Okay, so: I’ve been bad at blogging, but I have what I think counts as a good excuse! Three Sisters at Steppenwolf opened in June, and even if I’m primarily a soldier in the background who moves furniture (and secondarily play 16 bars of trombone in the basement), it’s been a great experience, lots of time and effort and really show of the highest quality.

What, you may be asking, does that have to do with anything? WELL, BOY, LET ME TELL YOU.

In our (insanely complete) dramaturgical packet, there’s a photo from 1901 of Chekhov and the Three Sisters gang (including Constantin Stanislavski, who you MAY have heard of once or twice – interesting sidebar: Checkhov and Stanislavski, two of the fathers of modern realism, or at least the attending physicians at the birth, didn’t get along super-well. More on this another time.) gathered around the table reading the manuscript.

So, that’s pretty cool. This gives Caroline (Irina, in our production) the great idea to reproduce this photo with our modern cast as a gift for Tracy Letts (who wrote our adaptation.)

A little work with Snapseed, and we get:

The tricky bit was getting the instagrammy frame set up in Photoshop… Elements. (Boo. Long story as to why I’m using Elements.) In our next episode, we’ll talk about clipping masks and what-not.