'Glass half full

On a Thursday afternoon in late January, a couple of dozen people sit huddled in the chilly Steppenwolf Garage, wool hats, scarves, sweatshirts and parkas in abundance. This is, allegedly, the first run-through of Lookingglass Theatre Company’s Our Town, Thornton Wilder’s gentle, staid portrait of quotidian life and death in a small, turn-of-the-century New Hampshire town. Every high school in America has cracked this 1938 chestnut; it’s hardly the kind of material you’d expect from a company with 20 years of energized spectacles under its belt.

Laura Eason and David Schwimmer sit on stage at a rough-hewn wooden table, hedging their way through a scene between Emily and George, teenage next-door neighbors sharing ice-cream sodas after school. Like most everyone in the cast, Eason and Schwimmer met 25 years ago as theater students at Northwestern, then spent nearly a decade devoted to the Lookingglass ensemble. But as the company grew into a major cultural institution, many of the ensemble members were pulled in various directions—marriages, kids, television shows, graduate school. This group hasn’t been together in the same room working on a play in about ten years. For Eason and Schwimmer, it’s been 15, nearly as long as their characters have been alive.

The two actors maneuver toward the scene’s tiny epiphany, when the teens, friends since birth, realize they should perhaps consider being in love in the near future. But just as they prepare to declare their feelings, they each turn and silently sip their invisible sodas for ten long, telling seconds. Like nearly every moment in this rehearsal, the acting is quiet and subdued, aching emotions submerged deep beneath placid exteriors. Where are the trapezes and Indian clubs? When does the moonlit boat descend from the ceiling and the punk-rock score kick in? This is supposed to be the company’s reunion, but what have these people done with the Lookingglass ensemble?

Back in the mid-1980s, when the future ’Glassers were assembling at Northwestern, you couldn’t swing a cat in the school’s Theatre and Interpretation Center without smacking into theatrical experimentation. Professor Paul Edwards was creating sprawling literary adaptations: a three-hour production of Dickens’s Hard Times, a two-day marathon of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Professor Frank Galati made strangeness theatrically engrossing. The year most of the ensemble arrived as freshmen (1983), Galati created a swirling, fractured assemblage from Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading, with a spritely John Cameron Mitchell as the freaky, pansexual narrator. And student productions often went for broke; senior Terry Nolan, now producing director at Philadelphia’s Arden Theater, mounted a huge outdoor version of Jesus Christ Superstar, somehow managing to illuminate every tree in sight at the moment Judas commits suicide.

In this heady atmosphere, a handful of acting students found themselves enamored of highly physical, transformative theater, the kind pioneered in the 1960s by folks like Megan Terry and Jean Claude van Itallie. In his senior year, Schwimmer directed his friends in Andre Gregory’s Alice in Wonderland, a show they took to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The warm reception they received stoked their ambition, so they rounded up a few more like-minded students and created Lookingglass in 1988.

“Partly we came together out of fear of not knowing what’s after college,” says Schwimmer. “Part of it was that we really liked our process. Ensemble-driven, no star, no ego in the room. And also a very physical approach.”

They spent half a dozen years devoted to their quasi-monkish ensemble, creating bold, image-driven plays—The Jungle, The Odyssey, Of One Blood, All Soul’s Day, The Arabian Nights—and holding exhaustive group workouts and warm-ups that often ate up half their allotted rehearsal time. Mary Zimmerman, who became an artistic associate in 1992 and an ensemble member in ’94, remembers going to watch a run-through of The Jungle scheduled for 8pm. “When I got there, they were all backstage quietly eating burritos, and someone told me they had pushed things back and were now scheduled to start at 3am,” she says. “Then someone corrected him: Warm-up started at 3am; the run-through started at 5.”

Above all, they wanted to give their audiences visceral experiences: big images, physical daring, epic acting. In The Jungle, actors who were stripped to the waist, hung from their ankles and shuttled along tracks became cows ready for slaughter. In The Master and Margarita, an ingenious bit of gruesome magic made it appear that two actors were tossing another’s severed head back and forth like a toy. And in The Odyssey, a two-day production, a half-dozen men in smart cocktail attire were “slaughtered” at the hands of a god when streams of sand fell 20 feet through the air and onto their heads, turning them to stone.

Though oddly coincidental, the Lookinglass Our Town is completely unrelated to the sleeper-hit Hypocrites production last year, directed by and starring David Cromer (who is now re-staging a commerical version in New York). Instead, co-directors Anna D. Shapiro and Jessica Thebus approached the ensemble with the idea, hoping the group would bite.

“When we were first getting together in college, we were like, ‘We’re gonna be the kind of theater that never does Our Town,’ ” remembers artistic director and founding member David Catlin. “Of course, I don’t think any of us had actually read the thing.”

Explains founding member David Kersnar, “I think the heartbeat of the piece speaks to how brief our lives can be, how little things aren’t necessarily little things, ideas much more elusive than we could have given it credit for back then.”

Perhaps all the interwoven years and wisdom these actors share explain why the townspeople in their version of Grover’s Corners, even in a chilly rehearsal hall with myriad flubbed lines and missed cues, need hardly raise their voices to convey the depth of life-long friendships.