Writer Tarell Alvin McCraney’s new drama Windfall, running now at Steppenwolf Theatre through May 31, is billed by its theater company as a story about “the spirit of activism versus money.”
The play depicts a Chicago man whose son is killed in a violent police incident. When the father is offered a significant cash settlement, he is visited by strangers and ghosts, all of whom weigh in on his moral dilemma and ruminate on a key existential question: What is the value of a human life, specifically a Black life, in our society?
McCraney, who is gay, won an Oscar for co-writing the 2016 Best Picture winner Moonlight. He is a longtime member of Steppenwolf and is additionally the artistic director of the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles.
McCraney told Windy City Times that Windfall’s thematic questions have increasingly weighed on him as he has entered middle-age and seen the nation’s impulses toward capitalism intensify. Societal discourses around health care, politics and public safety now can seem hijacked and shut down when they intersect with money, he said.
In the play, “I’m looking at the world in terms of what we value and how we value it,” McCraney said. “I think everybody can agree that in this country, money has a premium on our imagination, on our spiritual aspirations and on our physical well being.”
He added,”Because of the way in which our society is structured, money is always the goal, rather than the tool towards a more perfect union. … Literally the law currently stipulates that we put aside in our police budgets at least $83 million, I believe, in Chicago, for police misconduct—and no money in revitalizing or strengthening [solutions to] the reasons why that misconduct happens in the first place.”
Like most of his previous stage work, Windfall makes extensive use of music to accompany its stage action.
“In something like this, dealing with activism or the ways in which we speak truth to power, music is always been there—whether in the songs of protest and activism, or in the church,” McCraney explained, adding that in Windfall, “Music was always going to be a part of it. There’s just a musicality in the way we speak—I think that that lends itself to a kind of rhythm in the play.”
Theater has been a passion for McCraney since he was a youngster growing up in Florida. He was bullied frequently and took figurative refuge at Miami’s African Heritage Cultural Arts Center, and fell under the tutelage of its director, Marshall L Davis, Sr., for whom the Center has since been renamed.
Davis offered the young McCraney the chance to “hide without hiding,” he said. “Mr. Davis said, ‘There [will] be no hiding here.’”
The school had a very “Black Arts Movement-approach,” McCraney recalled, meaning participants learned about everything the Center had to offer. So McCraney took classes in acting, singing and dancing, and, perhaps most significantly, cultivated a passion for writing.
McCraney eventually graduated from DePaul University’s Theatre Program, where he began writing the script Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, the basis for Moonlight, as well as the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University. He is also now chair of Yale’s playwriting program.
It has been a decade since he and director Barry Jenkins shared a best adapted screenplay Oscar for Moonlight.
“I’ve never been to the Academy Awards since, and so I think I think it was one of those once in a lifetime things,” McCraney said. “Not to say that I wouldn’t go back again. I think that it’s one of those things that I’m very grateful for, and blessed that things turned out the way it turned out.”
McCraney rewatches the film occasionally “to see what it still has to teach me” and he admitted that the story still resonates with him the same way it did when he first conceived of it as a DePaul student in 2003. “I’m so glad that I had the encouragement and the blessing and grace for it to be made into a film—I’m so grateful for that,” he said.
McCraney wrote and executive-produced the series David Makes Man as well as the 2019 Steven Soderbergh film High Flying Bird.
“I’m fundamentally a theater artist,” he said. “But there are certain stories that belong either in the [television] series or in the feature [film] world. So when those moments come up, I work hard to make sure that those stories get told in the way that they feel best served. But I’d be being disingenuous if I didn’t say I was a theater artist first.”
He won’t be returning to acting anytime soon. He said performing the lead role in 2019 in Ms. Blakk for President, a play he co-wrote with Steppenwolf collaborator Tina Landau, was both his “swan song” and “born of necessity.”
“At the time, there were just so few folks who could do the role, and would do the role, and we just felt like it’s a story that needed to be told,” he recalled. “…It was a hard show to do. Once I was on stage, I was on until until it was over. There was no intermission. So it felt like a great time to stop doing something that I don’t really like doing anymore anyway.”
He co-directed what he said was “a beautiful production” of “Master Harold”…and the Boys at Geffen Playhouse earlier in the spring, and said he had several other “irons in the fire” for upcoming projects, including a new play at the Vineyard Theatre in New York City this fall. He’ll also help Steppenwolf mount a Chicago run of the recent Broadway version of the Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Purpose, which won the 2025 Best Play Tony as well as the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for drama.
McCraney now calls Los Angeles home, but, given his close ties to Chicago’s theater community, he returns to the Windy City several times a year. He said that Chicagoans, more so than audiences in other cities, have responded enthusiastically to his body of work, particularly Moonlight.
“The movie wasn’t set in Chicago, and I wasn’t born in Chicago, but whenever I go back to Chicago—I’m stuttering to say this, because it feels like I’m bragging—people recognize me there, like when I go into a restaurant,” he explained. “That doesn’t happen to me anywhere else. It doesn’t happen in L.A. and it doesn’t happen in Miami, where I was born and raised. In Chicago, people hold the work so dear. I can never get over how wonderful the city has been to me.”