Grateful American: A Journey from Self to Service(18)
We laugh about it now, but occasionally, in those early first days in the basement, Terry would quit and walk out. He’s an incredibly passionate and committed artist who sometimes felt he had to leave to make a point. But he’d always come back. Our rehearsals buzzed with craziness and energy and raw desires—and some days we just shook our heads wondering how we were going to get through it. But we felt hopeful too. I think we all quietly saw that as time went by, the passion and insanity going on offstage somehow seemed to be spilling over onto the stage. It was exciting and fun to be performing with these folks.
On opening night of the new Steppenwolf, tension ran high. We were still painting the walls a half hour before the audience started to arrive. We performed two of the one-act plays, one right after the other, and the stage exploded with energy. The next night we planned to do the other two plays and alternate back and forth from night to night. All the craziness in our lives found its target. The first review came out in our local newspaper, praising both the play selection and the acting, and reading it, we all couldn’t help but grin.
Our excitement was over-the-top. We were finally starting to rock and roll. And we weren’t passing the hubcaps for donations anymore. But at three bucks per seat, three fifty on weekends, the shows were a bargain even in 1976. We had very little money to produce our shows, but somehow we scraped together enough to put on more and more plays. Sometimes the basement was packed. Other times, we had more people onstage than in the audience—maybe a cast of seven and an audience of four. Some nights, no one came at all, so we ordered pizza and bought beer and turned it into our own little basement party. Again, no one was getting paid, but what really mattered was that we were doing our own thing in our own way, and even though our personal lives were chaotic, what happened onstage kept us together and moving forward.
By the time Steppenwolf opened its doors, Saturday Night Live had been up and running for a year, and on Saturdays after our shows we’d all go to someone’s apartment to watch. Back then, the SNL cast included John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, Jane Curtin, Laraine Newman, Garrett Morris, and Bill Murray. They were slightly older than we were, yet we identified so much with what they were doing as an ensemble. In general, Steppenwolf performed more serious work than SNL, but we approached the craft of being onstage with the same uninhibited passion and craziness.
On nights when no audience showed up, we hosted what we dubbed “Random Nights” in the basement, where we did anything possible to entertain ourselves. The more outrageous and sillier, the better. It turned out to be a good theater exercise, plus it kept our spirits up despite the empty house. John Malkovich had a running gag where he lip-synced to Springsteen’s “Blinded by the Light”—the Manfred Mann’s Earth Band version—and revved himself up like a deuce, rolling his hips, tripping and sneezing and wheezing with a boulder on his shoulder: the strangest dance moves anyone could imagine. We all hooted and howled and yelled catcalls from the audience. Terry liked to do a mime act, explaining that he was the rare mime who actually speaks. He had a dog named Fifi who did tricks for our entertainment. Terry positioned his hand like he was holding a leash and called out a trick. He ordered Fifi to sit, beg, jump, speak, and r-r-r-r-r-r-roll over—and we all gasped in astonishment, amazed by Fifi’s expertise. Now, we couldn’t actually see Fifi or her tricks because . . . she’s a mime’s dog. Get it? Moira performed as a French singer with the most horrendous French accent you’ve ever heard. Completely out of tune, she sang songs such as “Fool on the Hill” and “The Way We Were.” “The Sound of Silence” was a house favorite. Moira’s accent and pitch were so perfectly terrible that Laurie Metcalf had tears in her eyes, she laughed so hard.
Just for fun, I rented a little super 8 film camera with a microphone on it. I put together a short comedy-of-errors film titled The Audition, set in the small town of Beason, Illinois. A big-city, out-of-work New York hack is hired to direct Hamlet for a Beason community theater production of the play. The director starts with a grandiose speech, then the various citizens of the town try out for the play by giving their best rendition of the famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy.
Everyone in the company was in the movie, so today this is considered everyone’s first film performance. Terry starred as the hack director, Dan Ville, who begins to lose his mind as each audition gets worse and worse until finally, after it’s all over and he’s sitting alone in the empty theater, he closes his eyes in exhaustion and dreams of his perfect Hamlet—which, since he’s a terrible director himself, is not all that great. Moira played the assistant director, Cheryl Soul, a Corn Chex–chomping nutcase who crunches on cereal constantly but absolutely loves everyone’s audition. Jeff played a character called Billy Guile, a local car dealer with a bad haircut and a hideously ugly plaid jacket. Someone has coaxed him into auditioning, so he walks up with a potbelly and a cigarette hanging out of his mouth and, bored to tears and a bit aggravated at being there, delivers his Hamlet speech like he’s got some bad indigestion. Then he just quits in the middle of the speech because he’s tired and wants to sit down. Al Wilder played a character in a hideously ugly leisure suit who performed the lead role in Beason’s most recent musical, so he’s overconfident, feeling spunky, and turns the classic speech into a song-and-dance number. Laurie Metcalf danced behind Wilder, dressed up as the self-described “ugliest gal in town,” complete with crazy hair, dopey glasses, and no dancing skills whatsoever. When Wilder is asked by the director why Laurie is onstage, he replies, “She’s my chorus.” H. E. Baccus played Julius Rudell, an eccentric man in very tight shorts with an inflated vision of himself, and Malkovich was the local numbskull called Two-Barrel Wimer.