Steppenwolf Theatre Company announced this morning that Phylicia Rashad will direct the final production of its recently revealed 2017–18 season, the Chicago premiere of The Roommate by Jen Silverman.
Rashad, best known to mass audiences as TV's Best Mom Clair Huxtable on The Cosby Show, is an accomplished stage actor and director. She’ll be working at Steppenwolf for the first time, but she has previously worked on a Steppenwolf production—as a replacement in the role of Violet Weston in the Broadway transfer of Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County in 2009. She also worked with Steppenwolf ensemble members Tarell Alvin McCraney, Alana Arenas and Tina Landau in the New York premiere of McCraney’s Head of Passes at the Public Theater in 2016, directed by Landau and co-starring Arenas. She’ll reprise that role in Los Angeles this fall at the Mark Taper Forum. Steppenwolf honored Rashad at its annual Women in the Arts luncheon last month; if there was any buttering up on the menu, it seems to have worked.
Rashad first worked in Chicago as a director, helming a commercial production of Paul Oakley Stovall’s comedy Immediate Family at the Goodman Theatre in 2012. She’ll direct Sandra Marquez and Ora Jones, both members of the Steppenwolf ensemble, in The Roommate, a comedy about two diametrically opposed women in their 50s sharing an apartment. It’s scheduled to run June 21 to August 21, 2018 in the Downstairs Theatre.
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