'Seagull: True Story'

 

[Readers of Rick On Theater, even those who aren’t theater folk, probably know that Anton Chekhov, the renowned turn-of-the-20th-century Russian dramatist, is a beloved figure in the Western theater world.  Actors and directors, especially, love to do his plays.  He has a prominent place in nearly every repertory theater’s repertoire. 

[Chekhov’s plays are translated into almost every known language.  They’re also adapted and modernized almost as often as William Shakespeare’s are.  Below is the story, told via an interview with the play’s 34-year-old director, of one of those adaptations.  

[The play, The Seagull, which is about theater and theater people—two actresses and a playwright, has become a vehicle for the director, an exile from Chekhov’s own country, who conceived the adaptation, to tell his own story, 118 years after the playwright’s death.]

“RUSSIANS WHO FLED AFTER UKRAINE INVASION
STAGE FRESH TAKE ON CLASSIC PLAY IN U.S.”
by Jeffrey Brown, Zeba Warsi, and Anne Azzi Davenport

[This segment on PBS News Hour on Tuesday, 19 May 2026, caught my attention for two reasons.  One, it was an interesting theater story: a young, émigré Russian stage director of some accomplishment who fled Putin’s autocratic regime under duress, made a play based on a Chekhov classic that told his own story, got it produced at New York City’s esteemed Public Theater to considerable acclaim.

[And two, I hadn’t heard about it—or him—though he’d been here, working, since 2022 and his play has been staged a few times since early 2025!  So, maybe others missed the memo, too.]

Two Russians who left their country after the invasion of Ukraine and are now rebuilding their lives and careers in the U.S. Senior Arts Correspondent Jeffrey Brown reports on a recent production in New York for our Art in Action series, exploring how art and democracy shape one another, as part of our CANVAS coverage.

Geoff Bennett [Co-anchor of “PBS News Hour”]: Now a different kind of migration story, one involving theater and two Russians who left their country after the invasion of Ukraine and are now rebuilding their lives and careers in the U.S.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown reports on a recent production in New York for our Art in Action series exploring how art and democracy shape one another as part of our Canvas coverage.

Jeffrey Brown: [On screen: a performance; singing in Russian.] It’s a play within a play, with cabaret humor, even slapstick, alongside the drama of loss of friends, family and country.

Alexander Molochnikov: [Giving a curtain speech.] And I’m very thankful to all of you for allowing me to tell the personal, sometimes even dramatic story in a playful way.

Jeffrey Brown: For Alexander Molochnikov [Александр Молочников; often romanized as Aleksandr Molochnikov; b. 1992], the creator and director of “Seagull: True Story” [written by Eli Rarey (b 1977), with music by Fedor Zhuravlev (b. 1995)] this is personal. It’s based on his own story.

[Molochnikov is a writer, filmmaker, and internationally acclaimed theater director. He worked for over 10 years in Moscow where he directed five major productions in drama, a ballet, an opera, two feature films, and a TV show.

[Molochnikov has created and directed over 10 shows and films in Moscow including the most-viewed six-episode TV series, The Monastery (Монастырь – Monastyr), in 2022. His production of the operas The Telephone and The Medium by Gian Carlo Menotti (1911-2007) premiered at the Bolshoi Theatre, along with his ballet, The Seagull: Interrupted Flight, which was honored with the Golden Mask (Золотая маска – Zolotaya maska; the Russian equivalent of the Tony Awards) for best ballet of the year.

[Since 2014, his first play, 19.14, an antiwar cabaret play about World War I, had been running in repertoire for over 11 years at the Moscow Art Theater of Chekhov. However, the theater has removed his name from all materials. The billing now says “Directed by Director” because the names of directors who supported Ukraine in 2022 no longer appear in print.

[In 2022, he spoke out against the Russian military invasion of Ukraine and then in August, he moved to New York. Molochnikov is now unable to return to Russia. He became a U.S. citizen in early 2026, roughly four years after fleeing Russia.

[His feature film, Tell Her (Скажи ей – skazhi yey), about moving to the U.S. as a child, premiered in 2020 at the 47th Seattle International Film Festival. He premiered a cabaret-style stage adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s classic novel, Crime and Punishment (1866), at the Tel Aviv Gesher Theatre in December 2024. He is working now on a feature film related to the novel.

[His short film Extremist (Экстремистка – Ekstremistka) premiered at the 2025 Telluride (Colorado) Film Festival and won the 2025 BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) Student Award for Live Action (as well as the Special Jury Prize); he is now turning it into a feature.]

What did you most want to bring out in this play?

Alexander Molochnikov: I think the value of art, the value of art as air and water for some people, and not only for people who make it, but sometimes for people who watch it. With choosing between food and art, anybody would choose food if we are dying of hunger.

But, for me, I literally realized through this experience how, without doing theater, I start kind of dying inside.

Jeffrey Brown: [On screen: scenes from the play.] “Seagull: True Story,” recently at New York’s Public Theater [26 March-3 May 2026], plays off Anton Chekhov’s classic “The Seagull” and tells of a young Russian theater director named Kon, Molochnikov’s alter ego, about to achieve his dream of directing a play at the world-renowned Moscow Art Theater, when a very different kind of drama intervenes, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

[The Seagull by Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), Russian playwright and short story writer, premièred in 1896 in Saint Petersburg, Russia. (Its title is sometimes rendered in English as The Sea Gull, A Seagull, or A Sea Gull. The Russian title, Chaika [Чайка], has no article (because there are no articles in the Russian language), so it can also be translated as simply Seagull.)

[The character in the original version who becomes Kon, the avatar of Molochnikov in the adaptation, is a symbolist playwright named Konstantin Treplev. (Prior to its Public Theater run, the play was presented Off-Off-Broadway at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club from 16 May to 1 June 2025. From 17 to 19 January 2025, a workshop version of the play was staged under the “working title” Seagull Fucker at La MaMa as part of the Under the Radar Festival.)  

[The first production of Seagull in Saint Petersburg was famously a failure. Not only the play, but Chekhov’s reputation as a dramatist was all but written off.  Then, in 1898, the famous director Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863-1938), cofounder of the Moscow Art Theater, directed it for his troupe, and the production was a success.

[The playwright’s career was saved and The Seagull has since generally been considered the first of Chekhov’s four major plays and one of the masterpieces of modern Western theater.

[The famous Moscow Art Theater opened in 1898, after Stanislavsky, a talented, forward-looking amateur actor and director from a wealthy family, and the successful professional, establishment playwright, critic, and drama teacher Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko (1858-1943), met at Nemirovich-Danchenko’s invitation for an 18-hour discussion in 1897. Both men, who knew only each other’s reputations, wanted to reform the clichéd, melodramatic mainstream Russian theater.

[To develop and teach his acting “system,” which eventually changed the acting style and actor-training practices of almost all Western theater (and formed the basis of the Method), Stanislavsky began opening MAT studios for training actors in 1912, and MAT eventually opened the MAT School in 1943. 

[The theater, which went through a series of name-changes—it didn’t actually become the Moscow Art Theater until 1901—split into two theaters in 1987: the Gorky Moscow Art Theater, the descendant of the original theater, and the Chekhov Moscow Art Theater, the house in which the young Molochnikov worked.]

Alexander Molochnikov: In the beginning, you don’t think it’s forever. Or maybe some people understood. I didn’t.

Jeffrey Brown: Four years later, Molochnikov, who in his 20s had already directed productions at leading Moscow theaters, including the Bolshoi . . .

Man [actor in cast rehearsing on stage]: Happy birthday!

Jeffrey Brown: . . . celebrated his 34th birthday with the cast of “Seagull” in New York, where he now lives and works.

Alexander Molochnikov: Oh, wow.

Woman: Make a wish.

Sofia Kapkov, Producer: I had a team of 40 people who was working for me. I signed all documents and I left.

Jeffrey Brown: Also a new New Yorker, the producer of “Seagull: True Story,” 47-year-old Sofia Kapkov [b. 1978].

Sofia Kapkov: I came here without any plan, so I stayed with my friend. I told him I’m going to be there for a week. I ended up for a month. And then after a month, I realized that’s it. That life is gone.

Jeffrey Brown: That former life included heading her own production company that put on prominent contemporary theater and dance performances in Russia and abroad, not overtly political art, but she says a form of activism nonetheless.

Sofia Kapkov: I wanted to open this window to the freedom to show them, OK, another world exists. There is different type of art, for example, or different forms of art. And in a way, this is my type of activism to show something that is relevant, that it’s timely.

Jeffrey Brown: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine ended that. She left within days, taking her two younger children, joining an older daughter who was studying at NYU.

Sofia Kapkov: I had a nice life back then. I had a comfortable life. I had home, friends, projects, successful business.

But I had my doubts in my country. I woke up in the reality that we are killing our neighbors. For me, it was obvious I need to live for the sake of my kids. I don’t want them to get used to the idea that war is normal. And it’s a very hard decision, because you’re not just changing your life from one comfortable life to less comfortable.

You’re changing the destiny of your kids. It’s a very big responsibility.

Jeffrey Brown: Huge changes, big struggles documented in a memoir titled “Arts Hustler: A Story of Resilience” [MART Foundation, 2025], along with some advantages, including having international experience and contacts.

And within two years, she had co-produced “Our Class,” a play [by Tadeusz Słobodzianek (Polish; b. 1955)] set in Poland during World War II about neighbors turning on neighbors. It had successful runs in New York [Classic Stage Company, 12 September-3 November 2024], Boston [Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts, 13-22 June 2025], and most recently San Francisco [Z Space’s Steindler Stage, 27 March-5 April 2026]. 

In prewar Moscow, Alexander Molochnikov had demonstrated in support of prominent Russian dissident and opposition leader Alexei Navalny [1976-2024]. And after the invasion of Ukraine, he registered his protest with a series of anti-war posts on social media and danced to Ukrainian music in the Russian version of “Dancing With the Stars” [video clip of Molochnikov dancing]. 

His name was taken off production credits and he says he received death threats. In August 2022, he left Russia, enrolling in a graduate film course at Columbia University.

[Immediately after he publicly criticized Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Molochnikov says, he received threats against his safety from the state-funded Wagner Group, the private military company controlled at that time by Yevgeny Prigozhin (1961-2023), a former close ally Vladimir Putin (b. 1952; President of Russia: 2000-08 and 2012-present). The young theater artist reports that mercenaries from the Wagner Group sent him photographs of his parents’ houses in Moscow and Saint Petersburg with such text warnings as “Be careful walking there, you might slip and fall into a pond.”]

From that came a short film titled “Extremist” based on the true story of a young Russian woman whose public protest of the Ukraine war, putting anti-war and anti-Putin messages on grocery items, led to her imprisonment. [Scenes from the film are shown, with balalaika music (“Kalinka,” Russian folk-style song written in 1860 by Ivan Larionov [1830-89]) from the soundtrack.] The film would win various international awards and was also short-listed for an Academy Award for best live-action short.

Today, Molochnikov can see the positive impact of the upheaval he went through.

Alexander Molochnikov: Because collapse motivates you to rebuild and really develop as a person. I didn’t really want it to happen again. We just, like, built something here. I would love a few more years to build more.

But the feeling of apocalypse – and, of course, I want to say that, like, this my little art apocalypse is nothing compared to what people lost in Ukraine. But, still, you lose your career that you’ve been building for 10 years. It’s healthy sometimes to lose it.

Jeffrey Brown: The second half of “Seagull: True Story” is partly based on Molochnikov’s experience after coming to the U.S., including the overt commercialism of the theater world here and what he says were different kinds of restrictions on language and expression he encountered.

[Since we don't have official censorship in the United States, as Molochnikov had experienced in Russia under Putin, when he speaks of “restrictions on language and expression,” he’s talking about “political correctness,” “cancel culture,” ideological conformity, and similar socio-political pressures.

[In 2025, in Cultured, a print and digital magazine about contemporary art, architecture, design, fashion, film, and music, the émigré director asserts, “There are so many things everyone is afraid to talk about [in the U.S.] because we’re afraid society will turn against you. We’re afraid of a witch hunt. We’re afraid to say something that would offend someone when you didn’t mean to offend them.”

[Last April, Molochnikov told the Columbia Daily Spectator, the student newspaper of Columbia University, that many Americans don’t seem to “know how to be free in their society, because of the control over what you can say, words you can use, things that are possible to talk about, and impossible to talk about.”]

And the play includes a moment amid the crackdown in Russia in which one character asked the American audience:

Actor [scene from the play]: And something like this could never happen in America, right?

Actor: Right?

Alexander Molochnikov: Right?

And there’s always – it’s interesting. It’s not a laugh. it’s not a clap. Everyone’s like, oh.

Sofia Kapkov: It just is a concern.

Alexander Molochnikov: I hope that that this play, maybe not in everyone, but in somebody, it would leave some thought or some concern about what’s going on in U.S. today, and I hear it a lot. And many people who saw it a year ago, now they’re like, wow, this is about Iran now.

Jeffrey Brown: Molochnikov and Kapkov say New York is their home now. Both have become U.S. citizens and aim to further build lives here with their artistic work leading the way.

Sofia Kapkov: Theater is very similar to democracy. It should be a free space. There people are allowed to ask any questions. I believe in democracy, and I love this country, and I have hope for America. I’m American now, right?

I don’t have any hope for Russia, unfortunately. And what Putin did, he destroyed life of many generations. I don’t like a lot of stuff that’s going on here in America, but America is even younger than the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow.

Jeffrey Brown: America, the country.

Sofia Kapkov: America, the country, United States.

[Though the famous theater, opera, and ballet company didn’t acquire the name Bolshoi Theater until 1825, the linear ancestor of the company, which actually had no formal designation, was founded on 28 March 1776 (by license from Empress Catherine II [1729-96; Empress of Russia: 1762-96; commonly known as Catherine the Great]). That’s exactly 98 days (or 14 weeks) before Independence Day, when the U.S. was officially born.

[The name (in Russian: Большо́й Теа́тр) means “Big Theater” or “Grand Theater” to distinguish it from the Maly Theater (Малый Театр), which means “Little Theater” or “Small Theater.” Many cities, such as Saint Petersburg/Leningrad and Moscow, had both, among the many entertainment venues.

[In 18th- and 19th-century Imperial Russia, the designations signified an official categorization of a theater's artistic discipline and its rank within the Imperial Theaters system. The Bolshoi Theaters were designated for grand-scale productions like opera and ballet, which require larger auditoriums to accommodate orchestras, large choruses, and elaborate sets. The Maly Theaters were authorized for dramatic plays, comedies, and spoken theater which are better served in intimate settings constructed so that the performances are closer to the audience.]

Jeffrey Brown: [Over a scene with singing and music.] Good perspective from the theater world to today’s political realities.

For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown in New York.

[I observed in my introduction to this post that the plays of Anton Chekhov are popular with theater people: repertory theaters like to produce them, actors like to act in them, and directors like to direct them.  I also noted that Seagull held a special place among Chekhov’s works because it’s about theater and theater artists.

[One example of the phenomenon is experimental theater director Leonardo Shapiro (1946-97), about whom I’ve blogged many times on ROT.  He acknowledged that Seagull was deeply meaningful to him since he saw a school production of it as a prep school student.  Seagull stayed with Shapiro for the rest of his life.

[Before he’d ever staged a production of Seagull, Shapiro confessed to me, he’d long wanted to direct “an all-star, multi-racial” production of the play in Central Park for Joseph Papp (1921-91).  It was a recurring dream—which never came true.  The play had “always been mixed up in my mind with the love of literature and with idealism,” he explained, but he also admitted that he’d always wanted to direct The Seagull because of the “schmaltz” as well as the “lyricism.” 

[The play had long been a symbol for Shapiro, figuring prominently on a list of influences and inspirations he once wrote out for me.  He even invoked it in a 1965 playlet from his early college days.  When an old New York cabbie morphs into Joe Cino (1931-67), the seminal Off-Off-Broadway café-owner and impresario, the young passenger, a stand-in for Shapiro, asks, “Who are you?” and the cabbie replies, “I am a seagull.  No, that’s not it.”  These are the same words Nina says to Konstantin in Act IV of the play.  Apparently, 19-year-old Shapiro had already cast himself in that role.

[The play “speaks to artists about creativity,” said Shapiro, “and getting caught up in the ‘theater world.’”  He explained that the “basic values” of The Seagull are “love and art,” and that the “theme” was “showing the audience the need for art” in society. 

[(Note that Mokochnikov says above that the message he sees in Seagull is “the value of art, the value of art as air and water for some people, and not only for people who make it, but sometimes for people who watch it.”  The Russian’s statement is, I daresay, the same sentiment as Shapiro expressed.) 

[In the fall of 1992, Shapiro directed Karen Malpede’s Blue Heaven, which was Shapiro’s last New York production and centers loosely on a film production of The Seagull involving several of Blue Heaven’s characters.  For the promotional postcard for Blue Heaven, Shapiro posed the cast and crew in a restaging of a photograph of Konstantin Stanislavsky’s first rehearsal of Seagull in 1898, with Malpede sitting in Chekhov’s place and Shapiro in Stanislavsky’s.

[Ironically, Shapiro eventually directed a production of The Seagull, with the Riverside Repertory Theatre Company of Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1996.  It was his last work.  

[In the final year of his life, Shapiro approached Riverside and told the company, “I’m about to die, I want my final show to be The Seagull, and I want you all to be in it.”  Over a five-month period, the company “camped out” three or four days a week near Shapiro’s mountain cabin, spending days on the small, white backyard stage that Shapiro had built against the mountain background—reminiscent of the one for Konstantin’s play.

[Shapiro had initially resisted chemotherapy, but when he started working with Riverside, several company members reported, he began undergoing the treatment.  They figured it was a way to prolong his life in order to finish the play.  Seagull, one cast member felt, helped him decide to take the chemotherapy “so that we wouldn’t have to finish the play without him.” 

[The Riverside Seagull played in Albuquerque from 5 to 14 September 1996 and then in Baltimore, Maryland, from 6 to 17 November.  Shapiro hadn’t been able to travel with his cast, but he lived to see their success in the town—and at the theater—where, 23 years earlier his Shaliko Company débuted.  Leo Shapiro died of cancer on 22 January 1997, 15 days after his 51st birthday (and 18 months after he was diagnosed and given 6 months to live).

[It’s perhaps an interesting sidelight to Shapiro’s special feeling for The Seagull that he had such a proprietary attitude toward the play that he apparently resented when even another artist whom he admired appropriated it.  Tennessee Williams (1911-83), an inspiration and model for Shapiro, wrote his own adaptation of Chekhov’s play, The Notebook of Trigorin, in 1981. 

[Shapiro was aware of Williams’s adaptation, and on 14 December 1992, shortly after the downtown opening of the Shaliko production of Blue Heaven with The Seagull at its center, a staged reading of Williams’s play was performed uptown at Lincoln Center.  Shapiro refused to go despite his special interest in the writer and the source. 

[In his more than 30-year career with the News Hour, Jeffrey BrownJeffrey Brown has served as co-anchor, studio moderator, and field reporter on a wide range of national and international issues, with work taking him around the country and to many parts of the globe.  As arts correspondent he has profiled many of the world’s leading writers, musicians, actors, and other artists.  

[Among his signature works at the News Hour: a multi-year series, “Culture at Risk,” about threatened cultural heritage in the United States and abroad; the creation of the News Hour’s online “Art Beat”; and hosting the monthly book club, “Now Read This,” a collaboration with the New York Times.

[Zeba Warsi is a foreign affairs producer, based in Washington DC.  She’s a Columbia Journalism School graduate with an M.A. in Political journalism.  She was one of the leading members of the News Hour team that won the 2024 Peabody award for News for our coverage of the war in Gaza and Israel.

[Anne Azzi Davenport is the Senior Producer of CANVAS at PBS News Hour.]

Steppenwolf Theatre Company

 

[Arguably, the theater capital of the United States is New York City; I doubt anyone would dispute that.  But the second spot on the rollcall of U.S. theater towns might be debatable.  My vote goes to Chicago, which probably has the oldest standing as an active and supportive city in the country as far as theatrical activity goes.  Chi Town is the most recognized city in the country by the Broadway League and the American Theatre Wing, with four theaters receiving the prestigious Regional Theatre Tony Award, awarded on the recommendation of the American Theatre Critics Association. 

[Chicago’s institutional theater, the Goodman, named the number one regional theater in the U.S. by Time magazine, has made a significant national mark, having supplied Broadway with acclaimed adaptations of American classics and nurtured important new dramatic voices (24 plays since 1978; 25 Tonys, 24 Drama Desks, 4 Pulitzers).  The Goodman received the Regional Theatre Tony in 1992. 

[Among the many smaller theaters in the Windy City, however, is possibly one of the best-known troupes in the business: Steppenwolf.  Founded in 1974, the Steppenwolf Theatre Company is justifiably nationally (and internationally) famous not only for the well-known actors who’ve come out of the ensemble—John Malkovich, Laurie Metcalf, and Gary Sinise, among several others, who have made contributions to film and television as well as the stage—but because of the often starlling and impressive work the company has created and then shared with the country.  Among Steppenwolf’s national honors are the Regional Theatre Tony in 1985 and the National Medal of Arts in 1998.

[My first contact with Steppenwolf was in Washington, D.C., when I was there during the summer of 1985 (see Rick On Theater’s “‘Stages in DC' (Summer 1985)” [25 December 2011]) to write a survey of Washington theater for the New York City publication Stages (vol. 2, no. 3 – September 1985).  Kennedy Center artistic director Peter Sellars (b. 1957) had just launched his ill-fated American National Theater at the Kennedy Center, part of which was the presentation of productions from regional theaters. 

[The inaugural program was the Chicago Season, presenting productions from the Wisdom Bridge Theatre and Steppenwolf.  I saw Coyote Ugly by Lynn Siefert with Metcalf, directed by Malkovich (12 June-6 July 1985 in the Terrace Theater).  Neither artist was well known yet.  (Interested readers can check out my brief report on the performance, as well as the Wisdom Bridge piece I saw, in the above-referenced link.)

[The next Steppenwolf show I saw was 1990’s Broadway transfer of Frank Galati’s adaptation of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, which he directed with a cast that included Gary Sinise, Lois Smith (probably the first time I saw her on stage; I’ve praised her work many times on this blog), and a huge cast that included many members of the Steppenwolf Ensemble.

[Then I saw Austin Pendleton’s Orson’s Shadow at the Barrow Street Theatre in Greenwich Village in April 2005.  It wasn’t a Steppenwolf production, but the play had originated at that Chicago theater in 2000.  Pendelton’s a member of the ensemble, and so were many of the cast (including Tracy Letts, when he was still an actor; his name will come up again as the Pulitzer Prize-, Tony Award-, and Drama Desk Award-winning playwright of August: Osage County).  I’ve reported on Orson’s Shadow in “Three Plays from Distinguished Companies from the Archives” (16 April 2020).

[In June 2009, I caught Letts's multiple award-winning play, August: Osage County, at the Music Box on Broadway, where the play had moved from the Imperial in April ’08.  (It opened there on 4 December 2007 and ran for 18 previews and 648 regular performances.  Its run in Chicago was 28 June to 26 August 2007.)  Some of the cast was still from the original Chicago company, but I caught Phylicia Rashad (not an ensemble member) a little more than a month after she took over the part of Violet Weston, the family matriarch. 

[(At the performance I saw, the Weston patriarch (who disappears at the beginning of AOC) was played by John Cullum.  In an unusual bit of New York casting, Cullum was also performing Off-Broadway on Theatre Row—a half mile west and south from the Music Box—in Heroes.  For this reason, the curtain for the French comedy, which I’d seen about three months before AOC was at 8:30 p.m.; I had seen the actor arriving at 8:05 while I waited in the Clurman Theatre's small lobby and wondered why he was cutting it so close,)

[Over the years, I’ve seen many Steppenwolf actors and the work of Steppenwolf directors—not to mention several plays by writers who were or became Steppenwolf playwrights—but AOC was the last Steppenwolf production I’ve seen to date. (I’ve been to Chicago several times and seen some theater while I was there, but I’ve never seen anything on Steppenwolf’s home stage.)] 

“INSIDE CHICAGO’S INNOVATIVE
STEPPENWOLF THEATRE COMPANY
AS IT MARKS 50 YEARS”
by Jeffrey Brown and Ryan Connelly Holmes 

[This transcript is from PBS News Hour of 9 April 2026 in recognition of the troupe’s 50th season.  The Steppenwolf Theatre Company produced its first full season of plays in 1976, hence the discrepancy suggested by its founding date two years earlier.

[The troupe’s name comes from the novel Steppenwolf (German, 1927; English, 1929) by Hermann Hesse (German; 1877-1962), which original member Rick Argosh was reading at the time of the theater’s inaugural production in 1974.]

Steppenwolf Theatre Company has long been one of the nation’s most influential ensemble companies. It’s known for the actors it has launched and the groundbreaking work it has produced. It’s marking its 50th season at a moment of real uncertainty for theaters. Jeffrey Brown traveled to Chicago for our arts and culture series, CANVAS.

Amna Nawaz[, Co-Anchor, “PBS News Hour”]: Steppenwolf Theatre Company has long been one of the nation’s most influential ensemble companies, known for the actors it’s launched and the groundbreaking work it’s produced. Now it’s marking its 50th season at a moment of real uncertainty for theaters across the country.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown traveled to Chicago for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Actress [Kathryn Erbe (in a scene from a play)]: Think if I had stayed in the theater.

Jeffrey Brown: A production of “Dance of Death” [1900], a play by August Strindberg [Swedish; 1849-1912] being presented in a modern adaptation. [Adapted by Conor McPherson; directed by Yasen Peyankov; 29 January-22 March 2026; Downstairs Theater.]

Actor [Jeff Perry (in a scene from a play)]: And growing old, it’s horrible, but it is interesting, I’d imagine.

Jeffrey Brown: For actor Jeff Perry [a founding member], it’s yet another opportunity to do his thing now 50 years on at the theater company he helped create.

Jeff Perry, Co-Founder, Steppenwolf Theatre Company: It feels like wishes fulfilled.

Jeffrey Brown: It does.

Jeff Perry: Yes. A place built of artists, by artists and for artists is an exceedingly rare experiment.

Jeffrey Brown: Rare to start, rarer still to last. Steppenwolf Theatre’s roots go back to the early 1970s, a group of teenage friends in a Chicago area high school, then at Illinois State University [Normal, Illinois], and then a do-it-yourself theater company co-founded by Perry, Terry Kinney, and Gary Sinise, putting on shows in a church basement in Chicago.

Jeff Perry: Here’s what we thought simultaneously I think is the truth [sic]. We’re going to change the face of American theater. And we will probably fall apart within – within a month or two.

John Malkovich, Actor [in a video clip]: You tell him that I got a couple projects he might be interested in.

Jeffrey Brown: It would become an important incubator of American theater, actors, including John Malkovich, here with Sinise in a groundbreaking 1984 production of Sam Shepard’s “True West.”

[The statement above is incorrect, or at least misleading. The stage production of True West at Steppenwolf was in 1982; it opened at the company’s then-home theater, the Jane Addams Hull House, on 31 March. It transferred to the Apollo Theatre in Chicago for a commercial run, and then to New York City’s Off-Broadway Cherry Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village, where it ran from 17 October 1982 to 4 August 1984 (762 performances).

[This was the first Steppenwolf production to go to New York. Malkovich won several acting awards and Sinise won an Obie for his directing.

[The production proved so popular that it was recorded and aired on the Public Broadcasting Service’s American Playhouse on 31 January 1984. (It was probably from that recording that the clip seen on the News Hour broadcast was excerpted, and why the year 1984 was attached.)]

Gary Sinise, Actor [film clip]: I never thanked you for saving my life.

Jeffrey Brown: Sinise himself would become best known as Lieutenant Dan in the 1994 film “Forrest Gump.”

Laurie Metcalf, well-known for her time on the hit series “Roseanne,” Joan Allen, Amy Morton, Martha Plimpton, more recently Carrie Coon [wife of Tracy Letts], playwrights including Tracy Letts, whose “August: Osage County” won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize, and Rajiv Joseph and Tarell Alvin McCraney.

[I wrote about Metcalf in Lucas Hnath’s Ibsen sequel, A Doll’s House, Part 2, on Rick On Theater on 22 July 2017. My report on the Broadway transfer of Letts’s August: Osage County was posted on this blog on 30 June 2009. I reported on Joseph’s Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo on 11 June 2011 and Gruesome Playground Injuries on 23 February 2011.

[There’s an article on Tarell Alvin McCraney by Carvell Wallace from the New York Times Magazine, “Connoisseur of Grief,” reposted on 4 February 2019 and an interview with the young playwright from American Theatre in “Interviews with Two Theater Pros,” posted on 4 October 2018. I also wrote about a Washington, D.C., production of McCraney’s Choir Boy on 24 January 2015.]

All of them and more, along with several directors, are to this day ensemble members of Steppenwolf, meaning they work together in different shows over many years.

Tracy Letts, Playwright: It sounds different every time you do it.

Jeffrey Brown: And whatever else they do in theater, TV, or film, they can and do come back to work at Steppenwolf.

In 2016, as he rehearsed a new play written for his Steppenwolf colleagues, Letts told me that the freedom and sense of security that comes with the ensemble approach is priceless.

Tracy Letts: I can afford to take chances. I can afford to make a fool of myself.

Jeffrey Brown: And they will keep you around anyway.

Tracy Letts: They will keep me around anyway, and they will tell me. They will tell me to my face, you didn’t get this right.

[This was probably Mary Page Marlowe, which premièred at Steppenwolf in April 2016. It also came to New York and opened 12 July 2018 at the Second Stage Theater. The play closed on 19 August after an extension of its scheduled run.]

Jeffrey Brown: Success can be counted in many ways, including the number of shows, 18, that have transferred to Broadway over the years, winning 14 Tony Awards.

Actress [Kara Young (as Aziza in the Broadway production of “Purpose”)]: You said your daddy was some sort of reverend, but not like this kind of reverend.

Jeffrey Brown: Among them, “Purpose,” a Steppenwolf commission, which also won a 2025 Pulitzer for playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. He told me then what it meant to work directly with the theater company.

[The play ran in Chicago from 14 March-28 April 2024. It opened at the Hayes Theater on Broadway on 17 March 2025 with a largely new cast, and closed on 31 August, after 22 previews and 192 regular performances. It won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Tony for Best Play, another Tony for Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Role in a Play for Kara Young, and 2025 Drama Desk Awards for Outstanding Play and Outstanding Featured Performance in a Play for Young.]

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Playwright: I’m designing the game board for these incredible artists to every night find a new way through the story that might ping differently, create different emotions. Everything in this play was sort of inspired by the acting ensemble that emerged from it.

[I wrote up Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate on ROT on 31 March 2014 and Everybody on 6 March 2017.]

Glenn Davis, Co-Artistic Director, Steppenwolf Theatre [in a scene from “Purpose”]: You can’t be sneaking up on a man like that when he’s fresh out.

Jeffrey Brown: Among the “Purpose” cast, Glenn Davis, who now has an even more daunting offstage role, serving with fellow ensemble member, director and actor, Audrey Francis, as Steppenwolf’s co-artistic directors [since 2021].

Glenn Davis: Fifty years is a long time to keep a group of 17-year-olds together and still performing together and still liking each other and enjoying being in a room together. So that’s an accomplishment.

Jeffrey Brown: And then getting new generations of 17-year-olds.

Glenn Davis: Yes.

Audrey Francis, Co-Artistic Director, Steppenwolf Theatre: Yes.

Glenn Davis: And then adding new folks.

Audrey Francis: I think that when Glenn and I took the role on, it was really as we were coming out of the pandemic. Why would anyone take on a leadership role of a nonprofit arts organization, in particular live theater, at that time?

Jeffrey Brown: The answer, to keep a place that has nourished them and several previous generations alive and thriving.

But Francis and Davis, who both in a sense grew up as theater professionals here, face a host of challenges. Steppenwolf in recent years greatly expanded its theater and public areas, more space to use, but also to fill. And it’s not immune from the societal and other changes now roiling American theater generally.

Glenn Davis: The structural mechanics of doing theater today are very difficult. We used to do twice as many shows as we do now. So being able to employ the same number of artists becomes more difficult because you don’t have as many shows, you don’t have as many roles.

Those difficulties are all over the place. So we try as best we can to manage those and move through them as seamlessly as we can.

Jeffrey Brown: There’s also the reality of American politics today. Chicago has been one center of the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration. Davis and Francis say the theater’s core values and programming won’t change.

[The Department of Homeland Security announced the launch of Operation Midway Blitz on 8 September 2025, the start of a surge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents onto the streets of Chicago. (Reports indicate that enforcement activities began as early as 6 September.) The initial surge occurred from September to November 2025, with thousands of arrests.

[After a brief increase in activity, the visible presence of large numbers of federal agents decreased during the winter months. DHS officials have maintained that “they aren’t leaving Chicago” and recent reports as of late March 2026 indicate that agents continue to carry out hundreds of monthly arrests in the Chicago area.]

Audrey Francis: I don’t feel necessarily a pressure to program something that is commenting on something that’s happening right now because everything is happening so fast. What I do feel is an obligation to our city to make sure that we’re providing a place that is thoughtful, intentional, can be fun, can be challenging.

Jeff Perry [walking down a hallway lined with production posters]: They all, every one of these bring up memories.

Jeffrey Brown: And so, 50 years on, Jeff Perry and his colleagues are still at it.

Jeff Perry: It’s almost entirely a nomadic profession. This held the promise at least of an ongoing family of choice. And it proved as the years went on how it really is that.

Jeffrey Brown: For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown at Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago.

[In his more than 30-year career with the News Hour, Jeffrey Brown has served as co-anchor, studio moderator, and field reporter on a wide range of national and international issues, with work taking him around the country and to many parts of the globe.  As arts correspondent he has profiled many of the world's leading writers, musicians, actors, and other artists.  

[Among his signature works at the News Hour: a multi-year series, “Culture at Risk,” about threatened cultural heritage in the United States and abroad; the creation of the News Hour’s online “Art Beat”; and hosting the monthly book club, “Now Read This,” a collaboration with the New York Times.

[Ryan Connelly Holmes is a producer and reporter for PBS News Hour.  Based in the Chicago area, he produces segments and digital content covering a wide range of national and international topics. He joined News Hour in October 2016.

[A note about this repost of the transcript: if you had cause to compare this post with the online transcript, you may have noticed a few small differences.  That's due to the notice PBS includes with the text: "Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy.  They may contain errors."  Well, this one did, and when I compared what was posted with what the audio actually said, there were discrepancies, which I reconciled.]

'Waiting For Godot' on Broadway, 2025 (I)

 

[A new production of Samuel Beckett’s (1906-89) Absurdist masterpiece, Waiting for Godot (1953), opened on Broadway on 28 September, after starting previews at the Hudson Theatre on 13 September.  Its limited run, directed by Jamie Lloyd, is scheduled to end on 4 January 2026. 

[The production stars Keanu Reeves as Estragon in his Broadway début, and Alex Winter as Vladimir.  The rest of the cast is made up of Brandon J. Dirden as Pozzo and Michael Patrick Thornton as Lucky, with Zaynn Arora (also making his Broadway début) and Eric Williams alternating as the Boy.

[The scenic and costume design are by Soutra Gilmour, the lighting design is by Jon Clark, and the sound design is by Ben and Max Ringham.]  

“KEANU REEVES AND ALEX WINTER REUNITE ON STAGE
IN BROADWAY’S ‘WAITING FOR GODOT’”
by Jeffrey Brown and Anne Azzi Davenport

[Below is the transcript of the PBS News Hour segment of 10 October 2025 in which Jeffrey Brown, the program’s arts correspondent, discusses the new production of Godot with its stars.]

It’s a classic of theater that continues to be taken on by top actors and still resonates with audiences. “Waiting for Godot” mixes despair and comedy to raise questions about the meaning of life. Now, Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, two actors who are great friends, are doing their waiting on Broadway. Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown has the story for our arts and culture series, CANVAS.

Geoff Bennett: It’s a theater classic that continues to be taken on by top actors and resonates with audiences.

“Waiting for Godot” — yes, that’s how it’s pronounced [GOD-oh] — mixes high despair and low comedy to raise big questions about, well, the meaning of life. And now two actors, great friends themselves, are doing their waiting on Broadway.

[GOD-oh is the standard pronunciation in Ireland and the United Kingdom.  In North America, it’s commonly pronounced go-DOH.]

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown gets a look for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Keanu Reeves, Actor [in a scene from Godot]: Who am I to tell my private nightmares to if I can’t tell them to you?

Alex Winter, Actor: Let them remain private. You know I can’t bear that.

Keanu Reeves: There are times when I wonder if it wouldn’t be better for us to part.

Alex Winter: You wouldn’t go far.

Jeffrey Brown: Two men, Estragon, called Gogo, and Vladimir, or Didi, fearing, laughing, talking, waiting for someone they don’t know.

The two men playing them, Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter. And why are they here?

Keanu Reeves: Yes, but what did I know? I just had the — I just answered the universe and said you should do “Waiting for Godot” with Alex. And I was like, you’re right. OK, I will ask him.

(Laughter)

Jeffrey Brown: And he said?

Alex Winter: Absolutely. Yes, but it’s a mountain. Let’s go climb the mountain.

Jeffrey Brown: That mountain, “Waiting for Godot,” or Godot [GOD-oh], as they have chosen to pronounce it in this production, by Nobel Prize-winning Irish playwright Samuel Beckett.

Written and first performed in the 1950s, it’s still raising deep issues of human existence through a mix of pain and suffering along with broad comedy.

Actor [Brandon J. Dirden as Pozzo; in a scene from Godot]: Which of you smells so bad?

Keanu Reeves: He has stinking breath and I have stinking feet.

Actor: I must go.

Jeffrey Brown: Keanu Reeves, of course, is a mega-movie star, best known for his roles in “The Matrix” and “John Wick” series. This is his Broadway debut.

Alex Winter, a Broadway and film veteran, is best known in recent years as a director of documentaries, including one on rock star Frank Zappa.

Alex Winter AND Keanu Reeves: Excellent!

Jeffrey Brown: The two are forever linked through their roles starting in their 20s in the “Bill and Ted” sci-fi comedy films that began in 1989 about two rather clueless dudes who get their history lessons through time travel.

They have been close friends ever since, the kind who often finish each other’s sentences on and off stage. And when we met recently at Broadway’s famed Sardi’s Restaurant, Reeves, now 61, and Winter, 60, said taking on “Waiting for Godot” together was a must.

Is that because it made it more fun or because it got you past the fear of doing it or . . .

Keanu Reeves: For me, it just started with the fun.

(Laughter)

Keanu Reeves: This seems like a really good idea. Yes.

Alex Winter: Yes, and also that they’re — it is a play about two old friends who are interested in interrogating the questions of life, which is very much the two of us. So . . .

Jeffrey Brown: It is?

Alex Winter: Oh, yes.

Jeffrey Brown: You mean off stage.

Alex Winter: Oh, yes. Yes, yes, yes, like going back to — look, we’re goofballs and lead normal lives as well, but, like, I remember certain nights even on “Bill and Ted” one, it would be like 2:00 in the morning. We’d be sitting on the hood of my car in like in a strip mall in Phoenix, like, debating existence.

Keanu Reeves: Yes.

(Laughter)

Alex Winter: You know? So, like, in some ways, nothing has changed.

[In a scene from Godot] Look at me. Will you look at me?

Keanu Reeves: What a day.

Alex Winter: Who beat you? Tell me.

Keanu Reeves: Another day done with.

Alex Winter: Not yet.

Keanu Reeves: For me, it’s over and done with no matter what happens.

Jeffrey Brown: Are Gogo and Didi refugees from war or some environmental catastrophe, figures from outside of time? And who is this Godot?

Alex Winter: Beckett was cheeky, but he — I think he liked the fact that people debated these things. I think he was cheeky. He would say, oh, it’s not God necessarily, but maybe it is. You know what I mean? Like, I mean, come on.

(Laughter)

Alex Winter: Come on.

Keanu Reeves: Like, come on. If Samuel was here . . .

Alex Winter: Yes.

Keanu Reeves: I mean, come on.

Alex Winter: Yes.

Jeffrey Brown: You would say, come on, God — it is God.

Alex Winter: Of course God is in Godot, of course, of course, of course.

Steve Martin, Actor [in the 1988 Off-Broadway production at Lincoln Center]: Moron.

Robin Williams, Actor: Vermin.

Steve Martin: Abortion.

(Crosstalk)

Steve Martin: Sewer-rat. Curate. Cretin.

Robin Williams: Critic!

(Laughter)

Jeffrey Brown: The play has been done by certified funnymen such as Steve Martin and Robin Williams and amid boarded-up flooded homes [artist Paul Chan, Creative Time, and the Classical Theatre of Harlem staged a production in New Orleans in the flooded, hurricane-damaged Lower Ninth Ward and Gentilly neighborhoods, November 2007] in the wake of Hurricane Katrina [2005].

This production led by acclaimed British director Jamie Lloyd takes a stripped-down story and strips it further to a bare large tunnel, or cone, with no props at all. That, says Reeves, forced him to think and act in a new way.

Keanu Reeves: It’s even like the way I talked about the play early days, we can have mud, and why don’t we have water, and how about if we do this, and I will come out through the stage.

(Laughter)

Keanu Reeves: And then Jamie Lloyd and Soutra Gilmour, the production designer, went, here’s the set, and all of those ideas like a — like a mandala, just was like — that’s — get over that.

Jeffrey Brown: Yes. Did you find that freeing, though, too to not have the props?

Keanu Reeves: Oh, it’s freeing, but also illuminating. I think that our production is actually illuminating the themes of the play and what it’s asking and talking about. To have a literal tree that doesn’t look like a tree, you’re doing the same thing. You’re asking the audience to pretend that it’s got lots of leaves, and it’s like the spring.

Or then there’s a literal tree, and then I’m saying I see nothing. So they almost become more alive.

[Beckett’s original set instructions were: “A country road. A tree.”]

Alex Winter: Yes.

Keanu Reeves: And to the conceit, it’s more accurate.

Alex Winter: It is, yes. Every night, you find something else. We will come off stage even between act one and act two, and he will say or I will say, that — like, oh, wow, right, that.

Jeffrey Brown: But it’s still — you’re doing that between acts?

Alex Winter: Every night. Every night. Every night, there’s something. It’s just a play of limitless ideas and depth and possibility.

Keanu Reeves [in a scene from Godot]: Do you see anything coming?

Alex Winter: What?

Keanu Reeves: Do you see anything coming?

Alex Winter: No.

Keanu Reeves: Nor I.

Jeffrey Brown: Does it feel that way on stage too, where you’re saying, oh, I’m with Alex?

Keanu Reeves: Oh, yes. I get — I mean, so much of the night or the day of the performance, I’m just literally like looking at you . . .

(Laughter)

 

Alex Winter: Yes, we do a fair amount of that.

 

Keanu Reeves: . . . go through your contortions.

(Laughter)

Keanu Reeves: Poor Vladimir.

Alex Winter: Poor Vladimir.

Keanu Reeves: Trying to figure it out.

Alex Winter: I know, and failing miserably.

Jeffrey Brown: And how does the play land today, in a time of deep cultural and political divisions? Alex Winter had thought much about that, while Keanu Reeves offered lines from the play.

Alex Winter: And we’re certainly driving into it with the way we’re doing, is about looking past those divisions to this sort of human condition as a uniform issue that everyone faces, and this idea that we are all in this struggle together.

Keanu Reeves: And all mankind is us.

Alex Winter: Yes, for this moment of time.

Keanu Reeves: For this moment of time.

Alex Winter: Whether we like it or not. So let’s do something.

Keanu Reeves: Do something. Let us . . .

Alex Winter: I mean, that’s a pretty great thing to say right now.

Keanu Reeves: To help someone.

Alex Winter [lines from Godot]: Yes. Yes.

Keanu Reeves: We help him. We help him.

Alex Winter: Yes. Yes.

Keanu Reeves: Let us help him. We help him.

Alex Winter: Yes.

Keanu Reeves: Yes. Let’s go.

Alex Winter: Yes.

Jeffrey Brown: Is it ultimately a hopeless or hopeful play?

Keanu Reeves: Hopeful.

Alex Winter: Yes.

Jeffrey Brown: You’re going with hopeful?

Keanu Reeves: Yes.

Jeffrey Brown: Yes?

Keanu Reeves: I mean, they say, let’s go. Well, shall we go? Yes, let’s go.

Jeffrey Brown: But then they don’t move.

Alex Winter: But they’re together.

Keanu Reeves: But they still said, let’s go.

Alex Winter: Yes.

Keanu Reeves: They’re still doing it.

Alex Winter: Yes, they’re together. I think that — I think it lands. . .

Keanu Reeves: I will fight another day.

Alex Winter: Yes, they — it lands on this idea that it — that all we may have is each other, but that is enough to continue on. But everything else is up for grabs.

(Laughter)

Jeffrey Brown: Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, Gogo and Didi, are waiting for Godot into early January.

Alex Winter: Finish a phrase, I tell you.

Keanu Reeves: Finish your own.

Alex Winter: Moron.

Keanu Reeves: That’s the idea. Let’s abuse each other.

Jeffrey Brown: For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown on Broadway.

Alex Winter: Moron!

Keanu Reeves: Vermin!

Alex Winter: Abortion!

Bennett: Online, you can see more from Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, including their mutual love of Dr. Seuss and their favorite plays. That’s on our YouTube page.

[A word or two about Godot and God: Many people in the English-speaking world feel that Godot is Beckett’s stand-in for God and that the name is meant to invoke that belief.  However, Becket refused to say so, though he hinted that he might have had that in his mind.  However, it should be remembered that he originally wrote the play in French (it had its world première in Paris in 1953), and in French, the word for God is ‘Dieu,’ which has no resemblance to the English word ‘God.’

[In his more than 30-year career with the PBS News Hour, Jeffrey Brown has served as co-anchor, studio moderator, and field reporter on a wide range of national and international issues, with work taking him around the country and to many parts of the globe.  As arts correspondent he has profiled many of the world’s leading writers, musicians, actors and other artists.  Among his signature works at the News Hour: a multi-year series, “Culture at Risk,” about threatened cultural heritage in the United States and abroad; the creation of the News Hour’s online “Art Beat”; and hosting the monthly book club, “Now Read This,” a collaboration with the New York Times.

[Anne Azzi Davenport is the Senior Producer of CANVAS at PBS News Hour.]

Art, Disability, and Technology

 

[We’ve heard a good deal lately about the dangers to the performing arts posed by artificial intelligence (see “‘Entertainment in the Age of AI’” from SAG-AFTRA [22 August 2022]; “‘Use of artificial intelligence generates questions about the future of art’’ by Jeffrey Brown and Alison Thoet [7 March 2023]; “2023 Writers Guild Strike” [1 June 2023]; “‘AI in the Arts Is the Destruction of the Film Industry. We Can't Go Quietly’” by Justine Bateman [4 June 2023]; “‘The Actors' Strike Dims a Bright Spot For New York City’” by Stefanos Chen [25 July 2023]; “‘The Playwright in the Age of AI’” by Jeffrey Goldberg [7 March 2025].)

[It’s high time, I think, that we hear a little about the benefits of AI to theater and its kin.  Below is a report by Jeffrey Brown of PBS News Hour about an extraordinary opera that uses AI and other technology to bring voices (literally) to the stage that otherwise wouldn’t be heard.] 

“OPERA USES AI TO GIVE PEOPLE
WITH NON-VERBAL DISABILITIES A VOICE”
by Jeffrey Brown and Simon Epstein 

[Below is the transcript of Jeffrey Brown’s segment on PBS News Hour about Sensorium Ex, the new opera by Paola Prestini and Brenda Shaughnessy, which aired on 10 July 2025.

[The title Sensorium Ex isn’t explained anywhere I could find.  It clearly refers to the opera’s exploration of the human sensory experience and its potential expansion through technology and AI.  

[The word ‘sensorium’ refers to the sensory apparatus of the body or the seat of sensation.  ‘Ex’ seems to signify an expansion or extension of this sensory experience, hinting at the opera’s futuristic setting and themes of artificial intelligence and virtual representation.]

Amna Nawaz, “PBS News Hour” Co-Anchor: At an Omaha, Nebraska festival this summer [Common Senses Festival, 10-25 May 2025; the opera débuted on 22-25 May], new work explores the intersection of art, disability, and technology, asking questions like, who has a voice and who gets to be heard?

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown reports on this unusual undertaking for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

(Singing: “A bird is made to sing.”)

Jeffrey Brown: A mother sings to her disabled son of her love and hopes for him, but there is danger threatening.

(Singing: “If we say we belong to CORP [an evil corporation out to harvest the son’s DNA].”)

Jeffrey Brown: And, together, they decide to flee. We’re in a dystopian future world, though perhaps not so very different from our own, in which artificial intelligence is being used to create what? Some new kind of life.

The opera titled “Sensorium Ex” is both art and advocacy, aimed at giving new voice and opportunities to the disabled, using A.I. to benefit, rather than harm, and changing the world of opera itself.

Composer Paola Prestini, “Sensorium Ex”: I’m very interested in how art can open up new avenues, and that’s what I felt like “Sensorium” did.

Jeffrey Brown: In this case new avenues to?

Paola Prestini: To listen more deeply and to create more welcoming spaces for folks who express themselves differently and who have different disabilities.

Brenda Shaughnessy, Librettist, “Sensorium Ex”: Say "Paola."

Jeffrey Brown: Prestini’s collaborator, poet Brenda Shaughnessy [most known for her poetry books Our Andromeda (Copper Canyon Press, 2012) and So Much Synth (Copper Canyon Press, 2016)], wrote the libretto and grounded it in her lived experience as the mother of a disabled child.

Brenda Shaughnessy: What do you hear?

Jeffrey Brown: Her son, Cal, now age 18, seen here at 12 listening to music by Prestini played by her [i.e., Prestini’s] husband, cellist Jeffrey Zeigler.

Shaughnessy, who’d never written for an opera before, says this work was deeply personal and often painful, but, for her, necessary.

Brenda Shaughnessy: Nonverbal, nonambulatory. Kids like him don’t get to be part of anything. In a way, I wrote him into the opera because I wanted him to get to be part of the mix, get to be — get to do something, get to be the hero of a story, get to be — be heard.

(Singing: “You belong, too.”)

Jeffrey Brown: And that became the essence of this project, who has a voice and who is heard. Prestini and Shaughnessy were determined to make the answer “Everyone” by creating a work for a cast and crew that included some with disabilities such as cerebral palsy, autism, and blindness, writing and composing a story of a mother called Mem, sung by Hailey McAvoy, and her disabled son named Kitsune.

Brenda Shaughnessy: Kitsune’s voice is central to the opera. You can’t — it can’t be sidelined. It’s in the score. It’s the music. It’s in the tech. It’s in the plot.

Jeffrey Brown: But if opera is all about the voice, how to write for those thought to have none?

Paola Prestini: It’s like writing for a person who you love, but the instrument doesn’t exist yet. And so the challenge that we had was, well, how do we amplify the voice that this person does have? Because there are nonverbal ways in which you communicate. And then how do we find, if you will, a deeper expression to the communication device that this actor would use?

Jeffrey Brown: One of the two actors playing Kitsune, 23-year-old Jakob Jordan, who is himself nonverbal, but has a new way of communicating.

Jakob Jordan, Actor (through A.I. voice): For the first 22 years of my life, I felt like a witness to a crime that would happen over and over again. My thoughts were being held hostage inside my head while the wrong words were impersonating me, tricking everyone to believe I was much simpler than I am.

Jeffrey Brown: Jakob was diagnosed as a toddler with autism and apraxia, a neurological condition in which his body and speech don’t respond to the signals sent from his brain.

Here’s how he puts it, along with a bit of his characteristic sense of humor.

Jakob Jordan (through A.I. voice): Basically, my body does not listen to the commands I give it. I may want to ask my friend if he saw that cute girl walk by, but my speaking voice gets stuck in loops, talking about airports or dumb songs and a small variety of other repetitive topics.

It also affects my whole body.

Jeffrey Brown: Only in the last two years came a breakthrough, when he learned to type words with a trained communication partner. When he finishes his sentence, it comes out in an electronic voice.

Jakob Jordan (through electronic voice): I caught the acting bug.

Jeffrey Brown: But in our interview, for which we sent questions ahead of time so he could consider and type responses, we heard more of Jakob’s actual voice.

Jakob Jordan (through A.I. voice): Nothing compares to getting to express myself purposefully with the voice I was born with.

Jeffrey Brown: Brought to life through Sensorium A.I., a partnership between the opera’s creative team and NYU’s Ability Project, a research lab in Brooklyn, New York, dedicated to the intersection of disability and technology.

Luke DuBois is an NYU [New York University] professor, engineer and researcher and himself a composer and musician. He first recorded the sounds Jakob can and does make.

R. Luke DuBois, NYU Professor: So we have got recordings of Jakob just doing his thing.

Jakob Jordan: (Inaudible)

[nb: What Jordan said wasn’t precisely inaudible. He could be heard well enough, but what he said was indecipherable. That’s what DuBois meant by “speech like that,” below.]

R. Luke DuBois: Right? So he’s very expressive. Some of it is whistles. Some of it is singing. Some of it is speech like that. And what the system does is, it takes that recording and infers from it the physical body that made it.

Jeffrey Brown: Infers . . .

R. Luke DuBois: Yes.

Jeffrey Brown: . . . means you’re creating his — sense of his body and therefore sense of his voice.

R. Luke DuBois: Exactly. And so what I can do is, I can take a phrase like, “I would like to go sailing tomorrow,” have it cranked through. And then what you would end up with is, you would end up with a recording.

Jakob Jordan (through A.I. voice): I would like to go sailing tomorrow.

R. Luke DuBois: Right? And it sounds like Jakob.

Jeffrey Brown: DuBois and the team use sensors that allow Jakob to control his speech . . .

Jakob Jordan (through A.I. voice): I would like to go sailing tomorrow.

Jeffrey Brown: . . . and, depending on how he moves his hand, give it a kind of expressiveness of pitch and pace. [Jordan manipulates the speech device’s sound by moving his hand much the way a thereminist plays his instrument.]

Jakob Jordan (through A.I. voice): I was never lost.

Jeffrey Brown: Amazing stuff. And it was created specially for and incorporated into the opera, making this a story about the potential evils of A.I., while using its benefits. And this is open-source technology, publicly available for anyone to take to the next step.

R. Luke DuBois: I want this in the hands of everyone who needs it. I have been talking to all sorts of speech researchers all over the country in the last couple years. And they’re all looking at really interesting different angles on this thing. So it’s going to be cool, man. It’s going to be cool what happens next.

Jeffrey Brown: Composer Paola Prestini hopes her work will receive more productions and, offering a blueprint for the future, give new opportunities to those with disabilities wanting to be part of her art form.

Paola Prestini: Create the system and understanding that, yes, it’s a challenge, but these are the ways. And you just do it one step at a time and you get there. All of a sudden, you get the complexity of human life represented on stage.

And that’s why we do what we do. It’s not just a mirror to society. It’s also a pathway to a better way.

Jeffrey Brown: And poet and librettist Brenda Shaughnessy sees the opera and its technology opening avenues for many, including her son.

Brenda Shaughnessy: It’s not enough, in my opinion, for Cal to just sort of sit there on the sidelines not getting to participate in anything. It’s not enough for anybody to just sort of be there disconnected.

What I want is for a kid, a disabled kid, a nonverbal kid, to see this and suddenly say, not just, oh, I could be in an opera, I could maybe be an actor, maybe I could play Kitsune one day. But I also want that kid to say, there I am. I exist.

Jakob Jordan (through electronic voice): I see it.

Jeffrey Brown: It took Jakob Jordan about a minute to type his answer when I asked what it was like to perform on stage in Omaha earlier this summer. His answer was worth any wait.

Jakob Jordan (through electronic voice): It was the most fulfilling experience of my life.

(Cheering)

Jeffrey Brown: For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown in Brooklyn, New York. [Paola Prestini lives in Brooklyn.]

[After the segment, News Hour put up an on-screen text that informed viewers, "An estimated 5 million people in the U.S. and 97 million globally have conditions that limit their ability to communicate using speech alone."  It seemed to be a statistic from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association in Rockville, Maryland.

[In his more than 30-year career with the News Hour, Jeffrey Brown has served as co-anchor, studio moderator, and field reporter on a wide range of national and international issues, with work taking him around the country and to many parts of the globe.  As arts correspondent, he has profiled many of the world’s leading writers, musicians, actors, and other artists.  Among his signature works at the News Hour: a multi-year series, “Culture at Risk,” about threatened cultural heritage in the United States and abroad; the creation of the News Hour’s online “Art Beat”; and hosting the monthly book club, “Now Read This,” a collaboration with the New York Times.

[Simon Epstein is a multiple Emmy Award-winning producer.  Simon’s long-form productions include three historical retrospectives on the District of Columbia for public television, and the public affairs specials American War Generals, and The Last Days of Osama bin Laden for the National Geographic Channel.  Simon’s work also appears nationally on Discovery Channel, TLC, Animal Planet, A&E, and the History Channel, as well as a number of international broadcast outlets.]

[In addition to the posts I listed above, which all speak about artificial intelligence in regard to the performing arts, I also posted a collection of articles that predate AI, but concern computers and theater in the pre-AI days.  For those interested in the pre-history of AI-infused theater and film, see “Theater and Computers” (5 December 2009), “Computers and Actors, Part 1” (4 October 2021), and “Computers and Actors, Part 2” (7 October 2021).]