With her play ‘Dance Nation,’ Clare Barron observes teens’ steps toward adulthood

There’s a simple answer as to how playwright Clare Barron came up with the idea for “Dance Nation,” her play about young girls on a competitive dance team: She was obsessed with the reality show “Dance Moms.”

“I just fell in love with the girls,” Barron explains. “They were so talented and so fiercely competitive but also so kind to each other. I just got sucked into their world.”

But the answer becomes more complex when Barron adds that her obsession also was dovetailing with “complicated feelings” she was having about ambition and success as she started to experience her first taste of success as an actor-writer in New York City.

“I felt uncomfortable, almost kind of upset, when good things happened to me,” she says. “I was wondering why I would be built that way and had a hunch that it came from a very early adolescent place in me.”

Barron was writing about 13-year-olds but she admits she also was writing about herself as an adult, which influenced a peculiar casting direction. The girls (and one boy) are played, as per Barron’s instruction, by a multi-generational cast. In Steppenwolf’s staging, the actor’s ages range from early 20s to early 70s.

“I was interested in the way things that happen to us at 13, which I feel is an important moment for our identity, push us to the precipice of becoming a miniature adult,” Barron says. “So while you’re watching the play, I wanted you to see who these 13-year-olds grow up to be. You’re kind of having a dual experience.”

“Dance Nation,” now in previews ahead of the opening Thursday, makes its Chicago debut at Steppenwolf Theatre, where Barron’s Obie Award-winning “You Got Older” was staged in 2018. Portraying the girls are Audrey Francis (she also plays The Moms), Caroline Neff, Karen Rodriguez, Ariana Burks, Adithi Chandrashekar, Ellen Maddow and Shanesia Davis; Torrey Hanson plays the lone boy in the troupe. Guiding the young dancers is Dance Teacher Pat (Tim Hopper).

Director-choreographer Lee Sunday Evans has been connected to “Dance Nation,” a Pulitzer Prize finalist, since its development stage and directed its 2018 debut at Playwrights Horizon.

“I was completely, completely inspired by Clare’s really explosive, vibrant portrait of these young dancers,” says Evans, an ex-dancer herself. “I loved the exploration of dance culture as a way to talk about all kinds of coming-of-age questions and ideas of success, ambition and desire.”

The actors have varying degrees of dance training, and Evans is fine with that. She describes the choreography, which encompasses tap, lyrical jazz and contemporary, as “pretty body friendly.”

“It’s about using your body to be expressive in a really joyful way,” Evans says. “The dances capture something really important both about the joy that I think you feel with a dance team like this and also the intensity with which you are exploring how to test yourself against your own limits.”

Getty Images

Throughout the play, Barron mines the passionate ambivalence of early adolescence in ways that are completely original and at the same time startlingly familiar. One of the first things she wrote, for the character Ashlee, is an intense and insightful monologue that comes from the mouth of a 13-year-old but encompasses the woman she will become.

“I felt the scariest thing I could do is have a woman stand on stage and say everything she likes about herself and be really unapologetically honest about her body and about her brain,” Barron says. “If I had to get on stage and do this, it would be my worst nightmare.”

Shanesia Davis, who plays Ashlee, agrees: “It’s terrifying to do,” she says with a laugh. “But I live for a challenge. I live for the terror of who she is in saying those words. She is extremely complicated and full of life and surprise and self-love and self-doubt and power and vulnerability.”

Barron grew up in Wenatchee, Washington, a conservative, Christian town that she says has a huge arts community. Ballet was one of her pursuits (“I was incredibly bad but I loved it”). She recalls the intense female friendships, the dressing-room dynamics and learning about their bodies and sex, all of which are reflected in “Dance Nation.”

“It was this little pocket where we could be our authentic selves,” Barron recalls.

Around 11, she became interested in theater and joined a children’s Shakespeare troupe run by Sherry Schreck, the mother of playwright Heidi Schreck (“What the Constitution Means to Me”).

“I remember Heidi coming back to visit and hearing about what it’s like to be a working artist,” Barron recalls. “I just didn’t know that was something you could do with your life. Having this little peek at Heidi’s life was hugely influential.”

After attending Yale University, Barron landed in New York and pursued acting but became frustrated with the reality of being an actor. “My whole acting career was as a 20-something playing 15-year-olds,” she says.

She had written a few plays at Yale but it was performance artist and playwright Deb Margolin who encouraged her to find her voice: “She instilled the confidence in me that I could be a writer.”

Barron has developed a style in which she experiments with form and structure in powerful and intriguing ways that push her plays, including “Dance Nation,” into new and challenging forms, says Evans.

“This play has a deeply brilliant, deeply emotional intuitive structure in how the scenes relate to each other. There is a really beautiful story and plot, plus there are levels of explosive theatricality and expressiveness that I think are expressed in the play in a really, really profound way.”