Stephen Helper
Playwriting
New York, NY
The purpose of my residency is to continue my co-writing (remotely) with Bobby Rush on THE DEVIL’S MUSIC. This music theater work is about the 8 decades of this great African American Chicago/Delta Blues artist. He is 87. We have had a developmental reading with New Stage Theater in Jackson, MS (where Bobby Rush now lives) and are working on the next drafts.
The other main focus of my residency is furthering my work on the stage adaptation of the great American novel THE PIT by Frank Norris. I have been sketching this out for some time and completed a first sprawling draft at Yaddo in 2021. Set entirely in Chicago during the end of the 19th Century, it is a fantastic story of the dominating rise and crushing fall of a honest man, Curtis Jadwin, who gets sucked into the competitive allure of Wheat Pit trading at the Chicago Board of Trade. More than this it also concerns the wider social and economic repercussions of his market manipulation. His wife Laura struggles mightily with the severe confines of women’s lives at this time. It’s final form may be an opera.
Born in Denver, I lived in Sydney and worked throughout Australia for 30 years with numerous productions at the Sydney Opera House and the major performing arts centers throughout the country as director, producer and writer. I have only recently returned to live in New York where my beautiful play, A SIGN OF THE TIMES, was produced Off-Broadway at Ars Nova. It starred the wonderful Javier Muñoz. Unfortunately it had just begun when it was closed down by the pandemic in March 2020.
While in Australia, I was heavily involved in work with Aboriginal Australians, helping with the telling of their stories in the productions SOUL MUSIC, BLAK ELECTRIC, THE NEW BLACK and THE ADVENTURES OF NAMAKILI. This included work in remote outback communities and at large performing arts centers. I also conceived and directed the large-scale production of CAFÉ REBETIKA! about the refugee crisis in Greece in 1922 they term “The Great Catastrophe”. This bi-lingual production (English/Greek) It toured the country including sold out seasons at the Opera House and The Arts Centre Melbourne. My production as director of New York playwright Allan Knee’s play, SYNCOPATION, continues to be the most successful production of any new play in that country, touring some 44 theaters.
Following my degree in theater (directing/playwriting) at Yale, I apprenticed for two years with the great director/choreographer Jerome Robbins. Assisting him on Broadway revivals of his West Side Story and Fiddler on the Roof, he then asked me to remount Fiddler which I did for a Broadway revival where it nominated for the Best Revival Tony Award. I subsequently directed it for Opera Australia at the Opera House. I also worked for Arthur Laurents, Richard Maltby, Jr. and the great opera director, Jean-Pierre Ponnelle.
I have received grants and awards from the National Opera Institute, the Dramatists Guild, the Australia Council for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. In addition to my Yaddo residency in Saratoga Springs, NY, I have also been selected for a fellowship at the prestigious Bogliasco Foundation in Genoa, Italy later in 2022.