The summer before last, on the day Lawrence Steger’s performance piece The Swans (re-mix) was scheduled to open, the show’s writer, director, and star lay gasping for breath in a tuberculosis isolation ward at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. He hadn’t mounted an evening-length piece for nearly five years, and he’d spent almost a year developing this one with fellow cast members Laura Dame and Douglas Grew. It’s traumatic enough for a performer to cancel opening night, but for Steger, who learned in 1990 that he has HIV, it was the realization of one of his worst fears as an artist.
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Steger plays a tyrannical director struggling to create scenes sophisticated enough to contain his grandiose cinematic vision. But the harder he tries, the more quickly his scenes collapse. “It’s all about losing control,” he says. “That fear runs the show.”
Ludwig, who spent two fortunes–his family’s and his country’s–commissioning operas and building fairy-tale castles, devoted more time to dressing his attendants in Louis XIV costumes and taking boat rides across his indoor lagoon than tending to affairs of state.
Actually, Steger’s estimated time of departure may be later than originally estimated. A week after leaving the hospital, he was center stage in The Swans, apparently no worse for the wear. The show played to packed houses at Randolph Street Gallery and then traveled to Glasgow. After 18 months of TB medication (which had to be completed before he could start his current course of protease inhibitors) he’s back to his old impishly dissipated self–and then some. Sitting in a cafe, his bleached scrunch of hair a bit more unruly than usual after a night of overindulgence at a Museum of Contemporary Art opening (he never made it past the beer table), he stares through tinted glasses into a Marlboro Lights pack containing one lonely cigarette. Like Rais and Ludwig, he finds reality decidedly lacking.
