Grateful American: A Journey from Self to Service(17)
My pals were all highly educated about theater and playwrights and acting techniques, and I didn’t know much about any of that stuff. Some days, I felt intimidated by my friends, but I made up for it by taking action and working hard.
Right away, we made plans for a full summer season. I went to the Highland Park Chamber of Commerce, informed them we’d started a theater company, and asked for their ideas about a space in town we could use. They were excited about the idea of young people doing something positive in the community, and the head of the Chamber’s youth commission mentioned a basement over at the Immaculate Conception Catholic School. The school had recently closed, and a big open space in the basement, once a teen center, now stood vacant. I talked to the priest, explained what we were doing, and he agreed to rent us the basement for the exorbitant price of $1 per year as a tax write-off for the parish. Thankfully, the priest never saw any of our plays, because we ended up doing some pretty wild stuff. He might have kicked us out if he knew what was really happening in the basement.
In June of 1976, everyone from ISU moved up to Highland Park, and we began building our theater. We had a small stage on the cement floor of the basement and built risers with seating on three sides. Someone’s dad knew about a downtown building that had caught fire. The theater-style seating inside had survived, so we got eighty-eight seats for free and put them into our space. On half a shoestring budget, we brought in some real theater lights, began building a few small sets—mostly just a few pieces of furniture bought on the cheap from thrift stores or borrowed from Jeff or my parents’ hand-me-downs—and started rehearsing four one-act plays: The Indian Wants the Bronx, The Lesson, The Lover, and Birdbath. We put up posters all over town using the Steppenwolf stamp; we stood on street corners and handed out flyers; we tried to get free publicity in the newspaper—we did everything we could think of to inform the public there was a new theater opening in town.
We put together a governing board of grown-ups who wanted to support local kids. One board member had an old fire truck. We painted a big sign advertising Steppenwolf and put it on the side of the fire truck. A bunch of us rode on the truck—waving, shouting, screaming, howling like sirens—in Highland Park’s Fourth of July parade. We even wore whiteface, like a bunch of mimes. Anything to get some attention for what we were doing. Our opening was set for July 21, 1976.
During this time, we were all working summer day jobs to support ourselves. Jeff made egg rolls in a fast-food restaurant. Terry sold men’s suits. Malkovich drove a bus for a children’s summer camp, and I often wondered how those children turned out. I had a few different jobs in those early days. One was unloading boxes from trucks on the loading dock at the newly opened Nieman Marcus in Northbrook, Illinois. Another was as a groundskeeper and a maintenance man at the Ravinia Festival in Highland Park, where outdoor concerts rang out all summer long. Ravinia is the longest-running outdoor festival in the United States. As much as I appreciated a paycheck from Ravinia, my heart was simply not in the work. Steppenwolf was up and running in full swing, and my mind was focused fully on our theater company. Charlie, my boss, didn’t like me at all. I was still a screwup kid in many ways, and he could sense this. But I made the best of it. One time, when I was supposed to stock the bathrooms with toilet paper, I unlocked the storeroom doors to get my supplies and a bright idea popped into my mind. Toilet paper was expensive—and I thought, Hey, over at Steppenwolf, we need toilet paper! Paper towels too. A few waste baskets for our bathroom would be great! So I grabbed the supplies and tossed them over a shady area of Ravinia’s fence with a plan to pick them up after work. Relax, I told myself. They’ve got lots.
I always felt bad about helping myself to supplies. Years later, after I became better known as an actor, I appeared on LIVE! with Regis and Kelly during a week one summer when they shot their show at the Ravinia Festival. I thought, I want to pay Ravinia back for everything I took. During the segment, I shared the story of taking the supplies and had them wheel out this huge pallet of toilet paper and paper towels. I nodded to the pallet and said, “Sorry, Ravinia. No hard feelings?”
Suddenly, two police officers jumped out from behind the pallet and arrested me onstage.
Everybody howled.
But in the summer of 1976, not everything was so neatly resolved, as our ensemble was a little wild, trying to get along and learn to work together. In those first months of Steppenwolf, things quickly grew messy and complicated as personal life and theater life intertwined. Moira Harris had particularly caught my eye. She was a brilliant young actor. Beautiful. Passionate. Full of pure fire. I convinced her to date me, and we soon fell in love. She was unlike anyone I’d ever met. But our love affair wasn’t without its ups and downs. We were all over the place in our relationship. Two passionate personalities. On again, off again. In love, out of love. Clinging to each other. Mad at each other. Breaking up. Making up. Making out. And it wasn’t just the two of us whose relationships were so chaotic.
Laurie and Terry had dated in college, but they broke up right before we started rehearsals. Laurie then started dating John, so John and Terry were at each other’s throats. John was set to direct Terry and H. E. and me in The Indian Wants the Bronx, and Terry was set to direct Laurie and Jeff in The Lover. After a year, Nancy left and Joan Allen replaced her, and soon Joan and Terry started dating. No one, besides H. E. Baccus, who got married the summer of 1976, had a boyfriend or girlfriend outside the company. We simply didn’t have time. The love and the work and the plays and the passion mixed together and complicated everything. Like a family, we would argue our points, agree, disagree, get mad at each other, embrace each other, storm out, laugh, cry—our emotions could be all over the map. We were such an insulated cluster of craziness, and our theater was so small, even the audience members couldn’t escape the clutches of us actors. Some of our plays worked well, and some not so well, but there was always an electric charge running through the ensemble members.