It is a glorious thing when Gary Sinise demonstrates the curious, tilting snarl that he affectionately calls "the sneer." First the head flicks back and the eyelids droop, an expression epitomizing the concept of self-absorbed, somnolent cool. Then, as the upper lip curls, his sleek, sturdy features disintegrate into a combination of defiant faux-confidence and adolescent uncertainty.
In its tentative swagger, there are overtones of James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause and a hint of the young Paul Newman of The Hustler. For just a few moments, in a corner of the cozy Italian restaurant across the road from the Steppenwolf main auditorium in Chicago, Gary Sinise becomes what he once was: "a young punk, experimenting with all kinds of stuff, lashing out at authority."
This is precisely how drama teacher Barbara Patterson, now 70, first encountered the 16-year-old Sinise in a corridor of Highland Park High School in spring, 1971: "I was going down this hallway," she recalls, "it was where some of the ne'er-do-wells hung out. Then I saw these guys, leaning against the wall, looking like gang members. We were doing the school musical and I said: 'You look like you stepped out of West Side Story.' I particularly looked at Gary, who seemed to be the leader and was sneering the hardest, and said: 'You look like you could be a Shark or a Jet. I want to see you at auditions this afternoon.' "
It would prove a fateful encounter, one that would eventually become central to the mythology of one of America's greatest theatre ensembles: Chicago's Steppenwolf.
Founded in a tiny church basement of his home Chicago suburb of Highland Park by Sinise, his high-school friend Jeff Perry and and Perry's college pal Terry Kinney, the company had soon forged a distinctive style of performance of such physicality, intensity and emotional force that it left front-row audience members fearing for both their own and the actors' safety.
Blessed with brute talent, the company launched many outstanding screen careers, including those of John Malkovich, Joan Allen, Kevin Anderson, Laurie Metcalf ( Roseanne's sister), John Mahoney ( Frasier's father), and Sinise himself. Now approaching its 25th anniversary, Steppenwolf is mentioned by critics in the same breath as U.S. legends such as the Group Theatre from the 1930s and New York's Circle Repertory. Variety magazine calls it "the country's foremost actors' theatre." "A name synonymous with a visceral acting style full of raw passion," said Playbill magazine, "the uncompromising, in-your-face school of acting dubbed 'rock'n'roll theatre.' "
Sinise became artistic director of Steppenwolf in the early 1980s, initiating much that established the company nationally and internationally. He went on to direct some of the company's most successful shows, including the 1982 production of Sam Shepard's True West which propelled Malkovich to stardom, and the 1996 revival of Buried Child, which earned Sinise a Tony nomination. On screen, in 1992, he directed a masterly adaptation of Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men.
As most original Steppenwolf members will agree, it was Sinise's ferocious zeal and sometimes blind commitment that held the troupe together when they were playing to single-figure audiences in a cramped basement: "Gary always had the strongest vision of the group," remembers Metcalf. "For some of us it was just sort of a summer fling. But for Gary it was always more than that. It was obviously what he wanted to do with his life."
Already written off by teachers as hopeless by the time Patterson collared him, Sinise was skipping classes and had had a brush with the law "for a pot-related offence." But then, in the great tradition of greasepaint epiphany, everything changed. After showing up at the West Side Story audition, simply out of curiosity, he landed the small role of the Shark Pepe. By the last night of the production, any skepticism had melted away and Sinise was hooked.
Equally importantly, it was at the audition that he first met Steppenwolf co-founder Jeff Perry, who was cast against him as a Jet: "We were the odd couple," remembers Perry. "I was in glasses that were slightly larger than the rest of my entire head and he was in a leather vest. He was a rock star and I was what would now be considered a computer nerd. But we hit it off and soon we were inseparable."
While Perry moved on to study theatre at Illinois State University, where he met the final member of the original Steppenwolf triumvirate, Terry Kinney, Sinise stayed behind in high school, needing an extra six months to complete his diploma. On graduation in 1974, he converted a local Unitarian church into a stopgap theatre and gathered a group of high-school friends to form a company, naming it after the Herman Hesse novel that happened to be lying around.
Among the first Steppenwolf productions was the musical Grease, which Perry and Kinney travelled from university to see in June, 1974: "They had lights made out of old coffee tins," Kinney remembers, "a makeshift lighting board and costumes out of the junk yard."
However, Sinise's acting prowess and verve were enough to convince Kinney to go ahead with a production of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead with Sinise and Kinney in the title roles and Perry as the Player King: "We had a wonderful time working together," says Kinney. "On the closing night we sat on a bench and said, 'We need to continue this.' "
While Perry and Kinney returned to university to scout for actors, Sinise scoured Highland Park for premises, eventually settling on the Immaculate Conception Catholic School, which let out a disused basement for $1 a year. With the addition of Laurie Metcalf (then Kinney's girlfriend), Al Wilder and HE Baccus, who would become the first artistic director, company ranks soon began to grow: Joan Allen joined a year later, in 1977. Malkovich was discovered in a production of The Man Who Came To Dinner.
"It was the stupidest performance I ever saw," says Sinise. "I thought: 'We've got to get this freak into our theatre.' " Malkovich's recollection is equally robust: "When they asked me, I sort of went, 'These assholes with their theatre.' I didn't really know them. And what I did know, I didn't really like. They were like the Angry Young Men, complaining about one thing or the other. And I thought, 'I'll stick this for a week, maybe for a month.' I thought that was as much as I could take. That was 25 years ago. They're still among my closest friends."
The ad-hoc company selection process also brought together Sinise with Moira Harris -- now his wife -- whom he first saw playing Laura in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof.
In the summer of 1976, this group convened for the first full-fledged Steppenwolf season, which included Ionesco's The Lesson and Leonard Malfi's Bird Bath. From the beginning, the dramas backstage were often no less heady and explosive than anything presented to the audience, with ensemble members jumping in and out of each others' beds, and meetings that became so heated the police were sometimes called. These intense relationships would eventually lead to a clutch of weddings, including John Malkovich to Glenne Headly, Jeff Perry (after some love-triangle acrobatics) to Laurie Metcalf and, in 1981, Sinise to Moira Harris.
On-stage, this translated into a company style that was, according to Perry, hardly subtle. While young companies on the East Coast immersed themselves in formal experimentation, Steppenwolf was placing all the emphasis on the vitality of traditional performance. Plays were chosen on the basis of the roles they offered, politics came a distant second to youthful aggression, and immediacy bordered on violence. "We didn't pull punches," says Kinney. "There was no fake hitting."
Very quickly, it became apparent that something sensational was taking place. The Chicago press raved. "Acting of staggering power," said the Chicago Tribune of Israel Horowitz's The Indian Wants The Bronx in 1977. It went on: "Between them, Kinney, Sinise and Malkovich are giving some of the most accomplished and deeply felt performances it has been my pleasure to see on stage this year."
But despite the glowing notices and the company's growing status, the first years involved financial hardship and material struggle. It was not unusual for the actors on-stage to outnumber the audience. Even Sinise found the pressure difficult to take, and in 1979 he packed his bags and headed to Hollywood. But after a year of gruelling jobs as a soap-opera extra, including a stint on Knots Landing playing a beach boy, he leaped at the chance to return to Chicago in late 1980 as artistic director of Steppenwolf, when HE Baccus dropped out.
Sinise began to demand that Steppenwolf behave like a real professional theatre company, with structured meetings replacing the anarchic, uproarious, get-togethers of the past. He also surprised the rest of the company by making a more concerted drive toward directing. In 1982, he oversaw the production that established Steppenwolf on the map: Sam Shepard's True West, which had been a dismal failure when premiered two years before at the New York Public Theatre.
Sinise's re-energized production, with Malkovich as the drifter Lee and Jeff Perry as the anally retentive Austin, was an immediate smash, proclaimed by the Chicago Tribune, "a knockdown, slam-bang, all-out battle to the finish . . . one of the funniest, scariest evenings of theatre we're likely to see."
When the possibility of a New York transfer arose, dissent broke out in the company. Some feared it would collapse. When Sinise insisted, Perry dropped out (to be replaced in the Austin role by Sinise himself) with the rest demanding that the Steppenwolf name be removed. The premiere at the off-Broadway Cherry Lane Theatre in October, 1982, was an instant sensation, trumpeted as the "New York acting debut of the decade," referring not to Sinise, or even the production, but to the performance of John Malkovich. The Village Voice reviewed only Malkovich's performance, ignoring everything else.
"It was very difficult for Gary," remembers long-time Steppenwolf member Russ Smith. "You had David Bowie and Jackie Onassis knocking on the dressing room door, elbowing Gary out of the way to get to John."
Just as the dissenters had predicted, the True West phenomenon, and Malkovich's sudden and spectacular rise, was ultimately responsible for the fragmentation of a company built on a bedrock of ensemble cohesion and equality.
"Opinions changed and all of a sudden everybody wanted to go to New York," Sinise remembers. "It was like an epidemic." Acclaimed New York transfers of Lanford Wilson's Balm In Gilead and Shepard's Fool For Love launched the Hollywood careers of Laurie Metcalf, who would soon appear in Desperately Seeking Susan, Glenne Headly (who would soon appear alongside husband Malkovich in Eleni) and Joan Allen.
But Sinise, who was still Steppenwolf artistic director, chose to stifle his own ambitions and make an attempt to keep the company together. In 1985, he oversaw a production of Lyle Kessler's Orphans, which would eventually transfer to the West End with Albert Finney (who won an Olivier award for the role), and in 1986 directed Tom Waits in the world premiere of Frank's Wild Years, the singer/composer's two-act opera.
These successes would lead to an invitation from David Puttnam, then head of Columbia Pictures, to make another assault on Hollywood, this time as a director. Sinise relinquished the artistic directorship of the theatre and relocated with Harris to Malibu, where he still lives.
His first project, Miles From Home, was not a success. Sinise retreated once again to Steppenwolf to play Tom Joad in the Tony award-winning 1990 production of Steinbeck's The Grapes Of Wrath, only reluctantly returning to Hollywood for Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men. This time everything came together.
Reprising the role of George and Lenny that he and Malkovich had played at Steppenwolf 10 years earlier, and employing his father as film editor, Sinise produced what many critics regard as a miniature masterpiece. "This time, when we took it to Cannes," Sinise remembers, "we got a 15-minute standing ovation."
Sinise's film-acting career was taking off, too. He had already been cast as the legless Vietnam veteran Lt. Dan in Forrest Gump, for which he received an Oscar nomination, and would soon move on to Apollo 13. Then, via title roles in the TV movies George Wallace and the impressive Truman, he won big-screen leads in Ransom, Snake Eyes, and Mission To Mars. Sinise had finally blossomed into a Hollywood star, but he would never abandon the theatre that made him.
Despite Steppenwolf's loss of identity in the mid- to late-1980s, it remains a sanctuary where original core members can creatively recharge and rekindle the old Steppenwolf spirit. Metcalf returns about once a year, as does John Mahoney. Malkovich's visits are a little less frequent, though he will be back later this year to direct Terry Johnson's Hysteria. And Sinise makes appearances every two or three years.
"I've never had that mainstream thing of wanting to go out on my own and be a star," he says. "My whole creative life has been nurtured by working in a group. A lot of actors are nomads, fighting to get through auditions, defending themselves when they get parts. They don't have a community where actors are respected and nurtured. I've had that here through Steppenwolf. I've always known that there was somewhere I could come back to, where I could feel at home."