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?
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