Staging Sufjan

How playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury turned a classic indie-rock album into a Justin Peck-choreographed dance piece that's now Broadway bound. 

- Juan A. Ramírez

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?