By Jack Helbig
Eight years ago, as a founding member of Theater Oobleck, Dorchen was at the center of the hottest avant-garde theater troupe in Chicago. His Oobleck plays–including The Slow and Painful Death of Sam Shepard, Ugly’s First World, and Mysticeti and the Mandelbrot Set–were among the group’s best work. In the almost five years since he split with Oobleck, Dorchen has grown from a writer of sprawling, entertaining pastiches to a more focused, original thinker specializing in pieces for one or two actors. These later works–Birth of a Frenchman, The Croaking Fascist and the Armband Variations, and The Life and Times of Jewboy Cain–have earned him reviews as glowing as any he’s ever received. Yet now Dorchen looks like he’s had enough.
Yet Dorchen came by his argumentative side naturally. According to Danny Baron, a childhood friend from Michigan, “Jeff inherited his frankness from his father.” Baron, who’s now a screenwriter in California, says the family’s frank discussions were known to get loud–and mildly violent. Once Dorchen kicked out a taillight on his parents’ station wagon while bickering with his mother.
Dorchen and Baron kept this charade going for a week before finally telling Thompson the truth. Thompson took the joke well, and the three became fast friends, spending hours in Dorchen’s basement watching movies on cable. The three also loved to do weird things in public. “When we first discovered theatrical hair,” Baron says, “we would put it on strange parts of our body–our palms or our forehead–and then just go to the store.”
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The air was thick with anarchistic, utopian ideas. The university’s Green Bicycles program provided community-owned bikes, which riders would leave unlocked on campus for others to use. The community also had a strong interest in experimental theater, and there was even a professional avant-garde troupe–the Brecht Company, which advanced Bertolt Brecht’s idea of drama as a forum for leftist politics.
Though these plays were attributed to specific authors, the longer works were created in concert with friends and advisers, whom the Ooblecks would later dub their “outside eyes.” The outside eyes were invited to watch a piece during rehearsals and put in their own two cents. The term outside eyes has since been adopted by other theaters on Chicago’s fringe scene. Unlike these theaters, however, Streetlight and Oobleck would apply their anarchistic ideas to staging entire plays without the benefit of a director. Oobleck, in particular, would loudly proclaim its goal of creating nonhierarchical, totally collaborative work.
The company worked on one longer piece by Isaacson based loosely on Death Takes a Holiday. But the production soon degenerated into a textbook case of how things can go wrong when you’re depending on outside eyes to fix a work in progress. The play, which Isaacson can now barely talk about, wasn’t going well in rehearsals, due in part to an actress who rebelled against the Oobleck process. Everyone had ideas about how Isaacson could “improve” his play. He was soon overwhelmed, and there was no director to guide or protect him. Ultimately the production disintegrated after the troublesome actress dropped out.
