There is the traditional approach to theater: You could call it a dictatorship. The director rules, sometimes benignly, sometimes not. The actors are there to do the bidding of the master. Sometimes they revolt, sometimes not. The play is the Bible, the Koran, the Bhagavad-Gita. It’s etched in stone. You don’t change it.
And then there’s the Oobleckian approach to theater: You could call it anarchy. There is no director. Sometimes this makes things a little crazy, sometimes not. The actors control their own destiny. The play is a fluid thing, subject to change up to the absolute last minute. It’s also subject to the whims of the actors–and even innocent bystanders who happen to wander into rehearsals. Revolt — and being revolting — is encouraged.
This makes things a little harum-scarum at Theater Oobleck, a ragtag troupe of a dozen or so actors/writers/intellectuals in their 30s committed to sidesplittingly subversive drama.
But pandemonium is half the fun.
“There’s a lot of arguing,” says Oobleck member Ben Schneider, who plays Thomas Alva Edison in the company’s latest endeavor, “Necessity,” which opened last week and plays at 8 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays through Nov. 7 at the Footsteps Theater, 5230 N. Clark St. (Admission is nominally $7, but “free if you’re broke, more if you have it.”)
“It can be a little chaotic,” Schneider continues. “Details don’t come together until the very end. But this way, you avoid the problem of a bad director. More importantly, you’re not limited to one person’s vision. Because it’s being created as we go, we discover a lot of things onstage.”
Then there are the outrageous lies they tell–all in the name of theater. Current events and history are tossed into an indiscriminate mix of satire, skepticism and scatology. As they declare on their Web site “Manny Festo,” Theater Oobleck is not incorporated, “which is inconvenient for getting grants, but allows us to stay Below the Law (a status that frees us to plagiarize and be obscene and avoid the immense bribes necessary to make a theater up-to-code in Chicago).”
“It’s a very simple post-modern strategy,” says Oobleck co-founder Jeff Dorchen, who left Oobleck to form his own company, Theater for the Age of Gold. “There’s so much information out there, and there are so many lies. A person is now responsible for figuring out what he or she thinks is true. It’s democratizing and anarchizing to be awash in that (deluge of information) and choose what you believe. It’s subversive.”
And so, in recent Oobleck productions, Anastasia, the Czarist princess, is actually a serf. Bob Dole is really a dead man, his 1996 campaign kept alive by Jack Kemp and mad Russian scientists who zap Dole’s corpse with electricity. (The experiment frequently misfires, which is the real reason why Dole repeats himself, according to Oobleckians.) Freud escapes Vienna in a flying machine built by Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who has a passionate affair with Montgomery Clift. President Clinton is a “foul-mouthed blasphemous pagan from Arkansas” who worships Hindu gods, corrects his character problem with a time machine and humps everything he sees. (“We went as far as we could to make fun of him and lo and behold, it came true,” says Schneider.)
Then there’s “Necessity,” a “bloody and historically inaccurate biography,” written by charter member Danny Thompson with the liberal input of other Oobleckians and “Outside Eyes,” friends of the company who offer up their opinions during rehearsals.
In this retelling of Edison’s life, historical figures from all walks of life get thrown into the mix. Alexander Graham Bell (David Buchen, who changes stage names with every show, and in this production is known as “David Baxter-Birney”) is a dim bulb, a raging religious fanatic and the adoptive father of Helen Keller (Martha Schoeneberg). Keller, for her part, is a potato-throwing brat who jumps teacher Annie Sullivan’s bones. As it turns out, Sullivan is really “O.T.” in disguise, O.T. being a murderous moron with a heart of gold. (“O.T.,” says Thompson, “is a cross between Forrest Gump, Lenny from `Of Mice and Men’ and Carl from `Sling Blade.’ “)
In the Oobleckian version of history, Edison, the father of the incandescent light bulb, is really an egomaniacal serial killer (“Invention is one percent inspiration and 99 percent mutilation.”) who escapes life on the chain gang and counts among his victims deaf, dumb and blind Keller and his real-life rival, Nikola Tesla, the inventor of modern-day radio.
Yes, the intent is to offend folks. After all, the Oobleckians are the guys who produced “When Will the Rats Come to Chew Through Your Anus?”
The company got its start because of an offense.
Back in 1984, Oobleck co-founder Mickle Maher was a drama student at the University of Michigan. Maher was kicked out of playwrighting class for performing a monologue he’d written about a guy who straps his landlady to a table and booby-traps her with the intent of blowing up her–and the world–with a language bomb. Maher, Dorchen and other like-minded poets, writers and actors formed Streetlight Theater Company in Ann Arbor, performing marathons of one-act plays, and graduating to full-length productions. Eventually, the group re-named itself Theater Oobleck after the green goo featured in the Dr. Seuss book, “Bartholomew and the Oobleck.”
“It was mostly a writer’s theater,” says original member Terri Kapsalis, as she sat in the dark, claustrophobic space at Footsteps Theater, who was working the rehearsal as a pair of Outside Eyes. “There was no director from the beginning.”
“No,” interjects Maher. “My version is different. We’ve got a convoluted history. Like the story of the blind men with the elephant, everyone’s got their own version of how we got started.”
Wherever the truth may lie, everyone agrees that somewhere along the way, it became written in stone that the playwright must act in his or her own play to maintain the troupe’s egalitarian spirit. They also agree that Oobleck moved to Chicago somewhere around 1987 and started performing works that sometimes befuddled critics, including the Chicago Tribune, which panned the “blithe inaccessibility” of the 1991 production of “Mysticeti and the Mandelbrot Set”: “Anyone hoping to find a consistency in the proceedings will be severely bored. . . .”
Well, nobody ever said they weren’t erratic.
In fact, their seat-of-the-pants approach means that they often cut things perilously close. Watch an Oobleck rehearsal three days before opening night and the casual onlooker will leave convinced that the unmistakable odor of flop sweat permeates the theater.
Lines are still being flubbed. Costumes and props are still missing. The play meanders off key.
And when the players hit the stage, a strange alchemy takes place. The flop sweat evaporates. Suddenly, scenes that elicited yawns pop with energy. Actors improvise bits that never cropped up in rehearsal. The audience howls with laughter.
Somehow, it works. Even stranger, the idea of Edison as a bloodthirsty maniac starts to make a perverted kind of sense.
Which Oobleckians will insist is exactly the point.
“Five days before we open, I always think, `Why did I do theater?’ ” Thompson says, laughing a bit gleefully. “There’s that momentary panic. We’re not a smooth company, we make big, clunky mistakes a lot of the time. We’re probably too cerebral. But it works because every single person is responsible for making it work. It’s a crazy way to operate. But I certainly enjoy it.”
