The former “Saturday Night Live” star enjoyed a quiet moment sitting on a stool in front of the living room fireplace while guests filed into the Andersonville apartment and helped themselves to an array of home-baked desserts.
This spring Nora Dunn presented a working version of her one-woman show, “Mythical Proportions,” at a theater in Madison, Wisc., but Sunday night found her in a far more intimate setting as she fine-tuned what she hopes will be a theater piece she can debut in Chicago next year. Chana Zelig, a local artist and the embodiment of what Malcolm Gladwell called a “connector” in his book “The Tipping Point,” hosts multiple salons in her home each year, and Dunn, who had been a guest at previous ones, was taking center stage this evening.
“This is the kind of thing I love to do because it’s such a great, safe environment for a work in progress,” the 59-year-old actress and Chicago native/resident told the 50 or so guests once they had settled into the sofas, cushy armchairs and folding chairs among candles and various lamps that gave the room a warm glow.
Dunn wasn’t the only ex-“SNL” cast member trying out new material in an informal gathering over the weekend. On Saturday afternoon, Julia Sweeney, whose “SNL” tenure followed Dunn’s (Dunn was on the show 1985-90, Sweeney 1990-94), presented the seventh in a series of eight readings at the Evanston nightclub Space from an book of parenting essays she’s writing for a Simon & Schuster imprint due out in Feb. 2013.
Sweeney, now a Wilmette resident, had workshopped previous one-woman shows while living in Los Angeles before deciding to take a similar approach with this book, tentatively titled “If It’s Not One Thing, It’s Your Mother.” So she booked eight Saturdays at 4 p.m. for 45 minutes, charging $5 per admission and $15 for the entire series, with proceeds going to charity. (The last one is on Dec. 17.)
“It just forced me to keep working on it,” she said. “It was low enough stakes that I didn’t feel too much pressure. It didn’t make a difference to me how many people were there.”
As it has turned out, Sweeney’s audience has grown steadily, from about 20 the first week to about 80 on Saturday. And the benefit to her has gone beyond imposed deadlines.
“People give me good comments,” the 52-year-old writer-performer said, noting that one woman scolded her in an email about the tone she’d taken in an essay about children’s food issues. “It was really helpful. That right there is worth the whole thing.”
She said she’s actually a little sheepish about how one-sided the perceives the trade-off between patrons and her to be. “I just feel bad, like I’m using the audience,” she said, adding with a laugh: “But they’re not forced to come.”
This dynamic of artists trying out works in intimate, informal settings is tough to quantify. House parties and salons by nature are private; Zelig, who lives in her apartment with her 12-year-old daughter, invites friends to her get-together and allows them each to bring a friend but draws the line at friends of friends’ friends.
Anne Brody, a psychologist, said she’s aware of other salons that have popped up around town, but Zelig’s has its own flavor. The hostess bakes a bounty of desserts (11 on Sunday) while bringing together a diverse collection of artists and professionals to enjoy, for instance, a presentation by a physicist/artist, performances by musicians (including four double bassists earlier this year) and readings by authors. (Disclosure: I presented my 2009 book “The Foie Gras Wars” at one of Zelig’s early salons.)
“It’s like being in Paris in the ’20s,” Brody said.
“You go in there, and you feel like these are the people who aren’t watching reality shows,” Dunn said. “There’s another world out there.”
Echoing a similar sentiment from Sweeney, Dunn noted that she appreciated the opportunity to try out material that wasn’t necessarily funny. “If you go to a comedy club or iO, where I’ve gone to work, you can only work on the comedy,” she said.
Zelig was beaming that Dunn had accepted her invitation, telling her guests: “I just feel like the luckiest woman in the world having you all here and being able to do this.”
Dunn began by tucking her auburn hair into a stretched-out stocking, donning out a pair of bulky, black-framed glasses and becoming an 87-year-old Hollywood agent named Roberta, whom she later revealed to be modeled on producer Robert Evans. Taking credit for naming everyone from Rock Hudson to Warren Beatty to Bogie (“I would tell him, ‘Nobody wants to get under a blanket with a man named Humphrey'”), Roberta mused on what appears to be a key theme of Dunn’s show: the tension between myth and reality in Hollywood.
“We lived inside of a myth, and we loved it,” Roberta declared.
Roberta was part of the show when Dunn performed “Mythical Proportions” in Madison; what was new here was a series of personal reflections as the actress related how she is “hopelessly middle class” and has “never fit in with current Hollywood.” Dumped by “Saturday Night Live” not long after she refused to perform with woman-baiting comedian Andrew Dice Clay, Dunn reeled off a series of anecdotes recalling, with rueful good humor, how she fled a restaurant awe-struck after “SNL” executive producer Lorne Michaels had introduced her to Jack Nicholson and Anjelica Huston; addressed studio head Mike Medavoy by the wrong name throughout a meeting; and detailed her past drug use and contempt for NBC to someone she later learned was NBC president Warren Littlefield.
She also discussed her life in Chicago as a child (her family lived in 10 apartments and houses by the time she was 13) and adult, such as the camaraderie and crazies of the Division Street bus versus the isolation of driving in Los Angeles. In the Q&A that followed, Dunn commiserated with another former “SNL” cast member in the room, Tim Kazurinsky, who preceded her on the show.
“This was delightful,” Kazurinsky enthused afterward.
Dunn agreed, saying you couldn’t beat “telling stories, laughing and getting high on the sugar.”
Standing at the back of Space while the audience, mostly female and of an age that would have remembered her on “SNL,” took their seats, Sweeney said she was a bit apprehensive about the newest piece she intended to present: a 20-minute reflection on race as filtered through her parents and now-12-year-old adopted Chinese daughter. After informally riffing on politics (“I don’t have anything funny to say about Herman Cain, but I love it so much”) and reading a pre-adoption passage about not wanting to become “the barren aunt,” she introduced the race essay by saying, “It’s very all over the place. Here we go.”
It wasn’t as rambling as advertised, with Sweeney relating the mixed blessing of her daughter’s budding race consciousness as well as some offensive, outdated ideas presented by her mother years ago. The audience was responsive, laughing and gasping in the right places.
Sweeney said afterward that the piece “went over better than I thought.” but she wasn’t sure whether she would include the stuff about her mom in the book. “I feel bad throwing my parents under the bus like that,” she said.
Afterward, she lingered in the theater to visit with regular attendees as well as a pair of mothers, Liz Griffin and Kipra Heermann, who’d driven in from a Dayton, Ohio, suburb after reading of the show on Sweeney’s website.
“It’s very cozy and intimate in here,” Griffin said. “It makes it very personal. You feel like you know her. I can’t believe I got to sit three feet away from her.”
“We want to move to a big city,” Heermann said.
Others were glad they’re already here.
“This is a work in progress, and I love that she’s sharing this,” said Amanda Belle Culberton, a writer originally from St. Paul. “It was so raw.”
“Her raw is really, really good,” actress/writer Celia Forrest added. “I can’t believe that she’s here, and I just feel really lucky to watch her test her work. It’s one of the reasons you want to live in Chicago.”
Twitter @MarkCaro
