Grateful American: A Journey from Self to Service(25)
In the early 1980s, our theater grew, and we began to raise more money. We started to sell subscriptions and developed a stronger board of directors. We scored some hits at the box office, enabling us to extend the run of our plays. Eventually, as we started to have enough work as actors, we all were able to quit our day jobs and focus completely on building the theater, all the while getting better as actors and directors and theater artists.
And Moira and me? After forty years of being together, through all our ups and downs, all our confusion, all our passion, all our mistakes, all our successes—we are still married and still in love.
CHAPTER 5
When We Started to Look Beyond Ourselves
H. E. Baccus had been the artistic director of Steppenwolf from our beginnings when we were in the basement of the Catholic school in 1976. Four years later, in the fall of 1980 and about six months after I’d come back from Hollywood, Balm in Gilead became a huge hit for us, and we were on a roll. For the next production, H.E. had selected a comedy called Absent Friends that he was going to direct. During rehearsals, everything was going smoothly, or so we thought. One morning H.E. called us out of the blue and announced he wasn’t coming back in. He was a musician, he insisted, and he wanted to focus his energy there. So he quit the theater for good. We were caught completely off guard, but we wished him well and then scrambled to find another director. Malkovich stepped in and finished the production, which turned out to be a hit.
Once we got through opening night and the play was up and running, we met to decide on the next permanent AD. Malkovich and I were both suggested. John reluctantly said okay to being considered, but his tone didn’t suggest he really wanted to do it. He’d filled in as AD a few years earlier when H.E. had taken a summer off, and under his leadership we’d done a controversial dark comedy by Wallace Shawn, Our Late Night. Edgy and sexually explicit, it received terrible reviews. We had thought it was kind of funny, but audience members walked out in droves. Being artistic director is a tough job with a lot of pressure. You pick all the plays. Some of them work; some don’t. So while John accepted putting his name in for a vote, I don’t think his heart was in it. The ensemble voted, and I landed the position. I think John was relieved. He liked his flexibility and the ability to work at Steppenwolf or other theaters if parts came along. As for me, I jumped into the role as artistic director, ready to go. I proved a much different type of leader than H.E. I was convinced we needed to approach our work more like a business. The following Monday morning, I came in with a new set of rules. High on the list was the following: “All staff members in by 9:00 a.m. every day.” I made several other changes, and even fired someone. Good Lord! The new rules and approach came as a shock to the ensemble, sort of like General Patton had just walked in. While we still maintained our collaborative approach to the direction we wanted to go as a company, as AD I felt it was time to approach things a bit differently, to step up our game and allow the artistic director to lead in a new way.
One rule I implemented was the now-infamous—at least among the company—“no pot” rule. No pot could be smoked (or eaten) anywhere around the theater until after showtime. No beer either. Everyone thought the “No Pot” rule was hilarious coming from a guy who openly partook from time to time. But for the most part, everyone went along with it.
On a few occasions, the new rules were broken, and I made my disapproval known. Once, during a performance of a play I directed, I sneaked into the theater to check on the play and watched from the back of the house. During one scene I saw that a bunch of lighting cues I’d set for the play had been screwed up—totally off. After the show, I went up to the light booth to talk to the crew and found open beer cans. They’d been drinking during the show and had messed up the cues. I hit the ceiling, threw their beer into the garbage, and shouted at them to shape up. They never messed up again. Another time I went out to lunch with our board president and afterward brought her back to the theater, only to find a friend of the company who we’d worked with a few times sitting there calmly rolling a doobie. I quickly turned the president around before she noticed him and walked her out to her car. I then came back and chewed him out. After a while, I calmed down and explained to him, and to others who had gathered around, that I was serious about our theater and wanted folks to get on board with the new way of operating. We had such amazing talent in our group, and I was simply trying to focus our energies on getting better, saving the partying for after hours.
I felt confident in Steppenwolf. We all felt confident in Steppenwolf. Perhaps too confident. We had great faith in the chemistry and energy of our ensemble. But I believed we needed to get more serious about how we approached our work and built our company. And we did. And after a while, the “no pot” rule became a funny Steppenwolf legend that we still laugh about today.
Yet even with a little bit of chaos in our business approach to things, onstage we were dynamite, and by that time we were brash and even a bit arrogant about our work. We felt we had one of the best companies anywhere and as actors we could do anything we set our minds to. When Malkovich had directed Balm in Gilead, the success of the show had fueled those feelings of invincibility. John was ready to tackle his next big challenge.
One of my primary responsibilities as the new AD was to figure out what to put on the stage. But when I began as AD, I inherited a season that had already been planned by our previous AD. One production already in the works was Savages, by British playwright Christopher Hampton, with Malkovich set to direct. The plot centers around a historical atrocity that happened in the early 1960s: the systematic removal from the rain forest and the eventual slaughter of a single tribe of South American Indians. The play was an ambitious undertaking for our company—not only because of the calamitous subject matter, but also due to the simple logistics of assembling the needed cast.