Lifeline’s annual benefit was held on Thursday, April 16, in the newly refurbished, totally sparkly, mosaic-filled dome room of Preston Bradley Hall in the Chicago Cultural Center. Elegant and totally grown up. To go with our mystery theme (we’re gearing up for Busman’s Honeymoon at Lifeline), Christina adapted a Dorothy L. Sayers short story, The […]
Au revior, Lord Peter
I’m sitting in the darkened theatre. Voices of designers murmur around me. In the black I can see a few blue-tinted faces as they stare intently into their laptops, almost unblinking, their eyes flicking from screen to stage, screen to stage. In front of me I can make out the skeleton outline of our set, […]
Telling stories
Both Paul & Katie touch on the nature of artistic ensembles in their recent blog posts, something I’ve been pondering myself lately. I consider the Lifeline ensemble truly fortunate, since the primary function of the group is to choose and develop the material we produce, not merely just to direct/design/act in it. We aren’t stuck […]
Mariette thoughts
Four months ago, I wrote a blog entry following the first rehearsals for Mariette in Ecstasy, with every intention of handing over new entries on a regular basis to report on our progress, both through the rehearsal process and the run (two very different animals). Obviously that didn’t happen! There are variety of reasons, primarily […]
An Ensemble Prepares
There has been some discussion in the blogosphere of late on the role of an acting ensemble, lots of debate on that mysterious question of what ensemble members are entitled to expect. From Our perspective, I think we naturally look at each other first as a group of artists we respect, that we want to […]
Our new Managing Director
Allison Cain is Lifeline’s new Managing Director! Yay! We are so happy and fortunate. You may know Allison because she’s acted in four Lifeline shows (including the current Mariette in Ecstasy — closing April 5, don’t miss it!) as well as acting all over town. She was also Executive Director of the Factory Theater for […]
News, news, and more news
Ron Hansen was here! Again! (Elise Kauzlaric, Brenda Barrie, Ron Hansen & Christina Calvit) Author Ron Hansen returned to Lifeline on March 14th to see the finished Mariette in Ecstasy (he’d already come on first preview weekend!) He did a book signing between the 4pm and 8pm shows and a talkback after the latter. We’ve […]
Cheers for Mariette
Let me just give a shout out right now to the Lifeline house and box office team because ALL the bosses were out of town this past weekend and we did not get a single text. As per usual, Susan, Tonia and Deirdre had it all under control. I even got Deirdre roped into the […]
Pain
As we’re working on Mariette in Ecstasy, a play which examines the lives of nuns at the turn of the century in upstate New York, I find myself struggling with one of the key ideas of the text. Why would anyone actively seek pain? Mariette Baptiste, a young postulant, loves Christ with a passionate, teenage […]
Peter Brown was here!
Flight of the Dodo author-illustrator Peter Brown was our celebrity guest at Lifeline on January 18th. Author visits are thrilling and most of us Lifeliners were just bouncing gleefully — but the adapter and the director are generally a smidge Anxious as they wonder about author response to “what we’ve done to his book.” Pretty […]