Steppenwolf Theatre Company of Chicago

In Their Own Words

John Mayer

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781474239479
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Drama
• Index: Literature

In 1974, a group of determined, young high school actors started doing plays under the name of Steppenwolf Theatre Company, eventually taking residence in the basement of a church in Highland Park, a suburb of Chicago. Thus began their unlikely journey to become one of the most prominent theatre companies in the world. Steppenwolf Theatre Company has changed the face of American Theatre with its innovative approach that blends dynamic ensemble performance, honest, straightforward acting, and bold, thought-provoking stories to create compelling theatre. This is the first book to chronicle this iconic theatre company, offering an account of its early years and development, its work, and the methodologies that have made it one of the most influential ensemble theatres today. Through extensive, in-depth interviews conducted by the author with ensemble members, this book reveals the story of Steppenwolf's miraculous rise from basement to Broadway and beyond. Interviewees include co-founders Jeff Perry, Gary Sinise and Terry Kinney, along a myriad of ensemble, staff, board members and others.

Chapter 1

THE EARLY YEARS: THE SEVENTIES

All you really need to have a theatre is the actors. You can have a theatre without a script. You can have a theatre without a theatre. You can do it out in the street. But, without the performers, without the interpreters, you don’t have a theatre.

—Gary Sinise

The 1960s represented a pivotal period in American history: a virtual social revolution that composed a dynamic spiritual and philosophical liberation. That reform generated progressive new agendas, expanded the horizons for alternative lifestyle choices, awakened a heightened political awareness, and incited passionate appeals for social transformation. The relative complacency and indifference that characterized much of the suburban youth culture of the 1950s was gradually replaced by a more politically and intellectually aware generation. Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s early members’ formative, highly impressionable teen years coexisted with this turbulent period. Affluent liberal bastions, such as suburban Highland Park, twenty-five miles north of Chicago, loudly sounded this newly developing progressive ideal. It was here, amidst this enlightened and impassioned political and social awareness, that the roots of one of America’s finest ensemble theatres first began to take hold.

The seeds of Steppenwolf were originally planted in the theatre classes and plays at Highland Park High School in 1970. Gary Sinise and Jeff Perry, as students in these classes and actors in the productions, were not merely exposed to theoretical ideas pertaining to the art of performance, but they also traveled into Chicago and beyond to witness many professional productions. Chicago was alive with theatre during this period, from the venerable Goodman Theatre, improvisational giant The Second City, the non-traditional Organic Theatre, the roots of St. Nicholas Theatre Company where David Mamet and William H. Macy began to cultivate their craft, to major touring houses including the Studebaker, Shubert, and Blackstone Theatres. Academy Festival Theatre, an intimate 500-seat theatre, housed at Barat College in Lake Forest, Illinois, a mere ten-minute drive from Highland Park High School, provided students the opportunity to witness a diversity of high-level professional productions including Jason Robards and Colleen Dewhurst in the pre-Broadway run of Eugene O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten, directed by Jose Quintero; Irene Worth and Christopher Walken in Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth; Lynn Redgrave in Shaw’s Misalliance; Cicely Tyson in an all-black revival of Desire Under the Elms; and Geraldine Page and Rip Torn in Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes.

Highland Park High School’s theatre program headed by Equity actress and teacher Barbara June Patterson was one of the first of its kind in the nation. In addition to the frequent field trips, a broad range of theatre courses were offered, including a directing class, which generated many student-directed plays. School-sponsored productions occurred frequently and Highland Park High School annually participated in Illinois statewide theatre competitions. In Sinise and Perry’s junior and senior years, two productions respectively, Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood and Bertolt Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle, made it to the statewide final. Both Sinise and Perry received further acknowledgment as members of the all-state acting team for their work in The Caucasian Chalk Circle. The opportunity to work with such intellectually challenging scripts as these taught the future co-founders of Steppenwolf Theatre the intrinsic value of quality scripts in terms of play selection and performance.

Patterson’s classes offered students a broad theoretical vision of acting, directing, and script analysis, but also provided ample hands-on opportunities to apply the newfound knowledge. Jeff Perry fondly recollects this period:

I was captivated by Barbara’s passionate energy and theatricality. I was immediately struck by the sheer enjoyment of acting, which seemed to me more interesting in some ways than daily life, and that’s still what I get a kick out of, the empathy and imagination employed to inhabit numerous lives. And early on too, I became addicted to the camaraderie and tradition of theatre, that and being exposed to great stories from great writers. Barbara was exposing us to Miller and Brecht and Williams and Shakespeare at an early age.

Sinise and Perry immediately put their classroom experiences to work in a collaborative final directing class project, Brian Friel’s Philadelphia, Here I Come!

This 1973 production provided a preview of the innovative style that would eventually bring Steppenwolf international renown. Sinise and Perry, their cast, and various friends transformed a seldom-used portion of the school cafeteria into a black box theatre for their production, an inventiveness facilitated in part by the necessity to adapt and break free from the institutional regulations of the high-school setting. Sinise fondly remembered his first foray into directing in an interview with former Steppenwolf artistic director Martha Lavey:

Everybody had to find a place to do their final project, so we did productions in hallways, in the parking lot, everywhere. I went to the principal and asked if we could turn the cafeteria into a theatre on the weekend. We wanted our own theatre lighting, because the cafeteria just had fluorescent lighting. Our friend Gordon Kapes, an electronics wizard at the school, and Bobby Newman, a great technical director type, put floodlights in coffee cans and some guy’s dad had a wire store and we got all the wires and cables, and somebody else’s dad had a conduit or hardware store, so we got all this conduit. We hung the coffee cans from the conduit we’d attached to the ceiling. To top the lights off and to make for a wider or narrower spread we took cardboard and wrapped it around in different focal lengths on the coffee cans. We hung twenty-four lights and Gordon made a little lightboard. We had six dining-room dimmers on this little lightboard and you could plug four lights into each one, then if we needed a special, someone would unplug three of the lights and we’d just have one up there. We used the school’s risers and cafeteria chairs and made a theatre-in-the-round.

Highland Park teacher Sherry Rubel had been augmenting Patterson’s performance studies classes with a curriculum of basic technical theatre courses. Ms. Rubel also began directing shows at the high school, including Molière’s Tartuffe, which, in featuring Sinise as the title character, afforded him his first major role in a play. Classmate Kevin Rigdon² trained in Rubel’s stagecraft classes and participated in pulling off the transformation of the cafeteria theatre space with classmates Sinise, tech wiz Bobby Newman, Joan Channick (Associate Dean of the Yale School of Drama), Alisa Solomon (Director of the MA Arts and Culture Program at Columbia University, School of Journalism), and others.

The first performance of Philadelphia, Here I Come! burst to life in the little performance space carved from the high-school cafeteria; and a few years after the production, the high school turned the space permanently into a theatre. Co-directors Sinise and Perry also acted in the show, because both believed that working together as actors and directors would achieve the highest performance result. This decision foreshadowed what would become a Steppenwolf trademark, free crossover between actor and director. This flexibility came to form an essential aspect of the unique charm of the Steppenwolf ensemble. The focus was always on “the work,” and how the best possible results could be achieved.

After the success of Philadelphia, Here I Come! a veritable barrage of student-directed plays ensued at Highland Park High School. In January, 1974, Paul Zindel’s And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little directed by classmate Ricky Argosh was performed at the Unitarian Church in nearby Deerfield, Illinois. This became the first occasion for the use of the name, Steppenwolf Theatre Company. Argosh had been reading Steppenwolf, Hermann Hesse’s classic anti-war saga at the time and, as Sinise remembers,

We were going to have a program made for the show and we were sitting around the church before or after rehearsal one night discussing the idea of putting a company name on the program. That’s when Rick held up the book and we agreed to put Steppenwolf Theatre Company on the program.

Barbara Patterson further recalls:

Gary hurried out with his few remaining coins and bought a rubber stamp with the name Steppenwolf inscribed. He put that name everywhere and said that was the name of the theatre.

The first three plays of Steppenwolf Theatre in 1974—And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little, Grease, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead—all went into production as “class projects”, and played to ample audiences. There was no admission charge for the plays or to the original performances of Grease either, but the entrepreneurial Sinise made a strategic appeal for support during the show’s breaks. He remembers:

I literally held the audience hostage, and sent ushers around with hubcaps to collect money. I recouped my original investment, and took in an additional $300 or $400, which went into the budget for Rosencrantz.

Philadelphia, Here I Come! had established what would become an element of the Steppenwolf methodology, crossover between actor and director. And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little had given the company its name, while Grease helped to set the tone for what would become Steppenwolf’s early signature: rock and roll theatre. Grease also displayed to audiences the company’s boundless energy and unrestrained commitment.

During this 1974 season, Perry enrolled in Illinois State University to study theatre, but he continued to support the goal of starting a theatre, spearheaded by Sinise back home in Highland Park. Meanwhile, following closely on the heels of Grease in the early summer of 1974, came Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Terry Kinney, Perry’s classmate from ISU, gave his first Steppenwolf acting performance in this show. Perry recalls Kinney’s initial impressions of Sinise:

Terry and I had been talking; we had become very tight, great friends. I had been telling him what a great actor Gary was, and that he was going to love doing Rosencrantz. We saw Grease and really liked it. Terry thought Gary was great, but we laughed because he joked that it was really appalling that Gary was so shameless by asking people for money about three or four times during the show.

Highland Park provided the young Steppenwolf Company with a suburban audience ready to experience the arts and eager to support its local artists. The liberal community wanted to establish a strong cultural base and gave free rein and impassioned support to the youthful innovators. The three founders of the Steppenwolf Theatr...