by Gary Sinise
During rehearsals, we got ready to print the programs and I said, “Okay, we need to call this outfit something.” We threw out all kinds of names. Rick was reading a Hermann Hesse novel called Steppenwolf, and while everyone was making suggestions he didn’t say anything. He just held up his novel, and pointed to it, and I said, “Great, Rick! Let’s put that on the program.” I hadn’t read it, but it sounded good. Steppenwolf Theatre Company. We needed to print the programs quickly, so Steppenwolf it was. I felt so hopeful about what we were doing, excited to think we were creating a company. We pooled a few bucks together to buy a rubber stamp with “Steppenwolf” inscribed on it and stamped our name everywhere we could.
Stamp. Steppenwolf.
Stamp. Steppenwolf.
Stamp. Steppenwolf.
What none of us grasped yet was the magnitude of the moment when Steppenwolf was named. What we couldn’t see was a future bigger than any of us could imagine, something that would last for decades and is still going strong today—the Steppenwolf Theatre Company of Chicago.
Our first play opened in March 1974. We were simply an impassioned group of teenage actors doing plays under our own steam. How could we possibly see that our actions would eventually result in the creation of one of the most prominent theater companies not just in America, but in the world? Over the years Steppenwolf would open shows in London, Australia, Ireland, and on Broadway, would win Tony Awards, and eventually would build its own multimillion-dollar state-of-the-art theater on the North Side of Chicago. Steppenwolf would help launch the careers of many prominent actors, including John Malkovich, Joan Allen, John Mahoney, Laurie Metcalf, Tom Irwin, Gary Cole, Glenne Headly, and many more. The company would be a place where we would work hard to entertain, inform, and inspire—and it eventually would become an internationally recognized Chicago institution. But we didn’t know any of that then.
At first, Steppenwolf was completely grassroots. After our very first play was over, Rick, Leslie, and I sort of collectively shrugged and said, “Okay, let’s do another.” Grease became our second play because we’d all seen it before, and it was so much fun—and I thought I could direct it. We used the gym at one of my old elementary schools, Indian Trail, and did five performances of Grease over a weekend. We were on our way.
On opening night of Grease, we were packed. A line of people even stood out the door. In fact, we were so packed the fire marshal showed up. He walked around the edge of the crowd during the show shaking his head, muttering to himself. Fortunately, he didn’t stop our play, but afterward he gave me a stern lecture about seating capacities.
In the beginning we didn’t charge for tickets. We just wanted to do plays. Still, it costs money to put on any play, so we needed to figure out something. During the day I worked for my dad downtown at his film-editing business, putting cassettes together, so I took $1,000 of my own money and used it toward building sets and lights and putting a band together so we had music. I wanted to get some of my money back, so I had the grand idea of putting a shoebox in the lobby with “Donations” scribbled on the side, hoping folks would toss in some bucks. Very little money landed in the shoebox the first night. So the second night of Grease I came up with a better idea.
At the start of intermission, I came out onstage and made a shameless plug. I said, “Hey, everybody, we had to spend our own money so the show could go on—please consider making a donation. If you do, we’ll even give you the second act tonight.” Everybody laughed and started pulling money out of their wallets. In the show, we used hubcaps as pretend steering wheels, so our ushers—girls dressed in poodle skirts with their hair in ponytails—passed around the hubcaps like we were at church. People threw in lots of money, and we ended up with $1,500. Not only did I get my money back, but now we had an additional $500 to produce our next play. Grease ran in April and went so well that we recast certain parts and put it on again in May.
Before the show closed, I called up Jeff Perry, my good buddy at Illinois State, and told him to come see it on the weekend. He brought his new pal, Terry Kinney. I liked Terry right away and soon discovered that he was smart and an incredible actor. I asked them both to be in our next show, the existentialist tragicomedy Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. So, in June of 1974, when Jeff and Terry were done with the school year, they returned, and we headed back to the Unitarian church to put on the play. Our third Steppenwolf production proved another hit in the community.
We had done really well with our first three plays, but as the summer was coming to a close, it was clear that most of the kids in the company were going off to college and things were going to break up. One night after Rosencrantz, Jeff and Terry and I sat on a bench outside the church, talking about the future. None of us knew exactly where we were headed or how to get there. But we all knew we wanted to do something more with theater and that it would be great to keep Steppenwolf going. That night, we made a pact that when Jeff and Terry graduated from college in 1976, we would pump our energy into this theater company and make a bigger go of it. In the meantime, I had the rubber stamp, and I would use it.
Jeff and Terry returned to college. In the fall of 1974, a few of us tried one more play. In the Highland Park cafeteria, we put on Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, with Barbara Patterson playing the lead role of Amanda, me playing her son, Tom, and Rick Argosh directing. I still have the little paper program from the production. This was the fourth Steppenwolf show. In 1975, we figured out how to incorporate as an official nonprofit, and that summer we put on the final production with this original group, the Pulitzer-winning drama The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds. Barbara Patterson directed, and I wrote the music for it, although I didn’t act in the play.
All the while I worked for my dad, as well as played in a band for the Free Street Theater, a group of actors who performed basically anywhere—stages, street corners, parking lots. They had a mobile trailer they towed around that would fold out into a stage, where they’d perform. Meanwhile, I moved into a beat-up old house with four buddies. The rent was $275 per month, and one of the guys, Ira, was an artist who blew glass and sculpted. Ira lived in our basement and had a day job working for the city in the sewers. He once found two baby raccoons in the sewers and brought them home to live with us. My band rehearsed in the basement where Ira and the raccoons lived. As the raccoons grew bigger, they started chewing on cords, guitar straps, whatever, so we gave Ira an ultimatum: either the raccoons or you, buddy. The raccoons went.
In 1975, Jeff quit college and moved up to Minneapolis to do theater there, but before long he reenrolled at ISU. Then, shortly after, his father was diagnosed with cancer, so Jeff quit school again to move back home to Highland Park to be with him in his final days. Later that same year, Jeff, Terry, and I decided it was time to make good on that pact, and we started discussing what we wanted to do. First item on the agenda: assembling a larger company. We needed more actors. The three of us loved the films of Martin Scorsese, John Cassavetes, and Elia Kazan, and we wanted to create theater like the work of those directors. So we needed brilliant actors. Hard-driving actors. Actors who would give it all on the stage. And perhaps most important, actors who would work for free.
In January 1976, Jeff, Terry, and I began meeting with other students in the theater department at Illinois State to start forming our new ensemble. Jeff and I traveled down to ISU from Highland Park in my 1969 Camaro convertible. Once, on the way home, I forgot to put oil in the car, the engine blew up, and smoke billowed everywhere. Dead. My dad had to come get us on the South Side, not a great neighborhood for two young kids to fry the engine and get stranded in. But we got the car repaired, and before long we were headed back to ISU. The meetings went on for weeks, from January through April. This new project was so important to us. All our sessions were free-form, with lots of talking and debating and passion and arguing and hanging out—all in our quest to determine who would join us. Eventually, we ended up with a total of nin
e people for our new Steppenwolf, and today these nine are sometimes referred to as the original members, even though the name Steppenwolf had already been in use since 1974. The nine original members were John Malkovich, Moira Harris, Nancy Evans, H. E. Baccus, Laurie Metcalf, Al Wilder, and the three founders—Terry Kinney, Jeff Perry, and me.
My pals were all highly educated about theater and playwrights and acting techniques, and I didn’t know much about any of that stuff. Some days, I felt intimidated by my friends, but I made up for it by taking action and working hard.
Right away, we made plans for a full summer season. I went to the Highland Park Chamber of Commerce, informed them we’d started a theater company, and asked for their ideas about a space in town we could use. They were excited about the idea of young people doing something positive in the community, and the head of the Chamber’s youth commission mentioned a basement over at the Immaculate Conception Catholic School. The school had recently closed, and a big open space in the basement, once a teen center, now stood vacant. I talked to the priest, explained what we were doing, and he agreed to rent us the basement for the exorbitant price of $1 per year as a tax write-off for the parish. Thankfully, the priest never saw any of our plays, because we ended up doing some pretty wild stuff. He might have kicked us out if he knew what was really happening in the basement.
In June of 1976, everyone from ISU moved up to Highland Park, and we began building our theater. We had a small stage on the cement floor of the basement and built risers with seating on three sides. Someone’s dad knew about a downtown building that had caught fire. The theater-style seating inside had survived, so we got eighty-eight seats for free and put them into our space. On half a shoestring budget, we brought in some real theater lights, began building a few small sets—mostly just a few pieces of furniture bought on the cheap from thrift stores or borrowed from Jeff or my parents’ hand-me-downs—and started rehearsing four one-act plays: The Indian Wants the Bronx, The Lesson, The Lover, and Birdbath. We put up posters all over town using the Steppenwolf stamp; we stood on street corners and handed out flyers; we tried to get free publicity in the newspaper—we did everything we could think of to inform the public there was a new theater opening in town.
We put together a governing board of grown-ups who wanted to support local kids. One board member had an old fire truck. We painted a big sign advertising Steppenwolf and put it on the side of the fire truck. A bunch of us rode on the truck—waving, shouting, screaming, howling like sirens—in Highland Park’s Fourth of July parade. We even wore whiteface, like a bunch of mimes. Anything to get some attention for what we were doing. Our opening was set for July 21, 1976.
During this time, we were all working summer day jobs to support ourselves. Jeff made egg rolls in a fast-food restaurant. Terry sold men’s suits. Malkovich drove a bus for a children’s summer camp, and I often wondered how those children turned out. I had a few different jobs in those early days. One was unloading boxes from trucks on the loading dock at the newly opened Nieman Marcus in Northbrook, Illinois. Another was as a groundskeeper and a maintenance man at the Ravinia Festival in Highland Park, where outdoor concerts rang out all summer long. Ravinia is the longest-running outdoor festival in the United States. As much as I appreciated a paycheck from Ravinia, my heart was simply not in the work. Steppenwolf was up and running in full swing, and my mind was focused fully on our theater company. Charlie, my boss, didn’t like me at all. I was still a screwup kid in many ways, and he could sense this. But I made the best of it. One time, when I was supposed to stock the bathrooms with toilet paper, I unlocked the storeroom doors to get my supplies and a bright idea popped into my mind. Toilet paper was expensive—and I thought, Hey, over at Steppenwolf, we need toilet paper! Paper towels too. A few waste baskets for our bathroom would be great! So I grabbed the supplies and tossed them over a shady area of Ravinia’s fence with a plan to pick them up after work. Relax, I told myself. They’ve got lots.
I always felt bad about helping myself to supplies. Years later, after I became better known as an actor, I appeared on LIVE! with Regis and Kelly during a week one summer when they shot their show at the Ravinia Festival. I thought, I want to pay Ravinia back for everything I took. During the segment, I shared the story of taking the supplies and had them wheel out this huge pallet of toilet paper and paper towels. I nodded to the pallet and said, “Sorry, Ravinia. No hard feelings?”
Suddenly, two police officers jumped out from behind the pallet and arrested me onstage.
Everybody howled.
But in the summer of 1976, not everything was so neatly resolved, as our ensemble was a little wild, trying to get along and learn to work together. In those first months of Steppenwolf, things quickly grew messy and complicated as personal life and theater life intertwined. Moira Harris had particularly caught my eye. She was a brilliant young actor. Beautiful. Passionate. Full of pure fire. I convinced her to date me, and we soon fell in love. She was unlike anyone I’d ever met. But our love affair wasn’t without its ups and downs. We were all over the place in our relationship. Two passionate personalities. On again, off again. In love, out of love. Clinging to each other. Mad at each other. Breaking up. Making up. Making out. And it wasn’t just the two of us whose relationships were so chaotic.
Laurie and Terry had dated in college, but they broke up right before we started rehearsals. Laurie then started dating John, so John and Terry were at each other’s throats. John was set to direct Terry and H. E. and me in The Indian Wants the Bronx, and Terry was set to direct Laurie and Jeff in The Lover. After a year, Nancy left and Joan Allen replaced her, and soon Joan and Terry started dating. No one, besides H. E. Baccus, who got married the summer of 1976, had a boyfriend or girlfriend outside the company. We simply didn’t have time. The love and the work and the plays and the passion mixed together and complicated everything. Like a family, we would argue our points, agree, disagree, get mad at each other, embrace each other, storm out, laugh, cry—our emotions could be all over the map. We were such an insulated cluster of craziness, and our theater was so small, even the audience members couldn’t escape the clutches of us actors. Some of our plays worked well, and some not so well, but there was always an electric charge running through the ensemble members.
We laugh about it now, but occasionally, in those early first days in the basement, Terry would quit and walk out. He’s an incredibly passionate and committed artist who sometimes felt he had to leave to make a point. But he’d always come back. Our rehearsals buzzed with craziness and energy and raw desires—and some days we just shook our heads wondering how we were going to get through it. But we felt hopeful too. I think we all quietly saw that as time went by, the passion and insanity going on offstage somehow seemed to be spilling over onto the stage. It was exciting and fun to be performing with these folks.
On opening night of the new Steppenwolf, tension ran high. We were still painting the walls a half hour before the audience started to arrive. We performed two of the one-act plays, one right after the other, and the stage exploded with energy. The next night we planned to do the other two plays and alternate back and forth from night to night. All the craziness in our lives found its target. The first review came out in our local newspaper, praising both the play selection and the acting, and reading it, we all couldn’t help but grin.
Our excitement was over-the-top. We were finally starting to rock and roll. And we weren’t passing the hubcaps for donations anymore. But at three bucks per seat, three fifty on weekends, the shows were a bargain even in 1976. We had very little money to produce our shows, but somehow we scraped together enough to put on more and more plays. Sometimes the basement was packed. Other times, we had more people onstage than in the audience—maybe a cast of seven and an audience of four. Some nights, no one came at all, so we ordered pizza and bought beer and turned it into our own little basement party. Again, no one was getting paid, but what really mattered was that we were doing our own th
ing in our own way, and even though our personal lives were chaotic, what happened onstage kept us together and moving forward.
By the time Steppenwolf opened its doors, Saturday Night Live had been up and running for a year, and on Saturdays after our shows we’d all go to someone’s apartment to watch. Back then, the SNL cast included John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, Jane Curtin, Laraine Newman, Garrett Morris, and Bill Murray. They were slightly older than we were, yet we identified so much with what they were doing as an ensemble. In general, Steppenwolf performed more serious work than SNL, but we approached the craft of being onstage with the same uninhibited passion and craziness.
On nights when no audience showed up, we hosted what we dubbed “Random Nights” in the basement, where we did anything possible to entertain ourselves. The more outrageous and sillier, the better. It turned out to be a good theater exercise, plus it kept our spirits up despite the empty house. John Malkovich had a running gag where he lip-synced to Springsteen’s “Blinded by the Light”—the Manfred Mann’s Earth Band version—and revved himself up like a deuce, rolling his hips, tripping and sneezing and wheezing with a boulder on his shoulder: the strangest dance moves anyone could imagine. We all hooted and howled and yelled catcalls from the audience. Terry liked to do a mime act, explaining that he was the rare mime who actually speaks. He had a dog named Fifi who did tricks for our entertainment. Terry positioned his hand like he was holding a leash and called out a trick. He ordered Fifi to sit, beg, jump, speak, and r-r-r-r-r-r-roll over—and we all gasped in astonishment, amazed by Fifi’s expertise. Now, we couldn’t actually see Fifi or her tricks because . . . she’s a mime’s dog. Get it? Moira performed as a French singer with the most horrendous French accent you’ve ever heard. Completely out of tune, she sang songs such as “Fool on the Hill” and “The Way We Were.” “The Sound of Silence” was a house favorite. Moira’s accent and pitch were so perfectly terrible that Laurie Metcalf had tears in her eyes, she laughed so hard.