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CHICAGO — On a freezing cold February day, in an over-lit rehearsal room, in the run-up to yet another referendum on the state of our nation and democracy, Tracy Letts was chanting and pounding his chest.
This should surprise no one, really. Letts, 54, made his name a quarter-century ago with a pair of plays — “Bug” and “Killer Joe” — that involved no small amount of macho posturing, almost always to disastrous effect for the characters involved.
But the cause of Letts’s current exhortations had little to do with sex, guns and drugs, and more to do with the other blood sport that has overtaken our national psyche: politics.
His newest play, “The Minutes,” is a dark comedy, set at a City Council meeting in a small town called Big Cherry, a Peyton Place riven by vicious rivalries, petty parking concerns and a community secret or two.
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And while the temptation is to see the play as a parable for our current political divisions — see all that chanting and chest pounding — Letts says “The Minutes” wasn’t meant to be a condemnation of President Donald Trump, or any particular politician. Rather, it’s an examination of how we make myths about ourselves as a society and how that informs how we treat one another.
“If you are going to talk about politics, or the way we behave socially, and you’re going to talk about this country, in a basic or elemental way, you have to visit how we made it, how we got here, and the resistance to visiting that, both now and forever,” he said after a recent rehearsal at the Steppenwolf Theater Company, where the play premiered in 2017. “And that’s one of the things that really drove me to complete the play.”
How he ended up acting in the play, mind you, is a different story: “The Minutes” is the first time Letts has appeared in a play of his own, let alone one on Broadway, where the production opens on March 15 at the Cort Theater. Cast by director Anna D. Shapiro as a replacement for the former “CSI” star and fellow Steppenwolf member William Petersen, Letts portrays the patient, pragmatic and problematic Mayor Superba, a character who rarely leaves the stage for 90 minutes.
But Tracy Letts, playwright, says Tracy Letts, actor, was not his first choice.
“I didn’t want to do it,” he said, noting that Petersen was “terrific” in the 2017 premiere, but was unavailable for the Broadway run.
But as Shapiro and the play’s commercial producers mulled New York, many of the bankable male actors they considered didn’t “necessarily understand the joys of ensemble theater,” Letts said, noting that Superba shares the stage with an assortment of council members, adorned with similarly Dickensian names like Oldfield, Assalone, and Carp. (He says he stole the Superba name from a refrigerator.)
“You go through a few of those people and then you go, the hell with it, I’ll do it,” Letts said.
So it is that Letts — who won a Tony Award in 2013 for his take as George in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” — has been stumbling his way through rehearsals as an actor and then stumbling home to do rewrites as a playwright, trying to tweak the script while also cursing the writer.
“If I’d known that I was going to wind up doing it I wouldn’t have given him so many goddamn lines,” Letts said of Superba.
Letts’s fatigue, of course, has more to do than with just his performance: His son, Haskell, will turn 2 just days before Letts opens on Broadway, and just as his wife and Haskell’s mother, actress Carrie Coon, finishes a revival of “Bug,” his 1996 creepy-crawly conspiracy comedy, at Steppenwolf.
The opening of “The Minutes” and the closing of “Bug” are scheduled for the same day, and Letts, a first-time father at 52, describes his family’s current chaos — toddler, rehearsal, performance, repeat — like “planning the battle of Midway everyday.”
Indeed, Coon, who fell in love with Letts as she played Honey in “Virginia Woolf,” says the current grind is so intense that Letts is threatening to retire, something she teases him about.
“He says he wants to be a stay-at-home dad,” said Coon, 39. “I’m like, ‘Why don’t you give that a try for a couple of weeks and see how that feels?’”
“The Minutes” also comes to Broadway — with a cast that includes Blair Brown, Jessie Mueller, Austin Pendleton and Armie Hammer — just as Letts is coming off a streak of screen performances, often playing stuffy, if lovable, middle-aged men: Henry Ford II (blustering and blubbering his way through “Ford v Ferrari”), and the impressively mutton-chopped editor in Greta Gerwig’s “Little Women.” (He said he specifically asked the director for such showy facial hair. )
He also took a sweeter turn as the title character’s father in Gerwig’s “Lady Bird,” after playing an ambitious U.S. senator in Showtime’s “Homeland,” a role that leads us back to “The Minutes.”
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In some ways, it seems fated that Letts would write a play infused by politics: He is a man, after all, who frequently uses the word “congress” as a verb. He is a die-hard liberal who hails from Oklahoma, one of the nation’s most conservative states. He was born on the Fourth of July.
But Letts insists the idea for the “The Minutes” came well before Trump’s election, as he watched the national rancor build leading up to the 2016 campaign.
As time has passed, however, the script has seemingly taken on meaning, said Shapiro, who serves as artistic director of the Steppenwolf.
“Quite frankly, when I did it before I thought the world was as bad as it could get; and now, the situation is far more precarious,” Shapiro said, adding, the play was now “less abut a bad place that’s been bad for awhile, and more about the moment that a community, and a culture, turns.”
Letts echoes this. “It might have been a little weird when I wrote it,” he said, “but it seems less and less weird with each passing day.”
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“The Minutes” came during a period of creative ferment for Letts, during which he wrote “Mary Page Marlowe,” a play inspired in part by his mother, novelist Billie Letts, who died in 2014, and “Linda Vista,” which he said was inspired by some friends and fellow 50-somethings, “good fellows who have made some mistakes.” (He also finished an unproduced play, “The Scavenger’s Daughter,” which he said was too big and peculiar to get a showing.)
Letts, who has been sober for nearly three decades, says he has no explanation for the last decade’s prolific spurt of writing. “They just kind of tumbled out,” he said.
Each recent production has seemingly moved Letts — who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for the epic family drama “August: Osage County” — further away from his earlier reputation as enfant terrible, which he says was always overstated anyway.
“I’m pretty happy," he said. “I got no reason not to be.”
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That said, there is still a wee bit of the outcast vibe in Letts, who seems to prefer black-on-black garb, blocky glasses and dark boots. Now gray and slimmed down, he grew up an “awkward smart aleck,” in Durant, Oklahoma, the son of a pair of professors at Southeastern Oklahoma State University. His father, Dennis, was also an actor — Letts’ first performance came as a 15-year-old alongside his dad in a production of Howard Teichmann’s “Solid Gold Cadillac.”
“I did this play and people were nice to me,” Letts said, adding “it had that social element that I wanted to repeat.”
Steppenwolf, with its ensemble company, had a similar vibe. “There isn’t a star system here,” he said. Nonetheless, Letts has become one of the bigger names and most steady producers at the company, which includes John Malkovich, Gary Sinise and Laurie Metcalf, who earned an Oscar nomination, playing opposite him in “Lady Bird.”
Oklahoma provided the backdrop for “August,” which remains one of Letts’ proudest accomplishments — a Tony for best play, in addition to the Pulitzer — and one of his most bittersweet, given that his father died during its Broadway run, his mother a few years later.
Both are often on Letts’s mind, particular as he and his wife raise Haskell, a blond, rhubarb-cheeked cherub sporting the same wispy-on-top hairstyle as his old man.
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They live in an elegant, modern home in the Bucktown neighborhood of Chicago, decorated with vintage movie posters and Mort Kunstler prints. Letts writes in a second-floor office piled with old newspapers he swears he’s going to read. His process is a technophile’s nightmare: pounding out words on an old IBM Selectric, before transferring scripts to a file on a laptop, which he then prints off the computer before … deleting the file, something he says sometimes forces him to retype — and rewrite — as he goes.
The basement of the home contains what Letts jokingly calls his “sickness”— a stash of 5,000 or so films on DVD, arranged alphabetically, by director’s name, secreted on shelves behind a row of curtains.
His parents liked jazz — Weather Report, Yusef Lateef — and Miles Davis was on the turntable on a recent visit. There were also plenty of kids’ books, and his son was happily baby-talking through “Charley Parker Played Be Bop,” and “Little Humans.”
“Little humans can put on a show,” the little boy said, repeating a line in the book.
His father beamed.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times .