Grateful American: A Journey from Self to Service(30)

Little did we know then how big this play would become for Steppenwolf.

We opened True West in spring 1982. The play received great reviews and did so well that we moved it to the larger Apollo Theater in Chicago. Malkovich in particular was fantastic in his role and received all kinds of press attention. I knew we had to do something bigger—much, much bigger—with True West. We needed to take it to New York.

Theater success happens all around the country, but a success in New York can draw national recognition quickly, raising a theater’s profile. To have a hit show running in New York could only help us back in Chicago. So I called up Wayne Adams, a New Yorker who’d produced Say Goodnight Gracie for us in Chicago, and asked him to come see True West. He flew out, loved it, and returned with investor Hal Thau, who also loved it. Wayne and Hal raised $120,000, a lot of cash back then, for us to produce the show in New York. The opening was slated for October 1982. I flew to New York to scout theaters and found the Cherry Lane, a beautiful, older, 180-seat theater downtown near Sheridan Square. It was perfect.

Not everybody was happy.

Steppenwolf was in the middle of a move into a different theater in Chicago. The Hull House had proved too small for us, so we’d agreed to renovate the former St. Nicholas Theater space. Our board needed to raise extra money to make this possible, and the board, as well as a number of our actors, didn’t think the timing was right to take a Steppenwolf show to New York. And they didn’t think that I, the artistic director, should be spending so much time away from Chicago during the renovation and move. I disagreed. I felt we had to jump at this opportunity. We needed to find a way to make both situations work—opening the new theater, and moving the show to New York. I knew that the artistic director leaving town at the same time we were renovating a new theater was not exactly the best timing. But I wanted us to do both things simultaneously. The majority of the company did not agree with me and thought that by going to New York I was abandoning the theater just before all the construction had to be done. So right before I left for New York, I went to the St. Nicholas Theater. Some old risers needed to be chopped up and removed. I went in early one morning, fired up a chain saw, and buzzed through the risers like cordwood. Company members filed into the theater, one by one, to see what I was up to. I must have looked like an angry nutcase, attacking the risers with the chain saw, but I didn’t want anyone to think I didn’t care. And besides, I needed to relieve a little stress with that chain saw.

Complicating matters, the New York producers wanted us to switch up some members of the cast of True West. Laurie Metcalf, a terrific actress then in her twenties, had performed the show in Chicago, playing the mother, a character in her sixties. The producers wanted us to recast the part with a New York actress of actual age. Additionally, Francis Guinan and Jeff Perry, who were also in the cast, decided not to go to New York, siding with the members of the ensemble who didn’t think the time was right to move the show. So I needed to recast their parts as well. John was still up for it, but he was going to be directing our opening play at the new St. Nicholas, so I needed to figure out how to rehearse True West in New York with the new actors and without Malkovich being there in the beginning. I was definitely pushing a big boulder up a hill on my own, and as there were now only a few of us involved, the ensemble got so ticked off with me that they decided that the New York production could not be billed as a Steppenwolf show because it wasn’t going to be a total Steppenwolf cast. So there was no mention of the company anywhere on any of the posters or newspaper ads for the show.

Perhaps most difficult of all was the situation with Tom Irwin. Tom is a fantastic actor who today has appeared in dozens of plays, movies, and TV shows, including his role as the soft-spoken father in the hit TV series, My So-Called Life. Tom had stepped into the role of the younger brother for a few weeks in our Chicago production of True West, and when Jeff told me he wasn’t going to New York, I’d asked Tom to come and do the play there. Tom had agreed. But after we started rehearsals in New York, one of our producers took me aside and said I needed to play Tom’s role. The year before, the producer had seen Malkovich and me acting together in our production of Of Mice and Men, and he felt that John and I acted very well together. Over the course of the next several days both producers kept encouraging me to make the change. This was a really tough moment. It was the first time we’d taken a show to New York, and everything was new. The pressure was building. It had been a stressful summer just getting the show to New York in the first place.

I don’t want to sound like I’m dumping this decision about Tom all on the producers. I knew it was going to be controversial within the company, and there had already been tension about whether we should take True West to New York at all. But no matter how much I tried to avoid making this decision, I felt I could do a good job in the role, and the producers kept urging me to make the change. So I did. The difficult job of telling Tom what I’d decided fell to me, and the decision didn’t go over well with either Tom or Steppenwolf, unsurprisingly. Not only had I gone off on my own and produced the show in New York against the wishes of the theater, now I’d just let one of our actors go and replaced him with—myself. Sheesh. The company was not happy with me, and since they were in Chicago focusing on our work there, and as there was a possibility that I may be staying in New York for a while if the show did well, they voted to remove me as artistic director. I was crushed. But I understood. Jeff Perry became the new AD. And me? I needed to focus on getting True West opened. Thankfully, down the road, there were no hard feelings between Tom and me, and he appeared in three out of the next four shows that I would direct in Chicago, including Tracers.