts in coffee became popular after actress Mae Murray, thought to be the inspiration for Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, accidentally dropped a donut in her coffee one day at Lindy’s Deli on Broadway.

Who knew?

The play takes place in a donut shop in Uptown, an historic Chicago neighborhood. The donut shop first opened its doors in 1950, and is showing its age. So the set, designed by Jack Magaw (who also designed Geva’s Evie’s Waltz and Bad Dates), has to be clearly aged while looking like a contemporary functioning shop. Onstage, we see the donut case behind the counter, the red vinyl chairs and bar stools, the coffee maker, the door to the kitchen and the soda cooler (just out of the range of the camera in the picture to the right) – everything that  makes a donut shop run. The shadows just visible through the transom windows hint at the city beyond the shop. In this photo, taken by Ken Huth, we see the wear on the doors and walls, and the dated chairs and bar stools. The floor tiles, handcrafted by Geva’s scene shop to create the perfect look, are worn and complete the sense of the store’s 60 year history.

Accuracy is important when staging any play – historic or contemporary. Attention is paid to even the smallest detail. In the photo above, Arthur Przybyszewski (center), played by Skip Greer, talks with Officers James (left) and Randy (right), played by Ron Scott and Mary Jo Mecca respectively. While the show takes place today, the costumes for Superior Donuts, designed by Christina Selian, reflect the same kind of attention to detail given to a period play. I asked Geva’s costume shop manager Amanda Doherty for an example, and she responded with a great story about a very intricate detail, and the importance of new technologies in theatre:

Re-creating police or military looks on stage is one of the biggest hurdles costume shops face.  We know we must strive for absolute authenticity, not only because we are representing official government agencies, but because audiences care deeply about these institutions being accurately portrayed.

However, since Sept. 11, 2001 it has become increasingly difficult, if not outright illegal, to acquire many of the accessories necessary for authenticity in military and law enforcement apparel.

There are a few companies that carry authorized replicas of badges and patches, but usually only for larger, well known cities and organizations.  In the case of Superior Donuts, we were fortunate that we could get replica badges, or stars as the Chicago Police Department (CPD) refers to them. But we could not acquire a hat shield, nor a hatband, for the unique and very distinctive CPD uniform cap.  Occasionally, a decommissioned cap will appear on eBay, or a shield on badge trading web-sites; but these are few and far between and the demand is high.

With the advent of affordable and easily accessible 3-D printing, costume and prop shops have expanded opportunities for creating hard to find pieces.  This is an amazing process using a digital file to literally print a 3-D object in a solid material, as opposed to laying down ink on a 2-D piece of paper.  The ink is replaced with a solid material, in our case acrylic, and laid down in layers to build an object.

To create the CPD hat shield for Superior Donuts we pulled several high res images of the shield from various internet sources.  Gary Jacobs then used those references to digitally draw the hat shield in a sculpting program.  The data was sent to a Granular Materials Binding printer at the Rochester Institute of Technology and printed in acrylic. The image below on the left shows the hat shield as it arrived to us in white acrylic. I then could mount the appropriate hardware to the acrylic (center) before painting in black and adding silver leaf (right).  Painting a 3-D image black before gold or silver leafing helps bring out the definition of the details on stage. 

The finished shield was mounted on the uniform cap (below), with custom embroidered hatband, and appears much as an authentic one would.  The only concession we made for legal reasons was to print “Chicago Police” on the front as opposed to a precinct number.

Like A Raisin in the Sun, it takes place in a distressed Chicago neighborhood.  In Donuts, the story comes to us from Uptown, an historic neighborhood to the north of downtown Chicago. In the 1900′s the area was a summer resort for city dwellers, and as the end of most of the city’s transportation system (at the time), it also became a vibrant entertainment destination. By the 1950′s, the middle class population of Uptown began leaving Uptown for the suburbs, leaving upscale mansions and residential hotels to be subdivided into apartments. It’s a racially diverse neighborhood, and that diversity creates much of the tension we witness in Donuts.

Tracy Letts, in 2008

Letts is a Chicago-based playwright, whose play August: Osage County won the Tony Award for Best Play as well as the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2008. His other work includes Bug, which was adapted into a film in 2006 (starring Ashley Judd, Harry Connick Jr. and Michael Shannon); Man From Nebraska (about a man’s mid-life crisis of faith); and Killer Joe, an early work about a homicidal trailer trash family. He’s also a highly respected actor, with a very impressive stage and screen resume. To get a good sense of Mr. Letts’ character, check out this great New York Times article, published shortly after the Tony Awards in 2008.

In Superior Donuts, we watch the unfolding of a relationship between Arthur Przybyszewski, his new employee, Franco Wicks, and the neighborhood inhabitants who frequent the donut shop Arthur’s father began 60 years ago. As this relationship changes throughout the play, we see tradition clashing with new ideas and a new energy. Before rehearsals began, Mark and I talked a little about what this means on a personal level for Arthur.

We go along in life, and more so the older we get, trying to make our life comfortable. And we really work on how to get through the day with the least amount of change to ourselves and our habits – it’s just the way humans are.  We can adapt but we like to do it on our own terms. And Arthur is certainly a wonderful example of someone who has built a life that has shielded him from engaging in what he feels are dangerous relationships.  And he tells us from his whole life story – about his father and the war – he was always trying to step away and to not engage and to defer.  Even when someone does something horrible to him – ransacks his store and writes graffiti about him on the wall – he still defers and checks out.  He’s built that life and that’s how he’s going to go through.  Until a change agent comes into his life. And the great thing about Franco is that he’s 20 and doesn’t get that.  I mean he’s been through a lot already but he doesn’t try to build comfort for himself. He’s just trying to get through day to day.  If you think of the story if Franco hadn’t walked into that donut store – where would Arthur be?

In the next post, I’ll share some of the ideas behind the design for the play – and how our designers and the artists on staff here at Geva plan to create a donut shop on stage. I’m off to rehearsal – but maybe a donut first…

On opening night, the phrase that gave me pause was a line of Asagai’s (played by Tyrien Andre Obahnjoko) in the second act. As we know, without giving any major plot points away, the play hinges on the decision about what the family will do with the insurance money from the death of the Big Walter.  And by this point in the play, it is safe to say that things are not going well for the Younger family.  Asagai says to Beneatha (played by Jessica Frances Dukes) “Isn’t there something wrong in a house – in a world – where all dreams, good or bad, must depend on the death of a man?” On opening night, that line struck me as full of both condemnation and inspiration. And as I think about the many leaders – in the Civil Rights movement especially – whose deaths have cut short the realization of their dreams, that line makes my breath catch.

I look forward to seeing you in the theatre – and to hearing your thoughts! A Raisin in the Sun runs at Geva through March 25.

Towards the beginning of rehearsals, I read a great article by Kai Wright on The Root. The article began like this: “The thing about history is that you don’t get answers to questions you don’t ask.” It’s a fantastic point – and it really sums up my work as a dramaturg in the rehearsal hall. I spend my time asking questions, finding new ways to ask questions, and working very hard every day to find new questions to ask of the play, of the playwright, of the director and the cast.

But Wright’s point is that Lorraine Hansberry is viewed the world over for her contributions to theatre and literature and specifically for her influence on the stories presented about African Americans. But unless you dig, you will not find a discussion about her sexuality and its impact on her work, on her life and on her political activity.

It’s hard to know for sure if Lorraine Hansberry would have identified herself as a lesbian – labels like that are far more defined now, and actually seem to have taken on a new importance, given the current politics of the country. Hansberry was married, for a brief time, to a man – Robert Nemiroff – who is responsible in many ways for the continued visibility of her work. (He was the executor of her estate, and is one of the authors of the musical, Raisin, as well as the 25th Anniversary script of the play and the multiple incarnations of her story, To Be Young, Gifted and Black.) However, she dated women and belonged to the lesbian political organization Daughters of Bilitis, which was the first of its kind.

In 1961, she wrote an unpublished letter to the editor of ONE magazine. “I have suspected for a good time that the homosexual in America would ultimately pay a price for the intellectual impoverishment of women… Men continue to misinterpret the second-rate status of women as implying a privileged status for themselves; heterosexuals think the same way about homosexuals; gentiles about Jews; whites about blacks; haves about have-nots.”

As this extremely talented cast heads downstairs into the theatre to take the play one step closer to public presentation, I can’t help but think about how timely these words are today, and how indebted we are to Lorraine Hansberry for her expression of her forward-thinking ideas onstage. I only wish that, as a society, we could more fully accept her complete identity, for it is from that identity that works like A Raisin in the Sun spring.

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore -
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over -
Like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
Like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

I’ve known of this poem for years, but had only ever thought of it in connection with this play – what I hadn’t realized was that it was just one of a series of poems on the topic Hughes wrote, called Montage of a Dream Deferred. I am not a poet, nor am I a scholar of poetry, so I’m not going to analyze them, but I do want to share a few – they resonate throughout the play, and as we go into the rehearsal room each day, I find that the resonance grows stronger. What is the consequence of deferring your dreams? When does the desperation and the frustration kick in?

Dream Boogie
Good morning, daddy!
Ain’t you heard
The boogie-woogie rumble
Of a dream deferred?

Listen closely:
You’ll hear their feet
Beating out and beating out a -

You think
It’s a happy beat? 

Listen to it closely:
Ain’t you heard
Something underneath
Like a -

What did I say?

Sure,
I’m happy!
Take it away!

Hey, pop!
Re-bop!
Mop!

Y-e-a-h! 

Tell Me
Why should it be my loneliness,
Why should it be my song,
Why should it be my dream
deferred
overlong?

Deferred
This year, maybe, do you think I can graduate?
I’m already two years late.
Dropped out six months when I was seven,
At a year when I was eleven,
Then got put back when we come North.
To get through high at twenty’s kind of late -
But maybe this year I can graduate.

Maybe now I can have that white enamel stove
I dreamed about when we first fell in love
Eighteen years ago.
But you know,
Rooming and everything
Then kids,
Cold-water flat and all that.
But now my daughter’s married
And my boy’s most grown -
Quit school to work -
And where we’re moving
There ain’t no stove -
Maybe I can buy that white enamel stove!

Me, I always did want to study French.
It don’t make sense –
I’ll never go to France,
But night schools teach French.
Now at last I’ve got a job
Where I get off at five,
In time to wash and dress,
So, s’il vous plait, I’ll study French!

Someday,
I’m gonna buy two new suits
At once!

All I want is
One more bottle of gin.

All I want is to see
My furniture paid for.

All I want is a wife who will
Work with me and not against me. Say,
Baby, could you see your way clear?

Heaven, heaven, is my home!
This world I’ll leave behind.
When I set my feet in glory
I’ll have a throne for mine!

I want to pass the civil service.

I want a television set.

You know, as old as I am,
I ain’t never
Owned a decent radio yet?

I’d like to take up Bach.

Montage
Of a dream
Deferred.

Buddy, have you heard?

So, how do we know what is intended? We go back to the dialogue. Robert has actually deleted many of the stage directions, and we let the dialogue dictate the action. In many productions of A Raisin in the Sun, Ruth spends a great deal of time ironing – she has taken laundry home from the white houses she works in, washed it at home, and irons it during many scenes in the play. Was this business, invented to keep the actress onstage, or is it driven by the dialogue? We can only know what the text teaches us.  Will you see Ruth, in the Geva production, continuously ironing clothes? Only time will tell…

Oh – and last night, after rehearsal, I caught The Good Wife on CBS – and wouldn’t you know it? Lynda Gravatt, who plays Mama in our production, was on the show!

Robert and Clint were both really impacted by the images of Chicago’s Southside in the 1950′s, which brings to light a side of A Raisin in the Sun that isn’t often fully depicted onstage – the visceral desperation that the Youngers deal with throughout the play. This family – Mama, Walter Lee, Ruth, Travis, Beneatha and (until his death sometime before the play) Big Walter – have been living in a tight, crumbling one-bedroom kitchenette apartment for over 30 years. As the family grew, the living space became more and more cramped, and the privacy dwindled until it was practically nonexistent. With the family living literally right on top of each other and the absolute absence of breathing space, tensions rose until, as Walter says to Ruth, “How we gets to the place where we scared to talk softness to each other. Why you think it got to be like that? Ruth, what is it gets into people ought to be close?”

According to Clint, this feeling of desperation and the horrible state of most apartment buildings in the Southside was the starting place for the design. He wanted to create “a space so cramped and desperate that moving out really becomes a life and death situation.”

Clint Ramo's model

So he has created a space that leaves no room for romance, no room to imagine that this space could possibly have anything but a negative impact on the Younger family. What does a space so small do to a family?

Personally, as I look at this space and try putting myself in the shoes of any of the characters in the script, I feel my chest constrict with hopelessness and frustration. It reminds me of something Lorraine Hansberry wrote in a letter to a young college student who wanted to know her views on Civil Rights, or, as he put it, “the Negro question.” As part of her response, she said, “In the twentieth century men everywhere like to breathe: and the Negro citizen still cannot, you see, breathe.” This is not the point of her reply – but it hits on the head one of the problems with a space like this. There is not even room to breathe.

Existence in Chicago’s South Side in the 1950′s was harsh.  Discriminatory housing policies meant that the majority of African American families lived like the Youngers, in kitchenette apartments – larger apartments were broken up into several smaller homes, with a very small kitchen and one bedroom.  Entire families lived in these apartments, and usually shared a bathroom in the hallway with others on the floor.

Breaking up apartments like this allowed landlords – like Carl Hansberry, Lorraine’s father – to greatly increase the income they gained from their buildings.  And the more people they fit into their buildings, the more crowded the South Side became. In 2003, Timuel Black interviewed residents of the South Side from the 50′s, as a way of capturing the oral history of the area.  One recalled, “It was so crowded because back then all of us were moving all the time! First white folks moved out, then black folks would move in. We even had something called “Moving Day,” which was in September and sometimes also in April. That’s when the white folks would be leaving and the black folks would be coming in. It was kind of prestigious to do that because our community was constantly expanding, and we were always moving farther south.”

With overcrowding came an increase in the poor conditions.  And because Federal Housing Authority policies actually encouraged discriminatory lending policies, very few African American families were able to secure the loans necessary to move out of the neighborhood, even if they were prepared for the uphill battle against racism they might receive in another area. So the South Side began more and more to look like this:

This is what the Younger family in A Raisin in the Sun is fighting so hard to get out of – overcrowded spaces both inside and outside of their apartment walls, which are crumbling around them. What happens when a family – or a whole city full of families – is pushed to the brink like this, where even getting up in the morning involves a fight with those around you?

This post is a summary of a some research into the South Side – for more thorough information, and an in-depth look at the discriminatory housing policies mentioned, I recommend: 

• Black, Timuel D. Bridges of Memory: Chicago’s First Wave of Black Migration. Evanston: Northwest University Press, 2003.
• Miller, Wayne F. Chicago’s South Side: 1946-1948. Berkeley: University of California Press, Ltd., 2000.
• Satter, Beryl. Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009.