Steppenwolf Theatre Company has long been one of the nation's most influential ensemble companies,

known for the actors it's launched and the groundbreaking work it's produced.

Now it's marking its 50th season, at a moment of real uncertainty for theaters across the country.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown traveled to Chicago for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Think if I had stayed in the theater.

A production of Dance of Death, a play by August Stringberg being presented in a modern adaptation.

And growing old, it's horrible, but it is interesting, I'd imagine.

For actor Jeff Perry,

it's yet another opportunity to do his thing. Now 50 years on at the theater company he helped

create. It feels like wishes fulfilled? It does. Yeah. A place built of artists by artists and for artists is an exceedingly rare experiment.

Rare to start, rarer still to last.

Steppenwolf Theater's roots go back to the early 1970s, a group of teenage friends in

a Chicago area high school, then at Illinois State

University, and then a do-it-yourself theater company, co-founded by Perry, Terry Kinney,

and Gary Sinise, putting on shows in a church basement in Chicago.

Here's what we thought simultaneously, I think, is the truth. We're going to change the face of American theater, and we'll probably fall apart within, you know, within a month or two.

You tell him that I got a couple projects. He might be incident.

It would become an important incubator of American theater.

Actors, including John Malkovich, here with Cinesse in a groundbreaking 1984 production

of Sam Shepard's True West.

I never thanked you for saving my life.

Seneese himself would become best known as Lieutenant Dan in the 1994 film, Forrest Gump.

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