FOR FAMOUS DOOR THEATER, the summer of 1999 turned dramatic.
The 12-year-old group had a successful winter with its off-Broadway production of the coming-of-age drama “Beautiful Thing” and another big hit with “Remembrance,” in which Chicago veteran and hometown favorite Mike Nussbaum starred.
But spring gave rise to the debacle of “Two Planks and a Passion,” a show that has them on their knees financially and has drained them of their usual zeal.
Rather than retreat — rather than play it safe with a quick comedy or a commercial crowdpleaser — the company has decided to tackle Joshua Sobol’s sobering Holocaust drama “Ghetto” as its next project. It’s a bold, almost crazy move spearheaded by artistic director Dan Rivkin, director Calvin MacLean (who brought the script to Famous Door), and a somewhat reluctant Larry Neumann Jr., the company’s managing director and its only paid staffer.
Neumann fears “Ghetto” might be beyond Famous Door’s means. But MacLean and Rivkin have made a forceful argument about the play’s importance and, swept up by their enthusiasm, he has signed on to do a show that will push the company’s annual budget to $500,000 — its biggest ever.
But what neither Neumann nor MacLean know is that Rivkin, the man in charge of Famous Door’s artistic futures for the last dozen years, has been harboring a secret.
On a warm August afternoon, Rivkin stands at the center of the empty black box of a stage at the Theatre Building. Gathered in the front rows are 11 members of Famous Door’s troupe, who are expecting a routine report on the company’s upcoming production of “Ghetto.”
Instead, Rivkin quits.
“I’ve been doing this for 12 years now,” Rivkin says, as he reads off his notes. “And it has become apparent to me that it is in the best interest of the company that I step aside.”
For most members of the company, there has never been anyone else at the helm of Famous Door. Each one of them was brought in by Rivkin, or has worked side by side with him in an intense and intimate way for years.
But though the decision has been long coming, Rivkin has never breathed a word of his personal struggle to anyone except his wife, Elaine, also an actor with the troupe, and, just a few minutes before his public announcement, to Marc Grapey, the person with whom he co-founded the company in 1987.
The decision to step down comes after more than a year of late-night discussions with Elaine, after he’d put in regular work days with Johnson Controls, then another 6 to 10 hours each night with the theater.
“My family is my primary responsibility,” says Rivkin, whose soft voice and generally sunny disposition belies his almost Herculean efforts on behalf of Famous Door. “But then we — both Elaine and I — have this other thing, this passion for the theater that we can’t live without. I mean, the downpayment of what should have been our first house went to produce `Conquest of the South Pole’ and to outfitting the theater. For about a year all we did was discuss how important our family life is, especially our 3-year-old daughter, Elise.”
When Elise was born, everything changed for Rivkin. Not only did he feel the responsibility of providing for her but taking care of Elise forced Elaine out of work for almost a full year. “It put a real burden on her,” he says. “And it raised the stakes for me.”
Before the meeting, he wrote out his resignation because he was afraid that if he tried to talk off the cuff, he’d be overwhelmed by emotion. “I wanted it understood this wasn’t abandonment,” he says. “And that I wanted very much to participate, to participate strongly.”
After his announcement, there is a stunned silence.
“I feel really sad,” actress Laura Fisher says, and breaks into tears. “Is there anything that might happen that would make you stay?”
“No,” Rivkin replies. “I only have a finite amount of time in my life.”
After Rivkin’s done talking, members of the company walk up to him one by one and talk privately. Briefly, he and actor Roderick (“Rick”) Peeples embrace. Later, Neumann, in an emotional encounter, says he plans to apply for the job and may leave the company altogether if he’s not picked.
Afterward, Rivkin goes home to Elaine, who greets him with a necessary hug. “With Elaine, it was like a conclusion,” he says. “I got teary-eyed but I didn’t actually weep. Mostly, I was very relieved. I felt overwhelmed by the company. I got this great sense of togetherness. I just felt they understood.”
– – –
Stocky, balding, graced with the easy manners of a locker room regular, Rivkin is an unlikely actor. Should you meet him on a plane, you might assume, correctly, that he is a salesman.
He found his way to theater, in fact, because he wasn’t growing fast enough in high school to continue as a jock. “I was always into sports, and I played football my freshman and sophomore years in high school,” he recalls. “But suddenly everybody grew but me. I was getting killed.”
Son of Bloomingdale’s police chief, he also grew up putting on proverbial neighborhood plays, and he’d dabbled in theater in junior high. So when football went bust, he got involved in theater, a member of a team that won the Illinois state drama competition with a selection from “I Never Sang for My Father.” (Rivkin, then in his teens, played the father.)
“One of the most influential people in my life is Mike Dice, my high school drama teacher,” he says. “He had us watch `Streetcar (Named Desire’) and do scenes. I thought it was really cool. Here I was, watching young Marlon Brando and getting a real appreciation for the kind of actor I wanted to be — physical, dramatic. That got me, that captivated me. And, you know, I still have that dream.”
That high school theater championship earned him an acting scholarship to Illinois State University, where he majored in drama and met, on a brief visit, legendary Broadway director Jose Quintero (“Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”) “We invited him to our house for lunch, and he talked about his experiences. We told him our idea of moving to Chicago to start a company, and he said, `Just do it. As long as you have something you want to say.’ “
On a night in Chicago, he saw the Steppenwolf production of “Balm in Gilead” and thought he caught a glimpse of his own future. “I wanted to do that kind of powerful, visceral work,” says Rivkin. “But I wanted the company we founded to be more than friends. I wanted it to be an organization that would endure and thrive. I knew even then that, eventually, I’d have to walk away.”
After he moved here, Rivkin acted with several troupes, including the Commons Theatre, where he worked with a young MacLean. That’s also when he met Grapey, who had an office job with Steppenwolf, and a script he wanted to mount about the life of the late playwright Joe Orton called “Black and Blue.”
The two of them formed a company they named after a famed 1930s New York jazz club, where musicians took to carving their names on the door as a rite of passage. “Jazz as a musical form is very theatrical for me,” Rivkin says about the name. “However you play the music is a lot like how an actor plays a part.”
While Rivkin possesses an easygoing charm, Grapey’s personality is strong-willed, forceful and blunt. He is more traditionally handsome, and like a lot of actors who start fledgling theater companies here, he has since developed a much more high-powered acting career on his own. He had a big break in an important role in “Griller” at the Goodman a few years back, he plays a recurring character on the rising NBC television series “The West Wing” and he now spends four months of the year in Los Angeles “doing the pilots,” auditioning for television and movie roles. In Chicago, he has a career in advertising voiceovers, a lucrative moonlighting gig pursued by a lot of Chicago stage actors.
“A lot of soul searching was spurred (when Grapey left for L.A. in 1989),” admits Rivkin. “Marc and I have always been on different paths. What he had going back then was this youthful look; I was losing my hair. It was his time. Whereas for me, I was in my late 20s playing character roles. I knew I wasn’t going to go to Hollywood and play character roles. It was better to build a resume, to build a company.”
Grapey came back in 1992. But, after 12 years with Famous Door, he seems a little weary of how much the troupe must struggle.
“We give the illusion of prosperity, I think,” he says. “But we’ve never been there. We’ve never made the step up to the next level. Yet, we’re older than Roadworks, we’re older than Lookingglass, but we never came from affluence or Northwestern and all that that means. We were always working class.”
But Grapey’s face lights up when he talks about the troupe’s history, revealing some of the passion and love that starts these theaters and keeps them going.
“I was 20 years old, I’d just left college and I was working at Steppenwolf in the box office back when John Malkovich and Gary Sinise and John Mahoney and Laurie Metcalf were there all the time. I served as Malkovich’s assistant director on two shows. Someone introduced me to Dan, we had $500 and we put the show (`Black and Blue’) on in a theater on Buena Avenue in Uptown that was a little like Beirut. The “L” would come roaring by and everything would shake. We used lights from my parents’ Kankakee dress shop for lighting equipment, and Dan had his parents store seats from a shuttered movie theater that we lugged to Chicago in a truck. At least, I had the presence of mind to know this was a great time in my life.”
He served briefly as artistic director by himself, and for another quick stint, as co-artistic director with Rivkin. “Dan and I have fought each other for the past 12 years, but in a good way,” he says. “He’s all those things a leader has to be. He can be a bully and intimidating, but he can be forceful. He’s the one who has kept the theater going.”
– – –
There’s a sad paradox to life in the off-Loop theater. Necessarily, these modest troupes are built on the sweat and passion of the individuals who create them, foster them and fight tirelessly for their survival. At the same time, often as soon as a year or so, these very individuals burn out, working by day, acting by night and carrying the 24-hour burdens of running a not-for-profit organization.
At that point, many companies simply fold. But those that make it find new individuals willing to come in, take on someone else’s vision and then move on.
In mid-August, the ensemble members meet to talk about what they’re looking for in a new artistic director. The session is designed as a preliminary one: They don’t plan to pick anyone tonight.
They gather at Fisher’s North Side home, and, after a brief back-yard social, they jam into a circle inside her soft-lit living room, whose academic furnishings (including two world globes) and orange-tinted walls hint of a Parisian salon. A dog yelping obnoxiously next door lends an air of reality: Off-Loop theater companies are accustomed to surroundings tinged with a little adversity.
At first, the discussion serves as a chance to salute Rivkin. “You’ve been good at being a diplomat.” says ensemble actress Hanna Dworkin, “Someone who can funnel and embrace others’ ideas as well as balancing a broad range of people.”
“We need someone who’s almost a glue, who can take everyone’s input and channel it together,” says Peeples. “And good at relating our theater to the rest of the community,” adds set designer Robert G. Smith.
The two-hour session is lively, frank and wide-ranging, touching on qualities they want in a leader (not a dictator and not an outsider); the mission of the company (there’s a general consensus the troupe should focus more on new work, though good new plays are nearly impossible to find); and company commitment, which has lagged somewhat since the troupe left the Jane Addams Center as a permanent home in 1997 and a system of committees fell by the wayside.
“Since we lost our home, there just isn’t as much full involvement,” Dworkin says.
As the empty beer bottles accumulate (“An off-Loop artistic director definitely needs to be able to drink lots and lots of beer,” someone jokes), enthusiasm mounts, too, with pledges to broaden the company’s appeal to other artists.
“We’ve now got quite a lot of respect in this community, and I think we should take advantage of that,” says Karen Kessler, a director.
Elaine Rivkin notes, “It would be great if we could get every company member to find just one new script each year and bring it for consideration.”
At the end of the meeting, Rivkin asks the group if anyone wants to toss his or her hat into the ring for the artistic director job. Four people speak up: Kessler, managing director Neumann and actors Patrick New and Scott Kennedy.
“I wasn’t surprised by Karen and Larry,” says Rivkin. “But Scott. . . . He’s been with the company such a long time, and he’s so very dedicated. I just didn’t realize he was interested in a leadership position.”
He confesses, though, he’s a little worried about Neumann. “I think Larry wished we’d had more time to talk about (my resignation) a little bit,” he says. “I know he’s concerned about where we are headed. A new artistic director means changes.”
– – –
On Saturday, Aug. 28, 13 members of the ensemble crowd into the tiny, cramped, blandly decorated conference room at the Theatre Building to interview the four candidates. One by one, they come in and answer a series of pre-determined questions (“What are the strengths of Famous Door?” “What are the weakness?” etc), each candidate sitting in the hot seat for about an hour. The session resembles both a marathon and a drama.
New, for instance, shows up in a dark green suit and fancy dress shoes, a dramatic statement in a room full of casual jeans, shorts and T-shirts, the costume of most staff gatherings. In contrast, Neumann wears a gaudy Hawaiian shirt, brown slacks and a brown fedora. In the interview, the natty New makes a big point about the theater’s image, and in the discussion afterward, everyone agrees his strength is his slick sense of public relations.
But that undoes the 31-year-old actor too: He tells the group at one point, “I’m a facilitator, not a visionary.” The ensemble agrees later, after all the interviews are finished, that his strengths are not necessarily those needed in an artistic director.
Neumann, meanwhile, gets some knocks for his casual approach: He apparently showed up similarly attired to a performance of “Beautiful Thing” attended by an interested New York producer. “Here he is managing director and he didn’t make more of an effort,” someone grumbles. More significantly, despite several pointed questions on the subject, Neumann fails to differentiate between the visions of managing director and artistic director. And he has never directed a show for the company.
The most remarkable session of the evening, though, comes when Kennedy, who has long hair and a long beard, sits down and recites his own prepared story from notes on a legal pad. Without even acknowledging the fact, Rivkin dispenses with the prepared questions and lets Kennedy go on for a solid hour, a mix of mission statement and personal confessional. Kennedy, nicknamed “Skid,” explains his long history with the company, his hard work in the early days and some disappointments as he failed to be cast.
“For a while friends would ask why my own company wouldn’t cast me,” he recalls. “When those very friends were lucky enough to be cast in one of our shows, they tactfully quit asking.”
“There was so much personal feeling,” says Rivkin later about Kennedy’s presentation. “I thought he really needed to get them out, to have a forum. There was some stuff directed at me, which was a little hard to hear. But here was somebody who had stepped away and now wanted to step back in . . . and I . . . it was so important to listen.”
Among other things, Kennedy blames a long, debilitating bout with carpel-tunnel syndrome on his volunteer typing for the company. It led to a long spell of depression: “When you fancy yourself a playwright and you can’t type, you’re in a bad, bad place,” he says.
Now, however, he’s back again, writing a new play and acting with the group, and he uses the interview as a chance to explain to the ensemble everything he has been through. The message sinks in deeply. In their discussion afterward, some of the younger members who don’t know his history are especially moved and impressed.
In the end, 7 of 13 votes, a simple majority, go to the final candidate, Kessler, who arrives in a plain black dress and impresses with her keen intelligence and disarming humor. She knows the theater, she’s an accomplished director with a good track record and she has an air of authority. After the secret ballot, some members in the post-interview discussion wonder if she might be too blunt, but in the end they stay with their choice and decide to recommend her as their pick to the board of directors, which will make the final choice in September.
They also vow to encourage New’s participation in public relations efforts, to give Neumann a chance to direct and to re-embrace Kennedy, who they think would make an excellent literary manager.
A week later, Kessler says, “I’m thrilled they had enough trust to give it to me. I feel we are at a very exciting place, and despite our growing pains over the last year, I’m optimistic.” She makes no pretense of humility: “I do believe they chose well and that I’m suited for this job.”
Separately, Neumann says he’s resigned to the choice and won’t, after all, be leaving his job. “I do what I do well,” he says, and then concedes, “I can see why they made the decision they made.”
Besides, it looks as if he’ll have a juicy part in “Ghetto” that he’s very enthusiastic about.
In the meantime, director MacLean also has approached Rivkin about taking on a major role in “Ghetto.” Rivkin tells him he can only do it if he gets an Equity contract. “I have to offset some of the baby-sitting expenses,” he says. “I have to give my wife a break.” It will be the first time he’s ever been paid for acting with his own company.
The night after the board of directors officially approves Kessler as the new artistic director, Rivkin, who will stay on in the new unpaid position of executive director, says he is surprisingly happy. “It’s the point of no return,” he says. “And no regrets either. I feel really at peace with all of this.”
