LEROY AND LUCY World Premiere, NOISES OFF & More Announced For Steppenwolf's 2024/2025 Season

Steppenwolf Theatre Company, under the leadership of Artistic Directors Glenn Davis and Audrey Francis and Executive Director Brooke Flanagan, has announced its 2024/25 Season, featuring several Chicago and world premieres.

The 49th Season includes five Steppenwolf Membership Series productions that invite audiences to experience the next chapter of Steppenwolf’s bold, visceral and muscular work, while celebrating a dynamic range of exciting new voices and Steppenwolf legends. The 2024/25 Season is presented at Steppenwolf’s expanded campus, which includes three theaters: the in-the-round Ensemble Theater in Honor of Helen Zell, the Downstairs Theater and the intimate 1700 Theater.

Artistic Directors Glenn Davis and Audrey Francis comment, “Our 2024/25 Season demands the best from our ensemble. The plays we've chosen require our artists to bring the whole of themselves (physically, emotionally, spiritually) and leave it all onstage in a sprint to the finish. Night. After. Night. This season feels like the strike of a match, a lit fuse and a race to the explosive finale.”

Raising the curtain on Steppenwolf’s 2024/25 Season, Tony Award-winning ensemble member Anna D. Shapiro returns to direct Michael Frayn’s classic comedy Noises Off, presented in a co-production with Geffen Playhouse, where ensemble member Tarell Alvin McCraney serves as Artistic Director. Steppenwolf’s take on the funniest farce ever written features ensemble members Audrey Francis, Francis Guinan, Ora Jones, James Vincent Meredith and Karen Rodriguez. The 49th season continues with the world premiere of Ngozi Anyanwu’s bluesy, seductive Leroy and Lucy, directed by Awoye Timpo. Featuring live music, ensemble member Jon Michael Hill stars in this tale of a musician and a stranger who meet at a crossroads on a dark Mississippi night. Up next, Jeremy Herrin helms Sam Shepard’s masterpiece Fool For Love, a twisted and tequila-soaked love letter from one of the greatest American Playwrights. In the spring, Steppenwolf is thrilled to present the Chicago premiere of The Book of Grace by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, an explosive family portrait directed by Steve H. Broadnax III and featuring ensemble member Glenn Davis. The 2024/25 Season concludes with the Chicago premiere of Noah Diaz’s wildly imaginative new play You Will Get Sick, directed by Artistic Director Audrey Francis with an ensemble cast including Cliff Chamberlain, Amy Morton and Namir Smallwood.

2024/25 Classic Memberships are now on sale starting as low as $160 and include all five Membership Series productions – three plays in the Downstairs Theater and two in the Ensemble Theater. Classic Members receive priority access to seats along with full membership benefits, including unlimited ticket exchanges. The Black Card, Steppenwolf’s flex membership, offers six ticket credits starting as low as $120 that allow patrons flexibility for when and how they see shows at Steppenwolf. For patrons under 30, RED Card Memberships offer six ticket credits for just $99. Discounted packages for students and teachers and accessible packages are also available. For more information and to purchase Memberships, visit Audience Services at www.steppenwolf.org or call (312) 335-1650.

Throughout the 2024/25 season, Steppenwolf continues its commitment to the next generation of audiences with dedicated student matinee performances during four of the five Membership Series productions (Noises Off, Leroy and Lucy, Fool For Love and The Book of Grace). Reaching nearly 15,000 teens, educators and community members annually, Steppenwolf Education and Engagement also includes in-school residencies, teen programs, community partnerships and educator trainings for classroom teachers and teaching artists. For additional information about Steppenwolf’s Education and Engagement programming and to register your school for a field trip visit steppenwolf.org/education.

Also in 2024/25, Steppenwolf’s LookOut Series will continue to present an incredible breadth of work in the 1700 Theater. A home for Chicago’s performing artists across disciplines, LookOut will shortly announce their eclectic lineup for Summer 2024 and beyond. Highlights will include: new work from Chicago theater legends, a recurring musical theater-themed drag show, solo showcases from Chicago’s funniest comedians, evenings of exciting local music and much more. The LookOut Series is ongoing, with full programming at steppenwolf.org/lookout. 

Executive Director Brooke Flanagan adds “With next season, Steppenwolf is doubling down on our role as America’s preeminent ensemble theater. Our commitment to bold ensemble-driven work, service as a launching pad for new plays and partnership in education to teachers and teens across Chicago has never been stronger. Our three-theater campus has also allowed us to welcome a broader spectrum of the arts community to create alongside us – through both the LookOut Series and visiting artist initiatives. The result is a dynamic calendar of offerings to complement our season of produced work that positions Steppenwolf as a cultural hub for Chicago.”

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Steppenwolf's 2024/2025 Season

Noises Off

By Michael Frayn
Directed by ensemble member Anna D. Shapiro
Featuring ensemble members Audrey Francis, Francis Guinan, Ora Jones, James Vincent Meredith and Karen Rodriguez
A co-production with Geffen Playhouse
September 12 – October 27, 2024
In the Downstairs Theater
Press opening: Sunday, September 22, 2024 at 6 pm

The cast and crew of Nothing On are scrambling to prepare for opening night, but despite their earnest efforts, the production is an absolute mess. Line flubs and lost props and missed cues, oh my! Can this beleaguered ensemble overcome egos and jealousies to pull the show together in time? 

Onstage antics collide with offstage foibles in Steppenwolf’s production of Noises Off, the classic comedy that writes an ingenious, slapstick and zany tribute to “theatre-people” everywhere. By the end of this dizzying play-within-a-play, you won’t know stage right from left.

Leroy and Lucy

World Premiere!
By Ngozi Anyanwu
Directed by Awoye Timpo
Featuring ensemble member Jon Michael Hill
October 24 – December 15, 2024 
In the Ensemble Theater in Honor of Helen Zell
Press opening: Sunday, November 3, 2024 at 6 pm

Two lost souls meet at a crossroads, in the dead of night, deep in the Mississippi of it all. With a yearning guitar between them, they tell secrets and conjure a sound once forgotten – a tune pitched with Leroy’s longing and the sweet purr of Lucy’s desires. In this sultry world premiere, a play with music from Ngozi Anyanwu, the Delta Blues fill the air, the future lies just down the road and we are everywhere and nowhere all at once. 

Fool For Love

By Sam Shepard
Directed by Jeremy Herrin
January 30 – March 16, 2025
In the Downstairs Theater
Press opening: Saturday, February 8, 2025 at 7:30 pm

In a sweltering motel room in the Mojave Desert, May and Eddie lick their wounds and get ready for another relentless round. This brawl is eternal and infernal. And the Old Man is always watching. 

Perhaps the sexiest, most haunting play of the 20th century, Fool for Love is a twisted and tequila-soaked love letter from Sam Shepard, one of the greatest American Playwrights, indulging the need to get inside someone just to tear them apart

The Book of Grace

Chicago Premiere!
By Suzan-Lori Parks
Directed by Steve H. Broadnax III
Featuring ensemble member Glenn Davis
March 27 – May 18, 2025
In the Ensemble Theater in Honor of Helen Zell
Press opening: Sunday, April 6, 2025 at 6 pm

Grace looks for the good in everything: in her husband’s rules, in the border he patrols, in the return of his estranged son. But a want for goodness cannot unwind the past, as this taut family reunion explodes in all directions.

The Chicago premiere of Suzan-Lori Parks’ The Book of Grace is an incendiary family portrait from the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer of Topdog/Underdog. Witness this startling reminder that the search for common ground can be bloody and brutal, leaving casualties on every side of the divide.

You Will Get Sick

Chicago Premiere!
By Noah Diaz
Directed by Artistic Director Audrey Francis
Featuring ensemble members Cliff Chamberlain, Amy Morton and Namir Smallwood
June 5 – July 13, 2025
In the Downstairs Theater
Press opening: Sunday, June 15, 2025 at 6 pm

A young man with a secret. An older woman who will listen. A predatory flock of birds. An upcoming audition for The Wizard of Oz. Welcome to You Will Get Sick, a wildly imaginative new play that traces the touching, hilarious, heartbreaking saga of one man’s illness and his unlikely caretaker’s pursuit of her dreams.  

Admired as “lively, surreal and surprising” by The New York Times, Noah Diaz’s Chicago debut is equal parts comedy, form-bending experiment and sober meditation on mortality. Renowned ensemble member Amy Morton (a Tony Award nominee for August: Osage County and Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) returns to the Steppenwolf stage for the first time in over a decade, making this season finale a must-see experience! 

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Steppenwolf Theatre Company is a Chicago theater that is home to America’s ensemble. The company began performing in the mid-1970s in the basement of a Highland Park, IL church—today Steppenwolf is the nation’s premier ensemble theater with 49 members who are among the top actors, playwrights and directors in the field. Deeply rooted in its ensemble ethos, the company is committed to equity, diversity, inclusion and making the Steppenwolf experience accessible to all. Groundbreaking productions from Balm in Gilead and August: Osage County to Downstate and Pass Over—and accolades that include the National Medal of Arts and 12 Tony Awards—have made the theatre legendary. Artistic programming includes a membership series; a Steppenwolf for Young Adults season; and LookOut, a multi-genre performance series. The nationally recognized work of Steppenwolf Education engages nearly 15,000 participants annually in Chicagoland communities promoting compassion, encouraging curiosity and inspiring action. While firmly grounded in the Chicago community, more than 40 original Steppenwolf productions have enjoyed success nationally and internationally, including Broadway, Off-Broadway, London, Sydney, Galway and Dublin. 2021 marked the opening of Steppenwolf’s landmark Lefkofsky Arts & Education Center—deepening the company’s commitment to Chicagoland teens and serving as a cultural nexus for Chicago. Glenn Davis and Audrey Francis are the Artistic Directors and Brooke Flanagan is Executive Director. Keating Crown is Chair of Steppenwolf’s Board of Trustees.