Behind the scenes, from Naperville to Steppenwolf

Chris Freeburg auditioned for the seventh-grade musical when she attended Lincoln Junior High School in Naperville, “but I didn’t make it,” she said, “and ended up pulling the curtain open and closed and moving the piano around. And I thought, this could be interesting.”

Although she made the cast in eighth grade, she found herself thwarted again in that regard at Naperville Central High School. “Tried out, didn’t make it, did the props,” Freeburg recalled. “And that became the rest of my life.”

Indeed it did. Freeburg is now a stage manager at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago and serves that behind-the-scenes role in its new production of “Sex With Strangers,” which opened last weekend.

It reunites Freeburg with a couple of old friends and collaborators — director Jessica Thebus and playwright Laura Eason — and, as a stage manager basically acts as a facilitator, dealing with the logistics of bringing their artistic vision to life, familiarity is key.

Eason, whom Freeburg has worked with as a stage manager both on plays she wrote and acted in, was artistic director at Chicago’s Lookingglass Theater when Freeburg was cutting her teeth there as an intern after getting her degree in production management in DePaul’s theater department.

“I’ve worked with Jessica before, so we know how to talk to each other. We know how to communicate. I know what she wants,” Freeburg added. “When you work with someone new, there’s a bit of a margin of error, time that it takes to figure out what they really need and what they want. It’s nice to work with someone you’ve worked with before, because that shorthand is already there.”

And acting on that shorthand is really the essence of being a stage manager. “Ultimately, our job is to facilitate the director’s artistic vision by communicating between the director and the artistic staff, the production staff, the creative team,” Freeburg said.

They’ll work with actors, schedule rehearsals and costume fittings, and make sure all runs smoothly.

That extends to the play onstage as well. “We maintain the technical side of the show,” Freeburg added. When a light goes on, she’s most likely flicking the actual switch. “We just make sure it happens at the right time, that people are safe, that it looks the same every night.”

Although she cut her teeth at Lookingglass, more recently she’s been working regularly at Steppenwolf. “They pretty much keep me on staff here, and they pretty much keep me busy the whole year,” Freeburg said. A month or two off between productions is welcome, however, as it gives her more time with her 3½-year-old daughter in Chicago. Her parents, Sandy and Jim, still live in Naperville.

That’s where the theater bug planted and stuck with her at Naperville Central. “They have a great program, great facilities, great teachers,” Freeburg said. “Now they have a fantastic new facility there that wasn’t there when I was in school.”

Instead, she can content herself with working at the state-of-the-art facilities at Steppenwolf, known for its flashy scenery and transitions between acts, which challenge a stage manager. “Sex With Strangers,” however, is running in the upstairs theater, which creates its own challenges and benefits.

“It’s a smaller space,” Freeburg said, “so you’re much more with the actors in the room, so it’s much more intimate than it is downstairs.” She said she didn’t want to spoil some of the elements by revealing them beforehand, but did add that the play “is a lot about technology, so we have some neat technology in the show that’s exciting for us to use.”

In short, the role of stage manager demands the same devotion to craft as acting, just out of view of the audience. Freeburg said she’s never missed the attention.

“I never regretted my decision at all,” she said. “I think I have terrible stage fright. I can’t imagine how they do that every night, go out and keep it fresh and keep it real. There’s a huge amount of rejection to being an actor. You audition and you don’t get it. And I don’t think I could do that. So I am just in awe of my colleagues. It’s the greatest job I could ever imagine having.”