posted by Jennifer

Bid the last fruits to be full;
give them another two more southerly days,
press them to ripeness, and chase
the last sweetness into the heavy wine.

~ from Autumn Day, Rainer Maria Rilke

October is here and fall is fiercely rushing by, dragging winter on its coattails. This is the time of harvest where we gather up what warmth and sweetness we can, storing it in bits that we’ll parcel out and savor until spring. Here and there you can see Chicagoans battening down the hatches, picking the last delicious bits from their gardens or Farmer’s Markets. They’re unpacking their woolen, polar fleece and flannel panoplies, preparing to settle into the long, wild, Windy City winter.

Here at TUTA however, we’re breakin’ out the Speedos and sunscreen ‘cause things are about to get hot (okay, not really Speedos, I didn’t mean to scare you like that.) In our usual antipodal fashion we are filling up the fallow days of fall and winter, planting a new project which will ripen and fruit in January, 2010. It’s an interesting time of year to be rehearsing a piece. Many of us will trudge through rain, hail, sleet and snow as we brave a harrowing Near West commute. We’ll pile our wet and sloppy boots by the door, sliding around in sock feet as we warm up with pseudo-volleyball and whatever other trouble we can make. Cast and crew will bond as we share holidays into the New Year and through Valentine’s.

This is the third show I’ve rehearsed with TUTA during this season and while it often means missing festive parties and events, it’s actually an excellent time of year to gestate art (and a great excuse to do less harrowing holiday shopping.) It’s too damned cold to be outside and our current studio at the Fulton-Carroll Center is bright, open and warm. We really do create a haven of riotous color and fecund imagination amidst the subtle white, black and gray of the hibernating city around us.

TUTA Studio, early fallI have such rich memories of sharing this part of my year with the Tutian creative process. I can recall in detail, the small, cluttered, concrete-floored studio in which we rehearsed The Rules for Good Manners in the Modern World in 2004. I remember the spicy, sweet smells from the tea maker’s space next door and my stomach’s nervous flutters about stepping into such an unusual and challenging role. Three Baronesses, one director, one dilapidated rolling chair and Shostakovich’s second waltz…that’s all we needed to create strikingly unique beauty. I cannot forget the excitement of loading into the Prop Theatre as Thanksgiving approached, snow on the ground. It still makes me laugh to think of us hurriedly shimmying into our baroque, black lace stockings and garters in a dressing room that was so cold that we could see our breath. We’d joke that the frost in our underwear is what gave our performances their crisp, scintillating edge.

In the fall/winter of 2007 we rehearsed and produced another Lagarce piece, It’s Only the End of the World. We put in long hours exploring the play and co-creating an approach to its richly dense language. I remember bringing in a festive buffet when we rehearsed on Halloween night; how we got hopped up on candy corn, apple cake and one of my wackier creations: chipotle-maple popcorn. Later, during tech week, Kay cooked a delicious feast at the theatre in honor of Thanksgiving. We pulled together all the set pieces to make a ramshackle dining area and laughingly shared delicious food, wine and conversation. The quality time (or perhaps the wine) let us relax more fully into the loveably dysfunctional family we had been building for months. That family feeling continued to grow throughout the run and was nurtured by an overworked electric kettle and the truly hideous little Christmas tree that consistently blew fuses in the dressing room.

And of course in 2008 we took on one of our “biggest” projects to date, The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy Of Romeo and Juliet. We packed ourselves, some scaffolding and an air mattress into the studio for months, overflowing out into the hall where actors could be found napping, munching apples and going over the line notes Tanera patiently gave us. The fourteen person cast then descended upon the Chopin where we spent our holidays swapping cookies, patronizing small Polish bars and learning how strong one must be to muscle through three hours of the Bard several times a week.

Soon, the TUTA cast and crew of Brecht’s The Wedding will begin to build a temporary garden on Fulton Street, sowing it with the seeds of our combined talent and vision. We’ll find our own ways to dive deeply into the work: to explore, expand, laugh and make the most of a busy holiday season together. Our commitment will feed those seeds, our love for theatre will water them and our willingness to take artistic risks will keep them warm. Despite January’s chill, we will harvest the abundant fruits of our labor. TUTA’s uncommon and edge-pushing rehearsal process will have pressed those sweet fruits into ripeness and through tech week we will “chase the last sweetness into the heavy wine”.

Won’t you join us at the Chopin in 2010 for a luscious, Brechtian toast? It promises to be a delectable vintage. Besides, knowing TUTA, someone is sure to end up dancing on the table with a lamp shade on their head.