Grateful American: A Journey from Self to Service(21)
After our summer season of four one-act plays at Steppenwolf, we opened the fall 1976 season with a play called Look, We’ve Come Through, and it flopped—our first play that really tanked—but as an ensemble we laughed it off. (We should have been tipped off about this play, because the director, H. E. Baccus, found it in a book titled Broadway’s Beautiful Losers.) After that, we started putting together The Sea Horse with Moira and me in main roles and John Malkovich directing. I loved being onstage with Moira. But just before opening night, she developed phlebitis in her leg, a highly painful condition where a vein becomes inflamed. We sought medical help right away, and doctors ordered her to stay off her feet for a while. Moira couldn’t go on. Holy cow! It was our opening performance. Tickets were sold, and we even had a few potential donors coming that night. We started to scramble. We asked the few critics who were reviewing us at the time to hold off until Moira was back, and John jumped into action to find a replacement. The show must go on!
Rondi Reed, a classmate of all the ISU folks, had performed the same play the previous year, so Malkovich called her up and promised her fifty bucks for a one-night performance. She drove up from Bloomington-Normal and met me for the first time ever about fifteen minutes before the curtain went up. It’s a highly physical play that contains some violent scenes. Moira and I had never choreographed all of our movements, so I explained to Rondi that in rehearsals Moira and I just kind of whaled on each other during those moments. The lights dimmed, the curtain went up, and Rondi and I did the play. She pulled off the performance brilliantly, and thankfully nobody got hurt. The show played well to the audience, and Rondi got her fifty bucks and headed back to Illinois State.
But what about the next night? Laurie Metcalf had returned to ISU that fall to finish her final semester at school, so John called and asked if she would be able to take time off to come back and help. Laurie is an amazingly quick study, so the next day she learned the part in the car on the way up to Highland Park, and when she arrived I also explained to her that for the fight scenes we would just go at each other. Crazy, but it worked. Laurie continued brilliantly in the role for the rest of that weekend. The following week Moira felt better again, came back full force, and was awesome. The critics came, the show, Moira, and I got good reviews, and it did well for us. So, it all worked out in the end. And since Laurie was already in Steppenwolf, we didn’t have to pay her. Hey, fifty bucks was fifty bucks.
Steppenwolf put on more plays throughout 1976 and 1977, and from time to time we moved a few shows into the city. In the summer of 1977, we were able to pull some funding together to rent a bigger, more professional space on the North Side of Chicago called the Jane Addams Hull House. This was our first official run in the city of Chicago. We remounted two of our one-acts, Birdbath and The Indian Wants the Bronx, and, later, another play called Our Late Night. I was not in that play, so I took a bass-playing gig in the Quad Cities to back up a vocal group, seven weeks of shows at the John Deere convention. I remember being there on August 16, 1977, when we heard the news that Elvis Presley had died. Sad to see the King go. We played a few Elvis songs that night.
The one-acts did well that summer, the other show flopped, and we tried, as always, to learn from our mistakes in order to make our shows better. In fall 1978, Chicago’s St. Nicholas Theater Company, founded by William H. Macy and David Mamet, among others, hired seven out of the nine actors in our ensemble to be in a play called Fifth of July, written by the great playwright Lanford Wilson. It was the first time members of our company got paid for acting—eight shows a week for a hundred bucks per person. After taxes, it dropped to eighty-eight bucks a week, and the money didn’t go far. We all ate a lot of mac and cheese back then. A can of tuna fish mixed in was a big treat.
Some family location shuffling turned out to have a big impact. My parents decided to move to Los Angeles where Dad opened the West Coast office of his film editing business. Mom, Dad, my brother, and my sister moved out to California while I stayed back in Highwood, living with Moira. Steppenwolf grew stronger all the time, although no one yet made a living from acting. We were into our second season of plays as a full ensemble and growing, yet we were all still working day jobs.
Neither Moira nor I had ever been to California, so in the summer of 1978, we took a break from theater and visited my parents for a couple of weeks. Moira and I were at another tense point in our relationship—so tense we wondered if we should break up for good. We’d broken up a few times before, but a visceral magnetism always pulled us back together. Still, this time we visited my parents with the plan to break up after we returned to Chicago.
California was amazing to us midwestern kids. We did all the touristy things. We drove up the coast from L.A. to San Francisco with my parents, marveling at the ocean the whole way. We stopped in the romantic towns of Monterey and Carmel-by-the-Sea. We headed back to L.A. and toured Universal Studios and Hollywood Boulevard. My mom took us to Beverly Hills to see the stars’ homes, then down to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre where we put our hands in the handprints and saw the stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Moira and I really enjoyed our trip, even though throughout our travels, the big decision of whether to break up for good still hung over our heads.
When we returned to Chicago, we decided to give it one more go, but our relationship remained rocky. While we were working at the St. Nicholas on Fifth of July, Moira’s father, who’d been battling lung cancer for some time, was not doing well at all. Moira had a new day job as a receptionist at a law firm in Chicago where one of the attorneys developed a crush on her. Moira’s parents and older sister wanted her to break up with me and take up with the attorney. So Moira felt very torn at this time. We loved each other, but our relationship spiked up and plunged down, always confused. During the run of Fifth of July, Moira’s father passed away. It was hard on her, and I tried my best to help her through.