Stuart Gordon’s Shock Treatment

He made the national news (and Johnny Carson’s monologue) in 1968, when he staged Peter Pan with naked Never Neverland fairies (his future wife, Carolyn, among them). “I thought nudity would suggest innocence,” says Gordon, blandly. The inspiration for the production was the 1968 Democratic National Convention, in Chicago, where Mayor Daley gave his police license to bust the heads of antiwar demonstrators. In Peter Pan, the pirates became cops; Peter and the lost boys hippies; Wendy, Michael and John straight, suburban kids; and flying became tripping. “‘Think lovely thoughts and up you go,'” says Gordon, quoting. “The lines were there. Without changing one word of dialogue, we made a political cartoon out of J.M. Barrie’s play.”

After the second performance, the police nabbed Gordon and Purdy for public obscenity. The case was dropped, but the university theater department told Gordon that if he wanted to continue directing, he’d have to submit his scripts to a faculty panel and have a professor at every rehearsal. “At which point I said, ‘I guess I just graduated,’ and left school.” He never got his degree — although the college now, in light of his success, claims him as its own.

“Stuart’s favorite word of praise,” says critic and playwright Terry Curtis Fox, “has always been ‘outrageous.’ They did The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn at the Organic, and what’s interesting is that Huck is in a lot of ways Stuart. Like Huck, there was a point at which Stuart said, ‘All right, then I’ll go to hell!’ This is a man who put his wife onstage nude at every conceivable opportunity.”

In Screw Theater’s darkest hour, help arrived from Paul Sills, director of Chicago’s acclaimed Story Theatre troupe, who read of Gordon’s troubles and invited the company to take up residence in a Chicago church. “They had an enlightened congregation,” recalls Sills, “and they let Stuart tear all the pews out.”

From Sills, Gordon learned to choose strong stories and develop original projects with a resident acting company. According to playwrights who worked with the theater, now renamed the Organic, actors, not writers, had the most power in shaping material; among Gordon’s quirks is a mistrust of words. Despite his counterculture impulses, he wanted a genuinely popular theater — a theater that would appeal to both highbrows and lowbrows.

“I have never separated art from having a good time,” says Gordon. “My feeling is that something is a classic because it has pleased audiences for many years. There’s a wonderful book on Shakespeare by Anthony Burgess, where he makes the point that Shakespeare was concerned with selling tickets the same as any other producer. He knew he couldn’t just have people reciting poetry, so he had scenes of people plucking out eyes or tearing out tongues; he has a woman making love to a jackass. You have to grab people. Roosevelt said the first job of a president is to get elected. The first job of a producer is to get an audience.”

At first, audiences were lean, and at the end of every week, the company would divide up the meager booty. The commercial breakthrough was Warp, a muscular three-part sci-fi adventure in which characters traveled through space, time and alternative dimensions (making wisecracks all the while). In his sixteen years at the Organic, Gordon oversaw thirty-seven original plays and adaptations, among them David Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago; Bloody Bess; Terry Curtis Fox’s Cops (which Gordon will direct for Tri-Star with Jim Belushi); Bleacher Bums, an improvised ensemble comedy set at Wrigley Field that has been playing in Los Angeles for seven years; and E/R Emergency Room, which became a TV series. The theater helped launch the careers of John Heard, Joe Mantegna, Andre De Shields and Dennis Franz of Hill Street Blues.

A friend of Gordon’s once dubbed the place “the take-off-your-clothes, scream and bleed theater.” William J. Norris says, “Stuart’s big line was ‘If it can be done on film, it can be done onstage, only better.’ And all the bruised bodies and broken bones were a testament to the fact that sometimes you can do it and sometimes you can’t.”

By the time Gordon left to pursue filmmaking in 1984, the Organic had a budget of over $1 million a year and attendance that cut across class lines. All that was missing were nibbles from Hollywood. While Gordon was casting around for a film project, a friend mentioned six stories by H.P. Lovecraft written under the general heading Herbert West, Re-Animator. Gordon, who has lots of doctors in his family, began to haunt the Cook County morgue.

Re-Animator became a Gothic horror comedy about a dedicated young med student who gives life (or a crazed, blood-frothing version of it) to corpses. Poor Herbert: every time he injects his Day-Glo-green reanimating fluid into the brain of something dead, it gets up and tries to bash his head in. Some gratitude. This means the whirling corpses must be killed all over again (with bone saws, axes, et cetera). Re-Animator has a headlong pace and a giddy sense of its own absurdity (though it never condescends to the genre), along with wicked, straight-faced turns by Combs, Bruce Abbott as his sweet, frazzled straight man and David Gale as a plagiarizing neurosurgeon whose head gets hacked off — his body spends the rest of the film dragging his noggin around, brains dripping.