Grateful American: A Journey from Self to Service(16)

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 nine 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.