Mickle Maher remembers the day he became a full-time theater anarchist. It was 1984, and he was a sophomore at the University of Michigan, sitting in his Ann Arbor apartment, staring at two piles of paper on his kitchen table. One was a paper due for class the next morning. The other was an unfinished play called King Cow and His Helpers.
Everyone sat down, ostensibly to give notes to one another. Instead, a dreadful silence fell. “We all had this look of gloom,” he recalls. “Then [company member] David Isaacson spoke up. ‘OK, we’re going to take a deep breath, and we’re going to do the play again.’” They ran the show once more, then opened it the next night, performing in a cafeteria. “And people liked it. We realized then that we could do it. It could be sloppy, not be completely aligned with a vision, but out of the organic whole there was talent enough there that we could wing it.
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He packed up his things and headed east to finish his undergraduate degree. He chose Bennington College in Vermont for its strong writing program, as well as its rural backdrop. “You know, back in the 19th century, if you got sick or melancholy you got the prescriptive to go to the countryside. It worked for me. You spend two years in the Green Mountains, you’re going to feel a lot better.
So he returned to the city he’d left as a depressed, burned-out wreck only four years before, and in short order he mounted two of the most compelling and literate pieces of his career. In the 1998 Rhinoceros Theater Festival he performed The Invasion of Desire and the Resistance to That Invasion, a giddy monologue about a neurotic man unable to fall out of love with the woman who extorts money from his small experimental theater company. Then in 1999 he premiered An Apology for the Course and Outcome of Certain Events Delivered by Doctor John Faustus on This His Final Evening, his Gogol-esque retooling of the Faust legend, which was subsequently presented by the Museum of Contem-porary Art.
