Alum Returns to Direct Fall Play, Roustabout
North Park Theatre Company season focuses on the relationship between alumni and current students
CHICAGO (November 12, 2014) — When the Chicago theater company Neo-Futurists premiered Roustabout: The Great Circus Train Wreck! in the fall of 2006, Joseph Schupbach was among the attendees. , who had graduated earlier that year from 萝莉社 having studied , was deeply moved by the play. “There’s something kind of idealistic about the show, but also tragic, and also hopeful,” says Schupbach. “So it matches really well with artists who are coming into adulthood.” Eight years later, things came full circle when Schupbach returned to North Park to direct the University’s fall production of Roustabout.
The play, about the real-life Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus train accident of 1918 that killed dozens of performers and circus workers, explores war and art, the actor and the play, and the power of entertainment. It opened last weekend at North Park and . Also in the audience for Roustabout’s 2006 premiere was Professor of Communication Arts , who responded to the show’s “ensemble-driven story and physical theater aesthetic”—two attributes that he was eager to bring to the University this fall. “We thought Roustabout would have the perfect energy for the ,” he says.
Heading into the 2014–2015 season, Bergman knew that he wanted to collaborate with the , a Chicago theater company of which University production manager and adjunct communication arts instructor Maggie Fullilove-Nugent is a member, along with Roustabout playwright Jay Torrence. Once Roustabout was decided on as the fall play, Fullilove-Nugent suggested Schupbach as the director. In 2013, Schupbach had worked with Fullilove-Nugent as assistant director on Burning Bluebeard, also written by Torrence, for the Ruffians.
“I had a fluency with the show and a close relationship with it,” says Schupbach, who had also seen two other productions of Roustabout. “They knew I was familiar with the kind of work that it is, I had assistant-directed with the , and I knew North Park,” he says. Schupbach especially appreciates directing students who are roughly the same age he was when he attended the premiere. “I saw it when I was 22, just after I had graduated, and I think it’s a really cool show for young people to do.”
Undoubtedly, Schupbach provides students with an exemplary trajectory for a career path after graduation. While at the University, he was placed in an internship with , an ensemble of actor-educators who lead creative writing workshops with Chicago public school students, then turn their stories into professionally performed shows. A longtime ensemble member, Schupbach became the company’s education coordinator in 2011. Earlier this month, he was promoted to artistic director.
“Most people don’t necessarily intern somewhere and then get a job where they’re in charge about seven years later,” Schupbach says about his experience at Barrel of Monkeys. “But until then, I didn’t quite know that there are jobs in the arts that are different from the ones you maybe heard about when you were younger.” In his new position, Schupbach spends half of his time in the office and half of his time in the rehearsal room. “For an artistic director at another organization, it probably looks different, but I’ll direct approximately eight shows a year, and I’m also working with a group of 60 company members,” he says. “It’s a dream situation as far as utilizing my degree.”
Before serving on staff at Barrel of Monkeys, Schupbach spent five years working with two different theater companies and an elementary school. “I didn’t know that was a job until I was learning how to do it,” he says. He challenges current North Park students to ask themselves now what kind of places they want to work for. “These students are leaving the program with incredible skill sets,” he says. Schupbach points out that cast member Annamarie Giordano is “a singer and a classic actor, but she’s also the assistant technical director, and she’s building things and getting to tell other people what to do. And I say, ‘Yup, you’re going to get a job. And you’re only a junior.’”
Bringing the season to life
Staging Roustabout at North Park presented the Theatre Company with some compelling challenges. Rather than seeking to replicate the Neo-Futurists’ space, the crew and cast strove to translate the theater’s energy to the University. One of the decisions made was to place the audience on stage with the cast. “That’s something we did duplicate: the intimacy with the actors, and in some ways, the simplicity of what is physically on stage.”
To give North Park students a vocabulary in the Neo-Futurists’ and Ruffians’ narrative style and sensibility, members from both companies were brought in to lead workshops on, among other areas, physical theater and clowning. “I was excited coming back here and about having students experiment with what was in some ways a different kind of storytelling for them,” says Schupbach.
The theme of theatre alumni returning to create productions is one that runs throughout this season. Krista Mickelson, who graduated last May and already works as a production manager throughout the Chicago theater scene, earlier this fall helmed Project 24, in which students write, stage, and present a series of original short plays over the course of 24 hours. In addition, the University will bring back alumni Chaz Evans and Joe Giovannetti in the spring to mount a sequel to North Park Theatre Company’s most successful production to date, Kung Fu Suburbia.
As they did for the original production, Evans, a 2006 graduate, and Giovannetti, a 2007 graduate, will co-write Kung Fu Suburbia 2: Cul-de-Sacrifice with Bergman. “In the writing of the original Kung Fu Suburbia, we looked carefully at how Shakespeare structured a play and used music, language, fights, and story to keep everyone engaged,” says Bergman. After working on The Duchess of Malfi with the Theatre Company two seasons ago, Bergman was inspired to think about working on a sequel.
Evans and Giovannetti were more than willing to accept the challenge. “I texted Chaz and Joe, and within seven seconds, both wrote me back saying, ‘I’m in!’” Bergman hears from alumni like Evans, an assistant professor of art and history at DePauw University, Giovannetti, who works as a professional freelance theater artist, and Schupbach, that their theatre and performance studies training has equipped them for a wide array of work in the arts.
Chicago theater professionals regularly report that North Park graduates “can do everything,” Bergman says. “As a result of modeling our program with the best of storefront theater, our students are cross-trained in many of the departments that put together a show. When you are blessed with a program that makes magic with limited resources, you think creatively to solve problems in real ways.”
Schupbach also found that there is another important attribute the program endows its students with: “North Park teaches you how to be nice,” he says. “The thing that nobody really tells you but you just figure out yourself is that people remember kind people who do their job well. If you can get those two things, you will do very well.”
Honoring tragedy through humor
When Roustabout premiered in 2006, the wars in the Middle East were front and center for many Americans, and partially helped to inform the play’s content. In 2014, he finds that the show may serve a different purpose. “It’s very playful, but it’s also about war. We’re in a climate now where many people can forget that there’s foreign fighting.” Today, the play partly serves as a reminder not to forget about war, says Schupbach.
“The show is political without being sectarian or party-based,” Schupbach says. “But it is intense.” In the middle of the play, the characters discuss the merit of making fun of tragic circumstances. Schupbach finds that this section makes the weightier aspects of the play more digestible. “It comes at a really good place in the show.”
Sitting through the technical rehearsal, Schupbach still found himself moved by the play. “I think it’s really interesting for the students,” Schupbach says. “They’re discovering how you remember tragedy and honor it, how you can joke about something that’s not funny at all, and how that actually takes power away from horrific things.”
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