Things were looking grim back in the winter of 1988. A slippery former Yalie and Texas oilman with pronounced difficulties with pronunciation had just won the White House. The economy was in a slump, and twentysomethings with liberal arts educations were living paycheck to paycheck off soulless temp jobs and food service gigs.
One Friday night in the midst of this angst, my roommate and I, along with a friend of a friend who was staying with us for the weekend, went to check out a new theatre company in Chicago. It had received interesting notices in the Chicago Reader for its first couple of shows, and my roomie was acquainted with an actress in its latest effort.
The show was being produced at a down-at-heels coffeehouse in a remote industrial stretch of the Near Northwest Side (gentrification being what it is, the place was later transformed into a slick, yuppie blues club), so we indulged in a cab. The driver was a racist, reckless, raving Eastern European emigre who, after making an unannounced pit stop for cigarettes and chocolate, insisted that we gals feel his skull for what he claimed were fragments of shrapnel from a shotgun attack he'd survived.
Then we saw the show. And that's when things got really crazy.
Of the hundreds of plays I've seen in my life, two stand out as seminal. One was Mother Courage with Judi Dench at the Royal Shakespeare Company in London in 1985. The other was The Slow and Painful Death of Sam Shepard, written by Jeff Dorchen and presented originally by Theater Oobleck, one of the most important experimental companies that worked during a particularly fertile time in Chicago theatre. And now lucky Angelenos will have the chance to see it again in a revival directed by Bill Cusack for Zoo District theatre company, opening this weekend at Sacred Fools Theater.
For those who have followed Oobleck's work over the years, it's strange to think about the title of "director" showing up anywhere near one of its shows. The company (which is more or less on hiatus these days, with many original members scattered around the globe) prided itself on being non-hierarchical. In practical terms this meant that the traditional role of a sole director was supplanted by a series of "outside eyes" to provide notes and assist with blocking.
The ensemble also used a principle called "actor's prerogative," which basically meant that the actor most affected by a line or piece of stage business got the final say and could rewrite a line if he or she felt it was necessary. ("If they're in a polite mood, they usually remember to mention it to the playwright first," reads the group's website notes.) Chaotic? Sure.
This failure to adhere to the expected norms of theatre didn't win the company fans in the mainstream press. On its website, Oobleck quotes a Chicago Tribune review from June 1988: "The players boast in the program that they work without a director. They desperately need one." This is followed by a quote from a November 1988 Tribune editorial: "We endorse George Bush for president of the United States."
But groovy, non-hierarchical methodology wasn't the reason to love Oobleck. The end results were what counted.
Strange Trip West
Sam Shepard follows the Marlboro Man of the American theatre through various incarnations, from his hard-slamming romance with Patti Smith to his Gary Cooper turn as Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff. The main conceit is that Sam makes periodic trips home to his strange backwoods family (who call him "Shmool") to refresh the springs of his creativity in increasingly dark ways. Although Dorchen's script is studded with clever theatrical and literary references, the point isn't to send up Shepard so much as it is to explore mythmaking, commodification, and the inherent cannibalistic tendencies of American culture and politics.
Oh, and it was really, really, really funny, particularly Dorchen's performance as Sam/ Shmool's creepy Pappy. (One of my favorite moments was when Dorchen sidled up alongside Lisa Black's raving Patti Smith, and said, in the oiliest and most insinuating of tones, "Twenty-three skidoo, girlie!")
Dorchen and Oobleck went on to produce many more fine shows, including 1990' s Ugly's First World and 1989's In Cheap Shoes (by Robin Harutunian). Cusack appeared in the latter, and his love for Dorchen's work led him to direct a critically acclaimed revival of Ugly's in 1999 for the Actors' Gang in L.A.
"It was in 1996, and I was sitting in L.A. going, 'What the hell am I doing here? What do I really want to do?'" recalled Cusack during a recent interview with Back Stage West. "I was auditioning a lot for things I really wasn't interested in. I always loved Jeff Dorchen's work. I thought it was the greatest thing out there. I figured nobody out in L.A. knew about him. So I asked him if I could pitch a couple of scripts to Actors' Gang."
After a reading of Ugly's First World (a piece that involves homeless demons from hell, T.S. Eliot as a coroner, and his fickle-hearted niece, among other things--including musical numbers), the Gang signed on to produce it. "I didn't think about directing it until I realized no one else could do it in order for it to get done," explained Cusack. "I figured since I'd seen the original production, the least I could do was rip off everything they'd done."
Dorchen (who left Oobleck and formed Theatre for the Age of Gold with fellow former Ooblecker Mickle Maher in 1992) came out to Los Angeles from Chicago and made cuts to the text. He also directed the music. Though some of Dorchen's plays had been published by Chicago Plays, the Actors' Gang production marked the first post-Oobleck life for one of his scripts. And Dorchen was pleased with the results. "I just had to cut a lot of stuff that was written with that [original] ensemble in mind--people who understood the characters and understood their mechanism in the entire machine of the play.
"But that's nothing against the [Actors' Gang] performers. Bill emphasized different things and themes that I hadn't been aware of the first time around. And they were really valid. It showed me that it is a living text."
Cusack added, "He was very amenable. I didn't want to cut a single line at first, but the cast was in revolt [over some lines]. I ran the cuts by Jeff, and he was fine with it."
Zoo District members who saw the Actors' Gang production were enthusiastic, too, and let Cusack know that they were interested in other Dorchen scripts. And thus the rebirth of The Slow and Painful Death of Sam Shepard. Dorchen now resides in Los Angeles, but his involvement with the current production has been minimal. "[Sam Shepard] has real discrete units, and it's clearly structured. It's a smaller ensemble [than Ugly's First World], so it just didn't seem to need as much work," said Dorchen. "It's fable-like, and I think in a certain way it's the most mainstream thing I've done with Oobleck."
Not Alone on the Edge
Oobleck wasn't alone in creating vibrant, mind-bending original theatrical works in Chicago theatre from 1988-'93 (though it was the only company that strictly adhered to the "no director" rule). Curious Theatre Branch produced lovely, dark, lyrical plays about loss, redemption, family, personal mythology, and the creative process. Cardiff Giant created hugely funny social satires from long improvisational rehearsal processes. Redmoon Puppet Theatre put together epic and touching spectacles (including a stripped-down version of Moby Dick, adapted by Dorchen). The NeoFuturists (who also started in 1988) are still going strong with their late-night hit, Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind: "30 Plays in Sixty Minutes." Most importantly there was--and still is--a real sense of community among these groups and others.
In 1995, several of these companies were jointly awarded a MacArthur Foundation grant--an acknowledgment that Chicago's experimental fringe theatre scene is a many--headed beast with many creative outside eyes assisting one another's processes. (It also helped those companies, like Oobleck, with their ultra-accessible "$5--more if you've got it, free if you're broke" pricing policy, to avoid going completely into the red for each show.)
But the mainstream press still lagged behind the curve with the work. Dorchen's 1991 play, The Mysticeti and the Mandelbrot Set (a play that is, admittedly, probably my least favorite among Dorchen's scripts) received a particularly incoherent review from the Chicago Sun-Times, whose critic confessed in print that she thought Mandelbrot (a mathematician who pioneered the term "fractal") referred to mandel bread. "She was expecting a play about biscotti," said Dorchen, with a laugh. "The general mainstream critical viewpoint is 'audiences are stupid.'" The terrific response that Ugly's First World received in its L.A. incarnation gives the lie to this notion.
But the appeal of this work transcends a particular time or region. Said Cusack, "I think a lot of people don't want to go to the theatre and pretend they're at the movies. They want to be treated like they're really in the audience. Oobleck does a great job of bringing in people who want to have a live experience that's happening right in front of you. I think the strength of Jeff's writing is that he really understands and has a great hold on these currents that are going on out there. He has a great ability to draw these incredibly far-ranging and seemingly unconnected events and can tie them together in ways that make hilarious sense."