A Vital Arrogance (Reprint)

Posted on | October 12, 2009 | 12 Comments

Note: This essay was originally published in 1990 by the Chicago Public Library in a collection called Resetting the Stage: Theater Beyond the Loop 1960-1990. The publication was part of a larger exhibition of the Chicago Theater Collection (part of the Special Collections of the CPL) curated by Scott Fosdick. Originally intended to be published as part of my project Theatre That Works by arrangement with the authors and the CPL, I’m bringing them to a new home here. “A Vital Arrogance” by Gary Houston is the third of five.

Here’s a good way to picture the lineage of acting companies who’ve made their mark in Our Town over the last three decades. Put Paul Sills and the fifties and sixties groups or movements he sired – Playwrights Theatre, Compass Players, Second City, Game Theatre, Story Theater – in the center as a tree trunk. Give it two branches – on one side, The Reality Makers; on the other, The Story Tellers.

The Reality Makers generally coax scripts, not ad libs, into stage life. Yet they draw inspiration from the improvisation work of such pioneers as Sills inasmuch as they want their actors’ utterances to sound as spontaneously, effortlessly real as do improvisers’. You might place among them playwright David Mamet and his St. Nicholas Theater, as well as past Goodman artistic director Gregory Mosher, who at New York’s Lincoln Center continues to direct Mamet plays; you probably should put Steppenwolf Theatre there too, even though it is widely guessed that its conceptual bent differs in basic ways from that of the Mamet-Mosher ambit. Include, also, the later Remains Theatre.

The Story Tellers are not wedded to the technique of Story Theater, which allows each player to help narrate the plot and, thus, refer liberally to his own character in the grammatical third person. But, in line with that very spirit, they are less focused upon the actor’s performance as a perfectible end and more upon it as a means to spin a yarn. Put here the Organic Theater under the regime (1969-1985) of Stuart Gordon. Also include the Piven Theatre and Workshop which has been working at Story Theater and related theater games since 1968. The techniques which were postulated by Northwestern University’s Robert Breen, called Chamber Theatre, and have on occasion been roused out of theory and into practice by former Breen student Frank Galati, also belong in this category. (Chamber Theatre actually predates Story Theater and resembles it except for the call for a traditional, solitary narrator.) Include, maybe, the early Remains Theatre. In any case, leave room for others.

For the tree’s roots put Paul Sills’ mother, Viola Spolin, and her still-in-print book, Improvisation for the Theater.

This is such a good and handy way to say in a nutshell what is being alluded to in the phrase “Chicago acting” and what’s special about it that it has been said, over and over again in print and on radio and even television. It is as near to an “official” recounting as we’ve had, though it focuses on acting troupes and so does not directly take into account the majority of Off-Loop theaters who cast shows from the available citywide acting pool.

But what comes below does not disagree with the tree image so much as seeks another way of looking at why companies take on their particular identities.

It is not a myth that once upon a time a show in town could draw just about all the audience it wanted by getting one or two decent daily reviews. A company did not have to run display ads, put its directors and actors on talk shows, sell T-shirts or even welcome its patrons in a bonafide playhouse with cushioned seats replete with backs. Perhaps it simply taped posters to walls and windows, or wheat¬pasted them to poles. These companies did not especially want or seek subscribers; they wanted to be known simply by word-of-mouth. Their producers most likely feared that any amassment of supporters – those who sit on advisory boards, those who subscribe, to say nothing of those who publicly critique – could sooner or later be a lobbying power presuming to steer the producers in directions profoundly irrelevant to the very impulses for starting a place in which to create.

In Chicago’s theater history there actually were ethereally brief, carefree stretches of time like that; and whenever I am on the verge of accusing myself of arcadian fancies I soon recall, specifically, those several plucky storefront and mom-and-pop operations that dotted the north side when I came to live on it just as the sixties were expiring. It was a non-competitive atmosphere in which companies greeted newer ones with an attitude of the more the merrier. But human memory, as lawyers will tell you, is poor.

There have been so many companies and enterprises, worthy and otherwise, that over the past thirty years have died both in body and in essence, yet most are dismally remembered or utterly forgotten. Some were formed around individuals who just happened to know each other as fellow Chicagoans. Seldom actual acting companies, they were usually producing companies whose members lacked common roots. In a few cases, they were organized with only a vague design, or whim, to stage plays.

Few theater aficionados will have heard of the eclectic Chicago Stage Guild, which during the mid-sixties drew customers to its North State Street space, now but a wisp of memory, for shows ranging from Tom Jones to Ghosts. Or Hyde Park’s Last Stage, whose artistic director Sid Passin bravely tackled material extracted from James Joyce to mount the only Chicago production ever, as far as I know, of Ulysses in Nighttown. Or Cafe Topa, a cabaret operation run by Sherry Fox on North Ashland whose last show in an also-mottled repertoire history was to be Dracula. Or the Old Town Players, which during Frank Carioti’s tenure as artistic head was the only north side community theater dedicated to the meticulously tasteful spooning up of quasi- and neo¬classical fare. Then, of course, there was the Ivanhoe under George Keathley’s steerage, the only in-city concern outside the Loop to feature name actors in serious theater whose future seemed, for awhile, quite secure.

Among the more innovative theaters now scarcely recalled is the Kingston Mines Theatre Company on Lincoln Avenue, where seminal, off-beat pieces by Jean-Claude van hallie, Megan Terry, Susan Yankowitz, Maria Irene Fornes, Michael McClure, Charles Ludlam, John Guare, Edward Bond, and Joseph Heller received Midwest premieres. Where, lest we forget, Grease originated. Or Lincoln Avenue’s Body Politic – not as it is now, but as it was in the late sixties, when the Reverend James Shiflett and troupe staged their audiences’ and their own nocturnal visions and called the result Dream

Theater, and when Paul Sills was developing Story Theater. And where, into the seventies, countless experimentalists came and went as renters. Some will know well, from still earlier in the sixties, of the illustrious reign of Bob Sickinger over three Hull House spaces (Jane Addams, Uptown, and Parkway), who included in his juggling act highly touted productions of everything from Jack Gelber’s The Connection to the musical Take Me Along; but the knowers’ ranks are with time thinning to a snapping point.

Those companies did need organized help, proof of which is the fact that all either died for its lack, or were altered, often irreversibly, by accepting it. Just about every time a theater caved in to the pressure of well-meant urgings from outsiders, it transformed into an enterprise not so much beyond its original dreams as within the field of what it had once consciously rejected. Whether it stayed in business – perhaps to flourish – or not, it did in some way, and in someone’s view if not in its own, die. If we believe that it is slightly twisted, if not the height of irony, to lay all the blame at the helpers’ feet, we believe so mainly because it’s obvious that every tale of the birth, rise, and fall of a company has its unique wrinkles, which reflect the company’s particular fortunes and innate failings.

My “once upon a time” means more than a framed bit of the past. It refers to any period of time when Chicago gave an emerging group of theater artists a chance to find and air their own special voice, and sent to them the populace’s adventuresome and curious. This gentle time, with a group in the creche of its creative promise, may be when Chicago is kindest, or most open, or most indulgent. It is when the big town behaves like a small one – as if grateful for, boosterish about, its new cultural acquisition.

For a fledgling acting troupe, however, this is greatly a self-nourishing infancy. Women and men who probably majored in theater and knew one another on some college campus somewhere, who by election or plain happy fluke wound up here, are sustained by an often unarticulated belief that from mutual experience, and from the hoary precepts of some beloved faculty mentor, has alchemically arisen a viewpoint, sensibility, sense of humor plus configuration of talent the likes of which Chicago has surely never before encountered. What that is exactly is not the point; the point is that it’s bound to be, if not earth-shaking, Chicago-shaking. Sometimes – in no small way due to this vital arrogance – it is. And this arrogance propels new groups into self-¬promotional campaigns of the before-we-got-here-¬there-was-nothing type that helps blur our, and their, sense of heritage.

More than its general public, Chicago’s theater folk, who include its writers on theater, are ever a transient lot of arrivistes and imminent departers. Don’t scold the former too harshly for believing that our theater scene got underway sometime coinciding with St. Nicholas Theater’s inception in the mid-seventies, or with Steppenwolf’s surfacing in the late seventies; for though these are opportunistically convenient beliefs to adopt, they were no doubt also circulating as the newcomers arrived. Nor, perhaps, should we even be too hard on the members of arriving troupes who assume that the scene is only underway now that they are here.

Fueled by this chutzpah, they come with the idea of Chicago as a new home, as a cultural wasteland awaiting their fertilization and, most fascinatingly, as a thing to be overthrown. What’s to be overthrown simply consists of the prevalent kind or kinds of theater they see when they get here. The older theaters and, often, the actors they are fond of using are liable to be seen by the hungering new kids on the block as media-sanctified, overrated, bloated. In short, seen in a cockeyed way as the Establishment ¬never mind that in fact they are probably struggling just as hard to stay in business as are the newcomers to open theirs. Above all, the older companies are perceived to be obsolete, irrelevant and dead, “dead” with the force of meaning Peter Brook gave the word when he decried the suffocating psychic baggage commercial theater imposes on Western culture.

It is not a question of fairness but of survival. The newcomers must commit to this posture of aggression, if only to force themselves to declare who they are, what they’re made of, what they stand for in theater and why finally they are distinct – for if they’re not, how can they expect to arouse the interest of playgoers? Or of critics?

A company’s image is fermented by its background and, in Chicago, distilled by necessity; and, also by this necessity, all this happens rapidly. What we see on its stage comes to be called, if it’s made an impression, its “style.” But just as likely, and often more accurately, it’s the company’s approach to theater, its collective response to what else is established here, and its declaration as a new alternative, that are what we’re really seeing demonstrated.

This is suggested by glimpses at the early careers of three companies – Organic, St. Nicholas, and Steppenwolf.

When Stuart Gordon and other University of Wisconsin alumni brought the Organic Theater Company here from Madison in 1969, he saw what he later described as “plays where people were just walking around in apartment settings, smoking cigarettes and carrying on, I dunno, stupid conversations.” His was a negative view of one strain of representational theater that to him seemed prevalent here, the sort of show that gave you no more than sort of real-looking sets and costumes, acted sort of realistically under pedestrian direction from scripts that in the end had nothing whatever to say that distinguished them from television. These shows, above all, were boring; they didn’t grab Gordon. The theater’s full resources to create illusion – lights, sound, make-up, costumes, the set itself, the actors themselves – were woefully underused. Each actor played only one part, in itself an aspect of the prevalent producers’ lack of imagination, plus their underestimation of the audience’s willingness to “buy” whatever you put in front of them so long as you were clear about what you intended them to make of it.

The success of any evening depended upon whether within the first five minutes the actors and audience had tacitly agreed to the show’s rules – in the spirit of playing a game. If you saw any of the episodes of the Organic’s sci-fi trilogy WARP! in 1972, you sensed this immediately. Actors changed personae rapidly, often back and forth, from drab earthlings to exotic extraterrestrials. The “acting style” was akin to Second City’s: actors were not trying to create various characters, they were simply assuming them – throwing on and off such things as hats and eyeglasses, at least for the earthlings, and keeping vocal indications of “character” to a minimum. If an actor could do a funny caricature, certainly he could run with it; but telling the WARP! story in stage pictures, even as costumes for the dimensions beyond the Third became wilder and wilder, had little to do with convincing spectators that the actor playing Character A was not also the one playing Character B. Unless, of course, the illusion is desired.

At bottom, Gordon felt that the prevalent theater was wasting its time and that of audiences trying to replicate, or represent, the real world onstage. If theater stood for anything, it was make-believe. Yet he was never so dogmatic about this that he opposed at least one ideal of naturalism – that the actor believe that whatever is happening to his character is simultaneously happening to him. Indeed, Gordon was trying to practice naturalism as he understood it from reading Stanislavsky, prior to and palpably by 1982, with his theater’s last big hit, E/R (Emergency Room) .

By the late seventies, nevertheless, the stock of naturalistic theater had so enormously risen with the vogue of Mamet’s plays that Gordon and the Organic – despite having in 1974 premiered Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago – had come to be perceived in many quarters as its die-hard dissenters. Also lacking taste and awareness of, or proficiency in, different styles. And lacking adult-ness: the same critics who in the still-sweet afterglow of the Age of Aquarius had cited Gordon’s “child-like” vision in contexts of unmistakable praise had started to pan his productions as “childish” – also “immature,” “sophomoric,” “puerile.” By the early eighties, some Organic trustees were enjoining him to revise the company’s image along Steppenwolf lines. Nevermind Organic’s long-standing commitment to creating shows from scratch, or close to scratch – or that Bloody Bess and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn had toured Europe, or that Candide, WARP! and Bleacher Bums went to New York, or that E/R became a TV series. He left town for Hollywood in 1985 to make films.

Soon after Mamet and his Goddard College student-¬cohorts descended on the city from Plainfield, Vermont, to found St. Nicholas, they made no secret of their aim to usurp Organic’s eminence as Chicago’s white-haired Off-Loop company. Son of a Chicago labor lawyer, and himself a student of Sanford Meisner in New York, Mamet was to spearhead two kinds of thrust.

Operationally, St. Nicholas set a new standard for Off-Loop theaters. Once in the Halsted space today occupied by Steppenwolf, it announced scheduled seasons – certainly not a new idea, but still an agenda most small companies had always been skittish about committing to. The theater culled an unprecedented number of subscribers, grants and money givers through the diligent, painstaking phone and mailing efforts of a largely unsung heroine named Patricia Cox. It offered theater classes as revenue-raisers. It hired experts to speak to its staff on subjects like audience-building, command-structure and cashflow. (It is ironic to recall this dazzling flurry and then remember that it was a bad business decision – the for-profit production of The Enchanted Cottage in late 1979, that eventuated the demise of St. Nicholas a couple of seasons down the road.)

Artistically, Mamet as a playwright and a man-of-the-¬theater brought to town a recommitted realism laced with dogma. Much of it bore the stamp of Meisner’s regimen; indeed, James O’Reilly recalls once having applied to teach acting at St. Nicholas and being told he couldn’t because he was not a Meisner practitioner.

In the Mamet lexicon “theatrical” – which denoted the Gordon forte – was a bad word meaning about the same as “phony.” And those who saw the Mosher-directed Goodman Stage 2 premiere of Mamet’s American Buffalo were probably struck, as I was, by the actors’ studied flatness and anti¬-musicality of delivery: a signature of both dramatist and director that with repetition in later shows threatened to suggest a style, thus a theatrical ism, all its own. Still, it was meant to be honest; and this intention was not, contrary to impressions still widely held of Mamet, in the name of a style – “American naturalism” – but in the name of approach. The goal of all art being to reveal truth, the goal of theater was to reveal its most available and important truth, that obtaining in the actor’s own “soul.” The soul was mined by the actor as he went about discovering among his character’s wants his primary one, and his character’s action was his struggle against obstacles to get at it.

“Acting is Action” was among several placarded slogans found on the walls and bulletin boards backstage at the Goodman during the Gregory Mosher years. For the persons in Mamet’s recurrent acting company in time vaulted the confines of St. Nicholas’ identity to become those Mosher hired for Goodman productions of both Mamet and non¬-Mamet plays. They included many who would later act in Mamet films, like Colin Stinton and, though still off-and-on Organic actors, Jack Wallace and Joe Mantegna.

In the summer of 1977 I was surprised to hear a much-liked Organic actor being scorned and ridiculed by a few members of the then just emerging Steppenwolf. I was in Highland Park directing rehearsals for Steppenwolf’s first show to open in Chicago, Wallace Shawn’s Our Late Night, and during our breaks they often amused themselves by picking this actor apart. It seemed crucial, essential that they pick out a few visible quarries, like this local guy or like, of all people, Elizabeth Ashley (then starring in Vanities at one of the Drury Lanes), and chew and worry at them – hound like – without let-up. For they had to forge within themselves the will to justify what their negativity was presupposing, that they were and would prove themselves to be better. I imagined they saw themselves as a sort of lever turning on a fulcrum, one end moving negatively so that the other might go positively. And we know now that this self-hypnosis, or whatever the principle underlying their auto-psychology was, paid off.

Putting aside the press bouquets to come, what was most impressively positive about these actors early on was their Can Do attitude in the face of all sorts of financial, logistical and technical obstacles. It was a sharply refreshing attitude for a then non-Equity company, for most non-Equity companies’ idea of getting things done was simply to follow the lines of least resistance.

And it infused their acting. They were into no-frills stuff: no shtick, no winks to the audience, no laughing at your own jokes, no heed to the dead, weighted and received authority of stage conventional wisdom. An exchange of slaps was to be the real, unstagey thing, as I in uneasy awe discovered watching Terry Kinney and Moira Harris belt one another in the Our Late Night rehearsals. I thought that to critics it might look like the director’s touch and waffled over whether I wanted the credit, which was entirely theirs.

I don’t think they cared much for rules at all, which is why I doubt whether their theatrical beliefs -whatever most of them are alleged to have learned at the feet of Professor Ralph Lane at Illinois State University – were ever, like the Mamet camp’s, schematic or stated in tones of ideology. Their procedure was an article of faith in raw, moment-by- moment instinct rather than in plotting action-lines. It has not served them well when they have tackled continental European fare – e.g., Exit the King, Three Sisters, Ring Round the Moon – but in almost all other cases it has. And they above anyone else so far have made “Chicago acting” an object of national focus and international interest.

These next words are seventy years old and from the typewriter of H.L. Mencken on the subject of writers, but think actors as you read them:

Draw a circle of two hundred miles radius around Chicago, and you will enclose four-fifths of the real literature of America – particularly four-fifths of the literature of tomorrow … My notion is that it would pay to ship forty or fifty head of young New England authors to Chicago, and let them breathe the ozone of the stockyards; it might electrify them as it electrifies the young peasants of Indiana, Iowa and Illinois, and there would be something in them that was … worth electrifying.

The stockyards are gone and we might say it’s the audiences, of course, whom actors wish to be electrified. But they wish it so hard they can’t do without it, and they need it so badly they must bolster themselves by expecting it. So the arrogance of the actors does not necessarily emerge from real confidence, and I think the most promising of them do come here, singly or in clumps of comrades, to see if anything’s in them that is worth electrifying. If their actions as companies suggest dog-eat-dog, as I with some angst have hypothesized, reassuring words, this time Tennyson’s, arise: “And God fulfills himself in many ways. Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Gary Houston has been performing in, directing and writing about Chicago theater nearly since his arrival in the city in the summer (like many others) of 1968. In the 1970s a Chicago Sun-Times features writer and editor, he originated the role of Roger in Kingston Mines Theatre Company’s 1971 world premiere of Grease, and as a director he staged Chicago, Midwest and occasional U.S. and world premieres of plays by Sam Shepard, Peter Handke, David Hare, Heathcote Williams, Fernando Arrabal, Ted Whitehead, Agatha Christie, Joyce Carol Oates, Joseph Heller, Terrence McNally, Alan Gross and Samuel Beckett. He founded and for several years led the Pary Production Company before joining the Organic Theater’s company of players. More recently [2008-09] he has acted in TUTA Chicago’s Uncle Vanya and Northlight’s Mauritius.

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