Imagine this: You’re approaching middle age or you’re already well into it. And you’re still hanging out with the kids you met in college.
Like many other boomers, you’re successful and now you often travel far afield from your home base. But you keep coming back, rekindling old friendships, renewing old clashes, doing work not unlike the kind that brought you together in college.
And all so you can continue to be part of the most famous resident acting ensemble in the country.
“Family doesn’t even begin to describe it,” says Jeff Perry, a founding member of Steppenwolf Theatre. “When it comes to change-any kind of change-we’ve been together so long, we’re retarded.”
John Malkovich tells the story of one show in the early ’80s where everybody got nude on stage and remained so backstage, even while talking on the pay phone, arguing out deals with their agents. Friends who get naked together stay together seems to be the message. Then there was the ensemble meeting around the same time when Terry Kinney got so mad he threw a chair across the room.
“It’s a family all right, one big dysfunctional family,” says a member. “Of course, we all love each other very much.”
As the group approaches its 20th season, as its founding members near their own midlife years, Steppenwolf is caught up in a tumultuous identity crisis. Randall Arney recently resigned as artistic director after eight years. His replacement, Martha Lavey, has been an ensemble member officially only since 1993, though her association goes back nearly 15 years. A few weeks after Arney’s resignation, longtime managing director Steve Eich resigned as well.
But even more telling than this personnel shift-which took place with a bit of acrimony on Arney’s part-is another shifting tide in the mood of this inscrutable 30-member troupe, a shift that signals a willingness to confront bold changes in the way it operates. Nobody can be sure yet where it will all lead, but Steppenwolf is now poised to confront internally what many have regarded as a problem for a long time: People whose success means spending their lives in New York and Hollywood are hard pressed to run an operation based in Chicago, no matter how importantly they view it.
“I think our charge is to figure out how the ensemble can continue to be a resource to the theater but not the final resonance of every bit of the theater’s identity,” says Lavey, hired as acting artistic director for an indefinite period.
In a classic Steppenwolf contradiction, Lavey says the new mission is twofold: To avoid becoming “institutionalized” but to recognize at the same time that the founding actors won’t be around forever.
A trio of original members-Kinney, Perry and Gary Sinise-are now on an executive advisory board empowered to call the shots. They hired Lavey-“and they can come in and fire me tomorrow,” she notes wryly-and they hope to involve themselves more directly in the theater’s productions.
There’s something of an admission in all of this. “We realized we can do better,” she says, in terms of onstage work. Certainly Steppenwolf can boast many successes over the last decade or so, from “The Grapes of Wrath,” which won the Tony Award for best play, through “The Song of Jacob Zulu,” “The Rise and Fall of Little Voice” and “My Thing of Love,” all of which wound up on Broadway. Other kinds of acclaim came for Tony Kushner’s “Slavs,” for instance, and actor Jim True’s directorial debut, “Ghost in the Machine.”
But many observers have claimed for several seasons that Steppenwolf productions have lost their luster. These critics-who include some ensemble members-often cite subscriber disdain for “The Road to Nirvana,” Arthur Kopit’s scatological Hollywood send-up, as a low point.
Even more, faithful followers began to mourn something of a loss of the energy of Highland Park and early Chicago-the bouncing-off-the-walls, so-called rock ‘n’ roll food-fighting that characterized early productions like “The Indian Loves the Bronx,” “Balm in Gilead,” “True West” and “Coyote Ugly.” The young actors of those casts acted like no one had acted before them-front-row audience members sometimes feared they might get hit by mistake.
The real problem might be that the idea of an ensemble is hard to pass on to succeeding generations. Steppenwolf Theatre is unique in so many ways it’s easy to ignore the most obvious, that theirs is a troupe based on the primacy of the actor.
Most institutional theaters in America, Chicago’s Goodman among them, are defined by an artistic director and maybe a few associates: The Goodman’s Robert Falls and the New York Shakespeare Festival’s George C. Wolfe come to mind. Though actors may repeat, they’re officially hired one production at a time. These directors provide the theater’s identity, and after they leave, after 10 years or so, a new identity emerges.
Steppenwolf, instead, has stuck with its beginnings as a disparate association of actors, all able to take their turn as directors and set the world on fire when they do, Malkovich’s “Balm in Gilead” (1980) and Sinise’s “Orphans” (1985) being two notable examples.
Once they started succeeding in New York and Hollywood, the logical thing was to shut down and move on; instead, they built a multimillion-dollar theater.
“There was never any real agreement about how to run the place, ever,” says Kinney. “The only agreement, really, took place on stage, a kind of magical charge between us as actors.”
If anything, Arney’s amiable nature probably kept the operation working longer than it might have without him. For eight years, he stitched together seasons that usually involved at least one founding participant per production. Ironically, his system worked better this season than in preceding years. Steppenwolf’s shows have enjoyed solid support all season, right down to the current hit, “Nomathemba.”
But the current administrative changes began several years ago. As early as 1991 and “The Grapes of Wrath”-which reunited Perry, Sinise and Kinney onstage for the first time in years-members began to question how long the whole thing could continue.
“We were personally revitalized by it, and we knew our theater was on the brink of change, that we had gone from storefront to institution,” Perry says.
The Brothers Three, as Lavey jokingly calls her advisers, began discussions then about formalizing their role. Arney and Eich put them off for a few years, while considering other measures that might help solve the problem of trying to run a theater whose defining individuals were far-flung but still consulted by long distance on all major decisions.
For a time, Arney assumed the tighter role of a more traditional artistic director. Even now, the Brothers admit Arney’s task throughout these recent years has been a thankless one. “We’d whine at meetings that we wanted more input, and then we wouldn’t be available,” Perry admits.
Perhaps for that reason, Arney himself began to tire of the job, and after staging Steve Martin’s “Picasso at the Lapin Agile” both here and in Los Angeles (and, possibly soon, New York), he began to itch for other opportunities. Meantime, a prior agreement among Arney and the trio to have a new plan in place fell apart by the end of last year. The Brothers Three decided it was time to go before Steppenwolf’s board of directors and ask for executive powers-without telling Arney.
Arney resented that and wrote a complaint letter to fellow members that eventually became public. He also resigned. Now he says he’s mollified and that the letter was only one of a thousand he wrote during his tenure. “It was meant to be strictly internal,” he says.
The three others, for their part, rush to call him gracious and admit they handled things poorly. “Nobody ever said, `Randy, you should go,’ ” says Perry. “The process definitely got screwed up.”
“When the smoke cleared Randy had resigned,” Kinney notes. “I don’t sense any hard feelings now, though. He was supportive when we all got together to meet when `Nomathemba’ opened.”
Arney is certainly philosophical. “You know, when I took over in 1987, the press were already saying our heyday was over. I knew the only way to attract our artists back was to give them a home like this, and more than anything I’m proud of that. I also oversaw the addition of nine new members, including Martha (Lavey), Tim Hopper and Jim True.”
Now it’s someone else’s turn. Steppenwolf’s founding group started out in the mid-’70s in a Highland Park basement; Arney was a little younger than the founders and didn’t finish school and come on board until 1980, as an actor in the company’s landmark “Balm in Gilead.” It was staged at the Jane Addams Center on North Broadway, Steppenwolf’s home before what Arney calls the “converted dairy” at 2851 N. Halsted St. (The new theater, at 1650 N. Halsted, opened in 1991.)
“What you’ve got, basically, are three generations,” says Bruce Sagan, board chairman when the current theater opened and now the board member who will assume many of Eich’s duties until a replacement is named.
“The first generation started to meet with success elsewhere in the early ’80s, when Gary and John and Laurie (Metcalf) began to leave. Randy and the others were able to reinvent the ensemble for the next 10 years or so.
“Now a lot of those newcomers are leaving, too,” Sagan adds. “How do you reinvent the ensemble a second time? To some extent, Martha represents the second generation. She can provide some continuity as we build yet a third.”
Everyone agrees there are no easy answers, but at last Steppenwolf seems to be ready to admit it can’t go on forever as it was in the Highland Park days. “We’ve spent the past 10 years with one foot in yesterday and one in the future,” says Perry. “Suddenly the place seemed to be crying out for change.”
In something of a contradiction of the anti-institutional vow, Lavey hopes to hire a dramaturge (a kind of script editor, often a playwright) and a literary manager to enable the troupe to develop more continuing relationships with playwrights and performers, similar to Eric Simonson’s work with Ladysmith Black Mambazo in “The Song of Jacob Zulu” and now “Nomathemba.”
There also are plans to increase the number of offerings in the upstairs Studio Theatre to encourage experimentation and open the doors to new voices and faces.
All of that means more money. Steppenwolf’s staff has remained surprisingly small. Sagan says the additional personnel will amount to $250,000 or so more than the annual $4.5 million budget; more expensive will be the plans to produce more upstairs.
“Is it all possible? Over time, yes,” he says.
Meanwhile, the Brothers Three will specialize in separate areas. Perry is interested in playwrights; Kinney is interested in the physical space and design work (he directed last fall’s stunningly staged “A Clockwork Orange”); Sinise is expected to check in as all-around program planner.
“It’s a transitional phase,” admits Kinney, “and it may be awkward and bumpy for a time. But if we don’t plant these seeds, we may not be around in the next decade.”
Of all the scenarios, that’s the least likely. If nothing else, Steppenwolf has an uncanny talent for survival.
“The reason we did this to begin with was to be arbiters of our own destiny,” Kinney says.
“For 10 years, all we knew was each other. Maybe it was incestuous, but it made us need this place in a perpetual way.”
“It’s all weird and bizarre when you get right down to it,” says Arney. “I mean, almost all of us are from some small town in Downstate Illinois, and we first met years ago at Illinois State University, in Normal, Illinois, of all places. From there we launched this amazing theater company, home to some of the most acclaimed actors of our time.
“How can you stay mad? The whole story leaves me speechless.”
