Claire Elizabeth Saxe, like any high school senior, had planned to go to prom with her friends.
“We’d sort of talked about it for a couple of years,” said Saxe, an Oak Park and River Forest High School graduate.
But when the big night came, May 19, Saxe found herself in her dressing room at Steppenwolf Theatre, a young actor in a professional show running six days a week on the Chicago stage since April 5.
“I’ve never been much of a high school dance enthusiast, and while I was mildly disappointed that I would have to miss this milestone event, there was really no contest in my mind,” she would later muse. “Doing a show at Steppenwolf was definitely worth missing prom.”
Still, sitting in the dressing room that night she began to think about her friends and got “a little envious.”
Just then, frantic knocking at the door revealed Gail Shapiro and Mariann Mayberry, fellow actors in The Diary of Anne Frank. “We’re kidnapping you,” Shapiro said. They wrapped her in a red dress, walked her toward the green room and someone put a pink tiara on her head.
It was a Steppenwolf Prom.
They bought a cake, decorated the green room and even installed a mini disco ball on the ceiling. Stage manager Malcolm Ewen held a flashlight to the disco ball for the desired effect, and the young men in the cast donned suit jackets and danced. Well, all except Kirk Anderson, who didn’t have a jacket and had to wear his Nazi uniform instead, “which was really funny,” Saxe said.
Saxe says she isn’t much of a dancer, but felt completely comfortable dancing with the cast and crew and “making complete fools of ourselves.” She called her Steppenwolf friends “such sweet, supportive people.” They danced for a half-hour before the call came to get ready for the evening show.
The show closed this past Sunday, and in the fall Saxe heads to Saratoga Springs, N.Y., to attend Skidmore College where she’ll study acting.
Playing Anne Frank “made me understand what happened [during the Holocaust] on a much more personal level,” she said. “I thought I understood. I really did. But then I realized that I didn’t.”
The experience also taught her to celebrate people’s idiosyncrasies. “Now I just accept [them] as what makes people individuals.”
Saxe took a reduced load at OPRF to act in the play, having completed all of the necessary classes and credits before her final semester. She’d depart early every day to act, leaving her friends and the last days of high school behind. She’s looking forward to having two months to reconnect with her friends before setting off again in the fall.
But at Steppenwolf there were other connections. Saxe said the theater is a “wonderful place to begin … because everyone is so kind and it is such a community. Leaving [on Sunday for the last time] was strange.”
The Steppenwolf Prom was “the kindest thing that anyone has ever done for me. I was amazed at the amount of preparation that went into coordinating this event and touched by how enthusiastic they all were,” Saxe wrote in a blog entry. “I’m sure the OPRF prom was great, but this prom meant so much,” she said.