The physical flair comes naturally. A semi-delinquent who was “on my way to getting thrown out of school” as a Highland Park sophomore, Sinise’s life turned dramatically around when he was cast by teacher-director Barbara Patterson in a high school production of “West Side Story.”
Three years later, after graduation, he formed “Steppenwolf” and directed and starred in its maiden production, “Grease.” In two years, 1976, he was joined by another “West Side Story” alumnus, his best friend Jeff Perry, together with Jeff’s Illinois State drama classmate Terry Kinney and a whole raft of Illinois State University actor alums who included Malkovich, Metcalf and Gary’s eventual wife, Moira Harris.
In 1980, Steppenwolf moved to Chicago, and, in 1982, with Malkovich and Sinise as the feuding brothers, a revival of Sam Shepard’s “True West,” vigorously directed by Sinise, Steppenwolf conquered Broadway.
It was the New York Times’ acerbic drama critic Frank Rich, among others, who (admiringly) dubbed Steppenwolf’s no-holds-barred style “rock ‘n’ roll theater.” And Rich was inspired by “True West”–where, at various points in the play, Malkovich chugged five beers, relieved himself in the sink, tapped Sinise’s eye glasses with a golf putter and fiercely bit Sinise’s hand to keep him away from some keys.
After “True West,” the rest is history. Malkovich and Sinise–especially Malkovich–were the toasts of Broadway (even though they were following in the footsteps of an unsuccessful production with Tommy Lee Jones and Peter Boyle.) Malkovich was off to Thailand to make his first film–“The Killing fields”–the day “West” closed. (“I was the other guy,” Sinise would sometimes remark sarcastically.)
Steppenwolf brought a half dozen more plays to New York, all praised, climaxing with their epic production, directed by Frank Galati, of John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” (with Sinise as Tom Joad.)
Distinguished Steppenwolf members began to appear in plum roles in TV and movies. The troupe as a whole dominated Chicago’s Joe Jefferson theater awards during the 1980’s. Sinise directed two movies: the Cannes Festival entry “Miles at Home” and a remake of “Of Mice and Men”–with himself and Malkovich as George and Lenny–that some (including me) think tops the classic 1939 Lewis Milestone version.
A terrific story. But–as the movie “Backbeat,” about the young Beatles’ Hamburg stints showed–some of the most interesting stuff may lie in the prehistory. Some of the rest we may never know.
“I grew up outside of Chicago in Highland Park. A lot of old homes. And there’s this very Midwestern feel to me, you know, in some ways. The places I grew up: old houses, big attics. Basements, two stories. Yard and things.”
Midwestern he is. Sinise’s voice has that nasal, easy-going, Heartland twang, caught behind a grin. He talks in brusque, stripped-down Midwestern sentences (Hemingway-speak or Brando-speak). He has a Midwesterner’s tendency to lay back and wait for the ball. Then: clonk! And he has the open-hearted, no-baloney, take-it-or-leave-it quality that sometimes makes Easterners uncomfortable (when it doesn’t charm them).
Gary’s dad was Robert L. Sinise, a film editor in industrial films, TV shows and movies who later worked for his son on “Of Mice and Men.” In Gary’s boyhood and teenage years, the family skipped around a lot, from Highland Park to Glen Ellyn and back again. One of those jumps inspired the name of Gary’s last band, the acid-rocking “Half Day Road”
The real Half Day Road is, he says, “a road (near) the border of Highland Park and Highwood. Italian. You got Highland Park, Highwood and then Fort Sheridan, which has now been closed down, Lake Bluff and Lake Forest. Highwood is this Italian community, right in between. Lot of Italians, really great restaurants. Small community, probably a lot bigger now. I was back there, a little over a year ago, for my high school reunion.”
If “Half Day Road” was his last band–not counting Steppenwolf’s occasional bizarre ventures into cabaret–his first band was born in the fourth grade when, enamored of The Beach Boys, Sinise formed a group called “The Beach Dwellers.” The Dwellers didn’t do much more than flail away on guitars (“we didn’t know how to play–we were just bangin’ on them!”) and lip-synch to “Help me Rhonda” or “I Get Around.” But when he could play, in the mid-’60s, his 6th and 7th grade years, the British invasion was under way, and Gary and his mates did “Yardbird songs, Kinks, ‘You Really Got Me,’ Dave Clark Five. Some Beatles.” And, of course, “Satisfaction.”
“We rehearsed where we could. Somebody’s garage. Somebody’s basement. I started with lead guitar. I was always the leader of the band.” Later, they got a better guitarist and Sinise switched to front man and singer. “I was always the guy who organized the gigs, tried to pull the band together. Put the song list together, made the phone calls to the high schools. I was always kind of the business mind.”
Came the 1970s and Half Day Road was into acid rock, heavy blues, Grand Funk, Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, The Doors, the Allman Brothers, “Purple Haze,” “Foxy Lady,” “Hey Joe,” “Communication Breakdown,” “Whole Lotta Love” (“Remember that Who album, ‘Live at Leeds?’ We played that whole record, that whole side.”) Working high schools, socials, church functions and carnivals–including “Highwood Days”–they also dipped into the outlaw style of the period.
So when Gary and some friends tried out for Barbara Patterson’s “West Side Story” in his sophomore year at Highland Park High School, he was doing it as a goof: maybe to scare hell out of the wimp drama students acting like gangbangers. Ms. Patterson fouled him up by casting him. His life–just like in the movies–suddenly changed.
“I played a Shark, one of the Sharks. Pepe. Pepe the Shark. And that was the real turning point.”
Sinise got the bug right away. “It came at the right time in my life. I’d always liked performing. In the bands, I used to imitate rock stars. Hendrix. Daltrey. (Grand Funk’s) Mark Farner.
“But, when I got in the show, I was really having a rough time in school. Despite the band, I was having a hard time makin’ friends. I wasn’t doing well.”
Surprisingly since Steppenwolf was a theater company with unusually fine literary judgment, Sinise was barely interested in reading as a kid. “Not at all–or academics in any way. I really just couldn’t have cared less about it. I was always lookin’ out the window.
“My mother kept all my report cards from kindergarten through high school. It was horrifying. ‘Cause the grades never changed–except when I got into the theater program. Then I started getting A’s–because I’d really found this thing that I loved. So I wanted to take all the technical classes. And Shakespeare. I wanted to know all about it.”
Patterson’s choice of plays for her students–in plays and classes–was pretty daring. By the time he graduated, a half semester after his classmates, Sinise had played the lead in Moliere’s “Tartuffe,” Ionesco’s “The Bald Soprano,” Bernard Shaw’s “The Devil’s Disciple,” Bertolt Brecht’s “The Caucasian Chalk Circle,” Dylan Thomas’ “Under Milk Wood,” Lillian Hellman’s “The Little Foxes” and Edward Albee’s “Everything in the Garden.” He’d spewed Jimmy Porter’s furious invective in John Osborne’s “Look Back in Anger,” alternated the parts of Cyrano and Christian in “Cyrano de Bergerac” with Jeff Perry. He was hooked and energized–which may be a testament to the virtues of expanding, rather than ignoring, arts programs in secondary schools.
“She was very good, my teacher,” says Sinise. “Extremely good. Barbara Patterson. She taught there for 25 years. She’s retired, but she lives up in Minnesota. And she’s acting. I talk to her a couple times a year and she’s always busy with two or three plays. She comes from a theater family. Trunk baby. Born in the theater world. It’s in her blood.
“She taught me things I really applied. She’s the one who encouraged that whole kind of do-it-yourself attitude toward theater. And the importance of the actor: You can’t have a piece of living theater without them.
“You don’t need a script. You don’t need a stage. You don’t need lights. You don’t need costumes or sets. She encouraged us to find a space and make some theater. She said: ‘I don’t care where it is. It could be anywhere. The parking lot. The hallway. Whatever you want to do.’ “
Instead he found a church basement. Steppenwolf’s first production of “Grease” may have been . . . greasy? (Terry Kinney, brought to a performance by Jeff Perry, took one look at Gary’s finger-snapping lead, Danny, and almost decided not to join.) But their ambition and scope grew, especially in the first on-stage union of the Steppenwolfers–Sinise, Perry and Kinney–in Tom Stoppard’s virtuoso piece “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.”
“The scenario goes like this: Terry and Jeff went back to college. But the three of us made a decision that, when they got out, we were really going to form a company . . .
“Jeff left school early and lived in Minneapolis for a while. I did a couple more plays with Steppenwolf (including Paul Zindel’s ‘And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little’) and started playing in a band, just waitin’ for Terry to get out of school. He was going to graduate in June, ’76. So, about January of ’76 we started holding meetings at I.S.U. Jeff, Terry and I organized them–with people Jeff and Terry knew that were going to school.”
Those actors were mostly small-towners, suburbanites. And, of course, friends. “Laurie Metcalf was, at that time, living with Terry. Alan Wilder is from Mt. Prospect. Malkovich is from Benton (a coal-mining town, where his dad published an environmentalist journal!). Moira is from Pontiac. Laurie Metcalf is from Edwardsville.”
“We didn’t have any money. I think Jeff put in a thousand bucks or something like that. We started with a lot of people and kind of narrowed it down to the three of us and six others: Malkovich, Moira Harris, Laurie Metcalf, Al Wilder, H. E. Bacchus and Nancy Evans.” The last two left the company early on.
Steppenwolf’s first season consisted of four one-acts–including the memorable production of Israel Horovitz’ “The Indian Wants the Bronx,” directed by Malkovich, with Sinise and Kinney as two Bronx thugs who terrorize Bacchus: a production that the Tribune’s Christiansen recalls as the one play that actually made him frightened for his life (“when they finished with the Indian, you were pretty sure they were going to start in on you”).
Says Sinise: “We were starting to draw audiences. (But not) all the time. There were nights when nobody would show up. And so we’d just entertain each other. We’d get the beer and pizza and turn up the music and go crazy.
“We had a thing we’d call ‘Random Night.’ We always wanted to make a show out of it, actually. It was just everybody doing every crazy thing they could think of: Improvs.
“Jeff and I used to do a thing called ‘Duelling Tartuffes.’ You know that British vocal thing (where the actors) use their whole range. So Jeff and I would pretend we were British actors and duel each other with vocal inflections. John used to sing ‘Blinded by the Light’ at the top of his lungs and dance.”
(No record of “Random night” exists, but–film festivals please note-there is an intriguing-sounding 16-mm comedy short called “The Audition,” written and directed in 1978 by Sinise, which contains the first film performances of all the Steppenwolf stars. It’s the saga of a pompous New York director (Kinney) arriving in a small Southern Illinois town to stage the community theater’s production of “Hamlet” and being confronted with auditions that, according to Sinise, “just get worse and worse and worse.” Gary owns the only copy and plays it at theater parties.)
If Steppenwolf had rock ‘n’ roll antecedents, it has even more from the movies of the late ’60’s and ’70’s: a sometimes underestimated Golden Age of American cinema. Scorsese. Coppola. Cassavetes. Jack Nicholson and his insinuating smile and temper tantrums. Robert De Niro and “You talkin to me?” Gena Rowlands and “Woman Under the Influence.” “Taxi Driver.” “Mean Streets.” “The Godfather.” “The Last Detail.” “Scarecrow.” “Dog Day Afternoon.”
“There’s a lot more movies that influenced me than theater,” Sinise says. “It was only after I got into acting that I started watching actors.”
And, if Steppenwolf’s style seemed far more cinematic than most other theater groups of the time, part of it had to do with its emphasis on acting–which to some degree was forced on them by the composition of the group and their stage. Of the Chicago theater companies at the time, David Mamet’s St. Nicholas Players was obviously a writer’s theater and Stuart Gordan’s Organic Theater more a director’s showcase. Steppenwolf was for the actors. “We had no choice,” Sinese says. “That’s what our focus was: on the acting.
“We had a theater that was very small (88 seats). So the range that we could play in was much greater. The smaller the theater, the quieter you can get–which expands your range. In a very big theater, you can only get so quiet; you have to reach the audience.
