In Selina Fillinger’s White House farce POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive, the bumbling president remains unseen. The playwright instead gives the spotlight to a coterie of female enablers, ranging from his first lady and the chief of staff to an amiable young mistress, as they labor to prop up the big guy. The women’s methods and motivations may vary, but ultimately they all debase themselves in different manners to keep the country’s father figure from flaming out. Which invites the question: Why does that guy get to be president, when they’re doing all the work?

For Audrey Francis, who makes her Steppenwolf Theatre Company directing debut with the play’s Chicago premiere (October 26 to December 3), Fillinger’s lightly feminist comedy speaks to the heightened and often extraneous expectations that ambitious women can face. “You’d be surprised how much feedback one can get as to, like, what should or shouldn’t be a part of [your] personality or character, especially being a woman in leadership,”she says.

When it comes to leadership, Francis speaks from experience. As an actor in her 20s, she and Anne Adams helmed Pine Box Theatre, a short-lived but significant storefront company they formed with fellow members of the School at Steppenwolf’s class of 2004. She later started her own influential training center, Black Box Acting, with Pine Box colleague Laura Hooper Doughty, and has worked as an acting coach on local TV productions for Amazon, Showtime, and NBC.

Then in 2021, four years after she joined the Steppenwolf ensemble (her acting credits for the company include The Fundamentals, Between Riverside and Crazy, and Dance Nation), she and actor Glenn Davis were named the company’s co–artistic directors, taking over from Anna D. Shapiro. For Francis, joint leadership felt right: “I can’t imagine not talking with somebody else, having some sort of friend or voice or someone to disagree with when making really big decisions. And I respect Glenn immensely. You know when you’re with somebody that really artistically inspires you, but they’re not an echo chamber either? That’s exciting.”

When Shapiro took charge in 2015, she expressed a desire to continue diversifying both the ensemble (which was nearly all-white for its first three decades) and the work onstage, just as her predecessor, the late Martha Lavey, spent much of her 20-year tenure pushing Steppenwolf beyond the macho, rough-and-tumble reputation the company earned in its youth. Now, nearly 50 years into Steppenwolf’s history, Francis finds herself at the helm of a theater that’s still trying to define itself.

This comes at a fraught financial moment: Late this summer, the company announced it was laying off 12 percent of its staff, having seen subscriptions fall 40 percent since 2019 (following an industrywide postpandemic trend). And just as Francis and Davis took the reins, Steppenwolf opened its new theater and education center, a $54 million expansion they’re now charged with filling.

Having spent much of the past two years fulfilling production commitments made prior to the pandemic, Francis and Davis now open the first season of programming that’s truly theirs. “One of the things we really thought about this year is, How do we maintain the integrity of Steppenwolf’s bold, irreverent, challenging work and also allow ourselves to have a healthy sense of humor and hope in this moment in our city?” says Francis. “There was a lot of traumatic stuff on Steppenwolf’s stages for a long time. We did a bit of a listening tour, and a lot of people are like, ‘I’m so fucking depressed right now. I just need a little bit of joy or a little bit of laughter.’ ”

To Francis, her staging of POTUS — featuring ensemble members Celeste M. Cooper, Sandra Marquez, Caroline Neff, and Karen Rodriguez, among others — delivers this levity yet is still pure Steppenwolf. “I love having these artists onstage who are athletic and fierce and irreverent and funny and don’t give a fuck about making an ass out of themselves,” she says. “I don’t know if I’ll ever direct again, because to me this play was written for me to direct it. At Steppenwolf. In Chicago.”