



Born in 1957 in Lawrence, Kan., as one of seven children, but educated mostly at the all-girls Immaculata High School in Detroit, Lavey was the daughter of a man who worked for the CIA. Those who knew her often speculated that although Lavey had entered a seemingly different field, she had absorbed much useful advice around her family breakfast table in Michigan. Especially when it came to never fully showing your hand.



The premieres that took place at Steppenwolf under Lavey's stewardship form a formidable list, not the least of which was Tracy Letts' Pulitzer Prize-winning "August: Osage County," a show that brought Steppenwolf hurtling back to New York attention as, still, the brand name in intense American acting, and "Superior Donuts," which spawned a TV series. Similarly, the theater created many famous productions during the Lavey era, some of which moved to Broadway, and that cleaned up at awards time. Alongside new work like Austin Pendleton's remarkable "Orson's Shadow," directed by David Cromer, such shows included the Steppenwolf revivals of Ken Kesey's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" (2000) and Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" (2010), both featuring Morton, in whose career Lavey took an intense interest.



"Martha was directly responsible for my directing career," Morton said. "Martha pushed people to do uncomfortable things, just because she thought they could do them."



But Lavey, who avoided the acquisition of spouse or offspring, saw the entire Chicago theater landscape, including its nascent storefront companies and more than a few Steppenwolf wannabes, as very much within her maternal purview.



"I have known her for 35 years and I loved her very much," said Robert Falls, artistic director of the Goodman Theatre. "There was a privacy to Martha. She was always more interested in talking about you. She had the greatest curiosity of any theater person I have ever known. For her friends and for her community, for all of us who loved her so much, this is a loss beyond the tragic."



As Falls also noted, Lavey could constantly be seen at opening nights all over the city, a habit that afforded her a unique place of respect among the young artists of the city who typically throw stones at the larger institutions (they never were aimed in Lavey's direction). And she persuaded her own famous but notoriously insular institution to open its spaces to other companies who needed help — from Redmoon Theater to The Hypocrites to The Inconvenience.



She also advocated for the Chicago theater on an almost daily, sometimes hourly, basis, picking up the phone (to the chagrin of her staffers) to argue with a critic over a negative review, or, far more often, to point out a talented writer or company that she felt was in danger of being overlooked, or putting her name to someone else's grand cultural plan that was in need of her respected imprimatur. When she found herself in front of a microphone in New York, a not-infrequent occurrence, she typically avoided waxing lyrical on her own accomplishments at Steppenwolf — despite all the Tony Awards and Broadway transfers and the New York love of brands — but spoke instead of the excellence of Chicago theater and its crucial commitment to creative community. And she rarely failed to express her astonishment at her own good fortune.



Over her tenure, which ended when she graciously and discreetly stepped aside in 2015 for Anna D. Shapiro to take the helm, Lavey greatly expanded and diversified the Steppenwolf ensemble. That was perhaps her most crucial professional achievement, for it long has been the fountainhead from which Steppenwolf work has sprung, and surely will continue to spring.



"It was Martha who reached out to us," said the African-American playwright and Oscar-winning screenwriter Tarell Alvin McCraney, who became an ensemble member at Steppenwolf on Lavey's watch and whose career exploded thereafter, as did so many of the younger Steppenwolf artists and new ensemble members nurtured by Lavey. "It was Martha who did what Steppenwolf had not done before."