Stephenwolf Theater Company has long been one of the nation's most influential ensemble companies.

Known for the actors it's launched and the groundbreaking work it's produced.

Now it's marking its 50th season at a moment of real uncertainty for theaters across the country.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown traveled to Chicago for our arts and culture series Canvas.

Think if I had stayed in the theater.

A production of Dance of Death, a play by August Stinberg being presented in a modern adaptation.

And growing old.

It's horrible, but it is interesting.

I'd imagine.

For actor Jeff Perry, it's yet another opportunity to do his thing.

Now 50 years on at the theater company he helped create.

It feels like wishes fulfilled.

It does.

Yeah.

A place built of artists, by artists, and for artists is an exceedingly rare experiment.

Rare to start, rarer still to last.

Steenwolf Theat's roots go back to the early 1970s.

a group of teenage friends in a Chicago area high school, then at Illinois State University and then a do-it-yourself theater company co-founded by Perry, Terry Kenny, and Gary Senise, putting on shows in a church basement in Chicago.

Here's what we thought simultaneously, I think, is the truth.

We're going to change the face of American theater and we'll probably fall apart within, you know, within a month or two.

You tell him that I got a couple projects, he might be incident.

It would become an important incubator of American theater.

Actors including John Malkovich here with Senise in a groundbreaking 1984 production of Sam Shepard's True West.

I never thanked you for saving my life.

Senise himself would become best known as Lieutenant Dan in the 1994 film Forest Gump.

Lorie Medcaf, well known for her time on the hit series Roseanne.

Joan Allen, Amy Morton, Martha Plimpmpton, more recently Carrie [ __ ] Playwrights including Tracy Lets whose August Osage County won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and Rajie Joseph and Terrell Alvin McCrainy.

All of them and more along with several directors are to this day ensemble members of Stephenwolf, meaning they work together in different shows over many years.

It sounds different every time you do it.

and whatever else they do in theater, TV, or film, they can and do come back to work at Steenwolf.

In 2016, as he rehearsed a new play written for his Steenwolf colleagues, Les told me that the freedom and sense of security that comes with the ensemble approach is priceless.

I can afford to take chances.

I can afford to make a fool of myself.

They'll keep you around anyway.

They'll keep me around anyway.

And and they'll tell me they'll tell me to my face, you didn't get this right.

Success can be counted in many ways, including the number of shows, 18, that have transferred to Broadway over the years, winning 14 Tony Awards.

You said your daddy was some sort of reverend, but not like this kind of reverend.

Among them, Purpose, a Stephen Wolf commission, which also won a 2025 Pulitzer for playwright Brandon Jacobs Jenkins.

He told me then what it meant to work directly with the theater company.

I'm designing these the the game board for these incredible artists to like every night find a new way through the story that might ping differently, create different emotions.

Everything in this play was sort of inspired by the acting ensemble that emerged from it.

You can't be sneaking up on a man like that when he's fresh out.

Among the Purpose cast, Glenn Davis, who now has an even more daunting off-stage role, serving with fellow ensemble member, director, and actor Audrey Francis as Stephen Wolf's co-artic directors.

50 years is a long time to keep a group of 17year-olds together uh and still performing together and still, you know, liking each other and enjoying being in the room together.

So, that's an accomplishment.

Getting new generations of 17 year olds and then adding new folks.

I think that when Glenn and I took the role on, it was really as we were coming out of the pandemic.

Why would anyone take on a leadership role of a nonprofit arts organization in particular live theater at that time?

The answer to keep a place that has nourished them and several previous generations alive and thriving.

But Francis and Davis, who both in a sense grew up as theater professionals here, face a host of challenges.

Steppen Wolf in recent years greatly expanded its theater and public areas.

More space to use, but also to fill.

And it's not immune from the societal and other changes now roing American theater generally.

The structural mechanics of doing theater today are very difficult.

We used to do twice as many shows as we do now.

So being able to employ the same number of artists becomes more difficult because you don't have as many shows, you don't have as many roles.

Those difficulties are all over the place.

So, we we try as best we can to manage those and move through them as seamlessly as we can.

There's also the reality of American politics today.

Chicago has been one center of the Trump administration's crackdown on immigration.

Davis and Francis say the theat's core values and programming won't change.

I don't feel necessarily a pressure to program something that is commenting on something that's happening right now because everything is happening so fast.

What I do feel is an obligation to our city to make sure that we're providing a place that is thoughtful, intentional, can be fun, can be challenging.

They all of these every one of these bring up memories.

And so 50 years on, Jeff Perry and his colleagues are still at it.

It's almost entirely a nomadic profession.

Mhm.

This held the promise at least of an ongoing family of choice and it proved as the years went on how he really is that.

For the PBS NewsHour, I'm Jeffrey Brown at Stephenwolf Theater in Chicago.

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