It sometimes seems that theatre is dominated by two kinds of people: Those that overstate their accomplishments and those that understate them. Those that talk a good game, and those who play a good game. The talkers give great interviews, make big plans, have elaborate theories about what works and doesn’t work in theatre; almost inevitably, their work turns out to be very average at best and unwatchable at worst. Or they don’t manage to turn anything out at all.

Meanwhile, the players are too busy working on their next piece to concoct fascinating stories for those of us who regularly write features. They state what they are doing simply, even blandly, while they put all of their fire and eloquence into their art.

Eric Rosen, the articulate, soft-spoken co-founder of and Artistic Director for the About Face Theatre, belongs in the second camp. I spoke to Rosen two days after the Tonys, a ceremony in which a show that had been developed at his theatre company, I Am My Own Wife, had garnered two awards (Best Play and Best Actor [Jefferson Mayes]). The play had also won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for best play. But if I hadn’t already known that information, I wouldn’t have been able to tell from Rosen’s attitude.

Instead we talked about his current project, a musical version of Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio,” which he has been working on with Andre Pluess and Ben Collins-Sussman. Rosen mused that when he first began working on this project in 2000 he didn’t have the kind a close, emotional connection to the material.

The project was a commission, Rosen said, by way of explaining how a director known for his work with gay and lesbian writers of note ended up working on a stage adaptation of a musty collection of short stories that was, for generations, the favorite of high school English teachers. “Winesburg, Ohio” is now out of favor for many reasons, not the least being the difficulty of convincing 21st century students to care about an era when horse-drawn carriages dominated the roadways and trains were the fastest way to travel.

Rosen admitted that he had trouble getting into the project because it wasn’t close to his heart. And he built his career on doing adaptations of material close to his heart.

Rosen’s first major success, after all, was a stage version of Jim Grimsley’s novel, “Dream Boy,” which touched Rosen so deeply he admitted he “cried hysterically” when he read it the first time.

He was given a copy of the book by Kyle Hall, [co-founder of About Face Theatre] on his birthday and read the book cover to cover on a flight to New York. He was so entranced by the story that he began reading the book again almost as soon as he’d finished it.

“Then I called Kyle [in Chicago],” Rosen recalled, “and I said we have to do it.”

By a strange coincidence Grimsley was appearing at Unabridged Books up the street from About Face’s then space. “Kyle Hall went to Unabridged and asked Grimsley right there. He said yes, and that started his long relationship with us.”

For years Dream Boy was the signature play of About Face. Dream Boy was done at About Face twice, in 1996 and again in 1998. Rosen also took production of the play to 7Stages Theatre, Atlanta, 1998; New Conservatory Theatre, San Francisco, 1999; and StreetSigns Theatre, Chapel Hill, NC, 2003. And all of it was an outgrowth of Rosen’s initial inspiration.

Another strong inner tug sent Rosen into a life in the theatre in the first place. At 18 he caught Steppenwolf’s stage version of The Grapes of Wrath on Broadway.

“That show changed my life.” Rosen noted, “I always loved literature more than plays. I like theatre, but I looooved literature. And to see a work of literature come to life on a stage. That final image in the piece, that final image is so transformative.”

As a child, Rosen divided his time between one parent’s household in North Carolina and another in Connecticut. The fact that one parent was Jewish and the other Baptist only exacerbated Rosen’s feeling of living on the borderline between worlds. It seemed natural that a smart, literature-minded student living, at least part of the time in North Carolina would end up in Chapel Hill. But many of his choices as a Communication Studies major, were aimed at something larger: to study with the man who adapted and directed The Grapes of Wrath, Frank Galati, at the school, Northwestern University, where many of the aesthetic and intellectual underpinnings to Galati’s Tony-Award-winning adaptation were taught.

Much of what Rosen did in theatre at Chapel Hill was aimed at making him a good candidate for graduate school at Northwestern. However, Rosen still found time for social and political activism. His work on racial integration at Chapel Hill netted him The George Moses Horton Award for Excellence in Multi-cultural Leadership. Rosen was the first person not of color to ever win this award.

Rosen made it to Northwestern University in the Department of Performance Studies. There, he achieved his goal of studying with Frank Galati. He also worked with Mary Zimmerman, working for a while as her assistant on, among other projects, her adaptation of The Journey to the West at The Goodman.

It was while he was at Northwestern that Rosen came out as a gay man and artist. “I knew I was gay years before that but I didn’t come out.” Rosen said. “When I say to kids today I didn’t come out until I was 22, they look at me as if I had said I came out in my late 40s. But you have to understand, at Chapel Hill I was in a fraternity. My political convictions were more about multiculturalism and racial matters. But as soon as I was in grad school I came out.

“Much of that came from the shift I made at Northwestern from looking at theatre as an anthropologist to [engaging in] performance. I realized in grad school that a lot of my political work was about marginalization and repression in our culture. And as soon as I came out, I realized how much I felt marginalized as a gay man. For a time I was overwhelmed with rage. I was suddenly that gay artist guy.”

Rosen’s new found political commitment was one of the factors in the founding of About Face Theatre. “About Face was started in 1995,” Rosen explained. “We sensed a sea change in gay politics in America. Angels in America had changed things a lot. We wanted to create a theatre that had artistic energy as well as community engagement and a political component. We asked ourselves how can we make political change part of that agenda?” About Face Theatre was part of the answer.

“I was a campus lefty when I was a kid,” Rosen explained. “The company was born out of some deep political concerns. The culture was so different back then when we founded the company. We got to ride out a major cultural change. It has been great being part of this change. It has been so great to spend these 10 years doing things that you can care about artistically that you can channel directly into political change.”

A quick look at Rosen’s resume verifies how engaged he has been in the last 10 years: several collaborations with Jim Grimsley (Fascination, Dreamboy); directing Richard Kramer’s Theatre District; Undone, a collaboration with Chicago performance poet cin salach; an exploration of the work of Walt Whitman; Close to the Knives, a work based on writings of David Wojnarowicz; an adaptation of Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance; and the formation of the About Face Youth Theatre, a company created specifically to give a voice to gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered youth.

All of which makes Rosen’s current project, a musical version of Winesburg, Ohio, seem rather soft. Rosen is quite clear about his own initial struggles with the work: “It was the only show I have ever worked on that used material I had not chosen.”

Rosen went through artistic hell preparing a 70-minute one act based on Anderson’s vignettes of life in a small Ohio town. “I came up with a lot of drafts that I didn’t like,” Rosen laughed.

Rosen would not have been the first to have trouble with Anderson’s art. Ernest Hemingway, once one of Anderson’s protégés, famously split from him, satirizing his characters and writing style in “Torrents of Spring.” And the famous editor and writer, Malcolm Cowley once wrote an introduction to an edition of “Winesburg, Ohio,” that praised the collection as an exception to the rest of Anderson’s mediocre work.

“When the music was added, I began to like it a little more,” Rosen admitted, “But really I had big doubts about the show until the tech rehearsal for the first production at Steppenwolf in 2002. That was the real beginning of the project for me. I realized that for two years I had been trying figure out how to begin. Once I saw it in front of an audience I saw the potential of the material.”

After a well-received run at Steppenwolf, Rosen, Pluess and Collins-Sussman went back and added material for a remount at Theatre on the Lake. When that production was finished, the team still felt there was more exploration possible. They added more scenes, more songs, ultimately crafting a show that Rosen calls his first “narratively coherent piece.”

“The rest of the musical adaptations were song cycles.” Rosen explained. “This time I am trying to tell a coherent story. The show follows from Anderson’s work, a collection of short stories that ends up being a novel. It begins as a series of unrelated episodes and then George Willard emerges as the hero half way through.

“I have tried to make a coherent story out of the short stories. The story starts inside of George Willard’s house. We follow the life of his mother, Elizabeth, from her girlhood to her death; we move backwards and forwards in time.” A technique, Rosen quickly added, used by Anderson throughout his stories.

Concerning the topic of how this work fits into an artistic life as devoted as Rosen’s has been to issues of concern in GLBT communities, Rosen noted that he has come “to appreciate that as a major turning point in sexuality and literature. There is the depth beneath the surface, that stories are full of deep hidden secrets and what lurks in the shadows.”

One of Anderson’s stories, for example, describes in detail the hysterical, homophobic reaction of the town to an effeminate schoolteacher accused of abusing a student. The story was written decades before the terms homophobia or gay bashing were developed.

After a rocky beginning, Rosen now fully embraces Anderson: “I think people have be rediscovering Anderson’s stories. The stories speak as much to my taste in his narrative style and its content as anything by Walt Whitman.”

Winesburg, Ohio, a co-production between About Face Theatre and Steppenwolf Theatre Company, opens June 26 and runs through July 18 at The Steppenwolf Upstairs Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted, Chicago.

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