Letts play doctor

CONTINUING ED Sobel boosts Steppenwolf’s new works to the next level.

Photo: Lara Goetsch

A few years ago, a former employee of Steppenwolf mentioned to me that Ed Sobel, the theater’s director of new play development, was the Toby Ziegler of the organization. Ziegler was the chronically pragmatic, professionally implacable director of White House communications on NBC’s The West Wing (and, not for nothing, my all-time favorite Aaron Sorkin creation).

Having watched Sobel do his job for a while—I was first introduced to him when he was launching his then-experimental, now-emulated new play development series First Look, which is now in its fourth year and already has sent six plays into professional productions at other theaters—I can see how the analogy holds water. Toby never took a compliment, never polished his laurels, never did anything but keep everyone around him on message.

“We’re not test-marketing these plays. This is not a focus group,” Sobel says about First Look, which workshops new plays in front of an audience (though not for reviews) for a modest ticket price. “We’re doing this so the writers can hear their plays.”

For the record, though, Sobel grins a little more than Toby did. “After the Tonys, we had a few days of smiles, and then it was back to business,” Sobel says of the short-lived glow he experienced after being thanked on prime-time television by Tracy Letts in his August: Osage County acceptance speech. The “business” he got back to was a job that has impacted American playwriting.

Charged with the enormous task of fielding incoming new plays—he and his few apprentices read 500 new scripts a year—Sobel also commissions and shepherds new works from writers he believes in and matches them up with members of the artistic tribe that employs him. (Sobel is not a member of the Steppenwolf ensemble, but rather an administrative employee.) So invaluable is he to the organization that when his wife recently accepted a teaching job at Philadelphia’s Temple University, the theater made arrangements for Sobel to do his full-time job remotely, traveling back to Chicago a few days a month.

The original plays Steppenwolf has programmed during his tenure have made up an uneven lot to be sure. But in between works that underwhelmed or fell flat, Sobel and Steppenwolf have demonstrated they still know what they’re doing. August: Osage County, among the most critically and financially rewarded straight plays of the last decade, was programmed into Steppenwolf’s subscriber season while still in working-draft form. Play-doctor Sobel to assisted with revisions throughout rehearsal, but continued helping Letts revise the third act in between the Chicago run and the Broadway opening, when leaving well enough alone could have sufficed.

What’s more, Sobel helped bring multiple works by prickly satirist Bruce Norris to the stage. Norris’s feel-bad comedy The Pain and the Itch, about a family of privileged Bush-hating liberals forced to reckon with their own hypocrisy, made its controversial bow in the summer of 2005. And despite uneven reviews and few subsequent productions, it was the only clear voice in Bush-era American theater to cry foul on a class of theatergoers interested in griping about the President but eager to indulge in the decadent lifestyle his economic policies encouraged. It wasn’t embraced the way August was, but in many ways it was ballsier, and a literary calling card for a company usually regarded just as a collective of actors.

But a rarely mentioned characteristic of the works of Norris and Letts is also a crucial one: Neither artist comes from the world of academic playwriting. At a time when most name-brand playwrights draw their financial security by lending their names to college programs and most young writers wouldn’t try entering the system without an M.F.A., Sobel and Steppenwolf treat contemporary writers as working artists and new plays as thinking-person’s consumer commodities.

With a Northwestern M.F.A. in directing, Sobel was never a playwright himself, and never had an urge to become one (i.e., his desire to fix other people’s plays doesn’t stem from a frustration with his own). As a freelance director, he’s worked across the city, most notably on Brett Neveu’s work.

“Ed coaxes things out of writers very gently by asking the right questions,” says Obie-winning director David Cromer, who directs Jason Wells’s The Perfect Mendacity in First Look. Cromer acknowledges there’s little industry-wide understanding of play development, as it’s a process that can change radically from company to company and script to script. But in Sobel, he sees an objective, soft-spoken negotiator. “The director wants to tell everyone what to do, so you need someone in the room who has no agenda but making the play better.”

But Sobel isn’t really interested in taking the credit. Unsung heroes, after all, tend not to sing.

Steppenwolf’s First Look series is playing in the Garage.