Michael K. Meyers charts his own course.
Three years ago he thought he’d retired from performance for good. But he is about to emerge from that imagined retirement with a new piece this weekend at the Rhinoceros Theater Festival, a piece that follows a fictional “M.K. Meyers” through a series of incongruous lives across history. The piece isn’t strictly autobiographical–Meyers was never a Greek god, for example–but its peripatetic structure mirrors the author’s mercurial life.
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He spent two years at the University of Illinois College of Medicine beside physicians in training. “The hardest stuff was dissection,” he says. Every day he would report to his cadaver, turning the big metal crank that would raise it out of its metal box. Then he’d unwrap the section of the body he was assigned to study and get busy with his scalpel.
Canvas and paint ruled his life until one day in 1971, when a visit from a young theater director named Robert Wilson would change his life forever. Wilson brought one of his early image-based spectacles, Deaf Man’s Glance, to the university, and Meyers was overwhelmed. “Crawling fish moved across the stage,” he recalls, his voice resonating with excitement as though he saw the show yesterday. “Gorillas came up through trapdoors on the stage through smoke. There was a frog on a chair that just sat there for an hour and a half and then hopped all the way across the stage. It was this big, slow-moving painting onstage.”
“I thought it was the best thing I’d ever done. But one of the guys in my group hated it so much he wanted to hit me. And I’d never done anything that anyone had that much feeling about.”
Back at Wattle and Daub, winter was closing in. He had to move his amateur actors indoors. “Out on the sidewalk, there was this carnival atmosphere, a lot of things going on at once. So it didn’t matter if you watched this or that, or if you looked away for a while, whatever. But indoors, I had the rude awakening that everybody watches all the time. This was theater now. The actors couldn’t wear bags over their heads anymore.”
So as he approached his 60th birthday, he decided to become a full-time author–though he says with a laugh that his work is being published “nowhere.” In truth, his short story “The Second Man on the Moon” was published in a 1998 volume of the journal Fiction, alongside Anton Chekhov, Franz Kafka, and Joyce Carol Oates. Even so, he brags, “I’ve been rejected by all the best people.”
