Brendan Hunt Brings The Movement You Need to Steppenwolf Through May 10
Brendan Hunt is back in Chicago with The Movement You Need, and the one-man show is now in previews at Steppenwolf before opening this weekend and running through May 10. For the 53-year-old Chicago-born actor, it is a homecoming built from a stage memoir about childhood, his late mother, and the city that shaped both.
Chicago Roots, 53
Hunt said the current version is “pretty scripted,” which is a shift from earlier versions he performed at Hollywood Fringe and then at Boom Chicago, where he described the jump as moving from “30 seats to 340 seats.” At Steppenwolf, he called the production “a proper level-up with a director and designers,” a telling line for a piece that has moved from workshop energy toward a more finished stage run.
The material goes directly into family life with his troubled divorced mother in Rogers Park, Lake View, Gold Coast, and elsewhere in Chicago. That gives the show a narrower lane than a standard memoir act: it is rooted in specific neighborhoods, not broad nostalgia, and it draws its authority from the fact that Hunt is telling the story as someone who grew up here, not as someone passing through.
From 1990s Stages
Hunt started on local stages in Chicago in the 1990s, then spent five years with the Boom Chicago comedy ensemble in Amsterdam before reaching the profile he now carries from Ted Lasso. The television series went on hiatus after its third season, after winning multiple Emmys and a Peabody Award, which leaves this run as one of the clearest current places to see Hunt working live rather than through the screen role that made him widely known as Coach Beard.
Two early theater memories sit underneath the show’s title and tone: he first saw A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Court Theatre in seventh grade, and he saw a Second City show called Jean-Paul Sartre and Ringo in eighth grade, with Bonnie Hunt in the cast. The title The Movement You Need quotes a lyric from The Beatles’ “Hey Jude,” and Hunt has said, “Truth in comedy is vital.”
Steppenwolf Through May 10
The show began taking shape in 2022 after his mother’s death, and that timeline explains why this Steppenwolf run feels more substantial than a stopover. Hunt has already tested the piece in multiple cities, but Chicago is where the memoir lands with the most local weight, because the story is tied to the same streets and institutions that first put him onstage.
For anyone deciding whether to go, the practical answer is simple: this is not a generic celebrity monologue, and it is not trying to be one. It is a more polished version of a personal Chicago story, running only through May 10, which makes the opening stretch the best place to catch it before the schedule closes.
