Three years ago Marc Rosenbush should have been on top of the world. Not yet 30, the stage director had already accumulated a resume full of productions and a thick file of favorable reviews. He was helping to transform the Splinter Group’s modest annual Buckets o’ Beckett festival into a big-budget affair with important Chicago directors like Frank Galati and Sheldon Patinkin and a cast list that included such nationally recognized actors as John Mahoney and Estelle Parsons.
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After the festival was over Rosenbush escaped to a Zen Buddhist retreat in the south of France. “After all that happiness and all that acclaim–all that, ‘Ooh-wow, what an amazing thing you’ve done’–I was like, Where’s my wife? Where’s my life? I suddenly realized I hadn’t dealt with any of it.”
Rosenbush took a sabbatical from the Splinter Group, moved back in with his mother in Oak Park, and devoted himself full-time to Zen meditation, with interruptions for personal-development tapes and seminars. “I was afraid I didn’t have control over the next stage of my life,” he says. “I had to rethink the way I lived.”
Gaiman says he gets requests like Rosenbush’s every week, but the director’s letter stood out because it “seemed so sensible.” He hasn’t worked closely with Rosenbush and Toombs on their adaptation, but he’s kept in touch from Minneapolis (where he moved from his native England six years ago to be closer to his American wife’s family), critiquing various drafts and even sending them his notes for the novel to aid in their research. Previews of Signal to Noise begin next Thursday, the same day Gaiman is coming to town to sign copies of his latest book, Stardust, at the Stars Our Destination bookstore in Lakeview.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo by Nathan Mandell.
