It had been two decades, by Harry Lennix’s estimate, since he’d acted on a Chicago stage. Commitments to film and TV projects, including 10 seasons on NBC’s The Blacklist, kept him away. But he made up for lost time, returning to deliver indelible performances in three high-profile productions this year. “Chicago is the city of my birth. Chicago is my home,” says Lennix, 60, who grew up in South Shore and started his career in the city’s theater scene in the 1980s after studying at Northwestern. “You can take me out of Chicago, but you cannot take the Chicago out of me.”
Lennix, who now lives in New York, began the year starring as a familiar-feeling civil rights leader, pastor, and patriarch of a Chicago family in Steppenwolf Theatre’s lauded Purpose. Though Lennix says he didn’t base his performance on Jesse Jackson, it’s hard to miss the similarities: “This character is a deeply complex fellow, and we know that what he’s preaching about is not in line with what may be going on in his personal life. Like every other person in the clergy, you know that these are men, these are real humans.”
In the fall, Lennix led the Goodman Theatre’s revival of Inherit the Wind, inhabiting a fictionalized version of the lawyer Clarence Darrow. And in between those productions, he got to portray someone he knew personally: August Wilson, in the late playwright’s monologue How I Learned What I Learned. Lennix earned a Jeff Award for that performance, staged under the auspices of Congo Square Theatre.
Wilson was a muse for that Black company, and Lennix has been a strong supporter himself. He has also been the public face of a campaign to establish a Black cultural center in Bronzeville, with Congo Square as a primary resident alongside a proposed museum of Black performing arts. Steppenwolf and Goodman are worthy ambassadors for Chicago theater, he says, “but we need one on the South Side worth a damn, and I intend to put ourselves — put myself — in the mix there.”
Next up, though, Purpose moves to Broadway in the spring, and Lennix hopes to reprise his role. After that? “This is an extremely unpredictable craft,” he says judiciously, but adds: “I always tell people I’ve never really left Chicago, and I can’t wait to come back again.”