I don’t know John Schneider. Maybe he sighs a lot all the time. But sitting down to fill me in on the recent goings-on at Theatre X, he seems awfully winded. I haven’t even hit on anything sensitive yet, but he knows I will, and his hangdog expression grows ever more downcast as our conversation progresses. But once we do get to the nitty-gritty of who-did-what-when-and-why, he rallies just enough to let me know that I’m poking into “personal matters that have to do with lifelong friendships and ongoing love, and not with the policies of an artistic institution.”
Well, yes and no. That’s the rub with Theatre X, where personal matters and policies have been so entwined as to be nearly indistinguishable. Unlike most traditional theater companies, in which an artistic director sets the agenda, Theatre X was set up as a collective, with the performers themselves determining what would be seen onstage. And the fare was far from typical. The Desire of the Moth for the Star, created by members Debra Clifton and Flora Coker, was based on the 15th century memoir of Marjorie Kempe, who was convinced she was destined for sainthood.
Tackling the obscure and creating original work is a good part of what Theatre X has been all about. But in the spring of 2002, the company imploded when veteran members John Kishline; his wife, Debra Clifton; and Marcie Hoffman were told their services would not be needed in the coming season. In truth, the company is still standing, with Schneider and fellow “TXer” Flora Coker running the show. The question is, is this company truly Theatre X?
These most recent travails (the company has always led a precarious existence) did not erupt overnight. And determining exactly where things went wrong is about as easy as connecting the dots down at City Hall when some scandal breaks. But the bottom line seems to be that this child of the ’60s never really mastered the fine art of growing up.
One of the longest-lived experimental theater groups in the country, Theatre X was born in 1969. Led by University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee drama professor Conrad Bishop, it was one of a number of alternative troupes that appeared across the country in those days, inspired by the boundary-breaking, in-your-face aesthetics of such predecessors as the New York-based Living Theatre and propelled by the careening momentum of America’s conflicting social, political and cultural ideals. Theatre X may not have developed a teachable technique and it may not have been as assertively transgressive as some outfits (whose performances could end in group gropes), but its efforts to revivify the art of the theater were tonic.
“One of the first things I saw when I came to Milwaukee was a brilliant production, A Fierce Longing,” recalls Renaissance Theaterworks’ Marie Kohler. “It was visually stunning, biting, balls out. It was just great theater.” The show was prompted by the life and work of prolific Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, who disemboweled himself in protest against Japan’s post-war constitution in 1970. Written by Schneider and directed by TXer Sharon Ott (now artistic director of Seattle Repertory Theatre), it played off-Broadway in New York, earning an Obie Award for production design in 1979.
By then, UWM’s Bishop and his wife, Elizabeth, had gone on to create a new company in Chicago, but Theatre X continued with Coker, who’d joined in 1970; Schneider, who arrived in 1971; Kishline, who came a year later; and Clifton, a member since 1977. Hoffman joined in 1980. Rick Graham, another professor in the UWM theater department, who began doing sets and lights for the company in 1988, was formally made a member last year. (Graham, who offered his services gratis, was not exiled with the others, but he has chosen not to participate in the current season.)
Although Theatre X became a resident of Milwaukee’s Lincoln Center for the Arts in the late ’70s, the company toured widely up through the 1980s, making a name for itself in the avant-garde theater world, appearing at venues and festivals in the United States and Europe. Beginning in 1975, the ensemble entered an especially fruitful association with the progressive Mikery Theatre in the Netherlands. The Dutch government was a generous sponsor of all things creative, and Theatre X enjoyed life abroad for months at a time, developing and performing new work. It was a good gig. Money wasn’t a problem, and the European audiences embraced the company with greater enthusiasm than most Milwaukeeans. “We spent all our time in the early ’80s basically trying to get out of Milwaukee,” says Schneider. “I used to get sick every time I came back from Amsterdam. I’d come down with some kind of stress-related disease. But it was really depression.”
In some respects, Theatre X’s woes began once they were forced to put their peripatetic ways behind them. By the mid-’80s, the circuit they’d been playing had begun to shrink. Says Schneider: “Our board said, ‘Look, if you want to survive, you need to build a base of support in Milwaukee, you need to have a presence here, you need to have a season here people can depend on.’ We knew this was true because every time we would come back to Milwaukee, it would be like starting over. People would say, ‘Oh, Theatre X, do you still exist?’ ”
In 1986, the company set up shop in a former disco on Broadway in the Historic Third Ward, which was incorporated into the Broadway Theatre Center in 1993. The first production in the new digs was a version of Schneider’s My Werewolf, a piece inspired by the writing of controversial French philosopher Michel Foucault. “I remember when we came back to Milwaukee and first moved down here,” says Coker, sitting across the table from Schneider in the company’s office. “A photograph was taken and the caption was, ‘Theatre X is back.’ Like, ‘We’re here, we’re going to stay, so watch out!’ That was a powerful picture for a while.”
“That was the beginning of this process of institutionalization,” returns Schneider. Initially a loose group of like-minded artists, Theatre X had taken its time becoming an institution. “Originally,” explains Schneider, “Theatre X was its own board, the company members were the board. In the late ’70s, Sara O’Connor [then the managing director of the Milwaukee Repertory Theater] became our first non-company-member board member. She pushed us toward figuring out that there was such a thing as a board of directors and that the board of directors is not the same as the artists.”
Grasping that concept was one thing; living with it was another. “The board
Despite these adjustments, the late ’80s were pretty good times for Theatre X. The company appeared in Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, Sweden and Germany. Schneider was awarded an NEA playwriting fellowship; Kishline and Clifton were nominated for best actor and best actress by San Francisco’s Bay Area Critics Association for their work in A History of Sexuality.
In the mid-’90s, the company took a significant turn. The board created a new position – producing director – and hired former Kentucky Shakespeare Festival staff member Michael Ramach to fill it.
By the time he was fired in 1998 for mismanagement (among other things, failing to pay the company’s taxes), Ramach had increased the ensemble’s uneasiness with the board by convincing the latter it could no longer afford to pay the company members an annual salary.
“He had a lot of influence and created a big chasm between the board and the company,” says former associate producer Anne-Marie Cammarato. “He came in and made sweeping decisions about how they were paid, the kind of theater they were going to do, and the board backed him on all that.” (Oddly enough, the board members I spoke to don’t recall much about Ramach’s background, much less where he ended up.)
In the wake of Ramach’s departure, Cammarato – now associate artistic director at Madison Repertory Theater – consulted with various theater professionals, including Milwaukee Rep managing director Tim Shields, and suggested to the board that it retain her as producer and bring in a proper business manager. Enter David Ravel.
Ravel was presented to the board by then-president Sally Duback. An artist, Duback had done sets for a show at Marquette University, where Ravel’s wife, Phylis, had recently become artistic director of the Department of Performing Arts.
“The board had me talk to David Ravel, to see what my point of view on him as a leader was,” recalls Cammarato. “I didn’t think he was qualified. He had no organizational experience. And it seemed he had a real personal artistic agenda because he was a playwright and he seemed interested in changing the programming of the theater, which I didn’t think needed to happen.”
In the ’80s, the Ravels had founded Brooklyn Playworks, which presented staged readings of new plays and works by performance artists. Just before moving to Milwaukee, David Ravel had managed a bookstore. Not a fantastic résumé, suggests John Kishline. “I told the board, ‘I think he’s a reasonably intelligent guy, but I just don’t think he’s qualified for the position.’ ”
“Kish and Debra were adamant about not hiring David Ravel,” adds Marcie Hoffman. “And they were extremely disappointed that he was hired. He didn’t like them for resisting his hiring, and he had it in for them from the beginning.” Hoffman had no such reservations. She was particularly pleased to hear Ravel state that he had no intention of interfering with the ensemble’s creative decisions. “I believed him. I thought he was being sincere,” she says.
Theatre X had always seen itself as a self-determining collective, an ensemble of equals, all of whom had a voice in determining the shows they would do (though as writer/director/actor, Schneider led the pack in shaping the company’s programming). That tradition began to falter with Ramach, who had gotten the group to mount plays they ordinarily wouldn’t, such as Good, the late C.P. Taylor’s very popular examination of the rise of Nazism. Once Ravel was onboard, sitting around hashing out a season seemed to be a thing of the past.
“I was relying on David to call the meetings,” says Kishline. “He was the producing director and responsible for creating budgets, and I would think that it might be a good idea for him to convene a meeting so that we could choose a season. That was never done. There was no communication with us at all about such things.”
Ravel disagrees. “Why did I need to call meetings? Presumably, we were all peers there. If there’s a need for a meeting, call it. I’ll be there. That didn’t happen. I think I can say that by my third year, the meetings were no longer effective. They had been difficult, but by then, it was just like, basically, the [programming] was coming from me and John Schneider.”
Internally, the breakdown in communication only exacerbated the often fractious group dynamics. At one point, Coker intimated to Hoffman that Schneider was being paid more than the rest of them. Schneider denies this. Coker says she isn’t sure what she said or thought. “I vaguely remember discovering something about John getting paid more and telling the others. Now, how I felt about it, my guess is that I imagined, ‘Hmm, this could be trouble, this is something we ought to talk about.’ ”
To Ravel’s credit, he worked successfully to retire the company’s $90,000 deficit (roughly half of its budget). He even deferred his own salary of $28,500 for his first few months on the job in order to ease the company’s financial burden. But diplomacy was not his strong suit. One local funder describes him as arrogant. Says another: “When I didn’t immediately say, ‘Yes, here’s a whole lot of money,’ he got really angry and said, ‘You don’t get it. I’m from New York, blah, blah, blah.’ That’s unfortunate because Theatre X does have this really interesting history. But that put me off enormously. The thing is, like it or not, when you’re running a nonprofit, part of your job is fundraising and part of fundraising is you can’t burn bridges, you can’t have that attitude.”
In May 2002, board member Dennis Reis got whiff of a plan to downsize the ensemble. He wasn’t on the board all that long before he sensed a “tension” between the idea that Theatre X should operate as a nonprofit entity, with the company members as employees, and the idea that the company members themselves constituted this nonprofit entity. “Most of the board didn’t spend all that much time worrying about dealing with Theatre X,” says Reis. “But David Ravel was the producing director, and he had his ideas of how this theater could grow.” Those ideas, he suggests, appealed to “some of the company members” and engendered among board members the belief that Theatre X was an independent institution, irrespective of the company. “And,” he notes, “the question – ‘Are these the best actors for what we want to do?’ – became a board discussion.”
Uncomfortable with the way things were heading, Reis informed Ravel and several board members that he was going to tell Kishline, Clifton and Hoffman that they’d be out of work in the coming season. “I said, ‘This is something that needs to be aired in the open,’ ” says Reis. “You can’t just walk in one day and tell these people who have been here for X number of years, ‘It’s over.’ ”
“It’s over,” though, was presented to the threesome not as an out-and-out dismissal but as a year’s leave of absence. This, despite the fact that the board had voted not to retain a regular company at all.
Despite Reis’ efforts, negotiation proved ineffective. In a meeting with the ensemble, Ravel made his position abundantly clear. According to Hoffman, he told them, “When I see all of you onstage together, what I look at is dead, it is rote. You don’t listen to each other. I have nothing against you as individuals and I certainly don’t have anything against you as individual performers, but I don’t want to see this combination of people onstage anymore.”
Ravel issued an ultimatum: Either Hoffman, Kishline and Clifton were going, or he was.
So how did Schneider and Coker survive this putsch? Ravel refuses to discuss what he refers to as “HR issues.” For her part, Coker offers, “I understood why I was retained and the others weren’t. It made sense in many ways. I am, for one thing, easy to get along with. And I don’t have very much ego, so if I’m not cast for a part, I don’t insist on doing a play that has me in it.”
While board members describe this turn of events as simply a structural reorganization, personalities and sentiment played a big role. “My mistake may have been that I was contentious about play selection,” says Hoffman. “I objected to a number of the choices. And that made Ravel wild with rage.”
“I butted heads with David Ravel,” admits Kishline. “At a meeting after September 11, Debra [Clifton] was actually trying to come up with positive ways to raise money given the emotional fallout of that event and the fact that the stock market was plunging. Ravel lashed out at her and I yelled even louder at him. I said, “If you want to get into a shouting contest, you’re outta yer f—ing league, buddy! Now you don’t f—ing talk to anybody that way, you got it?” He stormed out. He didn’t like the fact that I did not respect his authority as much as he wanted.”
As Hoffman sees it, “David Ravel in some way reached Flora and John, singled them out. That allowed everything else to ensue.” The suspicion that Schneider in particular had found a new best friend in Ravel was underscored when he began teaching at Marquette, where Ravel also teaches. And when Ravel brought in MU students to perform, Hoffman and her sympathetic colleagues felt the professional profile of the company was compromised.
Though David Ravel was clearly the catalyst in the shake-up at Theatre X, it seems he walked into a house of cards that didn’t take much huffing and puffing to blow away. The ensemble members all admit that a fair amount of screaming occurred over the years but insist it was part of the creative process, a lot of sound and fury that never traveled beyond the rehearsal room. Still, it’s hard not to imagine the personal dynamics driving the whole enterprise into the ground eventually.
No matter how short-lived the outbursts, Schneider was often the center of the storm. “In terms of John Schneider,” says Kishline, “I have many times over the years had verbal battles. Not over the content of what he does but his form, the way he treats people.” (In return, Schneider says of Kishline: “He’s my brother, I love him dearly. He knows that.”)
“John Schneider seems to believe that he has been the entire artistic focus of Theatre X, which I think is dead wrong,” claims Clifton. “Kish and I both have written shows, and Kish’s shows have been quite popular, as have mine.… Everyone’s input is what created Theatre X’s artistic voice and strength.”
But now, conspiracy, duplicity and betrayal – real or imagined – pervade this whole affair. With so much resentment and worry in the air, what kept this small group of people from getting together and talking things out? “Inertia,” explains Hoffman. “The inertia we experienced as a group was the very thing that made us vulnerable and made it possible for someone like David Ravel to come in and say, “You’re not a company, you’re not an ensemble.’ ”
To the aggrieved parties, one of the most galling aspects of this dissolution was the fact that both Schneider and Coker knew their colleagues’ fate weeks in advance and never said a word. “I knew about it slightly before the others,” says Schneider. “And my response was, ‘How do you think you’re going to ever do this? It isn’t going to work.’ ”
“We were doing Chomsky 9/11 when I learned about it,” says Coker. “We had two weeks to go, and it required every ounce of strength I had to do that play because it’s hard. So I lied and said, ‘I don’t know anything.’ ” Did she speak up for her colleagues later? “No, I did not come to their defense,” says Coker. “Except that it isn’t that simple because there never was an opportunity. It never came to a point where I could say to myself, ‘If I come to their defense, it’s going to save them.’ ”
Kishline, Clifton and Hoffman took on their own defense. With lawyer Walt Kelly as counsel, they approached the board looking for $3,600 in lost wages and requested that if the organization was to continue on without them, the name Theatre X be retired. The ensemble is Theatre X, they argued, and that with the ensemble dismembered, Theatre X no longer existed.
But their request went nowhere, and they considered suing.
“The Theatre X that was originally created and chartered was an unusual collective corporate entity,” says Kelly. “Whatever changes have been made by this current board… have been changes in the by-laws.” The alteration of TX, he says, was not merely theatrical or philosophical but a “legally imper-missible change from a collective form of governance to a more traditional, hierarchical, top-down, board of directors operation.”
At press time, Kishline and company had elected not to sue, partly, says Kelly, because litigation would be an expensive and risky proposition.
“Theatre X is an idea,” counters one veteran artistic director, which means it goes on. “An idea may be created by people, but it outlasts them if those who take it up hold to its core belief.”
So Theatre X goes on. Its new season started on September 25 with Schneider as artistic director and Coker as managing director. But the waters seem as muddy as ever. Supposedly, the board voted to no longer support a company, but it seems that news hasn’t filtered down to Schneider. “I don’t think that’s ever been voted on or really discussed,” he says. “Like any artistic director, I can say I want a permanent company because that’s what I need to do the art. I would present that to the board and I would imagine the most important issue would be whether or not we could afford it.”
One thing is clear: The ensemble that was no longer exists. Hoffman appeared in a Milwaukee Dance Theatre production last fall but isn’t sure when she’ll act again. Kishline appears at the Rep in October in The Sunshine Boys. Clifton is playing in the improvisatory comedy Flanagan’s Wake at the Miramar.
What is it like to go from the putative avant-garde to the mainstream? “I have to say,” says Clifton, “doing Flanagan’s Wake is fun. But it’s not about me, it’s not about the work. It’s all about the audience. So it’s very different.”
“I don’t feel the need to make avant-garde theater at the expense of my humanity,” adds Kishline. “ We’ve done wild, interesting work. Neil Simon’s work is well crafted. Totally different from the kind of work I’m used to, but it’s interesting to do it with good people. It’s a different life but no less interesting.”
Ravel – now the director of Alverno Presents – resigned last November but stayed on to direct one last show last winter. His departure is curious, given that it seems he’d gotten Theatre X reshaped just the way he intended. “Oh… um, it’s a hard job, it’s a very hard job,” he says. “It’s basically a one-person office. It was time to move on, time to do something different. I had this opportunity to teach some really cool classes at Marquette. I had this opportunity to take this really cool job with Alverno Presents. And you know.…”
While Schneider says Ravel had simply burned out, Coker suggests he was running scared. “He was threatened with a lawsuit, too, and wasn’t sure anyone would come to his rescue. He wasn’t sure how the chips would fall if he got into real trouble.”
Listening to local theater folk, one has to wonder if the essential Theatre X hadn’t disappeared long before Ravel arrived. “I’d thought of Theatre X as a very creative and artistically free environment, pretty much at the opposite end of the spectrum from a place like the Milwaukee Rep,” says David Starmer, a company member from 1985 to 1995. “I discovered that the creative energy was not within the group, it was from outside. It was a group that really required some external stimulation to produce. I always felt the ensemble was more of an idea than a practice. The group as a whole spent a lot of time waiting for leadership, and I don’t feel there was a lot of leadership within the organization.”
Hoffman, interestingly, couldn’t agree more. “Always, always, we needed someone to galvanize the company.”
Even if Theatre X had ceased to regularly generate risky plays, other artists in town still found it a good place to work. Jonathan West, co-founder and artistic director of Bialystock & Bloom, first appeared at Theatre X in the play Good.
“Theatre X had become an organization that was basically using five actors in roles that maybe they weren’t meant to be playing,” says West. “The doors of Theatre X were blown open for young performers in the community. And we worked side by side with these people who had been there for 25 years. It was really a wonderful, wonderful experience.”
Like any theater company, theatre X has been battered at the box office by the effects of terrorism, war and a bum economy. But it didn’t take catastrophes to undo it. A small ensemble of aging white performers; a budget (approximately $200,000 today) that didn’t allow it to take on new, younger members; season brochures that went out late; productions canceled mid-season – all of this added up to something that seemed rinky-dink rather than first-rate. Speaking to area theater professionals, again and again one hears frustration – frustration with a board that seemed disengaged, with an ensemble that manifested a sense of entitlement.
“They’ve been riding on their laurels for a long time, and they’ve been fiscally irresponsible for a long time,” says one prominent member of the theater community. “There’s always turmoil. And it never seems to evolve.”
What’s more, the avant-garde began entering the mainstream more than 20 years ago. Places like Brooklyn Academy of Music and Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis made experimental work palatable to larger audiences, in part because the packaging was nice. Big stages, good production values, souvenir books and T-shirts all raised viewers’ expectations. They were willing to take a shot at something wacky as long as the seats were comfy and there was a bar in the lobby.
That kind of success has made it more difficult for groups like Theatre X, with its restrictive budget and tiny performance space. It’s not unusual to see only a handful of people at Theatre X performances. As the manager of another Third Ward theater observes, “Their audience grew up, and they haven’t been able to grab a new one.”
Clearly, times have changed. Reminiscing about her early days with Theatre X, Sharon Ott says, “We just worked until we felt we had something ready to show. And you could live, the city was cheap enough. There’s no company in America that can exist like that anymore. I was so lucky to have a company like Theatre X and really be able to explore and learn a lot about myself as an artist and a person in such a protected environment.”
So much for the warm and fuzzy. Theatre X may still be operating, but John Kishline isn’t buying it. “I think they’re taking money under false pretenses. They get grants based on the reputation of Theatre X, and what’s there now is not Theatre X. And the public ought to know that, and then decide if they want to support it. But don’t call it something it’s not. Because it’s not Theatre X, no matter what the hubris of John Schneider and the board of directors might be.”
Thomas Connors is a regular contributor to Milwaukee Magazine.
