Steppenwolf Theatre Company

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Steppenwolf Theatre Company

Steppenwolf Theatre Company is a Tony Award

Tony Award

The Antoinette Perry Awards for Excellence in Theatre, more commonly known as the Tony Awards, recognize achievement in live United States theatre and are presented by the American Theatre Wing and The Broadway League at an annual ceremony in New York City....
-winning Chicago theatre

Chicago theatre

Chicago theatre refers not only to theatre performed in Chicago, Illinois but also to the movement in that town that saw a number of small, meagerly-funded companies grow to institutions of national and international significance....
company founded in 1974 by Gary Sinise

Gary Sinise

Gary Alan Sinise is an United States actor and film director. During his career, Sinise has won an Emmy Award and a Golden Globe Award and was nominated for Palme d'Or and an Academy Award....
, Terry Kinney

Terry Kinney

Terry Kinney is an American actor and theatre director, and is a founding member of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company with Gary Sinise and Jeff Perry ....
and Jeff Perry in the basement of a church in Highland Park, Illinois

Highland Park, Illinois

Highland Park is a city in the Moraine Township, Lake County, Illinois of Lake County, Illinois, Illinois, United States. The population was 31,365 at the 2000 census....
. Its name comes from the Hermann Hesse

Hermann Hesse

Hermann Hesse was a German-Switzerland poet, novelist, and painter. In 1946, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. His best-known works include Steppenwolf , Siddhartha , and The Glass Bead Game which explore an individual's search for spirituality outside society....
novel

Steppenwolf (novel)

Steppenwolf is the tenth novel by Germany-Switzerland author Hermann Hesse. Originally published in Germany in 1927, it was first translated into English in 1929....
. Martha Lavey, long-time ensemble member, has been artistic director since 1997 and David Hawkanson has been executive director since 2003.

In 1980, the theater company moved into a 134-seat theater at the Jane Addams Hull House Center

Hull House

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Encyclopedia

Steppenwolf Theatre Company is a Tony Award

Tony Award

Chicago theatre

Gary Sinise

Terry Kinney

Highland Park, Illinois

Hermann Hesse

Steppenwolf (novel)

Hull House

Hull House was co-founded in 1889, in Chicago, Illinois, by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr and is located in the Near West Side, Chicago Community areas of Chicago of Chicago in Cook County, Illinois, Illinois....
on Broadway Avenue in Chicago proper. Two years later, the company moved to a 211-seat facility at 2851 N. Halsted Street, which was their home until 1991, when they completed construction on and moved into their current theater complex at 1650 N. Halsted Street. With its current subscription base of just under 20,000, the company has helped make Chicago a leading city in the performing arts.

In its inaugural season, the company presented Paul Zindel

Paul Zindel

Paul Zindel was an American playwright, author, and educator....
's And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little
And Miss Reardon Drinks A Little

And Miss Reardon Drinks A Little is an United States play written by Paul Zindel and published by Dramatists Play Services.The story surrounds three sisters: Catherine, an alcoholic; Anna, a hypochondriac and Ceil, an attention-starved socialite....
, Grease
Grease (musical)

Grease is a musical theater by Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey about the way rock and roll changed American sexuality and culture during the pivotal moment when America took its first tentative steps out of the conformity and social/sexual conservatism of the 1950s and toward the individualism and sexual revolution of the 1960s....
, Tom Stoppard

Tom Stoppard

Sir Tom Stoppard Order of Merit , Order of the British Empire, FRSL is a British screenwriter and playwright. He has written plays such as The Coast of Utopia, Arcadia , Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, and Rock 'n' Roll ....
's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams was an American playwright who received many of the top theatrical awards. He moved to New Orleans in 1939 and changed his name to "Tennessee", the state of his father's birth....
' The Glass Menagerie
The Glass Menagerie

The Glass Menagerie is a play by Tennessee Williams that was originally written as a screenplay for MGM, to whom Williams was contracted . The play premiered in Chicago in 1944, and in 1945 won the prestigious New York Drama Critics Circle Award....
.

In 1982, Sam Shepard

Sam Shepard

Samuel Shepard Rogers III is an American playwright, and actor, director of stage and film. He is author of several books of short stories, essays, and memoirs, and received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1979 for his play, Buried Child....
's True West
True West (play)

True West is a play by United States playwright Sam Shepard. Like most of his works it is inspired by myths of American life and popular culture....
, starring Sinise and John Malkovich

John Malkovich

'John Gavin Malkovich' is an Emmy Award-winning, two-time Academy Award-nominated United States actor, film producer and film director. Over the last 25 years, Malkovich has appeared in more than 70 motion pictures, including Dangerous Liaisons, In the Line of Fire, Con Air, The Man in the Iron Mask , Rounders , Changelin...
, was the first of many Steppenwolf productions to travel to New York City

New York City

The City of New York is the List of United States cities by population in the United States, while the New York metropolitan area ranks among the List of urban areas by population....
. In 1994, the company made its Los Angeles

Los Ángeles

Los ?ngeles is the Capital of the Biob?o Province, in the municipality of the same name, in Regions of Chile VIII , in the center-south of Chile....
debut with Steve Martin

Steve Martin

Stephen Glenn "Steve" Martin is an Emmy Award-winning United States actor, comedian, writer, playwright, Film producer, musician, and composer....
's first play, Picasso at the Lapin Agile
Picasso at the Lapin Agile

Picasso at the Lapin Agile is a play written by Steve Martin in 1993. It features the characters of Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso, who meet at a bar called the Lapin Agile in Montmartre, Paris....
.

Following the 19 day IATSE stage hand strike in December 2007, Steppenwolf opened its first new play written and directed by ensemble members at the Imperial Theatre on Broadway. Tracy Letts' August: Osage County was hailed by the New York Times as "... flat out, no asterisks and without qualifications the most exciting new American play Broadway has seen in years." Directed by ensemble member Anna D. Shapiro and featuring seven ensemble members, August: Osage County was number one in Time's
Time (magazine)

Time is a weekly United States newsmagazine, similar to Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report. A European edition is published from London....
Top Ten Theatre Performances of 2007. Tracy Letts' play went on to win the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Drama. On May 13, 2008, after moving from New York's Imperial Theatre next door to The Musicbox Theatre for an open-ended run, August: Osage County garnered five Tony Awards including Best Play of 2007, Best Director (Anna D. Shapiro), Best Leading Actress (Deanna Dunagan), Best Featured Actress (Rondi Reed), and Best Scenic Design (Todd Rosenthal). In November 2008 the play opened at the Royal National Theatre in London for a soaringly successful 10 week run with most of the original cast.

Through its New Plays Initiative, the company maintains ongoing relationships with writers of international prominence and supports the work of aspiring and mid-career playwright

Playwright

A playwright, also known as a dramatist, is a person who writes dramatic literature or drama. These works may be written specifically to be performed by actors or they may be closet dramas or literary works written using dramatic forms but not meant for performance....
s. In 1988, Steppenwolf presented the world premiere of The Grapes of Wrath
The Grapes of Wrath (play)

The Grapes of Wrath is a 1988 play adapted by Frank Galati from the classic John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath, with incidental music by Michael Smith ....
, based on the John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck

John Ernst Steinbeck III was an American literature. He wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath, published in 1939 and the novella Of Mice and Men, published in 1937....
novel, which eventually went on to win the Tony Award

Tony Award

Austin Pendleton

Austin Pendleton is an American film, television, and theatre actor, a playwright, and a theatre director and instructor....
's Orson's Shadow
Orson's Shadow

Orson's Shadow is a play by Austin Pendleton. The play received a Lucille Lortel Award nomination for Outstanding Play and won the Drama League Award for Distinguished Performance....
, which subsequently was staged off-Broadway

Off-Broadway

Off Broadway theater is an umbrella term for a defined set of Play , musical theater or revues performed in New York City. Originally referring to the location of a venue and its productions on a street intersecting Broadway in Manhattan's Theatre District, New York, the hub of the theater industry in the United States, the term later becam...
and by regional theatres throughout the country. Steppenwolf operates several internship programs for students and young professionals.

Steppenwolf helped to launch the careers of a number of well-known American actors, including Gary Sinise

Gary Sinise

John Malkovich

Joan Allen

Joan Allen is an American actress.Allen worked in theatre, television and film during her early career, and achieved recognition for her Broadway theatre debut in Burn This, winning a Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play in 1989....
, John Mahoney

John Mahoney

John Mahoney is a SAGA- and Tony Award-winning and Emmy Award and Golden Globe Award-nominated English American actor, best known for playing Martin Crane, the retired police officer father of Kelsey Grammer's Dr....
, Martha Plimpton

Martha Plimpton

Martha Campbell Plimpton is an Emmy Award-nominated United States actress....
, Francis Guinan

Francis Guinan

Francis V. Guinan, Jr. is an United States television and Theatre actor who is perhaps best known for his role as Edgar Teller the patriarch in the short-lived NBC series Eerie, Indiana....
, Glenne Headly

Glenne Headly

Glenne Aimee Headly is an United States actor of film, Theatre and television....
, Gary Cole

Gary Cole

'Gary Michael Cole' is an United States actor. He is known for numerous roles, including the television program Entourage , Fatal Vision, The West Wing, Desperate Housewives, Midnight Caller, Kim Possible, Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law, Wanted and Crusade , and the films The Brady Bunch Movie, Offic...
, Kathryn Erbe

Kathryn Erbe

Kathryn Erbe is an United States Actor, known for her role as Alexandra Eames on Law & Order: Criminal Intent, a spin-off of Law & Order....
, and Laurie Metcalf

Laurie Metcalf

Lauren Ophelia "Laurie" Metcalf is an United States three-time Emmy Award-winning actress. She is widely known for her performance as "Jackie Harris" on Roseanne ....
.

Among its many honors are the Tony Award for Regional Theatre Excellence (1985) and the National Medal of Arts (1998). The company currently is in its thirty-second season.

Steppenwolf Theatre Company

See also

External links