Word: steppenwolf
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Even in his hometown of Chicago, Keith Huff was hardly a playwriting superstar. Though the author of about 50 plays, many of them produced at respected Second City theaters like Steppenwolf and Chicago Dramatists, he still needed a day job--editing for a medical website--to help support himself, his wife and their 8-year-old daughter. Yet now he's a Broadway hot ticket. True, he has a couple of big movie stars to thank--Daniel Craig and Hugh Jackman, who were somehow persuaded to star in his play A Steady Rain. But they're only helping affirm...
Chicago, of course, has been a major force in American theater for some years. The Steppenwolf Theatre burst on the national scene in the 1980s, introducing plays by Mamet, Sam Shepard and others, popularizing a high-voltage performance style and spawning stars like John Malkovich and Gary Sinise. The city's biggest resident theater, the Goodman, has produced everything from major revivals of Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller to last year's Pulitzer Prize winner, Ruined by Lynn Nottage, while a growing roster of smaller off-Loop theaters have nurtured experimental works like 2007's critically acclaimed musical version...
...time: A family celebration at a restaurant becomes a three-part fugue: one couple is followed in real time for the next two hours; another's story moves forward two years; a third moves backward in time for two months. I've never seen it staged (though Chicago's Steppenwolf gave it a try some years back), but it reads like a dream...
...intimately my whole life. But until you really crawl inside of it and see how it works, it's not part of you. I know I'm a better playwright as a result of acting." He has returned the favor; August provides 13 juicy roles for the members of Steppenwolf, and the company is currently rehearsing Letts' next play, Superior Donuts. It's a lighter, less grandiose work, he says. "I started it before August was performed. But I knew August was really big, and I wanted a smaller gesture." Now that August: Osage County has thrust him into...
...says. "'You were on the Festivus episode.' That was four days out of my life!" He knew it was time to leave when he was kicking himself for losing out on a regular role in V.I.P., the Pamela Anderson action series. He drove to Chicago to appear in a Steppenwolf production of Glengarry Glen Ross and decided to stay...