Diana Slickman Part Two

BEHIND THE NON-ILLUSORY SCENES

[Slickman was the first theater manager the Neo-Futurists had, she created the position. It may be what eventually burned her out. This "job" she took on ate up more time than she got paid for, and in those days our office was just a little closet next to the State Park. No more than two people could be in there at a time. And she lived there day in day out. In understanding the reasons for the building of a more stable system within the company I felt it very important to get Slickman to talk about this aspect of her career with the Neo-Futurists.]

JP: You come into the company, you’re acting and you’re writing your own material and somewhere along the line you find out there’s no organization.

DS: There’s an organizational vacuum!

JP: So talk about that.

DS: Well, when I first started the show we did everything. Talk about DIY. My God, we did everything. We cleaned the space, we ran the space, we made brownies, we manned the snack booth. Which meant you got there and you made cookies and brownies and you made coffee. And then as soon as you could get everybody into the State Park you ran around and you were in the show. And one of the rotating responsibilities was taking care of the money because every night people brought us cash money and it had to be accounted for. So you had to reconcile the rolling sheets...there’s a form now, which I instituted. But people used to just take a piece of paper and make a grid each night and do the tally marks. And cast members would buy things for the show and turn in little scraps of paper and get reimbursed for them, sort of. You know, it was kind of loosey goosey. Doing the money was like a closing duty. Some people who were interested in that stuff did that stuff? And it seemed…it was kind of haphazard to me. I’d been a bookkeeper at the Westport Cash Saver, I’d done bookkeeping here in Chicago as my day job. And I believe in order. And I also believe that money is a form power, because I think that’s evident, and if you’re not keeping track of your money you’re not keeping track of your power. And a theater company, what don’t have no money, they should keep track of everything that they have. And nobody was doing that. I mean, it was getting done. The money was getting deposited. And we’d get paid. I remember Scott Hermes—for some reason—was, in my mind, the one who was always doing the money. Sometimes Greg would be counting the money, but I always seem to think of Scott as someone who wrote the checks and took care of things which doesn’t surprise me. He’s a math guy. But it didn’t seem very…well, it didn’t seem very organized or very business like. And one time the day came when we couldn’t get paid. And why couldn’t we get paid? Not because we didn’t have the money, but because we ran out of checks. How can that happen?? How can it be that no one noticed that they had written the last check? And then I thought, well, okay somebody clearly has to corral this. I wrote a little job description for myself and thought I’m gonna do this. Because I’d been the company manager for the Shakespeare company, and I wrote up a little job description of things I would do. Keeping up with schedules and scheduling the space, and doing the bookkeeping. I think six dollars an hour or something was what I was going to get paid to do that. I was immediately shot down. Immediately shot down. Because it was not a…it was the beginnings of a hierarchy. Somebody in charge of one particularly thing all the time. But I remember that meeting, as many did in those days, that meeting ending in tears. Because I had good intentions, my intentions were good, my intentions actually were to sacrifice myself for this thing for the betterment of the company so that we didn’t run out of checks again, or get to the theater at 10 on a Friday night and find out that there was no toilet paper. Or find out that nobody had done whatever it was that we couldn’t go on without doing, that nobody had bought soda or coffee or, you know, whatever it was. And I thought, I’m offering myself upon the altar of the theater to make everybody’s lives better and I was seen as somebody who was grasping.

[Slickman here. If John can throw in parenthetical remarks, I think I should get to, also, yes? I want to say here that I know I sound exactly like the big ol' drama queen that I said I hated in the early part of this interview. And despite the way I go on here, I wasn't the only one who thought this stuff needed to change and wanted to do things to make the company run better. I wasn't the only one working hard on that.]
Eventually, I got my way. And I don’t know how or why, I don’t know what turned the tide on that, I don’t know how I managed to convince people that that was actually a good idea. But I blame myself for everything now. That's what I do, John, I blame myself. For everything. Because at the time, having come from a theater company—the Shakespeare company—that had a very specific hierarchy, although I enjoyed the collective model, it was exhausting. We couldn’t make a decision about anything without talking about it—there was no time limit on our meetings in those days. [Anita Loomis, who actually instated many guidelines including a special fund where by every year all the cast members could take a class in any field of study they wanted and get 200 dollars reimbursed from the company. This was to keep us learning, to keep us bringing fresh ideas into the show. It was called the Loomis Fund. So Anita suggested we put a cap on how long we met. 8:45 to 10:30, and then we had to call it a night no matter where the conversations was going. We mostly still stick to this, but often we need a reminder to limit how much each person talks, and repeats themselves.] We met on Sunday nights after the show and talked until two in the morning if we had to. It was awful. I advocated that we have an artistic director. I thought we ought to have an artistic director. We didn’t have one.
We were hindered by not having an organization. It was a lot of work just to maintain that space, and it was a lot of work just to run that show. And there were only 9 of us. We were doing everything. We were writing grants, we were administering the show, we were writing press releases, we were doing all these things and we were…you know, there was no…and some people were working harder than others as is always the case in those situations. Everyone had their thing that they were good at. Annie did a lot of the early posters, she would put together the press materials because she worked at New City, she knew a lot of people in that arena. But no one was being compensated for those things. And we were getting paid like $12 a show. Or a week or something. It was nothing. We were getting paid nothing. And it was a lot of work for the joy of doing it and the glory of the show, but it was…I saw people putting in a lot of work without getting any remuneration. They didn’t get any…there was no incentive. Eventually everyone was gonna burn out. And so I thought, if we can compartmentalize, if everyone can have a job that they get paid a little bit for, that will make things easier. Everybody’s gonna know who’s doing it, you’re gonna feel like you’re valued because you’re getting a little money. You’re getting recognized and you’re getting a little pocket change. You’re getting drinking money, if nothing else. I thought it was a good idea, but in some ways it goes against the collective idea. And I think that that was...it did institute a hierarchy that did change the dynamic of the company. In a not good way. And I think the good thing was we all started getting paid more. Because we knew how much money was in the bank. We could make a budget, we could start writing grants. You know, I think one grant had been written before…in 1992? In four years? A show that was running every weekend to sold out audiences? That seemed absurd to me. I didn’t know why that wasn’t happening. Because I knew the money was out there. I thought if we organized a little, we’d get more done. We’d get paid better. And we did. Some of that stuff happened, but then it..lines started to be drawn.

JP: You started the company's savings account.

DS: I thought that was important. Again, because people brought us cash-money every week. And it would sit in our checking account not doing anything until we needed it. And, you know, why not put it in a savings account? Why not start a reserve? Because, you know, early on in my tenure there, we started talking about whether we could stay in that space forever. You know, we didn’t have that big office space at the time. I was in that closet. The current office was a Romanian library. That was unpleasant, a fraught relationship with them. We thought we were gonna have to move out of there eventually. And I thought, if we’re gonna move we gotta start saving money. Because we’re gonna have to buy a building or rent a building and to get grant money for that stuff? We’re gonna have to demonstrate that we’re fiscally responsible. I thought, what happens if we get closed down? What happens if this space gets closed down? We’re gonna have to start renting from somebody. We gotta have money in reserve so we can rent from somebody. So that’s why I started the savings account. Every good business should do that. You should have six months in reserve in case…the catastrophic happens. Your building burns down, your CEO dies. You have to have a little nest egg. So that’s why I started that. And, you know, we started keeping our books on the computer. We started a mailing list that was computerized, a database, that wasn’t on spreadsheet, somebody typing it into Word or something. My God. So we started doing that kinda stuff to build our audience and to be more effective. Especially as we started doing more prime time plays. So we could get people in there. And we wanted to tell our Too Much Light audience that we were doing something else. So I wanted to build that part of it, the mailing list and all that stuff. It’s a lot of work. And even then, you know, with everyone pitching in and doing stuff it’s still a lot of work.

WHO PUT SLICKMAN IN A CLOSET? (OH, SHE DID.)

JP: You were in a closet.

DS: I was in a closet.

JP: Not only were doing the show and maintaining the space, you were spending your afternoons and evenings in a small office that was in actuality just a closet. A small closet at that!

DS: ‘Till 1:30am. At one point I was there 7 days a week. Because I had 3 part time jobs, one of which was to work part time at the theater as managing director. I would be there from, like 4 to 7, Monday through Friday. I’d be at rehearsal on Tuesday nights, I’d be at the show Friday, Saturday, & Sunday nights. I was there all the time. And then I got burnt out. I got all burnt. out. [Diana has an intensity in her eyes, strong but as if she could cry at any moment, and this intensity in her whole self is infectious. Just the way she said she was "burnt. out." had me with my head in my hands cursing the world.] And I had to go. I took a sabbatical in the 2nd half of ’96—right before you came in—and that helped some, but I decided I had to do that after David Kodeski and I got into some fight. We got into something—you know Kodeski, he’ll fight with you about anything. We got into a fight about…about…we were doing a summer shorts, it was called, and we were doing a series of short plays. You know, 3 a night and there were 2 different programs that we did in different repertory. One night you do one, do the other the next night. And we got into a fight about which one went first. About which play goes on which schedule. And I had decided one thing for, I’m sure, some very good reason and David had decided another thing for, I’m sure, some very good reason. And we started yelling at each other about it. And he made me cry. And he made fun of me—well, I made myself cry—but he made fun of me or dismissed me for crying, and I said, “I’m leaving right now and I’m not coming back for 6 months and don’t come after me.” And that’s exactly what I did—and I still, I was still managing director but I was not in the show for six months. Because I was crispy. Crispy all over from burn out. My God, I crackled. And, you know, that was what? Last half of ’96? And end of 2000 was my last show. My last full-time show. [When I came in Diana was still the major force behind the administration, and she would bring all the business to us, and we would hash out every goddamn decision that had to be made. It was painful, painful as all getgo, but some sadistic DIY part of myself enjoyed it. So Slickman was still very active, and if this was her being "not so active" I can't imagine the "active" Slickman. But I did see her participation decrease and then she left Too Much Light and left her position at the theater.]

JP: [A few weeks later I conducted an interview with David Kodeski, and I knew that these two were tight, tight friends and still allowed themselves to tackle each other in a full out verbal war. So I wanted Slickman to talk a little about David.]

DAVID KODESKI CLOSE COMBATIVE FRIEND

DS: [David] is a particular guy. He’s…I don’t know why we get along as well as we do. We’re at odds a lot of the time. But from the beginning we were good friends and part of that was just from coming into the show, being new at the same time. Although Lusia and I get along, we don’t have that same sort of…you know David and I sort of hooked together somehow.

JP: And you still work together.

DS: Oh yeah, we still work together. He’s such a good writer. He writes really beautifully. He can be really funny onstage. And like Kotis, he’ll write things that are totally just…plays about farting, and then he’ll write something that’s so beautiful, both with equal facility. Many of us will write things that are completely unsuccessful, and yet will fight for this completely unsuccessful thing and it’s not that successful but we want it in anyway! He’s got that stubborn streak that in some ways served him really well in the show, that ability to fight for the things that you think ought to go into the show. He was not shy about expressing his opinion, which I think was really valuable. We were all pretty tough in those days. But he’s…um…he’s a generous performer, he’s a dear person. But he’s got a mean streak. Which he’s the first to admit, I think.

JP: In David I sometimes see my friend Peter, they both emulate this lovable drunken Irish [Polish] bar mentality where the more you argue with someone the more it means you like them.

DS: It’s almost pugilistic. It’s not about being right, it’s about winning the fight. And sometimes that can be aggravating, but sometimes when you get into that kind of fight with him it’s just a stupid thing. And it doesn’t have any bearing on how much you like him, it’s just an aggravating thing that he does. It’s like cracking his knuckles. It’s like the psychic equivalent of cracking his knuckles all the time. I’d still like him, but I wish he wouldn’t do that. Yeah, he’s…it’s the Polish.

JP: Did that combativeness come out in business meetings too or mostly just on the creative side? Was he like that across the board?

DS: I don’t remember us getting into it about that stuff so often. But just, you know, and partly, too, I think he sometimes is just a contrary…you’ll take a stand, he’ll take the opposite stand even though maybe he doesn’t care that much. He just doesn’t think you should have your way.

WHAT ABOUT ME!

JP: I’ve found recently that people will call me a contrarian. I’ve always taken it kind of hard. I’ve never thought of myself that way.

DS: No. You strike me as someone who sort of goes his own way.

JP: That’s what I always thought. I see myself as just slightly off. Like, I’ll try to understand something but I can only understand my perception of what I think is going on so, I think that makes me have a sort of slightly different opinion? Which is different to me than saying, “Oh, I get what you're saying and you're wrong.”

[Reviewing this next section, I feel about myself that over the years, becoming one of the senior members, I had to actively make myself be more vocal. It is important to have genuinely opposing opinions to better our decision making abilities, to be more aware of our responsibility to each other. I look back at Diana's evaluation of me, and I agree with it, but I don't like it. I think I have changed... for the most part.]

DS: “I get what you're saying and you're wrong.” That’s David’s way of doing it, and what I think your way of doing it is “I see what you’re doing and I think that you’re wrong so I’m going to ignore it.” Whereas David jumps into the breach, you wander away from the breach and occupy yourself in something else and pretend it’s not happening, whatever it is, whatever the argument is. “I’m just gonna wander somewhere else…” where as David is in there going (insert growling dog sound), tooth and nail. And that’s the difference in your style, but you may be exactly the same people. Everybody’s got their way of dealing with conflict and as David will himself say, he likes to have the last word. And he’ll get entrenched. And even if he thinks maybe it’s not worth being in that trench, he’s gonna stay in there until you admit it.

JP: There’s a lot of Neo-Futurists who are that way and it shows itself in different characteristics. Dave Awl picks his battles very specifically and makes sure he has all his "ducks in a row" so that his last words appear "educated." Greg, in his interview, talked about an incident in his childhood in elementary school. After watching a play he decided he wanted to be the last one clapping, so he continued clapping until his whole class was out in the hallway just to make sure he was the last one. It must have been an interesting period being with all these people who—

DS: Very. Strong. Personalities. Yeah. Nobody in the company was a pushover. There was not a lot of yielding. Which made for better theater in some ways. Made for very difficult rehearsals, sometimes it made for very difficult business dealings, sometimes? But the shows were good because we talked about everything. Nothing went into the show without discussion unless it was just so universally delightful that you couldn’t deny it. Sometimes the longest part of the night was deciding what would go in. Which I think is…in the later years that I was in the show and the couple of times I went into the show after I had quit full time, people were anxious to get out of rehearsal as quickly as possible. When I was originally in the show, often Tuesdays were your longest nights at the theater.

JP: The current NY casts spends a copious amount of time discussing each play. Each piece is talked about extensively.

ENSEMBLE CRITICISM MAKES THE PLAY GO

DS: We used to talk as much about the plays that we didn’t put in as the plays that we did. And that was incredibly valuable feedback. Some people didn’t want that feedback but they got it anyway. Or, sometimes you’d bring something in to read it and say "tell me what you think about that. I don’t think this is going in this week, but I want some feedback on it." And that was how it was with the Feminist Theater Collective, that’s what I was used to. I was used to bringing something in, reading it, gathering information, sifting through that and deciding what was valuable and working through what I had written based on those comments. We made better theater, we made better plays because we talked about what was successful and what wasn’t. And sometimes you couldn’t separate what was being said from how it was being said. We would have arguments about, if this play goes in I’m not gonna be in it. Because I don’t agree with that point of view and I don’t want to be seen as agreeing with that point of view. And that…that was fine. You could opt out of a play because I don’t’ want to espouse that point of view. But, you know, they were strong points of view. Which was great. I think that’s when the show is best, is when there’s a lot of diverse, strong points of view being put forward. Contradictory. Often. We’d have shows where some important thing had happened and there’d be two or three plays that dealt with it saying something different. And sometimes in direct opposition of the play that came before. That’s lively theater. That’s good stuff. Because that leaves the audience to think about it and decide for themselves instead of being told. Or just entertained. Not that I’m against being entertained but we were less concerned with—although we wrote some very funny plays—we were less concerned with making the audience like us as making a show that was interesting. If we had too many funny things we’d take a couple out.

[This challenge to Neo-Futurists to be openly critical is an ongoing battle. It ebbs and flows. We will get to the point where we have just stopped commenting for awhile, then someone will say, "We need to get back to more critical rehearsals." This ebb and flow seems to happen more frequently over the years. I feel it is not the quality of artists, I think the quality is always there, I feel it has more to do with the reality that each artist isn't in the show as consistently anymore, that we are all on different alloted time schedules: 16 weeks, 24 weeks 32 weeks 40 weeks. It is hard to build a strong critical relationship when the ensemble is changing week to week. It is a struggle of the modern neo times. One in which I do not feel we yet have a satisfactory solution.]

JP: There is a struggle for artists that to simplify is a balancing act between our own oblique unique selves and finding a relationship with the audience, where they can sympathize or even just be entertained by you. In searching for our own voices I feel often artists turn it into this hate of the audience, or referring to them as monkeys. [Not Barrel Of Monkeys, ACTUAL monkeys.] Perhaps that's a defense mechanism against being persuaded to appeal to the "majority." It's a difficult challenge to not distill your creativity in order to regularly be entertaining.

DS: More important than entertaining the audience is reaching the audience. And if that means I’m gonna make ‘em mad or uncomfortable or tell ‘em something they didn’t know before or present a point of view they hadn’t thought of. Or make them laugh until they pee, that’s fine. But they don’t have to like everything I say. And I think that some of the shows I’ve seen in the last few years, it’s been really concerned with, “I want the audience to like me,” For me it was more important to make the audience listen than to make them laugh. Although I’m all about making them laugh if I can. If I can do both. And I think we were less concerned with entertaining the first 2 or 3 years I was in the show. Not confronting them but engaged. We wanted them engaged, is I think the best way I can describe it.

JP: Okay. Now we can move forward to…You burned out, but you stayed around for almost two years. What eventually tipped you over the edge?

SLICKMAN OVERBOARD!

DS: You know what it was? The thing that tipped me over the edge, we went through that whole reorganization thing and I don’t know how it happened. I have no idea how it came to the place where we were having all day retreats about the organization of our company. How did that ever happen? I mean, yes, we needed—we had kind of fallen apart in what had been when I started, a sort of all-for-one mentality to a four people do all the administration stuff. And we had to have a board. We had had a straw board forever. People who were in the show. In fact, people who were no longer working with the company were on our board. Like I think our board was Phil, Karen, Tim [Reinhardt], & Greg [Allen]. Well that’s—half of those people are being paid by the company. Well, you can’t be on the board of a non-profit if you’re being paid by the company. This had to change because, especially with that PPA [debacle]. [I don't want to get too far into the PPA explanation but over the years there has been a Chicago code that has put plenty of storefront theaters out of business, and in summer/fall of 1999 the city came down hard, unreasonably hard on storefront theaters. We were put through all the aforementioned meetings orignally as measure to prevent us from being closed down, over time it morphed into something bigger and more complicated. Slickman eventually left in December of 2000.] The spotlight was being shown on small theaters and whether they were licensed to do what they were doing and we had to have a proper board. And truthfully, we needed a board. And, I’ll say it again, I don’t know how it happened but we had hired someone - a nice person, good intentioned - who had been working with theater companies that were not in anyway like our theater company. They were traditionally, hierarchally arranged theaters that she had worked with. And even then we fancied ourselves a collective. And she basically wanted us to be run like a business. Which, in some ways, was a great idea. But she also didn’t like the idea of artists having any control over the business aspects of the company that they had created and were funding through their work. She didn’t think that it was important for the people who were making the money to have decisions about how the company was run. And that was a mistake. She brought in someone to help us reorganize our company the way she wanted it organized. We went through a lot of exercises about being re-organized, and how to run our meetings and it turned out badly. I think it just broke us down rather than building us up. It was meant to build us up and it broke us down. The person whose idea this was, she was a catalyst for drama and we didn’t need anymore drama. We had plenty of drama at the time. Lotta personality conflicts in that company, didn’t need any help there. And that was the tipping point for me. It was no longer fun, it was no longer rewarding and I…it was emotionally draining. I didn’t need it. I couldn’t do it anymore. Every decision became fraught and it was like pulling teeth to get people to do anything because everybody felt sort of embattled or put upon or being asked something of. You couldn’t get anything done. And…yeah, I don’t know. It was unfortunate. And I don’t blame the board members, they were fine. I don’t blame the idea of the board. It was that process. It really…disintegrated things. It brought up a lot of long standing grievances that got aired in an unproductive way, that maybe never should have been aired. We could have gone on for a long time. Or eventually sorted things out ourselves or quietly disbanded instead of disbanding in a ball of flame. Which is why we ended up sort of losing people.

[In this ball of flame the company lost, throughout the next year or so: Diana Slickman, David Kodeski, Lusia Strus, Dave Awl, Anita Loomis, and me. (I was reactivated a few years later, although it was hardly noticable that I was inactive, in the grand scheme of neo-futurism.)]

DS: And the other thing about it is…what was fun about being in the company was doing the show. And all that other stuff we did because we had to do it and because we wanted the company to be successful. And then when you take that away from it, you start to resent people for the success of the company or when you think they’re getting attention for the success of the things that you think you worked for? Stuff you think you make possible but you’re not getting any credit for? That’s when being in the show stopped being fun. And when people started saying, I don’t wanna clean the toilets, I don’t wanna write any grants, I just wanna be in the show. And then the people who are doing that work are saying, “well, fuck you! maybe I just wanna be in the show, too. But I’m working here and you’re not doing shit but being in the show having fun.” That created a lot of tension. You know, people that were blowing off the duties we had all decided that we would do together. Because they didn’t wanna do that because that wasn’t fun. Or they had a job. Or whatever.

RESPONSIBILITY

JP: I’m wondering now is it a paradox to grow and yet try to hold onto all the day to day duties we do for the company? I feel the success of the show has a lot to do with the idea that we actively engage ourselves in the grunt work—it’s important to me that the audience sees us taking the garbage out every night or rolling them in and taking their cash, talking to them before and after the show. Is there a point where we can give too much responsibility away and just become hired actors, which is a strong fear of mine. Do you believe that these tasks we give ourselves actually affect the quality of the show?

DS: Well I think that’s…at least in my later days in the company, that was the tension. There were the people who just wanted to have fun and be in the show and didn’t wanna do all the other work that’s involved in running the theater company. That’s not what they were interested in. They were interested in writing and performing. Great. It should be fun. You should get to do the fun things. But I guess I believe in that ideal. That…I like the collective notion. I am in favor of people taking responsibility. That’s the bottom line. I think if you’re part of a theater company, or any endeavor, you should take a certain amount of responsibility for its success - which sometimes means doing things that aren't so fun.

JP: Correct. Can you go so far as to say this effects the quality of the performance?

DS: I don’t know. But I can say that I think the best experience I had was in the first two or three years when that’s what the company was, was everybody doing everything all the time and sharing responsibility for the things no one wanted to do to a more or less greater degree. I don’t know if it was just that group of people and the attitude that they had towards making this particular kind of theater. I can say that they were concurrent? But I don’t know that they were causally linked. I don’t know if one made the other possible. But I think we had a different attitude toward what the company was.

JP: I feel I’m in a Quixotic position now because I don’t wanna be doing all of that work, but sometimes I feel I have to for it to get done. That's what has driven me to realize that I am now one of the older statesmen at the company and this holds a large amount of responsibility because I truly believe in that idea, the aesthetic. It’s important to be working hard for the privilege to perform your own unique art.

DS: And that there is no line between what happens onstage and what happens offstage—which of course there is—but if the ideal is that your life onstage and your life offstage be inextricably linked or being the same, then you can’t just be in the show, you know what I mean? You have to be part of the whole. Even if that’s exhausting and you’re doing things you don’t wanna do. You know, welcome to the world. The world’s like that. If you want something to be successful you have to work at it. And if that means making a pleasant environment for the audience to come into—you know, the toilets are cleaned, the State Park is swept, whatever, then that’s what it means. But I think there’s a separation between those two things now. That the show is one thing and the running of the company is a different thing, and the maintaining of the space is a different thing. When we [Theater Oobleck] were performing Trojan Candidate in there I was appalled at the state of the space. Appalled. I mean, that poor space. It suffers so much because the landlords don’t give a flying fuck about it. But it also appears to not be cared about by the people who work there every day. You know, I took better care of that space when I was there in the six weeks of our run than I saw anybody else do. And it’s like, that’s not right. I know, I know, people are there too much already they don’t wanna take the time to mop the space when they leave, but the audience has to come in there. You don’t want it to be sticky when they come in. There was no pride of place. Which I think we had when first came in there. Like the the Hall of Presidents. What’s that doing there? Why is there a Hall of Presidents in the Neo-Futurarium? Because Ayun and Greg K thought there should be something in that hallway for the audience to look at. And Greg thought it should be presidents. I don’t know why. So they made it happen. They went to the trouble to make the space happen because they thought it should be a better place for our audience. I don’t know that that would have happened now. Are you looking for a portraitist now for Obama?

JP: Oh yeah, yeah. Well, we’re waiting. You have to wait for them to have a long enough time in the office.

DS: We didn’t do that with Bill Clinton.

JP: We waited to see what Bush would do. I think it is a smart idea to wait until we have a bit more of a picture between the intended goals of the new presidents and what actually is achieved in the presidential office.

DS: Gotta give the artist something to go with.

YEAH, THEY WERE IMPORTANT TO YOU THEN BUT WHAT ABOUT NOW?

JP: You are considered inactive/an alum, yet you still frequent the theater, and you stay in contact with many past and current Neo-Futurists: Kodeski, Ridarelli, Riordan, Claff—

DS: --and Mrs. Shaw.

JP: And Mrs. Shaw. And you keep in contact with the Kotis/Halliday family.

DS: Sure, sure, and Hermes. Lusia and I still talk every once in awhile or get together when she’s in town. Dave Awl and I still work together sometimes. We’re gonna do a Partly Dave Show later this month. [These took place at the Neo-Futurarium over a three month period, and I hope Dave will do them there again. Partly Dave.] Yeah, I’m still friends with all those people. I still see you every once in awhile, we’re sort of in business together. [Slickman has co-produced all the theater releases on my publishing company.] And I work with Steve and Sean every once in awhile, Heather I see all the time. So yeah, still connected with all those people. Wouldn’t have it any other way I don’t think. But yeah, I work with Theater Oobleck now. Which isn’t so different in a lot of ways, just in that the company is not so structured. It’s very much still a collective of people.

JP: There are a hand full of companies that have recently celebrated their 20th year, and many of these have chosen not to pursue having their own space. I find that pretty interesting. Perhaps some wanted a space but were too poor or lazy to find out how to get one, but I also thing it may have helped them in other ways.

DS: Having a space is like home ownership. Suddenly you have lots more responsibility that can’t be ignored. You know, when you rent a space on a show by show basis it’s not your responsibility to clean the toilets or deal with the landlord or try to figure out what to do about the roof that’s leaking that the landlord doesn’t wanna deal with or figure out how to make the space better for the audience. You breeze in and you breeze out and I think that for Oobleck, you know it’s funny because there are how many companies this year and last year having their 20th anniversary? The Neo-Futurists, Curious Theater Branch, Goat Island, somebody else I wanna say.

JP: Redmoon? [This isn't the company Diana was looking for, but they did start in 1990 and are closely approaching their 20th.]

DS: Four pillars of the Chicago fringe theater scene all celebrating their 20th year—what the fuck was in the water in 1988 is what I wanna know? What? That was just after I moved here and right after a whole bunch of other people moved here. There were a whole bunch of people coming to Chicago at that time, excited to make theater. And it’s an easy place to make theater. You put 3 actors in a room for 15 minutes and you’ve got a theater company, is what we used to say. And that was very much true at that time. You could rent empty storefronts and put on a show. It was easy. Still is. That’s one of the great things about Chicago.
I think a lot of those companies don’t have spaces because of the responsibility that comes along with it—not that they eschew responsibility, but it forces you to do things you might not wanna do. It forces you to put on 5 shows a year so you can keep money coming in so you can pay the rent. The thing that has allowed the Neo-Futurists to do that is, again, cashflow and it’s Too Much Light that brings in cash every week. It pays the rent. Then you just have to worry about finding money to pay the actors and pay the designers and make the publicity and pay the staff. But, without a space, you don’t have to put on a show just because you need to make money. You know, it’s hard. It’s hard to get people who are not theater administrators to run a space. We’ve seen that happen. We know it’s not easy. So I think for a lot of those people, you don’t have to produce if you don’t want to. And I think that’s the appeal for a lot of it. You just don’t have the responsibility. And you don’t have to start doing things you don’t wanna do because you have that responsibility. I think that’s why a lot of these companies don’t have a space. Oobleck’s been putting on weird ass shit for 20 years, crazy-ass shit. Curious Theater Branch, they’re prolific those folks. But they don’t have a space. You don’t necessarily need one in Chicago. Plenty of people who have it are willing to rent it out. Which is great. But, Oobleck’s a lot like the Neo-Futurists used to be. We have meetings where everybody signs up to do something. Everybody’s taken on some aspect of producing our next show. As they can. Everybody sharing responsibility, everybody knowing that there are unpleasant tasks that have to be done that will be made easier because everyone’s doing it. Or you know you have one unpleasant task and I’ll be doing it next time.


JP: What's up with BoyGirlBoyGirl?

DS: That’s a solo performance ensemble, which is a nice contradiction in terms. It started out with David Kodeski, Edward Thomas-Herrera, Stephanie Shaw, & Susan McLaughlin-Karp. They were each tired of putting on solo shows for six weeks that were attended by, like, 7 people per night. They decided to create a company where they could perform solo pieces together in one evening that would be completely attended because it was one-night-only and they each had their own audiences to draw from. And they’d be guaranteed a pretty full house for that one performance. And the idea for the show is to take a piece of found text and create pieces inspired by that piece of found text. So I think the first show they did was called…New More Shocking Secrets! or something. But their inspiration was like a tabloid magazine or a romance magazine or a true crime magazine or something. And they all did pieces inspired by that text. And then they did The Art of Italian Cooking, which was a cookbook, and they all did pieces about food or about traveling to Italy or meals, it was very fun. When Stephanie went back to school to get her master’s degree, and Mrs. Karp got pregnant, the ladies’ auxiliary (Rachel Claff and me) was formed. So the 6 of us have been performing off and on since then. And that’s fun. It’s…I like…it has some of the good elements of Too Much Light, you know, there’s a restriction? There’s a narrowing of the field which helps me at least, it inspires me to write if I’m made to think about a particular thing or made to write in a certain way or have a time constraint, so that’s been real fun. And, you know, you get the best of both worlds. You get to be a solo performer and you don’t have to draw crowds all by yourself. And we’ve branched out. No longer just the one night stand. We find that 3 or 4 is our best number. We’ve done, like, 6 performances for a show and we found that it just didn’t work out. Three’s the magic number. Gives people just enough opportunity to see them.

JP: It's a great group of people... A great group of friends.

DS: Yeah. Yeah. It’s fun. We’re all odd and dysfunctional in our own ways, which is good, in complimentary ways. So it’s nice.

Diana Slickman Part One

Diana Slickman, it is my belief that Slickman is one of those fairytale orphans found by a nice family of common folk, and then somewhere down the line we find out that she is of royal blood, that she is a princess. But along the way of hardship, and the kindness of the family that raised her, she has learned how to be compassionate yet tough, how to survive on her own funds on her own terms. She is one of the few that can criticize and praise simultaneously inspiring you to make "something" better, the world, or at least a small part of it. She is rational and logical in her approach to her life, yet all life seems to float around her in a romantic haze. Her pragmatism has helped keep afloat some of the most scatterbrained companies in Chicago, including The Neo-Futurists and Theater Oobleck. I give you Part One of a woman most often referred to just as "Slick."

A MOVIE STAR IS BORN

JP: alright, so, Diana Slickman. Where were you born?

DS: I was born in KC, MO in 1961. August 31st is my birthday. And lived there until 1985 when I moved here.

JP: Were you one of those kids who enjoyed school?

DS: I was one of those obnoxious children. That’s what I was. One of those obnoxious children.

JP: What do you mean?

DS: I had a neighbor when I was very small who used to say, “you wanna be a movie star when you grow up!” and I was like, “Yeah! That’s exactly what I wanna be! I don’t wanna be an actor, I wanna be a movie star.” And I was like, five. So I was one of those children. Attention seeking, unpleasant. My mother tells a story about herself that when she was a child she would make her classmates gather around her on the playground. She would stand on a tree stump and sing Shirley Temple songs. And wouldn’t let them leave. That’s the kind of child I was. Very unpleasant.

JP: As a child were you aware that you had this quality in common with your Mother?

DS: I didn’t know it at the time, but later when she told me that, I was like, “Oh Jesus Christ, that’s me.” But at the time, sure, I liked attention. I’m the youngest of 6 children so I had to fight for attention. And I got a lot of attention because my older sisters were much older than me so I was their doll. I was there for entertainment purposes in some way. Until I did something they got blamed for. Yeah, especially my two oldest sisters. They’re quick to praise me for any bit of creativity that I show. There are pictures of me in a beehive hairdo standing on our front lawn looking miserable because they’d ratted my hair, made my hair look “pretty.” So they paid a lot of attention to me, so I think I got a taste for that early. But I’ve always been a smart-ass and a wise-cracker so that’s how I’ve always asserted my personality. Through being funny. Or trying to be funny.

JP: I’ve noticed that a lot of Neos I’ve talked to: Scott Hermes, Heather, Dave Awl, David Kodeski—a bunch of people tend to come from smaller areas or at least smaller schools. Do you consider where you grew up to be small?

DS: I wouldn’t say it’s a small town, but it’s…as Midwestern towns go, it’s pretty big. I think the metro area probably has a million and a half people. So it’s not like, Carbondale. It’s a pretty big city. It’s as big as St. Louis, maybe?

JP: So, you had friends that lived close? Scott tells me his closest friends lived like 2 miles away.

DS: Oh no no. I played with the Martinis who lived just across—you went through the Singleton’s driveway to get to the Martinis’s house. I went to Catholic grade school and Catholic high school and there were a lot of kids in our neighborhood. It’s actually a nice town, Kansas City. Pretty; hilly. And in the 60s, you were pretty much left to your own devices as children. I didn’t have any afterschool activities, I didn’t play sports. Nooo. There wasn’t the regimentation there is now. You would come home and you just played. My brothers were in football, but my sisters and I didn’t have anything like that. And I played by myself a lot as a child. I liked to talk to trees. We had a big garden in the backyard and that was my house. Certain rocks were certain rooms and any time I went to a big building, that was my house too.

JP: Did you have specific or reoccurring imaginary friends?

DS: No, my brother did. My brother had 3 very specific imaginary friends with names. I’d talk to mannequins, I’d talk to trees. I really didn’t have anything specific. It was just whatever was handy. And I had a couple of really close friends in grade school. Alise Martini was my very best friend. Yeah, through about 8th grade. Then I went to a different school and she went to a different school and that was that. I was one of those kids that didn’t—this may be revisionist history—but I didn’t clique very much. I wasn’t somebody who ran with a specific crowd. Or like, to the exclusion of-- everybody kind of claimed me even though I didn’t always claim them. Especially in high school, you know, all girl high school, St. Teresa’s. I was funny, so everybody liked me. I like to think. Maybe everyone was just pretending and every one hated me, which is rude.

JP: You wanted to be a movie star when you were younger. Did any of that energy transform into actual performances? When did you first start acting?

DS: The first thing I would say I remember being in was, of course like many of us, the Christmas pageant. You know, classes sang Christmas carols and I think probably in 1st grade I got to be in the Christmas thing. We sang a carol called “The Huron Carol.” I don’t know where it really comes from, but it’s supposedly a Christmas carol as composed by Native Americans. I don’t know. It’s dumb. And I got to play an Indian squaw and that was GREAT. I fancied myself as part Indian anyway, for some reason. There’s no one in my family that has Indian heritage, but I decided that I was Indian because I had long brown hair that I wore in braids a lot, so that’s probably why I was an Indian. And I got really tan in the summer. But that’s really the first theatrical performance I remember being in. And in high school I was in as many plays as I could be. We did a play every year. I don’t think I was in a play freshman year, and then sophomore year I was going to be in a show but then it got canceled because our teacher got lupus and she couldn’t direct it. And then I was in a production of Our Town, of course. Like everybody is. And then senior year I was in You Can’t Take It With You. I played Penny Singleton.

JP: I don’t know if you know this, but there’s Phil and Greg's Father—

DS: Everybody’s been in You Can’t Take It With You. It’s one of those things that’s done in high school a lot. Especially high school of a certain era.

PRINCESS SLICK AND THE ALL GIRL SCHOOL

JP: How did theater work at an all girl school. Were there boys in your shows?


DS: Yeah, we did partnered performances. There’s a brother school to my high school, Rockhurst High School, and it’s an all boy Jesuit high school and we would often draw upon their talent pool for our male cast members. And I performed in a couple of shows over there. But for some reason I ended up being in a couple of sort of oddball student written productions. There was this really funny thing written by Ned Shine. I don’t remember what it was about, but I played Sister Mary Ellen Rogers. Now, Mary Ellen Rogers was Wally Cleaver’s girlfriend in Leave It To Beaver, so he’d written this play that was all sort of characters from television and it was about heresy. Now, how it got produced at this all boys Catholic school was, I have no idea but it was really funny, as I recall. But yeah, we traded cast members back and forth. Then my senior year we had the guy who…one of the few male teachers at St. Teresa’s at the time, he was a recent graduate of Catholic college in Kansas City, also called Rockhurst.. And he had guys that were friends of his, or guys that he knew from college? [You will notice that throughout this interview Slickman will make a statement into a question. In print it sometimes looks like she is unsure of what she has experienced, which may be true, but in "real life" she is just making sure you are following what she is saying. She is motherly in that way, wanting at all times to make sure that you are comfortable and understanding what she means.] So there were some college guys in our show, too. In You Can’t Take It With You. We didn’t have female performances in drag or anything.

JP: I often wondered what it would be like to go to an all boys’ school or Catholic school. I mean, obviously there was interest in boys. Did you look at these as opportunities to…

DS: Oh yeah, totally. Opportunity to be in close proximity with the opposite sex? Yeah. But you know we had that anyway. It’s not as restrictive as it sounds, I don’t think. At least it wasn’t then. I am all in favor of same sex education, I’ve gotta say, as a product of an all girl Catholic high school. I think if I had gone to a co-ed school, well, I wasn’t a very good student to begin with but I would have been worse. I was a terrible student. Until I got to college and then I got steadily better. Because I started taking things I wanted to take. I didn’t like being a child because I didn’t like people telling me what to do. Hated it. I still hate being told what to do. So I didn’t do well in school because I didn’t like them telling me what they thought I should learn, or doing it on their time schedule. I didn’t like deadlines. I’m kind of an obnoxious person. So when I got to college and I could take things that I wanted to take and I could make my own schedule I did a lot better. But in high school I would have been an even worse student if there had been boys on the premises. But you know, they’re Catholic so there are large families with boys everywhere. And my grade school, that was co-ed so I knew a lot of guys from my grade school that I was friends with throughout high school because they all went to Rockhurst. And there were dances and parties. It was just when you were on campus you didn’t have any guys. It was hilarious, there was this circular drive in front of St. Teresa’s and some guys in a convertible would drive around the circle. Honking. And you would think that Jesus Christ had arrived on the green because girls would rush to the windows, scream. And I’d think, I’m gonna see them later on this evening. I don’t understand why we have to do this now. And you know, girls are catty. So there were a lot of cliques and a lot of in-fighting. It wasn’t terrible. Not the way it’s sometimes portrayed. But I was sort of oblivious. I was apolitical sort of, in terms of who I hung out with so there wasn’t a lot of meanness that went on around me. But I think there might have been for other girls who were more popular or more concerned about their status. I remember it as being a sort of benevolent experience. Nobody really cared enough about me to snipe about me.

JP: You are a very intelligent woman. During this hardship in school did you already know that you were intelligent? Did you ever question it?

DS: Oh I liked to think I was real smart.

JP: So there was some hubris involved?

DS: Oh yeah, that’s partly why I still don’t like being told what to do. I think I know better. And I certainly thought I knew better in school. And I’m lazy. That’s the other thing. That’s the other thing that made me a bad student, I’m lazy. So people tell me I gotta do these workbook pages between now and tomorrow at 2? Uh, I’d rather not do it. So I got bad grades.

THE "ODD ONE"

JP: Were there other artists in your family?

DS: Um…you know, not really. I mean, I’m considered the odd one. I’m the “fancy” one, I’m the creative one. My mom was a very forceful personality. She liked to paint but wasn’t very good at it. Probably could have been better if she’d had more training and time to work on it. And she had a flare, you know, to say she had a flare for the dramatic makes it sound unsavory, but she had a very lively and extroverted personality, and I think she was the closest thing we had to someone very creative in our family. My dad was a doctor and very practical and mathematically inclined. My eldest sister is a nurse and also very practical and has a good mind for science, I think, and probably would have been a doctor if my dad had permitted her to go to medical school to be a doctor. My sister, Pat, is really…she’s got a lot of energy and a really great…she’s got a lot of personality on her though she might deny that she has any creativity about her. And both of my brothers in their very different ways are men of action, but neither of them “creative.” Though my elder brother, Drew, has a great way with words. My brother, Dan, likes to tell a story in a very detailed way. You dreaded him coming home from the movies because he was always going to recount every single scene of the movie in vivid detail. Which he could remember. And then my sister, Laura, knits these amazing things. I think she took art in high school, and she probably did okay. But none of them are performers or theater people and they think I’m a freak. A good freak, but yeah, none of them have that outward facing creativity, you know what I mean? They’re creative in their work or in their homes but their creativity doesn’t face out if that makes sense.

JP: That does makes sense.
[I catch myself using the word "creative" to mean people who write and perform instinctively, but I am constantly reminded that any pursuit, job, that requires you to use some small part of your imagination is tantamount to being creative. Often this is not acknowledged, and leads people to say that they are NOT creative.]

JP: So you chose to go to an arts college. Last part of high school, what lead you to make that choice? Was there any sort of epiphany?


DS: No, it was really the only thing I ever wanted to do. And in some ways I felt like it was the only thing I was suited for because, at the time, I didn’t feel like I had any practical skills. I was good at drawing attention to myself and that seemed like a good place to start. I can’t remember ever wanting to be anything other than a performer of one kind or another. Anytime I had an opportunity to take any class where I could perform something, any oral interp or debate, I took. But I really thought…I really was aiming for a traditional theater career. Yeah, career I guess, for want of a better term. I wanted to be an actor. I wanted to perform onstage as other people’s text as an actor. And that’s what I did in college although, it’s a big school, the University of Missouri at Kansas City. And a pretty big theater department at the time. I was a declared acting major from the time I walked into the building. That was my trajectory, that’s what I wanted to do. I found out late in my senior year that the department head and a couple of other key figures in the department thought I was a tech person. Which kind of explained why I had not been cast as much as I thought I should. And I was stunned by that information, and infuriated because then I realized I had lost opportunities because somebody somewhere just hadn’t noticed. I don’t know where they got that except that I hung out with the tech people all the time, I LOVED the tech people.

JP: You’re a great actor, Diana. In fact, some of the people I’ve interviewed have said you’re one of the best actors that they ever met. But you don’t come off that way!

DS: I seem normal?

JP: No, it’s not even that. You seem, too intellectual. You feel more to me like the George S. Kauffman of the Algonquin Table with the sardonic wit and incredible writing ability.

DS: Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I’m trying to think…I’m trying to think…isn’t it funny? I don’t have any friends from—I do have some friends from college still. But most of the people that I see from Kansas City when I go home for the holidays are friends from grade school. But I don’t…you know, I lived with a lighting designer. I lived with a stage management student. One of them I still keep the in touch with, the other one, I don’t know what happened to her. I can’t find her anymore. But I didn’t hang out with, in fact I didn’t befriend actors that much. Which is sort of odd looking back, it’s kind of an odd thing. Why I didn’t identify with those people, why I didn’t seek out their company, they were too…well, probably because they took attention away from me! I guess. I don’t know… I still sometimes would love to be an actor. A regular actor.

JP: They were around all the time.

DS: Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I’m trying to think…I’m trying to think…isn’t it funny? I don’t have any friends from—I do have some friends from college still. But most of the people that I see from Kansas City when I go home for the holidays are friends from grade school. But I don’t…you know, I lived with a lighting designer. I lived with a stage management student. One of them I still keep the in touch with, the other one, I don’t know what happened to her. I can’t find her anymore. But I didn’t hang out with, in fact I didn’t befriend actors that much. Which is sort of odd looking back, it’s kind of an odd thing. Why I didn’t identify with those people, why I didn’t enjoy they’re company, they were too…well, probably because they took attention away from me! I guess. I don’t know… I still sometimes would love to be an actor. A regular actor.

JP: I feel the same way. I was always more attracted to the tech people. I preferred their company and their smaller parties. Even now I’m often more fascinated with the snack people than the people I’m in the show with.

THE MOST ATTRACTIVE BEARDED LADY I HAVE EVER SEEN

DS: It’s funny, the show that I’m in now I play bearded lady. [The Art of Unbearable Sensations] And I’ve got this fabulous costume—my tits are all pushed up, I’m very open in through here. I’m told that I am “absolutely mesmerizing,” never more attractive than I am with a beard. Now I was thinking about that the other day and thinking what—it’s odd because I’m not usually objectified in that way? You know, I don’t think there are many people who, when they think of me they think, “ooh, sexy.” But now in this show with my beard, I’m this person. And I was thinking, well what do I think I am? I must think I have some appeal. What is the appeal that I think I have? And I decided that I think, I want to be seen as attractive for what I can do, you know? If I imagine myself as a person who is attractive, or sexually attractive or sexy, it—for some reason I want it to be for the things I can do. My efficiency! Which nobody finds sexy. For being capable. My capability is what I think is going to make me attractive to men. It’s like, um…not really but that’s okay. So I think that sort of fits in with my…I think where I was going with that thought is that sort of fits in with why I liked to hang out in those days with people who did things. These people have skills that make them useful, or make them valuable to the theater which seemed to me more valuable than being an actor who, we’re a dime a dozen. We’re—everybody gets paid before we do. The musicians get paid before we do. The house manager gets paid before we do. You know, I think there was a little bit of that in my rejection of actors, because they felt sort of superfluous. Even though the show cannot go on, literally, cannot go on with out us—I don’t know, there was less value to being an actor to me, I think, at the time.

JP: It’s hard to put a value on this, but is this really what you were feeling at the time?

DS: No, I definitely didn’t consciously think about it at the time. Although there are definitely personality types that I don’t like. I don’t like divas, I don’t like people who, you know, make a big fuss for no reason and demand special treatment because they are what they are instead of because they offer something that is essential or needed. And there was a lot of that in my—in every theater school—there’s always a lot of drama. Personal drama. And I didn’t care for that.

JP: I went to Columbia College here in Chicago, and the social habit I was known for—there were always parties going on, and I had [and still have] mixed feelings about going to these parties. I would literally get up to the door about to knock and then decide not to go. Sometimes I would just pace in front of the party until I walked away or someone made me go in. I wanted to be part of the drama in some aspect but I just couldn’t do it. Like, something in me thought, it’s not my world. I feel out of that. I felt more comfortable with the late night people in the kitchen talking quietly rather than being an integral part of the drama.



DS: It’s funny because Rachel’s [Claff] piece in the show we’re doing now, the BoyGirlBoyGirl show, is about that manufactured drama, the manufactured intrigue and that that sometimes surrounds the theater. Being catty for no reason or deciding that something is a big deal when it probably isn’t, but wanting to live at that sort of heightened state. Which I probably did on some level, and not only wanted to but probably did? I mean, I know there was a lot of drama in my life, things that I got really worked up about, but you know, I don’t know. They weren’t…I don’t know, I maybe…looking back maybe through filtered glasses, but I didn’t like the actors much. I think maybe that makes me a bad person. My best friends are actors, you know! It’s weird. It’s weird to be a theater person who—although, you know, most of the people I like don’t like actors, either. Even though they are some. And act like that, you know? It’s weird.

JP: I think some of this stuff is not talking in black and white. It’s grays, but I think what you’re saying is true about yourself. There’s always those perceptions.

DS: Oh yeah. I was young once, and foolish.

AN INTRODUCTION TO PERFORMANCE ART (DADA, SURREALISTS, ETC...)

JP: Were you introduced to anything performance styles other than traditional theater when you were in college?

DS: No. Un-uh. We did plays, you know. That’s what we did. We took other people’s text, we performed them. I didn’t take any writing classes. I had a theater history class that was taught by a fantastic teacher, Felicia Londré, a woman who still teaches there and she was - maybe still is - the dramaturge for the theater there. She’s also a scholar - she’s written books about Tennessee Williams and productions of Hamlet in different countries and so on, but she had a theater history class that everybody loved. Everybody loved taking Felicia’s class and because it was a requirement, I think, she knew she had a lot of people in her class who were not going to go on to become dramaturges or theater historians or whatever. The way her classes were structured were you could turn in five projects—five short projects, like one or two page projects throughout the semester, or you could write a big paper at the end of the semester. So what I did—

(Bob enters. he forgot Diana was doing this thing. he got a haircut. it is short and nice.) [Bob Stockfish is Diana's partner and the inspiration for a character in Greg Kotis' Urinetown.)

So the things that you could do for your little projects would be, you could write a short, surrealist play or your could make a slide presentation about the Fauvists, you know. All these sorts of things that clearly geared for the actor or the lighting designer or the playwright. You could pick and choose these things. So I would always choose those things instead of the big paper at the end of the semester because that bullshit I didn’t like. Oh, and turning in two pages was much easier for me, and doing something creative. So I did get a little bit of a taste for things like writing short things based on a theme, or short things based on a style. I wrote a Dadaist play based on a painting by Salvador Dali. Well, okay. Not sure how that furthered my education, but I did. So I did get a little bit of a taste for that in a theater history class, which is ironic to me. My last semester there I took an independent study under her direction and I wrote a fifteen-minute play. But I guess I wrote another couple of things, too, because one of them was produced right after college, come to think of it. But I didn’t perform anything that was sort of out of the ordinary. You know, undergraduate playwriting class projects.

JP: It’s funny, there’s a lot of people who go to theater school and don't get any introduction to Dada, The Futurists, Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Happenings, etc. They are considered visual artists but these individuals and movements began to blur the line between theater, music, and art. They helped to create "performance art."

DS: Felicia's class was great. There were two sections of it, one was up to maybe 1850 and then the rest was there to modern. Everybody wanted to take her class. She was a great teacher. Really made things come alive. And she was—still is—very tall, sort of bony and very sharp looking and if you met her in the hallway she would always sort of look shyly around and say, “hello,” in a very timid sort of nice-to-see-you sort of way. But in class she was really dynamic, and she would read—I’ll never forget—she read a passage from…Phaedra? the Racine play? In French. In the class. None of us understood French, but just so that we could hear the language of the play, the poetry of the play. And she was a completely different person. I think that she is actually a closeted actor that lacks the personal…you know, whatever that impulse is, that extroversion to put herself in front of an audience. But she did it every week in class. She was so much fun to be in class with, because she knew so much. And she was always excited about theater history - you know, we all have our own enthusiasms. But I really liked her, I really learned a lot in her class. Probably more than in any other class I took in college. But most of the acting I did was straight up theater.

JP: We're nearing your graduation. What are you thinking? What's next?

DS: Well, I applied to graduate school all over the place. Nobody wanted me. I picked five schools, auditioned for all of them, applied to all of them. Nothing. So I thought, well, I’ll just move then. I lived in KC for another couple of years after that, I think, and did a couple of shows with some small theaters there and had a great time but I didn’t wanna stay in KC. Because at that time, there wasn’t a lot of theater there? And what there was, there was dinner theater and community theater but not a lot of professional theater besides the big one at school.

THE FELLINIMART AND FINDING CHICAGO

JP: So were you working a lot of odd jobs in KC then?

DS: I worked at the public library all through college and then I worked at the Westport Cash Saver the two years after school, which we called Fellini Mart because it was just crazy there. And sometimes it was Diane Arbus day at Fellini Mart and that was really crazy. It was just a circus. Everything but dwarves was what we had. Oh it was quite a place. Still is, for all I know. Every day was some kind of new drama there. But, yeah, I just decided yeah, I’ll move then. So I picked five cities and did some research and narrowed it down and narrowed it down and finally decided on Chicago. Mostly for the theater. And that was 1985 and about a month—it must have been like the month I moved here, there was an article in Time Magazine about how Chicago was THE city for theater and if you wanted to be an actor you should move there. And EVERYBODY did. EVERYBODY DID. And I’m not saying I was ahead of the curve but I was just ahead of the article. So then within six months, I would say, there was a HUGE influx of actors in Chicago. Steppenwolf was very hot at the time, the Goodman’s profile was very high.

JP: Were there other elements that sold you on Chicago?

DS: Yes. It wasn’t as expensive as New York, it wasn’t as cold as Minneapolis, it wasn’t as rainy as Seattle, and it wasn’t that far from home. Seemed affordable. Somebody I knew had moved here. You know, like a lot of cities in the Midwest and the Rust Belt, Chicago is the next step up. The next biggest city. Part of it was climate, although I regret it now. Every single day of the winter I regret moving to this frozen, northern wasteland of a city. [Diana begins to let some of that quickly building stream subside. She is incredible at bringing comedy and venom together and then letting it dissipate into a cutesy smile.] And because it was starting to get a reputation for being a really good place to do theater.

JP: Did you jump right into auditioning?

DS: I had to acclimate to where I was. I don’t remember stepping into auditions right away. But not long after I moved here I started working with the Chicago Shakespeare Company, and I think they were formerly The Free Shakespeare Company. They needed somebody to be a board op or something. So I started doing that and eventually started getting cast with them. If they needed an extra body here and there they would put me in. Then I started saying in earnest that I wanted to be in the next show so they started casting me in stuff. I’d say about 4 or 5 years I worked with them. And we did, you know, not very good productions of Shakespeare. Not VERY good. Some were better than others, and I did some—you’ll discover a pattern—I started working there with ambitions to be an actor, and then I decided that maybe they needed somebody to be a company manager, to do some of the administrative tasks. Because nobody was doing them and that drove me mad. I ended up doing the bookkeeping. I didn’t know anything about bookkeeping—well, I knew a little because that’s what I did at Fellini Mart. I abhor an organizational vacuum. Apparently. I can’t help myself. So I ended up being more valuable that way than as a performer, I guess. And I was miscast in a lot of things, but there were a lot of things that I loved being in. I was in a production of The Winter’s Tale that—I played the role of Paulina and I loved playing that role. Because she’s right all the time, and I love being right. And she got to be indignant, and that was fun. Never liked playing ingénues, never liked that. They made me do that in KC a couple of time and it just—even when I was one, it wasn’t a good situation. No, they’re boring. Nothing’s more boring than an ingénue. I played Hero in a production of Much Ado About Nothing in Kansas City—Hero doesn’t do anything in that fuckin’ play. Except stand around and look—and be hurt. And faint. That was the most fun I had all day. I can’t wait till I get to faint, because then I get to do something. Mostly I just looked wounded. I hated it. But no, I love the characters of action. Paulina was a character of action. She moved the play along, she makes things happen, she yells at the king. It’s good. It’s fun. So I liked doing that. They cast me as…Olivia? In Twelfth Night? Who’s sort of an ingénue? I wasn’t good at it, I wasn’t sexy enough, and they said so, and recast me. I was like, wow, that’s not nice. But that’s okay, I got over it. And I played Mariah instead, who is lusty and earthy which I also am not. So I was miscast again but in a way that was more acceptable. But you know, I sort of enjoyed doing stuff with them. I got cast in men’s roles a lot. In Measure for Measure I played the provost, the guy who’s in charge of the prison. The administrator. I like that. I played the apothecary and Mrs. Montague, you know, Mrs. Montague has no lines. She basically says, “Oh!” at one point, somebody dies and she gets upset and then she perishes. But I got to play the apothecary, that was fun. I was a fairy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I was Hippolita and that was good. I can get behind being an Amazon. That was fun. But, on the whole—oh oh oh! And I played the Duke of Venice! I played the Doge of Venice. And I had a great costume. But I—always as women in these men’s roles.

JP: Scott and Phil talk about being at Goodman and the teachers and directors just didn’t know what to do with these guys. Did you feel similar ways during the earlier part of your performance career? It sounds like you got a lot of roles but did it feel like you weren’t coming into your own in these performances?

DS: Well, I’ve definitely fancied myself as lead material. I would like to have played…I, of course, always thought I was a better actor than whoever they cast or whatever they wanted. I don’t feel that way anymore, but at the time I would often be indignant that they gave the role to someone because that person had been around longer or complained more loudly or put themselves forward in a way. The thing I suffer from, if I suffer from anything in my “career”—in quotes—I lack ambition. I don’t put myself forward as often as perhaps I ought to. Or perhaps my career would have taken a whole different path if I had been more aggressive about pursuing theater work, I think. I’d probably be doing straight theater at someplace like Great Lakes Rep or something. I’d be playing Mrs. Capulet now somewhere. But I didn’t…I think that’s why I didn’t figure out until my senior year that they didn’t know I was an acting major, because I never went into the office of the department head and said “why am I not getting cast?” Well, I’m not getting cast because there are other people in the department who are better than me or, whatever. And at the time, in the Shakespeare company, I really did think that I was not being utilized well and that I would have been better than some of the women who were being cast in the roles that I wanted. And I don’t know that I ever expressed that out loud because theater is so political. I was sort of new to the company. The company had been around for awhile—Jane Lynch was in that company. Jane Lynch, who’s in all the old Christopher Guest movies now. There’s a person with force and ambition and personality. And talent. She’s very funny and a good actor. But she’s the kind of person who would put herself forward and say “this person should have this role. I should have this role and here’s why.” Whereas she would say that, I only thought it. I’d complain to someone on the side, but I would never say something to the company at large. Although I think I may have done that once or twice and been shot down. So, you know, I was relatively young at the time. They didn’t know me from Adam. They knew me as the person who came in as a board op. But they knew I was also an actor. I don’t know, it’s interesting.

THE FEMINIST THEATER COLLECTIVE

JP: I don’t want to keep pushing for a revelation that you may not have experienced, but how did you get to where you are now? What was going on with you? I mean solo performance and Neo-Futurism is a very different world from what you were experiencing in Shakespeare.

DS: Here’s what I was doing. When I left the Shakespeare company, I did some auditions. I auditioned for The Goodman a couple of times, I did some commercial auditions—never got anywhere with that. I half-heartedly started going to agents. Again, my inability to put myself forward as a product of course completely hindered my ability to get any work through agents because unless you basically punch them in the face every day with who you are and what you are and what you do, they’re not gonna get any work for you. It’s the total squeaky wheel gets the grease syndrome. So I backed off from that because I just didn’t have that kind of energy. I was looking through The Reader one day, like you do, and I always looked at the audition notices and the Wanted notices, and there was an ad looking for women who were interested in writing to start a women’s theater collective. Well I answered that ad. I’m a feminist. I answered that ad. That’s how I met Anita [Loomis]. A bunch of women started to meet on a regular basis and we would write things and read them to each other and talk about feminist issues and talk about issues of the day and it was kind of a reaction to the—whether it was real or perceived—this sort of guy…theater was very much a guy’s game in those days. Steppenwolf was full of guys who were walking around naked five feet from the audience and spitting on each other. It was in reaction to that because we didn't think women were getting enough work in theater, we didn’t think women were getting enough attention as performers or writers. So we would meet regularly. And we wrote things for each other, we’d give each other assignments, and the next time we meet we’d read them. And that’s what we did. It was fun. We put on several shows together. Stand-up comedy in those days was HUGE, and was completely a men’s game. There just were no women in stand-up comedy, certainly on the local level, very few on the national level. And that was very interesting to me, as someone who is funny, who thinks she is funny. I thought that was a good fit for me. So I wrote—I was writing stand-up for myself. And then we put on 3 or 4 shows. That was when I started writing because I had never written anything before, aside from the assignments at school, I had never thought about myself as a writer.

JP: Comedy was just not at all inviting to women.

DS: Yeah, women aren’t funny. That was still the…you wouldn’t think that as late as the early ‘90s that there would be that sentiment that feminism negates humor. Nothing could be further from the truth in my experience. But that was a prevailing sentiment, women are not funny. And that’s because the guys were performing at Zanies every weekend didn’t want chicks around unless they were fucking ‘em. They didn’t want that competition. They had enough competition within their own ranks. And they did not—I have to say, in 1992 I was crowned the funniest unemployed person in the greater Chicagoland area. I was in a competition and I performed, I think it was at Zanies. And to his credit, there was a guy who was on the comedy circuit. I don’t think he was headlining there but he came up to me after the show and he said, “You’re really funny and you need to pursue this. Because there are not enough women doing this in the world.” And he gave me his name and his phone number and his address and, you know, I never got in touch with him. Again, my total lack of ambition. I think he must have been the only man on the planet who was doing that in that world, who was pursuing—he said, “you’re looking at things the right way out of the corner of your eye. You’ve got the right attitude and you should pursue it.” And, you know, I didn’t. I didn’t like it much.

JP: No?

DS: Yeah. I mean, I love it for all the same reasons I love solo performance. If you do well, it’s all you. If you do bad, it’s all you.

JP: Were you good with an audience?

DS: I think I could have been. It’s intimidating. Yeah, like, working with a microphone is very odd for me? And not something I was used to from my years at school? I was taught to stand and project. So that, and I think a lot of—I know it sounds ridiculous—but a lot of comedy is how you use the microphone.

JP: Music is that way, too.

DS: Yeah. It’s a skill. And I was intimidated by that. I think there are a lot of stand-ups who write that way. You know, everything is planned. Steve Martin is one of those writers, I think. There’s no improvisation in his act. But then I think the people who are really brilliant are the people who have it scripted but do have room for improvisation. Which I don’t think I have.

JP: One of my all-time is Paula Poundstone?

DS: Oh my god!

JP: She was amazing!

DS: She’s still hilarious. She’s on Wait! Wait! Don’t Tell Me! every now and then.

JP: But she was—male or female—the best I saw at using an audience.

DS: Yeah, yeah. Knows how to work a room. Yeah. She’s great. I would have liked to have been her. Not gonna happen.

JP: So did this group have a name?

DS: Yeah, I would say after about five meetings of deliberation, came up with the EXTREMELY creative title of The Feminist Theater Collective. Oh, that makes me wanna go see their shows! Although, we actually did have a little following, after 3 or 4 shows. And you know, it didn’t hurt that there were about 18 of us in the group and we all performed and we all had a couple of friends and we performed at Club Lower Links. I loved Club Lower Links. Lower Links was so dark, you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face down there. But along with the people I met in that group, I went on to do other stuff. So, Anita, my friend Barbara Babbitt. I can’t remember if Susan Booth, who is now the artistic director of the Alliance Theater in Atlanta, at the time was working at Northlight, was in the FTC or not. We started sort of another theater company—well, “theater company” makes it sound like we were in any way organized, which we weren’t. But I started working on shows with these other gals, or the some of the gals from Feminist Theater Collective, and we started doing…in some way the same thing that we do now with BoyGirlBoyGirl, which is to take a piece of found text or an idea—mostly found text—and then create a show out of that text. And when we finally had to put our name on something, we came up with the name Matchgirl Strike which was…apparently there was a strike in New York among matchgirls, literally, girls who sold matches and it was a big deal. You couldn’t buy matches on the street anymore because there was a strike. It was a sort of labor movement. Early feminists unite. And we thought it was a cool thing, so that’s what we called ourselves. Matchgirl Strike!

JP: That's a very punny title. Very witty.

DS: Yeah! Look at that! Look at that! You see how it resonates. We did two or three really fun shows even if I do say. The first show we did was called “A Different Kind of Blow Job,” We took the transcripts of the 1983 Minneapolis obscenity hearings, which was trying to decide on an obscenity ordinance for the city of Minneapolis, and we made a show out of those transcripts. Sure. That sounds like a lot of fun. That was actually pretty fun, we performed that at Club Lower Links. We did a different show called “Women’s Day: A Living Magazine.” We did a living newspaper treatment of a single issue of Women’s Day magazine. We did both of those shows through the old Zebra Crossing, and that was really fun. We took an issue of Women’s Day and sort of deconstructed it, poked holes in it. We would have run it a lot longer but the guy who was one of the duo who ran Zebra Crossing worried about the copyright issues, called up Women’s Day magazine and said “we’re doing a feminist deconstruction of your magazine. Is it okay if we do that?” He identified himself and what theater company he was from and basically we had to shut down before they sued us. So that didn’t work out. The third and last show we did was called “An Act of Obscenities,” and we chronicled obscenity law from the beginning of the country to present day based on a book called Girls Lean Back Everywhere, which is a history of obscenity law. And that was fun, too. That was me and Barbara and Anita. Susan directed it.

INTRODUCTION TO TMLMTBGB

JP: Around this time you were introduced to the Neo-Futurists. Is that correct?

DS: I was in the Feminist Theater Collective and we were performing our first show, “Wild Women Get The Blues?” I had written 25 minutes worth of stand-up material about female protection. Which was fun. Greg Allen came to see that. There was a woman in the cast who was roommates with Miriam [Greg Allen's wife to be at the time, now ex-wife] He introduced himself and said who he was and it didn’t mean anything to me because I didn’t know anything about Too Much Light. It had been running 2 or 3 years by then. He cast me in something. Lexus Praxus at Zebra Crossing. In this series they would take non-theatrical texts and adapt them to the stage. Greg had adapted a short story by Richard House called “Milk,” with Chet Grissom who was Karen Christopher’s first husband. The Neo-Futurists had been not long in the Neo-Futurarium? This must have been ’92 so they had just moved in…or they were renting space from Oobleck. So that was how Greg and I got to know each other. And then in late ’92 I was at work at the Actor’s Center, minding my own business, and Greg called me up and said, “what are you doing?” and I said, “well, I’m working.” And he said, “The Neo-Futurists are having auditions tonight,” and I said, “Oh.” And he said, “Well, do you want to come by and audition?” and I said, “Well, okay.” and I said, “What do I have to have?” and he said “You have to have 2 minutes of original material.” And it just so happened that I had about 4 minutes of original material that I had written with the gals, with The Feminist Theater Collective. So I said, “Well, okay.” I didn’t have anything else to do. I don’t think I’d ever seen the show— I knew about it, but I’d never seen it. Or if I had—I don’t think I’d ever seen it, I’ll say that again. I’m pretty sure I didn’t know what I was getting into. So I went and while I was going there I was cutting and cutting and cutting from this piece that I had. And I was imperfectly memorized, I’m sure. But I went and I auditioned and it went okay. Everyone was very friendly and spoke to me afterwards and the next thing I knew, I was trapped. And then I started in January of 1993 in Too Much Light.

JP: Did you come in with other people?

DS: Lusia and David (Kodeski) and I were cast all at the same time. And Lusia and I started the same week. David started about three weeks later. It was fun.

JP: Okay, we’re there now.

DS: Yeah, it took long enough! Yak, yak, yak.

JP: You had never seen it before, but do you remember…what is your first memory in the show? Just being in it?

DS: I remember getting my nametag. Barbara Babbitt and I went together, I think, right after I got cast. And that’s all I remember getting my nametag and thinking, that’s bullshit. And then sitting—I think at the time you had to be interviewed—back, ooh, way back in the day.

JP: They still did the interviewing of the audience when you started?

DS: Oh, oh yeah. I talked to people. I still think that’s a good idea. We also had the audience write whatever they wanted on the back wall with chalk [This was before we even had a chalk board on the back wall. They were just writing on the wall itself.] This was a pain in the ass because every night you had to wipe it down and start all over again.

JP: Did you like it?

DS: Yeah, oh yeah. I thought it was a good idea or I wouldn’t have said yes. It seemed like fun. It is what it is. It’s fast-paced and clever, the people seemed interesting, it obviously had an audience. There were a lot of people there who had, some of them, had obviously been there before so I knew that it had a following and it was an exciting thing. There wasn’t—and still isn’t, as far as I’m concerned—anything else like it. It was absolutely filling a niche at that time. There was no late night theater. There was very little late night theater, I should say. There was comedy clubs…and that was about it, really. Comedy clubs. You had to be 21, you had to buy drinks to go. Nobody was doing that. Nobody I knew could afford to do that, was interested in doing that. So this was doing something that nobody else was doing, you know, for people who were under 21 or theater people. There was a real—in spite of the fact that there’s that lack of theatricality about it—these were clearly theater people. This was clearly put on not by comedians but by people who were theater people. In the best sense of the word. Who cared about connecting with the audience. And I liked that it wasn’t all funny, that there was room for—because I was a little more serious in those days. I was sort of going through a phase where I didn’t wanna be funny all the time even though I was doing stand-up at the time. I liked that there was a range of tone and a range of intent behind what was being presented. And I thought the people who were in it were smart, funny—and that was a big draw. That made it really appealing. There were people who were clearly smarter and more talented than I was working on it.

JP: You came in right at the beginning the only time when the show had a consistent cast for over a two year period.

DS: Yeah, I started in January of ’93. And they had been I think a fairly stable cast for a while. And I can’t remember who we were brought in to replace. I think Tim Reinhardt was quitting. I think Betsy Freytag was quitting, and I think Spencer was on her way out. That sounds about right. I think that’s actually who we were replacing…you know, not replacing, but we were filling those empty gender slots. Yeah, I was in the show with Greg Allen, Heather, Scott Hermes, Ayun Halliday, Dave Awl, Greg Kotis, me, Lusia & David. Us 9. For two years. It was great. It was great. Everybody was good. Everybody carried their weight. Everybody brought something different to the show. We didn’t always get along, in fact, we almost never got along. Rehearsals were fraught. But it was because we all wanted to make the show the best show that we could make it and we often disagreed on what that meant. Everybody had a different way of challenging each other, whether they knew it or not. Scott Hermes told me that—and I’m sure he’s said as much in his interview—that his goal was to get 100 plays in the show every year. That’s ENORMOUS. To get that many. Considering the show was only running 50 weeks a year and you were maybe performing—we had to make people take vacation—you were maybe in the show 48 weeks a year. That’s more that three plays a show. That’s a lot!

JP: Which meant he actually had to propose more than that.

DS: Oh my god. The man was a generator. He would bring in 5 plays a week. They weren’t all successful, but 3 out of 5 were pretty good. Good enough. And Kotis every week challenged himself to bring in something different or he just explored so many different kinds of styles. Even though he has a very distinctive Kotisian style. That overly formally, declamatory style that suits him so well. But he just used to bring in things that made you laugh so hard you couldn’t breathe or took your breath away, they were just so beautiful. Or strange, or looked at things in such a funny…or were just hilarious. Or all of those things. And Lusia just brought that Lusia energy. She just had something. That…her writing got better over time. I think all of ours did in that group. But she always had that magnetism onstage. You couldn’t take your eyes off of her. There was a sexual tension to her interrogation plays that wasn’t always savory. And Heather, always the master of the mundane couched in the extremely odd. Wonderful strange stuff. And Annie just has a cock-eyed way of looking at things and a way with language that’s really fun.
She would bring a very personal take on a hot button issue for want of a better term. Her plays about abortion or racism or gun control were always…sometimes you didn’t know what she was saying. You didn’t know whether she was coming down for or against, but they were provocative in a personal way. She always brought a very personal and personally revealing take on issues of the day, things that other people might not be comfortable revealing about themselves. She also is the master of reduction. She would take whatever movie everybody was seeing at the time? She would reduced it to two pithy and very pointed minutes.

JP: That’s something I’ve always admired that I just don’t have.

DS: Minutiae. She has a real gift for that, stripping a piece of popular media down to its ridiculous bones so that you can see the ridiculousness of the premise. Like The Piano. It’s a stupid movie. But she really showed you how stupid it was. But I don’t think anybody thought it was stupid. “Oh no, it’s a great movie!” She was like, “No. It’s stupid, and here’s why.” The audience loved Annie. The bagel was her thing and people, I’m sure, who have no other recollection of her know the bagel. Know that she’s the bagel lady. And, you know, she was beautiful without artifice onstage and I think that made people…she was really attractive to people and they would listen to her say things that they might not listen to other people say.

[Here I tried to phrase a question about the relationship between Greg Kotis and Ayun Halliday. They met in the show and got married, moved to NYC and started the first Too Much Light show there back in the mid 90's. I never solidified a question but Slickman took what I gave her and expounded.]

DS: It’s interesting about them because they’re very different kinds of writers? Annie’s got a lot of output—so does Greg—but Ayun just sorta puts it all out there, and Greg is a little more judicious about what he puts out there. Not that Ayun’s things aren’t crafted well or written well, but they’re a little more effusive, maybe? And Greg’s a little more reserved? And I think they’re a little like that personally. Greg is a much more contained and she’s just all out there. So they’re kind of an odd couple in that way? But they work together. I don’t know if they collaborate at all. I don’t know if any of the stuff that they’ve been working on in New York is collaborative or not, besides Greg writing and Annie performing in. But at the time they seemed…they were a well-matched, odd couple. And the first Neo-Futurist couple that stayed together and worked together.

DR. JEKYL OR PRINCESS WRITER?

JP: Well now that you look back, in retrospect, What in your career as a performer did that show nurture for you? And what do you think you brought to the show?

DS: It turned me into a writer. I never wanted to be a writer, I never set out to be a writer, I never studied to be a writer, I never thought of myself—still sometimes don’t—think of myself as a writer. But I had to. I had to write every week. I loved the idea of the economy of it. I liked that…I thought I could write things that were short because I’d done that before. I liked the constraints of Neo-Futurism, I liked being able to work within those confines. And already performing as a stand-up or as someone who had read things that I had written, I was comfortable with the idea of being myself onstage, it didn’t bother me that I wasn’t going to play a character. What did I bring? I don’t know. I don’t know what they saw in me, frankly.

[I sometimes feel Diana is hard on herself purely for the comical, I hope she doesn't really question her talent in Too Much Light. Sometimes when you hear a good singer, you feel that shiver up your spine, when Diana speaks her text I am immediately in a vortex of tears, happy, sad, joyful. I quite frankly don't completely understand her power, it seems so natural yet meticulous and shocking.]

JP: Did you ever feel like you battled the aesthetic?

DS: It took me awhile to figure out some of the parameters of it. I understood it intellectually but would lapse, if you will. I’m not good at creating characters, I’m not good at making up plots, I’m not good at making things up, necessarily. But I’m good at telling you…at looking at things from a different angle and I’m good at showing you what I’m seeing. And so the aesthetic worked for me in that way, because I could show you what I was seeing. Because that’s all that was required. To present a point of view or tell a story without any artifice.

STRONG WOMEN/STRONG WRITING

JP: I think of you and Heather in the same way I think about…Chrissie Hynde in The Pretenders. The way I saw her in music is the same way I saw you in theater. You didn’t even have to talk about feminist issues. It was so prevalent that you were past the point of having to fight and were just being a human being onstage. I imagine you had to go through a process to get as confident as you appear. Do you feel that you went through a struggle to be a strong "performer."

DS: All that time I spent with the Feminist Theater Collective, we talked about this stuff very concretely. And we were up in arms about it. Even now, I think it still exists. I think that theater in Chicago, in particular, is still a boys game in a lot of ways, although that’s changing and has changed a lot since I first moved here. But yeah, I mean it was very explicitly my agenda, to move women forward in the arts in Chicago. Because, again, it was…Steppenwolf was…and Sam Shepard and David Mamet—it was all guys stuff. Not that it was bad guy’s stuff it was just…there was no place for us, for women who weren’t objects or ingénues or grandmothers. There were no adult women in theater, it seemed like. And if there were they were in service of these very male plays. And so I really did, that was a very conscious thing that I went through. And I still think that in the show I brought some of those issues up without…without being sledgehammer-y about it.

JP: It’s difficult and I think that’s why I admire you, too, because when I came in I don’t think I ever really heard plays that were about that specifically. I think you just probably grew to the point where you realized I have to face issues and not just complain about the situation.

DS: Well, yeah, because complaining gets you—to some extent—nowhere. You bring the issue up and you throw the penalty flag and you explain the penalty and you go on. You know, the game goes on. And whether people continue to commit that penalty or not is up to them, but you keep throwing a flag at it. I think that by the time I got to the show, by the time I got to Too Much Light, I was kinda through that. I was kinda like, well, I’m just gonna be a strong woman in the world. I’m just gonna be what I am. Or try to live up to that ideal for myself and people will either accept that or they won’t but they’ll see the example, you know. I will live those ideals rather than talk about those ideals. And that was the nice thing about the show, too, in that context, was that seeing it, clearly women’s contributions were valued. There were at least as many women in the show as there were men. Or close to it. They got equal time, there weren’t censored, they weren’t subjugated to…you know, we weren’t all in men’s plays. It was ideal for me in that way. I don’t even know if I thought about it consciously, but it was a good fit.

Heather Riordan

Strong, dedicated, intelligent, physical, mighty, these are just the first few words that sprung to my mind when I began this sentence about Heather Riordan. There are many people I can claim to have made their mark in the history of the Neo-Futurists but none of them carry it with them like Heather. You know those metal-like skeletal structures that keep a building standing? She's that. She might not have been there from the beginning of the company, but it sure does seem like it! Heather gave me one of the most clear, concise interviews yet. I hardly had to edit any unfinished sentences, "likes", "ums", or gibberish. Me, on the other hand, almost every question or statement I make in these interviews have to be restructured, I don't understand how the hell I get the info I get, I don't understand how they interpret my chaotic gestures and random stringing of words together into questions for them to answer. Nonetheless, I must state in print, that the brain of Heather, is in line with the voice of Heather and the actions of Heather. She is what she is, and she is aware of herself more than anyone I know. And that is why, in many ways, she represents Neo-Futurism for me.
(This interview was conducted in the theater of the Neo-Futurarium by John Pierson. This interview was transcribed by the ever present Coley Verbick)

JP: What’s your early life like and how did it bring you to the theater?
HR: I grew up in Rockford, IL. My parents inexplicably moved from San Francisco and Palo Alto to come to Rockford. I guess because that was a good place to work and raise a family. I would say my childhood was average, sort of boring and nice, nothing really exciting. But my family fell apart when I was 12 years old and I think I sort of grew up fast during that time. I had been interested in theatre before it all fell apart, but that’s probably when I latched on to it more intensely.
JP: Did you find yourself staying at school longer to avoid going home?
HR: I frequently spent the night at school.
JP: Oh, really?
HR: I went to a very weird tiny little college prep school in Rockford. I went there K through 12. I think there were 12 people in my graduating class, plus 3 exchange students. A lot of my classes only had around 6 or 7 people. It was a really unique experience and for me it was especially great because as my family dissolved I had this other sort of family that I could totally immerse myself in. In which, totally immersing yourself was sort of necessary. There were so few people at this school, so everybody had to do everything. The soccer team made sure that on the weekends we had theater productions running they didn’t have games, because everybody was doing everything. We didn't have enough people to have cliques. When we would have a musical, ¾ of the school was in it. And that was really good for me because it allowed me to do a lot of everything and be really immersed in school. I got a lot of individual attention. I don't think I would have thrived in a huge 2000 person school. I was very lucky in that way. I was just able to do everything I was interested in. I was able to do theatre and I was able to be on the boy’s soccer team and do a wide range of stuff.
JP: You were at a small school in a big town. I mean, Rockford isn’t Chicago, but it's pretty big. Why was the school so small? [While editing these interviews I realized that I had been seeing the educational world with side blinders on. I didn't know anything about private schools except that they were for rich kids. I know this isn't the case with Heather. I was lucky, the Northwest suburbs had pretty damn good public high schools.]
HR: The public school system in Rockford was and continues to be not very good. There are a couple of Christian schools that are an alternative and this was the only small college prep school. It was really fledgling at the time and had a mishmash of talented teachers that you couldn’t really figure out why they were there. I took a couple years of Latin and a year of Ancient Greek from a woman—a very smart woman who had a PhD whose husband was the head of the Classics department at Rockford College, but Rockford College is a small college and they only had need for one classics professor so she taught at this high school. Here’s these really talented people who just for whatever reason were stuck in Rockford and were teaching there and it was really fortuitous for me.
JP: I have always thought of you as being very industrious. It sounds like in your school you had no choice but to be active, yet this is very different from being identified as "social." Did you consider yourself a social person? Do you still have friends from this time period?
HR: I was social. I do still have friends from that time period. One of my best friends from high school has lived with my brother for a number of years and we were very close in school. I keep up with a couple of people from high school. I also just reconnected with somebody on Facebook. When there’s only 12 of you, it’s very easy to fall back into a, “Hey! How are you?” relationship. I was very active. I think I wasn’t on the volleyball team and I wasn’t in the science club and I think there were two other things I wasn’t in. And that sounds like I’m a real go-getter, but the truth was everybody had to do everything. I was homecoming queen, not because I was the prettiest girl, but for the irony of the homecoming queen being the starting fullback on the soccer team. There’s a great picture. I don’t think it was the one that was in the paper, but was someplace else. It’s all the homecoming queens from Rockford and mine was a picture that they took—there was a nice picture of me, but they took it at half time and they put the little tiara on my head. I looked really pretty and I’ve got make up on this side and this side because it was a really rainy day, I’m just caked with mud. (both laugh) It sort of looks like a Carrie picture. So that, in a way, encapsulates my experience there. That was really freeing for me. I was very shy as a young child, really shy. I think I went through the first four weeks of kindergarten without saying a word, if you can imagine such a thing. (JP chuckles) I was not very outgoing, so it was a place that sort of fostered being active. I have always been industrious to a point too where it’s a little bit of a behavior that I do to stop whatever else was going on. Certainly when I was a teenager, being over-scheduled was a great way to not have to deal with any family issues.

JP: It seems this school was the perfect home for you. It kept you away from having to deal with some bad things.
HR: Yeah and just a perfect outlet at the right time. A very positive outlet as opposed to, I think in a different way or a different program I would have gotten into drugs or something else or maybe just have done one thing.
JP: Can you pinpoint when you decided theatre was going to be your pursuit? It seems you were doing everything. At that time did theater pop out as more important than other activities?
HR: You know, it was something that I had sort of thought for awhile, “Wow, I would never be good enough to do that,” and then I thought, “Why not try it?” And oddly, what I’m doing now is not at all the type of theatre that I thought I would be doing. When I was 12 my dad started taking me up to the Stratford Festival and then we started going to the Shaw Festival that was two hours away. By the time I graduated from high school, I had seen every Shakespeare and every Shaw play. I had just seen a tremendous amount of classical theatre. And that is what I always thought I would do, which is, of course, the antithesis of what I’m doing now. I never considered writing once. Ever.
JP: Did you take writing classes in school?
HR: You know,I never really took writing classes. I took an AP English class in high school and somehow got out of taking English 101 and 102. I took a lot of literature classes. I took three semesters of Shakespeare where papers were due, but I never took that writing class that everyone is required to take. I’ve always been cognizant of that that was something that was missing that I really should have gotten. I think maybe because I have a BFA, that sort of thing just slid under the table, as did that I’ve never taken a proper class in American history and the Constitution—which is a requirement.
JP: The required class I got away with never taking was biology.
HR: In high school, even?
JP: Yeah, everyone I knew in school had dissected frogs, insects and whatnot, I never did. I don’t know what happened. I know at the time I didn't want to take biology, and I was very well aware that somehow I had scooted around the "system, and got away with it." I enjoy science now, I still wouldn't dissect a frog, but I wouldn't have mind figuring out how it works. I always wonder about those kinds of things that you lacked or missed out in high school. And how that lack can sometime become a passionate pursuit later on. I have a passion for science. I wouldn’t be a scientist but I’m very interested in astronomy, physics, and anatomy.
HR: Science is fascinating.
JP: Since I started performing theater and writing I have been fascinated with incorporating a bit of science whenever I can. In order to stay current to what’s going on in the world. It’s important to make a one-to-one correlation with advances in science. [I started feeling stronger about this when I began studying Marcel Duchamp.]
HR: This is somewhat tangential and I think I fell into this a little bit in college and then thankfully got out of it—people whose lives are Theatre-Theatre-Theatre, you know, they’re theatre majors and all they do is theatre and everything, make really boring people and writers. And to an extent you need that drive if you’re going to be a successful person, but I just think it makes you—certainly for this show—less interesting. It’s what you do outside of your theatre. If all we wrote were plays about pursuing theatre and writing about theatre, all that inside stuff, it would be really dull. It’s our day jobs. It’s our interactions on the street. It’s the things that we study that are outside of that. And you’re a good example of that because your physicality stuff isn’t just physicality of theatre on stage. There’s a strong athletic component to that. And with you, it’s a little bit science-y and a little bit geeky. (JP laughs) That was what makes a lot of your stuff so interesting. I mean, I think there’s so much of an interesting physics component to what I saw in Fools. I’d love to sit down and do a show that was something like—Physics by John and Heather (JP laughs) and see where that goes. That, to me, is very interesting: how you bring your other interests into art. And if your other interests are just reading plays and auditioning for plays and talking about plays and hanging out with other actors—I just think at the end of the day you’d have to kill yourself.
JP: It's important, to get away from your own field in order to explore and bring things to it.
HR: I think it was Sonny Rollins was one of the bebop, late 50s/early 60s jazz saxophone players and he hit a certain modicum of fame. He took a sabbatical from music and was a janitor for two years while he said he thought it all out and then went back to jazz. Not that I wish to be a janitor, but it’s interesting when you see people like that who say, “I just needed to have a life that wasn’t music for a little while so I could understand music better.”

COLLEGE YEARS

JP: You’re in college prep school and then you are about to finish up, was it an immediate choice for you to continue on to college?
HR: I always knew I would to go to college. My parents were college educated so there was never an idea of not going to college. My parents were very straight-laced in that. They both had been professors at Stanford. I think the question was like, “What do you do after your bachelors degree?” That was sort of like what most people’s idea of finishing high school was my life. When you finish your bachelors, then what are you going to do? I chose a couple different schools and BU was the one I ended up going to. It was a conservatory program and that probably wasn’t a good choice for me. I probably should have gone to a small liberal arts school. But then I just played "See the World With Your Diploma." You know, I’d be like, “I hear there’s a good professor over here,” and I went to a bunch of different schools and I lived in a bunch of different cities.

JP: Name a few those schools.

HR: Cornell, Boston University, Harvard, Rockford College, University of Illinois, University of Minnesota, American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, and others. When I was in college, I never took a summer off. I always went someplace else that was doing a summer program. I did the Harvard summer dance program with Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane. I did the Lessac workshop up in Minnesota with Arthur Lessac. (He is now deceased) If I had the money, I’d still do that. I would. If I didn’t have to work, I would have taken the last Goat Island seminar last summer. Every summer I would study a different aesthetic, a different methodology.
JP: Many people just pursue their degree and then they want to be done with school. It sounds like you were, and continue to be, more or less interested in learning as a continuing process more than an ends to a single concrete goal.
HR: The only reason I’m not still in school full time is the lack of performance opportunities. I mean, you’d perform some in school, but there just weren’t enough opportunities and that’s the only thing that kept me from getting a PhD in performance studies. There’s so much grunt work for somebody else’s vision instead of you just performing. I think if I hadn’t been a performer and I had done something else, I would probably still be in academia.

JP: What situations began to alter your perception of yourself from being a traditional actor to more of a writer/performer?

HR: There were a couple of things:
1. My second trip to New York. I saw Squat Theatre Company. It was an Eastern European theatre company back in the 80s. They would spend about a year and a half working on a show that was really dynamic and unlike anything I had ever seen before. And they were the Squat Theatre Company because I think they all lived upstairs above the theater space. One of the women who was in that company was Eszter Balint who stars in Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise. I went to go see their show because somebody said, “If you want to go see something different, go see that.” There shows were set in front of a huge picture window. So the back screen of what was going on was the streets of New York City. The actors were amongst us. There was no fourth wall. Having seen theatre in Rockford and Stratford and Shaw Festival, that was pretty much it, I had never even heard the term “performance art.” It just blew my mind. There was a whole other world out there.
2. When I was in California, I went to go see a show—and I was staying with some pretty interesting people in California. One of the best quotes I ever heard, because everyone is so into their ideology. We had just got done with our acting class and I had this master class with Anna Deveare-Smith. She said, “ None of that Stanislavski shit is going to work here.” It was just so refreshing to have somebody say, “I’ve got a whole new aesthetic. There’s no fourth wall and there’s no rules and it’s all different.” Also, when I was in San Francisco, I saw Fred Curchek who’s a performance artist based in Texas. I don’t think he’s all that active now. He did some one man shows that were amazing. I went and I was captivated by everything he did. And those two things sort of introduced me to performance art.
It was something that I sort of heard of, but this was 1985. Who had heard of performance art? It was either very installation-based in museums that didn’t involve performers or people just dropping chocolate sauce all over themselves and I didn’t see the point of it. So that was really eye-opening to me. I was always really intrigued by pushing the boundaries of theatre and seeing what was this “performance art” and taking elements of that. And in a way that seemed really accessible and dynamic.


JP: What was the impetus to move back to Illinois (Chicago)?
HR: I was getting out of school in like ’86 or ’87 and Chicago was just at that beginning of being the place to be and the theatre place to be. And after living in other cities, notably San Francisco and Boston, the rents were so expensive that to put up a show, required either somebody’s parents having a trust fund or being rich or it was so mainstream. You just couldn’t put up anything in San Francisco because rents were exorbitant, there were no theaters and you were working 65 hours to pay your rent in whatever crappy place you were and in Boston it was the same way. And here, you could make a living and still have time to do art and that was really the decision and just sort of the idea that there was all this stuff percolating and happening in Chicago. I think a lot of people from Boston and also San Francisco ended up moving here because, and this sounds just so trite, but the rents were so cheap.
JP: What area were you living in?
HR: I lived in Rogers Park, which was not a good neighborhood at the time, just south of Loyola, in an apartment that was like $200 a month. I saw it during the day and was like, “I’ll take it!” and then came back that night and there were gangs everywhere and rats running by and people being shot on the subway platform. I can remember asking my dad for money like six months into it and I was like, “I need a new window,” and he was like, “What happened to your window of your car?” and I was like, “Somebody shot at it.” (both laugh) I didn’t really think that one through. Then I moved to Melrose and Broadway, and Southport and Irving Park. I lived on Southport when we were doing the show at Live Bait, which was nice because it was right around the corner.

JP: Right before you started Too Much Light, in what theaters were you involved?
HR: I was a company member at Zebra Crossing. I saw Lisa Buscani perform somewhere one night. It was just some show of different people performing monologues, but she just knocked my socks off. So later when I curated a show at Zebra Crossing about women’s rights, I asked Lisa to be one of the performers in it because she was really great. She very cheerfully said yes even though I just met her. She did the show and then she said, “Come see this show I’m in. It’s Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind.” It was at Stage Left at the time and I had that same experience. I said, “Ooh, that’s different and fun! I want to be in that!” A month later she called and said, “We’re having auditions. Come audition for the show.” It was just that simple. I had never written anything except for the times I was in a show and I wanted to be in the show and in order to be in the show you had to write something for it like the piece I had done at Zebra Crossing. But for the most part I had just never given any thought to writing my own material. I hadn’t considered myself a writer and I just liked performing and didn’t really want to spend all that time angsting over words. But I would write something for myself if that was how you got on stage. I was more than willing to do that.
JP: Talk about your first experience seeing Too Much Light.
HR: It was at Stage Left. And I had never been to Stage Left. I can’t express—it seems so commonplace now—how revolutionary it was to have a late night show. There were no late night shows. Theatre happened at 8. Maybe if it was a staggered thing, it happened at 8:30, but there was no 11 o’clock or 11:30 show. This was just the weirdest thing. Just that alone made it so kooky and off beat. It just had a really fun energy and it got a different crowd. It was clear that it was not a theatre crowd. And I was really impressed with that because one of the things that had always nagged me was I had always thought that once I got my degree, I had to get out of Chicago and go someplace where there wasn’t any theatre and start some up. There was a guy in Rockford, Jim Sullivan—who I’m still in contact with sometimes—who went to Beloit College. Very talented, went to college, came back and started a theatre in Rockford because there was nothing. It was this drab industrial town. And he took that all away from performing in a bar on weekends to a 200-seat equity house. And I really admired that. I had done work with that company and I really liked the idea of—you know, you don’t go to New York, you don’t go to Chicago, you don’t go someplace where there are 40 theatre companies and you’re number 41 competing for the same audience. You go to the middle of Nebraska and do something. There’s a quote from Megan Terry that I’m going to misquote. She was a feminist playwright in the 70’s and 80’s and somebody said, “Why, as an alternative feminist playwright, would you do stuff in Nebraska?” and she said, “Can you think of any place that needs it more?” (both laugh)
Too Much Light was creating a new audience. It wasn't just sucking from that same small group of people that go see theatre. I really, really admired that. I loved the speed of it. You could just see that they were hustling every minute. It was like a bunch of waitresses on speed at The Melrose doing performance art. I love the immediacy of it and how close they were. And I just really liked how it changed from play to play. It wasn’t like, “Here’s our style.” And I think in subsequent years we even did a better job of this, pushing that envelope and saying, “Here’s what we do. Here’s how many different ways we can do it.” You know, you’d have something really goofy and then Lisa would do a serious piece and you could hear a pin drop because the audience was with you so much.

Feminism inherent in the Neo-Futurist Aesthetic

JP: In much of the chicago comedy, improvisation, and stand up women struggled through much of the 80s and 90's to be taken seriously. The thing that impressed me with the Neo-Futurists when I started was that the women, Diana Slickman, Anita Loomis, and you, just to name a few, seemed to have found a way to express feminist issues, your equality, your strength without having to rely on being overbearing or even overtly obvious.

HR: Occasionally we’ll do something that’s overt, but I don’t think that’s as successful. A lot of times it’s just not as interesting. So I try to do it in a covert way because it is certainly a part of my agenda. In a covert way or with a twist or stylistically different or something, not just out there, sort of bald-faced. Not to say that I haven’t done some, I’m sure, dreadful, sledgehammer, terrible feminist plays. I’m sure we can dredge those up. But it’s just more interesting. Here’s a good example: Bilal does a lot of really neat political plays that are a great metaphor. The Bucket Play. You know, it’d be really easy to be like, “Why is the Senate so whiny?” And I think that’s something as an ensemble that we do is that we try not to just put the bald faced thing, but say, “How can we use this aesthetic—how can we use this style to mask this, to make it more art and less…”
JP: Before this interview took place I didn’t know about your high school experiences. I wonder if the fact that there were a very limited amount of people in your school, men and women crossed over their responsibilities in school more often than most schools. I wonder if it was just natural for you to be confident within your masculinity and your femininity. You had already proven what you could do.
HR: I can remember some of the Christian schools either not allowing us (the two girls) to play and then finally the coach was like, “That’s not an option. [Women playing] That means you forfeit the game.” I can remember one—which is where I first got this knee hurt. There was some guy in a Christian school, some sort of evangelical, Christian school that was very little about studying and all about the Bible, I could see just there were two guys who were going to take us down. That was at this Christian school, they were just going to take us out of the game. And they did it. I was in a cast for four weeks. So there were some things like that. When I was first working at the theatre here, I was a bartender at the Swissotel, which was a Swiss run company and had very, very conservative views on women's place. For awhile I could remember there was this huge consternation in Switzerland because our bartender was a woman [Heather WAS that bartender.] and literally I would have manager after manager from Switzerland explain to me, “No, you’re a cocktail waitress, that guy’s the bartender.” And I would say, “No, he’s the cocktail waiter, I’m the bartender.” And that was just very difficult for me and it was sort of like, “This is 1989 and we’re in the US. I don’t know where you think that’s coming from.” I certainly had a lot of little battles to deal with that. “What does gender have to do with bartending?” So it was just this idea of like, “Well, we only have uniforms for the male bartenders and we have little dresses for the cocktail waitresses.” I bought my own tuxedo. It doesn’t matter. So there are some things I had to put up with, but I never felt like, “Oh this is something I have to overcome,” because in school I was given every opportunity. I was just never told no and there were never enough of us that gender was something that could hold you back. Yeah, that made me feel more comfortable.
JP: Ok, so Lisa asks you to audition for TML, what did they ask you to do in the audition in those early days?
HR: They asked for, you know, a piece. There were no callbacks then. So I had to write a piece. I wrote a piece called—which I don’t have anywhere because this was before people had computers—called Pencil Dick that was about my experience actually with managers at the Swissotel that were sitting at the bar. I don’t speak French well, but I used to be able to sort of speak it and I can still understand some of it. They would talk at the bar and angst about this woman. “Why should she be a bartender? Why can’t she be a cocktail waitress?” And who was a good piece of ass. And this went on for weeks before I clued them in on that I understood French. So that’s what the piece was about and that was my audition piece.
JP: Then they called you to tell you you were in. Did you panic at all about not thinking of yourself as a writer?
HR: Yeah, well here was my plan: I was like, “I’m just going to ride this, for as long as I can and then they’ll figure out that I’m not a writer and kick me out. I’ll write a couple things for myself and hopefully people will write some good things for me and I’ll coast for as long as I can.” And to an extent, John, I still think that. (both laugh) It hasn’t really changed, I really only write out of necessity. I have some short stories that I’ve published under pseudonyms, but rarely do I write and I never do theatrical writing unless it’s out of necessity with a deadline and I have something to write about.
JP: This may be the crux of why I often feel you are the most Neo-Futurist of all the performers I have seen in the show, because your writing seems to be purely without decoration, whether it is literal or abstract.
HR: I don’t keep a journal and I don’t blog. I don’t do any of that sort of writer-y stuff because it doesn’t interest me. But when there is something interesting that happens, I have a little notebook that I just write it down and I try and use that as a springboard and then try to come and put a sense of style on that or how to abstract that. And I don’t spend a lot of time, or I try not to, unless that is the intention of the piece, to really think about like, “How is the audience going to get this?” Because I think that’s when I get in the way, when I’m deciding how I’m going to manipulate the audience into feeling. I have a general sense of it, but I think I brought in a lot of pieces that people just to this day are confused by. And I’m really fine with that.
JP: Sometimes we learn our style or a new style for ourselves over time in TML. Did you feel you had a style when you came in?
HR: I actually think like every two years I go through a sort of style change. There was a while where I did a lot of abstract movement pieces. I would have a lot of pieces that had words and movement and you wouldn’t call it dance but words that went along. I had a while where everything was a cohesive circle. A sort of, “Now I see. This play makes sense.” For awhile I did deconstructions. If I look back at my material and I look at the books, there’s like 4 or 5 different things going on.
JP: There is no denying that we all have certain plays that we bring back year after year, because they are timeless and the audience will always enjoy them. One of yours in this category is Heather Gets Classy. Can you talk about the genesis of this piece?
HR: Well actually, I had done the genesis of it while I was in college. I had to go to some of these vocal recitals and it was sort of like a contest and I don’t quite understand what they are and they have judges and I had to do one of them before in high school. I’m not a good singer. I mean, I’m a decent singer and I can hold a tune and I know music theory backwards and forwards, but I’m not an opera singer. I study opera just because I find operas interesting and I find opera sort of as means to an end and I used to do some musical theatre. So for this class, this voice class, you had to learn two Italian pieces. And the one I didn’t really know and I was studying puppeteering at the time (tries not to laugh), so my sort of “Fuck you!” to the whole process was to sing a Mozart aria from The Marriage of Figaro. So my whole goal in the thing was to do the one piece and not seem kind of good, get a chuckle, and then leave because this doesn’t impact my grade. It’s just something I had to do. I don’t want to be here. And so I was thinking about it and thinking about what is a great way of shattering the audience’s expectations. And I thought, “Man, there’s nothing worse than when you go see something and you get some self-important person who is going to do a classical piece,” and you can just, you know, people who watch you say, “Oh, no, you’re a decent singer,” and it’s like, “No.” And you can see the look of dread when they’re thinking, “Oh god, how long is this going to go on.” And so it’s sort of great to shatter their expectations. [If you haven't seen this piece. Heather stands center stage with what appears to be shark slippers on her feet, she begins singing, and while singing she turns her back to the audience and goes into a headstand with her knees on her elbows. You see her face upside down between her legs. It turns out the slippers are actually puppets and she makes the sharks perform a musical duet. It brings down the house every time.] When I proposed it for TML I didn’t even do it in rehearsal. I was like, “I’ve got this thing and it’s sort of funny. I’m going to do it with shark puppets,” and they just let me do it on Friday in the show and I have to say the rest of the cast just fell over laughing. You lean in expecting one thing and it shatters your expectations. And that’s, I think, the thing this show does most successfully. Or hopefully it does.
JP: So TML had been running for about 16 months before you came in. You just missed the painful exodus from Stage Left to Live Bait.
HR: Yeah. Ugh, thank God. The audition that Spencer [Kayden] , Dave [Awl] and I came in was to replace the people that they had had from Stage Left to bring the ensemble back up in numbers.

JP: What do you think the differences are between the early days of Live Bait and now?
HR: Oh, this sounds harsh. Focus. At first at the time, you didn’t know how long it was going to last, but was it. It was all we did. We put every ounce of creative juice into Too Much Light. Now we’re so spread out. You spent the whole week thinking about what plays—there just wasn’t anything else. Too Much LightToo Much Light was the be all and end all. Maybe you took some time off and did different shows, but not very much. And this was the pinnacle and there was no other programming and there was also no money and no hope for any money. I think when I joined the company we made $5 a month. (both laugh) And then it bumped up to like $10 a week. And that was good because at least at $10 a week you could claim it on taxes that you were actually a performer. But there wasn’t the, “Let’s move this theatre company forward,” it was just, “Let’s just do the show.” Every week it was like, “How can the show be better?” And the show was, maybe just by nature of it, more intimate. I mean, Live Bait is a 75-seat house. And our connection with the audience members was a little more intimate. You could never do this here, you’d have one or two people rolling and there’d just be one person name-tagging. It was usually Ayun. [Halliday] I don’t know why. It just always seemed to be Ayun. And then, when you walked through the theater, you’d walk on stage and there’d be four chairs and we would interview the audience. Sometimes it was just like, “So what did you have for dinner? Why did you come here? Why are you wearing those shirts? Are you a Republican?” And so you had chatted with every audience member before the show started because it was only getting in 60-75 people. And so you’d do a play and you bring somebody on stage and you could say, “Ah, these were the people who went to Pizzeria Uno for dinner.”
JP: Yeah I believe that a rapport with the audience is very important as to how they receive the show. That was an issue when we were in Wooly Mammoth Theater in DC. They have a 300 seat house with a full staff. When you have a stage manager, and all the luxuries of just being the entertainment, it’s easy to fall into the hiding backstage waiting for our entrance mentality. I think it’s an important element to the show to be seen, to be out there. Even though I find it difficult. I’m shy by nature. It’s hard for me. Sometimes I’ll just force myself to wander the stage and audience waiting for someone to grab my attention.
Greg said when the show moved here it was just too big to interview every audience member. It couldn’t be done.
HR: It was just too many people. I think part of it was we had tried it for two weeks and it literally had turned into this: “Hi, what’s your name? Oh, there’s people waiting. Can you go sit down?” We more than doubled our audience and so that just was not going to happen ever again. Back at Live Bait we just had like maybe 2 rollers, maybe 1, and just one person doing name-tags. So there were four or five people to be talking to the audience. There was no place else you could go. There was no hiding back there. There was no other duties and there weren’t as many things, for example you didn’t have volunteers. You didn’t have this to watch and we were at somebody else’s theatre company so we didn’t have to lock the door. You could just be totally interacting with the audience.
During the early days here at the Neo-Futurarium we would sell brownies before all of the legal ramifications. People would come up and ask, “Are these your brownies?” or “Are these Ayun’s brownies? Ayun always uses a lot of chocolate chips or whatever.” I mean, I had people who would be like, “Heather always uses a lot of vanilla and sometimes she puts almonds and Ayun makes it with cinnamon, and blah blah blah.” Or we’d make oatmeal chocolate chip cookies and they’d be like (whispering), “Whose are they tonight?” And that level of intimacy I really miss.
JP: Yes we often lose the personal elements while trying to grow a company, and I feel I have to be one of the voices that asks whenever we give away these duties, like cleaning the space after the show, taking out the garbage, handing out tokens. Giving up some of these duties makes sense because we’re busy people, But there’s part of me that says, “No, we should probably keep doing that so that the audience sees us doing the bare bone work. We aren't just actors here.” I often equate it to pure improvisation. There’s these key things that you have to give the audience all the time, taking suggestions, breaking character occasionally, making mistakes. They always have to know that you’re improvising to get the full enjoyment of the task at hand. Neo-Futurism has some of the same components that crave an added level of understanding in order to fully enjoy what we bring them. The audience needs to see us rolling people in, taking out the garbage; they need to see us talking to each other and the audience before, during and after the show.
HR: I love tokening. It’s a way of greeting every single person. It’s like when they come in, I’ve made eye contact with all of those people and I really like that and I really miss it. And I think it’s growing and I also think it’s just in terms as how we grow. Also, our programming. If we just did Too Much Light, we could still do all that stuff, but not with this robust, full thing that we have. So it’s one of the things you give up.

JP: Cliques never really leave us, we deal with being in them and perceived by them from the outside. Do you feel their have always been cliques in the company, and have you been apart of them?
HR: I’m sure other people might say, “Oh, Heather was part of this,” I saw myself as somebody who moved freely amongst those and wasn’t in one. Sort of never felt part of. There were little cliques, I just sort of felt like I was able to sit at any of the tables in the lunchroom (JP laughs) and didn’t know why. Maybe it’s just because I said that I would or maybe it was because nobody wanted me full time at any of them, so I just bounced around. But I sort of felt like yeah, that did happen, but somehow I managed to stay outside of it. And maybe part of that is my schooling and my upbringing of like, “Cliques? You got to be kidding! We don’t have enough people for a clique.”
JP: In high school I had a hard time dealing with idea of a clique, I had the instinct to try and bond with the other outcasts, but that even seemed a clique to me. I really wanted to fit in, but I always felt slightly off center. By senior year I had fallen into the theatre so I can see how I’ve become part of it, but here with the Neo-Futurists I feel like I dance pretty well between different inner groups.
HR: Yes, I would say that you do. I think people who do sort of fall in and I think there’s people that get stuck in the corner lonely and then I think there’s people like you and I that sort of bounce around.
JP: Often people will get frustrated with the fact that there are cliques. I believe they are things that just naturally happen. If you get along with certain people socially and tend to go out with them it makes sense that you would bring that into a show that purposely pulls from our real lives. Some of the getting around the pitfalls of cliques becoming alienating is just accepting that they exist.
HR: Yeah, certain people are going to be closer than other people. There’s certain people that I really enjoy working with, but I just don’t ever see socially. Just different things, and I don’t know if it’s age or what. I was looking around at some of the newer people and out of all the women, Caitlin’s who I really feel comfortable hanging with. Caitlin is probably young enough to be my daughter. But Caitlin is sort of one of those people that defies a clique and is interesting and you’re just comfortable hanging with her. I’ll see that or people that you sort of share other interests with. Like if I never did theatre again and she never did it again, I’d always want to spend time with Chlöe. And then there are people who I really like, but it’s more of a working relationship.

Is Heather accident prone?

HR: We had spilled some water on stage that we did not clean up and we were jumping over a chair in a movement-based piece, and I jumped off of a chair and hit the water. I didn’t realize it at the time because we’re all hyped up on adrenaline and running around, but I just couldn’t get… I tried to stand back up and my leg just buckled under and then I could hear people in the front (whispers) "Stay down." "Oh my god." Then I would say 45 seconds later we had moved on to the next play and I had finished the play. I sort of crawled up to the chair and finished and couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t get up. And then I was like, “What’s that sensation? Oh God, it’s pain!” And then the lights got really bright and I was realized, “Oh, I’ve done something really bad.” But coming from a medical family I knew that going to an emergency room Saturday night at midnight was really dumb and I was going to have to wait for an ambulance and I might as well just finish the show. (laughing) so I just finished the show with my leg up.
JP: Was it true that you were perched on the side of the stage?
HR: I couldn’t be physical. I couldn’t move. My best friend, Consuelo was in the audience that night and she said, “You know how I knew you were really hurt? I had never seen you sweat so profusely on stage.” Yeah, you never see me sweat on stage. And I was, just from the pain, dripping sweat like I was sitting in a sauna. And that was when I was thought, “Ok, this is probably really serious.” That accident took me out of work for two months, and I couldn't do the show either. That was 17 years ago. No income and I didn’t know how I was going to pay for my medical bills. I had little insurance and the choice that was left for me, because I asked somebody, “How do I pay for this?” was that you sue the theatre company, which at the time, to pay my bills and take time off of work would have shut down the theatre. Or "Too fucking bad." Those were the choices. That was a hit, thousands and thousands of dollars. I had no cushion at the time. I was like, “Ha, I think I’ve got $300 in savings.” So I borrowed money from some places. It took 3 years to pay all that back and I have yet to get the surgery on my knee. I did a little break on the fibula and I tore the MCL a little bit, but I totally ripped apart the ACL. My husband had that surgery two and a half years ago and it was really successful. And his was even longer than mine had been between accident and surgery. So it’s something I think about, but it again, would require taking a couple months off of work and I gotta tell ya, I’ve done enough surgeries for the next… maybe if “the accident” had not happened, I would consider. Like, “Oh, well I’m back in school now. Maybe I should get this ACL fixed.” [Heather recently had been hit by a car on her bike. This is what she is referring to here. She has also gone back to school to study Nutrition. This will come up later in the interview.]
JP: When did you become a Personal Trainer?

HR: Even when I had started doing the show, I was a fitness instructor. I had been teaching aerobics since college. I had found that in college. And that to me—and I’m surprised I didn’t think of it as a job earlier. I guess it was something you did on the side. But I had studied dance for many, many years. I took about 15 years of ballet and did a fair amount of musical theatre, which is more jazz and tap. But I had started ballet when I was 3 years old, just with my funny, deformed feet. [Heather's fourth toes sit on top of her other toes, like bunkbeds. It’s called brachymetatarsia] I think my dad thought I was going to have balance issues and was like, “Let’s get her in dance. Let’s get her really proprioceptive and really encourage dance and sports.” Just so this wouldn’t become a handicap. So I had played soccer and I had been a ballerina—which are two quite different things. They sort of have some similarities, they help each other.
Then later I was at this dance center in Boston called Joy of Music and it had this class called Aerobics and I was like, “What’s that?” I had never heard of aerobics. I took it and I was like, “I could so totally do this!” (JP laughs) And I really liked it. Also, it was the first year. It was my freshman year of college and I had always played on a sport, and danced in high school. And I was in college and I didn’t have money for dance classes outside of what was going on in whatever class you’re taking and I wasn’t doing any sports. I had tried doing the Boston University soccer team. But at BU they played on Astroturf and I couldn’t do that with my knees. The other thing was these people would practice at 7 in the morning. And I was like, “Maybe soccer.” But I really missed that athleticism. And then here was this class where you exercised for an hour. With music! It’s like, “Who wouldn’t want to do that? How could anyone in the world not want to do that?” And granted, there were ridiculous thongs and hair scrunchies. (JP laughs) You know if you could look beyond that. And you got this thing. You know, you worked out for about an hour and you got this nice endorphin rush, but the hour went by really fast. My one regret with college by sort of choosing theatre is that I always found sports medicine really fascinating. My dad was an orthopedic surgeon and was the team doctor for some local stuff. And I had always sort of had that bug. And when personal training had started to come into vogue—and I had really latched on right when it was early and people were like, “You're a personal trainer? Personal trainer for what?” There wasn’t that terminology, it just wasn’t in the lexicon back then. And you say something like, “A one-on-one athletic trainer. A one-on-one athletic coach.” It was all very different. I could do theatre and “Oh, I can do something with like… that’s like fitness based and medical based and help people feel better about themselves.” So as personal training started to come around, I sort of hopped on early and it was a weird transition because people just didn’t have personal trainers. It took a long time for people to see that as something that wasn’t just a luxury for the rich in the same way as massage. It always seemed like you didn’t get a massage unless you just had tons and tons of money. It was just something rich people did. And I think people started to say, “You know, I work with my body a lot. I should get a massage. It’s a good prophylactic thing to keep me from having to see a doctor early on.” Or like a financial advisor where it’s like, “Oh, I guess if I’m going to have this money, I want to utilize it the best.” And the same is sort of true at the gym. When that started up, I was at the Swissotel, which was a hard gig to give up because back in 1988 that paid $10.50 an hour plus tips and I was bartending, so I made a lot of tips. They probably could have paid us $3 an hour, but they didn’t. They paid us 10 because they were European and they didn’t understand that. (JP chuckles) Incredible benefits. You know, like not great insurance, but when I quit, the day before I turned 30. I think I had 6 weeks of paid vacation a year. I could stay at any Swissotel in the world for $25 a night. When we went to New York, I stayed at the Drake. Everyone else would be crashed on someone’s couch and I would be like, “I’m at the Drake. I’m on Park Ave.” It was a hard job to leave. I could also work 24 hours a week, which meant just 3 days, and be full time. So it was kind of hard to leave that because I knew I was going to take a really big dive being a personal trainer just because it’s freelancing. And back then you still had to explain to people what it was.

Of Fame and TML

JP: Did you ever have any expectations that Too Much Light would bring you national fame, or that it could be a vehicle for other successes?
HR: Not really. I have a lot of drive, but I don’t have any ambition. I just don’t. And it’s sort of a failing. And it’s true in my other work. I can remember I got a callback from MadTV right before they had started up. It was going to be the next Saturday Night Live. And I did well at the audition and I did well on the callback. I liked what I did and I didn’t make it. And I was sort of bummed about it because it was a time when David wasn’t making much money and I thought, “God, that’d be easy.” Then I watched the first show of it and I was so relieved. I thought, “Are you kidding?!” Here’s this great opportunity that I have every week to share material and I come in and people are there to help me make that material better. And it’s this collective experience. Out there, 1. you’re in LA. and 2. it’s television, and I don’t like television. I don’t watch television. I don’t own a television. And it’s really cutthroat and it’s really mean and it’s people saying, “I want to get my stuff in over your stuff.” That just struck me that it was more like, “Do you know how lucky you are that you didn’t make that last round?” Because I would have been miserable. I just think I would have been miserable and I would have lasted for about 2 weeks. I like the little sort of pseudo-quasi-fame that I have around Andersonville. People will come up and say, “Oh, I saw you in the show before!” Something like that. But fame? No. I think very few people handle fame well and want fame and I don’t think I want fame. I think it’s just a huge problem in the same way—I was discussing this with my husband. [David Bremer] We sometimes buy lottery tickets just for fun. And there was one that was $278 million. You know, you win $10 million, everyone loves you. You win $278 million, everyone hates you. You have a horrible life with that much money. You would just have to give all of it away. It would just be too much. And fame is sort of that way. I think it warps you. It would warp me and I’m glad I’m not famous.
JP: You have been active with this company for a long time Heather. Longer than anyone else accept Greg. You have seen many people leave. Scott, for instance, left to raise a family. Just realized he couldn’t do the show anymore. I respect him so much for the choice he made.
HR: Oh, so do I.
JP: His choice was devastating for some in the show at that time but the reason was so logical and beautiful. Some people may leave because they’ve gotten what they can out of it. Some have to disconnect and search for fame or security, and others leave to work out their own niche. What is it that keeps you here so long? [I must say here that about a month after I conducted this interview, Heather dropped the bomb that she might have to go inactive and leave the show. I am still in shock.]
HR: Well, it’s a combination. The dynamic relationship with the audience and when it clicks, it really clicks. Sometimes it doesn't click but if it happens at least every 6 to 8 weeks, that’s even enough. I felt the shows in Washington [Woolly Mammoth Theater] really clicked, and I had a real fun time performing. I felt even though it was a really big theater, I felt engaged with the audience and that was a lot of fun. And so I think part of it is that. Part of it is also, again, the lack of ambition and the laziness. It’s really the only theater that’s 2 blocks away from my job. And I’m already in the company and I’m lazy.
JP: You don’t have to re-audition.
HR: Yeah, you don’t have to re-audition.
JP: Every 10 years or so.
HR: Exactly. So there’s a lazy element. I mean, honestly if the company lost its space and we moved to Pilsen, I’d really have to think about it. But you know, the other part of that, I don’t mean to just say that I’m here because honestly, I have lived in this neighborhood for the last 10, 12 years because this is where the theater is. And it makes sense to live near what you do all the time. At least to me. And to be a part of that neighborhood and that community. But I just like it Too Much Light. I like the continual challenge of it. I find that really fascinating. And I always think that the show is always so varied. The show never peaks and valleys. It does nothing but peak and valley, you know? The show never has its apex. It’s just one of many. And so I think I’m always just tinkering with trying to get it right and trying to do something new in the space. And sometimes certain people will just come in to the ensemble and it will sort of revitalize you.
JP: Is there a sadness involved with your longevity and the people you have had to see go?
HR: There is. You know, like you were saying with Scott Hermes. When Scott Hermes left, he had no regrets. It was for his family. I was just devastated that somebody who had that much writing talent wasn’t going to be putting their stuff up here every week. I was like, not for Scott, for the rest of us. Like the world is a slightly less insightful and amusing place because Scott Hermes doesn’t do plays every week. Same thing with Slick. [Diana Slickman] It’s just her take on stuff, to have that there every week. But you know, a lot of those people have managed to find other outlets for themselves. I just think I don’t really have the ambition to do that. I don’t know, maybe I would. When I take breaks, I get opportunities to do stuff with other theatres and I turn down more stuff than I do. I wouldn’t know how to navigate in that world. But when people leave, sometimes I just think, “Yeah, they’ve had enough,” or sometimes I see where this show is just not quite the right fit for people. And they try to make it fit and they put that coat on for a couple years and it never does quite fit right. And when they leave, I think, “Well, they will find the thing that fits them a little better,” or the process just isn’t for everybody. Like David Kodeski and Greg Allen both have always struggled with memorization. When David finally left the show, he was like, (sighs). You know? There was a relief. Like, “I was never going to be good at memorizing and I didn’t have to deal with that aspect of it anymore.” It was interesting to hear him say that. Or people like Dave Awl who writes some wonderful stuff. Like some of the stuff Dave writes, you could just spend the whole day reading. But I think Dave always struggled with the whole, “Ok, bring two plays in every week.” He’s like, “I’m going to bring in something very well crafted that’s new and that’s sort of interesting like once every two weeks.” And when there are only 5 or 6 people, that just doesn’t work for this show. In a way, it almost sort of wasn’t the right fit. Like he needed more time or in a more perfect Dave Awl world where this was all that Dave was doing was writing. But I think the… for some people, sort of what I think a lot of us feed on. Like, “We do this and we do that and we do the other thing.” And for someone like Dave, Dave needs to just be a writer. That’s his process. The other stuff is just, I think where sometimes it’s intriguing for other people, is just a distraction for him. And I saw times when he was working 40 hours a week and trying to do the show and it just looked like it was killing him.
JP: I’m fascinated by Dave Awl. I love that man.
HR: One of my regrets, I can remember thinking, we were doing something and I was conducting, like… And I don’t think I said it harshly and I don’t think he took it harshly, but we were doing something. I think it was a play of mine and I was like, “I meant today, Dave! It’s got to be today!” And yeah, his work is a little more ponder-some. It just moves slow and I felt like he would bring in stuff that was like 6 minutes long. It’s like, “Sweetheart, that’s not… you can’t… this isn’t the show for that.” We just don’t have it and the time will run out. So in that way, it seemed like it was never quite the perfect fit. Dave’s material to me is like, you give Dave Awl a room, a little theater. Dave will write 10-15 minute pieces. That’s the Dave Awl piece. Whereas I think I really write 90 seconds. I can do that. And so Dave always seemed to be trying to pigeonhole longer material into this short thing and the frustration of how many times he had to hear something that was full, that was complete, that was perfect, right the way it was. And to have to edit that down, I can imagine that just wears on you after awhile.

[In a few interviews We talk about a big exodus from the company that happened during a series of reorganizing meetings, when it was discovered we needed a board to prevent ourselves from being shut down by the city. Alot of other shit went down during that time too. In David Kodeski's interview we talked about this thoroughly, because he was the first to leave directly after those meetings. Once again I feel it important to stress that these views of having a board are more based on the specifics that took place around 1999, and do not reflect accurately on the work that is being done currently.]
JP: There was a big exodus during the board discussions which we all sat through for hours and hours. Two weekends, Saturday and Sunday all day up until the cast had to leave to go perform the show, this alone took a toll on our willingness to accept the power shift that would have to occur with the type of board that was being offered to us at the time. Over the next year we lost Dave Awl, Diana Slickman, Anita Loomis, and David Kodeski. And actually me too, but I came back. That amount of people over a short period of time made recovering very difficult.
HR: It was big. It was a huge talent drain. I mean, that’s a lot of really great writers right there. It was. And I think some of the arguments were really valid. We lost a sort of sense of control. And any time you make something bigger, you sort of lose control of it a little bit. I think if I had the perfect world, I would make us a theater 30 seats smaller. And I would take the admission price down again, but I wouldn’t ever… If I were designing this or if something happens and you and I go to Ottawa and start Too Much Light up in Ottawa, I’ll look for a 120-seat theater that feels a little tighter than this.
JP: That is one of my biggest dilemmas with branching out, is the fear of losing intimacy. I just love the intimacy of storefront theater. I love the idea that I could reach out and touch someone, or grab them, that I could see the people in the back. Even in theater with characters, the proximity of the actors is very exciting to me.

HR: I can see that onstage how you’re performing in some huge plays, it’s just stops being people and starts becoming an audience. You know? You stop seeing people and you just see an audience. In our space we lost some of that intimacy when we stopped putting people on the floor.
[During the transition mentioned above, we also could no longer take the chance of over filling our space. We use to fit 50 more people in that space, and yes, you might think that that would make it less intimate, but as you will see in the following conversation, it actually made us much much more aware of their presence.]
JP: You couldn’t avoid stepping on them.
HR: Yeah, you’d be doing your play and you’d be like, “Excuse me,” and so I miss some of that. And an active board is very much about growing and looking at the future, and I have really mixed feelings about that. [But Heather is not one to just speak words, she actually was one of the middlemen between board and ensemble, she would go to all the meeting without any monetary compensation.] I don’t want to hold anybody back from doing stuff, but… I guess I just wonder what’s so wrong with what we’re doing now? Because if we go to this bigger thing, it’ll never be this again. I don’t begrudge the board or any of that, but I sometimes wish for a simpler time back when Too Much Light was the focus. Thank God we went from a four-show season to a three-show season. I believe it was your proposal. We were horribly over-programmed. As a company, we were burnt out and we were trying to do too much and I think that shows in the show when you’re flipping over all these people and different people are here every week as opposed to the same group of people for 6, 8 weeks. Some of them are running off to do a prime-time shows and others have rehearsal and you can’t give it the time. It’s the difference between having a monogamous relationship and sleeping with the entire football team. (Both laugh) And we try to sleep around a lot and pretend like we’re monogamous. You only get to have one or the other.

RANTING AS ENTERTAINMENT

JP: Rants as performance are hard to get away with without sounding like you’re just complaining to an audience. You often write plays in this style, and I think you usually get away with it, and make it entertaining.
HR: I think that I have a lot of anger and I’m good at ranting. I do, I get cranky about stuff and I’m really rant-y. I think that maybe I’m able to get away with it just because I’m a little bit weird and maybe I don’t seem that threatening. I think if it were somebody else maybe it would come off as harsh or mean. I had somebody come up—this was a play from years ago I haven’t thought of in awhile. You know how people come up and ask, “Do you still do that play?” and it’s a play from like 12 years ago and you’re thinking, “Did I do that?” So this woman was like… I connected with her on something and I haven’t seen her in over a decade and she’s asking, “Do you still do that play where you bitch at the audience about liking pistachio pudding?” And I was like, “Oh yeah, that play.” And she says, “That was so funny, it was really mean, but it was funny,” and she said, “You know, it always felt uncomfortable but it never felt dangerous.” And maybe… I don’t know. Maybe that’s it. Or maybe it was what I chose to rant about.
JP: A good rant carries with it an idealism which I think is admirable, but there also seems to be an acknowledgement of how ridiculous ranting can be.
HR: Yeah.
JP: Do you feel that’s something you nurtured growing up or is it in general that you had this sort of hostility and you had to…
HR: Sort of vent it somehow?
JP: Vent it, but also find the humor in it too?
HR: Yeah, I think you can. I think just by the nature of putting it on stage, you’re able to defuse it. And I think that’s really great and hopefully not just a like, “I need to spill my beans to somebody!” therapeutic sort of way. But if you can, I’ve found personally just in my relationship with David over 15 years, when I have something that really bothers me and I can put it on stage. Even David will admit that it’s fairly well-balanced. I don’t come in saying, “He’s a horrible pig and I hate him!” (JP laughs) But you know, that’s sometimes just helps to defuse any anger because then you can sort of laugh about it and see how common it is. There was a play where I think I referenced the fact that—this is clearly before the accident, because he’s really picked up since then—where I said something like, “It’s obvious you’ve never cleaned the bathroom because you don’t know where the bathroom cleaning supplies are located.” And somebody said, “I saw that really funny play your wife put on. It was on the website about how you never clean anything because you don’t know where it’s located.” He was like, “Show me that play.” But you know, I was like, “I got it out, in a funny way,” and so many people said, “(chuckles, then whispering) I don’t know where my stuff is.” And I think that that’s a great way of working through stuff. And whether that rants or what have you. And I think I also try to do a fairly balanced job of not putting myself either up on a pedestal or being a martyr, as if, “I was just doing everything perfectly and this bad thing happened.”
JP: Yes, I often feel that rants and even satire on our stage can often appear as righteous indignation. And this often happens because we may not understand that our outrage can also be seen as petty and humorless. There needs to be some amount of self analysis in every rant.
HR: Yeah, I try to, unless I’m purposely incorporating that attitude into the piece. Like the rant I had about the woman double parking in front of me. And that was fairly self-righteous. I mentioned how it’s my birthday and I’m feeling self-righteous and this woman double parks fight next to me. So I think sometimes you can get away that if it’s something that you are cognitive of. But other than that, I really think the best rants are the one where—Slickman would do this well. She would get really mad and she would, in the midst of it, mention she was probably at fault, but she’s still really really pissed off about it, even though in retrospect she should have never been there, but nevertheless. It’s just the willingness to show your own foibles.
JP: That’s why I liked One for the Ladies. Because it’s so true, the women in the audience rave about this play about women peeing on the toilet seat.
HR: The very same problem that they have.
JP: But even she’s allowed to take her rant to the comical extreme where she has to be physically carried off the stage.
HR: Exactly.
JP: “Wow, I’m just over the top. Maybe I’m taking this a little bit too far.”
HR: Yeah, exactly. And I think those are successful. I mean any of this stuff—and some of this works better than others—you get an idea that’s just this bald faced idea. It has to be couched in some sort of style or art. You’ve got to find, you know, are you going to take it and abstract it and make it with chairs? Are you going to make it metaphorical this way? Are you going to say exactly what happened, but you’re doing this non-sequitur movement with it? Or are you going to be waltzing? You know, what is it that makes it not just, “Bah! Here’s what happened today.” That’s the neat challenge of it, I think.

HEATHER'S INCREDIBLE ABILITY TO OVERCOME OBSTACLES

JP: So I want to end this interview talking a bit about the accident, or at least acknowledge the positive—not that we want accidents to happen to anybody, but you’re the one that definitely could survive such a horrible crash. For me it really intensified my belief in you as one of the strongest people I know.
[Heather was heading south on Clark. She went through the intersection at Foster and Clark during the green light and a car turned left directly into her and pushed her all the way up onto the curb. She broke many bones and shattered her wrist.]
HR: That was the thing David said halfway through the second surgery. He’s said, “How many people are going to tell you, ‘If it had to be somebody, it’s good that it’s you?’” (JP laughs) And I was like, “40,000 too many!” (Both laugh) Yeah, you know, in a lot of ways I was well prepared for it. I think if I hadn’t been where I was physically, I wouldn’t have come back so quickly. I was really lucky to have projects to come back to and to have a goal. I mean, it would have been terrible if I had been doing some show that was over in six weeks and I never got to do it or to come back. I mean, there are certainly many things that have been an adjustment and a change. Next week I will be starting school full time and not doing the show again for quite awhile. That is a choice that is driven by me not able to make my living as a trainer anymore. I’m doing prerequisites right now to get probably a Master’s in nutrition sciences and specifically, if I get a chance to a dissertation or a thesis I will do it on nutritional requirements menopausal athletes.
JP: What’s your end goal with these studies?
HR: I’m not able to do a lot of the stuff I was able to do before I was a trainer, just because of issues from the accident. One of the biggest things is I technically cannot train off site because I can’t perform CPR and my liability coverage doesn’t extend to a lot of the stuff I used to do. And there are a lot of formats I can’t teach anymore, a lot of stuff. For instance I can’t spot people. I can’t do some things like that. So hopefully working as a nutritionist will put me actually not any further ahead, but exactly where I was before the accident, which is able to work 20-25 hours a week and make… not a lot of money, but make enough money for me and make enough money that I can do theatre. Where I don’t have to worry about whether the theatre pays well.
JP: What does a nutritionist do? How is it different from what you do now? Is it more just counseling people?
HR: It is. But technically you can’t give a prescription as a personal trainer. Like I could say to you—and you probably heard me say this silly catch phrase when I was dealing with Daredevils, where I would say, “You should talk to your health care professional about whether taking flax seed would be a good idea,” or “You should talk to this person about that.” I can’t give you a prescription, I can’t say, “This is what you should be eating.” I do it to my friends all the time, but you can’t do that. As a nutritionist and you can do it with a fair amount of specificity. You can also get paid by insurance to do it. So if I could be making… if I could be making like $25-30,000 a year working 25 hours a week, then I’m free to this, maybe do some more shows with Theatre Oobleck, continue to do that sort of stuff. So that’s what all of this is about. Also, just the recognition. Now I’ve got some injuries that preclude me from stuff and I’m going to be 45, and I’m in a profession that is entirely physically based and I don’t know how much these injuries will limit me and just not wanting to find myself 50 years old with no skills and not even the ability to get a job at Starbucks because of my hand. So there’s a little of that, but also hopefully find some ways of incorporating it into… I don’t know, everything else that I do.

[And If I know Heather, this is what she will do, she is one who really does believe in experiencing life through enjoyment and hard work and using this knowledge to forward her dedication to the art of performing.]

Scott Hermes Part Two

Scott Auditions for Too Much Light

SH: I went to school with Phil, and the Theater School’s very small. Phil was an undergraduate when I was in graduate school, and my wife was an undergraduate. So I saw Phil in a couple shows, thought he was great, and then there was a big lounge, we’d hang out, smoke, eat lunch, and so you met everybody, everybody knew everybody in that school, it’s a very small school. Phil and I got along great. [laughing slightly] Me and Phil and this other guy Ted Rubenstien went off on a camping trip out in Wildcat Mountain in Wisconsin. Where, I don’t know why, but I decided that we should all run naked through the woods. [both laugh] So Phil took a Polaroid picture of me naked standing by the fire, luckily he sent it back to me. [JP laughs] So, yeah, good times with Phil. After Phil got out of college he started doing Too Much Light and he told me about it. [I laughed because this also reminded me of a story I heard about Phil. One night after the show, late, Phil said, "Let's go to Wisconsin." The gang thought he was joking, but he wasn't. They got in the car and drove to Wisconsin, bought some alcohol. And at one point, Phil jumped out of the car, I think while it was moving, and ran to hide. Moments later he was naked running on the side of the road. Eventually they caught up to him and took him home. But now it turns out after talking to Phil again, that I might be combing two stories and embellishing on the facts. Perhaps he stripped in New Orleans or perhaps he didn't get naked at all. I imagine such a story could have happened sometime during a late night escapade. So I will leave it's mention here, and now it is true, because it's in print. ]
Greggie K and I went together to see Too Much Light. In the early days of the Stage Left space, Mike [Tricoli] used to sit in the window, he was really fantastic. He would do basic mime work, but he was really good at it, sitting really still in the window, and suddenly moving. It was compelling, letting a cigarette burn and then suddenly he would move and scare the hell out of people. [JP laughs] Or Greg [Allen] would be out on the sidewalk, just basically asking people to come to see the show, trying to get people in. That space was very very very small and this tiny tiny lobby, so we’d spill out onto the street so it had this real air of excitement. I remember the first time I saw Lisa [Buscani], and just being blown away by her... I’d never seen a poetry slam or knew anything about that scene, and she’s just one of the most amazing performers I’ve ever seen in my life. Karen Christopher and the way that she did movement pieces, she really made the abstract accessible. I didn’t know what she was talking about, but I didn’t care.


JP: You saw the show originally at Stage Left and then later you auditioned for the show at Live Bait but you never performed at Live Bait.

SH: No I never performed at Live Bait. At Live Bait Greggie K and I auditioned but he got in and I didn't. At the next set of auditions, when they were at their own space (The Neo-Futurarium), then I auditioned again and got cast. (September 25th 1992) I was told they were very interested in putting me in at the same time as Greggie K but they didn’t want to bring two big character-y people in at the same time. I was in the show ‘til the end of ’95, when I finally dropped out. My oldest daughter Nina was born January 31st, 1995. I tried to stick in the show for about a year, but it was really just too hard for me to perform in the show, work full-time and try to be a dad. I just couldn’t do it.

A MESHING OF STYLES AND NEO AESTHETIC

JP: Can you talk a little bit about your process from working predominantly with big characters in Cardiff Giant into the non-illusory aesthetic of Too Much Light?

SH: In Cardiff Giant we would spend months creating these larger than life, almost clown style Commedia, characters that we would try to make as real as possible, and everyone totally bought into the situation around them. So it was very different from the open simplicity of the Neo-Futurists.

JP: What aspects of the Neo-Futurists' aesthetic most interested you?

SH: The rawness, the immediacy of it. And again I would have to say Buscani is one of my favorite all-time Too Much Light performers. Her openness about whatever her mind was on was so real, the deep pain that she suffered in her life. We all have pain in our lives, so whatever things I’d suffered up to that point I kept inside me. Turning pain into theater and not into therapy, that really was a very strong draw for me. You could be very open about who you were and what you were feeling, what you were going through, and not have it be... icky. "Here’s what happened to me and it was a crappy thing, but here I am, so deal with it."
I think it was Greggie K, who said we started this stuff before the Internet was big, right? So, Too Much Light was the Internet of the times. "Here's what happened in the news. Here’s our spin on it." Now we blog about it, but during that time we would write a play about it.

JP: I have never been much of a reader of current news, but while I am in the show, I do feel that I am more aware of what is going on politically, my newsreel is Tuesday night rehearsal.

SH: Cardiff Giant did two shows at Cafe Voltaire called “Some Candy and Some Mo’ Candy” We initially started off as a living newspaper. We had set characters, but we’d take something from the news. We’d throw out ideas to the people in the audience, and say, "Pick something out of the newspaper, and grab the Sun Times or the Tribune, hand it out, pick something out, and then we’d just run with that. We tried to put some more immediacy into what we were performing. It was part of the tension of the group too, one of the reasons why it split up. Even though we were commenting indirectly on what was happening through our parallel world, they wanted something that was more immediate. I think I probably felt that too. That was one of the things I enjoyed doing in the Neo-Futurists, ripping stuff out of the headlines. I would save news up that I’d read all week, and then I would just write for three hours on Tuesday morning. ‘Cause we would come in Tuesday night to lay down what we were going to do that weekend. My goal, even from my first time walkin’ in, was I would always have a minimum of three completed plays to propose every Tuesday. Then I read an interview with Ralph Covert, he was the leader of The Bad Examples. [He now records children records: Ralph's World] In the interview he challenged himself to write a hundred songs in one year. I think he made 99 by New Year’s Eve. So after being in Too Much Light for about three months, I gave myself the goal of trying to get a hundred plays on stage in a year. I think I got 95. At one point, in the summer, I think... at least half the show was my material.


JP: Many Neo-Futurists believed that you raised the bar as to quality and quantity of plays brought in. Many of them believe, including Diana Slickman and Dave Awl, that their push to be better was initiated by your commitment. Do you think any of this external affect was intentional?

SH: I didn’t consider it that way, I just made it an unspoken goal. I didn’t start telling anybody that I’m trying to set rules for myself. I would never... campaign for my play for the sake of my play, I would always try to write to the weaknesses of the show. The show varies widely from week to week. Sometimes it’s all monologues and sometimes there would be too many scenes. So I would look at what the current show was, and I would try to find what’s missing. Looking at what the show needed would give me ideas for writing. I really just thought of it as a stimulus, a way to make me write, ‘cause I have a very competitive edge to me that I need. If I don’t have a specific goal or a deadline, I’m not going to do anything. And that is one of the great things about Too Much Light. I’d never really written anything before, everything I’d done prior was done collaboratively through Cardiff Giant using improvisation. I never really sat down by myself and written anything. When I had to write an audition piece for Too Much Light I was very anxious about my ability to generate that material. I was worried that I wouldn’t have it. And in fact I went from working full time to working part-time just to devote myself to writing for the show. So I didn’t really think of it in terms of other people, I wrote a lot of material because I didn’t want to just argue for my play because of it being my play. If I was going to make an argument for my play I would make it for the sake of balance for the show.

JP: You say you were influenced by Lisa, and you had somewhat of a crash course in staging the simplicity of honesty, but you didn't just drop the character work that you nurtured with Cardiff Giant, if anything I think you and Greg K may have altered the show a bit by incorporating large gestures and helping to ad to the idea that pretend can still be in the bounds of non-illusory. It's ultimately about all these people writing in all different styles. It wasn’t just people telling the truth on stage, it was still performance, it was still larger than life in some ways. The style and games that Cardiff Giant played like finding different ways to kill each other with imaginary objects affected the show and even broke the tension that occurs in long drawn out ensemble meetings.

SH: We always raised stakes up high in Cardiff Giant we always killed each other at the end. Greggie K and John Hildreth were sort of the people who were best at it. And I’d trip them up, [Scot grabs nothing from thin air, twists it into a small weapon and whips it at an imaginary person at the table. Being an improviser myself I wonder if he had thrown it at me, if I would have reacted, spasm to my own death in this Thai restaurant, or would I just take on the role of journalist and just look at him and say "Uh huh." I did not have to make this choice. He chose to kill an unarmed invisible man instead.] We just created more and more exciting ways to kill one another. I think we probably looked for ways to bring that in. Another guy who influenced me was Gregg Reynolds. He was in an improv show with me called Naughty Monkey [Pups] that we did before Avant Garfielde. He was always great because he’s somewhat of a contrarian. He was the guy who drove me to the idea of looking at what’s there and looking at what’s not there, to try to find the thing that’s missing. Like you said, if it’s all about people talking about themselves and their feelings, what are we missing? Something loud and obnoxious. The big thing that I got from Gregg Reynolds was audience “penetration,” he called it. Whenever I’d look at the show [Too Much Light] I’d say, "How are we making the audience drive this show? How are we... even involving the audience as props or something." One of the most important things in Too Much Light is the dissipation of the fourth wall. We also did this in Cardiff Giant and Avant Garfielde. We would still be in our world, but the stage would always extend beyond the proscenium. We would go in amongst the audience all the time ‘cause it’s very exciting to an audience when the performers suddenly show up amongst them. It raises the energy in the room.

JP: That’s one of my favorite things about intimate theater in general is that all the action is write up in your face.


SH: They’re right up on you, yeah. Well I remember from Revenger’s Tragedy...


[SH and then JP laugh]

[Scott is referencing the first show I ever saw at the Neo-Futurarium. In this show Scott climbed into the audience and on to me. He didn't know me at the time. I was also lucky enough to be at the performance where one of the "dead" bodies on stage farted, and caused a laughing dead domino effect. This is talked about in detail in Greg Kotis' interview which will be out in a couple months.]

SH: I was up on top of you there.

JP: I hadn’t even seen Too Much Light before I auditioned. The Neo-Futurists' version of The Revenger's Tragedy is what made me want to audition for the company. I specifically liked the way you, and Greg K and a few others were able to maintain a character and then all of a sudden turn to face the audience, or even physically step out of character and direct your attention to the audience. It allowed me as an audience member to experience a duality of believability of character but also that these are actors who can acknowledge me at any moment. Those moments of stepping out of character with big specific gestures really impressed me. [This piece we refer to was directed by Greg Allen. Just recently he directed Strange Interlude, a six hour play by Eugene O'Neil. This play gave me the same giddy, theoretical feel I got twelve years earlier.]

SH: That’s something I got out of the Theater School, making those specific transitions, those specific choices. One of the great bits of feedback I got was from an acting teacher at the Theater School who said that when I didn't know what I was doing, when I was lost on stage, my hands would go berserk. So when I’m physically involved in what’s happening on stage, I have an activity, but when I'm not involved my hands are doing some weird thing, they start twisting off by themselves.

JP: One of the key techniques that I feel is often ignored in improv training is grabbing and holding objects, and how this can lead to creating your whole environment, instead of talking yourself into a word plagued non-space. If you are lost in a scene it can help just to reach out and grab an object. That’s what worked for me at Jimmy’s a lot. "I don’t have time to try to think of something smart I just have to reach out and grab something."

SH: Yup. And that was the basis of a lot of what we did. You can work off the environment. You don’t have to worry about being clever. That was the biggest lesson out of the improv experience from Avant Garfielde and Cardiff Giant, that if you immerse yourself in the activity, if you immerse yourself in the relationship and the environment, stuff will come to you, and you have to trust that.

MORE ON THE PROS OF TML

SH: The ability to write in a lot of different styles, the ability to be immediate with the audience, I just connected to that a lot. And I think that if you have improv background you’re very comfortable with the chaos

JP: It is interesting to be accepting of the chaos but also one who helps to control the confusion. Many Neo-Futursits who worked with you have said that your intros to the show were some of the best, that you could give information, make it interesting, and keep it succinct. The intro is very important, there is information that needs to be imparted, but also the potential to drain or increase the energy heavily weighs on how one handles these first few minutes in the theater.

SH: That's one of my pet peeves, man.

JP: What was your approach?

SH: At Jimmy’s we would rotate off doing the introductions. You’re seeing tons of theater and people are giving curtain speeches, you know. I think I know what makes a good opener and what doesn’t. The problem with the Too Much Light opener is that thirty, forty percent of the audience has been there before, but the other sixty or seventy percent is completely clueless. So you have two challenges: one is to convey the necessary information so that people who’ve never been there before understand... maybe not completely, but a good enough understanding of what their role is, and also to do it in a new way every night so that the thirty percent of the audience who’s seen it before is not going to see you saying the same thing you said before. And also to try to do that in a economical fashion.


INTRO TO THE BEAST - A HARD CONVERSATION BUT NECESSARY

JP: I was surprised to find out that Too Much Light had gone to the HBO Comedy Festival in Aspen Colorado. I have come to know this show as the theater experience purely made for theater, and that it would be hard to grow it into something larger, perhaps for TV, the Movies, or large capacity stadiums. But there must have been an inkling of stardom that ran through those days of "No one can stop us."



SH: [The HBO Comedy Festival] was my first exposure to the beast, to the entertainment beast. We’re doing this little show, at that time it was a dollar plus the roll of a die. We’re an under $10 show, and suddenly we’re thrust into the corporate arena, and even though they’re supposed to be offbeat, still it’s HBO that’s there. This is a lot of people’s meal tickets. People there who were hungry and desperate to get in on it or were on their way out. Remember Short Attention Span Theater, on MTV, Mark Maron? His show had just been canceled, so he was one of the guys who had sort of lucked into the meal ticket, and now was on the outside and hoping to get back in. Bill Maher was there, and also: Chris Rock, Cedric the Entertainer, Bernie Mac, Mr. Show, Tenacious D, and Kathy Griffin. All these people who were fightin’ to get on the air... all talented people. I just never had been around that sort of scene, and it was very interesting because there was a meeting where we decided our set (TML) before we went out, and there was a meeting where someone said “I don’t feel I’m represented enough in this show, and I want to put one of my solo pieces in. It doesn’t show me enough, that’s what I feel..” We never had that really happen before. We were a collective, right? So we had to say, "Okay." We didn’t have to but that’s what we said. "If you feel strongly about this, then let’s take out one of the pieces and put one of yours in." I don’t know if that made any difference, in their career or not. It was just that first look of... whoa, we’re not... just all friends having a good time together. There’s a career arc here. Even through the Tuesday selection process sometimes someone says, I don’t feel my voice is represented in this show, right, and that’s a valid thing to say. "Get it in here." But this, it was clearly because of the commercial pressure. "There may be someone in this audience who’s looking for someone like me and I want to show them my best me." That had never happened before. We all write for the show. The show is supposed to reflect the whole, and if there’s not enough of my written work in the show, it was a valid way to get a piece in the show to say, I have one piece in here now. I know this is not the strongest piece that came up this week but it’s mine, and I would like it to go in the show. And you can say yeah, let’s put it in. ‘Cause this show’s supposed to be a variety of ideas.

JP: No matter how much we might want it, the show is not a vehicle to stardom. Of course you can get recognition and it opens opportunities that you have to work HARD for, but the show works best once the performers put their effort into the collective. I sometimes feel much of the stress and hard feelings that can occur would not exist to the extent that they often do if our own egos and need for the spotlight didn't get in the way. There is plenty to learn in the show that you CAN use to help in a career.

SH: The important thing is it teaches you to try to find your voice, to try to find out, to experiment with who you are as a writer. You try on different skins very quickly, and, and the penalty for failure is negligible. Right, ‘cause if it’s not any good it either won’t get in the show, or if people say let’s give this a shot, put it up, then the worst thing is that people don’t like it. And it’s done.


THE MAGNIFICENT HERMES RAISES A FAMILY

SH: When I graduated from theater school in ’89, the theater school sent us to New York City to audition. A week before that I auditioned for a company called Looking Glass Theatre, they were just a small theater company then. They were doing Of One Blood. I got a callback from them. They were a local company just like any other storefront theater at the time. We were doing this thing called TLC, Theater Link Chicago, where everybody from this graduating class was gonna go out to New York City. "We’re gonna do our monologues, man, in New York City! We’re gonna be in front of the agents and stuff!" So I blew off the local guys and went with DePaul Theatre School out to New York. I did my audition bit, and out of the group of around forty students, there were about two or three of us that didn’t get a single callback, and I was one of those. I was devastated. So I didn't get a callback I went out to Long Island and visited some friends of mine. They had just had their first kid, one of the first people I knew that had a baby. And so I saw them hanging out, living their lives, being them, with their baby, and that planted that seed. At some point I knew I wanted to have kids, and then I hung out with another friend who was my age, and she’d had her first son, and I was able to see, "Oh yeah, I think I could do this." Wendy and I decided, we’re gonna have kids no matter what. "Let’s just do it, and, you know, if it means I have to give up theater to be a good parent, then I will." And eventually that’s what it had to be. I couldn’t juggle them both. I couldn’t, I couldn’t do those two things.

SCOTT'S LAST TOO MUCH LIGHT PLAY

The last TML play I performed on the Neo-Futurist stage was This Play Can Only Be Performed On a Sunday. I had to amend it later to a Sunday Evening, because somebody called it on Saturday night after midnight. [both laugh]. Unless you want me to go home and wake up my daughter [JP laughs], this show ain’t gonna happen. I talked about why I was leaving the show, how much great fun I had, and then I would bring Nina out. So at eleven months old she had her first performance. I’d bring her out on stage and I’d play with her, show the audience. "This is why I’m leaving. I can’t do both. I can’t, I can’t stay up ‘til three in the morning, and then be woken up at six a.m. I can’t do it." ... Yeah. So that’s why I left it.

[I tried to write a sentence here about the flood of emotions that last paragraph made me feel, but no words could express the complexity of how I felt about his choices and commitment, except this very reaction you are reading right now.]



JP: But you've still been writing. You still do the occasional solo show.

SH: Yeah, It’s difficult. When I’ve gotten older, it’s harder to write, harder to focus. My kids still... you saw, I got texted while we were having this interview about ‘where’s the firewire cable?’ [JP laughs] so that she could transfer her video onto her Mac. Um. It’s difficult. All that time away is time away from my kids. Nina will be fourteen at the end of this month. So in four years she’s gone. And she’s one of those... there’s different kinds of kids, some kids want to stay home, she’s not that, she wants to leave now. [JP laughs] I know I’m not going to see much of her after she leaves. Any time I spend away from her is sad to me. On the other hand, I still have this great desire to do stuff. I have been able to do some performing, but I was kind of in a funk after leaving Too Much Light. I wrote but I couldn’t get anything together. I hadn’t written anything before Too Much Light, and I didn’t write anything after for a long time that I was able to complete because I didn’t have that deadline, that real deadline. So finally, what happened in 2001, the company I was working for was bought out by GE, and I got a six-month severance package. Full salary. So that was sweet. John Hildreth did an adaptation of Cat's Cradle, so I tried out for that and did Cat’s Cradle at Lifeline Theatre and Phil was in it as well. And then I tried out for Jeopardy, and made it. I kept a journal of my experiences of going on Jeopardy, ‘cause I’m a big game show fan and loved Jeopardy as a kid. So I go on Jeopardy and I [laughs a little], I don’t come in first on Jeopardy, and it’s devastating to me again. Then a while after that Dave Awl contacts me, he’s doing the Partly Dave Show, and he wanted me to do something. And so again, I have a deadline, right, so I have to do something for each show. It was supposed to be a ten minute piece. I was a poor judge of timing. I thought I had ten minutes, and I had twenty-five pages, so it’s like twenty-five minutes worth of material. People were just dying, they were dying [Dying from laughter, of course.] It was a big hit. So then I turned it into an hour and fifteen minute performance and did it at Live Bait. Now I’m working on a variation of Little Red Riding Hood, called “Cry Wolf”. And that’s just a real pisser, I’m having trouble getting an ending on it. It’s, you know, again, there’s no deadline, right?

[I am happy to say that Scott had a stage reading of this script recently at the Neo-Futurarium, and from what I heard, it received quite a bit of praise. So keep your eye out for it.]

Scott Hermes - Part One

Interview between John Pierson and Scott Hermes, transcribed by Sid Branca.

I met Scott downtown in the loop, after his long day of work before he had to go home to his family far out in the suburb of Arlington Heights. We had Thai food in a pretty fancy place. I asked the Maitre d' to sit us under one of the shell-shaped alcoves they had there because I thought it would help with the acoustics of the digital recording over the din of soft jazz and a few clinking glasses. The Maitre d' looked at me as if I were joking. He asked if I had a reservation to sit there. No one was in the restaurant at the time, only at the bar. So I said so, "no one is here.", he begrudgingly let us sit in the area I requested. Actually I had no idea if the sound would be better but I had put the wheels in motion, and I feared looking like a buffoon in front of Mr. Hermes. Scott is the recipient of a multitude of highest regards from colleagues of mine whom I hold in the highest regard. In my mind Scott's regard was so tall it had to loom impatiently over the roof of the restaurant waiting for us to finish. We order our food, and while we wait I place the digital recorder in between us, right next to a planter full of flowers, which I will eventually move because it blocks my view of Scott's face. I let him know that he can eat and talk, if he so desires. So Scott immediately puts a breadstick in his mouth, crouches over the table, and crunches into the microphone.

SH: Yeah get ‘em up close, get the sound effects in there.

[Crunching sounds and my laughter slightly distort the recording.]

JP: So right out of the gate, where born? Where raised?

SH: Uh, I grew up in In Princetown, a half-hour drive outside of Schenectady, New York, which is a town in Schenectady County, like a township here. There was something like one business in Princetown, which was a bar, that was it in my little area. So if we were going to go pick up, let's say, milk, it would be a half-hour drive.

JP: Wow.

SH: one way

JP: That is pretty small

SH: When I grew up we could only see our neighbor’s house in the winter. Once the leaves were off the trees we could see our neighbors. So it was a very rural, I spent a lot of my time out in the woods as a kid.

JP: What brought your parents to that part of the country?

SH: My mom and dad grew up in Buffalo, New York, and my mom got pregnant with my oldest brother, so they both dropped out of University of Buffalo. My dad was in sales. He found this deal basically up in the middle of nowhere. So they moved us all out there. There was four of us, four kids, It was pretty weird at first, I think because he was the only one out there who didn’t farm for a living, right, it’s all these farmers. We were the only non-farmers out there for a while, and then more and more people started moving out who weren’t farmers but they were definitely like factory workers. It was very blue collar.

JP: Did you have many friendships growing up in such a small town?

SH: There was four of us, so at first that was our constant. We were all two years apart, so, you know, my older brother was pretty much my constant playmate for a long time. Once I was in school, then a couple close friends, but you’re so far away from people it’s hard to get together. There were some other kids who lived down the street, so we played with them ‘cause we had to ‘cause there was no one else really, around to play with. It'd be half a mile to your friend’s house basically, it wasn’t that big a deal.
I would consider myself mainly a loner as a kid. I spent a lot of time by myself. I was the youngest of four, so I was always hanging out with people who were much older than I was. My oldest brother is six years older than I am, so I’d be hanging out with his friends.

JP: Being a loner and having your brother's friends as friends, what effect did this have on how you interacted or even how it may have lead towards being a performer?

SH: My nickname was Alien ‘cause I would just say weird things. and so I quickly discovered that if you say weird things people laugh. That was one of the earliest discoveries. I would just say stuff just to see what people’s reactions were.
One of my earliest memories is at the dinner table. There was four kids, my mom, my dad, so everyone’s busy telling stories and cracking each other up. So the only way to get my father’s attention or to get the table’s attention was to be funny, to be funnier than everybody else. So that was the first cutting ground where you had to get attention. So that was, that was how we did it.

JP: Do you remember any of the dinner table antics?

SH: [laughing] We really just tortured my sister. Often we would try to make her snort milk up through her nose. We did it with great consistency. One time she got so mad she flung pudding at us, and it hit the wall.

JP: It sounds like your humor had tangible goals from the very beginning.

SH: Early on you could easily sit there and not say anything the whole meal and be lost in thought and no one would notice. No one ever asked you how was your day? They sort of expected that you were gonna get in there and get attention paid to you.

JP: Are there any actors or artists in your direct family?

SH: My grandfather on my father’s side was a painter and a wildlife photographer. He started off as a commercial artist, and then the family got a camera when my dad was little. My grandmother didn’t want to use it so my grandfather started taking pictures. He quickly became more interested in animals instead of people. He would make these short films without audio, and then he would take them around the country as part of the Audubon Society and he'd narrate them as they were being presented. He did that for many years. He retired from that ‘cause the cost of film was too expensive. He then took painting back up again and made a bunch of paintings before he died.

JP: Did you get to watch him do any of these lectures?

SH: We’d visit him down in Florida and he would do them for us there. But one of the funnier things was how he would get us to write letters to him. He started writing a science fiction story that featured the four kids. Every time we’d write him a letter, he would write a segment of the story back to us. We would get these letters, we’d all be very excited, or at least I was, I was the youngest. I remember it very vividly. We’d read them aloud after dinner to see what’s happening next. Basically he was writing a serial. The setup was that my older brother had a job at a space port, and he was giving us a tour when, you know, the doomsday signal goes off, right? It’s supposed to be that all these spaceships are for various politicians so they can flee the planet in case of a nuclear Armageddon. We were in one of the congressman’s spaceships when the Armageddon signal went off. So we just fled the planet. "Sayonara." [I laughed right here. And I am relaying this fact now to you, the reading audience, because this seemed to be one of those perfect childhood stories I sometimes feel can only be made up but is true in the life of Scott Hermes. It quite frankly made me laugh not only because it made me giddy, it made me nostalgic, and perhaps even envious. Which I rarely allow myself to acknowledge. It is safe to say it made me feel many things.] So the four of us left, and so we’re in suspended animation, and we wake up and some alarm’s going off, we’re going to the wrong place!. So we crash-land on some planet. It’s a whole brand new planet for us to discover and we have all these adventures. One of the first things that we meet are these carrot people. He would also do paintings to go along with the stories, it’s one of my favorite paintings that I still actually have in my bedroom, It’s like a Dr. Seuss type thing with these brightly colored carrot people sort of dancing around. It's based on the painting The Rite of Spring. There’s some famous painting where there are maidens sort of dancing around in a circle. It’s based on that but these are alien carrot people instead. [laughing]
My oldest brother was becoming disillusioned with all that kid stuff so he stopped writing my grandfather. This upset my grandfather so he killed him and knocked him off the story line.

[both laughing]

SH: I think I was in third grade. But yeah, all the four kids are characters in the story. And then, you know we start reading it and my oldest brother dies. I start crying uncontrollably, I’m weeping. My dad had to get on the phone, talk to his father and have my older brother miraculously come back to life. So the story is adjusted and it turns out he was just in suspended animation. [JP laughing] The plants can induce paralysis, he was really fine. And so these other weird aliens on the planet came and did this ceremony that brought him back to life. It was kind of like a spider stunning its prey, and he was about to be eaten and die but he looked dead, and so the coma.

JP: I think you were very lucky to have something like that in your life. That kind of experience growing up had to have aided your very own creativity.

SH: My older sister, my sister, my only sister, is very dramatic and she would put on shows. Actually, [laughing] I forgot about this, we shot the best movie ever when I was a kid, that my brother directed. We just found it; it's on super 8 at my Mom's home. I had the great fun of showing it to my wife and my two daughters. We watched it two or three times, and every time we’re going through it I’m pointing out more and more fantastic little details. One of the guys did a great acting job in there I was really shocked. It was my childhood friend Bobby Schleimann. He was really extraordinary. He did a really great death scene, he just died, you know, when he was dead his body was completely limp. You really couldn’t tell he was alive at all, it was fantastic acting. [This weekend I just had an interview with Bill Coleus, one of the original NYC cast. He had mannerisms similar to ones I had seen in Scott and Greg K. I asked him if he was inspired by them, and he says that Greg taught him a game where one person grabs something from the air and meddles with it until it becomes a killing device and then he kills, and then the killed must discover another killing device. Death and it's expression seems to be an intriguing tool for these boys of infinite talent and inspiration.] It was a monster movie. And I was the monster. My brother Dirk shot it. It was his idea, his script. We had some family friends, the Schliemanns. My brother Dirk had a friend John and I had a friend Bobby and my sister Chandra had a friend Terry. So we all had three friends in this same family. So they all came over and then just one day we shot a movie. Yeah, it was a lot of fun.

Are there any other art or theater incidences that you can think of that may have influenced the choices you have made in your life?

SH: My father’s mom and dad met doing a play. My grandfather tried out for the play just to meet my grandmother ‘cause he knew she was gonna be in it. My mom and dad met doing a play. My wife and I met at theater school, and my sister and her husband, they met when she was doing a community theater production of Oliver. [Many men Neo-Futurists have said in these interviews that they took up acting to meet women, The Hermes clan seems to have had a string of successes.]
My mom was always very theatrical minded but also she had come from a very long line of Scots, right, Scottish people, who are frugal, very thrifty, very, uh, pragmatic. So what was drilled into my head was, you’ve gotta make money. No matter what you do. And people in their generation had lived through, you know, (and then he says in a deep voice) the Great Depression. So they had suffered greatly through it, had eaten... raised their own chickens and killed them (Scott viciously stabs his pad Thai with a chopstick.). So. [pause] Even though my grandfather was able to make his living, artistically, that was sort of held up as the exception not the rule. My grandmother always did go off on these tangents about the financial opportunities they’d missed, and I don’t know, for whatever reason, it stuck with me. So, when I was looking around to go to college, I didn’t really look to do a straight theatre degree. My mom had convinced me that... [Scott doesn't imitate his mom but his tone changes a bit, one could say with a more calming yet pedantic tone.] "You can get a job and you can, you know, if you wanna act you can act. Nothing’s ever going to stop you from acting, right? If you want to actually act, you need to find something to make a living, you don’t want to starve to death." That was driven into my skull at an early age.

JP: So they weren't so strict as to boot you out if you pursued creativity.

[I am putting on a slight comic tone here, but I do have friends where this was actually the case, and even one who attended the very same school that Scott eventually attends (UOC) My friend Tammi Blustein, who is now in LA writing and performing for many sketch shows, was told by her parents that if she didn't commit her time in school fully to Mathematics they would "disown her." They specifically did NOT want her to take any theater classes or even step on a stage. She shared this with me. Moments after we performed an improv scene at Jimmy's Woodlawn tap she broke down crying and then told me about her present dilemma. She chose to pursue acting, and hopefully her parents chose to keep her. I haven't seen her in awhile. So like I said I knew this wasn't the case with Scott, but also I knew the influence these words could have no matter how caring they are said.]

JP: Well with such dramatic undertaking on the big 8mm screen in your childhood career, you must have ventured into some kind of theater in high school.

SH: In ninth grade the very first thing I had done was a musical, it was The Boyfriend. It was in the summer, they used to do musicals in the summer, and I just did it because I had been in choir and one of my friends was doing it, so I said okay, I’ll do that. So I tried out, I didn’t get any speaking parts. I performed in the chorus and became a stagehand. But at one part I did have a featured dance number just because I was the smallest boy. They paired me opposite the tallest girl in the chorus to do a dance number .

JP: [laughing] For comic effect?

SH: Oh yeah!

[laughter]

SH: My hair was spray-dyed black too, it was very good!

[The excitement Scott imbues this last description of himself with reminded me of a description a future friend would say of him. Phil Lortie: "First thing to know about Scott was that he was the skinniest dude I had ever met. He was more like a chipmunk than a human being. But, it being the 80s, he worked that rail-thin profile to the hilt by adopting a punk aesthetic. Old pictures of him will show periods of experimentation with mohawks, piercings, and really, really cool clothes. A bit of a gym shoe aficionado too, as I recall. He had it going on is what I'm trying to say."] - (I planned on putting more of Phi Lortie's comments in here, but I had to save them for the outtakes.)

SH: I had a ball, I had a blast, a lot of fun. So then I just did a lot of plays during high school, and spending more and more time in there, spending more and more time hanging out with people, it was good.
By the time I was in my senior year I was getting more leads, major parts. I’d always get the funny, the funny accent, the funny character stuff. I had a good friend, Len Clayton, who was from Canada and had traveled around a bit, his family was transferred off to Venezuela, his dad’s an engineer, and then he came back. He exposed me to some of the external influences that formed my comedy ideas. His dad is English and so he introduced me to all those English comics, like, the Goodies, Monty Python and The Two Ronnies.

[In the Chicago suburbs I was lucky enough to have been influenced by all these same shows thanks to the late night broadcasting of channel 11, and the nonchalance of my mother's bedtime policy. Other shows we both enjoyed were: Not The Nine O Clock News, Dave Allen at Large, and of course Benny Hill. Channel 11 also had the tendency to leave in the "naughty bits."]


SH: On Wikipedia there was a list of unusual deaths, and so I was sharing it with my kids. My daughter was amazed that people had died of uncontrollable laughter. Someone died of uncontrollable laughter after watching a Goodies episode. [both laugh] It’s pretty amazing.


JP: Do you think you had a vision of yourself as a sketch performer, a character actor or a leading man.

SH: I never saw myself as a leading man. I always saw myself as a character actor. For instance, in our senior talent show, me and my friends did, two Monty Python skits and were basically continually booed through the entire beginning to end. [JP laughing] We even rigged up our own sixteen ton weight. I was the one who it got dropped over, but there was a screw that was coming through the piece of wood that was like the brace and it came down and it cracked me. It hit me perfectly, whack!, right in the back of my head, blood was coming out. Other than that we were just sort of booed continually through the entire rendition of our two sketches. [pause] We did some Shakespeare too. Again me and one of my friends, Vince, we went and did an audition for a production of Taming of the Shrew. That’s a great way to grow up fast is to be like in the 1970s be a sixteen or seventeen year-old hanging out with a bunch of community theater actors.

JP: That’s what happened to me, too. Yeah, we were all "experimenting." Huffing this weak suburban drug called Rush that basically just gave you a short term dizzy spell and a long term headache and Ya' know, running around forest preserves nude in the middle of the night [both laugh]

SH: Yeah, you sort of look back on it now and go “what the hell happened?” My wife Wendy and I try to explain to our kids, what things we did, it was the 70s, you know? Things happened like this all the time and nobody thought anything about it. [JP laughs.] So my friend Vince, we were sixteen or seventeen, and sort of having a grab at some twenty-one year-old actress there, yeah just hangin’ out, smoking dope and drinking and partying with us, and no one thought anything about that. [pause]
I was looking for something to do after I’d had so much fun doing the Shakespeare. My mom had been doing a lot of modern dance her whole life, and as a kid I used to watch these, she used to do a children’s modern dance where she was the rabbit from Winnie the Pooh. I would hang out at her rehearsals, ‘cause you know she had to do something with me. I was always very much into dance and movement. So someone had started this experimental movement dance theater improv thing, that was based on Sylvia Plath. And while I was dong that someone told me what a great city Chicago was. Then I got this catalog. I mentioned it to one of my teachers. I had a really good teacher in 11th and 12th grade, he was a former college professor, Fred Von Daacke, who had taught in Louisiana. One of his students later became like the Ku Klux Klan Wizard, like the Grand Wizard of the KKK. So now he was trying to get kids earlier on, to try and mold their minds when they still had a chance, ‘cause by the time they got to college he saw it was pretty much formed. So he was very much challenging our beliefs all the time and he really taught me how to write. He’s the one who said the University of Chicago’s a great school and you should go there.

[When I was sitting with Scott this was very clear, but I just want to make sure the reader realizes that Fred decided to teach younger kids because he wanted to help inspire critical thinking to help avoid minds being corrupted by prejudice and ignorance. That's my take on it.]

JP: Was UOC your one and only choice? Did you have other options in mind?

SH: [laughing] No. I mean, it’s ridiculous. I don’t know what you were like, I was seventeen and I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I mean now my daughter’s getting ready to go to Prospect High School, and so they’re asking her what kind of career path do you think you want? She’s like, ‘I have no idea.’ [laughs.] ‘I’m thirteen!’, you know?

JP: I imagine some guidance counseling was going on in my school, but my family life was going through so much conflict: Father left, my older brothers were all causing trouble, arrested and drug trafficking, so my mind was elsewhere and my mother was too busy to get involved. I saw other people preparing for college and I didn’t do any of that. I worked for a year and then I helped start my band (Screeching Weasel) which allowed me to tour the country and eventually the world. So who can blame me?

SH: Beats the hell of out college.

JP: But later, on my own initiative, I decided I wanted to go to school to learn more so I went to Columbia College.

SH: I applied to MIT, University of Chicago, and University of Miami. Those were my three schools.

JP: Why Miami?

SH: I was interested in science, and my family’s always been very nature-oriented, So I figured marine biology, sun, sand. I got into the University of Miami with a full ride scholarship. I got turned down by MIT. One of my classmates got in to MIT, Lionel Sleeper.

JP: Lionel Sleeper? [I found this name very funny. It reminded me of my English teacher Lyon Trainer.]

SH: [laughing] so he deserved it man, he was much smarter, a far more hard-working student. I was a complete slacker as a student, even though I finished fourth in my class, it all just came to me, I never had to work at it and he worked really hard, he deserved everything he got.
I got a partial scholarship for University of Chicago which made it possible for me to go there. It was also the furthest away that my parents would pay for me to go visit. I wanted to get the hell out of Schenectady. It’s a physically very beautiful place, but there’s a lot of racism and close-mindedness growing up. I wasn’t really aware of it at first, but as I started getting older and I would go to Albany [A much larger city] I would interact with people different than me. In this dance-theater troupe I was also interacting with more diversity, a couple African Americans, different people. I began saying to myself, ""Well, all these things I’ve been hearing my life just aren’t true." And just knowing, realizing, that this is not the way I wanna be, and I don’t want to be around this close-mindedness. So one of my goals was to get as far away as I could from Schenectady.
So I visit Chicago and I love it. It’s hard to imagine this now. I was seventeen and my parents just sent me out, they put me on a train. "See ya!" [laughs] I checked out the city and the school, liked it. I got ripped off on a bad drug deal. I tried to buy dope from somebody in the Palmer house, they went to go get change, [JP laughing] and they never came back.

JP: You learned some lessons?

SH: Yeah. When I started at UOC I was a math major. I always loved math. And then I started doing shows even though University of Chicago didn’t have a theater department at the time,

JP: Yes, that’s what I always think is so interesting about that school, it’s brought out so many amazing performers and yet it didn't have a program for theater. It really is interesting, the culture that that college manifested, it just had it in it, whether the students had a theater department or not, it just seemed more organic, like the whole approach to University of Chicago seems to lend itself to creativity in any field. Does that make sense?



SH: Yeah, definitely, there was more of a DIY aesthetic there. "It doesn’t matter what you say we can do, here’s what we’re gonna do." Right? there’s always been that sort of attitude there. There’s a very rigorous academic agenda, but also a thriving underground, even if we’re having a good time it’s got to be intellectually challenging. So the school attracts a lot of people like myself who were good in school and smart, but also had this artistic side they wanted to explore but didn't want to go to a school just for the Arts.

JP: Were you aware of this complexity before going to UOC?

SH: I knew that there was no acting program, but that there was an acting club, University Theater. So the guy who ran University Theater when I got there was Steve Schroer. Steve is a lot like Greg Allen in a way, a very strong sort of vision of what he thinks is good art and what is not good art, but he had bad people skills. At some point he started an improv club. Improv at the time was predominantly coming from Second City. Whatever happened in today’s news we’re gonna mock that or, it’s making fun of the latest thing that’s going on TV. So Steve's idea, which was great, and certainly this carried through in my writing, is that we weren’t allowed to mention any references, any contemporary references whatsoever.

[I laughed here. But it wasn't in disbelief, it was a glorious recognition of my own beliefs, a belief that one tries to appeal more to the relative and the universals, dealing more with getting to the roots of things, creating timeless situations and character studies.]

SH: You can’t make fun of slogans, you can’t do a Mayor Daley impersonation. He was exploring improv but also using it as a tool for generating writing. We did a combination of written skits at first, mainly he did all the skits and we did all the segued improvisation in between.


JP: Did that lend you more to focusing on relationships and character?

SH: Well... [pause] Yeah number one he went back to the roots of improv which is always about what is the other person doing? How can you help the other person? It forced you to generate imaginary worlds, parallel universes.
In Aftertaste, the musical that Cardiff Giant ended up improvising, years later, it still had the Steve Shroer influence on us. Our cola was called Krispie Kola. You just make up parallels. There's no classical references, but the idea was to write timeless stuff, or to perform in a way that whatever you did it wouldn’t just be getting name recognition laughs which he felt was the cheapest laugh.

JP: This group lead by Steve influenced you greatly. This is where you met many of the people with which, for years, you would continue to create great theater.

SH: I met Mark Holman, and John Hildreth, and Phil Lortie. [And later Greg Kotis] Avant Garfield was our first thing we performed at Jimmy’s Woodlawn Tap, which was where the Compass Players also performed.

JP: Yeah, I performed there with a group called Sheila, which was a direct descendant of Avant Garfielde.

SH: Yup. So we would open up with a variety act, this would bring people in, and then we would perform. We’d do a combination of games and skits and after a while we stopped doing skits and just did games. Then later on we took a class with Del Close. He came down and taught us the herald. We also got to meet David Shepard.
The Jimmy's stage was a six feet deep platform. We would put curtains across the back window. Jimmy’s is a classic Chicago tavern, where it’s got a wooden railing that goes up halfway across the window where you can look down on the street, people can see in. They took three basic bars and jammed them together so there’s three separate rooms. You start in the front, you go through the main bar, there’s a middle room, and then finally there’s a back bar where we were. So we could be isolated from all the other places. We were stuck at the way at the end of the bar. We would be on one end on a slightly raised platform. We built railings, took down the existing railings and made railings that were detachable. We had hinge-pins we’d pull off and have to stack that so we could then have the complete stage. There was an exit door on the left where people could walk out. Above it was an area to store our props. We had a ton of props, a ton of hats and wigs. We would fasten some clip lights, announce to people we were starting the show, so people who didn’t want to be bothered would leave. We’d perform for free and then afterward just pass the hat.

JP: That space was a great lesson to me. You had to get up and go, ‘cause these people were just here drinkin’ and to get them to listen you had to have an abundance of energy right out of the gate. For me it was a nurturing of the big, I had a hard time trying to do anything smaller there.

SH: I think that initially we had to be big and funny and fast

JP: What I'm pushing towards, what I experienced there perhaps through oral history and perhaps through osmosis, was a style that incorporates large, quick, yet detailed gestures. I see this style in common with you, Greg K and Phil. Do you think this style was nurtured at Jimmy's?

SH: Yeah... I think what happened is that we, as a group, as an organism developed an idiom, developed a way of working together, sort of signals that we would give one another. Doing that show was one of the best times of my life, without a doubt. We’d rehearse twice a week and then we would perform once, and then later we were working on long-form shows. We spent a lot of time together honing our craft. After a while it became so seamless and when it flew it was just fantastic and crazy. We didn’t necessarily have to be big and we could do quiet and smaller stuff but I think it was just that we liked to be big, loud and fast. Insane characters. We would always want to keep cranking it up ‘til you had to kill someone, that was the only logical ending [JP laughs] to any scene. We had all kinds of murdering props, a huge duct tape hammer that we would use that was left over from another show we did.


JP: When did Greg Kotis come into the picture there?

SH: Sheldon Patinkin came in and helped start the Off-Off Campus, Greg K and Bob Fischer were in that. So after that was done, Steve asked them if they wanted to join us. Steve had worked with them as well, he was part of the whole UT, University Theatre. Those guys were just great. The first year of Avant Garfielde was me, Mark [Holman], John Hildreth, Phil Lortie and Dawn Brenann, who’s also a really great artist, just beautiful, huge, insane paintings. Then Bob Fischer and Greg joined and then even later on Greg Reynolds joined us. And after awhile I went to theatre school at Depaul. We’d actually graduated and still did the show for a year. Then, basically, I wanted to learn how to act. Between my junior and senior year I went off to New York and did Strasburg Theatre Institute through NYU for the summer. I got a lot of positive feedback from the instructors there. I was very encouraged by that, so when I came back I decided I wanted to do more acting. I was struggling along, going out and auditioning and I got one role at Court, I was like second night watchman in Much Ado About Nothing. It was fantastic and a lot of fun, but I decided I wanted to learn more about the craft of acting and so I applied to Northwestern and DePaul, and I got into both. Northwestern’s incredibly expensive, so I went to DePaul theatre school instead. That was a great experience.

JP: And that is where you met Wendy Goeldner and Phil Ridarelli, one of the best actors I know. Phil told me that DePaul didn't quite know what to do with him and it seems you may have had a similar experience since the three of you ended up in the same Sketch comedy show. Nobody knew what to do with you.

SH: Yeah, exactly. Nobody... I don’t know who let me into that school. [JP laughs] I have a feeling it was this guy Rick Murphy, ‘cause he was at my audition. So for whatever reason I got in. They saw something. I wasn’t classically trained, I didn’t really fit in. So what we did was a thing called Dream Story. That’s where I got to work with Phil and with Wendy, the second show I did with my, at that time girlfriend, now wife, then Wendy Goeldner now Wendy Hermes. I met her in What the Butler Saw. We had a great time doing that, and then we got to do Dream Story together. This speech teacher, Bill Burnett, wanted to explore storytelling and dreams. It was free-form. We would basically do whatever we wanted to any given night.

JP: Were you still working with the gang in Hyde Park at this time?

SH: Nope. I would sometimes come down and join the improv set. At that point they were trying to crack into the North Side and they were doing, I think that’s where Phil also got involved with them, Roxy’s on Fullerton. They were doing an improv show there for a while and I would see them there. I had a big falling out with Steve [Schroer], the director, ‘cause I criticized his skits. They did a sketch show at Straw Dog and it was universally panned and ripped. I saw it during my first year of theater school and I’m liking all these theater school ideas jammed in my head. So unfortunately I shared them with Steve. He asked ‘What’d you think of the show?’ I told him honestly what I thought, and so the next day he called me up at home and was like, "I can’t believe you said those things to me last night, I never want to talk to you again, you can’t work for this group again, you’re never gonna make it in this business." So I didn’t talk to him again for two or three years. [pause.] Then inside of Cardiff Giant there was a revolt, they kicked Steve out, they took over the group themselves. So I worked with those guys again. And eventually I saw Steve later and he was apologetic about his behavior.


JP: When did this group become known as Cardiff Giant?

SH: So Avant Garfield became Cardiff Giant when they started performing on the North Side and they did their first revue. It was basically Steve’s idea. It’s a P.T. Barnum story, a P.T. Barnum scam. A farmer in upstate New York, Cardiff, comes and says "I found this petrified body of a giant." And P.T. Barnum goes and sees it, immediately recognizes that it’s fake. But all these crowds are showing up to see this giant that once walked the earth. And so Barnum makes his own. The guy with the original Cardiff Giant sues him, and P.T. Barnum says "You can’t sue me, it’s a fake, a total fake, it’s a fake of a fake." So Steve liked that idea of acting as being a fake of a fake. People are pretending to be something that they’re not, we’re pretending to be people that we’re not. The idea that there’s something... implicitly scamming about performing.
The last year of my MFA at DePaul, that’s when Cardiff Giant did LBJFKKK which was their first show by themselves, improvising without Steve directing, fully improvised rehearsals turned into a scripted play, it was a huge hit for them.

JP: You weren’t involved with that?

SH: Nope. It was really hilarious because I knew they were going to open it, so I was talking to some of my theatre school friends, "I’m going to go see some friends of mine tonight, does anyone want to come along?" They’re like, "Oh yeah what is it?" "Oh, it’s this group called Cardiff Giant, doing this show called LBJFKKK." "Oh yeah! Yeah, yeah! yeah!" [Scott imitates a few different emphatic excited voices, as if cheering. And then referencing himself he says in a calm, deadpan voice,] "Oh, okay." [both laugh] The Reader had just published a great review of the show by a critic who just never liked anything, EVER, always ripped everybody a new asshole. And he just went on for paragraph after paragraph expounding about how brilliant Cardiff Giants' show was, how he’d blown snot on the back of the people in front of him he was laughing so hard. So I went to see it and it was brilliant. They blew me away, I was so happy for them.
When I graduated I started working with them again, and so we did Love Me, Rancho Obscuro, All Eight Die, and then we improvised our first musical, Aftertaste, and then I directed Dreamy, which did incredibly badly. It was the worst show, in terms of attendance, that we ever did.

JP: You guys were a transient company, you didn't have your own space?

SH: Yeah we were just renting spaces. We started off with a bunch of shows at Mary Archie Theater, then Straw Dog, and then we got our own space, which later became Factory’s space up near Loyola

[What is odd is that my group Hope And Nonthings and my friends' groups; David Cromer's Big Game and Nick Digilios' Factory Theater were all using these exact same spaces and to my recollection I never overlapped or even heard of Cardiff Giant. So much was going on at that time in storefront theater. In retrospect, not knowing about them was a serious loss to me.]

JP: The first people in that Loyola space was David Kromer and Anna Schapiro with Big Game.

JP: There are so many crossovers that existed in the world of small theater in Chicago. [Our minds were being blown at the moment, that might also have to do with the four glasses of wine we just drank.]

SH: Yup, it’s a small scene.

JP: Molly Brennan was a part of Factory and then hooked up with Adrian Danzig who was a neo-futurist, and Molly's company she helped start Barrel Of Monkees have a long running show still play at the Neo-Futurarium. And my friend Steve Walker has worked with almost all these companies, and with you!

SH: Wow. I was talking to John Hildreth the other day, John went on and did a lot of work with Second City and the northwest SC company and directed a bunch of stuff, worked with Second City a lot. He’s teaching at Columbia now too he also came back and directed me when I did my Jeopardy solo play. At some point during that run we all got to start reminiscing about the old days. And he says something like, "You know, it’s just different now because... we had no thought other than putting up our current show." We would improvise for six months, that’s all we would do, five days a week, Monday through Thursday night and then Saturday and Sunday and then the director would tape it, and the director would go home and transcribe what we had rehearsed, and come back in, and then at some point we would start putting it together. We’d find good stuff then the director would start saying okay, go this direction, improvise this way, improvise that way. We’d start putting the skeleton of the plot together, but basically for six months all we’d ever do was just work on the play. But now, at least according to John, it’s very hard to get that kind of commitment out of people. ‘Cause everyone’s doing this thing as a way to get showcased. So that they can have someone to come see them so that they can get to the next point in their career. In Cardiff Giant we had no other idea other than that we were gonna put on the best show we could put on. That really drove us.

JP: I sadly never got to see a Cardiff Giant so I would like to spend a bit more time with you looking at the history of Cardiff Giant shows.

SH: LBJFKKK was huge, Love Me did well, Rancho Obscuro and then All Eight Die. All Eight Die had a couple great moments in it... Greg and I had a great orphanage song and we had this one extended bit which always killed, which is the pudding people. So All Eight Die was basically, in the title, all the character’s are gonna die, but it’s basically about some village called Southtown, directly south of Northtown, and there were developments moving in and we’re getting run down. The pudding people are our central myth. [both laugh] It's a story that everybody knows but again this stuff that Steve [S] early on imbued us with, this idea that we can’t reference anything in the real world, we'd make up our own mythology all the time. So people don’t know what we’re talking about. But we do. ‘Cause we would spend months rehearsing and improvising. We would have all these scenes that would never make it into the show, but our characters knew that we did these things and our characters knew this about each other. So we had history that would never show up textually on stage, but would always show up in our relationships. Things that had happened through the process.
Then it was Mark Holman's turn to be director. He wanted to do a musical. We thought he was nuts. We had never done a musical before. So he brought in this great composer, Patrick Sinozich that he’d worked with elsewhere. We just started from scratch and every once in a while you’d have to bust out the rhyming dictionary, and Patrick sort of taught us how to fake songs, um, that like you’re trying to improvise-- you know, so we’d always improvise songs during the show and some of us were really good at it in our improv and some were not, but, like, like for me he, when, the great advice that he gave on like, trying to write a song, take an existing song, and then re-write the lyrics to it, ‘cause then you know you’ll always scan well, right, so... you can always write new music to it, right. So you can take “We’re Off to See the Wizard”, right, and you can, you can re--over, you know, “follow the yellow brick road” or “somewhere over the rainbow” and as long as you write lines that scan to that, you can put any music behind it, and it’ll still scan. It has an internal alignment. So you don’t have to worry about having uneven lines. That was my problem when I was writing and improvising song lyrics, they were all over the place, they didn’t scan. So Aftertaste was this huge hit. We actually opened it the night before I got married. So we had been trying, we thought we were going to do it in like three months, it took us six months to put it up. I thought my wedding was gonna be at the end of the run, and my wedding ended up being the day after we opened. I performed this thing, I got it up, did the first weekend, went off, had an understudy fill in. I got married, went out on my honeymoon for two weeks, came back and jumped right back in. The show kept selling out that little Factory Theatre space again and again and again, very popular. That’s when Phil came in, because he took over for John, ‘cause John had some other commitment. [pause] It was actually kind of sad, it was sort of the beginning of the end for us.[This was NOT because of Phil. Scott goes on to explain why things began to dissipate.] The show was so popular, I don’t know if you’ve run into this before, it’s where success dooms you. You start bringing in structure and People raising money and putting together a board. I think that tore us apart.

JP: After you had left the Neo-Futurists we had similar pains that tore us not completely apart, but it caused rips that I still haven't recovered from. We lost Diana Slickman, David Kodeski, Dave Awl, and Anita Loomis when we went from a more traditional collective to a board run non-profit.

[This didn't have to happen, as Diana Slickman and David Kodeski will talk about this in their upcoming interviews. Bringing on a board doesn't have to tear a company apart, and it took us years to get to the point where we have a pretty great board right now.]

END OF PART ONE:
PART TWO WILL BE UP IN ONE WEEK.

Comments and Questions

Hey folks! If you read these please become an official "follower" by signing up on the right there, or even more important to me, please leave comments in the comment sections. If you have specific questions for Neos or just a general question please leave those too. This project is important to me, and everyone involved is doing it purely of their love for the company's history and not for any monetary gain, so it helps to see comments to ensure people are actually reading and enjoying the work.

Coming up next: Scott Hermes & Heather Riordan.
I am flying out to NYC this weekend to get Ayun Halliday, Greg Kotis, Rob Neill, and Bill Coleus

thanks
the management.

Greg Allen

[Unintelligible man banter, Greg expresses concern that this will be verbatim.]

(My transcriber for this interview, Corey Craig, said that progress was going slow typing out the audio because Greg and I kept talking over each other. We made it hard because we were laughing all the time. The only response I could have to this response was to start laughing, because I knew it was true. Greg and I share similar fascinations with both the sketch comedy absurdness of Monty Python and the often highbrow, academically absurd performance art of DaDa, John Cage and Marcel Duchamp. We even share an appreciation of the melodic genius of the band Bad Company. Although many of our beliefs about friendships, morality, and objectivism are miles apart, we endlessly entertain each other and ourselves with our communal isolation, and at times, lonely appreciation of chance, the vulgar, the nonsensical and the meticulous. We share an awareness of the insecurities in ourselves as social beings, and this makes it hard for us to tell when we are being genuinely spontaneous and when we are looking into the future constructing the history of our identities and supporting the myths of ourselves. This tension makes for an interesting and well-respected friendship.
Many came to this company with an awareness of its popularity, and this immediately complicates a relationship with its creator. I had never seen Too Much Light before, and had only known Greg Allen from a meeting where the spokespersons for a hand full of Chicago theater companies got together in the early 90’s to discuss going to the Edinburgh Fringe festival as a unit. I found the words he spoke a bit self-righteous for someone I had never heard of. Today, I may still find these words puffed-up, but having been lucky enough to join the company and go to Edinburgh on our own and receive a special award at this prestigious event lessens my criticism of his boisterous appraisal of his company. [It should be noted that Greg has no recollection of this meeting.]
To be the creator of a show that purposely highlights the lives of the performers themselves, and to succeed beyond anyone’s expectations inherently creates a tension. What is more important the structure and concept of a show or the performers and writers themselves? The complication deepens when it is realized that there is no real answer when discussing Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind. All of this was on my mind when I interviewed Greg Allen. Yet, when it came down to it, these thoughts were too ethereal. All I really wanted to know was where he had come from and where was he now.)

An Interview with Greg Allen
Conducted by John Pierson
Sitting in the empty Neo-Futurarium Theater
Transcribed by Corey Craig

A CHILDHOOD OF PRIVILEGE AND LONELINESS

GA: I grew up in Wilmette, I was born April 6th, 1962, that’s about a couple years before you.

JP: Twelve years, Greg. (I look at him, feigning exasperation.)
[We look at each other waiting for the other to crack. I crack first.] No, it’s only five.

GA: (laughing) I was going to say, “Not that many.” (We get back on track.) I went to New Trier East, in Winnetka, which was a very rich, very affluent community. I never had a sense of being rich myself. It was so pervasive that we were blind to our own affluence.

JP: Did you have any friends that were filthy rich?

GA: I didn’t really have friends, John. No, I really honestly… I literally... [This is the way of Greg, he likes extremes and he often catches himself in an exaggeration mostly for humor, but in this situation the reality may not be too far from the extreme, he may not have had “no friends” but I could easily sense the loneliness he may have felt in his childhood.] I had a best friend, Joe Gordon, from fifth grade until freshman year of high school. He became kind of hunky and started hanging out with girls. I was not up for that in some way, and I think he was not particularly up for hanging out with this geeky guy. So I lost Joe Gordon my freshman year of high school and did not get together with another friend until college.

JP: So what did you do after school every day?

GA: I went and watched television. [This is meant as sarcasm, yet like myself, I’m pretty sure he spent a goodly amount of time watching television in his youth. Today Greg and I can often honestly claim our ignorance of pop culture, but I’m sure we both lived through it as isolated children looking for something to do.] I don’t know. I was very depressed for a long period of time. Literally my entire high school career I was extremely isolated. I was a photographer. That was my artistic outlet. I was a darkroom fine-art photographer, black and white. By my senior year I remember over half my day was spent in the darkroom, which was impressive. I was able to wriggle around so I was able to have about half my day either in the darkroom being a lab assistant in my photography class, or in cinematography class, which I also studied with my photography teacher. I lived in the darkroom where I was king.

JP: Do you have a sense of when photography became important to you?

GA: My teacher at New Trier was extremely inspiring. He was really my mentor, Dick Olderman. Photography gave me an incredible outlet in response to the incredible isolation and depression that I was in the midst of.

JP: Did you have a conscious awareness of yourself using photography as a devise to help justify your sense of isolation?

GA: It wasn’t conscious as to that was why I enjoyed it, but I was very conscious of using it as self-expression. I very much expressed this incredible isolation through my photos. I did a whole photo series on graveyards called “Graven Images,” and another series on store window mannequins about how fake and creepy they were. I became a darkroom master on multiple exposures. We had the most amazing darkroom. I was able to set up seven projectors in a row and expose the same sheet of paper to all these different images that I had set up and then develop it, in the chemicals. One of the masterpieces of my time was a photograph of my other photography teacher, Mr. Ware, who was this black guy with a big afro. I was able to double expose his face on two sides, and superimpose a barbed wire fence with a little angel up in the corner. Everyone thought it was about the black man’s experience. To me it was just a self-portrait.’ I was also the photo editor of the art magazine at New Trier.
[Greg wrote a play about the illustrious people who had come from New Trier including Lorie Dan and Charlton Heston. Greg enjoys saying New Trier. I surmise it is not only his personal history of the place that makes it important but the audible sound it makes which keeps the repeated word fresh in his mouth.]

JP: Let’s go back a little bit to grade school.

GA: Early in grade school I was kind of a bad kid, up until third grade. I was the class clown always getting in trouble, wisecracking, trying to get everybody to laugh. Then in third grade, it’s weird how I really remember this, I was put in Miss Umanzio’s class, and suddenly looked around me and there was Robby Esp, and Vincent McCarthy, and Paul Onley, and myself, the four worst kids in the school. And I was like, ‘I’m not that bad! I’m not like those three!’ Then I fell in love with my third grade teacher, and basically would do anything she said and really became studious and introverted and quiet, kind of, in one year. I very clearly remember this.
My fourth year in grade school was the beginning of my theater career, when for some unknown reason, my friend Paul Campbell and Jack Blanchard and I, got the idea of entering the talent show. We wanted to do a Laurel and Hardy bit on stage, but since we hadn’t seen a Laurel and Hardy movie, we had seen the Dick Van Dyke show, within which Dick Van Dyke and a friend of his do a Laurel and Hardy bit. So what we did, it was already meta at this point, was our version of The Dick Van Dyke, Laurel and Hardy bit. We reproduced that on stage with Paul Campbell, the skinniest guy in class, being Hardy, and I played Stan Laurel. [The subtle joke here is that Hardy was actually the fat one. Neither Greg or his friend were fat, so they chose the thinner of the two to be the fattest.] I just remember it was slap sticky and we broke eggs. Jack Blanchard was the waiter. His first entrance to the stage he slipped and fell down on his ass and got a huge laugh. So in the second performance he did it again intentionally and actually fell down and hurt himself. But that experience was when I realized, “Wow, hey, this is really fun.”
So in fifth grade I figured out a way of breaking into the school auditorium. Every day at lunch I’d break in with a bunch of friends and we’d just run around. Somehow that inspired me to create theater in the auditorium. My fist idea for a play was to stage Tommy, [The Who’s Rock Opera] with all my friends. I said, “Come on guys! We could do this!” Here, I’ll sing one of the songs...’ [Greg begins singing me his rendition of the lyrics "There’s A Doctor I’ve Found," from Tommy. He is singing very loud and out of tune... on purpose. Or is it?] I wish that’d happened, I would love to have that on film. Really, I didn't understand Tommy, at all, at that point. My friends wouldn’t go along with it. Our fifth grade class had a video camera, so we filmed these parodies of “Laugh In” bits, where I played the hippy dippy weatherman. We would also stage these for the school. Then I started writing this play called, “George the Genius,” in which of course I was George. The concept was that these robbers would hold up various stores and take their money. The robbers were wearing T-shirts that said, “N-O-T-H-I-N-G,” and they’d run away, and then the cops would show up, you see this coming, the cops show up with George the Genius as the investigator, and he would say, “Well, what happened?” “Well these guys broke in and took all our money!” and then he’d say, “Well, what were they wearing?” and they would say, “Nothing!” And he’d say, “Oh, they were wearing nothing? I don’t believe you.” and he would walk away assuming there had been no crime. This was the premise of the whole play. And so, it came time for the entire fifth grade to come see my play. The robbers robbed the first store, a hat store. The second store was a wig store, or something funny like that, and then they robbed a third store, and then started to rob the fourth store when Mr. Clements, my fifth grade teacher, stood up, and said, “That’s it! This is going nowhere! Everyone back to class!” And that was the last time I set foot on stage until college. That was it.

JP: “This is going nowhere?” Did he ever question you about the play later?

GA: No, no. I never talked to him about it. It is actually possible that it was going nowhere. [laughter] I think I theoretically worked out the end, but there wasn’t a script or anything. It crushed me, though. Having been humiliated in front of the entire fifth grade class.

JP: Did you have opportunities to see much theater outside of student productions during those school years?

GA: My first theater-going memory is when I was in first grade. A group had come to Central School, to do Dandelion Wine, and it was in our gym. At the end of the play I remember thinking they’d done such a good job. It was such a wonderful show. I wanted to be the last person clapping. [Greg begins clapping.] And so everyone applauded at the end of the show, and I just kept applauding, and then I still wasn’t sure that I was the last one applauding, so I just kept applauding. [Greg increases the intensity of his clapping. It is a good thing we are dong this interview in our empty theater and not in a restaurant.] Then it came time for all the classes to file out, and my class got called, and we all stood up, and in line I continued clapping down the entire hallway, because I had been so extremely moved by that production.
My parents did take me to various shows. [He pauses, and then remembers an important detail of his life.] My parents actually met in the theater, which is really surprising, they were both in a little community theater group in Wilmette, where they met, my mom was doing tech or something, or costumes, and my dad was in the play “You Can’t Take It With You.” [In my interview this is the third time this damn play has a connection to Neos. Yes, it was a popular play, but... Come On!] He was they guy who lives downstairs and makes lots of explosives. And so, I guess they fell in love there, which is kind of wild. I know it’s really weird, ‘cause basically, I always say, I come from a long line of businessmen. I don’t have any real artists in my family. My dad was a painter as well, kind of a, Do-It-Yourself man.

JP: He sounds fairly artistic to me. Your family just didn’t have anyone before you who had an artistic career. His painting was artistic?

GA: Yeah, it was artistic. He painted watercolors, he did lots of photography, he didn’t do darkroom stuff, but took slides, you know, slides, that’s what you took back then. And he also did a lot of wood working, which I helped him with a lot, which is how I know how to do wood working stuff, and um... Oh, and models! He built models a lot, which was really fine work, so he was pretty crafty.

JP: All of that plus a regular job, he sounds like he kept himself very busy.

GA: Definitely, yeah. He was a very busy guy. He was a regional sales manager, for a scientific equipment company, so he would travel around the country meeting with these incredible scientists in the labs, like FERMI lab, figure out what they need, and then he’d come home, because he was also an engineer, and he would draft things like, a sputtering system, or a vacuum pump. Then he’d go back and say, “I think this will do what you need it to do.” And then he’d send it to his company, and the company would build it, and then sell it to the lab. My dad was very much a traveling salesman in terms of loving to tell jokes. He always had endless jokes and lots of bad puns.

JP: [My father was also a salesman. I auditioned for the company with a piece called, “The Aluminum Comedian.” My dad was an aluminum siding salesman and an incredible joke teller. He had a library in his head full of one-liners and comedic short stories. I believe I did not inherit that kind of talent. This skill was a must for door-to-door salesmen. They had to have charisma, a certain panache, to succeed.] With sales jobs in our parents’ days, joke telling seemed to be ingrained in their living, you just had to be charming and good with small talk.

GA: Yeah. Everyone loved my dad, and dad loved his job. He said from the get-go that he loved every day of his job. And he’d be away, I mean, he was gone for most of my childhood. He was always on these business trips, forever.

JP: I grew up without my father living in our house, so it was hard for me to perceive what it would be like to have a mother and father at home. Did you feel that difference? Did you feel the difference of other kids having their parents’ home more?

GA: See, I was so isolated. I don’t even think I had anything to compare it to. And actually, that was the day and age too, where moms stayed home, and dads went to work, and so even with various friends, I would go to their houses, but you’d never see their dad. Mom would stay home, take care of the kids, make the dinner, it’d be on the table when the dad came home and by that time, I was gone.
My dad passed away fourteen years ago, now, my mom kind of reminds me of what it was like to live in a house with a hawk and a dove in it at the same time, ‘cause during the Vietnam war, my dad was very gung-ho military power, and my mom was very non-violent, so they just vowed never to talk about it, which I think was the story of my family and the whole North Shore in general, nobody talked about anything. That impression really got to me in general. No one ever talked about anything important. My family never had any open emotional expression whatsoever. That was one of the things that inspired me to seek out an artistic outlet, as well as to create something like Neo-Futurism, which is based in self-expression.
My family was so repressed. Girls, sex, romance, it was really weird how verboten those topics were in my house.

JP: That must have lead to some difficulty for you in the school years where one of the main topics for kids is sex.

GA: I kind of just shut down. I was uptight about talking to my friends about it. I just didn’t make the leap into adolescence. I freaked out and didn’t know how to talk to girls, and ultimately even lost how to talk to boys. I was a major outcast with the advent of high school.

JP: I wrote a play for TML called “Inside”, about how many of my creative friends, including you and myself, have trapped inside themselves a sense of still being a child. It both isolates the person and creates this wonderful sense of play that makes them captivating to be with and watch. I’ve noticed that in many of these cases something happened when they were younger where they, either had to grow up too fast, or they just had a departure from what other kids were experiencing. They need to hold on to this idea of childhood and keep it safe.

GA: I’ve always felt like I’ve never had a childhood until I got to Oberlin. I was always a very good boy. I never got in trouble. I always did the right thing. I always got good grades. You know, since that transition in third grade, where I fell in love with Miss Umanzio, I was just the best kid there was, and uh, you know, the idea of a fight happening in my house was impossible. No one would ever have any open expressions of emotion in my home.

JP: I was the good one too, and I felt an overwhelming pressure from myself to be good, because my family was so explosive, my brothers, and older sister grew up in the midst of a divorce, they were always angry and volatile. I felt that I had to be the one that was respectful to my mom, and came home when I was supposed to, even if she didn’t ask me to. My younger sister was able to bridge the gap between older siblings, I could not, I remain distant.

INTRO TO ABSURDIST THEATER AT NEW TRIER

GA: You have to complete a junior thesis at New Trier, and, I didn’t know what to do it on. I was sitting in this library, and there were books in a rack. There was a book called, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? And I thought, “Wow, what a weird title.” I started reading it. “What the fuck is this? It’s like a play, but no one could actually perform this! I mean this doesn’t make any sense! People don’t talk like this!” Then someone told me about this book called, The Theater of the Absurd by Martin Esslin. So I read that, and that talked about Beckett and Pinter, and so then I picked up “Waiting for Godot”, and I read that and I picked up “The Zoo Story” and “American Dream”, “Rhinoceros.” I just suddenly read all these plays on my own. “This is really wild wild stuff!” They talked about rebellion, and I was psyched about that. “Rhinoceros” is about not conforming to the masses, but trying to stay individual, so that was like my bible.

JP: I didn’t know about Beckett until after I started writing my own absurdist plays. In my high school years Rhinoceros was my introduction to reading Absurdist Theater. [I came to Absurdism not first through reading absurdist playwrights but by seeing the movie “The Producers.” My father took me to a showing of it when I was little. I loved Mel Brooks. Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel were magical together. I later found out that they starred together in a film called Rhinoceros. I couldn’t find it so I checked out a play from the library that had the same title. At that time I was still unsure whether or not they were related. Many years later Greg and I would have a discussion about this, and a few days later I found a gift in my mailbox at the theater. It was a rare VHS copy of the film “Rhinoceros.”]

GA: It’s a great play for being inspired. And so without ever looking at Neil Simon, or any kind of realistic stuff, I immediately launched into Absurdism. I went and saw Edward Albee when he lectured at Northwestern. I wrote my junior thesis on theater of the absurd, and “The Zoo Story” and “American Dream”. I was always a slow reader. I could never pick up novels and read through them, and I hated poetry, so, plays were perfect because I could actually get through them.

THE COLLEGE YEARS

JP: [This question in no way implies that there is any pattern at all with Neo-Futurists but I still think it is an interesting question to ask.] Did you go straight into college?

GA: I did. At New Trier everyone went straight into college. There was never even a question that I was going to go straight into college. And in high school somehow, the summer before my senior year of high school, we took a college trip where we stopped at seventeen different colleges, in mainly the east. I think Oberlin was the first stop going east. And then everything in the east and then come back, and I did it in the summer because I was scared to actually talk to anybody. So I never actually met any of the students at these schools, I just read the catalogues and kind of looked at the campus. And then somehow, by my senior year, I had decided to apply to Vassar, Hampshire, and Oberlin. I liked Oberlin because... I was very much my mother’s child, very involved in civil rights, and studying non-violence, and um, and Oberlin was the first school in the country to be co-ed, it was the first school in the country to admit blacks, and had a long history of rebellion, in the 60’s, so I was pretty psyched about that. Vasser I kind of threw in there as one step below the Ivy League, so I could flash it in front of my friends, ‘Oh yeah, I’m going to Vasser.’ And Hampshire because it’s incredibly self-directed and that was kind of my photography-artistic side, of thinking, ‘Wow, if I really want to go for that, I’ll go for Hampshire.’ I walked around for a couple weeks telling people I was going to Vasser. I applied and I got into all three, which didn’t help at all.
I decided to go to Vasser but then I looked at Oberlin’s catalogue again, and just said, “Oh, I’ll go to Oberlin.” I basically knew nothing other than it’s history, and it was also the closest to home, which is not something I wanted, really. (He surprises himself.) I wanted to go away. My brother had gone to Boston University, before me, and kind of, left, just, left the house altogether. That was my model of getting out. I made the shift over to Oberlin knowing nothing about it. My parents drove me there.
The first day we stayed in a hotel outside of Oberlin there was some girl at another table that looked about my age, eating with her parents. My parents dropped me off at my dorm, and left, and then I saw the girl again, in my dorm. I kissed her two days later, and she was my girlfriend in four days. I had gotten my first kiss at high school graduation, from the most popular girl in school. I set my sights very high! And so my second kiss, EVER, was in the first three days of college. I made a ton of friends that day, and I felt like everybody here is an outcast, and everybody is in the same boat as I am. It was a tremendous shift. Early on I said, “I’m gonna be happy here,” and I was. I immediately fell in a couple groups of friends who are still my friends. [Blair Thomas, Adrian Danzig, and Kate Goehring, to name a few.] I just ate it up, the liberal sensibility, the openness of communication, the homosexuality on campus, and bisexuality. I slept with a man before, I slept with a woman! (He says with a bright boyish grin.) Ah, um, pretty wild stuff. Oberlin helped to open the door of experimentation.

JP: Were there good photography classes at Oberlin?

GA: There was not, and that was one of the issues. There was a really lame photography professor, who taught one class in photography. There’s a winter term at Oberlin where you can choose to do one subject for one month. So I came back and worked with my mentor at New Trier. I worked in the darkroom and helped teach an LD class with him.

JP: So having not much in the way of Photography at Oberlin, let's hear a little on how the transition into theater for a career occurred.

GA: I never took an intro to fiction class at Oberlin because I was scared to death I’d never be able to finish the novels in time. So I took the intro to drama class, because I knew a little bit about it already, and because I knew I could read plays. There was a practical intro to drama class, and we had to put on scenes. That was pretty damn fun. Sophomore year, the only way to get into an acting class at Oberlin was to throw your name in a hat. It was a lottery. And I thought, ah, this is a good way to meet girls, too. [Adrian Danzig, in his interview, said a similar thing about meeting girls in theater. I wish I had know that. It never occurred to me it would be any easier in theater than in any other pursuit. Perhaps Oberlin girls are extremely pervious to theatrical sexuality.] So I threw my name in a hat and got chosen to be in an acting class, my sophomore year. This opened up a whole other world for me. I never had thought physically. I always thought either intellectually or emotionally. I felt like this was a third part of my life that had opened up. I’d never been in touch with what my body felt, at all. I’m just who I am. So the acting training from Roberta Rude, was very influential in that way.
Then I was cast in my first show. It was an absolute disaster. I was cast in an Ionesco play, “The Lesson” as the professor, who has 80% of the lines in the play. This is the beginning of my inability to memorize lines. It panicked me, just absolutely panicked me. And I had to memorize almost an hour’s worth of nonsense, to be able to do this play for a student director. I went to New York that spring break, and just sat in the NYU library trying to memorize lines the whole time. It was torturous. I came back and I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t do it. I had to go on, book in hand, which really kind of crushed me because every one else did a good job. I just, couldn’t get it down.

JP: Did you still pursue written character roles after that?

GA: I auditioned, but I didn’t think of myself as an actor. I was way too much in my head to be an actor. I had taken the directing and playwriting classes at Oberlin. My junior year I went to London and saw about sixty plays. That was just the most amazing theater scene in the world. I was already a theater person before I went, but that experience turned me into a director.
After I graduated, my girlfriend, Kate Goehring, was still at Oberlin, so I went back to live with her. And while I was there I started assistant directing with my old professor doing “Tartuffe” on the main stage. He asked me to play a small part. I’d watch the show from the audience for the first half, and then I’d go back and get in costume and make-up and come out to deliver this one little monologue, then leave. In the second performance I walked on stage and said about four sentences, and blanked. Just completely blanked. There was an audience of around 500 people, sold out. This was my cast that I directed, and I felt so bad. I looked down, and then I looked up, and I burst into a sopping sweat, and then I backed up, and said my line again, and I was able to finish out the little speech, but at that point I vowed never to set foot on stage again. [For the third time. If you’re keeping track.]

JP: I have been thinking about the many shows that you have directed, particularly the ones that are adaptations, and they actually seem more like reinterpretations. Do you ever feel it is enough just to try to stage what the author intended?

GA: I’ve always latched on to reinterpreting whatever is on the page. I don’t believe in trying to figure out what the author intended because you never will know. And so I feel here are the words and you can interpret them any way you want. And so, even early on, when I was in my directing class, I did “Measure for Measure,” I intentionally reversed the traditional roles of who the protagonist and who the antagonist was. I experimented with staging in the round. I would always dick around with style and structure as a director. I enjoy coming up with unique interpretations, or making the production say what I want it to say, and not worrying about what’s being loyal to the author.

JP: Where does this instinct come from?

GA: I don’t know. I guess kind of a need for self-expression. I would latch on to these things and feel like, “Well this is what it’s about, for me.” I don’t really care what it’s about for anybody else. I wanted to say what I wanted to say. I latched on to directing as a communicative media. Even though I wasn’t the playwright, I would be able to take known texts, and adapt them in such a way that they said what I wanted them to say. Even in my beginning directing class I remember getting in trouble for it. The teachers would say things to me like, “Well, that wouldn’t work for the whole play, but for the scene you chose that’s pretty interesting!” I’ve never really let that get in my way.

JB: You obviously discovered yourself as a director at Oberlin. Did you do any writing for the theater while you were there?

GA: I wrote my first play at Oberlin. ‘Cause I took a playwriting class there. I was very involved in the Nuclear Freeze movement at the time, and I read Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth, in “The New Yorker,” and was very moved at the doom that hung over all of us, and so I wrote a play called “Angst” [laughter] ...very college. “Angst” took place between the time all the missiles were launched, and Armageddon, basically, and you watched these two characters on stage trying to figure a way out of this dilemma. They hit upon the idea that if they don’t think, don't breathe, and don't feel they can stop time. And when they did this the lights would shift on stage and then there'd be these little dream scenes which would get them out of their dilemma. There was this absolute panic as the missiles were coming down and the play asked what would you do in those last moments? I was trying to figure out what’s the last thing to say in one’s life - very much like Beckett. So in the last sequence they realize it's not working because the audience is there, thinking and breathing and feeling. So the two actors turn out to the audience and command them to stop time with "Don't think! Don't feel! Don't breath!" and then that's the end of the play. It was either incredibly self-indulgent or [laughter] a really powerful ending, depending on how you look at it.

JP: How did it fare?

GA: It fared pretty well. Blair Thomas the founder of Redmoon and Blair Thomas Productions directed it, with my friends Ann Colby and Peter Riggs. That was my first experience of writing a play and giving it to a director and saying, “I’ll show up on opening night.” I remember just cringing and hating it, because of course it wasn’t the way I wanted it to be. So that was definitely what inspired me to be a writer/director/performer. "Cut out all the middlemen! I want it to be exactly what I want it to be!" [If Greg had long hair and a tie on, at this point is where these elements would fly through the air uncontrollably, and then in the pause he would straighten his tie and comb his hair back.] Um, so that experience was very influential in terms of that.

THE ITALIAN FUTURISTS, THE AUTOMATONS AND RELATIONSHIPS SPIRALING

JP: In between going to school at Oberlin and then returning, you lived in Boston for awhile. What were you doing there?

GA: In Boston I needed to find out that I could survive on my own. I’d gone through school, school, school, school, and then suddenly left college and... I had to get a job. I left Oberlin as an English Major, and it’s like, "What does that mean?" I’d never had a job really. I had worked at a photography studio in Winnetka for a couple years during the summer, and that's about all. So in Boston I got a job telemarketing for a theater. I didn’t last more than two months, but I outsold everyone else there, I was very good as a salesman. Then I started working for the Boston Public Library. Which is where I worked at what my friends called the Book Death Camp, throwing away 50 tons of books over the course of the summer. That was very exciting, doing heavy manual labor for the Boston Public Library. Then come November or something, maybe December, I went back to live with Katie at Oberlin.

JP: This is when you worked on Tartruffe and a few other directing projects, but most important to the history of Neo-Futurists, this is when you staged your first Futurist show.

GA: Yes, we called ourselves The Automatons. That was great fun.

JP: What was the structure of this performance?

GA: Earlier in my junior year at Oberlin I had taken a seminar on the Avant Guarde with Philip Auslander, who’s now a really big writer, theoritician. He introduced me to the Italian Futurists. I was like, "Gah! [That's the best spelling of the sound that Greg made that Corey and I could come up with. If you decided to strangle yourself right when you had the largest epiphany of your life, it may sound something like "Gah."] This stuff is crazy, this is great!" I liked the plays and I liked the Manifestos. So later I got together with Kate, Blair, John Russell, who later went on to write “Stupid Kids” before he died of AIDS, and Kirk Van Skoyik. I said let’s do these Italian Futurist plays. We just performed them back to back, a short fifteen minute thing. And we performed them in this very mechanical way. Everyone thought it was wonderfully hysterical. It went over big, to the point where we actually did it outside the next day during lunch and got another big crowd of people to watch us. And I said to myself, “There’s something to this.” That was definitely inspiring.

JP: I'm sure that didn't bring in any money at that time, how were you surviving?

GA: I was freeloading off of Katie. I mean I knew all the ins and outs of how to get free food and I was staying with Kate so it didn’t cost anything, uh you know, you learn how to break into everywhere.

JP: When did you feel you had to leave there? Did you-

GA: I, uh. So I was living with Kate, and then Kate went to the O’Neill, she went to the National Theater Institute in January. I don’t know how I got away with this... I was living in Katie’s dorm room in an all female dorm, and Kate was then gone, and so for January I’d set it up to direct “Tartuffe” with my professor, even though Kate wasn’t going to be there. The winter term came to an end I was living in Kate’s dormroom, and you could eat in the co-op if you weren’t a student. I paid about a hundred bucks for a month of food. And during that time was when we did a wedding brunch. We thought it was a fun idea to just declare a wedding. We took away all the chairs so no one could sit down, only served finger food, and then I sat at the front door with a whole bunch of name-tags, so that people could put on name-tags and assume different personalities, like, “Shell-Shocked Uncle” or, I was “Joey,” the autistic brother of the bride. Everyone had a role, and that was the the inspiration for the name-tagging for Too Much Light.
So, Kate was gone, and there was a girl about to move into Kate’s room and I had to get out of there, so I met this woman on campus who I hung out with one night, and I mentioned I needed a place to stay. The next night we were hanging out and she said, 'So are you gonna come live with me?' I said, “errr, ok.” This is where the play “The Lamb May Lie Down With The Lion But She Doesn’t Get A Lot Of Sleep” comes from. I moved into her house, which meant her room, which meant her bed, and we slept in the nude. I didn’t expect that at all! She knew Kate! She had a boyfriend! I, yeah, that didn’t last long.
Then I got really freaked out about how many women I was seeing at the same time, and I had to leave. I was even directing “Action” by Sam Shepherd at the time, and I just said, I’ve gotta get out of here, High Fidelity issues. I was seeing four different women on campus. It fucked with my head, big time.

JP: Was it women issues which finally drove you away from Oberlin for good?

GA: I loved Kate, but I thought, "Maybe I could love more than one person at one time!” I tried but it just totally freaked me out completely. So I went back to Boston and got an apartment in Summerdale, and worked at the Café Pamplona, for about a year. And then, basically following in Kate’s footsteps, I went to the O’Neill, to the National Theater Institute. I applied for the fall session of 1985. Fourteen weeks, where you do everything.

FOURTEEN WEEKS AT THE O'NEILL AND A RETURN TO CHICAGO
(SCRIBBLING DOWN THE FIRST NEO-FUTURIST PLAYS)

JP: The O'Neill is pretty intense.

GA: It was very intense. You had one day off for the fourteen weeks. But a tornado hit, in the middle of it, that was kind of cool, so we got a couple days off. The O'Neill was also where I met Jeremy Piven. We were enemies, we were absolutely arch-enemies, which is pretty funny. When he finally came to see Too Much Light, he got turned away at the door. And I, someone told me this, he said, and no one knew who he was at the time, but he said, “But I’m Greg’s arch-enemy! You have to let me in!” And I’ve always given him a lot of credit for saying that. There's a good, friendly animosity between us. Also, Ian Roberts was there. He’s one of the founders of the Upright Citizens Brigade. I lost touch with him.

JP: Was there any experimental theater going on there?

GA: No, it was pretty traditional acting training. Most of the teachers came from New York, or Yale. I had the utmost respect for the teachers there, and learned a ton. Yeah, it was pretty straight-forward theater, but I still experimented with elements. I directed scenes in the round and from different perspectives. I wrote a play there called, “Out of Sight, Out of Mind”. It was a scathing review of my family, which is a little harsh.
I went there as a director, but the teachers not only thought I was a strong director, but also a strong playwright and actor. That really gave me the confidence to then move back to Chicago to pursue theater and to face my upbringing, which my brother never did. My brother ran away from home and just, never came back, basically. I felt like I can’t run away. I don’t want to run away from my upbringing, I want to deal with what the North Shore was like, I want to deal with my parents.
When I came back to Chicago I lived at home, worked at the Blind Faith Cafe in Evanston, and got into a double internship at the Organic and Wisdom Bridge, which were two of the bigger theaters in town. Then I moved on to an internship at Remains, while I became the literary manager of the Organic. I leapt right into practical volunteer experience, which I always encourage people to do. At the Organic there were only two people in charge there. It was the Artistic Director and the Managing Director. Blair and I jumped in and we became half the staff. That was pretty cool.
After about a month at home I got my own apartment on Paulina behind what was Carson’s Ribs, near Senn High School. Surviving on my own, with my own apartment, that was cool. A number of Oberlin people were here too. So I pretty quickly had a community of people. I was acting in a couple shows for people who called me up and just said, “Can you be in my show?” I was in “Josephine the Mouse Singer” at Chicago Actor’s Ensemble. That was a disaster. And I was in BetaWolf, at the Organic. That was pretty funny. It was this long process, ensemble oriented devised show, based on Beowulf, set in the future. Preposterous show. It was a cast of around thirty-five, so that was a fuckin’ blast. It ran for quite awhile. It was six months worth of work. It was great because you had this community very quickly.
Then I got to know Larry Sloan at Remains theater. While there I worked as the AD for Bob Falls’ production of Road. I was a dresser with Curt Columbus for The Mystery of Irma Vep which was a great play. I did three shows helping out Remains. I got fired from the Organic. [under his breath] ...That was a fuckin’ nightmare. That was a really ugly thing. I won’t go into it but it was nuts. It was not good. Bad. Political. Situation. [I did not push him for info about this, I don't want these interviews to be gossip columns but I feel it is important to acknowledge conflicts within the theater world. And obviously this was a big one for Greg, and may have given him an insight into what he would be dealing with in his own company.]

JP: Were you writing during this period? Was there any planting of seeds at this time for starting your own performance company?

GA: I took a couple classes with Thomas Riccio about devising work and I was very inspired by that. I still had the Italian Futurists show The Automatons in mind. And I had pretty much developed this audience interactive sense. At that point I was very much, viewing the audience as the antagonist to a show, like with “Angst”. I somehow latched on to audience participation as being really really fascinating. I was incredibly frustrated trying to write anything that lasted very long. So I took the Italian Futurist sensibility of these really short plays and then my own beliefs in audience participation and no illusion which drove me crazy too, all the acting and fakery. I started writing three scenarios a day on an eight and a half by eleven sheet of paper in a notebook. And every day I sat down and tried, as quickly as possible, to write three plays, or scenarios for plays. And I did that for a while, to the point where I had about seventy. And then I did a reading of them at the Organic, with the title, “Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind”. That got a really good response.

TOO MUCH LIGHT MAKES THE BABY GO BLIND, WHAT?

JP: But I know you didn't jump right into producing Too Much Light, you had directed and adapted other shows around the Northside for awhile.

GA: I directed “No One Knows How” at the Gallery Theater. I talked the Artistic Director into letting me direct something and he gave me a copy of this play by Pirandello called “No One Knows How” It was the last play he had written. I turned it into a meta-theatrical play. I’ve always wanted to go back to that, because Pirandello is mostly known for “Tonight We Improvise” and “Six Characters in Search of an Author”, very meta-theatrical plays, whereas a huge bulk of his work is all just melodrama. So I took one of his melodramas and made it meta-theatrical. I adapted and directed an adaptation of “Down and Out in Paris and London” by George Orwell, at The Bailiwick. I did a performance art piece “Ballot, Bullet, Ballet” with my friend Robin MacDuffie. [Who would become a member of the first Neo-Futurist cast.] I’d made friends with Dennis McCullough who was the Artistic Director of Stage Left at the time. He had been an intern at Wisdom Bridge before me. He approached me about doing something at Stage Left and he said, “What would you like to do?” And I had a bunch of different ideas and one of them was exploring these Italian Futurist plays and this whole idea of doing very short plays and cranking them out really fast. Around that time The Italian American Theater Company did a show at Randolph Street Gallery, which was a presentation of the Italian Futurist plays. It was very very aggressive in the real traditional sense. You walked in the door, and they had this Doberman, chained at the door, that would bark the fucking daylights out of you. And then you had to get around the Doberman, and someone cross-examined you and then you went in and they gave you, I think, three green peppers, during the show, and then they would come out and you were supposed to whip these green peppers at the performers. It became the war that you read about the Italian Futurists experiencing. People in the performance got pretty damn hurt, and you could buy more peppers if you wanted! You could whip a green pepper pretty hard and this woman caught one in the eye. It was harsh, it was harsh. It inspired me to do that as well.

JP: Many Neo-Futurists I have talked to have been inspired by the poetry that Lisa and Dave had brought in to TML from Forensics and Slam poetry, was this any influence in the early days for you?

GA: I was unaware of it. I mean, I went to Randolph Street Gallery, and would see performance art, or Lower Links, and see performance art, things like that. But I was, essentially unaware of the poetry of forensics side of things.

[There was much underground theater springing up in the late 80's in Chicago. It makes sense that an artist could not see all the influences going on around them. So it is wonderful that even though this is the case, many of these influences beginning during this time could eventually make impressions on TML. Too Much Light is a show that welcomed the eclectic nature of Chicago at the time. Just look at the amount of companies celebrating their twentieth anniversary the last year or two: Theater Oobleck, Curious Theater Branch, Profiles, Comedy Sports, The Neo-Futurists, The Annoyance, and actually my company Hope And Nonthings!)

GA: So I told Dennis the show I was working on was called Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind and we agreed that that was the most frightening thing I could do. Blair had talked about late night theater and I’d never heard about late night theater, there are all these empty stages, after shows, and I’m out, prowling around for something to do in the middle of the night, why don’t we try that? Stage Left was right near the Punkin’ Donuts on Belmont and Clark, so it was perfect location, there were kids out there all the time, so we opened December 2nd, 1988, I cast one of my co-workers at Powell’s. (Greg was working at Powell’s Bookstore at that point. This is the area he was in when he got shot in the leg while minding his own business. ) I cast Robin McDuffie, who I’d worked with. There were three people from Stage Left, who wanted to be part of it, Randy, Mike, and Melissa, Kathy Gees came out of nowhere, I think she just auditioned, for me. I had these open auditions. Phil Gibbs came outta nowhere...

[I am trying to get an interview with Phil Gibbs. I haven't heard back. I'd like to find out where "nowhere" actually is. Perhaps that is where he is now, and that is why I can't get ahold of him yet.]

JP: What was the audition process like? Did they have to come in with an original piece?

GA: I had people come in and create an exquisite corpse, in groups, and then stage those. I wanted to see them working together. I don’t really remember exactly what I did. I mean, I do remember exquisite corpse pieces coming out of that night. And some theater games. I remember offering a lot of parts to people, some people going, “no.” So when we started rehearsals I would just preach the Neo-Futurist gospel and talk about that a lot, and then give assignments. People would bring in pieces, but I’d written about two thirds of the show. But other people were devising pieces and we’d rehearse almost every night, up to opening, and then keep rehearsing every night, and writing manifestos. I would start the show with a Manifesto on stage, to the audience, which was very angry at the time. I would just improvise a manifesto in the moment. It was usually about getting out of your seats and taking charge of your life and rebelling against being a voyeur. Things like that, change the world. Kind of hard to imagine now.

[I believe in this idea of changing the world, if only in small nudges. The Neo-Futurists may not cause world peace in a country or even in a neighborhood, but it is an influential force on many individuals, perhaps causing them to open their eyes to new ways of learning and understanding those whom are different and/or similar to themselves. These small changes are difficult to measure or quantify. I have no doubt that this show has changed the lives of hundreds, if not thousands. Just keep reading these interviews and you will witness ensemble members altering each others paths and slowly but surely affecting attitudes that will ultimately help to shape the world.]

Greg: We did two weeks before we closed for Christmas. We had an audience of invited friends the first couple weeks, and then... I don’t know, somehow, it just took off. We sold out our first night, in June of ’89. We had our first gig that same week. We went over to Edge of the Lookinglass, which was Lookingglass’ first space, downtown.

JP: When you first opened did you really think you'd be -

GA: Creating a show that would go forever?

JP: Hopefully. What I mean to ask is, most shows have "runs." They have built in expiration dates. Is it correct to say that Too Much Light did not have a set expiration date?

GA: Yes, you can say that. The idea was that we were going to create ten new plays a week. It was a while before I caught on to having them roll the dice to determine how many new plays. The intentions was to just keep going. I don’t know why I didn’t think of having a set run, but we never had a set run.

JP: I know that every new cast members brings a unique voice, but there are certain staples, certain ways of organizing plays that we fall into, and every once in a great while we may stumble upon a new way in which to structure our short plays. Do you believe that a large portion of the structures still used came from those very very early days?

GA: Yep, I think so. Also, we never had a technician for the first couple years, so it was basic, almost no tech. And if we really needed tech someone would run up to the booth and climb a ladder to go up there and push a button, and so that really changed the tenor of the show, that basically, it was really all people in the same room. It was just lights up, heres the show. Certain things like the line play was created back then, and flashlights were heavily used, matches, you know, all the really, simple stuff.

JP: This do-it-yourself mentality, using a lot of cheap props and even cheaper special effects, showing the strings as it were, the man behind the curtain, do you think it was inherently part of the aesthetic, or did these elements become part of the aesthetic out of necessity?

GA: Well, that was kind of one of the great things. We had no budget, so we didn’t even think of having a budget. And also we were performing on other people’s sets, which was wild, for the first three years. Until we moved here we were on someone else’s set. So, yeah, I think through great challenge, you come up with great creativity. We would show up and suddenly there’d be a kitchen sink set behind us, you know, and then the next week we’d write a play to do on the kitchen sink set. We called that play, This Old Set. It was a very funny play. I walked around talking about how everything was fake.

JP: Yeah, I actually revised that one, my own version that we did in New York. We just couldn't ignore that we were performing in a bright yellow motel room.

GA: We’d open the oven, “Nah, nah, it doesn’t really work.” We’d go out into the audience, “What about this audience?" "No, they’re all those puffy inflatable things.” And then we’d walk outside, “What about these cars out here on the street?" "Nope! All pretend! It’s all back projection!”

INTERVIEWING THE AUDIENCE

JP: In the very beginning the cast used to interview the audience as they entered. Did this element disappear because the audiences got too large?

GA: It ended here. [The Neo-Futurarium] It was just too many people. Yeah, it just took forever. At the other two locations we always interviewed people at the at the top of the show. When we went to New York at The Public we interviewed people. The first thing, people would come in the door, they’d roll the die, pay one to six bucks, they’d get a name tag from someone in a little booth, there was a little ticket booth, and so they really couldn’t hear, and they had the old big walkman, and earphones. The whole idea was that it was supposed to be task oriented, where someone would say their name, “Bill!” and you’d hear “ill!” and so you’d write down ‘ill’ or you’d write down ‘zill.’ It was an Ellis Island kind of thing. They usually had to stand in line, and then we would have a bunch of seats on stage, and we’d fill the seats on stage, and then we’d interview them. Phil Gibbs usually interviewed people, or I interviewed people. “So what’re you here for? What do you expect? Who are you?” Then when we thought they were done, we’d put them in the audience. This was a great way of getting to know the audience quickly, ‘cause when someone’d come back. I mean, I swear for the first year, I knew anyone who had come to that show. If someone came back, I would recognize them instantly. It’s just so hard to imagine now.
So we’d interview them, and finally we’d get them in their seats, and start the show. It was kind of abrasive, like if, a critic came, we’d say, “OH, so you think you’re a critic, huh? You’re someone to judge us!” You know, and then we’d say, “Hey everybody! A critic!”
One thing I just loved about the Stage Left space was there was this display window, and we would show up about an hour ahead of time, someone would show up, often me, and you’d just sit in the window, and there’d be different things you could do. You could be a living mannequin who didn’t move, and then people would go by, or you could follow them with your eyes, while you didn’t move. Or you could be there and eat dinner or something. It just stopped traffic. It was amazing how many people were just fascinated that there was a human being, in the window. It was very Neo-Futurist. It was just a person, you know, but it was fascinating in that framework. People would come and go, there’d be crowds around the fuckin’ window! It was so funny! “Is he real?” “No, he’s not real!” “Yeah, I think he’s real!” That became most of our publicity. “That’s the show with the guy in the window, right?”
And we talked to everybody at the end of the show. I would talk to everybody in the lobby. That created this community of, “ah, this is great, I’m gonna come back and tell my friends” Those are the elements that we’ve lost here. We tried to replicate the window-work at Live Bait, but it didn't last ‘cause there was no walk-by traffic there. And the window wasn't suited for it.

JP: When you went from Live Bait to the Neo-Futurarium the audience capacity more than doubled in size, did you even bother trying to interview the audience at the first shows here?

GA: We did, we tried it here. At Live Bait we had a house of about 75. We were able to interview everybody on stage. Then, when we came here it was over, I mean, we tried it for a couple weeks, but it just took forever. And everyone had to sit around and wait. The advantage of both, Live Bait and Stage Left, was we were able to take the audience out into the street occasionally, which was pretty cool. ‘Cause it was right there, and we tried that here. There was a play called “Deja Corner of Foster and Ashland.” We walked the whole audience out to the corner and they watched a play take place across the street. That just took forever. I mean, it was like, “AND fifteen minutes later, we’re back!”

THE ELDER STATESMEN OF NEO-FUTURISM HEATHER & PHIL RIDARELLI
AND ALL THOSE OTHERS THAT FIRST YEAR

JP: Next to you, the only one that comes remotely close to having been here since early on is Heather Riordan, can you talk a bit about when she came into the show.

[Heather entered the show Jul,y 6th 1990. You should know that just recently, after this interview was conducted, Phil Ridarelli petitioned to become active in the company again. If all works out you will see Phil in the show at least 16 weeks a year. But not in a row!]

GA: When we started the show we had rehearsals at Chase Park, we paid ten bucks a night , and that started going up. "This sucks, we don’t want to pay this much." That was the one financial deal we had with Stage Left, was that they paid for our rehearsals in Chase Park, and then kept 97% at the door. That was something that was not good either. Ah, yeah, there was a real ugly fall out with Stage Left.

[Greg and I barely touched upon this conflict already talked about with Dave and Lisa. After I met with Greg, I met with Karen Christopher, and she was very open about the conflict and how it affected people on the inside. So you have that to look forward to.]

GA: Then I discovered Margate Park, which was right near my home in Uptown. They didn’t know to charge anybody anything. It’s like, “Can we have a room?” “Yeah!” “..Okay! We’ll just take the room!” So we had auditions there, of all places, and I remember Heather coming in, and standing on her head, and singing opera with shark puppets on her feet, which then went into the show as “Heather Gets Classy” which I’m sure you’ve seen.

[Here is one of those moments, where memory is tricky. A few days later I interviewed Heather and it was clarified then that this was definitely not the piece with which she auditioned. What Heather said about this classic piece is that she brought it to the group a few weeks after she had been in the show. She didn't even show them in rehearsal. She just explained that she would put shark slippers on and sing an aria while standing on her head. She said the reaction to the proposal was lackluster, but they put it in anyway. The first night it aired, it became an instant classic. The cast cold barely put themselves together to perform the next play.]

GA: Back then we had auditions, that was it, someone came in, did a two minute piece, we’d ask them a question or two and they left. Then we’d say, “Yeah, let’s cast her.”

JP: Did you find you would go through cast members quicker back then?

GA: Yeah, it was an underground show, late at night. [He stressed the late at night. At the time this concept really was an anomaly, the only other company at the time besides Second City performing late night theater was Annoyance, who were also just beginning.] We went through like twenty people the first year, I think. Maybe not. I mean, it- well... maybe not twenty, maybe fifteen, well... maybe twenty. [I left this stumbling over the amount in because noone I have talked to has a clear picture of how many came and went in that first year, but it was definitely enough for Greg to get flustered and not be able to distinguish the number fifteen from the number twenty. Greg then began naming a bunch of people; actors, singers, and friends who did the show anywhere from three weeks to three months, this began to get a little ridiculous, so he decided to hold official auditions.] At the end of the year we [The cast: Greg, Karen, Lisa, Phil R. Melisa Lindberg and Randy Burgess.] cast four people, Ted Bales, Adrian Danzig, Paige Phillips, and Ayun Halliday.

JP: Often, even more than yourself, I see Heather as the one who takes the Neo-Futurists aesthetic of non-illusory, no character, real life performance to heart. I can honestly say that Heather is always Heather.

GA: I think Heather’s that way because- I mean it’s almost like the Supreme Court judges, like these guys who were put in, who were kind of conservative at the time, and now they’re really liberal. Compared to everybody else, I think thats kind of the case. I think at the beginning we were incredibly hardcore Neo-Futurist for the first year or so, and then, mostly because I stopped training the people coming in, I think the aesthetic got filtered down, so that I think, Heather’s just a throwback to the class of 1990, where it was closer to the bone. We talked more about the aesthetic. Whereas now, people come in and have to pick it up through osmosis or a class, which I think has helped a lot, to have people take our class, to at least understand the basics of it. I don’t know, I don’t think of Heather being that hardcore of a Neo-Futurist -

JP: I do. Looking at her body of work, I just think she physicalize it a lot more. Instead of straight intellectualizing she abstracts it with movement, rhythm and with disjointed, yet brutally honest, text.

GA: Yeah, it’s funny I always thought Heather wasn’t a writer. Honestly, when she came into the ensemble I thought Heather didn't write that much, she doesn’t even really think of herself as a writer. I would say she’s more of a performer, than a writer.

JP: I agree that she is more a performer, but who plays are still based in text, without a doubt, but whether it's abstracted or in a rant it's just Heather speaking.

GA: Right, yeah, absolutely, no, no crap there, no. Yeah, we had to break people of some other acting habits, Ted was the hardest. Ted really, was always acting up a storm on stage.

JP: Whatabout Phil? [Ridarelli]

GA: Phil is an amazing performer. Phil, Phil is always Phil, I think Phil has a really great sense of being a goofball on stage and that lends itself to being aware that it is Phil. I mean, you know, all his little stuff, [Greg tries to gesticulate like Phil] is still very much Phil. I don’t think of him being a character.

JP: When you brought Phil in did he just seem to get it?

GA: I think he just took off from the get-go, yeah, and he was just a really dynamic performer.

JP: Do you remember what Phil did for his audition?

GA: Phil did a hokey phone call. “Yeah? Joe? Yeah, it’s Phil.” You know, it’s- [laughter] it was some comic scenario. It was called Phil’s Phone Call when it went into the show, but it wasn’t actually particularly Neo-Futurist. But, you know, we kind of took that in stride at the beginning. [Yet, the aesthetic as aforementioned was discussed more, so this must have lead to very interesting polarities.]

JP: I've heard stories, perhaps from Phil himself, that he made an appearance in the workings of the show even before he was known to the cast.

GA: In the program it said something about sitting in the chair, and look at the audience, and just be yourself. And it said "Talk to Phil" And so Phil was like, “O-kay, maybe it says talk to me.” The program was talking about talking to Phil Gibbs, but Phil Ridarelli wound up with the microphone, interviewing people his first time coming to the show, and so the mic was turned on, we were like, “Who is that guy?” And he came back again, and it was like “Oh, this guy’s great.” Then when he auditioned for us, it’s like “Oh, that’s Mr. Microphone.” So, yeah, we just had a good feeling about him.


[And then Greg and I ran out of time. Greg will be re-interviewed down the line. There is much more I want to learn about the company through a polyphony of voices, and I look forward to interviewing him again with more of a sense of the many diverse perceptions. I imagine Greg and I will also discuss the transition from The Neo-Futurists just being a show called Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind, into the present company which now has a full Primetime Season, plus one off evenings like the Filmfest. We will also discuss the opening of the first and second New York Branch. And perhaps his future as a Neo-Futurist adaptor and director.]