A real welcome home for onetime L.A. actor
Things really seem to be coming together for Steppenwolf ensemble member Francis Guinan. He stars in the current Steppenwolf show, "Kafka on the Shore." And before that he was on Broadway, in Tracy Letts' Tony-Award-winning play, "August: Osage County." Oddly, the flowering of his career happened after Guinan left Hollywood, where he had worked for almost two decades, and moved his family back to the Midwest, to an old house on a quiet street in leafy Elmhurst.
The irony of this is not lost on Guinan. "I have been telling people I am the luckiest person in theater," Guinan says.
And luck has played a significant part in Guinan's life, even in his choice of professions. Guinan became interested in acting in college during the Vietnam era after a low draft lottery and a failing grade in chemistry persuaded him to move from pre-med to English. Later, a chance meeting with the director of a college play led him to transfer from Iowa State University to Illinois State University in Normal, where he met a group of actors intent on starting a theater company in Chicago.
That theater eventually became Steppenwolf. Guinan was invited to join the ensemble in 1979.
Guinan appeared in many Steppenwolf productions, include Frank Galati's Tony-Award winning adaptation of "The Grapes of Wrath." And then, like many Steppenwolf ensemble members, Guinan moved from Chicago to New York to Los Angeles to get work in The Industry.
"I moved to New York and then L.A.," Guinan says. "I spent 17 years in Los Angeles. I was fortunate to get lots of work in television. Most of the time it was great; I didn't have to work hard to get work."
Then, in Guinan's words, "work started drying up. The middle class in Hollywood is disappearing," Guinan says. "Either you are Tom Cruise or you are everyone else. Either you earn lots of money or you earn the minimum." And the minimum is very hard to live on, especially if you are trying to raise a family.
"It was my wife who suggested we get out of Dodge," Guinan says. "We checked around. We wanted to find a place with a decent school for our son. We looked at Oak Park, Evanston. Elmhurst had the right combination of housing stock and good schools."
Guinan and family made the move. And that was when his luck changed for the better. Almost from the moment he returned, his stage acting career bloomed.
Guinan most recently appeared in both the Chicago and New York productions of "August: Osage County," only leaving the New York cast in June after appearing in it for eight months.
"I missed my family and my home," Guinan says.
He returned to Chicago and was immediately cast in Frank Galati's adaptation of Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami's absurdist comic novel about post-war Japan, "Kafka on the Shore."
"I play four characters," Guinan says. "The two major ones are Colonel Sanders and Johnnie Walker. Not the real Colonel Sanders or the real Johnny Walker." Guinan's Johnny Walker is a lowlife who murders cats in the neighborhood for pleasure. Likewise, Guinan's Colonel Sanders is really a pimp.
"The story is rather dreamlike," Guinan says. "It is sort of an artifice on which the author, and Galati (as director and adaptor), have hung this series of images and ideas. I don't know how to describe it. It has the structure of a poem. There is a story that you can follow, but that is not what drives the piece. It's a wonderful piece of theater."
"Kafka on the Shore" runs Thursday, Sept. 18 through Sunday, Nov. 16 at The Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halstead, Chicago. For tickets call (312) 335-1650.