STEPPENWOLF AT 50 

Founding member Jeff Perry looks back at the little ensemble that could.

Plenty of young actors want nothing more than to be “discovered” and enjoy unending fame and fortune. But some performers just want to do the work, to get up onstage and tell a story. Such was the case with the crew that founded Steppenwolf Theatre, now marking its 50th anniversary. While many of their creative peers were determined to strike out on their own and find stardom in New York or Los Angeles, Jeff Perry and his pals—Gary Sinise and Terry Kinney—opted for a different path. “We chose, decidedly, a preference for a family, for the protection and invigoration of each other.”

Like many Steppenwolf members, including Sinise, Laurie Metcalf, John Malkovich, and Joan Allen, Perry went on to a successful career in film and television, appearing most recently in the ABC drama series Alaska Daily. But like many of the Steppenwolf cohort, he too has returned again and again to North Halsted Street. Over the years, he has acted and directed more than 40 productions at Steppenwolf and is once again onstage in Conor McPherson’s adaptation of August Strindberg’s The Dance of Death, featuring fellow ensemble members Cliff Chamberlain and Kathryn Erbe.

The Steppenwolf story is one of the more legendary in Chicago’s theater scene. Its first production was a 1974 staging—directed by a 19-year-old Sinise—of Paul Zindel’s And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little. The following year, Steppenwolf, which took its name from the title of a 1927 Hermann Hesse novel, incorporated as a nonprofit and, in 1976, set up shop in the basement of the Immaculate Conception Catholic School in Highland Park. In 1980, the company moved to the city, settling in at the Jane Addams Hull House Center on North Broadway, where Malkovich directed Lanford Wilson’s Balm in Gilead, with a cast that included John Mahoney, Ora Jones, and Glenne Headly; Tracy Letts, who would go on to win a Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize for his play August: Osage County, served as stage manager for the production.

When asked what made the place tick from the start, Perry recalls, “Gary operated at such an instinctive and musical level, with sheer willpower and drive. Terry had gigantic empathy and identification with what Lanford Wilson said of his characters in Balm in Gilead, ‘losers who refuse to lose.’ That was a real strength. And me, I think the most notable thing was I was such a theater communist; I just loved the collaborative, familial way of working.”

The early years were a mixture of fearlessness and folly. “We did a couple of one-acts, The Indian Wants the Bronx by Israel Horowitz and Eugène Ionesco’s The Lesson, playing to an audience of eight or 10 people,” recalls Perry. “So, after that, we decided to do a jukebox musical combining the music of Harold Arlen, Cole Porter, and Kurt Weill. We all wore grey turtlenecks and sort of sang and danced, but almost nobody could sing, almost nobody could dance.” By the mid-80s, the ensemble, then in residence on Halsted Street, had found its footing and saw its profile rise when its productions of True West and Balm in Gilead transferred to New York. In 1985, Steppenwolf was awarded a Tony for Regional Theatre Excellence. The organization has gone on to receive 14 Tony Awards, debut two Pulitzer Prize-winning commissions, and seen its productions play in New York, London, Sydney, Galway, and Dublin.

From the start, the company’s values derived from a commitment to the idea of an ensemble—a group of like-minded artists exploring together. “In the early and mid ‘70s, the Goodman existed, there was a little bit of dinner theater and a touring Broadway show or two, but that was about it,” notes Perry. “So, our heroes were from TV and the film world—Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro, Elia Kazan and Marlon Brando, John Cassavetes, and Gena Rowlands, the first cast of Saturday Night Live, SCTV.” But when Hollywood came calling, stress followed. In 1992, Sinise directed and co-starred with John Malkovich in a film adaptation of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. “Having done the piece as a play, I felt left out, I felt a certain jealousy,” shares Perry. “Gary and I go back to age 15 as best friends, brothers. That led to an estrangement between us. We got over it. This group was destined to have both individual careers in film and television, combined with ensemble work. It was never going to be just one or the other.”

At 50, Steppenwolf is an institution. But season after season, it continues to take risks with material old and new. Last year, it premiered Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ Purpose and Samuel D. Hunter’s Little Bear Ridge Road. Now comes Strindberg’s darkly humored 1900 drama, The Dance of Death. “I’ve long had a fascination with Strindberg’s Miss Julie, but I didn’t know this play,” admits Perry. “But I’m nuts for it. And it is absolutely up the bitter, passionate, effed-up domestic territory that is the Steppenwolf ethos.”

For more information, visit steppenwolf.org.