My (Very Brief) Life in the Theater, Part 1: With Both Feet

In celebration of the passion of our younger family members who are currently pursuing their love of theater in venues ranging from high school and summer shows, through national tours, to Broadway: Ezra, Chloe, Lizzie, Allison, and Julie. And in fond memory of Joel.

The first of four parts.

One sun-filled day in June 1976, near the beach and sailboats of beautiful Lake Mendota in Madison, Wisconsin, I suggested to a friend that we walk over to watch auditions scheduled that day for the city’s prominent experimental theater group, Broom Street Theatre.  I had never seen one of its plays, but I had read and heard that it was a gonzo outfit producing plays ranging from wild adaptations of classical scripts to outrageous original satires of the human condition.  I was not aiming to audition myself.  Instead, I simply wanted an inside look at this operation during its audition process.  At age 26, I had just completed my third year of doctoral studies in sociology at the University and, after having colored for so long between the lines, I was hoping to have a look at some measure of creativity, even if only briefly.

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As soon as we walked into the audition space several blocks from campus, we were confronted by a pudgy man in an untucked black t-shirt and black pants, with a black, scruffy beard, long, unruly hair, a distinct way of speaking, and a no-nonsense baritone voice.  “Are you here for the auditions?”  I replied no, that we were there only to watch them.  To which he immediately answered, “You can’t just watch.  Either you audition or you have to leave.”

While I hesitated, my friend said he would leave, and immediately did so.  I looked around the room and saw nobody I knew.  I decided that it would be worth making a fool of myself by falling on my face, simply for the chance to watch everyone else.  I had no idea what I was in for.  I had never before participated in theater.  I sat down and waited my turn.

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In fact, I did pretty much fall on my face in my audition.  Literally.  The audition process was bizarre.  There were no monologues to read, nor scenes to play.  One by one, we were called up by the man in black, who told each auditionee to enact various physical and verbal acts that had no connection to each other.  Nor were any two auditions alike in these directions, save for one requirement.  I was the last to be called up.

The memorable requirements of my audition were two.  In one, I was told to run across the stage while speaking a given line from Shakespeare.  But to do so with a particular kinetics.  In the middle of my run, I was to do a ballet leap at stage center, during which leap I was to change my voice in mid-line from bass to falsetto.  In the other, I was told to fall down as fast as I could without hurting myself, which everyone was required to do.  I don’t know about my Shakespearean leap-and-speak, but I knew from my martial arts training how to take a fall.  I returned to my seat thereafter, where all of us awaited the director’s decisions.

After looking at his notes, he called off three or four names of those being added to the company for the theater’s next show.  Again, mine was the last called.  Given how crazy the auditions had been, I didn’t know what to make of having been chosen.  And I had absolutely no idea what would be expected of me.

Neither did he.  After the others left the building, he told those he had selected that we would meet with the rest of the cast at the rehearsal space in another part of town the next day.  During our earliest “rehearsals,” he said, he would be figuring out what play we would be doing.

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Broom Street Theatre was founded in Madison in 1969 by Stuart Gordon and his wife, Carolyn Purdy-Gordon.  An undergraduate theater major at the University of Wisconsin, Gordon produced several plays under the University’s auspices, the last of which was a satire of Peter Pan in the fall of 1968 that skewered the police riot against anti-Viet Nam war protestors during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago that August.  (Coincidentally, I also happened to be at the Convention.) Gordon had been teargassed by police at that event.  Among other features the play included a 15-minute dance by eight naked coeds, and its performance brought the arrest of Gordon and his future wife for obscenity, making national headlines.  (The charges were later dropped.)  Soon thereafter the two broke creative ties to the University and formed the independent Broom Street Theatre.

After producing the new theater’s first show in 1969–his take on the ancient sex-themed comedy by Aristophanes, Lysistrata–Gordon moved to Chicago and founded the Organic Theater Company, before eventually moving to California where he wrote and/or directed films, including Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989), Body Snatchers (1993), and David Mamet’s Edmond (2005).

In 1970 Broom Street Theatre selected its next full-time director, an eccentric polymath whose unique aesthetic would define the theater’s work in Madison for the next 35 years.  Over the years many in the experimental theater community around the country came to see him as a genius.

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That was Joel Gersmann, the schlumpy-looking individual who had required me to audition or leave.  At our first rehearsal the next day, he was the only person I recognized.  The other six, plus myself, were the acting company.  I quickly learned that I was the only one who had never acted before.  The others had acted in various shows previously, including one who had done many star-turns in shows with Joel.  (From the beginning I could only think of him by his first name.)  Another was a classically trained actor with a befitting air of confidence and grace about her.  Immediately, I performed my first acting of the experience:  I tried to act like I belonged.

Other than his announcements and instructions, I don’t recall much about that first meeting.  As we did not yet have a play to discuss, he told us other things about what was ahead that summer and fall, about our rehearsal schedule and about our target date for opening whatever show we were doing.  Again, he was no-nonsense.  He spoke out of the right corner of his mouth with solid remnants of his New Jersey accent, while his eyes flashed from their left to their right corners and back again, typically looking at no one in particular.  To me he seemed at once peculiar and spectacular, even when discussing mundane details.

Rehearsals would be seven days a week all summer, two to three hours a day, all in the evenings except for Saturday afternoons, at three different locations in the city depending on the day.  The theater had no regular space to work.  Then he gave us the headline he had buried.  Our play would open in Seattle, Washington, on September 5, at the annual Seattle Arts Festival: Bumbershoot.  Broom Street Theatre had been honored by being chosen as one of only four experimental theater troupes–among the 35 considered from around the country–to present its work at the Bumbershoot’s second annual Alternative Theater Festival.  The others were:

The Magic Theater in San Francisco, led by a young Sam Shepard, the American playwright and actor whose 1978 play, Buried Child, won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and in 1996 was nominated for five Tony awards, including Best Play, for its Broadway production.  Two of his other plays were later nominated for Pulitzer Prizes, and between 1966 and 1984 he would win a record 10 Obie Awards for writing and directing plays.  He would also be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role as the famed American pilot Chuck Yeager in the 1983 movie, The Right Stuff.

The Magic Theater of Omaha, Nebraska, led by Megan Terry, a playwright and screenwriter.   She wrote the nation’s first rock musical, Viet Rock (1966), which was also the country’s first play to protest the U.S. war in Viet Nam.  Her 1970 play, Approaching Simone, won that year’s Obie Award for Best Off-Broadway Play.  In all, she wrote 70 plays, and among other recognition she won the Dramatists Guild Award in 1983.

The Playgroup of Knoxville, Tennessee.  Knoxville’s first professional theater company, The Playgroup toured its plays around the country.

It would be heady company in Seattle on the coming Labor Day Weekend, and that June we at Broom Street did not yet have a play.  But we had a cast-in-waiting.

End of Part 1