Mariann Mayberry, a self-effacing but essential Chicago actress whose work embodied the city’s ensemble ethos and whose emotional intensity on stage seared many a Chicago heart, has died after a lengthy battle with cancer. She died early Tuesday, according to an announcement from the Steppenwolf Theatre Company.
Steppenwolf also said it was canceling Tuesday night’s performance of “Hir” because of Mayberry’s death. Amy Morton, a member of the cast, was one of Mayberry’s close friends.
Mayberry, 52, was a Steppenwolf ensemble member, an original cast member of Tracy Letts’ 2007 play “August: Osage County” and a frequent collaborator with the auteur director Mary Zimmerman and the Lookingglass Theatre.
“This is a serious loss,” Zimmerman said in an email to the Tribune Tuesday. “There’s not another like her. Her body was so entirely, so beautifully inhabited by her spirit, from head to toe. She had a kind of taut, sprung energy, a vitality on stage. And then so playful, so modest, so unassuming in rehearsal, full of wonder and invention; so in love with the story, with the act of dressing up, the act of pretend; so embracing of her colleagues, always on the brink of laughing. Free as a bird.”
Aside from “August: Osage County,” in which Mayberry created the role of Karen Weston, Mayberry’s memorable work includes the 1999 production of Paula Vogel’s “How I Learned to Drive” at the Northlight Theatre; the 2005 Steppenwolf production of Steven Dietz’s “The Last of the Boys”; and the 2006 Lookingglass production of Zimmerman’s “Argonautika,” wherein Mayberry played a pumped-up version of the goddess Athena, a character who had no problem telling the wind how to blow.
Heidi Stillman, the artistic director of Lookingglass, called Mayberry “a brilliant and consummate stage actor” able to draw from “a huge well of empathy for fellow humans.”
Along with “August,” Mayberry’s work on Broadway included the Steppenwolf production of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” in 2001 (she was Candy Starr) and Zimmerman’s “Metamorphoses,” in which Mayberry appeared for almost a year during one of several stints living in New York. That allowed her, like many Broadway performers, to also appear on TV in the “Law and Order” franchise.
Perhaps her greatest performance, though, came back in Chicago in the unforgettable 2012 Steppenwolf production of David Lindsay-Abaire‘s “Good People,” for which she won a Joseph Jefferson Award for best actress in a principal role for her work as the Boston Southie Margie, a role she had researched by sneaking a tape recorder into Boston taverns and recording the patrons.
The character was a struggling, working-class woman, and this was a part that seemed to tap into Mayberry’s background as a child of southwestern Missouri.
“I grew up very blue-collar and really poor,” she told the Tribune in 2012. “Even now, my parents don’t really understand what it is that I do.”
“Thank God I got out,” she said at the time.
Mayberry’s arrival in Chicago was a result of her father getting a job at the Six Flags Great America amusement park in Gurnee, after losing a post at Silver Dollar City in Branson. Newly installed in Illinois, she applied for, and to her surprise received, an acting scholarship at Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington and, upon graduation, walked through the door of the Steppenwolf Theatre looking for work. When she found herself bounced from an administrative position, she convinced then-managing director Stephen Eich to help secure her a chance on stage. Neither the company not the actress looked back.
Although her authenticity and famous dedication to research and hard work were widely heralded at the theater, where she was a beloved figure, Mayberry and her Missouri accent always were something of a curiosity to her colleagues, especially those from more polished backgrounds. The theater’s former artistic director, the late Martha Lavey, often marveled at Mayberry’s ability to “live out of a backpack” and what seemed to her to be a singularly unstinting embrace of the actor’s vagabond life. Even into middle age.
Eventually Mayberry settled down, insofar as an actor can settle down, and married her fellow performer Scott Jaeck.
“I always knew things would happen for me later in life,” she told the Tribune over a cup of tea one afternoon. “I remember being 7 and thinking I’m not getting married until I am 40. I’m certainly grateful though. So many actors at my age have to give up and go into something else. What could I do? I can type.”
She no doubt had that useful skill, but it hardly was necessary. And she never gave up.
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