Grateful American: A Journey from Self to Service(32)
The great British actor Albert Finney came to see Orphans and liked it so much he asked if I’d direct him in a London production of the show. He wanted the role of Harold, played by John Mahoney in my original production. Albert was a legend, and I was knocked out by the magnitude of his request. So we made a deal to bring Kevin Anderson from the original cast as the younger brother, and as Terry was caught up with developing another play he was going to direct, we brought in Jeff Fahey to play the older brother. In March of 1986, Orphans opened for a limited engagement at the 173-seat Hampstead Theatre before moving to the larger Apollo Theatre in the West End of London. Albert was in the finest form imaginable, winning the Olivier Award for his performance. During rehearsals, I stayed in an extra room in Albert’s house. Although Albert was about twenty years older than I was, we went out every night, and I could not keep up. We’d wine and dine and party until 2:00 a.m., and I’d be conked out the next morning when Albert would stop by my room at seven, bright-eyed and clearheaded, hollering, “C’mon, Gary, we’re going for coffee!”
Many top British actors came to see Albert in the show, including Sean Connery, Anthony Hopkins, and Vanessa Redgrave. Very gracious and extremely smart, Vanessa took Moira and me out to dinner one evening and talked about international things we knew nothing about. We just nodded whenever it seemed appropriate and said, “Yeah? . . . Yeah.” Or . . . “Yeah!”
From 1982 to 1987, we produced even more shows back in Chicago, moving a total of six of those shows to New York—True West, And a Nightingale Sang, Balm in Gilead, Orphans, The Caretaker, and Educating Rita. With the exception of The Caretaker, which was produced in midtown Manhattan at the Circle in the Square Theatre, these were all Off-Broadway productions, and all of them did well. In early 1985, I was appointed artistic director again, taking back the reins from my buddy Jeff Perry.
More good things were coming. That summer, Steppenwolf won the Tony Award for Regional Theatre Excellence. A Tony is the highest honor you can receive in the New York theater. A bunch of teenagers had stayed true to their dreams, created their own fiercely independent theater company in a basement in Highland Park, given it everything they had, and emerged on the other side with the top honors in the country. It had taken us just over a decade to be recognized nationally for our work.
We hatched more big plans. In summer 1986, I directed the production of a play written by musician Tom Waits and his wife, Kathleen Brennan, titled Franks Wild Years. Terry Kinney started out directing the play, but Tom and Terry didn’t see eye to eye, and at one point they came into my office to try to talk things out. There was a lot of tension, and for a while Tom just sat and rocked back and forth, clearly feeling a lot of anxiety. I was worried. Steppenwolf had brought in some outside investors who had put some big money into the show in hopes of moving it to New York, and as artistic director it was my job to sort things out.
After trying our best to work through the problems, it was clear that Terry, Tom, and Kathleen were not going to be able to get on the same page, so I had no choice but to step in to take over directing the play. We were only days before the first audience, and we needed to get something up onstage quickly. It was important immediately to make Tom comfortable with working with me, so I started the new rehearsals by asking him simply to perform for our ensemble all the songs he’d written for the play. We put a single spotlight on the darkened stage, and while the band played, he stood under the light and entered the spirit of each song, relaxing more and more as he played and sang for us. I gave everyone the next day off so I could go through the script to figure out what I wanted to do. We had to work fast. I decided I needed kind of a clean slate so I could come up with a new staging. I removed most of the set that had been built, choosing instead to go with very simple and movable set pieces. We came back together with a reworked script, and over the next few days restaged the show, did our technical rehearsals, and added the lights and sound. It all began to gel, but the clock was ticking and the end of the first act was still not right. I woke up early one morning with an idea and came into rehearsals that day asking Tom for a new song. I felt we needed a big Vegas show tune to take us into intermission, so Tom went off with his band and came back in ten minutes. Right there on the spot, he’d written the song “Straight to the Top,” a classic Sinatra-styled up-tempo show tune. We decided Tom should wear a red velvet tuxedo and black Elvis wig, and he infused the song with a passionate clown-like tap dance. It was hilarious, and a great way to end the first half of the show.
In the end, the show came together great. And while our hopes of moving the show to New York did not materialize, the investors made some of their money back, and the summer turned out to be peaceful, joyful, productive, and fun for the cast of Franks Wild Years.
During this period in the mid-1980s, other doors opened, and at one point, the summer of 1985, we simultaneously ran shows in three different cities. We did Miss Julie in Chicago, Orphans in New York, and two shows in Washington, DC: Coyote Ugly, which Malkovich directed, and Streamers, another play set during the Vietnam War that Terry directed and I acted in. Then, a few years later, in 1990, we opened The Grapes of Wrath on Broadway. That production won us another Tony, this time the award for Best Play. Director Frank Galati, who also adapted the script, won the Tony for Best Director. Lois Smith and I received nominations for featured actress and actor in a play: Lois for her role as Ma Joad, and me for my part as Tom Joad, the iconic role played by Henry Fonda in the 1940s film version directed by John Ford. These accolades all helped cement Steppenwolf’s reputation—both nationally and internationally.