By Albert Williams
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“Back then it was expected that if you graduated from the Goodman you left town. There was nothing here,” says Paul, a Wilmette resident and Goodman School of Drama alumnus. In his early 20s, he’d snagged a job as a prop runner at the Ivanhoe, carrying props up and down the aisle during scene changes. Sometimes he found himself running up and down Wellington Avenue as well, working shows at both the Ivanhoe and the Chicago City Players, an experimental troupe down the block that specialized in plays by Sam Shepard, Megan Terry, and Jean-Claude van Itallie. When Keathley offered the post of resident designer to Paul, one of the things that convinced him to accept the job was the promise of designing Out Cry.
“I kept hearing that we were going to do this play,” Paul recalls. “It was in the works for months, but it never got listed on the agenda. Williams was doing rewrites to get it ready for production–it had only been done once before, under a different title in a workshop in London in 1967. I knew I could not turn down a Tennessee Williams premiere. So I did show after show, waiting. Finally it came through.”
Out Cry’s premiere on July 8, 1971, was “an event,” says Paul. The Tribune gave it a front-page overnight review, in which critic William Leonard said that the “set of a cluttered stage which converts into something like a haunted house is a triumph of understatement.” Critics also praised the performances of stars Eileen Herlie and Donald Madden. But the script itself didn’t fare so well; deeply personal but deeply flawed, it was in need of drastic overhaul–as the failure of a 1973 Broadway production, in which neither Keathley nor Paul was involved, would prove.
The Northlight space–shaped like a Greek amphitheater, with a high ceiling, a three-quarter thrust stage, and a sharply raked seating area–couldn’t be more different than the tiny bookstore back room inhabited by the Writers’ Theatre. “The whole room–including the audience–is the size of the Ivanhoe stage,” says Paul. “There are moments when the actors talk over the viewers’ heads, as if they were in the living room with them. I put architectural fragments hanging from the ceiling–sort of a ghostly effect, appropriate for a memory play.” The set contains what Paul acknowledges as “an homage to one of my favorite actresses, Ann Sothern. It’s a poster for one of her movies from the 30s, Kid Millions. I saw her play Amanda in a production of The Glass Menagerie that Keathley directed in Los Angeles–this was a couple of years before I started working at the Ivanhoe. When I met Tennessee I told him I’d seen her and she was wonderful. He said, ‘I knew she would be.’”
