Steppenwolf Theatre Company

 

[Arguably, the theater capital of the United States is New York City; I doubt anyone would dispute that.  But the second spot on the rollcall of U.S. theater towns might be debatable.  My vote goes to Chicago, which probably has the oldest standing as an active and supportive city in the country as far as theatrical activity goes.  Chi Town is the most recognized city in the country by the Broadway League and the American Theatre Wing, with four theaters receiving the prestigious the Regional Theatre Tony Award, awarded on the recommendation of the American Theatre Critics Association. 

[Chicago’s institutional theater, the Goodman, named the number one regional theater in the U.S. by Time magazine, has made a significant national mark, having supplied Broadway with acclaimed adaptations of American classics and nurtured important new dramatic voices (24 plays since 1978; 25 Tonys, 24 Drama Desks, 4 Pulitzers).  The Goodman received the Regional Theatre Tony in 1992. 

[Among the many smaller theaters in the Windy City, however, is possibly one of the best-known troupes in the business: Steppenwolf.  Founded in 1974, the Steppenwolf Theatre Company is justifiably nationally (and internationally) famous not only for the well-known actors who’ve come out of the ensemble—John Malkovich, Laurie Metcalf, and Gary Sinise, among several others, who have made contributions to film and television as well as the stage—but because of the often starlling and impressive work the company has created and then shared with the country.  Among Steppenwolf’s national honors are the Regional Theatre Tony in 1985 and the National Medal of Arts in 1998.

[My first contact with Steppenwolf was in Washington, D.C., when I was there during the summer of 1985 (see Rick On Theater’s “‘Stages in DC' (Summer 1985)” [25 December 2011]) to write a survey of Washington theater for the New York City publication Stages (vol. 2, no. 3 – September 1985).  Kennedy Center artistic director Peter Sellars (b. 1957) had just launched his ill-fated American National Theater at the Kennedy Center, part of which was the presentation of productions from regional theaters. 

[The inaugural program was the Chicago Season, presenting productions from the Wisdom Bridge Theatre and Steppenwolf.  I saw Coyote Ugly by Lynn Siefert with Metcalf, directed by Malkovich (12 June-6 July 1985 in the Terrace Theater).  Neither artist was well known yet.  (Interested readers can check out my brief report on the performance, as well as the Wisdom Bridge piece I saw, in the above-referenced link.)

[The next Steppenwolf show I saw was 1990’s Broadway transfer of Frank Galati’s adaptation of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, which he directed with a cast that included Gary Sinise, Lois Smith (probably the first time I saw her on stage; I’ve praised her work many times on this blog), and a huge cast that included many members of the Steppenwolf Ensemble.

[Then I saw Austin Pendleton’s Orson’s Shadow at the Barrow Street Theatre in Greenwich Village in April 2005.  It wasn’t a Steppenwolf production, but the play had originated at that Chicago theater in 2000.  Pendelton’s a member of the ensemble, and so were many of the cast (including Tracy Letts, when he was still an actor; his name will come up again as the Pulitzer Prize-, Tony Award-, and Drama Desk Award-winning playwright of August: Osage County).  I’ve reported on Orson’s Shadow in “Three Plays from Distinguished Companies from the Archives” (16 April 2020).

[In June 2009, I caught Letts's multiple award-winning play, August: Osage County, at the Music Box on Broadway, where the play had moved from the Imperial in April ’08.  (It opened there on 4 December 2007 and ran for 18 previews and 648 regular performances.  Its run in Chicago was 28 June to 26 August 2007.)  Some of the cast was still from the original Chicago company, but I caught Phylicia Rashad (not an ensemble member) a little more than a month after she took over the part of Violet Weston, the family matriarch. 

[(At the performance I saw, the Weston patriarch (who disappears at the beginning of AOC) was played by John Cullum.  In an unusual bit of New York casting, Cullum was also performing Off-Broadway on Theatre Row—a half mile west and south from the Music Box—in Heroes.  For this reason, the curtain for the French comedy, which I’d seen about three months before AOC was at 8:30 p.m.; I had seen the actor arriving at 8:05 while I waited in the Clurman Theatre's small lobby and wondered why he was cutting it so close,)

[Over the years, I’ve seen many Steppenwolf actors and the work of Steppenwolf directors—not to mention several plays by writers who were or became Steppenwolf playwrights—but AOC was the last Steppenwolf production I’ve seen to date. (I’ve been to Chicago several times and seen some theater while I was there, but I’ve never seen anything on Steppenwolf’s home stage.)] 

“INSIDE CHICAGO’S INNOVATIVE
STEPPENWOLF THEATRE COMPANY
AS IT MARKS 50 YEARS”
by Jeffrey Brown and Ryan Connelly Holmes 

[This transcript is from PBS News Hour of 9 April 2026 in recognition of the troupe’s 50th season.  The Steppenwolf Theatre Company produced its first full season of plays in 1976, hence the discrepancy suggested by its founding date two years earlier.

[The troupe’s name comes from the novel Steppenwolf (German, 1927; English, 1929) by Hermann Hesse (German; 1877-1962), which original member Rick Argosh was reading at the time of the theater’s inaugural production in 1974.]

Steppenwolf Theatre Company has long been one of the nation’s most influential ensemble companies. It’s known for the actors it has launched and the groundbreaking work it has produced. It’s marking its 50th season at a moment of real uncertainty for theaters. Jeffrey Brown traveled to Chicago for our arts and culture series, CANVAS.

Amna Nawaz[, Co-Anchor, “PBS News Hour”]: Steppenwolf Theatre Company has long been one of the nation’s most influential ensemble companies, known for the actors it’s launched and the groundbreaking work it’s produced. Now it’s marking its 50th season at a moment of real uncertainty for theaters across the country.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown traveled to Chicago for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Actress [Kathryn Erbe]: Think if I had stayed in the theater.

Jeffrey Brown: A production of “Dance of Death,” a play by August Strindberg [Swedish; 1849-1912] being presented in a modern adaptation. [Adapted by Conor McPherson; directed by Yasen Peyankov; 29 January-22 March 2026; Downstairs Theater.]

Actor [Jeff Perry]: And growing old, it’s horrible, but it is interesting, I’d imagine.

Jeffrey Brown: For actor Jeff Perry [a founding member], it’s yet another opportunity to do his thing now 50 years on at the theater company he helped create.

Jeff Perry, Co-Founder, Steppenwolf Theatre Company: It feels like wishes fulfilled.

Jeffrey Brown: It does.

Jeff Perry: Yes. A place built of artists, by artists and for artists is an exceedingly rare experiment.

Jeffrey Brown: Rare to start, rarer still to last. Steppenwolf Theatre’s roots go back to the early 1970s, a group of teenage friends in a Chicago area high school, then at Illinois State University [Normal, Illinois], and then a do-it-yourself theater company co-founded by Perry, Terry Kinney, and Gary Sinise, putting on shows in a church basement in Chicago.

Jeff Perry: Here’s what we thought simultaneously I think is the truth [sic]. We’re going to change the face of American theater. And we will probably fall apart within – within a month or two.

John Malkovich, Actor [in a video clip]: You tell him that I got a couple projects he might be interested in.

Jeffrey Brown: It would become an important incubator of American theater, actors, including John Malkovich, here with Sinise in a groundbreaking 1984 production of Sam Shepard’s “True West.”

[The statement above is incorrect, or at least misleading. The stage production of True West at Steppenwolf was in 1982; it opened at the company’s then-home theater, the Jane Addams Hull House, on 31 March. It transferred to the Apollo Theatre in Chicago for a commercial run, and then to New York City’s Off-Broadway Cherry Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village, where it ran from 17 October 1982 to 4 August 1984 (762 performances).

[This was the first Steppenwolf production to go to New York. Malkovich won several acting awards and Sinise won an Obie for his directing.

[The production proved so popular that it was recorded and aired on the Public Broadcasting Service’s American Playhouse on 31 January 1984. (It was probably from that recording that the clip seen on the News Hour broadcast was excerpted, and why the year 1984 was attached.)]

Gary Sinise, Actor [film clip]: I never thanked you for saving my life.

Jeffrey Brown: Sinise himself would become best known as Lieutenant Dan in the 1994 film “Forrest Gump.”

Laurie Metcalf, well-known for her time on the hit series “Roseanne,” Joan Allen, Amy Morton, Martha Plimpton, more recently Carrie Coon [wife of Tracy Letts], playwrights including Tracy Letts, whose “August: Osage County” won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize, and Rajiv Joseph and Tarell Alvin McCraney.

[I wrote about Metcalf in Lucas Hnath’s Ibsen sequel, A Doll’s House, Part 2, on Rick On Theater on 22 July 2017. My report on the Broadway transfer of Letts’s August: Osage County was posted on this blog on 30 June 2009. I reported on Joseph’s Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo on 11 June 2011 and Gruesome Playground Injuries on 23 February 2011.

[There’s an article on Tarell Alvin McCraney by Carvell Wallace from the New York Times Magazine, “Connoisseur of Grief,” reposted on 4 February 2019 and an interview with the young playwright from American Theatre in “Interviews with Two Theater Pros,” posted on 4 October 2018. I also wrote about a Washington, D.C., production of McCraney’s Choir Boy on 24 January 2015.]

All of them and more, along with several directors, are to this day ensemble members of Steppenwolf, meaning they work together in different shows over many years.

Tracy Letts, Playwright: It sounds different every time you do it.

Jeffrey Brown: And whatever else they do in theater, TV, or film, they can and do come back to work at Steppenwolf.

In 2016, as he rehearsed a new play written for his Steppenwolf colleagues, Letts told me that the freedom and sense of security that comes with the ensemble approach is priceless.

Tracy Letts: I can afford to take chances. I can afford to make a fool of myself.

Jeffrey Brown: And they will keep you around anyway.

Tracy Letts: They will keep me around anyway, and they will tell me. They will tell me to my face, you didn’t get this right.

[This was probably Mary Page Marlowe, which premièred at Steppenwolf in April 2016. It also came to New York and opened 12 July 2018 at the Second Stage Theater. The play closed on 19 August after an extension of its scheduled run.]

Jeffrey Brown: Success can be counted in many ways, including the number of shows, 18, that have transferred to Broadway over the years, winning 14 Tony Awards.

Actress [Kara Young (as Aziza in the Broadway production of “Purpose”)]: You said your daddy was some sort of reverend, but not like this kind of reverend.

Jeffrey Brown: Among them, “Purpose,” a Steppenwolf commission, which also won a 2025 Pulitzer for playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. He told me then what it meant to work directly with the theater company.

[The play ran in Chicago from 14 March-28 April 2024. It opened at the Hayes Theater on Broadway on 17 March 2025 with a largely new cast, and closed on 25 February, after 22 previews and 192 regular performances. It won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Tony for Best Play, another Tony for Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Role in a Play for Kara Young, and 2025 Drama Desk Awards for Outstanding Play and Outstanding Featured Performance in a Play for Young.]

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Playwright: I’m designing the game board for these incredible artists to every night find a new way through the story that might ping differently, create different emotions. Everything in this play was sort of inspired by the acting ensemble that emerged from it.

[I wrote up Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate on ROT on 31 March 2014 and Everybody on 6 March 2017.]

Glenn Davis, Co-Artistic Director, Steppenwolf Theatre [in a scene from “Purpose”]: You can’t be sneaking up on a man like that when he’s fresh out.

Jeffrey Brown: Among the “Purpose” cast, Glenn Davis, who now has an even more daunting offstage role, serving with fellow ensemble member, director and actor, Audrey Francis, as Steppenwolf’s co-artistic directors [since 2021].

Glenn Davis: Fifty years is a long time to keep a group of 17-year-olds together and still performing together and still liking each other and enjoying being in a room together. So that’s an accomplishment.

Jeffrey Brown: And then getting new generations of 17-year-olds.

Glenn Davis: Yes.

Audrey Francis, Co-Artistic Director, Steppenwolf Theatre: Yes.

Glenn Davis: And then adding new folks.

Audrey Francis: I think that when Glenn and I took the role on, it was really as we were coming out of the pandemic. Why would anyone take on a leadership role of a nonprofit arts organization, in particular live theater, at that time?

Jeffrey Brown: The answer, to keep a place that has nourished them in several previous generations alive and thriving.

But Francis and Davis, who both in a sense grew up as theater professionals here, face a host of challenges. Steppenwolf in recent years greatly expanded its theater and public areas, more space to use, but also to fill. And it’s not immune from the societal and other changes now roiling American theater generally.

Glenn Davis: The structural mechanics of doing theater today are very difficult. We used to do twice as many shows as we do now. So being able to employ the same number of artists becomes more difficult because you don’t have as many shows, you don’t have as many roles.

Those difficulties are all over the place. So we try as best we can to manage those and move through them as seamlessly as we can.

Jeffrey Brown: There’s also the reality of American politics today. Chicago has been one center of the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration. Davis and Francis say the theater’s core values and programming won’t change.

[The Department of Homeland Security announced the launch of Operation Midway Blitz on 8 September 2025, the start of a surge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents onto the streets of Chicago. (Reports indicate that enforcement activities began as early as 6 September.) The initial surge occurred from September to November 2025, with thousands of arrests.

[After a brief increase in activity, the visible presence of large numbers of federal agents decreased during the winter months. DHs officials have maintained that “they aren’t leaving Chicago” and recent reports as of late March 2026 indicate that agents continue to carry out hundreds of monthly arrests in the Chicago area.]

Audrey Francis: I don’t feel necessarily a pressure to program something that is commenting on something that’s happening right now because everything is happening so fast. What I do feel is an obligation to our city to make sure that we’re providing a place that is thoughtful, intentional, can be fun, can be challenging.

Jeff Perry [walking down a hallway lined with production posters]: They all, every one of these bring up memories.

Jeffrey Brown: And so, 50 years on, Jeff Perry and his colleagues are still at it.

Jeff Perry: It’s almost entirely a nomadic profession. This held the promise at least of an ongoing family of choice. And it proved as the years went on how it really is that.

Jeffrey Brown: For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown at Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago.

[In his more than 30-year career with the News Hour, Jeffrey Brown has served as co-anchor, studio moderator, and field reporter on a wide range of national and international issues, with work taking him around the country and to many parts of the globe.  As arts correspondent he has profiled many of the world's leading writers, musicians, actors, and other artists.  

[Among his signature works at the News Hour: a multi-year series, “Culture at Risk,” about threatened cultural heritage in the United States and abroad; the creation of the News Hour’s online “Art Beat”; and hosting the monthly book club, “Now Read This,” a collaboration with the New York Times.

[Ryan Connelly Holmes is a producer and reporter for PBS News Hour.  Based in the Chicago area, he produces segments and digital content covering a wide range of national and international topics. He joined News Hour in October 2016.]