Walk down the stairs into the lobby of Goodman Theatre this fall, and you will spot a large sign proclaiming, simply, ”The New Season.” It is a plain, terse statement, purposely so, yet referring as it does to Chicago`s oldest and largest resident professional theater revving up for its 61st year, the sign is also one charged with significance.
The big ”new” in this $4.7 million season of great expectations is Robert Falls, 32, the hometown boy who after a year of conflict, crisis and organizational disarray at Goodman is taking charge in his first full season as the theater`s new artistic director with a promise to re-energize its main stage and with the belief that ”Chicago actors can change the face of classical theater in this country.”
He begins, opening Oct. 6, with a production designed to test his promises and beliefs to the full: a $400,000 production of ”Galileo,”
Bertolt Brecht`s epic-scale historical-philosophical-autobiograp hi-
cal drama, directed by Falls and with stage-and-screen-actor Brian Dennehy heading a cast of 27 players, almost all drawn from Chicago`s talent pool.
With this inaugural production and an ambitious season scheduled to end next spring with a $400,000 staging of Stephen Sondheim`s Pulitzer Prize musical ”Sunday in the Park with George,” Falls is quickly and dramatically putting a personal imprint on this prime Chicago cultural institution.
Big (6 feet 4 inches) and bearded, Falls ambles about Goodman`s warren of backstage offices in baggy pants, surgical scrubs and sockless shoes, looking a little like a curly-headed hayseed, his image the very opposite of that projected by his trim, fastidiously attired predecessor as artistic director, Gregory Mosher.
But to those who know and have worked with Falls in the decade that he has been involved in Chicago theater, the word ”genius” comes quickly when speaking of him; and though his personal style is disheveled, his conversation crackles with instantly recalled facts, passionately held opinions and remarkably sharpened insights. ”There`s nobody like him in theater here,”
says Doug Finlayson, who served as assistant artistic director when Falls headed operations at the off-Loop Wisdom Bridge Theatre in Chicago, ”and I doubt there`s anybody like him anywhere else, either.”
Falls` prominence, underlined by national and international touring productions of his shows and by his presence on the boards of several important theater institutions, almost parallels the rise in prestige that theater work in Chicago has enjoyed over the last few years.
He first came to Chicago to direct a play in the mid-1970s, while he was still a student at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, just when a phenomenal gathering of young theater artists here was taking root; and his own burgeoning career closely follows the mushrooming attention and acclaim their work here has drawn.
Fred Fine, Chicago`s enthusiastic commissioner of cultural affairs, has described Falls effusively as ”at so young an age, a symbol of our city`s theatrical greatness,” and Falls himself, responding to Fine`s compliment with mock amazement, has admitted, ”Yes, perhaps I am a living metaphor of Chicago theater.”
In truth, if you are looking for a living metaphor, Robert Arthur Falls, born Downstate on March 2, 1954, would be a perfect choice for charting the ups and downs of life in the theater in the city of Chicago. The oldest of four children of Arthur and Nancy Falls, he spent most of his childhood in Ashland, a small town of about 1,500–”a place right out of `The Last Picture Show,` ” Falls says, 22 miles west of Springfield. His mother was a member of a farming family in the area, and his father was a transplanted New Yorker, an Irish Catholic who always was ”a little uncomfortable as Andy of Mayberry,” according to his son.
Nevertheless, Arthur Falls, now retired in Sarasota, Fla., worked successfully as a Republican politician in his area, running for state treasurer in 1966, becoming Illinois assistant secretary of transportation in the early 1970s and managing, with Richard Ogilvie, Gerald Ford`s presidential campaign in Illinois in 1976.
Falls himself almost decided to go to law school to please his father, but when he finally decided to enter the theater, he recalls, ”My father wrote me one of his rare letters, saying that he loved me and that he had faith in me and in what I had decided to do. But because as a politician he knew what it was to be out of a job, he was pretty damn nervous about how I was going to make a living. He thought I ought have something to fall back on.”
For Falls, however, the die had been cast early in life. As a child, always possessed of a sense of the dramatic, he fainted each Christmastime from the surprise and suspense of the occasion. And starting with the first forays into downtown Chicago theater with his family, he began repeating routines he had seen in such shows as ”The Music Man” and ”Mame.”
He became interested ”in making stories happen,” he says, either on a puppet stage or with his school pals in elaborate live productions he adapted from the old movies he watched on television. When he was 10 or 11, for example, Falls staged his own ”happening” of the classic science-fiction movie ”The Day the Earth Stood Still.” ”I moved the audience around from scene to scene in the town park,” he remembers, ”and I had the Alien enter Earth by climbing down the ladder of the town water tower with a silver bag over his head.” Not bad for a kid.
When Falls was in 7th grade, his family moved from Ashland to Urbana, where his father became director of admissions and scholarships at the University of Illinois. The move so affected the 12-year-old that, he swears today, ”I didn`t talk to anyone for a year, and this continued practically unbroken into high school.”
To compensate for the strangeness he felt in his new environment, the youngster turned even more to the movies, entering the world of the art house and foreign-film circuit that the college town of Urbana offered. Using money made from a paper route, he attended as many as three or four movies a day on weekends. ”It was movie mania,” he says. ”I was withdrawn from real life; I had no friends; I lived totally at the movies.”
About the same time he also began collecting original cast albums of Broadway musicals, memorizing the lyrics in play after replay of the songs and staging the numbers in his mind.
By the time the Falls household moved to west suburban Lombard, when Falls was entering high school, the shy, inarticulate teenager was reaching toward the theater`s world of make-believe. At Willowbrook High School in Villa Park, Falls, a tall kid, went out for basketball, but to the dismay and anger of his coach he decided to give up that sport in favor of theater. ”I remember,” Falls says, ”that by being able to give up basketball, I really felt my life had fallen into place.”
”Terrified of auditioning,” he nevertheless tried out for a school production of ”Inherit the Wind” when he was a sophomore and managed to land a small part. From then on, there was no stopping him. He wrote, acted in and directed his own full-length plays, stealing most of his material from Second City comedy albums, Broadway shows and ”Midnight Special” routines he heard on WFMT. In quick succession, too, he acted in ”Arsenic and Old Lace,” ”No Time for Sergeants” and ”Death of a Salesman,” in which, Falls says, ”I was the most astounding Willy Loman you ever saw.”
James Harms, a professional musical theater actor who then occasionally worked as a drama coach at Willowbrook, recalls that Falls was ”a tall, gangly, skinny kid, so responsive and enthusiastic in what he was doing and so self-motivated that he made you look good, no matter what you told him to do. He was just the kind of student you hope you`ll get if you go into teaching.” Harms, appearing as Cornelius Hackle, the love-smitten clerk in the musical
”Hello, Dolly!” at a local theater, coached Falls for the same role in a student production, and, Harms says, ”Bob was so moving when he sang Cornelius` song, `It Only Takes a Moment,` that I remember thinking to myself, `He`s going to be better than I am.` ”
Falls` interest in the theater, once he had taken the plunge, was typically all-consuming. While still a student at Willowbrook, he made weekend trips into Chicago to see professional theater, watching the slick professional direction of George Keathley at the old Ivanhoe Theatre and completely surrendering to the glorious fantasy of ”Warp!” the science-fiction comic-strip serial that director Stuart Gordon`s Organic Theatre had staged with great imagination at the Body Politic Theatre on North Lincoln Avenue.
The passion for theater apparently swept away Falls` silence and alienation, for he enthusiastically entered school politics, becoming president of his junior class and president of the student council when he was a senior.
Those were the days of the Vietnam War, and, Falls says, ”What happened in the war and the peace movement were inseparable from our own school politics. We flew the school flag at half-mast after the My Lai massacre; we felt we were that involved in it.”
This involvement brought him into conflict with his father`s politics, but he maintained ”a real desire to please my parents” by taking up the study of law. It was only after being ”torn in my heart” that he decided at last to study theater at the University of Illinois, where he was accepted as a playwright on a Shubert Foundation scholarship.
He was, by his recollection, ”a terrible student, out of sync with everybody else in the department and a complete mystery to many of my teachers.” Despite that, he found his four years at the U. of I. ”a very creative time.”
”I was told I was too tall to be an actor, which left me empty and hurt, so out of spite I did as much acting as I could.” He continued his writing of poems and plays, a carryover from his shy, lonely period, and he began directing in earnest, finding that ”directing was a very social act. It`s such a community of artists, with the director shaping it all.”
Two of his classmates in theater at the U. of I. were Stuart Oken and Jason Brett, who became his first producers, in an off-campus presentation of ”Moonchildren,” Michael Weller`s touching drama of students in the Vietnam era. The play, staged in an old railroad station called The Depot, gave Falls his first great success as a director.
Oken, who with Brett later founded the Apollo Theatre Center in Chicago and went on to produce films (”About Last Night . . . ”), remembers Falls this way: ”When it came to the theater, he had a creativity that made him seem much older than he was. He had a strong sense of casting, and he was very inventive and cinematic in his direction. He could reorganize three or four versions of a script so that the play made sense, and he could incorporate music into a play so that it really added to the drama.
”He was an extremely bright, overgrown kid, terrifically funny and with tremendous energy, but outside the theater he was completely disorganized and never had any money. He was always staying at somebody else`s house.”
Fall`s own memories of his student days pretty well jibe with those of Oken. For much of his time at the U. of I., he recalls, he lived out of a car or in friends` rooms. ”When the time came for senior finals,” Falls says,
”I checked into a really crummy motel room for three weeks and spread my books out there because I just had to have a place to set down and work.”
(This nomadic way of life recurred in later years, when Falls was well established as a director in Chicago. Dan Sullivan, artistic director of the Seattle (Wash.) Repertory Theatre, remembers attending a national theater conference during which Falls lost his hotel room key and consequently wandered from place to place for a time looking for a spot to rest.)
By the time Falls was a senior, in 1976, Oken and Brett had been graduated from the U. of I. and had moved to Chicago to try to stake out their own territory in the theater, Oken as a fledgling producer and Brett initially as an actor.
Chicago in that post-Vietnam War period of the mid-`70s was a magnet for young theater artists. Actors, directors, designers and playwrights were pouring into the city, establishing small theaters in storefronts up and down the North Side. St. Nicholas Theater, founded by the rising playwright David Mamet, had established itself in a former warehouse and garage at 2851 N. Halsted St., opening in December of 1975 with Mamet`s ”American Buffalo.”
Following that production, however, there was a lull in the schedule, and Oken and Brett, now eager to establish themselves as producers, grabbed the chance to bring in ”Moonchildren” as an independent presentation for a limited run, with Falls again as director.
To do that, Falls needed to get a leave of absence from school, which the head of his department would not allow. Falls went anyway but not without some trauma because, he says, ”To this day I have nightmares about not getting out of school.” (He did graduate in 1976.)
”Moonchildren,” with Brett again in the cast, was a hit at St. Nicholas, its young cast beautifully capturing the pain and humor of the play under Falls` direction. Its success virtually assured that Falls would return to Chicago after graduation to establish himself here as a man of the theater. After helping to write and acting in ”The Great American People Show”
Downstate for the bicentennial summer of 1976, he did go to New York to study for several months with acting coach Edward Kaye Martin, but he soon returned to Chicago and started out, as usual, by ”parking myself on the couches of various friends.”
