CHICAGO — Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre had its struggles emerging from the pandemic, especially with the added burden of a costly new campus that opened on Halsted at a less-than-ideal moment for a company that needed to scale back production for financial reasons. But 2025 saw not just a recovery but a banner year for Chicago’s most famous theater company, long an emissary for this city that bespeaks of intense acting, ensemble commitment and serious theatrical craft.

The original Steppenwolf productions of “Purpose,” a dazzlingly audacious play by Branden Jacobs Jenkins, and “Little Bear Ridge Road,” a moving showcase by playwright Samuel D. Hunter for the longtime Steppenwolf star Laurie Metcalf, both moved to Broadway. Tracy Letts’ “Bug,” one of the first Steppenwolf shows back after the pandemic with longtime ensemble member Carrie Coon as the star of her husband’s play, will open on Broadway in early January. No other nonprofit theater outside Broadway can say anything close to the same. In 2025, Broadway basically looked to London and to Steppenwolf.

The man behind much of this success was this year’s Chicagoan of the Year in Theater.

Glenn Davis, 43, is a son of the Chatham neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, a DePaul University graduate and a longtime Chicago actor who has made it his business since becoming co-artistic director in 2021 to keep Steppenwolf very much in the national cultural conversation. All greatly to the benefit of the city he calls home.

With his stellar co-artistic director Audrey Francis keeping the theater’s artistic and educational offices running smoothly and creatively in Lincoln Park, the gregarious Davis has been free to roam, all the way to the Tony Awards, where he was a 2025 nominee for his featured performance as Solomon “Junior” Jasper in the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama “Purpose,” a character clearly based on former U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., even if the name never was actually spoken from the stage.

Few Tony nominees have filled the dual role of negotiating the terms of a nonprofit-to-commercial transfer with themselves in the cast, but Davis, who has been intertwined with Steppenwolf since he joined the acting ensemble in 2017, self-evidently made it work. Meanwhile, Chicago audiences also enjoyed a mostly successful Steppenwolf season featuring such powerful dramas as “You Will Get Sick” (that title alone took some guts to produce) and K. Todd Freeman’s production of Rajiv Joseph’s moving drama “Mr. Wolf,” one of the best shows of the year in Chicago.

Davis is an inveterate dealmaker and Chicago theater needs more of those. He’s acutely aware of the power of the Steppenwolf brand and committed to its protection. And as an actor himself, he understands how performers have long animated this unique and long-lived company.

“The success we saw this past year came as we approached our 50th anniversary season, and it came with a play that was written for our ensemble,” Davis said in a recent interview. “Even going into it, ‘Purpose’ felt like it had the makings of something special.”

No doubt. But it also took some nerve to stick with the project. On the first day of rehearsal for this commissioned work, the writer only had about 40 pages completed. Everything else, and it sure was good, came contemporaneously with the rehearsal process and actors were still being thrown new pages on days when they were performing that night. Lots of other artistic directors would have panicked or bailed. Davis doggedly stuck with the plan.

“Doing any new play there’s always a huge amount of risk for any theater, so there has to be a balance with familiar titles like ‘Amadeus,'” he says. “So, yes, ‘Purpose’ was a big swing for us. But the result was real artistic fulfillment on every level. Audiences loved it and came in droves. Its artistic merit was universally lauded. The play won the Pulitzer and the Tony. And we had a lot of Steppenwolf actors nominated, too. You never work for accolades but this still all felt to me like a monumental achievement, not just for our ensemble but for all of Chicago. The best part of accepting that Tony for the best production of a play was the texts that came in from so many Chicagoans saying, ‘You represented us very well.'”

Indeed Davis did, both in New York and Chicago. Throughout 2025.

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