This is a story about money. Don’t let them fool you otherwise. When a Chicago father loses his child in a clash with the police, he is visited by three strangers who advise him to take the city’s cash settlement, relocate and forget his grief — or else remain, haunted by memories of the world his child fought so hard to protect. This lyrical world premiere from Academy Award-winning ensemble member Tarell Alvin McCraney is a vital and timely look at the spirit of activism set against the most indifferent system of them all: the almighty dollar. — Steppenwolf’s “Windfall”
It sounds heavy, but: Don’t let the weight of the subject matter dissuade you from experiencing and growing from the love, care and joy inside “Windfall,” says Director Awoye Timpo, who sat down with Rebellious as part of our partnership with Steppenwolf.
Timpo, who directed “Lucy & Leroy” at Steppenwolf in 2024, spoke with us about the collaborative process behind “Windfall,” Black storytelling traditions and how audiences can support Black women directors in Chicago and beyond.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Karen Hawkins: I’m so grateful that we get to have this conversation.
Awoye Timpo: Yes, I’m very excited. I love this play so much. So I’m very excited to chat with you about it.
What do you love about it? Let’s start there.
Oh my goodness, there’s so many things. First of all, I think that Tarell McCraney is one the great writers of our time. So, it’s just an honor and a pleasure and a gift to sit inside of his words, and his ideas and the ways that the characters collide with one another. It’s just extraordinary. And a lot of my work is looking at Black storytelling traditions, and Black playmaking and theater-making traditions. And I just love how beautifully this piece fits inside of that and really cracks open the possibilities for our storytelling.
That is a perfect segue to a question around Chicago’s long history of police violence: There’s been so much said about it, but I don’t feel like we have really told those stories. Why is it important for our voices to be telling this story and living this work out on stage?
There’s a great historic theater maker and producer, his name was Woodie King Jr., and he was the founder of New Federal Theater and the first producer ever of “For Colored Girls [Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf].” He passed away recently, and there was a celebration service in New York. One of the things people kept speaking about him was the ways in which he made space for our stories, in our voices, in our unique rhythms, to live. And I feel like other people can tell our story, but until we tell our story in our rhythms, in our voices, with all of our perspectives and beauty and just the rigor of the storytelling, the story has not been told. And so it feels like this opportunity for Steppenwolf, in particular, which is such a renowned Chicago-based, storied company to investigate our stories, to give us space for Black artists.
The beautiful thing about making a new play is that you’re always asking a lot of questions. We didn’t come into this play and say, these are the answers to these questions. We said, what does it mean to gather this group of people to figure out together how to tell this story? And so, in a way, the making of the play becomes guided by Tarell’s extraordinary writing, a kind of a think tank of ideas, with some incredible minds thinking about, how do we as a community tell our own stories for our people.
It sounds very collaborative, this process.
Absolutely. The beautiful thing about this piece is that we also had a lot of people in the room who’ve known each other for a very long time. Our playwright, Tarell, and one of our actors, the incredible Glenn Davis, as well as Alana Arenas, they went to college together. Tarell and Alana have known each other since they grew up together in Miami, so there was just a lot of trust in the room. So much of the play is reinforcing a notion of we and us, rather than just I, and I feel like we really tried to embody that inside of the rehearsal process as well. And again, with a really beautiful and incredible guide that was this script that was itself always growing and changing because we, as the people creating it, we’re growing and changing inside of the making of it. So the collaboration was key, but it’s also serving as a model for, I think, what the play is trying to teach us or remind us about how we work together as a community.
Why now? Why is now a time to tell this particular story in this particular way?
The beautiful thing about this piece is that, as I say, it’s about asking questions together, right? And I think this question is a recurring one: What is the value of a life? And what does it mean to even consider a life in terms of a monetary value rather than a community value? I think that’s a question that pervades our every single day existence. And so now is the time, because these are questions that we’re asking all the time. We’re asking these questions when we see police killings. We’re asking these questions as we see and ask questions about why are we going to war? Whose life is valued inside of these processes? There are so many things that pervade our every day that are tickling that question.
Now is the time for us to remember and get to the core of why these ideas are circulating and are circular inside of our society, so that hopefully we can think about how to break some of those cycles and figure out what our responsibility is inside of it. We think of plays really as rituals, right? And rituals have intention.
And so for us, we really determine what’s the intention of this ritual for us. And the intention and the reason for now is for us to interrogate the ways in which capital continues to try to silo us, but also to create a space for us to remember and also interrogate what it means for us to work together and what community and what love means inside of the societies that we live. There’s a West African tenet, that anything we do should be in service for the betterment of the community. And so I feel like those are the things that we’re trying to do, interrogate these ideas to serve and for the betterment of the community.
So does that inform what you want audiences to know about this show? I’m curious about people reading the description and being like, oh, man, that sounds heavy. What do you want people to know as they’re considering this show?
The thing that is so brilliant in Tarell’s writing is that he’s taken a subject matter that is so inherently dark, but infuse it with humor and with so much love. The thing I want people to know is that you’re walking into a communal, safe place for us to ask questions and think together and play together inside of that space so that we can really ask tough questions, but also know that we’ve got each other’s back inside of it. We laugh through it, we cry through it, but that’s just part of how we live. We sing through it. We prompt other people to sing through it, you know what I mean? We laugh together. And all of that is encompassed inside of the experience. So I would tell people to come through and to know that while it’s a difficult subject, it’s handled with a lot of care and love and respect, because it wants us to be able to all grow from it. It doesn’t want to leave us diminished, it wants us to leave lifted inside of the question asking.
Chicago audiences are a very specific beast, as you know. What has been your impression of how we’re engaging with the play?
It’s so beautiful. It’s so much fun. It’s just been so amazing to have everybody in the room, like seeing their neighbors in the theater space. And the beautiful thing is that it’s also in the round. So you can see your neighbor across the way. And I feel like that really invites the spirit of, oh, OK, we’re doing something together. We’re participating together inside of the event. So it’s been just magnificent to be in the audience with the people who have made the choice to come and be a part of this event and this experience. And one thing that the Steppenwolf has been doing, which is really incredible, is that after every single performance, there is a post-show conversation, and it’s conversation that’s not with the actors or the creative team necessarily, but really a conversation amongst the community about what’s resonating in the play, what questions are coming up for them in the play.
So you get a really wonderful experience of both getting to experience the story and to have a group of people to talk to about it afterwards. So it’s a really holistic, beautiful event. For us, we are in the rehearsal room for like a month or so, putting it together a little bit in isolation. This time we remixed the formula a little bit and invited the audience into the process earlier on. The thing that we do is not complete without the audience presence. And especially for this piece, it has a kind of a call-and-response element, so having the audience is essential and beautiful.
It sounds like these community conversations also offer a more expansive idea of the role that theater plays in the community.
Yes, yes. Absolutely. It’s easy now, especially, to pop into the theater, pop out, continue doing your thing. Many people do that, and they have the conversations in the car ride home, or children and their parents are coming through to see it, and they’re having great conversations when they get home. So it’s been amazing as people have been texting me about, oh, I saw the show and then I had a great conversation with my mom after, for like an hour. That is so special and meaningful for us. I’m excited for all the conversations that are happening around the piece.
I’m going to switch gears a little bit to talk about perception that I am hoping you will tell me is wrong: Which is that there are not a lot of Black women doing the work that you do, directing plays and creating this kind of work. I’d love to be wrong.
I’ll answer it in two ways. There are so many incredible Black female directors in Chicago, in New York, in Minneapolis, in Los Angeles, in towns and cities across America. There are so many fierce, incredible, brilliant, amazingly talented directors. The challenge I would say is that we are inside of a larger American theater system, and particularly as in so many industries, finances are a concern. People are really paring back on the amount of programming. And we still have a lot of work to do to make sure that we are opening the door for all the incredible talent that exists to have their debuts at Steppenwolf and beyond.
But I am heartened by the fact that there’s so much incredible talent out there, and I think the task for all of us is to figure out how to make more opportunity, crack open the doors for those artists, for their stories that they want to tell to not go untold, for the pathways that they want open to not be blocked off. That’s the work that we have to do because the talent is there and extraordinary.
Are there things that audiences can do, that Rebellious readers can do to help to open some of those doors?
Absolutely. I think there are great directors in Chicago, the great Malkia Stampley, who works at the Goodman. She’s got a show coming up called “Covenant.” I would say go check that out. It’s coming up and it’s incredible. If the wonderful director Lili-Ann Brown is in town, she’s brilliant. See anything that she’s doing. And just support the incredible Black female and female-identifying artists who are doing great work in the great city of Chicago.
Two last questions. One: What makes you Rebellious?
Hmm. Great question. I think it’s kind of connected to your last question. I’m a freelance director, meaning I move around the country at a bunch of different theaters. And sometimes I’ll have Black women actors in the rehearsal rooms that I’m leading who say, I’ve never been in a room with a Black female director, which is crazy, you know? So I feel like my work is really about finding ways to bring more directors in wherever I’m going in. As I sometimes like to joke, there are so many rules and systems, et cetera, that are in place. And sometimes I’m like, I was not there when that rule was made. So I don’t think it pertains to me.
I feel the spirit of being able to say, to really ask questions inside of my own practice, and then inside of the larger theatrical system of norms to say, I don’t think that’s how we do that. Because we come from a long, long line of incredible Black directors. There’s a long legacy that I feel that I come from. So I try to bring that forward with me and say that, that legacy is long, and try to push that forward without being trapped inside of more narrow ways of thinking about what this art form is and what it can do.
What is the most rebellious thing you have ever done?
We had a conversation early in the rehearsal process with Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, who I worked with at the African American Policy Forum, and we were talking about the notion of disruption and what are things that are exciting her about disruption now. And in a way, I think that sometimes the very presence of a Black female director is the disruption inside the White institutions. Because, as I say, we have so many institutions that are really geared to supporting Black theater artists. But I think inside of the PWIs [predominantly White institutions], the fact of my presence is a disruption. And the fact that we can bring in so many incredible Black artists working at the top of their craft is in its own way a disruption and a reshaping of the industry. So I’m very excited to be a part of that and standing on the shoulders of so many greats while I do it.
“Windfall” is at Steppenwolf through May 31.