Features | Aug. 2023
HIGHLAND PARK HEADLINER
By Mitch Hurst
PHOTOGRAPHY BY LISA EBRIGHT
Jeff Perry, one of the founders of Steppenwolf, says the idea of working as a collaborative ensemble was there from the very beginning.
When you get Jeff Perry started on talking about what it meant to grow up in Highland Park and attend Highland Park High School, be prepared for superlatives. Perry, co-founder of Steppenwolf Theatre along with his high school classmate Gary Sinise, is also a well-known film and television actor whose most recent television acting credit is Alaska Daily opposite Hilary Swank.
Perry just wrapped Steppenwolf’s production of the Harold Pinter play, No Man’s Land, in which he played Hirst, an eccentric alcoholic. But regardless of the medium, Perry will tell you it all started with the creative energy that was infused into Highland Park High School.
“Highland Park and the mysterious but wonderful art-loving chemistry of that community one hundred percent is the reason I fell in love with acting. It’s the reason I’m still in love with it,” Perry says. “I got to visit Barbara June Patterson, in Nashville, Tennessee a month or so before she passed away. For 12 years. She was a transformative English and drama teacher at Highland Park High School. She took Gary and I at age 15 and threw us into some auditions for West Side Story, gave us parts, and changed our lives.”
Perry’s visit with Patterson will be part of documentary released on PBS American Masters as part of the celebration of Steppenwolf’s 50th Anniversary, which takes place with the 2025-2026 season. While his passion for the stage will never dim (more on that), Perry points to his early television work as the catalyst for allowing him to build a broad acting career.
“It was being cast as a regular with Don Johnson in Nash Bridges on network TV in the eighties and early nineties and being on Grey’s Anatomy, a wildly popular show,” he says. “And then being on a show like My So-Called Life, which was very short-lived but had a real reverberation, and then being on Scandal on ABC with Kerry Washington and Tony Goldwin for seven years, it’s the television roles that probably give you the greatest exposure.”
Perhaps more than any other theater company, Steppenwolf actors like Perry have gone on to perform before and work behind the camera— Sinise and Perry, John Malkovich, Laurie Metcalf, Joan Allen, and a host of others. And it has a collection of Tony Awards that rivals any house on Broadway.
“Something that I’m grateful for and proud of is the way this community of artists in American theater history, these kinds of careers just didn’t used to happen,” Perry says. “The choice became either I make tens or hundreds or thousands of dollars in camera work, or I make tens or hundreds of dollars in theater work.”
The love for live performing and for doing ensemble work and the ability for the ensemble to control its work and control its destiny is what remains special about Steppenwolf, Perry says.
“It’s important for me. I don’t care if it pays 10 dollars or 100 dollars. It’s important to me to do a play. I’m passionate about doing it live and doing it with people I love and that I respect, and it will help me grow,” says Perry. “Laurie Metcalf would famously say she loved and was grateful for her work on Roseanne and I know, it might sound disrespectful, but there was an aspect to which her coming back every hiatus to do a play at Step, an aspect which she spoke honestly of was, ‘I want to make sure I can still act in difficult material’.”
Steppenwolf is known for many things, but perhaps, especially in the theater community, it’s focus on ensemble and independence. Productions curated and selected with actors in mind who’ve known and worked alongside each other for decades. The freedom to stage plays by up-and-coming playwrights as well as plays by Pinter. This ethos was part of the early discussions when Steppenwolf was conceived.
“That was part and parcel of our conversations. It was the whole thing. It was a selfdetermination,” Perry says. “It would be like organizing a smaller group of farm workers and saying, ‘Guys, we’re buying our own farm, and we may succeed, we may fail, but we’re running it. Period’.”
These values are present in Steppenwolf’s upcoming 2023-2024 season. There’s Sanctuary City, a play by Martyna Majok about two immigrant teenagers in post-9/11 Newark, New Jersey. POTUS Or, Why Behind Every Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive is about “how seven brilliant and beleaguered women risk life, liberty, and the pursuit of sanity to keep the commander-n-chief out of trouble.”
There is also the world premiere of a play written by Brandon Jacobs Jenkins, Purpose, starring Felicia Rashad, who Perry says is, “an amazing artist both as an actress and director. The Thanksgiving Play by Larissa FastHorse is a farce about the language that currently dominates our politics.
Now that he’s finished with No Man’s Land and his hiatus from Hollywood is over, Perry says he’s headed back to Los Angeles. He was scheduled to begin filming the second season of Alaska Daily, but a little strike got in the way.
“I’m waiting for the writers and actors strike to end and all that,” he says. “What’s next for me is going on a picket line.”
