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March – May 2012
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS:
PLAYWRIGHT, POET, DREAMER
A JOURNEY INTO “BIEITOLAND”:
INTRODUCING THE UNCONVENTIONAL
WORLD OF DIRECTOR CALIXTO BIEITO
A Conversation with Fish Men
Playwright Cándido Tirado

March – May 2012
CONTENTS
In the Albert
1 Why Camino Real?
2 Tennessee Williams: Playwright, Poet, Dreamer
7 Tennessee in Chicago
8 A Journey into “Bieitoland”: Introducing the Unconventional World
of Director Calixto Bieito
In the Owen
12 A Conversation with Cándido Tirado
15 For Love or Money: The World of Chess Hustling
At the Goodman
16 Insider Access Series
In the Wings
17 Imparting Culture and Communication: A Conversation with Ira Abrams
Scene at the Goodman
19 Race Opening Night
Celebrating Race and Diversity
Off Stage
20 A Legacy of Great Theater
For Subscribers
21 Calendar
VOLUME 27 #3
Co-Editors | Lesley Gibson, Lori Kleinerman,
Tanya Palmer
Graphic Designer | Tyler Engman
Production Manager | Lesley Gibson
Contributing Writers/Editors | Neena
Arndt, Jeff Ciaramita, Jeffrey Fauver, Lisa
Feingold, Katie Frient, Lesley Gibson, Lori
Kleinerman, Caitlin Kunkel, Dorlisa Martin,
Julie Massey, Tanya Palmer, Teresa Rende,
Victoria Rodriguez, Denise Schneider, Steve
Scott, Jenny Seidelman, Willa J. Taylor,
Kate Welham.
OnStage is published in conjunction with
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and subscription information call
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direction by Kelly Rickert.
Goodman productions are made possible
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and a CityArts grant from the City of
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IN THE ALBERT
FROM THE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR
Photo by Brian Kuhlmann.
Why Camino Real?
During my tenure as artistic director I have had the privilege of bringing some of the most notable directors now working
on the world stage to the Goodman, including Peter Sellars, JoAnne Akalaitis, Ivo van Hove, Elizabeth LeCompte,
Flora Lauten (from the esteemed Cuban company Teatro Buendía) and our own Mary Zimmerman. Although vastly
different in style and approach, these directors share a passion for exploring new ways of theatrical storytelling, an
uncompromising singularity of vision and a radical (and often controversial) way of reimagining classical texts. To this
group I am extremely proud to add Calixto Bieito, a Barcelona-based director whose soaring, radical interpretations
of everything from classic operas to Shakespeare have astonished, inflamed and challenged audiences throughout
Europe and South America.
My first experience with Calixto’s work came in 2004, with his sexually charged interpretation of Mozart’s The
Abduction from the Seraglio in Berlin. I found that production to be both fascinating and disturbing; Calixto’s investigation
of the dark subtext that lay beneath the “classical” exterior of the piece displayed a courage and sophistication
that was, to me, profound and unsettling. Soon after the performance I met with him, and was immediately
impressed by his warmth, intelligence and infectious passion for his work. When we began to discuss possible
projects that might be of interest to him, he revealed his love for the works of one of my favorite writers, Tennessee
Williams. Though our conversation began with a discussion of Williams’ better-known works, in talking to Calixto
it occurred to me that his bold artistry might be better used to explore one of Williams’ less often performed plays,
Camino Real. First produced in 1953, Camino remains one of the author’s most poetic works, and one of his most
ambitious: it is an impressionistic musing on the nature of love, loss, humanity and the encroachment of time,
peopled largely by iconic figures of romance who are coming to terms with their own mortality. Because of its nonrealistic
milieu and aching lyricism, I felt that this seldom-produced work, long considered one of Williams’ most
personal, would inspire Calixto to do what he does best: to create a world in which the playwright’s images and ideas
could take flight and soar. After reading the play, Calixto agreed, and the result is a full-bodied, extraordinarily theatrical
piece which fuses Williams’ poetry, music and evocative imagery to create, in Williams’ words, “the continually
dissolving and transforming images of a dream.”
Although Camino Real is notably based less in realism than its author’s more familiar works, it shares with those
plays a highly charged blend of disparate elements: beauty and brutality; moments of romance punctuated by shocking
dissolution. As interpreted by one of today’s most courageous and uncompromising directors, I guarantee that its
vivid images and haunting, sometimes squalid beauty will live with you for a long, long time.
Robert Falls
Artistic Director
1

IN THE ALBERT
2

Tennessee Williams:
Playwright, Poet, Dreamer
By Neena Arndt
Tennessee Williams,
circa 1955. Photo by
FPG/Archive Photos/
Getty Images.
In the foreword to his phantasmagoric
1953 allegory, Camino Real, playwright
Tennessee Williams, who by then had
made a name for himself with psychological
dramas like A Streetcar Named Desire
and The Glass Menagerie, wrote, “More
than any other work I have done, this
play has seemed to me like a construction
of another world, a separate existence.”
Casual Williams fans may remain
unfamiliar with the dreamlike Camino
Real, which differs stylistically from his
better-known works. In fact, those who
know only Williams’ “greatest hits” might
be hard-pressed to believe that Camino
Real—broad in scope and sweepingly
ambitious—flowed from the same pen
as the classics they cherish. But Camino
Real springs from the deepest recesses of
Williams’ heart and psyche, and offers a
glimpse into the staggering imagination of
this multifaceted writer.
In 1951, two years before Camino Real
premiered, Tennessee Williams became
a household name when 27-year-old
Marlon Brando swaggered and shouted
his way to immortality as Stanley
Kowalski in the film A Streetcar Named
Desire. Under the direction of Elia
Kazan, Brando portrayed Williams’ most
iconic male character as lustful and sensuous,
giving a grandiose performance
that nonetheless was grounded in the
realistic acting style of which Brando
was a master. An early “method” actor,
Brando was steeped in the theories of
visionary Russian director Konstantin
Stanislavsky, which permeated American
theater and film in the mid-twentieth
century. This style supplanted melodrama,
which saw its heyday in the nineteenth
century and took its last fluttery
breaths in the middle of the twentieth,
when writers like Tennessee Williams,
Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller transformed
the American stage with such
masterworks as Streetcar, Long Day’s
Journey into Night and Death of a
Salesman. Directly imitating real life had
never been among melodrama’s goals,
but now, both on stage and on screen,
many artists aimed to hold up a mirror
to the world around them.
Today, Tennessee Williams is most often
remembered as one of the writers who
pioneered this style in America. Indeed,
the works for which he is best known use
largely realistic plots and characters to
achieve Williams’ goal of rooting around
the human psyche. Their stories concern
SYNOPSIS
Tennessee Williams’ hauntingly poetic
allegory takes us to a surreal, deadend
town occupied by a colorful collection
of lost souls anxious to escape
but terrified of the unknown wasteland
lurking beyond the city’s walls. When
Kilroy, an American traveler and former
boxer, inadvertently lands in this
netherworld, he sets off on a fantastical
adventure through illusion and
temptation in an attempt to flee its
confines—and defy his grim destiny.
3

IN THE ALBERT
“More than any other work I have
done, this play has seemed to me like
a construction of another world,
a separate existence.”
—Tennessee Williams
events that could occur in the real world,
and their characters confront their problems
in psychologically realistic ways. Yet,
even in these works, Williams’ language
is languidly poetic, and his stage directions
often indicate that he envisioned his
works being performed with an undercurrent
of visual and auditory metaphors. In
A Streetcar Named Desire, for example,
Williams indicates that Blanche’s descent
into madness is underscored by echoing
voices and “jungle noises.” If, in the text
of Streetcar, Williams is holding a mirror
up to life, it is a warped mirror, each distortion
meticulously sculpted. The poetic
elements in these works afford readers a
glimpse of his wide-ranging sensibilities.
But in order to fully appreciate the vastness
of Williams’ dramatic imagination,
one has to experience his more overtly
surrealistic works like Camino Real, The
Gnädiges Fräulein or Stairs to the Roof .
In The Gnädiges Fräulein, a pair of southern
ladies chatter and preen in rocking
chairs while being entertained by a retired
vaudeville performer who has had her
eyes pecked out by an oversized bird. In
Stairs to the Roof, the characters go on a
whirlwind surreal journey before ascending
symbolic stairs to the roof of an office.
Here, the mirror Williams uses is straight
out of a fun house—and like those twisted
images that confront us at carnivals,
they provide a different, but equally valid,
way of perceiving and making sense of
the world.
The phrase “camino real” translates from
Spanish as “royal road,” but in Williams’
play it ironically represents a dead end.
Camino Real places familiar characters
from literature—such as Don Quixote,
Casanova and Lord Byron—in a mythical
town in an unspecified Latin American
country where the “spring of humanity
has gone dry.” Although the play contains
references that place it in the twentieth
century—an airplane, for example—the
play’s time period remains fluid and
ambiguous. The presence of literary
characters from different eras reinforces
the notion that the action occurs either in
many time periods simultaneously, or in
no time period in particular. These literary
characters are joined by characters
who are products of Williams’ imagination,
such as an enigmatic gypsy and a
freaky faction of “streetcleaners” whose
job is to remove corpses from the streets.
Much of the action centers around Kilroy,
a newly arrived American whose name is
inspired by the popular World War II era
graffiti phrase “Kilroy was here.” A prizefighter
with a “heart as big as a baby’s
head,” Kilroy first appears to be the all-
American hero—but the nightmare dreamscape
in which he now finds himself
proves more treacherous than any fighting
ring. While Kilroy and his fellow inhabitants
of the town are theoretically free to
leave, outgoing transportation is sporadic
and a vast desert wasteland stretches to
the horizon—so setting out on foot seems
foolhardy. Most of the characters remain
stuck in their current situations, both
geographically and emotionally, allowing
Williams to explore the inner workings of
their desperation, and their love for (or
perhaps just attachment to) each other.
4

OPPOSITE: Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando in A
Streetcar Named Desire. ©Bettman/CORBIS. BOTTOM:
Denholm Elliot and Elizabeth Seal in a scene from
the Tennessee Williams’ play Camino Real. Photo by
Popperfoto/Getty Images.
Just as they occupy the town, the characters
also inhabit the fertile landscape
of Tennessee Williams’ mind, representing
his experience of the world rather
than the world’s literal outward appearance.
Prior to Camino Real’s Broadway
opening in 1953, Williams published an
essay in The New York Times describing
his thought processes about the play:
My desire was to give audiences my
own sense of something wild and
unrestricted that ran like water in the
mountains, or clouds changing shape
in a gale, or the continually dissolving
and transforming images of a dream.
This sort of freedom is not chaos nor
anarchy. On the contrary, it is the result
of painstaking design, and in this work
I have given more conscious attention
to form and construction than I have
in any work before. Freedom is not
achieved simply by working freely.
in 1953, theatergoers scratched their
heads over Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for
Godot, another play which places little
focus on plot—but is now considered
a staple of the Western canon.) Critic
William Hawkins noted, “The first thing
evident about this brave new play of
Tennessee Williams is that explanations
of it that suit you may not suit anybody
else. The playwright has composed his
work in terms of pure emotions. They
are abstract, without excuse or motivation.
What you see and hear is the effect
on the heart, of human nature when it
is greedy or hilarious or sorry for itself.”
For other critics, the play inspired less
openmindedness: John McClain opined,
“There is not the slightest doubt that Mr.
Williams has some provocative and highflown
thoughts about love and life, and
he is capable of lyrical and humorous
and sometimes utterly earthy writing, but
it seems to me that in this instance he
knocked himself out being oblique.”
Never inclined to scorn or ignore his
audiences’ reactions to his plays,
Williams returned to the typewriter
after the play opened on Broadway and
revised the script. The published version
reflects the changes he made to help
audiences enter his admittedly mysterious
world—an added prologue which
sets up the action, and some additional
When the play premiered on Broadway
in a lavish production by Elia Kazan,
some critics and audiences applauded its
stylistic originality, while others decried
its lack of storyline and expressed confusion
regarding Williams’ intentions. (Also
WOMEN’S BOARD
SPONSORS CAMINO REAL
The Goodman Theatre Women’s Board continues
a long tradition of support for exciting and challenging
work with its sponsorship of Camino
Real. Since its formation in 1978, the Women’s
Board has made it part of its mission to sponsor
a production every season and provide
crucial funding for the Goodman’s Education and
Community Engagement programs.
Goodman Theatre gratefully salutes the Women’s
Board as a Major Production Sponsor of Camino
Real, and is extremely thankful for the dedication
and generosity of its members.
5

IN THE ALBERT
scenes. Williams was also careful to
note, in an afterword, that due to its reliance
on visual elements, this particular
play would provide a far more satisfying
experience on the stage than on
the page. While he acknowledged that
some plays are “meant for reading,” he
emphasized that text is not always of
primary importance to a play:
Of all the works I have written, this
one was meant most for the vulgarity
of performance. The printed script of a
play is hardly more than an architect’s
blueprint of a house not yet built or
built and destroyed. The color, the
grace and levitation, the structural
pattern in motion, the quick interplay
of live beings, suspended like fitful
lightning in a cloud, these things are
the play, not words on paper, nor
thoughts and ideas of an author, those
shabby things snatched off basement
counters at Gimbel’s.
In the years following, the revised play
went on to numerous regional productions
(including one at the Goodman in
1958), usually receiving mixed reviews.
In 1970 it was revived in New York by
the Lincoln Center Repertory Company,
and critic Clive Barnes proclaimed,
“There are people who think that Camino
Real is Tennessee Williams’ best play,
and I believe that they are right. It is a
play torn out of a human soul.” Barnes
went on to observe that when the play
was first produced in 1953, “there were
many who found it obscure. Our standards
of obscurity, like our standards of
obscenity, have escalated since those
dark days of theatrical innocence.” When
Barnes wrote those words, only 17
years had passed since Camino Real’s
premiere—now, we experience Williams’
work at a distance of nearly 60 years. In
the interim, innovative playwrights like
Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Eugene
Ionesco and countless others have
“The playwright has composed his work
in terms of pure emotions. They are
abstract, without excuse or motivation.
What you see and hear is the effect on
the heart, of human nature when it is
greedy or hilarious or sorry for itself.”
—William Hawkins, Critic
spurred audiences to expand their ideas
of what constitutes a play. These writers
employ techniques such as extensive
use of symbolism and placing their plays
in no particular place or time. Viewed
through the lens of history, Camino Real
seems less radical than it did in 1953—
though it remains a vivid, visceral peek
into the mind of one of America’s most
complex and beloved playwrights.
BOTTOM: Mundy Spears and Emily Webbe in The Gnädiges
Fräulein performed as part of WSC Avant Bard’s 2011
Tennessee Continuum. Photo C. Stanley Photography.
HONORING A LEGACY:
HOPE ABELSON AND
CAMINO REAL
Through its 2011/2012 production of Camino
Real, Goodman Theatre honors the legacy of a
true luminary of the Chicago arts world, the late
Hope Abelson. At the Goodman—as well as
many if not all theaters in Chicago—Hope was
a champion of new work.
Hope began her life in the arts as a performer,
working as an actress in radio drama. Her
career led her to serve as a producer for several
Broadway shows. She also founded the American
Friends of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival and
she was instrumental in the early days of the
League of Chicago Theatres.
In 1953, Hope served as an assistant on the
original production of Camino Real. She was
responsible for daily script changes and she made
herself indispensable to both Tennessee Williams
and the play’s director, Elia Kazan. She became a
critical supporter of arts organizations large and
small, including the Chicago Symphony Orchestra,
Ravinia Festival, Court Theatre, Victory Gardens
Theater and Steppenwolf Theatre Company. Hope
was an early board member of the Goodman and
also served on the Illinois Arts Council.
The Goodman is grateful to her daughter Katherine
Abelson, a Goodman Women’s Board member,
and Katherine’s husband Robert J. Cornell, for
carrying on this tradition through their support
of our education and community engagement
programs for Camino Real.
Hope Abelson and her daughter Katherine at the Goodman’s Inaugural Gala.
6

LEFT: Peg Murray and
Scott Jaeck in Goodman
Theatre’s 1982 production
of Tennessee
Williams’ A House Not
Meant to Stand. Photo
by Lisa Ebright. BELOW:
Tennessee Williams
and Goodman Theatre
Executive Director Roche
Schulfer outside the
Goodman Studio.
Tennessee and Chicago
By Steve Scott
Although the city most often associated
with Tennessee Williams’ work was New
Orleans (his adopted home and the setting
of some of his most famous works), it was
Chicago that gave him his first real success
in the theater and that would provide
artistic haven to him late in his career.
Williams’ love affair with the Windy City
began in 1944 with the landmark success
of The Glass Menagerie, produced
at the Civic Theatre prior to its arrival on
Broadway. Claudia Cassidy, the venerated
critic for the Chicago Tribune, became a
passionate advocate for the play, writing
in her initial review that, “it reaches out
its tentacles, first tentative, then gripping,
and you are caught in its spell.” Cassidy’s
praise, and her continued exhortations
to local audiences to support the play,
brought national attention to the work
before it had even moved to New York,
and helped establish Williams as the preeminent
dramatist of his generation.
Thereafter, Williams considered Chicago
to be one of the best theater towns in
the world; in a 1951 letter to Cassidy,
he urged her to stump for the establishment
of a strong locally based theater
community here, exclaiming, “No better
place on Earth!” Touring productions
of his Broadway hits were a staple in
Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s, and,
as local producing companies began to
sprout, Williams’ plays were an important
part of their repertoire. Director
George Keathley’s first major hit at the
old Ivanhoe Theatre was a much-lauded
revival of The Rose Tattoo which swept
the first annual Joseph Jefferson Awards
in 1969. Two years later, Keathley produced
the world premiere of Williams’
Out Cry, an experience unfortunately
marred by the playwright’s erratic behavior—although
Williams later admitted,
after the failure of a subsequent New
York production with a different director,
that the play “was better in Chicago.”
Problems also plagued the 1980 premiere
of Clothes for a Summer Hotel, which
starred Goodman School of Drama alumna
Geraldine Page as the ill-fated Zelda
Fitzgerald; although Williams himself was
in better emotional shape, his play was
greeted with critical disappointment.
Later that year, the playwright embarked
on an alliance with Goodman Theatre
that would result in in his final major
work for the stage. Some Problems for
the Moose Lodge, which was produced
first in the Goodman Studio as one of
three short plays collectively billed as
Tennessee Laughs
(a title Williams
apparently loathed),
was a darkly savage
comedy detailing
the travails of
Cornelius and Bella
McCorkle, an elderly
couple dealing with
the disintegration
of their family and
their marriage. The
reception of Moose
Lodge was positive
enough to encourage
Williams to expand the play into a longer
one-act, now entitled A House Not Meant
to Stand, produced in 1981, again in the
Goodman Studio. Despite some critical
misgivings, Williams kept working on the
play, encouraged by then-Artistic Director
Gregory Mosher; the result was a fulllength
version of House, which premiered
on the Goodman mainstage in the spring
of 1982. Now subtitled by the author
“A Gothic Comedy,” the new version
expanded the expressionistic absurdities
of its earlier drafts, revealing even more
passionately the playwright’s own frustrations
with the challenges of aging; as
Richard Christiansen noted in his Chicago
Tribune review, “it is a loud, harsh, bitter
pain-filled shriek at the degenerative process
of life…a tantalizing and frustrating
creation.” A House Not Meant to Stand
would be the last production with which
Williams himself would be associated;
tragically, he died nine months later.
7

IN THE ALBERT
A Journey into “Bieitoland”:
Introducing the Unconventional
World of Director Calixto Bieito
By Tanya Palmer
Fluent in five languages, Bieito has juggled
a career in his native Spain—where
he was the artistic director of Barcelona’s
Teatre Romea from 1999 to 2011—with
an international career directing primarily
opera around the globe. His work
has taken him to Germany, Belgium, the
United Kingdom, Scandinavia, France,
Italy, Switzerland, South America and
Mexico, but his upcoming collaboration
with the Goodman will mark only the second
time his work will have been seen in
the United States, and his first collaboration
with American actors and designers
on the work of an American playwright.
Over the past 15 years, Spanish director
Calixto Bieito has earned a reputation
as a “bad boy” of European theater,
simultaneously admired and reviled
for his radical revisionist productions
of classic operas and dramatic texts.
His harshest critics have condemned
his work as “sickening,” “puerile” and
“tasteless,” while his advocates describe
him as a “director of vision and courage,
an Almodóvar of the opera stage.” His
most famous (or infamous) productions
include a version of Verdi’s A Masked
Ball at the English National Opera
(in a co-production with the Liceu in
Barcelona and the Royal Danish Opera)
which relocated the mise-en-scene from
eighteenth century Sweden to 1970s
Spain and began with a controversial
image of a vast public urinal; a staging
of Macbeth (first produced in German for
the Salzburg Festival and then restaged
in Catalan at Teatre Romea) in which the
characters were cast as mafia dons and
molls, monarchs of what one reviewer
called a “hedonistic, drug and drinkfuelled
culture with no bounds” on a set
of garish white leather sofas, cluttered
drink trolleys and porcelain tigers growling
ominously at passersby; and a production
of Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s
Golden Age classic Life is a Dream,
which Bieito staged on a gray sandy set
dominated by a giant suspended mirror
which functioned as a “metaphorical
tool, providing both a dazzling image
of an elusive world that can never be
entirely controlled and a commentary on
a play that continuously questions what
we mean by ‘reality’ and ‘fiction.’”
While some critics accuse Bieito of desecrating
classic texts with needlessly
shocking images of violence and sexuality,
his work is the result of a conscious
approach to create a visceral connection
between contemporary audiences and
classic works. Theater scholar Maria
Delgado suggests that Bieito’s work consistently
asks radical questions about how
and what texts mean to different generations.
In a profile of Bieito in Fifty Key
Theatre Directors, a book that explores
the work of directors from around the
world who “have shaped and pushed
back the boundaries of theater and performance,”
Delgado writes, “With the
classics especially, he has demonstrated
the ability to reinvent texts, stripping them
of the legacy of past productions and
reimagining them for contemporary audiences.”
This method of “reinventing texts”
often involves working closely with a
translator and/or adaptor to cut and rearrange
canonical works—deleting characters
and interpolating contemporary musical
or cinematic references into the performance
texts, such as a 2004 production
of King Lear which contained depictions
of violence that were a direct homage to
the final sequences of Kill Bill and The
Texas Chainsaw Massacre. For Bieito, this
process of connecting the dramatic text or
opera to the contemporary moment—and
locating himself and his collaborators
within the work—all begins with an effort
to interpret what the writer was trying to
communicate. Rather than simply laying
on a concept, Bieito’s goal is to create a
visual and auditory universe that releases
the text from the confines of history—thus
unlocking its meaning and connecting it
8

Rather than simply laying on a concept,
Bieito’s goal is to create a visual and
auditory universe that releases the text
from the confines of history—thus
unlocking its meaning and connecting
it more directly to the present moment.
more directly to the present moment. In a
recent conversation with the Goodman’s
Associate Dramaturg, Neena Arndt, Bieito
explained his process this way:
I have a way of approaching the text,
I have to prepare…reading a lot about
the context, the period, about the
writer. In this case, with Tennessee
Williams, there are his Memoirs. After
that, you think—what was the writer
trying to do? And what does it mean
for the audience, today, or what does
it mean to me today? And what can
I express of myself with this?
Bieito first came to prominence internationally
in 1997, when his production
of Tómas Bretón’s 1894 zarzuela
(or popular operetta) La verbena de la
paloma (The Festival of the Dove) was
performed at the Edinburgh International
Festival. Setting the piece in an urban
wasteland, Bieito’s production undermined
the “celebratory tone” in which
the piece was generally read, presenting
it instead through the “prism of an overt
social criticism of bourgeois complacency
and corruption.” The production marked
Bieito as an important and original
young voice, but by that time he was
already well known in his native Spain,
where he’d built a reputation tackling a
wide variety of texts—everything from
Shakespeare to Sondheim.
Born in 1963 in a small Spanish town
called Miranda de Ebro, Bieito moved
to Barcelona at the age of 14. He came
of age in the final days of the Franco
regime and was educated by Jesuits.
Bieito grew up in a musical household—
his mother was an amateur singer and
his brother teaches in the Barcelona
Conservatoire—and went on to study art
history at the University of Barcelona. As
a young man he traveled around Europe,
studying and working alongside some of
the continent’s most visionary directors,
including Jerzy Grotowski, Peter Brook,
Giorgio Strehler and Ingmar Bergman.
He made his professional debut in the
mid-1980s at Barcelona’s Adrià Gual
theater with a production of Marivaux’s
The Game of Love and Chance. His
directorial approach—marked by rigorous
textual readings of complex dramatic
works that evolved on sparse stage environments
where décor is reduced to its
bare essentials—was in many ways at
odds with the Spanish, and in particular
Catalan, theater scene at the time, which
was defined in large part by the acrobatic
ingenuity of non-text based performance
companies like Els Joglars, Comediants
and La Fura dels Baus.
From the beginning of his career, Bieito
has sought to balance his identity as a
Catalan director with his interest in working
across linguistic and cultural boundaries.
“Bieito is one of the few Catalanbased
directors who has consciously
sought to work both in Catalan and
Castilian,” explains Maria Delgado in her
article “Calixto Bieito: A Catalan Director
on the International Stage.” “He has
OPPOSITE: Director
Calixto Bieito at Teatre
Romea. Photo by David
Ruano. RIGHT (left to
right): Don Carlos, by
Friedich Schiller. 2009.
Production: Teatre
Romea & Nationaltheater
Mannheim. Tirant lo
Blanc, 2007. Production:
Teatre Romea, Institut
Ramon Llull, Hebbel am
Ufer, Schauspielfrankfurt
& Ajuntament de
Viladecans.
9

IN THE ALBERT
LEFT: La Ópera de Cuatro Cuartos (The Threepenny
Opera), 2002. Production: Focus, Salamanca 2002,
Festival d’estiu de Barcelona Grec 2002 & Teatro Cuyás.
OPPOSITE: La Vida es Sueño (Life is a Dream), 2010,
Production: Teatre Romea & Complejo Tetral de Buenos
Aires. Photographer Carlos Furman
seem like a Sunday school play.” For
Falls, the production engendered in him
an emotional response that convinced him
to seek out more of Bieito’s work:
resisted the monolingual register favored
first by Franco—who promoted Castilian
at the expense of the other languages
of the Spanish state—and later by Jordi
Pujol, president of the Catalan Parliament
between 1980 and 2003, who sought to
remedy the balance by prioritizing Catalan
as the official language of Catalonia.”
As the artistic director of Teatre Romea,
which began its long history as a home
for Catalan-language drama, Bieito
sought to expand the theater’s mission
to include presentations of contemporary
European plays and reimagined classics
alongside contemporary and classical
Catalan plays. But while he has sought
to break down linguistic and cultural barriers
in his work, he continues to identify
strongly with his heritage:
My references come from my Catalan,
Hispanic and Mediterranean culture.
From the Spanish Golden Age, Valle-
Inclán, Buñuel, Goya…. The black
humor that shapes my work is part
of this cultural heritage. Spain is not
only about flamenco and bullfighting.
It’s part of my imagination. It’s an
approach to everything I direct.
Goodman Theatre Artistic Director Robert
Falls knew Bieito by reputation, but his
first encounter with Bieito’s work came
in 2004 with his staging of Mozart’s The
Abduction from the Seraglio for Berlin’s
Komische Oper. In what would become
a notorious production, Bieito dispensed
with the traditionally “light” opera’s
Turkish setting, locating it instead in a
modern day European brothel modeled
after one that sits near Berlin’s Olympic
stadium. The cast, including a contingent
of sex workers, displayed their wares in a
series of transparent boxes. As one critic
put it, “there [was] enough onstage sex
and nudity to make the golden calf orgy in
the Met’s production of Moses and Aaron
“I thought that Calixto could illuminate
this play in a way that some American
directors might not be able to, that he’d
identify it is a poem, rather than a play
by an American southern playwright.”
—Robert Falls
I find it hard to be shocked in the theater.
And this production shocked me.
Coming in I didn’t know much about
The Abduction from the Seraglio; but
I was so taken by it and disturbed by
it—and to me that is a good thing,
because I don’t often feel that way in
confronting art. Generally when I see
a painting or listen to music or watch
a play I may like it, I may think it was
good, but in terms of being viscerally
stimulated or disturbed, I don’t feel
that way very often. I had a profound
reaction to that Mozart opera. It sent
me back to listen to the music and
study the libretto, at which point I
realized that the story is very much
about rape and the subjugation of
women. Calixto put those images of
subjugation and domination on the
surface in a way I felt was brave and
profound. I felt that he was unabashedly
and fearlessly trying to reveal
something deep in the subtext of the
work, and that inspired me in my own
work. At the time I was preparing my
production of King Lear, and I was
seeking courage. He provided me the
inspiration to go further in examining
what the play was really about, and to
not be afraid of presenting the horrors
of the world to an audience.
Falls initially approached Bieito about
directing a Eugene O’Neill play as part
of the Goodman’s 2009 festival, A
Global Exploration: Eugene O’Neill in
the Twenty-First Century. But ultimately
their conversation turned to another
10

major American playwright: Tennessee
Williams. Bieito was familiar with the
more widely known Williams plays like
A Streetcar Named Desire and The
Glass Menagerie, but it was Falls who
introduced him to Camino Real. With its
inclusion of the iconic Spanish literary
figure Don Quixote, its Latin American
setting, and its surreal, dreamlike musicality,
Falls felt that Bieito might respond
to it—and he was right. Falls was excited
to see what this distinctly European
director would uncover in the work of an
iconic American playwright. “We think of
Tennessee Williams as a realist. I think
Williams was trampled down by the
general conformity of the 1950s and the
rise of the method actor, some of whom
brought everything down to a non-poetic,
mumbly, grumbly realism. And Williams
was a real poet. I thought that Calixto
could illuminate this play in a way that
some American directors might not be
able to, that he’d identify it as a poem,
rather than a play by an American southern
playwright.”
Williams saw this play as an attempt to
challenge himself, his audience—and the
theater as a form, writing in the play’s
foreword that his intention was “to give
audiences…the continually dissolving
and transforming images of a dream.”
He writes, “We all have in our conscious
and unconscious minds a great vocabulary
of images, and I think all human
communication is based on these images
as are our dreams; and a symbol in a
play has only one legitimate purpose
which is to say a thing more directly and
simply and beautifully than it could be
said in words.” This wild dreamscape—
this reliance on a striking image to reveal
what a torrent of words cannot—makes
Williams’ play a remarkable match for
Calixto Bieito’s approach, in which a
text and the theatrical space are stripped
to their bare essentials, as Delgado
explains, “allowing the construction of a
multi-dimensional world where the real
and the poetic can exist cheek by jowl.”
When asked what he sees as the role of
the director in approaching a play, Bieito
explains his task this way:
To understand the play. In your way.
To be honest with yourself, and be
brave. And to express yourself with
the piece. To others…and sometimes
you don’t know exactly what you
want to do; you have an intuition, you
have to follow this. Sometimes I am
sleeping and I have a dream…and
suddenly in the dream I have images
that come into my mind and I use
them the next day in the process…I
try to feel free, to feel open, to feel
naked. You have to give answers, but
you have to keep the mysteries, the
hidden things of the play, keep them
hidden as well.
INDIVIDUAL SPONSORS
FOR CAMINO REAL
Goodman Theatre would like to thank the following
individuals for their support of Camino Real.
M. Ann O’Brien
Orli and Bill Staley
Randy and Lisa White
Sallyan Windt
Director’s Society Sponsors
Katherine A. Abelson and Robert J. Cornell
Education and Community Engagement
Programs Sponsors
Commitments as of January 23, 2012.
11

IN THE OWEN
A Conversation with Cándido Tirado
This spring marks the second production
in the Goodman’s ongoing collaboration
with Teatro Vista, Chicago’s largest
Equity theater company dedicated
to producing Latino-oriented works
in English. Starting April 7, the world
premiere of Cándido Tirado’s Fish
Men will take to the Owen stage. Set
in Manhattan’s Washington Square
Park, Fish Men chronicles an afternoon
with a group of chess hustlers as they
attempt to lure unsuspecting “fish” into
high-stakes games for cash. But the
action—played out rapid-fire in real
time—quickly leads to a series of devastating
revelations.
Playwright Cándido Tirado is Teatro
Vista’s writer-in-residence this season,
and while Fish Men contains only
one Latino character, director Edward
Torres—also Teatro Vista’s artistic director—maintains
that the play’s multiethnic
focus is an essential element of its
Latino identity. “The urban landscape
has shifted dramatically, and I define
‘Latino’ now as being at the center of
world cultures—African, indigenous
European and Asian—because for me
Latino culture is rooted in all these other
cultures,” he says. With this shift in the
cultural landscape in mind, Fish Men
also represents a first step in a change
of direction for Teatro Vista towards presenting
more multicultural work. Says
Torres, “We hope to present the work
of fresh Latino writers from their unique
perspective and the world they’re living
in, which is often at the intersection of
many different cultures.”
It is precisely at this intersection of
cultures that the Fish Men playwright
Tirado spent his formative years. A
native-born Puerto Rican, he immigrated
to the Bronx at age 11 and came of age
in a densely populated neighborhood
where people of myriad cultures converged.
Just before rehearsals began, he
talked to the Goodman’s Lesley Gibson
about chess, Latino theater and how his
experience as a live witness of the events
of 9/11 informed this new play.
Lesley Gibson: What was your initial
inspiration for Fish Men?
Cándido Tirado: I’m a chess master
myself, and it’s one of my greatest loves.
I’d been trying to work on a play about
chess and had a lot of false starts. Then
one day I was out with a friend and we
walked into Washington Square Park and
the play came to me like a wave. My
initial inspiration was to make the play
about hustlers. But man’s inhumanity to
man is a big theme in my life, and I’ve
always wanted to write about it because
that’s a great interest of mine—how we
treat each other and how things like
genocides happen; there were so many
genocides in the twentieth century.
So I decided to try to deal with that
subject in the context of a chess hustle,
where the hustler is trying to almost
dehumanize his opponent, not just over
the [chess] board but psychologically to
make him feel worthless, to make him
feel less-than, to break him down so
he’ll be easier to beat. There’s a type
of psychological war that happens. So
instead of just being a play about playing
chess, it becomes about life and death.
LG: Did you spend a lot of time in the
park researching and playing chess?
CT: I always go to the park to play. I
used to hang out to listen to people
talk. Chess players are very funny, and
a lot of them are a little bit more than
acquaintances; we talk often. So that’s
part of my world, whenever I walk in
SUPPORT FOR FISH MEN
The Goodman is proud to acknowledge the following
sponsors who support our dedication to
producing new work including Fish Men.
Julie and Roger Baskes
Lynn Hauser and Neil Ross
Cindy and Andrew H. Kalnow
Eva Losacco
Catherine Mouly and LeRoy T. Carlson, Jr.
Shaw Family Supporting Organization
Beth and Alan Singer
Orli and Bill Staley
New Work Season Sponsors
Harry and Marcy Harczak
New Work Student Subscription Series Sponsor
The Davee Foundation
Major Contributor to Research and Development
of New Work
Contributing Sponsor for Fish Men
Commitments as of January 23, 2012.
12

OPPOSITE: Cándido
Tirado. RIGHT: Steve
Casillas, Jessie David
and Marvin Quijada in
Mamma’s Boyz. Photo
by Art Carrillo.
there everybody says, “Hey, Tirado!”
And I love that, because it’s like Cheers,
where everybody knows your name.
They make you feel welcome for a little
while, then they just want to play you
and try to beat you. But for five minutes
it’s good.
LG: Are any of these characters based
on actual people you played with in
the park?
CT: They’re basically composites of
people. Flash is a composite of three
different people; I knew a guy who was
really brilliant but he dropped out of
school and became a hustler. Nobody
knew why he dropped out of school,
but he was really intellectual, he had a
fast mouth and he could beat you with
his mouth he talked so much. He was a
great trash-talker but he was also nerdy,
so in order to create the character Flash
I wanted to give him more street toughness.
I know another hustler who was
more “street” who could confront you—
because when you’re hustling you got to
get tough. Sometimes the people losing
don’t like losing; not everyone wants to
give you their money, and sometimes
you have to make a stand or a threat.
So I wanted to make this character live
in both worlds; have a kind of a street
toughness and an intellectual side. But
some of the other characters are totally
fictional or are based on situations I’ve
seen that I’ve taken creative license with.
LG: The characters in this play come
from all different backgrounds; only one
of them is Latino. Do you think of this
as a “Latino play”?
CT: I don’t; that’s my quick answer. For
me, the central theme of Fish Men is
whether human beings are going to continue
on this planet. So the characters in
the play come from different ethnicities—
there’s only one Latino character—but
he’s a major character because I wanted
to talk about some part of a Latino/
Indian genocide that happened. So I don’t
consider the play a Latino play, but I’m
Latino, and I wrote it so I guess it is.
“There’s a type of psychological war
that happens. So instead of just being
a play about playing chess, it becomes
about life and death.”
—Cándido Tirado
In this country everybody gets defined
by their background. So I’m a Latino
playwright in this country. But the plays
I write—I like to do more symbolic characters,
I like to do metaphorical characters.
In Mamma’s Boyz, one of my plays
that Teatro Vista just produced, there
are three young drug dealers whose
names are Mimic, Shine and Thug.
Each name means something, but they
don’t have to be Latino actors to play
them. They could be Italian or Irish or
African American; as long as their culture
is that of the street, impoverished,
where drugs or crime seem like a way
out. I had a friend from Italy who saw
the play said, “Wow, that seems like me
and my two friends.”
LG: You mentioned in a previous interview
that you were in lower Manhattan
on September 11, 2001; did your
experience that day affect your work
on this play?
CT: It did, a lot. After the first plane hit I
was still going to work—I worked across
the street from the second tower that got
hit. There was a policeman in the middle
of the street—it had just happened—and
he was blowing his whistle and telling
people, “Don’t go that way,” but people
13

IN THE OWEN
weren’t listening. But he looked me in
the eyes and told me not to go where I
was going, so I walked away, and about
two minutes later the second plane hit; I
would have been underneath that building
when the second plane hit. With all
the glass and parts that were falling I
probably would have been really hurt or
killed. I ended up walking home across
the Brooklyn Bridge, and there was a
lot of fear and adrenalin, because at the
time I thought, “If they hit the building
they’re going to hit the bridge too,”
which sounds dramatic now but it’s
what I was thinking.
For a while after I got really depressed—
coming so close, being there, and then
dealing with a lot of survivor’s guilt. It
informed me about the play, and about
the characters, and how big this thing
is—man’s inhumanity to man. There
are characters in the play who lost their
family; I could never get close to that
and I hope I never will, but I got a little
taste—a very small taste—of that.
thing that brought everybody together,
and that feeling was amazing. The fear
was horrible, but this spiritual thing was
amazing, and that informed in me in the
play because I think that’s very special
in humanity.
LG: Do you think your chess skills seep
over into your process as a playwright?
CT: People tell me that the way I think
is like a chess player. In chess there’s
something called a “trio of analysis.” You
analyze a few variations of a move, and
each variation has all of these branches,
so it could go on forever, but you usually
pick the top three responses and analyze
them to see which has the best payoff.
And I look at writing like that—I analyze
the possible ways of doing something,
and sometimes I take the least likely
way to get to that place. People tell me
all the time, “The way you just made
that point is like a chess player.” I really
don’t get it because that’s how I think
naturally. I’m a playwright; I think about
structure and form and how you make
a play, and I also know chess and the
argument of chess. So maybe writing a
play and playing chess are more similar
than they appear.
BELOW: Steve Casillas and Jessie David in Tirado’s
Mamma’s Boyz. Photo by Art Carrillo.
But then at the same time as I was coming
out of my depression and my fear
and all that stuff, there was kind of a
spiritual thing going on in New York. You
know, if the recovery workers needed
socks, in an hour they had too many
socks. If they said, “We need blood,”
in an hour they had too much blood,
and they kept making announcements,
you know: “Stop giving blood, stop giving
socks.” So there was this spiritual
GOODMAN THEATRE WOULD
LIKE TO THANK ALL NEW WORK
DONORS FOR THEIR HELP IN
MAKING OUR PRODUCTION OF
FISH MEN POSSIBLE.
14

For Love or Money:
The World of Chess
Hustling
By Steve Scott
They can be found in any of New York’s
public parks or gathered in chess shops
throughout the city. Their names evoke
the legendary status that some of them
achieve: Broadway Bobby, Russian
Paul, Sweet Pea, Poe. Their ranks
have included future Hollywood greats,
day laborers, students, international
champions and homeless knockabouts.
Although the trade that they ply is technically
illegal, they are largely ignored
by legal authorities—and their unique
brand of fame has been chronicled by
newspapers, blog sites and at least one
feature film.
Welcome to the world of chess hustlers,
players who compete at the
board game for money, a fixture of New
York street life that has been referred
to as the “largest growth industry”
in the city. Chess hustlers have plied
their trade in Manhattan’s parks for
decades; according to local lore, actor
Humphrey Bogart made his living as
a master of speed chess during the
Depression, as did future Unites States
chess champion Arnold Denker. Film
director Stanley Kubrick (whose passion
for the game made its way into such
movies as 2001: A Space Odyssey)
was a frequent—and victorious—habitué
of Washington Square Park’s chess
boards in the early 1960s. But the
popularity of street chess is generally
acknowledged to have started with a
former convict named Bobby Hayward,
who in the late 1960s or early 1970s
set up shop on a garbage can on
Eighth Avenue, between 42nd and
43rd Streets. Word soon spread, and
Hayward’s enterprise was immortalized
by photographs in The New York Times.
Such mainstream attention brought
visibility (and perhaps legitimacy) to
Hayward and his fellow hustlers, and
soon street chess was a sought-after
activity for both chess wizards and New
York tourists.
The form of the game preferred by most
hustlers is known variously as speed
chess, blitz chess, or lightning, in which
each side has five minutes (or three,
in a variation known as bullet chess)
to complete all their moves. There are
two ways to play speed chess: touchmove
(meaning that if a player touches
a piece, he has to move it) or the more
common clock-move (meaning that a
move is not complete until a player
punches the clock). Veteran speed chess
players can keep several games going at
once, keeping track of the tally as they
go. This can be an effective method of
bilking more money out of the neophyte
player by causing him to lose track of
the number of games that have actually
been won, or to lose track of the amount
of the wager made on each game. There
are other tricks that the hustler can use
to fix the outcome of a game: rigging the
clock so that the opponent’s time runs
out faster than the hustler’s or, when a
hustler’s luck runs out, fleeing the game
via an unannounced break. In his 2000
book The Virtue of Prosperity, author
Dinesh D’Souza describes one such
game in which his opponent, a storied
street chess champion, was unexpectedly
down after fifteen minutes. “I’ll be
right back,” the opponent said, heading
for the men’s room in a hotel across
from the park. A few minutes later,
an observer pointed out the obvious
to D’Souza: the hustler wasn’t coming
back, and D’Souza wasn’t getting his
five-buck winnings.
ABOVE: Chess hustlers in Washington Square Park.
Photo by David Shankbone.
Although such shenanigans are eschewed
by many bona fide chess hustlers, the
competition among hustlers is fierce,
and the stakes may be higher than the
monetary bet at hand. As the character
Flash in Cándido Tirado’s Fish Men says,
“We’re not happy with just winning. We
want to obliterate the opposition.”
GOODMAN THEATRE
WINS 2011 EDGERTON
FOUNDATION NEW
AMERICAN PLAYS AWARD
Goodman Theatre is the proud recipient of a
2011 Edgerton Foundation New American Plays
Award, to support its world-premiere production
of Cándido Tirado’s Fish Men. Since it launched
nationally in 2007, the Edgerton Foundation New
American Plays program has awarded grants to
not-for-profit theaters for 150 new plays. The
awards are competitively granted to theaters to
give plays-in-development extended rehearsal
time, allowing the production and its theater artists
the opportunity to reach their maximum potential.
Past awards from the Edgerton Foundation include
support for the world-premiere productions of
Chinglish, Stage Kiss and Turn of the Century.
15

AT THE GOODMAN
Want to Learn More About What
Inspires the Work on Our Stages?
Discover the Insider Access Series.
Insider Access is a series of public programs that provide insight into the Goodman’s artistic process. With Artist Encounters,
you’ll meet the names and faces behind the work on our stages—actors, playwrights, directors, the gamut! And PlayBacks take
place directly after selected performances; they’re the ideal chance for audiences and artists to interact and analyze the production
right after the curtain comes down.
CAMINO REAL
ARTIST ENCOUNTER: CAMINO REAL
A Conversation with Calixto Bieito
Sunday, March 11 | 5 – 6pm
Institito Cervantes | 31 West Ohio Street, Chicago, IL
In this one-night-only event, internationally acclaimed director
Calixto Bieito takes us inside his new adaptation of Tennessee
Williams’ fantastical 1953 play, Camino Real, in an intimate
conversation with Goodman Theatre Resident Artistic Associate
Henry Godinez. Dubbed “one of Williams’ most imaginative
works” by The New York Times, Camino Real is a rarely performed
carnival of desire and temptation; this production marks
the first original collaboration with an American theater for
Bieito, who is known throughout Europe for his radical revisionist
interpretations of classic operas and plays.
FREE, reserve tickets at GoodmanTheatre.org or 312.443.3800.
FISH MEN
ARTIST ENCOUNTER: FISH MEN
Featuring playwright Cándido Tirado and director Edward Torres
Wednesday, April 11 | 6 – 7pm
Chicago Cultural Center, First Floor Garland Room
78 East Washington Street, Chicago, IL
Join us for an intimate conversation with Fish Men playwright Cándido
Tirado and director Edward Torres before a 7:30 performance.
FREE, reserve tickets at GoodmanTheatre.org or 312.443.3800.
PLAYBACK: FISH MEN
Following each Wednesday performance of Fish Men, Owen
Theatre audiences are invited to attend PlayBacks, post-show
discussions with members of the artistic team.
FREE
PLAYBACK: CAMINO REAL
Following each Wednesday and Thursday performance of Camino
Real, Albert Theatre audiences are invited to attend PlayBacks,
post-show discussions with members of the artistic team.
FREE
THEATER THURSDAY: CAMINO REAL
Thursday, March 8 | Reception: 6 – 7pm
Performance of Camino Real at 7:30pm
Goodman Lobby
Join us for a pre-show reception featuring internationally
renowned Catalan director Calixto Bieito, co-adaptor Marc
Rosich and the Goodman’s Associate Dramaturg Neena Arndt.
Enjoy Spanish-themed hors d’oeuvres, beer and wine—as well
as a discussion with Bieito and Rosich on their preparation and
vision for the play. Then catch a performance of Camino Real,
directed by Bieito, known as “the Quentin Tarantino of opera.”
Tickets to the reception and play are only $50. Use promo
code THURSDAY when purchasing at GoodmanTheatre.org,
or call 312.443.3800 and mention “Theater Thursday.”
Chuck Smith at the Race Artist Encounter. Photo by David Raine.
INDIVIDUAL SEASON SPONSORS
Goodman Theatre is grateful to these individuals for their outstanding support
of the 2011/2012 Season.
The Edith-Marie Appleton Foundation
Ruth Ann M. Gillis and
Michael J. McGuinnis
Principal Sponsors
Sondra & Denis Healy/Turtle Wax, Inc.
Merle Reskin
Leadership Sponsors
Julie and Roger Baskes
Patricia Cox
Andrew “Flip” Filipowski
and Melissa Oliver
Carol Prins and John H. Hart
Alice Rapoport and Michael Sachs/Sg2
Major Sponsors
Commitments as of January 23, 2012.
16

IN THE WINGS
Imparting Culture and Communication:
A Conversation with Ira Abrams
The Goodman’s Student Subscription Series (SSS) provides
matinees, post-show discussions and educational resources for
Goodman productions to Chicago Public School teachers and
students free of charge. In return, partner teachers must provide
lesson plans detailing how they use Goodman productions in
the classroom, attend professional development workshops and
previews for each production their students see, and organize
annual school visits with the Goodman’s education department
to ensure their continued participation in the series. Education
Associate Teresa Rende recently spoke with one of the
Goodman’s Student Subscription Series teachers, Ira Abrams,
who has worked with the Goodman to bring theater to his students
at the Chicago Military Academy for over eight years.
Teresa Rende: What inspired you to participate in the SSS?
Ira Abrams: It just seemed obvious to me that if there was this
incredibly generous offer out there that my students should be
able to take advantage of it. Coming to teach in the Chicago
Public Schools, I could see how students often felt alienated by
much of the cultural knowledge we were trying to pass on to
them; the Goodman bridges that gap for students.
From an instructional point of view, the Goodman program has
been the cornerstone of my efforts to help students see what is
possible to do with a text. My students come to the Goodman
having studied the script and struggled with its shape and its
nuances. Then they get to compare their reading with the production.
There’s a light bulb that comes on in this context and I
would be hard-pressed to reproduce that kind of learning by any
other means.
TR: What were you hoping to impart to your students when
they saw Race this January?
IA: Chuck Smith, the director for Race, asked the question,
“Why aren’t the races talking to each other?” It seems to me
that “not talking to each other” is one of the great themes of
our time. In Race, playwright David Mamet looks specifically at
the way manipulating story lines and public images has become
more important than genuine communication. I wanted my students
to do their own writing to explore the difference between
genuine communication and posturing conversation, both public
and private.
Ira’s Chicago Military Academy students participate in a post-show discussion with the
playwright and cast of El Nogalar; April 2011.
TR: What has been your favorite element of the program thus far?
IA: I can think of dozens of students for whom the SSS program
has been either a doorway to a bigger vision of life, or a literal
life-saver. One student in particular stands out for me.
This young woman had virtually dropped out of school by
March, when we began studying The Story. She was very bright
but had always been an inconsistent student, and now her
mother had become ill and was relying on her to work and be
a caregiver. Eventually, she admitted that she was planning to
drop out of school and was only coming to my class because
she wanted the chance to perform and to attend the plays.
I made her a kind of a deal, whereby she had to meet some
basic goals to earn a ticket to the show.
Somehow, after the trip to see Tracey Scott Wilson’s The Story,
she got a burst of energy and started coming to school. I never
did figure out what it was about that play that made such a difference
for her, but for the last months of the school year every
time I saw her in the halls she had her ragged copy of that
script tucked under her arm. She managed to graduate and is
now an accountant, but theater was her double-major in college.
She still acts in her church.
GOODMAN THEATRE WOULD LIKE TO THANK ALL
EDUCATION AND COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT DONORS
FOR THEIR HELP IN MAKING OUR OUTREACH
PROGRAMS POSSIBLE.
17

COMING SOON…
A NEW (WEB)
HOME FOR THE
GOODMAN!
It’s the second best thing to being there. The
new Goodman website will bring you closer than
ever to the magic of live theater, with exhaustive
archives, interactive features and new ways to
experience the drama—wherever the internet
may find you!
ON THE NEW GOODMAN WEBSITE YOU’LL BE ABLE TO:
SEARCH for the best seats and buy
tickets with greater ease
PURCHASE season subscriptions
24/7 and even select your own seats
WATCH exclusive behind-the-scenes
films in our expanded video library
AS WELL AS:
• EXPLORE our extensive archive of all productions staged
from 2000 through today
• RELIVE your favorite past shows in our photo albums
• LEARN more about the artists who bring the Goodman’s
work to life
• READ in-depth articles about productions past,
present and future
• PERUSE our extensive collection of actor bios
• DISCOVER our programs for Chicago-area students
• PLEDGE your support
GoodmanTheatre.org
EARLY SPRING, 2012
18

SCENE AT THE GOODMAN
Race Opening Night
On January 23, 2012, sponsors and guests gathered at Club
Petterino’s to celebrate the opening of David Mamet’s Race.
Following cocktails and dinner, guests attended the opening performance
of Mamet’s latest work.
Special thanks to our sponsors who made this production possible:
Corporate Sponsor Partner Mayer Brown LLP; Media Partner
WBEZ 91.5 FM; Season Sponsors The Edith-Marie Appleton
Foundation, Julie and Roger Baskes, Patricia Cox, Andrew “Flip”
Filipowski and Melissa Oliver, Ruth Ann M. Gillis and Michael
J. McGuinnis, Sondra and Denis Healy/Turtle Wax, Inc., Carol
Prins and John H. Hart, Alice Rapoport and Michael Sachs/Sg2
and Merle Reskin; and Director’s Society Sponsors John and
Caroline Ballantine, Mary Jo and Doug Basler, Doris Conant, Julie
M. Danis and Paul F. Donahue, Paul Dykstra and Spark Cremin,
Linda Hutson, M. Ann O’Brien and Susan and Bob Wislow.
RIGHT (top to bottom): Goodman Resident Director and the director of Race Chuck Smith,
Trustee Elizabeth A. Raymond (Mayer Brown LLP) and Marc Kadish, Director of Pro Bono
Activities and Litigation Training at Mayer Brown LLP; Mayer Brown LLP is the Corporate
Sponsor Partner of Race. Director’s Society Sponsor Mary Jo Basler and Trustee and
Season Sponsor Alice Rapoport.
Celebrating Race
and Diversity
On January 25, 2012, at Club Petterino’s, the Goodman held
its winter Diversity Night event featuring David Mamet’s Race,
directed by Chuck Smith. This free event is a product of the
Goodman’s ongoing commitment to reflecting the diversity of
our community in all areas of our organization, and is designed
to bring a new audience of culturally diverse individuals to our
theater. At the event, guests saw a special video that included
a wide range of Chicago-based artists and cultural leaders,
putting into context the themes and issues raised by Race. We
hope our guests came away with a framework for engaging in
conversation about how theater addresses the difficult social
and cultural issues of our time. This Diversity Night was definitely
an evening to remember!
Goodman Theatre gratefully acknowledges each of the sponsors
including: including Diversity Initiatives Leader Charter
One Bank; Diversity Initiative Partners Accenture, Allstate, Ernst
& Young, Fifth Third Bank, Exelon Corporation, Loop Capital,
Macy’s, McDonald’s Corporation and Mesirow Financial; along
with Corporate Sponsor Partners for Race Mayer Brown and
Event Sponsors Baker & McKenzie LLP and Kirkland & Ellis LLP.
RIGHT (top to bottom): Ralph Hughes from Diversity Initiatives Partner Macy’s and Glenn
Mazade, Event Co-chair from Diversity Initiatives Leader Charter One. Goodman Board
Chairman Ruth Ann M. Gillis from Diversity Initiatives Partner Exelon Corporation and
Marc Grapey from the cast of Race. Goodman Trustee and Event Co-chair Rebecca Ford
Terry and Tamberla Perry from the cast of Race.
19

OFF STAGE
Special Rates at
Chicago Kimpton
Hotels
Participating Chicago Kimpton Hotels are offering Goodman
Theatre patrons special rates under $200—up to 60 percent
off regular rates—through August 31, 2012. Participating
hotels include Hotel Allegro, Hotel Burnham and Hotel
Monaco. These rates apply for standard rooms, but special
savings may be available for suites with Jacuzzis; inquire at
the time of your reservation.
GUESTS AT CHICAGO KIMPTON HOTELS ENJOY:
• Superb dining at area restaurants
• Gorgeous rooms with eclectic décor
• Central location in exciting downtown Chicago
• Complimentary wine bar for hotel guests
• Fitness rooms and classes
• Plus, pets are welcome!
PRESENTS
Underwater Photographer Brian Skerry in
OCEAN SOUL
Monday, March 26, 2012 | 7pm | Albert Theatre
National Geographic Live returns to Chicago this March for one
unforgettable night at Goodman Theatre! Voyage across the
oceans with one of our most seasoned photographers. Brian
Skerry dives eight months of the year, often in extreme conditions
beneath Arctic ice or in predator-infested waters, and has
even lived at the bottom of the sea to get close to his subjects.
Skerry has spent more than 10,000 hours under water creating
portraits of creatures so intimate they appear to have been shot
in a studio. The evening will include riveting stories of Skerry’s
encounters with whales, sharks, and giant squid and feature
stunning, high-definition images from his new book, Ocean
Soul. Special ticket pricing for Goodman Theatre Subscribers
at GoodmanTheatre.org/natgeo.
To obtain Goodman Theatre rates at participating Kimpton
hotels use promo code GMT when ordering online at
KimptonHotels.com, or call 312.325.7211 Monday through
Friday, 8am – 5:30pm. In order to access the rate, you must
click on the individual hotel’s website.
A Legacy of Great Theater
In November 2011, the Goodman lost a
cherished member of our theater family,
Bettie Dwinell. A Subscriber and donor,
Bettie’s long-standing commitment to the
Goodman spanned more than 60 years.
Bettie’s passion for theater could be traced
back to her childhood in Mt. Morris,
Illinois. “Living in a remote area, listening
to theater and other shows on the radio
was all we had to do,” she once told the Goodman’s Director
of Development Dorlisa Martin. Years later, she began attending
shows in Chicago and even met her late husband while he
was a lighting design student at the original Goodman School of
Theatre. Over the years, she became involved with many other
Chicago cultural organizations, including the Field Museum, the
Art Institute, the Lyric Opera and the Saints.
Bettie’s enduring love of the arts inspired her to join the
Spotlight Society, an association of theater enthusiasts who
have remembered the Goodman in their estate plans. Thanks
to Bettie, future generations of Chicagoans will experience the
outstanding productions and community educational programs
offered by the Goodman.
To learn more about Spotlight Society membership or make
a planned gift to Goodman Theatre, please contact Jenny
Seidelman at (312) 443-3811 ext. 220 or JennySeidelman@
GoodmanTheatre.org.
20

CENTER STAGE
Subscriber and annual donor Beatrice Hall shares
why she supports Goodman Theatre.
How long have you been involved with the Goodman?
So long I don’t really remember. I can tell you that
I was there at the old theater when you could have
dinner in the rehearsal room. Back then I was not a
Subscriber; I was buying ticket by ticket. I saw all of
August Wilson’s plays.
With all the options in Chicago, why do you
support Goodman Theatre?
One reason is because it’s the theater where I was
introduced to theater. Also, it’s always been easily
accessible from my home and my office when I was
working. And I’ve always been really impressed by
the programs you offer for inner-city students.
Do you support other arts and cultural organizations
in Chicago?
I do attend other organizations, but the Goodman is
where my support really goes.
Which Goodman Theatre productions have been
favorites in our recent history?
I enjoyed Silk so much that I actually bought the
book it was based on; there was just something
about that production. I also loved Crowns, King Lear
and The Piano Lesson.
BELOW: Subscriber and annual donor Beatrice Hall
In the Albert
CAMINO REAL MARCH/APRIL 2012
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In the Owen
FISH MEN APRIL/MAY 2011
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
4/8
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5/5
SOMETHING NEW AT SOUTH WATER KITCHEN
With the addition of acclaimed Chef Roger Waysok, Goodman Theatre preferred partner restaurant South Water
Kitchen has recently revamped its menu. The new menu was inspired by the classic Midwestern dishes from
Chef Waysok’s childhood, and includes fresh takes on classic favorites, like roasted all natural chicken, BLT tuna
tartare and smoked pork pizza. For a quick bite before or after a show, opt for the delectable tavern menu, which
features tasty and affordable small plate options.
South Water Kitchen is located at 225 North Wabash
Street, next door to the Hotel Monaco. For the complete
menu, visit SouthWaterKitchen.com. For reservations
call 312.236.9300.
21

WHAT GREAT THEATER SHOULD BE
170 NORTH DEARBORN
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS 60601
Non-profit Org.
U.S. Postage
P A I D
Chicago, IL
Permit No. 2546
WHERE YOU CHOOSE YOUR DESTINATION
A WORLD OF
POSSIBILITIES
WIN THE TRIP OF A LIFETIME!
On Friday, May 11, 2012 at Goodman Theatre’s annual Gala five
lucky winners will be selected to win this extravagant prize.
Don’t miss out. Look for the World Travel Raffle brochure inside this
issue of OnStage. For more information, please contact Katie Frient
at 312.443.3811 ext. 586 or KatieFrient@GoodmanTheatre.org.
Special Thanks To:
Exclusive Airline of
Goodman Theatre