Steppenwolf's new season

Steppenwolf Theatre announced its 2009-2010 season today, and now that the August: Osage County crew is back from its global domination tour, it looks like things are back to usual at the ‘wolf. The new lineup is a fairly traditional one for the company, built rather evenly on a few money-in-the-bag revivals and several so-new-you’ve-never-even-heard-of-them new works.

In the Been There category are David Mamet’s American Buffalo (the one in the junk shop) and Samuel Beckett’s Endgame (the one with the trash cans), neither of which has suffered from a lack of Chicago productions.

While it’s likely that you’ve seen both these plays before, though, you’ve never seen Buffalo starring Francis Guinan and Tracy Letts, who makes his first stage appearance, since people forgot he was anything but a Pulitzer-winning playwright, next December. (His last outing on the boards was two years ago this month in Betrayal.) Amy Morton directs the classic about hustlers in a Chicago junk shop; assuming the economy hasn’t completely rebounded yet, expect lots of reviews discussing the contemporary nature of Mamet’s play from the 70s.

Meanwhile, Endgame will be staged in April by Frank Galati, and will star ensemble members Ian Barford, William Peterson and—reunited as a cranky married couple after their August success—Francis Guinan and Rondi Reed (right) as the parents in the existential garbage cans.

These titles are familiar to be sure, and will probably be scrutinized by some for that reason. (I’ve griped in the past about too much familiarity in the Steppenwolf mix.) But it should be noted that The Crucible and The Diary of Anne Frank—two 1950s Broadway plays regarded as the stuff of high school theater—both had bracing , up-to-the-minute productions at Steppenwolf, so there’s promise that these new stagings could offer the same. (It will be hard, though, to compare Amy Morton’s American Buffalo to Robert Falls’s Broadway revival from late last year. That production only played a week of official performances before posting a closing notice.)

As for premieres, next season will include two, as well as a trio of relatively new works by a former Steppenwolf performer.  Ensemble member Eric Simonson’s Fake, a comic murder mystery about Arthur Conan Doyle, will kick off the season in September. Kate Arrington will be in that one, in her first main stage appearance since being made an ensemble member (and since becoming a mommy with now Oscar-nominee Mike Shannon).

In January, a rotating bill of three plays by Tarell Alvin McCraney called The Brother/Sister Plays: In the Red and Brown Water, The Brothers Size and Marcus; Or the Secret of Sweet will employ the talents of ensemble members Alana Arenas and Jon Hill. McCraney has worked at Steppenwolf as an actor (he was part of Tina Landau’s dynamic ensemble of writer/performers in Theatrical Essays in the Garage) and his play drag-world play Wig Out! made splashes last year in both New York and London. These coming-of-age dramas are set in rural Louisiana. Due to their sprawling nature, it will take two nights to see all three works; you’re officially warned.

Finally, next July will witness the unholy repairing of director Anna Shapiro and her contentious, brilliantly impossible creative partner Bruce Norris, playwright of The Unmentionables, Purple Heart, The Pain and the Itch and other terrifically unpleasant plays. The indispensable and often controversial dramatist rolls out his newest work, A Parellelogram, about a young woman with potentially clairvoyant power. (Arrington has been announced to appear in this show also.) By the time it comes around next summer, Chicago will have had four years without a new Norris play, to say nothing of a Norris/Shapiro collaboration. I understand why not everyone loves his vicious wit and cringing satires of phony manners, but it’s hard to think of another American playwright in the last decade who has looked with such unsparing savagery on the hollowness of American liberalism.

Barring another major disrupting success that takes ensemble members out of town—key Steppenwolf players Morton, Shapiro, Letts, Reed, Barford and Guinan were all yanked from various, previously announced projects to make August: Osage into a Chicago export—the 2009-2010 season looks like the flagship is back on track.

CORRECTION: The plays by Tarell Alvin McCraney were originally reported here to be premieres. They have already appeared at other venues, though. My bad.—CP