Best Established Theater Company: Steppenwolf Theatre Company
Robert L. Segal
Best Established Theater Company
The Reader’s Choice: Steppenwolf Theatre Company
Sure, there’s the sense of a foregone conclusion about Steppenwolf taking Best Established Theater. This was the year of August: Osage County, after all. Or, more accurately, the most spectacular so far of what promise to be several years of August: Osage County (coming up next: the touring production and the movie). Tracy Letts’s play and Steppenwolf’s Broadway production of it won pretty much everything New York had to offer in 2008, including five Tony Awards and a Pulitzer. But it’s not the trophies from national institutions that have earned Steppenwolf this particular honor. It’s not the show’s incredible popularity, its stunning craft, or even the chance that it might help turn the tide against whiny little MFA plays. It’s the proof the show provides that a major nonprofit enterprise like Steppenwolf can still be organized in such a way that it can pick up an ensemble member’s untried script and do it to the hilt. It’s that artistic director Martha Lavey, executive director David Hawkanson, and whoever else gets in on those decisions went ahead and let Todd Rosenthal build that enormous, three-story set—an apparently life-size cross section of a house—before they knew what a success August would turn out to be. Basically, it’s that the company kept faith with itself—its founding communal values—when it had the resources and prestige not to. 
Next at Steppenwolf is Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Previews 3/26-4/3. Opens Sun 4/4, 6 PM. Through 5/31: Tue-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat-Sun 3 and 7:30 PM, Wed 5/6-5/27, 2 PM, 1650 N. Halsted, 312-335-1650, steppenwolf.org, $20-$70. —Tony Adler
Our readers’ choice: Steppenwolf Theatre Company
