Rock ‘n’ roll will never die. And rock ‘n’ roll never forgets.
So what happens to a Chicago rock ‘n’ roll theater guy, transplanted to California, who in the last year, suddenly graduates from respected craftsman admired by the cognoscenti, to multi-media star recognized by millions?
Like Steppenwolf’s Gary Sinise.
Sinese looks up now, toys with his water glass, waits for his veal milanese. He doesn’t act like a guy who’s made a double score in 1994’s biggest movie and its highest-rated TV film. He doesn’t act like a major 1995 Oscar candidate. Or someone Tom Hanks calls a “great actor.” Or someone who’s finally hit the top of his profession–just like his old Steppenwolf buddy John Malkovich did a decade ago.
He acts like, well, maybe like an old rocker from Highland Park.
“You know, when I heard ‘Satisfaction’ the other night,” he says in the wine-glass-clinking hubbub of an Italian restaurant in Pasadena near his home. “When they go into that song–the crowd goes wild.”
We’re talking about the venerable and mighty Rolling Stones, who, the night before, blew away another audience in the Pasadena Rose Bowl–sending 80,000 people into a waving, clapping, screaming, match-striking frenzy.
“These guys,” Sinise goes on, a tight-mouthed grin tearing open his blunt, still boyish Midwestern face, “have been on top of the game for such a long time. They know it backwards and forwards. And they still are gonna put on a great show. You’ve got the feeling that they’ve been through so much. Now, they’re glad to be alive! And still rockin’!”
Still rockin’ himself, Sinise–co-founder, actor-director and major artistic force of Chicago’s national dramatic pride, the Steppenwolf Theatre Company–is holding a hot hand these days. 1994 saw the ex-Highland Park kid costar in the year’s highest rated TV mini-series (as immune hero Stu Redman in the plague-world of Stephen King’s “The Stand”) and also in the 300 million dollar-grossing monster movie hit, “Forrest Gump” (playing the ferocious Lt. Dan to Tom Hanks’ ineffably sweet Gump).
Has he changed? Gone Hollywood? Maybe. But, peeking out of his composed, inwardly mischievous 40-year-old’s face, you easily glimpse the young turk of Steppenwolf’s early days. Even, perhaps, catch a hint of the early 70’s teenage rocker in a string of Highland Park-Glen Ellyn bands with names like The Dirty Brain, Uproot Confusion and Half Day Road.
He sounds like that younger guy, especially when ruminating on The Stones: “This 30-year-old song that they’ve played a zillion times still gets 80,000 people stompin’ and goin’! And I thought: These guys have played that song so much and they’re still makin’ it work. The crowd is still goin’ crazy. And I was a kid when I was playin’ it.
“It was just so, like . . . ” Sinise is shaking his head, the grin getting wider and wider in the pasta-chomping din. “I mean, I hope I never lose that kind of interest, that excitement. That enthusiasm.
“Hey: I wanna be rockin’ when I’m up there like them!”
Next up for Gary Sinise, in his current salad days, is the movie he’s shooting at Universal Studios, “Apollo 13,” a film of the dramatic, aborted 1970 lunar mission in which he costars again with Hanks, under Ron Howard’s direction. Vietnam vets in “Gump,” Hanks and Sinise are astronauts in “Apollo 13”: Sinise with the ground command as Ken Mattingly, Hanks sweating it out in space as James Lovell. (Recreated on a Universal sound stage, that perilous adventure, backstage, looks a bit like a museum exhibit; the actors–Hanks and Bill Paxton–do most of their work lying down.)
Hanks, as affable, likable and open offscreen as he is on–though, strangely, he seems taller in person–was lavish in his praise of his co-star. “There’s just no getting around the fact that Gary is really a great actor–and that he’s at the top of his game. You know, his part changed a lot just before we shot–but Gary would pound in the reality of what Lt. Dan was going through. It was always totally natural.”
Equally a booster was Howard, one-time child star of TV’s paradigm rural comedy, “The Andy Griffith Show”: a bright, generous guy whose adorable (and inevitably red-headed) family visits him on “Apollo’s” set. Gary, he said, is a “terrific guy. A terrific actor. Really wonderful to work with.”
Sinise, in turn, says of Hanks: “I love his performance (in “Gump’) I think he’s–great. He’s gone from being an actor who was always in your face–and I admired that–to someone who really works, internally.”
Both Sinise and Hanks are skeptical of the way “Gump” has been “co-opted”: proclaimed by political types of the Left and the Right as some ultimate retro-take on the Vietnam era and a blast at anti-war dissidents. Hanks says the movie’s only real social message is “the idea of taking personal responsibility,” and points out that the hallmarks of Forrest’s character are “his belief in God, his mother and that Jenny (the movie’s radical and rebel) can do no wrong.”
Says Sinise: “Some people just can’t release themselves from their preconceptions. I don’t think Bob (Zemeckis, the director) thought it was going to be a statement film: ‘I’m gonna make a statement about America–or abused children–or disabled veterans.’ Bob–and he’s a very, very strong director–just wanted to make an entertaining movie. The bottom line is that he felt something for Forrest Gump.
Gump is “a character who’s got no agenda,” Sinise says. “And we can kinda view things through the eyes of this completely innocent human being the way parents rediscover the world once they start having kids.”
Yet maybe, Sinise suggests, it’s better if critics do see things the moviemakers never intended “than write it off and not talk about it at all.” Anyway, he can’t kick. “Gump,” Hanks, Zemeckis (and perhaps Sinise) are legitimate Oscar favorites this year (and four of 13 nominees for work in the movie).
Millions of people saw Sinise’s crooked little smile, heard his anguished raps or quiet digs sometime in 1994–a far cry from the early Steppenwolf years, when he and his friends once played a performance of Hugh Wheeler’s “Look, We’ve Come Through” to an audience of four.
That Steppenwolf theater chronicle is one of the most fascinating Chicago arts stories of a generation or two–maybe worthy of a whole play, or movie, itself (“Cry Steppenwolf?”). Central to the tale is the amazing decade-plus stretch when Sinise and his comrades went from a threadbare 1974-76 beginning in the basement of a Highland Park church to numerous local, New York and national awards for landmark productions like “True West,” “Balm in Gilead,” “Orphans” and “The Grapes of Wrath”–and then saw a dozen or more members branch out into notable theater, movie and TV careers, with the company still thriving in Chicago.
A classic American story. Great days, modest beginnings. Rebels vs. the Establishment. “Let’s put on a show.”
But whatever the memory, Sinise is at the heart of it. Of all the Steppenwolf crew–including such eventually famous and slightly-less-famous actors as John Malkovich, Laurie Metcalf (of “Roseanne”), Jeff Perry, Terry Kinney, Joan Allen, John Mahoney, Glenne Headley, Alan Wilder and all the rest–Sinise, in a way, is Mr. Steppenwolf.
Steppenwolf starts with him. He formed the group when he was just out of Highland Park High School, later attracting a pack of Illinois State University student actors through his high school friend Jeff Perry (and Jeff’s college buddy, Terry Kinney, third of the original Steppenwolf triumvirate.) Sinise served as their artistic director, coaxed them into their conquest of New York and, as both actor and director, helped foster their ultra-physical, tear-along, rock-the-house style. “Gary,” says long time Tribune arts and drama critic Richard Christiansen, “is probably the most exciting director of physical action I’ve ever seen.”
Most people assume the name “Steppenwolf” comes from Hermann Hesse’s symbolic novel about Harry Horner and the magic theater. And it does. Someone from the troupe was reading that book when they were fishing for names. But though Sinise has probably heard an album or two by the L. A. band Steppenwolf, whose “Born to Be Wild” became America’s biker anthem, and who also copped from Hesse, he admits to never having read the lyrical book whose title signifies his career (“but I know it’s good. I know the name fits”).
Asked how he had the chutzpah to found a theater group right out of high school–much less stick with it for decades–he shrugs and says, “It just sort of felt natural–for me, anyway.” Asked how, as a high school graduate, he kept up with the college-trained ensemble, he bristles a little: “‘Cause I started it! They were coming into our thing. They all moved into Highland Park, my (and Jeff Perry’s) home town.”
A pause, brooding. “In the early days, you know, I was intimidated by some of our people–even though I was the founder. Intimidated because I didn’t go to college, didn’t feel as knowledgeable. But I had something else going.”
And, asked how he had the even bolder urge to push the group toward New York–where other Chicago groups, such as the Organic Theatre, had failed previously–he calls it, simply, a strategy to solidify the group: “The only way we could keep together was to keep stretching out. I really always believed we were a great theater company. I always knew we had great actors–who could go off and have film careers. It was important to try and keep challenging these people.”
John Malkovich, in a recent interview, agreed: “I took some classes in college, but they were pretty inconsequential. It was the work I did with my friends at Steppenwolf that proved to be the best education I could have.”
With that creative energy went a certain arrogance: a high self-regard that these twentysomething actors may have needed just to weather their tough days: “We were a real clique, you know,” recalls Sinise. “We hated everything. We didn’t like any other theater. We just had this very cocky defensive thing going on. Without saying exactly what we saw, we didn’t like anything.”
“To live outside the law,” Bob Dylan once sang, “You must be honest.”
And, in a way, Sinise projects a quality, on film and on stage, like the one Pauline Kael once ascribed to Paul Newman: “a traditional heroic frankness and sweetness.” But, since, like Newman (and Brando), Sinise comes from a post-Freudian age, his characters are rarely free from demons. Sometimes, as with the homicidal soldier he plays in “A Midnight Clear,” he’s devoured by them.
