Happy Accidents (9 page)

I wanted desperately to get an audition at the Goodman Theater or the Body Politic, but I also sent my stuff to The Second City improv theater. I was surprised when I got into one of their big open-call auditions.

Improvisational theater scared me. It required basically making something out of nothing. You had to be quick on the draw and get right to the punch and somehow be consistent with your metaphors. There were no set rules for an improvised scene other than to accept everything that comes at you (called “yes and” in the parlance). There were no parameters, no structure to work within. Basically, one would need to enjoy free-falling. I needed the certainty of the script. I was not one to “go with the flow.”

At the time, I failed to see that this was what I had been doing all along on
America’s Shopping Place
. I just didn’t see improvising as one of my strengths. And at that time, I had my sights focused elsewhere. I was a
serious theater actress
. . . .

But there I found myself, auditioning on the stage at The Second City, making stuff up. I don’t remember being funny or even particularly inventive, just that I had fun goofing around. Out of nowhere, I was cast as one of the two women for a new touring company. I honestly had no idea why I had been cast, but I was just thrilled. I had a paying gig and I was going on tour! I threw my whole self at and into it.

Although the form is commonly referred to as “sketch comedy,” at The Second City we spoke of performing “scenes.” At their best, these scenes were grounded, human, and very real. The pathos was wrapped up in some sociopolitical context, with themes that were liberal and envelope-pushing, like gays or Vietnam. Someone might wear an occasional wig or funny glasses, but otherwise there was no big gimmicky shtick. It pleased me so much. I just loved it and took to it immediately.

I didn’t have to face my fear of performing improv, because we did set scenes on the road—the touring show was a “best of” past Second City scenes, scenes that had started as improvisation in Chicago and had been reworked and cultivated for the main stage before finally being sent out on the road. The heavy lifting had been done for us, and we just had to perform the finished product.

Being part of this ensemble in which I played a bevy of different characters in one performance, singing a song here and there, was a brand-new high for me. Where had this been all my life? A whole new world opened up. I loved and enjoyed the heck out of my fellow cast mates and delighted in traveling from burg to burg with them. Plus, I was touring to exotic locales like St. Louis and Kansas City via a twelve-person van, which, despite sounding horrid to me now, was enormously exciting at the time.

This work also scratched my itch to be a part of a greater whole. We were an ensemble and we had to work together for it to work at all. We were a pretty selfless group in that regard. I remember everyone being very supportive of one another, and I think we may have been unique in that way. (I have heard horror stories about members of past companies devouring one another.)

Once again, I had had a fixed idea of how things were supposed to go, but this time, instead of trying to control everything, I let things happen, and The Second City popped up out of nowhere into my life. Suddenly I was in a whole new place and ensconced in a whole new way of creating, and I felt like I had found my people: people who lived to laugh and find the funny. I showed my classically trained, uptight self the door.

Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert, Amy Sedaris, and Tim Meadows were all touring with The Second City when I was there. I got pulled off the road and onto the main stage in Chicago when they needed someone to step in for Bonnie Hunt when she got married. I stayed on as an understudy for the main stage show, usually stepping in for Bonnie or Barb Wallace. I was quite diligent with my understudy duties. I went to the show every night and sat on the bench in the back of the house where I could watch for free. I was up on everything that went on: I knew every line and every move of the current revue, and I went over and over the songs and the choreography. When they called, I was ready, and you’d never have known I hadn’t been in the show for the whole run. I felt so proud of myself I thought I would be rewarded for my good work by getting a spot of my own in the cast.

That was the plan, but no one was taking the bait, so I would pop into the office to see Joyce Sloane, The Second City’s producer and den mother, from time to time and say, “You know, Joyce, I’d love to be in the main stage company. If there’s ever an opening, I’d love to have that chance.” I had heard that this was how you campaigned for yourself. There was no more auditioning at this point. You either got moved up, or you didn’t.

“I know, Jane, I know,” she’d say. And nothing would happen.

One afternoon, I walked into her office and started my pitch again. “You know, Joyce, I’d still love to—”

“Jane,” she said, looking up, “you will never be on the main stage. It’s just not gonna happen for you here. I’m sorry.”

I turned and walked out, stunned. I had gone above and beyond for them and I got no love. That was it—I wasn’t going to make myself available for understudying anymore.

What I didn’t see at the time was that, as at
America’s Shopping Place
, I had gone to great lengths to please people who never had any intention of pleasing me back or giving me what I wanted. In my mind, I had been racking up brownie points and undying admiration, and it was true that everyone at The Second City was aware of my excessive effort and devotion. But sometimes I would do this to the point of disrespect for myself, and then, when the appreciation I thought I deserved didn’t materialize, I’d get resentful and entertain fantasies of revenge. I’d become famous one day, and they’d regret this . . . yadda yadda yadda . . . Sometimes I’d even daydream that terrible things would befall them, but then, because I was still a knee-jerk Catholic girl, I would feel terrible.

It wasn’t until after I turned on my heel and left The Second City that I started to have the tiny beginnings of awareness that this was becoming a vicious, miserable pattern. I started to see that I had been expecting the fulfillment of promises that had never, in fact, been made. It would still be a while before I would be able to see that doing things for the adoration of others, rather than for my own satisfaction, would always feed this pattern.

In the end, there were no hard feelings on either side; years later, The Second City sent me a huge floral arrangement after I won the Emmy (adoration that I do appreciate).

Though I did not enjoy feeling discarded by The Second City, it was only because my work with them ended that I was able to benefit from yet another happy accident: I was cast by the Steppenwolf Theatre in one of a series of late-night short plays. Steppenwolf was a storied theater created by actors for actors; it is safe to say that every actor in Chicago aspired to work there. It had always seemed unattainable, so much so that it wasn’t even on my radar of places to audition. Steppenwolf housed its own resident ensemble of incredibly gifted actors but would also cast outside of it when necessary. A girl I had gone to college with at Illinois State was the assistant to the artistic director and had recommended me for an audition for a short play to be performed in a late-night slot. When I came home to a message on my answering machine telling me I’d been cast, I was so excited I spilled wine on the cassette tape, garbling the recording. The story of my frantic call explaining what had happened and asking “Where do I go, and when?” must have made the rounds, because after I started, the director asked me if my answering machine was still drunk.

My first part at Steppenwolf was the principal in
Terry Won’t Talk
, a comedic one-act play about a little boy who refuses to speak. Wouldn’t you know it: I’d be playing a man’s role. My performance led to an understudy gig in the next season’s series for
Stepping Out
, a comedy about English adults taking a tap dancing class. I covered five of the actresses, diligently highlighting my script with five different colors for each character, learning the lines and blocking for each. Completely unable to get my feet to tap, I learned the arms only. One night, an actress I covered got laryngitis. Through the gift of adrenaline and preparedness, I sailed through the two-hour show in what felt like five minutes. Apparently no one noticed I was just dancing the arms. Or at least that’s what I was told. This time, my über-prepared and thorough self would be rewarded. I got cast in their next play, Craig Lucas’s dark comedy
Reckless
, with Joan Allen and Boyd Gaines.

My career was morphing into a legitimate gig. I was doing theater and had been getting work doing voice-overs for a while, and then I started to get cast in TV commercials. I was finally making a living doing what I loved, partly because I was willing to take just about any job.

In fact, during my whole time in Chicago, I can only remember one audition I wouldn’t do. I was about twenty-five or twenty-six, and there was a new agent in town we all were trying to sign with. He showed up roaring drunk at a performance of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, the very same performance that would become my Shakespeare Company swan song. Bleary-eyed and inappropriately touchy-feely, he told me to come down to his office that next Monday. Red flags noted and ignored, I was only too delighted. On that Monday he directed me to an appointment. “There’s this calendar shoot, at a garage. They’re doing a look-see for models.”

As he talked, I realized he was sending me to audition for one of those cheesecake calendars that hang in auto body shops, where buxom women smile as they wash cars in tube tops and cutoffs. “Go on down there,” he said, “and wear something sexy.” I was young, so if you looked at me in the right way, I could be somewhat fetching. I almost went to the audition, but in the end, I couldn’t. It wasn’t a moral thing—if I had been a girly girl, I wouldn’t have hesitated for one second. I even picked out an outfit that morning, but I just couldn’t make myself put it on, feeling like I couldn’t pull it off.

More evidence that I would do close to anything was the
1988
movie
Taxi Killer
. An Italian production company came to Chicago to shoot the film, which would star Chuck Connors. Back in the day, Connors had starred as
The Rifleman
on TV, and he had been in classic movies like
Old Yeller
. Now that he was in his late sixties, this super-low-budget thriller was apparently his last hurrah.

I auditioned with about a hundred other actors and managed to get cast as one of the taxi drivers. The plot (such as it was) involved female taxi drivers taking revenge on a gang of young punks that had raped one of them. The producers cast actors of all ethnic stripes from all over the world—Polish, Russian, Italian, you name it. I think they just planned to overdub the whole thing at the end. The entire production had a tacky, chaotic feel to it. But I knew that when the Italian director shouted, “
Accione!
” I’d go all-in for
Taxi Killer
.

My first day, the makeup person did her thing, but there was no mirror, so I couldn’t see what she’d done. Driving to the location, I looked in the rearview and gasped. I looked insane, with orange lips and brown smears all over my face. Ironically, the makeup was better done than the ridiculous and highly improbable script, in which I was to say, “My comrades and I tire of the abuses by men.” I was pretty sure this film was going to suck and that I would be glad there was no distribution deal for the U.S.

After a week or two of shooting, the filmmakers blew town without paying us. The Screen Actors Guild fought for us and eventually got us a few cents on the dollar, but it was basically a wash. Ultimately, and to the benefit of humanity, the movie never got made. But for me personally, as a first movie experience,
Taxi Killer
wasn’t so bad. Chuck Connors was a doll and had played sixty-six games at first base for the Cubs in
1951
. I was a huge fan of those “lovable losers.” We had lots to talk about.

The Rifleman and me.

In 1990, my friend Faith Soloway asked me to join a new show. I had met Faith when she played the piano for our Second City touring company. She doesn’t read a note of music but can play just by ear and intuition. She is a master of parody and sees the goofy in everything. She and her sister Jill, who is a great writer, were as obsessed with television as I was, so they ended up creating an homage to the greatest of seventies sitcoms (and our favorite show of all time),
The Brady Bunch
.