The playwright behind Moonlight asks if money has replaced the soul of Black America
Some playwrights write to entertain. Tarell Alvin McCraney writes to make you reckon with yourself.
The Artistic Director of Geffen Playhouse and Academy Award-winning writer behind Moonlight has spent his career giving voice to the stories America would rather not sit with. Now, with Windfall — his latest work running at Steppenwolf Theatre Company through May 31, 2026 — McCraney takes on perhaps the most uncomfortable conversation of all: the price tag America has quietly placed on Black life.
Born in Miami’s Liberty Square and shaped by Chicago’s electric democracy, McCraney brings to the stage a father, a settlement offer, and three strangers who force a community to ask what it truly values. It’s a play that doesn’t preach. It provokes.
With the urgency of a man who has seen too much and the grace of a storyteller who knows exactly what he’s doing, McCraney breaks down what inspired Windfall, why Chicago is America’s most honest city, and what he needs audiences to carry with them when the lights come up.
What inspired you to write Windfall?
I remember when Glenn Davis, who is artistic director, and Audrey Francis, co-artistic directors, they approached me about writing for the 50th anniversary at Steppenwolf.
One of the things that I always want to do is be in conversation with the people I love, and so Alana Arenas, Jon Michael Hill, and Amir Smallwood are folks that I have been in the ensemble with for a while, and never gotten a chance to sort of work together. And so, when we got in the room — this was actually while they were rehearsing the Tony Award-winning, Pulitzer Prize-winning Purpose by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins on Broadway — I said, can y’all come out of y’all’s other rehearsal, and come into rehearsal with me, for a little workshop, and I just want to talk about money. Which is, you know, a kind of third rail conversation. You just don’t talk about money, you’re not supposed to talk about money, especially with your friends.
We started having these conversations about the ways in which money is tied to the bodies of Black people. The ways in which we have been monetized, the ways in which every major city in America has a line item in their police budget for harm that comes to the body. When police misconduct happens, Chicago has, I believe it’s something like $83 million set aside in a line item for police misconduct settlements, even though the settlements and the lawsuits often outpace that budget. But it means that the government, the city, is interested in putting that number down, because they know that that harm will come, and that harm usually is to Black and brown folks.
While we were thinking about that, and we were thinking about the political unrest that has gotten us to this day, there was an encampment across the street from where I work at the Geffen Playhouse of students who had decided that they were going to encamp on campus at UCLA. I was amazed by the activism that they brought forward, and also to learn that there were other kinds of encampments all over Chicago, in recent history and in the past. And also, in my hometown of Miami, the Dream Defenders had encamped around a precinct before, so I really wanted to just talk about the ways in which we are trying to disrupt this system, but this system keeps finding ways to eat right into itself, laws that protect itself. There’s an insurance policy about the brutality or the harm that may happen to our community.
I just wanted to think about that, and our audiences at Steppenwolf are a cross-section. There are people who are in the seat of power there. We’ve had sitting mayors in our audiences quite often. We have legislators, we have former mayors, we have people on our board who make legislation. And then we have the youth, we have a very grassroots, young adults at Steppenwolf who are about that life, as they say. They are trying to give voice to the voiceless. And I thought, well, I need to make a play where we can come and have a conversation across the aisles to each other, and no better place to do that than in the round at Steppenwolf.
Windfall is a play about a father who finds out that his child was harmed by the police, and he is offered some money. And there are three strangers, visitors, who visit him in offering him that money. Now, that might sound like a bleak moment in the theater, it might sound like a tragic play, but it isn’t. It’s one where we discuss the ways in which our community has metabolized this kind of harm for years, and centuries, almost, and the ways in which we respond, and the ways in which we need to think new about fighting oppression, and making sure our voice is heard.
Can you talk about some of the ways that Chicago informed the story?
Chicago, for me, as a young person, when I came to Chicago for the first time when I was 18 to start school and to study drama, and then became a part of the Steppenwolf Ensemble. And it is a place where the voice of people who are oppressed is often heard. Democracy is alive in Chicago, and always has been, and always will be. In fact, before I left Chicago, we hosted a screening of a documentary that Glenn and I are working on called Area 2, which is about the Burgess precincts that were happening in Chicago in the 80s into the 90s, and the cases of folks who were wrongfully convicted in those areas.
Out of those trials, out of those cases, came the torture panel in Chicago, which is almost one of its kind in the nation. There’s no other city that I know of that has a panel that is specifically made to root out any of the kind of misconduct that has happened before, and that’s such a win. And, at the same time, there are laws on the books that protect people who are incentivized to stool pigeon, to snitch.
Chicago is, as I have always said, America’s first real city. It’s the city where all the good of America and all of the bad of America are right there for us to engage in. And because democracy is so alive and well, it served as the place where I wanted to make sure we were in dialogue. It’s also my creative home, so I wanted to make sure we were having a conversation about home.
But to be honest and to be fair, this play could take place in any city. New York, LA, Miami, Houston, because the same line item and the same settlement could be happening in any of those neighborhoods in the Third Ward, in Liberty City, where I grew up. In South Central LA. All of these stories, sad but true, could be happening in those neighborhoods.
What was your collaboration process like with Awoye Tempo?
Awoye is one of those people that can get into a room and make peace happen. And she just provided a space for everyone to come with joy and great respect for a conversation that could get really gnarly. I mean, we are talking about pronouns and identity, and, you know, three generations of Black folk trying to have conversations about whose activism is better. Whose activist songs are better, Kendrick Lamar or Sweet Honey in the Rock, right? And in those moments of needing to be at cross-purposes, you need a person like Oye who is making space for all the ideas, for the best ideas. So that’s what it was like working with her. We had worked together previously on other things, but in this capacity, she really birthed a platform for me to do this work in a brave way.
This play is unlike any other play I’ve ever written. When you come see it, and when you engage in it, you’ll see that there is some certainly some telltale McCraney, Alvin McCraney styles, but definitely new stuff for those of you who want the mixtape. And I’m very grateful that she allowed me to try my new stuff.
How do you approach building characters that feel authentic and layered?
I have been blessed with collaborators, and when I say blessed, I really do mean that. God put people in place for me to work with, and I’ve been working with Glenn, Alana, and Jon, and now Namir for a long time, and so when I get in the room, I just really try to bring this sketch. There’s a sketch of a character that I’m trying on, and I give it to them, and I look, and I go, oh, this isn’t fit, right? Let me tuck this here, let me hem this here, let me let this out some. This might need some more room.
And what happens is the actors begin to show you what they can actually inhabit, right? They’re so good that they can do almost anything. But then there’s these moments where you’re like, that feels wrong, that doesn’t feel quite right. And again, all the characters aren’t natural, they aren’t people you would see at this pace all the time, but they are people you would see in given circumstances, at a heightened circumstance, right? You know that auntie who talks like that. You know that cousin who gets a little animated and says things like that, right? You know that Black capitalist who has read all the books and the laws of power and wants to now instruct you on how you should invest your money. We all know that cousin.
And so, when these actors are trying on those characters, you want to make sure that they can do that authentically, and fully, and using their full self. That’s my shortcut, right? I listen to what the actors are doing, and I watch what they need, and when they need space, I try to make sure that they have it. And when they’ve gotten too much, and they’re getting tangled up in the fabric, I cut it back.
How do you see theater’s role in shaping culture?
I think Martha Lavey, our former artistic director, used to say all the time that theater is the place we go to practice being human.
Because it’s the place where you sit, and you’re listening to someone tell you a story. Now, again, we have great sets, but at the end of the day, the actor tells you where they are. I went to go see recently Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which is an incredible production over at the Goodman. And we’re in Chicago in that studio, but only because they tell us, not because we are actually in the 312. It’s because they tell us that’s where we are, and in that point of time. And so, it is a place where we are allowing people to help us imagine something, and we imagine it together. And that is the most human thing possible.
We don’t know if other species do this, but we know that human beings come together and recollect together, and storytell together, and pass on together. And so, what’s incredible about the Ensemble theater at Steppenwolf is that it’s in the round. Not only can you see the actor telling that story, and believe where they’re taking us, but you can see across the way, and that might be your friend, your enemy, your neighbor, that person who bumped into you when you was on the way out of the subway. They’re sitting right across from you, engaging in the same way, dreaming in that same way.
And that is how democracy expands, right? Because we choose to sit in a room with people we may agree with, may not agree with, and we choose to dream together. And that choice is what democracy is all about. Democracy isn’t that we all believe the same thing, or that even we all feel the same way. Democracy is that we all come from where we come from, and we sit around a space, and we choose to live peaceably together. And so that’s a practice that the theater has. It is extending that part of our culture even now. That’s why the Greeks swore by it. That’s why the Romans need it. That’s why authoritarians and totalitarians want to oppress it all the time. Because in the theater, you are actually practicing that thing that gives us all voice.
I may say there’s a tree behind us on stage. Your vision of that tree and my vision of that tree may not be the same, but the fact that we agree that there’s a tree there means something. That means we can agree on something. The unseen can become something to both of us. We can both have faith in things unseen, and so that’s pretty powerful. And pretty necessary for us as a people.
If there was one idea that you would want people to walk away with after seeing Windfall, what would that be?
The main idea is that money has replaced spirituality for us in our communities, in our society. And is that where we want to be? That’s the main question. Is that who we are?
It’s not a question of whether or not money has done it, it has done that. We give money to solve almost every issue there is. Injustice, throw some money at it. Heartbreak, throw some money at it.
Almost anything you can name, we think there is a cash value to it. And that’s rooted in how we became a society. The free labor to this country is indebted to the bodies that literally walk around every day today. My ancestors were free labor that built this country, and are owed a debt. And we talk about that debt quite often, right? And some people don’t want to talk about that debt.
There’ll be this, oh, we’ll build this park. I grew up in what was the largest housing development for poor people in the nation, which was Liberty Square at the time, only to be outpaced by New York, I think it was Queens, Queensboro Bridge projects.
But there’s something about the way in which we try to monetize our efforts towards being more human to each other that we need to wrestle with. We’ve got children online every day thinking that their job is to grind, to get up and grind towards making that money on the internet. Because that’s all they see, that’s all they’re taught. And that is where we are, and we’ve gotta make a decision pretty soon here, if that’s what we want to leave behind for our children. And if that’s who we want to be, going forward.
Rapid fire
One word for Windfall: Money.
Who inspires you: Lorraine Hansberry.
Creative habit you swear by: Sleep.
What’s next: I’m writing a new play, and mounting it, hopefully, in September.
Windfall runs at Steppenwolf Theatre Company through May 31, 2026.