ArtAntica Articles from The No Child Issue

Here it is, our 20th year as a theatre company! Lookingglass was founded in 1988 by an ensemble of seven newly graduated students of Northwestern University. We have become a company of twenty-two ensemble members, producing primarily new work of our own making, in a beautiful little theater in a castle on Michigan Avenue (thanks to our generous art-supporting city and mayor). We are one of the largest ensemble-based companies in the country that primarily produces original work from within the ensemble; there are only a few others of similar size and longevity: Theatre de la Jeune Lune in Minneapolis, and the TheWooster Group in NYC.

What’s funny is that we didn’t set out to write our own plays. It’s not our mission. But as the years have gone by and we look back at the tapestry we’ve been weaving, the pattern of creating original work is seen trailing out behind us. It evolved that way because there was a certain kind of theatre that was exciting to us (not that we would have even been able to articulate it at the time). As a student at NU, I remember seeing this grad student, Mary Zimmerman’s shows (future LG ensemble member) and this play West by Steven Berkoff, directed by a young and foxy David Catlin (now our Artistic Director), and thinking to myself, “this is what I want to do with my life”. It was epic storytelling, with this crazy combination of being highly literate as well as highly visual, physical, and stylized. It was very theatrical and thoroughly exciting. So we like-minded types banded together and formed a company. We couldn’t find many plays that tapped into the kind of storytelling that intrigued us, so we started fashioning our own.

Part of the joy of working in the theatre, and in creating one’s own plays, are the worlds you get to fall into—the research, the pictures, the costumes. It’s your job to play at living in different times and places, to imagine being different people. There is much satisfaction in the serious intimacy you have with the material you are working on and the context of that material. From the gritty killing room floor of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, to the massive sails of Argonautika, Lookingglass has journeyed all over the world and through time. And this month we begin to share our travels with you.

We’ve heard you say you are interested in learning more about the world of our plays, and with this issue of Artantica we are pleased to introduce our online Resource Guide. We encourage you to use this tool over the course of the next season to learn more about each play’s background; about its period and setting; to view images both contemporary and historical. We offer the Resource Guide to help contextualize your experience, whether you’re reading up on one of our productions before attending the show, or afterwards because your curiosity has been sparked and you’d like to learn more. Our desire is to enrich your Lookingglass experience; when you’re at the theatre keep an eye out for lobby displays and stick around on Thursdays for our post-show discussions. We are interested in creating theatre that ignites a dialogue between the audience and artists, and we want to hear from you. - Read more