“This place was born the day twenty-two-year-old Jeff Daniels started his apprenticeship at the Circle Repertory Theatre Company in New York,” Guy Sanville says, sweeping his arm around the Purple Rose Theatre during a Casting Session rehearsal break. The artistic director removes his baseball hat and collapses onto a front-row seat. “Every time I sit in this theater, I think, ‘Look at what he’s done. Look at what we’ve made. All of us, working together.'”

This year, the Purple Rose Theatre Company started celebrating its twenty-fifth season as its founder, Chelsea native Jeff Daniels, turned sixty. In the past quarter-century, the theater has grown from an actor’s dream to a cultural landmark whose list of awards and honors runs to eight pages, single-spaced. The theater also accounts for an estimated $3.6 million annual economic impact on Washtenaw County.

Daniels traces his acting career to a sixth-grade classroom at Beech Middle School. In 1966, music teacher DiAnn L’Roy asked him to impersonate a senator giving a speech–while his pants were falling down. Long beyond his allotted three minutes, the boy kept the class–and visitors attracted by the commotion–in an uproar.

“That day I learned that I was good at something,” Daniels says. “I discovered what I wanted to do with my life.”

On a blindingly sunny day, the actor/director/playwright/singer/songwriter/theater founder is relaxing at his Cavanaugh Lake home. In an office filled with books, mementoes, family photos, and several of his many awards, he leans back in his desk chair, links his hands behind his head, and plops his bare feet on the desk as he begins the story of his, and Chelsea’s, theater.

Daniels majored in theater at Central Michigan University; as a junior, he auditioned for a spring theater festival at Eastern Michigan. New York City director Marshall Mason was in town to help with the festival and picked Daniels for the lead in two productions, Tennessee Williams’ Summer and Smoke and Lanford Wilson’s Hot l Baltimore.

Before the first performance, Mason pulled Daniels aside and asked, “You know what you should do with your life, don’t you?” He urged Daniels to move to New York and apprentice with the Circle Rep. With his parents’ blessing, Daniels dropped out of college and headed to New York.

It was a big step. “Suddenly I was thrown into New York-style acting, where the directors are taking our emotions and directing us in a way that resembled public therapy.” And Lanford Wilson, who worked exclusively with Marshall Mason, became Daniels’ mentor and introduced him to a new interest: playwriting–“which was the fuel for my starting the Purple Rose Theatre,” he says.

The Chelsea native apprenticed for two years, supporting himself by appearing in commercials until he became an Equity actor in 1976. But he was already looking beyond New York. Seeing Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon, he says, “convinced me that theater could be the means to an end–and I wanted that end to be movies.”

In 1981, Daniels made his film debut in Ragtime. Two years later, he played Debra Winger’s husband in the Oscar-winning Terms of Endearment. Then, in 1985, he was nominated for a Golden Globe for his performance in Woody Allen’s film The Purple Rose of Cairo.

Working with Allen changed his life and career. “I was thirty years old when The Purple Rose of Cairo came along. It was my step up. I knew it. And I was terrified.” I asked myself, ‘Am I good enough to be here?'” His question was answered when Jeffrey Kurland, Allen’s longtime costume designer, told Daniels, “Woody wants me to tell you that you’re really good.”

Daniels pauses. “I’ll never forget that … My first thought was not, ‘I’m gonna be a big star,’ but, ‘Okay, I can make a living in the business.'”

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Following his marriage to Chelsea native Kathleen Treado, the birth of their son, Ben, and another Golden Globe best actor nomination for his 1986 performance in Something Wild, the family decided to return to Chelsea. Lucas was born the following year, Nellie in 1990. “There’s no question about it: that decision to move to Chelsea affected my career. Michigan is a far cry from New York and L.A.,” Daniels concedes. “But both Kathleen and I have family here and a strong support system. We wanted to raise our kids here, and they have always come first.”

Although he loved being home again, he missed the energy that comes from being surrounded by other actors. So he and Kathleen began discussing the idea of starting a regional theater modeled after the Circle Rep. They quietly began scouting possible locations.

At the time, Chelsea was full of empty storefronts and industrial buildings. “We were all concerned about Chelsea’s future,” recalls Ann Feeney, who was working for Chelsea’s Chamber of Commerce at the time. “Chelsea was in an economic downturn. There were a dozen possible places for Jeff to choose.”

The Danielses bought a dilapidated building at 137 Park Street for $150,000, then called on a circle of friends for ideas, advice, funding, and manual labor. “We wanted to give Michigan’s twenty-one-year-olds the same opportunities I had been given,” Daniels says.

“We called ourselves ‘The Founding Four,'” Daniels’ friend Bart Bauer says. “Jeff had the vision. I supervised the renovations. Doug Beaumont served as treasurer. Newell Kring was in charge of the artistic side … when Jeff was off doing movies.” Soon afterwards, Daniels created a board of directors, starting with John Mann (now president of the Chelsea State Bank) and Bill Holmes of the Chelsea Milling Company. Holmes remembers the first board meeting around a makeshift table made from a discarded door lying across sawhorses.

“We were flying by the seat of our pants,” Daniels agrees. He grins when he describes the early days. “The building was a tinderbox of kindling.”

Maintaining a strict shoestring budget, he and his board decided their first priority must be comfortable seats–purple seats. Everything else would be borrowed, adapted, or purchased inexpensively. Initial renovations totaled $168,000–“just so we could function,” Daniels says. “This crazy idea didn’t make any business sense whatsoever … We launched this theater on blind faith. I thought I had enough fame to get audiences to come once. Then we’d get ’em with the quality of what we were doing.”

During the reconstruction, Daniels ran an ad announcing open auditions at the Chelsea Methodist Church. He hoped to identify talented playwrights, directors, and thirty actors “who wouldn’t need a lot: just molding, changing, and slapping the bad out of them.”

Each actor was asked to perform two brief monologues, one comedic, one dramatic. “Our criteria was believability,” Daniels says. “Good actors play real people. They must absolutely believe and mean what they’re saying. Show-and-tell acting wasn’t what we wanted.”

Blush at Nothing, written by Lisa Wing, opened on February 7, 1991, in a theater that still smelled of sawn lumber and fresh paint. Daniels struggled to find local playwrights. “We wanted people to write about life here in Michigan, about people and places familiar to our audiences,” he says. But “it took ten years to develop a stable of playwrights.”

Daniels stepped into the breach. His first play for the theater was Shoe Man, a comedy in which a game of golf leads to infidelity and hilarity. “I wrote Shoe Man thinking that if nothing else, the audience would come to see a movie star’s play,” Daniels says.

The comedy attracted growing audiences and won glowing reviews. It also convinced Daniels that “funny sells tickets.” With The Tropical Pickle in 1992, he challenged himself to see how much humor he could pack into a play.

“We needed $300,000 to keep the doors open, so The Tropical Pickle had a lot riding on its success–or failure,” he recalls. “Fortunately, it became a hit … We came out of The Tropical Pickle with $100,000 in the bank.” The play also introduced Guy Sanville to the theater. Three years later he replaced Kring as artistic director.

As soon as the theater was completed, Daniels established an apprenticeship program, based on the Circle Rep model. Apprentices learn to act, but also serve in rotations that include direction, stage building, lighting and sound design, box office, and administration. “It’s not easy work,” Daniels concedes–but when they’re done, they’ll know what they need to do to become an actor, director, stage manager, lighting designer, sound designer, or set designer in New York.

As the theater took root, Daniels juggled its needs with his acting career. “Mentally I had the drive and ambition to do everything here, but physically I knew I couldn’t plan to act or direct when my movie career was still on the upswing,” he says. “Movies took precedence; everything else stopped for them. But I learned I could write music and plays anywhere, and when I was in town I could raise money for the Purple Rose.”

When Daniels headed to New York, he spent $400 on a guitar “because I had the feeling I’d be alone a lot. I’d never played before in my life,” he says. “The guitar has given me sanity in between phone calls–and several years ago, I could go months at a time between phone calls. That’s the dark hole every actor falls into. We finish a movie and don’t know what’s next.”

Playwright Lanford Wilson nudged him into his musical career in 1978, when he suggested Daniels write music to the poem “Road Signs.” Year later, when Wilson came to the Purple Rose opening night, he asked Daniels’ friends if he had ever played “Road Signs” for them.

“Jeff doesn’t play the guitar,” one friend said.

“You have to share this,” Wilson told his protege.

That night Daniels strummed a guitar in public for the first time.

The PRTC Board of Directors asked him to play for a fundraiser. “It was 2002, and I was so tired of raising money the conventional way, so I agreed,” Daniels says.

For months, he practiced daily, with mounting panic. “There was no character for me to play–actors hide behind the filter of the character,” he says. “Finally, the third year, I discovered how to eliminate panic: create a character to hide behind.”

Nowadays, he not only plays for theater fundraisers, but tours the country with his son Ben’s band. And for the last dozen years, his “Onstage & Unplugged” fundraising concerts have been a holiday-season tradition.

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When the doors closed on the last performance of George F. Walker’s Criminal Genius in August 1999, the original Garage Theatre was demolished and construction began on the present theater, at a cost of $2.3 million. While Daniels, development director Judy Gallagher, and the board of directors worked at fundraising, Guy Sanville kept the theater company alive, presenting plays at Detroit’s Gem Theatre.

Lanford Wilson’s Rain Dance heralded the new theater’s opening on January 11, 2001. Patrons filled the 168 seats. The expansion “raised the stakes here,” Sanville says. “We got 40 percent bigger, so we needed to sell 40 percent more tickets to 40 percent more people … Every decision had more weight.”

To date, the Purple Rose has staged ninety-seven plays, including sixty world premieres, nineteen Midwest premieres, and sixteen of Daniels’ plays. Occasionally an American classic will be performed–“but only if we can give it an entirely new slant. We don’t do karaoke,” Sanville says.

Daniels adds, “You have to connect with the crowd. You have to keep them engaged so they don’t feel like, ‘Man, that was two hours I’ll never get back!'”

As the theater grew, so did Daniels’ career. He cites four films and one play that define his work: Civil War hero Joshua Chamberlain in Gettysburg, dimwitted Harry Dunne in Dumb and Dumber, a self-consumed professor in The Squid and the Whale, a quirky single father in Fly Away Home, and Johnny Got His Gun, a Circle Rep performance in which all the action takes place inside a man’s mind. “I sat in a cage and acted out a script that consisted of ninety pages’ worth of this guy’s thoughts,” Daniels says. “The New York Times reviewer wrote, ‘It does not engage our emotions,’ and it closed after three weeks.” He adds, “But it won an Obie because the Village Voice saw it and liked it.”

Daniels is good at keeping both viewers and reviewers happy. Among his honors are an Emmy for his role in Aaron Sorkin’s television series The Newsroom; a Tony nomination for the Broadway production of God of Carnage; and four Golden Globe Award nominations, including one for The Purple Rose of Cairo.

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On the eve of the theater’s twenty-fifth anniversary, the board has announced a $5 million capital campaign and plans for another expansion. “We’re in the process of acquiring part of the empty lot next to us from the city, so we can expand our lobby and add on a rehearsal center, classrooms, a larger shop, and some offices,” explains managing director Katie Doral. The theater’s full-time staff has grown to ten–a far cry from the days when Daniels’ mother-in-law, Daphne Hodder, took board notes, answered phone calls, and issued tickets (“written by hand”).

Today, “The Purple Rose is a huge source of community pride,” Chelsea mayor Jason Lindauer says. “Forty thousand people visit our town each year, drawn by the theater,” 80 percent of them from outside Washtenaw County. “Each of them spends, on average, between $60 and $70 here, not including theater tickets. The theater is an economic force that grows every year.”

Twenty-five years ago, Craig Common was convinced to open the Common Grill after conversations with Daniels and his father, Bob, a community leader and businessman, who wanted a restaurant for Purple Rose playgoers. The Chelsea House inn has a close relationship with theatergoers and offers temporary housing for actors and directors. Theater professionals devote a total of 15,000 hours a year to teaching acting, directing, stage managing, and playwriting. More than 2,500 teens and adults have enrolled in classes since 1991, and 500 actors have performed on the Purple Rose stage.

Jeff Daniels has two new movies (Steve Jobs and Ridley Scott’s The Martian), a Broadway show Blackbird, opening in March, and a tour planned with his son Ben’s band. And the world premiere of Casting Session, his sixteenth play, launched the Purple Rose’s fall season. “Twenty-five years ago, I never would have guessed that my career and this theater would be at this stage when I turned sixty,” he says. “I’m very, very grateful.”

Throughout his career, Daniels says he has followed Marshall Mason’s original advice: You know what you should do with your life. “And it helps if you pick up people along the way who believe in you,” he adds. “I was lucky enough to have [teacher] DiAnn L’Roy, [Terms of Endearment director] Jim Brooks, Marshall Mason, Lanford Wilson, Woody Allen, [manager] Paul Martinez, my parents, and my wife in my circle. When the journey gets rough and these people say, ‘Stay,’ you listen to them.

“In turn, you pass it on. That has become part of the mission of the Purple Rose. We gather talented people we enjoy working with, people who can act, direct, manage, teach, support, encourage, and correct. Together, we create art.”

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Calls and Letters: Spring 2016

Our Winter 2015 article on the Purple Rose Theatre Company and its founder, Jeff Daniels, drew on writer Cynthia Furlong Reynolds’ new history, The Purple Rose of Chelsea. Adapting it for the magazine, we extended the floral metaphor and titled the article “Purple Rose in Full Bloom.”

When the issue appeared, Grass Lake filmmaker Randall Lee called to point out that we had virtually duplicated the title for his 2014 documentary on Chelsea’s storied playhouse, The Purple Rose in Full Bloom. We regret the unintentional duplication, and encourage everyone to check out Lee’s film–and, of course, go to the Purple Rose.