Inside Chicago's innovative Steppenwolf Theatre Company as it marks 50 years

Transcript

Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.

Amna Nawaz: Steppenwolf Theatre Company has long been one of the nation’s most influential ensemble companies, known for the actors that’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: Think if I had stayed in the theater.

Jeffrey Brown: A production of “Dance of Death,” a play by August Strindberg being presented in a modern adaptation.

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

Jeffrey Brown: For actor Jeff Perry, 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, rare or 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, 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. 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: 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.”

Gary Sinise, Actor: 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, playwrights including Tracy Letts, whose “August: Osage County” won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize, and Rajiv Joseph and Tarell Alvin McCraney.

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.

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: 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.

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.

Glenn Davis, Co-Artistic Director, Steppenwolf Theatre: 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.

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.

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: 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.