Michael Stumm stalks his meager opening-night audience like a gleeful rat. Rail thin, skittish, and inexplicably menacing in a rumpled poplin suit and limp polka-dot tie, he’s frolicking through Jim Strahs’s dizzying and disjointed monologue How to Act, offering a torrent of questionable advice to would-be actors. “Topic: anal leakage,” Stumm announces. “What are you doing about it? All the greats suffered.” But before we have a chance to consider our rectal health, he makes it clear that most everyone’s career is doomed anyway. “There is just so much to know and so little time until the demographic changes and you’re too old–so please…”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Stumm had an itinerant childhood. “My pop worked for Westinghouse, and their idea of a good time was transferring their executives every six months,” he says. “It was worse than the army.” When he finished high school he was living in Denver, devouring copies of The Drama Review and learning about convention-defying New York companies–the Living Theater, the Open Theater, the Performance Group–that were intent on making theater as immediate and visceral as Shakespeare in a lunchroom. Kindred artistic souls were out there.
Then a bunch came to town. An experimental theater from Milwaukee called Theatre X brought its first tour through Denver, and Stumm, who was 19, took a workshop with them. He clicked with an 18-year-old company member named Willem Dafoe. “I was immediately struck by him,” Dafoe says. “Very passionate. Every day he had a new obsession–a band, a book, whatever.”
His new roommate turned out to be an ambitious young painter named Jeff Koons. “He would introduce himself to strangers, ‘Hi, I’m Jeff Koons artist.’ No comma.” Koons liked to invite friends over to see the trinkets he’d picked up on 14th Street and installed in his bedroom as art. “We’d say, ‘Yeah, great, let’s go get a drink.’ But it was cool because no one knew what art was then. It was all changing so rapidly.”
That might have ruined the struggling company, but as luck would have it another avant-garde director, JoAnne Akalaitis, was up in Boston setting Endgame in a subway and receiving equally threatening letters from Samuel Beckett. “Suddenly a lot of critical ink was spilled about us and the notion of artistic ownership,” Stumm says. The Wooster Group was on the map.
“When she asked me if I wanted to be in the piece, I said, ‘Well, not really, but I’ll do it if I can just sing songs.’ Because really, by then that’s what things had boiled down to for me. So I go to rehearsals thinking I’m just going to sing, and the next thing you know you’ve got your clothes off and you’re swinging from the chandeliers.”
