In order to become a Next Big Thing, the best Chicago director you’ve probably never heard of had to get on a plane to New York and restage a play he did here three years ago at A Red Orchid Theatre on North Wells Street.
Next Big Things are created in Chicago all the time, of course. But director Dexter Bullard has been under the radar for the past 15 years working with edgy, innovative troupes in small theaters around town. Only now, with his off-Broadway production of the paranoiac thriller “Bug,” is he being noticed in the wider show-business community. Director William Friedkin (“The Exorcist,” “The French Connection”), for example, caught the show at the Barrow Street Theatre and optioned “Bug” for the movies.
While landing in Next Big Thingland creates new opportunities, it also prompts some soul-searching for a director who cherishes the artistic freedom of small theater even as he seeks financial security. It’s a dilemma faced by many other Chicago directors, like the Goodman Theatre’s Robert Falls, and actors, like William Petersen, before him. All had qualms about moving to higher professional plateaus and their unavoidable compromises.
“Small is OK,” Bullard says, contemplating the future of his troupe, Plasticene Physical Theatre Company, and his own career. “But the existence is tenuous.” Put it this way, he says: “Plasticene lives in the mountains. The vegetation is sparse. But the freedom is fantastic.”
Bullard, 38, is an anomaly in Chicago: a major director, steeped in improv, who has yet to work with Steppenwolf (beyond a couple of workshops) or the Goodman, the Court, Writers’ Theatre, Victory Gardens or Chicago Shakespeare Theater. Nor has he really tried to work at any of those places, keeping busy at other venues, including A Red Orchid, Famous Door, Next Lab, American Theatre Company and other low-paying, high-freedom outposts.
“I am who I am,” he says, “because the city is what it is.”
He founded Plasticene, one of Chicago’s highest-grade perpetually broke experimental troupes, in 1995. The company is committed to developing shows–image-streams, really, like poems or dreams pulled into three dimensions–through intense improvisation. The company’s 2002 offering, “And So I May Return,” for example, unfolded on the stage and every other part of the Viaduct Theater on Western Avenue, allowing the audience to eavesdrop and survey several relationships enacted in various “rooms” of a vast, emotionally haunted house.
A typical Plasticene production draws around 800 or 900 people a run, Bullard says. A small number, to be sure, but fans are passionate about his often-controversial work, eager to see more of it. This fall’s show, an imagistic exploration of life under siege titled “The Perimeter,” will be directed by longtime company member Sharon Gopfert, who also teaches with Bullard.
The limited foundation and city support for the progressive, sculptural Plasticene work has prompted Bullard to consider taking the company on tour to increase its exposure. But its only tour so far was not an auspicious debut on the road.
“I encouraged the company to [take a show] to New York,” Bullard says, his near-perpetual half-smile momentarily going into a wince. “It was intended as a showcase; we hired a publicist. And then we had a snowstorm. We did great with the Chicago people [in New York] who knew us, but . . . we just didn’t make an impression in New York.”
He wonders if Plasticene would have better luck in New York after the success of “Bug.” But he also wonders if small theater companies like Plasticene, regardless of their renown, are fated to stay small.
“Some companies are lifted up by a gift–a hit show or something–and that draws more funders, and before they know it they’re following the Steppenwolf model. Which, you know, God bless it, because it’s such a wonder. And God curse it, because it’s not necessarily a viable model for everyone.”
Plasticene’s work is considered harsh and opaque by some. Even those who happily lost themselves in “And So I May Return,” “The Palmer Raids” or the most recent show, “Blank Slate”–done with a manically whirling blackboard and a few risk-prone performers–may wonder if Plasticene can achieve wider success.
“My naivete was shattered slowly over the past nine years,” Bullard acknowledges, “realizing there’s a much more intricate structure that funders and arts presenters expect when they encounter a company asking for money.” He laughs. “So. That’s been a struggle.”
Says playwright Tracy Letts, author of “Bug” and an admirer of Plasticene’s work: “As soon as the thing starts becoming organized, and incorporated and managed, Dexter starts to lose interest.”
Bullard, a graduate of Northwestern University and the Art Institute, has a full-time job teaching performance at The Theatre School of DePaul University. He also teaches classes at The Second City, where he has directed and run the touring company. On top of those duties, he’s traveling back and forth to New York for “Bug” work, typically for understudy auditions or to work with a recent cast replacement.
He flies in, gets to the theater, and attends a performance of Letts’ itchy, scratchy thriller, which opened in February and is expected to run until the end of the year. After the final moments, in which the leading performers drench themselves, naked, in fake gasoline, light a match and go up in a 10,000-watt theatrical approximation of flames, Bullard walks to a French bistro a few blocks from the theater.
On its patio one recent midsummer night, Bullard talked about his life and work.
The theater scene was different 15 years ago, he says. That was around the time he started the Next Lab as part of Next Theatre, in Evanston, scoring with precise stagings of messy shows such as “Bouncers.”
“There was a huge influx of actors coming into the town. They’d come out of all the training programs. People stayed for five or six years, then maybe they went to L.A. or to New York.
“Now, though, people stay for maybe two or three years. They try to collect a couple of resume shows, then they realize, ‘Eh, this isn’t going as well as I thought it would. I’m not making a living here.’ And they move somewhere else.”
Yet new people keep coming, and actors keep taking Bullard’s classes. On a recent Monday night, he and Gopfert taught part of a five-day Plasticene “summer intensive” on the University of Illinois at Chicago campus. The classes focus on what the Plasticene Web site describes as establishing “links from physical control to spatial awareness to contact improvisation to object encounters, [culminating] in a group creation.”
It sounds like one of the more florid singles offerings you’d find in the Learning Annex brochure. It’s not. It’s slow, careful, repetitive work, more akin to a yoga session that has run off to join a circus-skills class.
While Gopfert does some stretching and handstands against the wall, Bullard gets the students thinking about the central dilemma of the rehearsal room–“filling that awkward space between two people.” He talks about “putting action onto someone else,” about “sculpting” with bodies and in space.
In pairs, the students pretend there’s a stick five feet long connecting them, precariously. They cannot let it drop, no matter where they go or what they do. Bullard veers in and out of the groups, watching the results, which often turn into bizarre variations on the game of Twister.
An hour later, Plasticene composer Eric Leonardson arrives with his electronic gear and homemade instruments. Soon the air is filled with amplified boinnnggggs from a rubber band, twangs and string-plucking and thummpp-thummpping percussion. A new exercise: One student’s an “angel,” the other a “hero,” and the angel must catch–literally catch–the hero, who begins to fall after spotting some sort of amazing invisible temptation.
Bullard offers soft-spoken axioms throughout the exercise:
“Slow is interesting.”
“If you’re expending extra energy, you’re dancing. If you’re using only the energy you need, you’re acting.”
And this crucial one:
“Look each other in the eye. It’s a great way to start a relationship.” In the class is Bullard’s fiance, actress Tiffany Liveris. She smiles. He smiles.
Watching Bullard in his Zen-like Plasticene mode, he seems ill-suited to the high-octane, highly commercial comedy style of Second City. But the relationship has worked well, says Kelly Leonard, president of Second City Theatricals. “Theater directors have never been a good fit for us,” he says. “I find Dex to be the exception.” Bullard’s improv approach, however, is not always well received. Leonard recalls Second City actor David Pompeii saying at one Bullard rehearsal: “I’m not doing [bleeping] yoga!”
Leonard and Bullard are in early discussions about a possible Las Vegas project, a satiric burlesque revue. “Dex had this idea years ago,” Leonard says. “We kidded at the time that it’d be perfect for Vegas.” Now they’re not kidding. Burlesque is hot. Vegas is hot. And Second City already has two shows running at the Flamingo.
Fifteen years ago at Next Lab, not long after Bullard graduated from Northwestern, he met Letts, then an actor, during auditions for replacements in the long-running “Bouncers.”
“It was an ‘out of control’ show,” remembers Letts, then new to town. Bullard’s direction was “extremely energetic. He’d jump up on stage with you and give you maybe three or four ideas. You’d try one, and before you’d even have a chance to settle in, he’d be right there saying, “OR you could do this! Or THIS! Or THIS!”
A year later at the same 40-seat theater in Evanston, Letts and Bullard worked on two Howard Korder plays, “Fun” and “Nobody.” Letts was startled to see how differently Bullard was acting around this lower-keyed milieu. “He seemed to completely change his approach to suit the material,” he says.
In that project, Letts acted with Michael Shannon, then a 16-year-old high school dropout from Detroit. Years later, Shannon originated the part of Peter in “Bug” in its 1996 London premiere, with Shannon Cochran. Shannon and Cochran teamed up once again for the off-Broadway “Bug.” (Shannon left the run earlier this year.)
Set in an Oklahoma motel room, “Bug” is about a woman hiding from her abusive ex-husband. She falls in love with Peter, a man who may have been subjected to insidious military experiments and who may, or may not, have millions of tiny critters swimming in his bloodstream.
“When you’re playing a part like Peter in ‘Bug,’ you tend to focus on your character’s pathology and your own agenda,” Shannon says by phone from Los Angeles. “Dexter very rigorously told me to focus more on the connection with the other person. And he was right.”
Adds Cochran: “I think Dexter would make a fantastic film director. All of his notes start from the tiniest thing, like eye contact, or proximity of bodies to each other, or what a gesture like crossing your arms or touching someone might mean.”
Letts says Bullard’s directing style “doesn’t really get too involved in the emotional life of the characters. He doesn’t even have much to say if you talk about that kind of stuff.”
What Bullard does contribute, Letts says, can be seen in the scarifying moment in “Bug” when Agnes peers into a microscope and sees the bugs Peter has just dripped, in blood, onto the microscope slide. Her line is simply: “Millions!” Bullard came up with two ideas for the next beat: After a huge blast of scream-rock, an offstage fan blows out the candles and the scene ends in darkness–a bold stroke followed by a quick, subtle one.
“He’s got taste,” Letts says of Bullard. “He knows when enough is enough.”
Bullard’s fellow Northwestern alumnus, Stephen Colbert, did shows with him in various not-up-to-code venues. “Schumacher,” an early one-act, was improvised into existence after Bullard asked Colbert and company to read up on “viral reproduction” and “the soullessness of business.”
“We did it for, like, a dollar twenty-five,” recalls Colbert, now a pricelessly deadpan faux-news correspondent on “The Daily Show.” “Dexter would call me up every so often and say, ‘You wanna go do something?’ Meaning, he had a [theater] space for maybe nine days and we had to work fast. We’d duct-tape mattresses in the windows of an old storefront and paint everything black and get a desk.”
On one occasion, they mounted Vaclav Havel’s comedy, “The Increased Difficulty of Concentration.” The Velvet Revolution that booted out Communism in Czechoslovakia had just happened, everyone was into its leader, Havel–and here they were, performing a comedy, and no one was laughing. What to do?
“Dex built a big Vaclav Havel head, ala Terry Gilliam,” Colbert says, “and we rigged it with a spring-loaded mouth. We wrote a prologue where I did the voice, educating the audience that this was a comedy, what to expect. And it worked! It changed the reaction of the audience completely. He was always up for stuff like that.”
Plasticene’s first performance piece was called “doorslam,” and in its tightly choreographed movement the performers found surprising ways to enter, exit, spy on each other, get each other’s goat and generally make sinister trouble in a memorably dreamlike way.
“We built the three doors before we knew what the show was about,” Bullard says. “That’s the way Plasticene is. We make theater backwards. We build a set, and then find the show hidden inside of it.”
Mounted first in Chicago, “doorslam” was about “nervousness and paranoia and fear, which made a lot of sense, because we were all nervous and didn’t know if it was going to be the worst thing anyone had ever seen.”
It wasn’t. Anna D. Shapiro, at the time programming the Steppenwolf late-night lineup, invited them to do it there. It eventually was taken to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Sharon Gopfert was there with another Chicago show, and remembers being awed by the precise, mysterious flow of Bullard’s staging.
Some newer Chicago companies, such as The House Theater, have an open-faced “dog” quality, marked by lively, eager-to-please theatrics that draw on archetypal, endlessly reinterpreted myths: Peter Pan, the American West, Ray Bradbury science fiction. Plasticene never had that “dog” quality. It is more of a cat: mysterious, sometimes cryptic, but informed by a lovely, enveloping oddness.
A newer cat of a related stripe, ironically called DOG, has been around for a couple of years under the direction of Leslie Buxbaum Danzig. She is married to Adrian Danzig, one of the 500 Clown troupe members. Buxbaum Danzig staged “500 Clown Macbeth,” which has achieved more crossover success than Plasticene ever has, and probably ever will, but she says the city’s progressive theater artists owe Plasticene a lot. “Plasticene’s audience develops into a DOG audience, or a 500 Clown audience,” she says. “You see provocative work, and you get hungry for more.”
She also observes that Plasticene is at a point now, “with enough years together, that everyone expects to be paid. With DOG, no one expects to be paid. We just try not to take a huge personal loss.”
The critical success of “Bug” has gotten Bullard thinking about that and a few other things. He’s meeting with prospective theatrical agents. He wonders what a move to New York might be like, although L.A., he says, is where a lot of his old Chicago pals are.
“I know he’s dealing with the success he’s had in New York,” says Second City’s Leonard, “and the question of going to New York. He asked me about it, and I told him: ‘No! Just do good work here, and then do good work there. Make your life as an artist in Chicago, and travel around.’ He’s massively bright, and his visual sense is unequaled. I think he’ll have success wherever he goes.”
But, like other fiercely independent directors and actors who come to a crossroads in their careers, Bullard is ambivalent about going to the next level. Letts says Bullard told him that if going to New York means directing a mainstream staple like ‘A View From the Bridge’ at a middle-of-the-road regional theater, he’s not sure he’s interested. “At the same time”-a raspy chuckle here-“he’ll bitch about our peers, who’s doing what, and he’s like, ‘I wish I could get some of that work.’ And he could! He could, if he went for it.”
Anyway, Letts says, “I’m sure there was a time when the idea of teaching full time at DePaul would have been horrifying to him. Soon he’ll be 40 and married.” So in five years, what? “Same Time, Next Year” at the Drury Lane Oakbrook Terrace?
“Hey,” Letts jokes, “if he’s lucky.”
This fall, Bullard will be back to teaching at DePaul, where in the spring of 2005 he’ll direct “Under Milk Wood” by Dylan Thomas. He suspects there’s another staging of “Bug” in his future, and maybe the Second City burlesque revue in Vegas. And who knows what else, along with the teaching gigs and the ongoing–if scaled-back–commitment to Plasticene.
The candles are running low on the bistro patio in Greenwich Village as Bullard reviews the “Bug” performance that night. The latest male lead, Paul Sparks, is doing fine, he says. It’s a tricky role, in that the actor must play “both the creep and the romantic hero at the same time.”
Audiences are tricky, too. The Tuesday crowd laughed at everything, even the most heinous incidents of violence. Wednesday’s crowd was quieter, more “judgmental” in Bullard’s estimation, and the actors got scared.
Launched with a budget of $300,000, according to co-producer Amy Danis, “Bug” is hanging in there during the notoriously daunting summer months. It may even go into the black some day and start paying back its investors.
Bullard is grateful for the exposure he has gotten from “Bug,” and he admits that, in slightly altered circumstances, he might not still be around as director. The production was supposed to star Amanda Plummer, known for her gallery of ultra-eccentric characters on stage (the stigmatic nun in “Agnes of God”) and screen (the ax murderer in “So I Married an Ax Murderer”).
Plummer never saw eye to eye with Bullard. She was nervous about the nudity, resistant to his ideas. Things weren’t working out.
“Here I was, this nobody coming from Chicago; she probably thought I was 12,” Bullard says. Two weeks before “Bug” opened, it had what Letts fondly recalls as “the stink of disaster all over it.”
Normally, Bullard says, “the show’s producers would’ve fired me and kept the headliner.” But they didn’t, and Plummer quit prior to the first preview.
The producers called Shannon Cochran in L.A. on a Friday; she got to New York on Sunday. With three days’ rehearsal, “Bug” opened for the critics as scheduled. As they did in London eight years earlier, Cochran and Michael Shannon took audiences all the way inside Letts’ feverish universe. Even those who didn’t warm to the material were over the moon about the production, deemed everything from “criminally good” on up by the major New York critics.
It’s past midnight at the bistro, and Bullard is on-the-one-hand, on-the-othering the question of why we do, or attend, or believe in live theater. “I’m not one of these theater people who says, ‘The theater will one day be vital again.’ I’m also not one to say the theater’s dying. But I recognize this–here’s a metaphor, my last metaphor, and then I’ll stop:
“I make stained glass for a living. You don’t ‘need’ stained glass to build a building.”
So why make it?
“Because stained glass is irreplaceable. When you walk into a church, you know that stained glass was made by hand by someone, in a specific shop somewhere. It reminds you something about light, and of something about glass, and something about the human measure.”
Sounds nice. And the local theater scene? “Whatever the hell it is, I completely salute the Chicago style. There’s a deep integrity in it. There’s an acknowledgment that theater is supposed to be fun. It’s expressive, it’s hard-boiled, it’s living in the space. Inhabiting the characters.
“It’s not about panache, or veneer,” he says. “It’s about kicking the door open and seeing what’s inside.”
———-
On Aug. 31, the newest “Bug” cast changes will take effect: Kate Buddeke, who played Agnes in Chicago, takes over for Shannon Cochran; Jonno Roberts replaces Paul Sparks; and another “Bug” alum, Troy West, steps in as the mysterious Dr. Sweet.
