Steppenwolf Theatre Company announced at a press conference Thursday morning details of a planned, major physical expansion project, as well as an artistic and management succession.
The former announcement was widely anticipated, delayed in the coming and has been much discussed. The latter was a surprise.
Martha Lavey, the theater’s artistic director since 1995, said that she will step down from her position at the end of the current 2014-15 season. She will be replaced by Anna D. Shapiro, a longtime artistic associate, ensemble member and director at the theater.
Ever since her widely acclaimed and Tony Award-winning work on Tracy Letts’ “August: Osage County” propelled her to Broadway recognition, Shapiro has been a busy Broadway director. Shapiro’s production of “This is Our Youth,” produced by Scott Rudin, is currently playing at the Cort Theatre in New York, and, later this year, she will direct a new Broadway project written by and starring the acclaimed comedian Larry David.
There also will be a change in the top management of the company. David Hawkanson, the executive director, is to be replaced in the position by David Schmitz, the current managing director of Steppenwolf. Hawkanson, 68, a highly experienced arts manager, said he will continue to work with the theater “on a consulting basis,” including on the new building. Hawkanson said that he thought it important that the theater had “continuity of management” as it tried to raise the necessary money for its expansion plans.
Although Shapiro was an obvious candidate for the position of artistic director, the surprise was that the position was open at all, at this juncture.
Lavey, who is 57, somewhat younger than the typical baton-passing age, has been widely viewed as a good steward of the Steppenwolf brand, and a shrewd and savvy leader of the many complex talents in its famed ensemble.
Although not a director herself, Lavey, a fierce intellectual and supporter of smart new plays, has picked numerous works that have become hits and been an early supporter of the likes of Letts and Bruce Norris, a Pulitzer Prize-winner for his work on “Clybourne Park,” one of Norris’ few plays not to premiere at Steppenwolf. She also was an early supporter of the playwright Lisa D’Amour, who scored a hit with “Detroit” and whose new play “Airline Highway” opens at Steppenwolf later this fall. Much appreciated for her frequent attendance at other, smaller Chicago theaters, Lavey cut a distinctive cloth around town and has been admired (and sometimes feared) for a rhetorical style that takes no prisoners.
Lavey also has picked and chosen many significant directors — including Shapiro, who grew up in Evanston and graduated from Columbia College Chicago and Yale University, where she earned an MFA in directing.
Lavey said Thursday that she will remain an ensemble member at the Steppenwolf. Shapiro said she will remain a professor at Northwestern University, but will no longer have administrative responsibilities at the university.
Both of these major leadership positions have been filled internally, without the typical national search. That was not unusual in terms of Steppenwolf history on the artistic side of the business.
“Artistic leadership,” Lavey said, “has always come from within the ensemble.”
Shapiro has long been tipped as the heir apparent.
It is more unusual in the realm of executive director. Hawkanson’s replacement is considerably less experienced, although highly regarded within the all-important internal constituency.
For the Steppenwolf board with an obligation to promote ticket sales, Shapiro’s string of Broadway involvement with such bold-faced names as James Franco, Chris Rock, Michael Cera and David surely made this look like a good moment to pass the baton. The 2013-14 season was not a banner year for Steppenwolf, either critically or financially. But such is the risk that theaters take when their artistic director is committed to progressive new plays, as is Lavey, with a passion. Asked about whether this new gig would root her in Chicago, as distinct from Broadway, Shapiro allowed that it would.
“I am delighted about that,” she said.
The change in leadership overshadowed the formal detailing of the long-known expansion plans for the Lincoln Park theater. These will include the demolition of a parking garage that never was completed and construction on a vacant lot between the current theater and the garage. The plans promise a much improved home for one of Chicago’s flagship arts institutions.
The new Steppenwolf campus, still at least two years away (if not more), will feature a new, 400-seat, flexible theater (designed to replace the current Upstairs Theatre), a small black-box studio to the north of the current theater in the former furniture store already acquired and developed by Steppenwolf, and some expanded rehearsal space on the footprint of the old, second-floor performance space. The 550-seat mainstage theater will remain largely unchanged, although the entire venue will benefit from additional lobby space and other planned audience comforts.
The physical plans have been long in the gestation — and slow in the funding, with Steppenwolf finding that many of the public sources of money available to the Goodman Theatre and other institutions have been tough to snag in the current economy. Nonetheless, at Thursday’s event on Halsted Street, the sense was that the money would indeed be raised, although Hawkanson noted that no construction on the second, larger phase of the project would begin until the money was in hand.
Thursday’s announcement was kept tightly under wraps with only a few people knowing — or guessing — what was on the agenda for the press conference. The morning began with a board meeting, followed by a session at which staffers and ensemble members were told, before Lavey, a crucial and long-lasting figure in Chicago, announced her departure from the job she has held for 20 years, a crucial period of growth for the company that carries the edgy, gritty Chicago imprimatur with an intensity and marketability unequaled by any arts group.