Lost, lost, I don’t wanna be lost. –Maestro Subgum and the Whole, from the song “Rainy Day”
Beau talks about the difficulties involved in covering a $2,000 overhead with $1,800 in receipts. He talks about the strains involved in working experimentally, reminding us both that “there are no models: what’s vital about the fringe isn’t just new work, it’s new forms.” He takes a moment to consider the prospect of a theater world without new forms.
Hardly compelling news.
These will be bittersweet developments for Beau, and not just because most developments seem to be bittersweet for Beau. As Jenny Magnus will later point out, he’s getting everything he’s always wanted on conditions that negate much of their appeal. Which is to say, bluntly, that he can keep his family as long as he doesn’t try to be the daddy or to cast Jenny in the wife role she no longer wants. It’s an Orpheus and Eurydice situation: They can both return to the land of the living, all right, but only if he can overcome the urge to look back. Each has to make the trip together alone.
As the O’Reilly family expanded toward Guinness book proportions, rental space became harder to find in the city; so they headed out to Crystal Lake, where they bought a two-bedroom converted vacation cottage–and became, as Beau remembers it, “the biggest family in this town, and probably the poorest. . . . We were always bohemians and weird.” Winifred (who prefers the phrase “artists and therefore out of the norm” to “bohemians and weird”) stayed at the cottage in Crystal Lake for the next 20 years. But James was much more difficult to pin down: a hard drinker with some profoundly bad habits who worked day jobs in the city and acted at night. By the mid-60s James and Winifred were separated.
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The circle of friends became a kind of tribe and migrated together, first to California and then to De Kalb, Illinois, where they lucked into possession of a veggie restaurant/folk music club called Juicy John Pink’s, lived collectively, and put on avant-garde adaptations of Kafka stories. Beau and Jenny broke up but remained members of the tribe. “All that 60s hippie shit, even though it was ten years late, was going on,” Beau says. As for Colm, “the only thing I really remember vividly [about Juicy John’s] is running down this big long bar . . . and just running right off the edge.”
