“When I was 13, my mother made me take an acting class over the summer,” says Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s new resident director Anna Shapiro, making it sound like her mother forced her to eat soap. “I think I was irresponsible in some way during the academic year, so I had to make up for it.”
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At the time Shapiro wanted nothing to do with the theater. Acting may have been an outlet for many a rebellious Evanston teenager, but she was in familiar territory: her mother, Joann, is a successful local actor and director. Shapiro tried her best to hate acting. “I just thought those theater guys in high school were the biggest geeks,” she says. “And they were. They still are.” By the time she got to Columbia College she was determined to strike out on her own, but the farthest afield she could wander was to study film. Then she met Tom Bell, a fellow student who had big plans for a cramped storefront he was renting in Rogers Park.
Big Game Theater opened its doors in 1988 with Shapiro’s production of Balm in Gilead, one of the plays that had put Steppenwolf on the map almost a decade before. “There were 23 people onstage in a theater that held 50,” she says. “It was like the clowns coming out of the Volkswagen.” The set cost 50 dollars. “We tried to make back production costs by holding a benefit and making our parents buy expensive tickets.” The show was a hit and ran for four months. Still, the company couldn’t afford to produce more than two shows a year, let alone pay themselves anything. “The mission of the theater became getting as many people in the cast as there were seats in the house. Big casts bring audiences.”
After being whisked to New York to meet with Gary Sinise, Shapiro was appointed director of Steppenwolf’s New Plays Lab in 1995. Her first production there, Rubin’s The Viewing Room, got clobbered in the press. “My mother said, ‘If the worst thing that happens to you is someone writing bad things about you in the newspaper, how bad is that?’ And I said, ‘That’s really fucking bad. People who went to high school with me who thought I was a jerk are reading that I’m a moron.’”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Anna Shapiro photo by Eugene Zakusilo.
