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Edited by Kris Vire
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Edited by Kris Vire
Resetting the stage
Steppenwolf’s new artistic director has big plans—and a big learning curve. By Kris Vire
director has big plans—and a big learning curve. By Kris Vire
Steppenwolf’s new artistic W
hen Mary Page Marlowe begins performances at Steppenwolf Theatre
Company March 31, it will mark the fourth collaboration between playwright Tracy Letts and director Anna D. Shapiro. Together they’ve premiered Letts’s Man from Nebraska (2003), August: Osage County (2007) and his adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters (2012); the Broadway transfer of August earned Tony Awards for both of them in 2008. But Marlowe also serves as Shapiro’s first production in her new role as Steppenwolf’s artistic director, following Martha Lavey’s
two-decade run at the theater’s helm. When the current season was announced in March 2015, there wasn’t yet a director attached to Letts’s latest, and Shapiro didn’t intend to take on a directing project in her first season. “My stance was, I’m not directing anything my first year as the artistic director. The learning curve felt really steep to me,” says Shapiro during our meeting at Steppenwolf’s administrative offices. “I thought, That’s crazy. I have to be on the ground every day. I said, ‘I can’t do that.’ And I still am not sure that wasn’t the right position to take, but somehow….
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There was this confluence of things, and we decided what was best for the play, and what was best for the theater, was that I do it. It’s still a little bit of a blur how that happened.”
Shapiro, who turns 50 in March, was announced as Lavey’s successor in October 2014 at the same time that David Schmitz was announced to replace retiring executive director David Hawkanson. It was to be a total turnover at the top but a gradual one, with Shapiro officially taking over as AD at the beginning of the 2015–16 season and Lavey, who would remain an ensemble
member, still there for her as an adviser when needed.
That learning curve, though, got a lot steeper when Lavey suffered a stroke last May. Shapiro had been living in New York with her husband, fellow ensemble member Ian Barford, and their children, while she directed Larry David’s Fish in the Dark and Barford performed in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night- Time, both on Broadway; at this point, she had to take the reins at Steppenwolf more abruptly than planned.
“We had this plan, you know?” she says with a slight shake of her
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