Brendan Hunt is bringing his Chicago childhood, his late mother and the Beatles to Steppenwolf this weekend in The Movement You Need, a one-man show that opens after a long path through workshops and earlier versions in other cities. The production runs through May 10.
For Hunt, 53, the show is not a side project but a personal excavation. It digs into family life with his troubled divorced mother in Rogers Park, Lake View, Gold Coast and elsewhere in Chicago, and takes its title from a lyric in “Hey Jude.” He said the piece started to take shape in 2022 after years of rattling around in his head in the wake of his mom’s death. “You can’t really pull back from the emotional parts,” Hunt said.
That candor fits a performer who made his name far from the drama wing. Hunt is best known as the Chicago-born co-creator and co-star of Ted Lasso, where he plays Coach Beard. The series went on hiatus after its third season and won a slew of Emmys and a Peabody Award, making Hunt’s return to a smaller live room in Chicago feel less like a detour than a homecoming.
The show also reflects how he learned to work. Hunt started on local stages in the 1990s, then spent five years with the Boom Chicago comedy ensemble in Amsterdam. Along the way, two field trips helped set his path: in seventh grade, he saw A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Court Theatre, and in eighth grade he saw a Second City show called Jean-Paul Sartre and Ringo. Those experiences helped feed a career built on comedy that keeps one foot in theater.
Hunt said the material has been tested in different rooms and different sizes before landing at Steppenwolf. “It was Hollywood Fringe first, and then kind of surprisingly, I did it at Boom a week later, so I had to take this jump from 30 seats to 340 seats,” he said. “At Steppenwolf, this is a proper level-up with a director and designers, and it’s pretty scripted.” He added, “I try to bring it a step forward every single place I do it.”
There is still some looseness built in. “There’s a little bit of audience interaction — just enough to guarantee that it’ll never be 100 percent the same,” Hunt said. He also pointed to a comedy principle he still carries from Chicago: “As the great lord Charna tells us, ‘Truth in comedy is vital.’ We’re still trying to live by that doctrine.”
That is the friction at the center of The Movement You Need: a show rooted in loss, but shaped by a comic’s instinct for timing, observation and release. Hunt is trying to tell the story of his mother and his own formation without sanding down the hardest parts, and he is doing it in the city where those memories began. The result opens this weekend at Steppenwolf, and for Chicago audiences, the question is not whether the material is familiar, but whether a performer known for TV warmth can make a theater room hold something more fragile and far less polished. Hunt’s answer is already in the work: he is not pulling back.
