Peter Weller is the first to admit he has “the gift of gab,” as he puts it.
But unlike some people we all know, Weller — who has returned to the stage after a 20-year absence to portray architect Frank Lloyd Wright in Richard Nelson’s drama “Frank’s Home” at the Goodman Theatre — doesn’t just gab about himself.
Recently, for instance, after ordering the duck and some lentil soup garnished with cornichons and pork belly at Blackbird, Weller (slicked-back, silvering hair, dark sunglasses, pale silk scarf slung around his neck) looked up from his lunch and commanded, in a mellow stage voice: “Let’s talk about John Ruskin.”
And who could say no?
Weller zoomed through a refresher course on the 19th Century art historian and thinker known to be one of Wright’s great influences (“Ruskin comes along in the 1850s and absolutely vilifies the Renaissance … and he was furious that when man runs out of ideas he just reinvents Greece and Rome”); offered a quick albeit somewhat meandering history of the fall of the Roman Empire (“So, the tribes come in, the tribes don’t build, they get Christianized, they take over what’s already Rome, the Moors come in and they build, and they build magnificently . . . ” ); touched on the organic/additive elements of Gothic architecture versus the mathematical/deductive in Renaissance architecture; described his own conversion to the painter Piero della Francesco (“I didn’t get him, didn’t dig him”); and, probably for the first time in history, compared Masaccio’s use of single-point perspective to the car chase in “The French Connection” (both can be emotionally distracting).
And all of it, Weller said, while finishing all the bread on the table, relates to his role as Frank Lloyd Wright, and the architect’s vast influence on American culture: “He read Ruskin at 11 . . . you had him saying the same thing about America that Ruskin was saying about England: that it had no culture of its own.”
Weller is obviously a bit of a Renaissance man, who, it so happens, earned an master of fine arts degree in Italian Renaissance art history, from Syracuse University’s program in Florence; teaches a popular class at Syracuse, “Hollywood and the Roman Empire”; plays in a bebop sextet with the actor Jeff Goldblum; and is the host of the Monday-night History Channel series “Engineering an Empire.”
All of which may come as a surprise to those who know him only as a movie star (“Robocop,” “Mighty Aphrodite,” “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai” and dozens of others) or a TV star (“Star Trek: Enterprise,” “Odyssey 5,” “”Homicide: Life on the Street,” “Monk,” and most recently in “24”).
“Can we have a pen?” he asked the waiter, then pushed aside glasses and plates and began sketching the Colosseum on the paper-topped table, to explain the system of proportion in the Roman arch.
“It’s a hobby! I have no scholastic background in ancient Rome but I’ve been studying on my own for 35 years,” says Weller, who graduated from North Texas State in the late ’60s, but has been obsessed with Rome ever since his father gave him Robert Graves’ “I, Claudius.”
“Read Tacitus — go read `The Twelve Caesars’ by Suetonius — it reads like the E! Channel,” he said with a laugh. It was his former girlfriend, “the wonderful Ali McGraw,” who opened him up to art history years ago.
Weller’s relaxed enthusiasm about heady topics explains why he fell with ease into hosting that first “Engineering” series, on Rome (which evolved into the subsequent episodes examining the architecture of great civilizations around the world; next week: The Byzantines.)
`Off the cuff’
A History channel producer — tipped off by a friend of a friend of his friend Matt Dillon, who’d been on the receiving end of Weller’s impromptu lectures — called Weller up while he was in his “little pad in Italy,” and said, “Don’t you teach the Colosseum at Syracuse?”
“So I went down and he put me on camera. . . . It was totally off the cuff. Everything I’m saying in that show on Rome is completely out of my head, man — there’s no script at all.”
Returning to school wasn’t quite as carefree.
“I’m not a great academic, but I’m a great teacher,” said Weller, who decided, during a looming actors’ strike, to pursue his MFA in the spring and fall of 2001. “It was backbreaking,” he said. “I never would have done it if I’d known how hard it was going to be.”
It wasn’t just the late nights in the library, and the translating (he’s fluent in Italian), and the backpacking across the Ponte Vecchio at dawn in the bitter cold: it was his fellow MFA students, who were half his age (he’s now 59), and who made the movies look like a day at the beach, he said.
“Seven girls who were absolutely horrible-horrible! . . . because I am a movie guy stepping into their thing with no undergrad degree in art history,” said Weller, who jokes about the experience, even though it clearly still smarts. “They were mean to me! I tried to buy my way in by treating them to cappuccinos and drinks they couldn’t afford,” he said, laughing. “And it got even worse. They became co-dependent.”
Anyway, it all worked out just fine for him: He’s getting his PhD at UCLA and is now on the board of directors of Syracuse’s program abroad. “I don’t know where those other seven [jerks] are.”
Weller was also in his little pad in Italy when he was offered the Wright role, although they had no idea how truly well suited he was for it, and initially, “I wasn’t going to do it,” he said.
“I’d stayed away from [Wright] a bit because he professed to be of the [anti-Renaissance] Ruskin school.”
But his wife, “who is one of the great human beings to walk the world, said, `You know people stop you on the street all the time because they’ve seen you in this or that movie, but the only time your face lights up is when it’s one of your former students . . . or somebody saw you in a play years ago.'”
Exploring Wright
And so he got to know Wright better than he ever had before, reading, spending some time with the architect’s grandson Eric Lloyd Wright, cultivating relationships with Wright experts around the country, including Chicagoan Thomas Heinz, who wrote the “Frank Lloyd Wright Field Guide” series. “Everyone has come up to me since I’ve been here and said, “Did you know there’s a Wright house in so and so. . . . And I call Tom up almost every night and say, `Do you know there’s a Wright house in so and so,’ and he says, “Nope, that’s not a Frank Lloyd Wright.”
A cousin who lives in Stevens Point, Wis. (which is where Weller was born), also called him up about a Wright house, in Plover. “I told him he was probably wrong. But I called Tom, and he said, `Yeah, there’s [one] sitting in a valley in Plover.’ My cousin was absolutely right, and he’s doing the insurance on the roof.”
“I’ve seen all the houses. I’ve done the whole thing — I’m going to Racine next week to see his building for Johnson Wax,” Weller said.
All of which has opened up his opinion of Chicago too. “What Chicago is now, to my mind . . . is one of the most elegant cities in the world. New York is always adorable New York, but Chicago is like Paris. You can walk around Chicago and feel uplifted.”
Weller’s phone rang during dessert (one scoop pear sorbet; one coffee with heavy cream). “Oh, no,” he said into it, still wearing the dark sunglasses. One of the actresses had fallen ill, and he had to leave for an understudy rehearsal.
“I don’t know if I’d appreciate Chicago so much if I weren’t playing Frank Lloyd Wright, walking around town with all these Louis Sullivan buildings and these Louis Sullivan -inspired buildings,” Weller said, before trying to catch a cab back to the Goodman. “It’s a thrill, its’ a gift.”
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ernunn@tribune.com
