Chicago's Steppenwolf theatre begins $54m expansion with UK firm
The renowned Steppenwolf theatre in Chicago has broken ground on a $54m expansion that will include an “intimate” 400-seat theatre-in-the-round.
The 50,000 sq ft project, built in collaboration with the Chicago architectural firm Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill and the British company Charcoalblue, is expected to open in summer 2021.
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The 45-year-old, Tony award-winning theatre began life as a group of college kids in a suburban Chicago church basement, experimenting with a brash, naturalistic brand of production. It became one of the most influential ensembles in the US, spawning talent including Joan Allen and John Malkovich.
According to the Chicago Tribune, the new theatre will have some resemblance to the Circle in the Square, a storied Broadway space. The building will also contain classroom and rehearsal space on the same floor, as “a village of architecture at Steppenwolf that works as a full ensemble”.
“This is a monumental moment for us that is more than two decades in the making,” the Steppenwolf artistic director Anna Shapiro said in a statement, trumpeting a project “built on the shoulders of the former leaders, the ensemble, the board, and the staff who have touched this project and together have made this vision a reality”.
Steppenwolf alumni, including Gary Sinise and the late Sam Shepard, who staged True West, have prided themselves on a decidedly “un-lovey” approach to theatre, often weaving the ethos of rock music into productions. Malkovich’s 1984 revival of Lanford Wilson’s 1965 play Balm in Gilead, for instance, used songs by Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits and Rickie Lee Jones as the basis for theatrical sequences.
Founding member and actor Terry Kinney once the described the company’s technique for maintaining its characteristic energy.
“We’ve always been more influenced by cinematic techniques than stage techniques because stage techniques have been around long enough to become really boring and cliché,” Kinney told the New York Times in 1985. “Our earliest influences were the films of John Cassavetes, not any plays we’d seen.”
Specifically, Kinney recalled, theatre members did not aspire to pretension. Allen has said she first acted in high school after not making it as a cheerleader; Malkovich that he turned up to his first audition to try to impress a woman.
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Charcoalblue, the firm called in to consult on the Steppenwolf expansion, is best known for working with the Royal Shakespeare Company to design a temporary 1,000-seat theatre, the Courtyard. It has worked on projects at the Liverpool Everyman, the National Theatre, the Marlowe theatre, Chichester Festival theatre, Queen Elizabeth Hall in Antwerp, the Leys school and Wells Cathedral school.
According to the Chicago Tribune, funding for the new theatre comes from Groupon cofounder Eric Lefkofsky, the chair of the theater’s board of trustees, the theater’s board of directors and members of the ensemble.
“When you look at Steppenwolf’s 45-year history, it’s been marked by a constant desire to be innovative,” Lefkofsky said. “It’s become apparent that the existing campus just can’t meet all our needs. We wanted to give the artistic ensemble all the tools they need.”
