Shakespearean actor mounts political podium in Cambridge

Virgil Wright

In Cambridge, a city of theatrical politics, a seasoned stage veteran has put his training to effective use, rising from the cheap seats to the rostrum of the Cambridge Democratic City Committee.

Twice elected chairman of one of the most active city committees in one of the most thoroughly Democratic states in the union, Trellis Stepter spends his working hours across the river as chief of staff for state Rep. Byron Rushing (D-South End), the House’s second assistant majority leader.

As a result, Stepter is probably the only Beacon Hill operative who can jawbone fluently in Elizabethan English and cite not only Tip O’Neill but also French deconstructionist Michel Foucault, who said politics and theater are the two ways you can most influence culture.

In 1998, the Shakespearean actor, with ten years on the world’s top stages behind him, moved to Cambridge from New York as a guest artist in a civic discourse project at Harvard under the direction of theatrical and political provocateur Anna Deveare Smith.

Any thought of a permanent return to Manhattan began to dissolve when he met Lisa Bromer, a Harvard researcher who conducted Stepter’s entrance interview for the project.

Close to three hours after the conversation began, the Julliard graduate was still talking, his soft Louisiana inflection wrapped around theories of art and politics, his heart beating in iambic pentameter. It was the role of a lifetime.

Stepter headed to the Royal Shakespeare Company in London with a prestigious Fox Fellowship after completing the Harvard project, but love left little doubt about the next move. Between working on stagecraft and researching the life of Ira Aldridge, an 18th century African-American actor who left the U.S. for the more welcoming theaters of Europe, six months quickly passed.

“At the end of my time in London, I came here to live with Lisa, and never left,” says Stepter during an interview in the sun-splashed apartment he and Bromer — now his wife — share in Cambridgeport.

Stepter’s credentials landed him employment at the American Repertory Theater in Harvard Square. But nudged along by Bromer’s wide circle of politically active friends, politics began to edge out theater as Stepter’s waking obsession.

The move to the Athens of America did not stir up his political interests as much as offer them an outlet. As a four-year-old living in New Orleans, Stepter had watched with wide-eyed fascination the unraveling of the Watergate drama — with outsized protagonists, villains and plenty of hubris — on the TV screen.

“My mother said I cried as I watched the set,” laughs Stepter.

In the summer of 1999, the Bill Bradley campaign swung through Boston. Stepter and Bromer attended one of his events and got hooked on Big Bill, the senator who had denounced the Rodney King beating by whacking the speaker’s podium to illustrate each blow of the policeman’s baton.

Though entertainment and politics have been undergoing a slow fusion in U.S. culture, what attracted Stepter to Bradley was not the senator’s style but his substance.

“I found him to be authentic, a different kind of politician, someone who didn’t shy away from problems about race and health care and challenged us to do our part,” says Stepter.

Late in the 1999 season at ART, Debra Winger was performing in a Chekhov play and told Stepter, who was headed to New Hampshire to work in Bradley’s primary campaign, to say hello to her old beau — former U.S. Sen. Bob Kerrey.

The verbal letter of introduction, along with Stepter’s considerable communication skills, eventually helped land him a spot on Bradley’s press advance team — but not before he served an apprenticeship of slogging through the snows along the back roads of the Granite State.

“Being here, you realize how close you are to New Hampshire and how much you can really have an impact on the presidential race,” says Stepter. “Going door-to-door, canvassing for Bradley, I found that people wanted to talk about the issues facing the country. My acting skills were incredibly beneficial in being able to go out and convince people to support the guy I supported.”

However, hopes of a long campaign after New Hampshire faded when Vice President Al Gore’s machine jumped ugly all over Bradley’s health care plan, sending the lugubrious senator’s poll numbers tanking. Bradley grimly hung on but his failure to effectively counter Gore’s attacks was the most prominent example of a candidate imitating a punching bag until John Kerry ignored the assault on his Swift Boat service four years later.

Chastened but not discouraged by his first foray into the electoral arena, Stepter returned to Cambridge determined to get neck deep in politics and policy.

“The first thing people said is that you’ve got to be involved in local politics if you want to change things. So Lisa and I became associate members of the Cambridge Ward 5 Democratic Committee,” says Stepter, who eked out a living dialing for dollars as a mellifluous telemarketer with the Democratic National Committee.

A contact from Ward 5, Cambridge City Councilor Marjorie Decker, helped land a position for Stepter on the staff of state Rep. Alice Wolf (D-Cambridge) in January 2001.

Working first as an aide and then as staff director, Stepter acquired casework, campaign and legislative experience and in the meantime became a full member of his local ward committee, which functions not just as a political organization but as a community group, advocating for efficient snow removal, affordable housing, and minimal university encroachment in the leafy neighborhood bounded by Central Square and the Charles River.

During the same year, he won election as vice chairman of the Cambridge City Committee and served two years in the post, succeeding Candace Pruitt as chairman in 2004 and winning re-election earlier this year with no opposition.

If such a rapid rise seems unusual in a state where political positions, no matter how minor, are generally hoarded like gold, that’s because it is.

“The Cambridge City Committee has a deep commitment to diversity and to bringing along new people,” says Stepter. “The fact that I had the backing of Alice Wolf, the top vote-getter in the City of Cambridge, didn’t hurt.”

As chairman, Stepter has focused on increasing voter registration and turn-out among young people and in low-income communities. He won strong reviews for keeping political discourse civil during the 2004 primary tensions between backers of John Kerry and Howard Dean.

In the summer of 2004, when incumbent state Rep. Paul Demakis (D-Boston) announced plans not to seek re-election to the 8th Suffolk District seat that straddles the river between Back Bay and Cambridgeport, Stepter got flooded with calls to become the Cambridge candidate in the race. With marriage plans under way and a new job with Rushing on the horizon, Stepter deferred.

He won’t rule out an elective future. In the meantime, he’s got plenty of political work on his hands.

“We have been trying to build layered coalitions of Democratic activists to start the process of taking back the governor’s office,” adds Stepter, a Deval Patrick supporter in the Democratic primary.

“Deval understands my story, what I’ve been through and where I come from,” he says. “It’s important in our political culture that politics empower people and be accountable for what kind of government we have.”

Born in New Orleans, Stepter moved to California at age 6 after his parents divorced and returned to the Big Easy to live with his grandmother at age 13. He attended high school in suburban Metairie — home of gun clubs, country clubs, and neo-Klansman David Duke — and won a scholarship to Loyola University.

Stepter left Loyola for Tulane after auditioning for an Arthur Miller play and being told no blacks could land roles in the production. He went on to Julliard in New York to earn a BFA and then for ten years specialized in Shakespeare, performing in top Broadway and touring productions.

One of his favorite roles was Richard III, the hunchback king of England, an insider with an outsider’s perspective, a reflective soul with a lust for power.

“It was a natural progression to go from acting to politics. A lot of people have a tough time sharing their story and getting up in front of an audience. Politicians, like actors, have to learn to do it,” says Stepter, who confesses missing his old career from time to time.

“For me, the theater was the place I got spiritual energy. It was a religious experience. It opened me up to sides of myself I wasn’t really aware I had. It teaches you by trial and error, mostly error, that you just have to perform and give it your best.”