That’s Moment One
Posted by Michael Patrick Thornton on 10/31/2007“Playing John Merrick will save my life.” That’s what I wrote in my notebook one week into rehearsals of The Elephant Man. Flashback to 13 years earlier: I am a gangly and disproportionally excited high school freshman leaning out of my balcony seat—eyes bulging, jaw dropped, heart pounding—furiously clapping for the Steppenwolf for Young Adults production of Twelve Angry Men. Acting at Steppenwolf became a goal for me as an actor and (perhaps more importantly so) as a Chicagoan. I have spent much time since that experience in the balcony chasing that feeing and failing in articulating it. I would dream of myself playing delicate & intellectually touché-ing scenes with Malkovich, and oh, who’s this beautiful woman I love entering with tea? And a knife? Why that’s Joan Allen! And here’s Jeff Perry playing my good buddy dropping over for a late-night/rain-soaked/kitchen table with copious empty bottles of beer/confessional betrayal scene.
Those were my dreams. I’ve had lots of them. Most have come true. But never—never—in my wildest dreams did I see myself taking the stage at Steppenwolf in a wheelchair.
Had I been cast in the handful of roles I was called back for at Steppenwolf before I got sick, you would have had a different sort of actor. These days, I’m over myself enough to take the stage at Steppenwolf and forget that I am Taking The Stage at Steppenwolf. I show up with no expectations, no anticipations, no agenda towards what I want to happen. I only want to be open & receptive to what will happen, living the part as opposed to acting it/Performing it. “Get over it, it’s not about you” was the screensaver on my Meisner teacher’s computer in college. Exactly. It took seven years and two spinal strokes to get that.
This morning, I am not playing the thriller I’d imagined in my younger, able-bodied days. Joan Allen does not enter with tea, concealing a knife; it is Lily Mojekwu as “Mrs. Kendall”, and I fall for her every time. Malkovich and I are not entangled in spiraling and blazing rhetoric; instead, that scene’s played with me by Thom Cox as “Dr. Treves.” Jeff Perry, though a buddy in real life, is not my buddy and booze-soaked betrayer onstage; that’s left to Kurt Ehrmann as John Merrick’s manager “Ross.” And Kirsten Fitzgerald and Erik Hellman and Rom Barkhordar will cyclone around and through me as various doctors & royals & freaks today in The Elephant Man. And there’ll be me, in pajamas, in a wheelchair. The Elephant Man is nothing as I imagined, everything I’ve ever wanted, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
“Playing John Merrick will save my life.” We’ll see. These are simpler days. I show up to work, get dressed, and wait for my entrance. When it comes, I just try to get up the ramp. That’s it. That’s enough. That’s Moment One. And after the Final Moment, after wheeling down the ramp, then back onstage for the curtain call & post-show talk-back, I have seen gangly kids in the balcony, freshmen in high school age perhaps. They lean forward. They always clap the loudest. And I have to smile and shake my head, amazedly.