Staging Sufjan
When the choreographer Justin Peck reached out to playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury about adapting Sufjan Stevens’s Illinois for the stage in 2022, Drury was skeptical. “I wasn’t sure what I would even do,” says Drury, who is best known for her 2018 Pulitzer Prize–winning play, Fairview, a formally inventive look at race and performance through the lens of a middle-class Black family. She had fond memories of Stevens’s record — a sweeping concept album that’s equal parts whimsical and melancholy — but couldn’t envision it as a traditional musical. “That sounded crazy to me,” she says.
But Peck’s approach, which imagines the album as a song cycle in which a group of hikers goes into the woods to tell stories around a campfire, drew her in. “The hushed intimacy of that setting made me understand how the intimacy of Sufjan’s voice could be transported into a theatrical setting,” she says. Two years later, Illinoise sold out performances at the Park Avenue Armory and organized a surprising, last-minute transfer to Broadway. More of a dance-theater piece than a musical and without any spoken dialogue, Illinoise focuses on the story of a young man, played by Ricky Ubeda, who’s dealing with coming-of-age heartbreak. Although Stevens was not involved with its production, the show still feels like a collaboration among Stevens, Peck, and Drury.
In early April, Drury and I chatted at a backyard café in Bedford-Stuyvesant as she prepared for the show’s transfer, which will be her Broadway debut.
When did Sufjan’s music come into your life?
I’m not cool enough to have known about him before the Illinois album. That was my entrance into the oeuvre. I don’t remember if I even had the album when it came out, but I definitely bought it on CD. When I met my husband, he was doing a master’s program in Chicago, and we were deciding whether or not our relationship was going to be serious. I moved from New York to Chicago to be with him, and we listened to this album the entire drive. I hadn’t heard it straight through for probably about ten years before starting this, but I have such warm feelings toward it.
Something about his music really engenders a ferocious attachment in people. Did that factor into the way you approached this project?
I was really nervous even thinking about working on it just because I knew that some people hold the album in such reverence and then others don’t know how to pronounce his name. There’s a lot of mystery and confusion around him. But from talking to Justin the first time, Justin was so open and thoughtful and personally available that there was no pretension or division from the work. Everything about putting the show together has felt really personal, which is a weird, fake-sounding thing to say.
I know Sufjan hasn’t been involved. Did that inhibit you at all?
He’s been in contact with Justin, since they have a long relationship, but that wasn’t the plan from the beginning. We thought he was going to be a bit more involved, but he’s had a really difficult year. If anything, it’s made me feel more invested in the project to make sure we’re as emotionally truthful as we can be.
Was there anything from the album you felt you had to include in the show?
I remember when the album came out, Sufjan Stevens’s sexuality was such a mystery in a way that people were really grotesquely excited about. It was at a time when Wendy Williams was outing people on her show for entertainment, and I can completely understand why he wouldn’t have wanted to offer that up for public consumption. So to me, it’s beautiful that the queer love story in this piece is a given; it’s how it starts and is the grounding of that character’s reality.
A musical requires you to release more control and depend on other production elements than you would for a play. How did that make you feel?
The lack of control was amazing. The way that people have taken responsibility for the whole show with their performances has been really inspiring. I’ve been having conversations with performers about love and loss and sharing stories of people I know that have passed away, or people they’ve had crushes on, and thinking about how to access all of those thoughts while they’re doing their performance.
In that way, Justin is directing the whole piece, but inside of that, people are directing themselves. It also means that the performances shift every night. You don’t get to do that, especially on Broadway shows that have to be frozen. Having that breath makes it still art.
How important is the audience when you’re writing something?
Oh, it’s the only reason to write. I think about trying to have the audience have an experience, something that makes different audiences feel comfortable and uncomfortable at different times. The thing I’m most proud of is that when you watch Illinoise, you’re emotionally invested in the experience as a whole. There’s something discursive about the way the music and narrative and gestures of the performers only combine in your head. The singers don’t dance; the dancers don’t sing; no one is actually telling you the story. Normally, I start a play from a political place that comes from a place of anger or disruption, but figuring out how to use that circumvention for joy has been really meaningful to me.
Has that opened a door for you in how you want to push audience experience?
I still want to make dark, political work that interrogates whiteness and white supremacy, but I also don’t want to make only upsetting work. Earnestness is really hard — it’s hard to take, it’s hard to do, and even suggesting that Illinoise might do earnestness well makes me feel queasy. But a lot of us grew up with religion but don’t practice. A lot of us grew up with a sense of safety that we no longer feel, so making group spaces to experience both positive and negative emotions feels really important. When listening to the album, the “Man of Metropolis” song was always a skip for me. The cheerfulness of it I couldn’t totally get behind, but the show has made me genuinely love the song. When it gets rocking and all the people come in — those moments of joy and community are really moving. You can blame COVID, I guess, for wanting more of that.