It's the play that put Steppenwolf on the international map, coined the term "Chicago-Style"acting and made John Malkovich into Hollywood's most Fabulous Monster. After over three decades of seeing its most thrilling moments (the ones that still give us chills as we recall them) re-enacted in countless studios, storefronts and classrooms, littered with kitchen shrapnel and reeking of testosterone fumes—well, a production that doesn’t try to replicate the legend comes as a relief. In the 21st-century Steppenwolf-does-Shepard experience, not only do Jon Michael Hill and Namir Smallwood actually look like brothers, but the similarities in their height and weight make them more evenly matched physically, thus enabling us to ignore the cartoonish visual aspects of earlier productions and instead take note of the psychological disparities that keep Lee and Austin at odds with one another—enmity assuring mutual failure. Focusing attention on the textual, rather than the transactional, dynamics allows us to absorb the expository details pursuant to comprehending the evolution of the crisis under way. (Their mother's equanimity at discovering the house in shambles and her sons bent on nihilistic rampages, for example, bespeaks a tribe where such behavior is commonplace.) What this does, that the 1982 version didn't, is to give us an emotional stake in the fortunes of the siblings, whose talents—one for imaginative storytelling, the other for articulate composition—could make them both rich and successful, if only they could learn to work together. When the final confrontation ensures that this will never happen, we feel the weight of its wasted potential, doomed to wither in the harsh desert climate like the carefully-tended plants in their mother's sunroom.
