Free Milly

BEFORE THE BUBBLE BURST Murphy was the queen of Chicago performance art.

Next weekend’s return of Milly’s Orchid Show—the variety pageant that sprang from the fertile mind of Brigid Murphy and introduced scores of influential characters to Chicagoans—brings up memories of a different kind of theater scene. Once upon a time, in 1987, performance artists were about as common on Chicago stages as imitators of David Mamet are today.

Of course, “stage” was a relative term back then. At the hub of that whirling scene, the bare-bones Randolph Street Gallery—where the most challenging, baffling and influential performers in the city and the country regularly appeared—there was no stage at all. Performers held forth in a run-down, amenity-free room no bigger than a studio apartment. Audiences sat crammed together on folding chairs, several of which matched.

But oh, the gloriously inexplicable things that went on in that little space. Chicago’s Chris Sullivan extracted a sopping wet, life-size artificial lover from a mason jar and waltzed with her. New York’s John Jesurun delivered an evening-length monologue from inside an enormous gray box. On any given weekend, at places such as N.A.M.E. Gallery, MoMing Dance & Arts Center, Artemisia Gallery and Club Lower Links, performance artists defied, dissected and dismantled every aesthetic convention in the book. They even stood poised to claim the city’s “legitimate” stages as their own. Sharon Evans opened Wrigleyville’s Live Bait Theater in 1987 expressly to give her colleagues a clean, well-lighted place to put up their enigmatic work. And in a gesture never seen before or since, one of the city’s mightiest theaters, the cavernous Organic, produced an entire season of performance art.

Looking back today it’s easy to see 1987 Chicago as performance-art paradise. But even then, at least one performer felt something was missing. Murphy, then fresh out of Columbia College, had spent a couple of years performing her grandly costumed movement pieces just about anywhere she could, both here and in New York. “There was so much challenging, difficult work going on everywhere,” she says. “But the scene was so serious. And I’m a showgirl, a vaudevillian. I want fire eaters and plate twirlers.”

One Wednesday night in New York, she stumbled upon King Tut’s Wa Wa Hut, an East Village bar where a cadre of artists—dancers, filmmakers, poets, musicians, performance artists—were holding their weekly showcase in the back room. “It was Ed Sullivan gone crazy,” she says. “On the plane ride home I knew what Chicago needed.”

She was a friend of the owner of Lounge Ax, a Lincoln Avenue watering hole with a tiny backroom stage. She rounded up some usual suspects from the performance scene, tossed in a few wild cards (an operatic soprano, Samantha and Her Trained Rats) and transformed into the übersequined bumpkin emcee Milly May Smithy. And Milly’s Orchid Show was born.

“It was such a fun mess,” she says. “And zero budget. I was gluing sequins on the Orchid Show sign. I was opening and closing the curtain we strung up.”

The mayhem caught on. With an ever-changing lineup, it played monthly for two and a half years, introducing Chicago to David Sedaris, David Cale and Blue Man Group, packing in crowds even after Lounge Ax knocked out a wall to make room for 300 people. When the Park West invited Milly in 1990, Murphy knew that, contrary to her nature, she had to get serious.

“In a venue like that, I couldn’t just wing it,” she says. “I had to really script Milly’s monologues. And of course I needed back-up dancers and an all-girl band…who are actually guys in drag.”

She also knew she could start booking bigger names (Syd Straw, Eric Bogosian Frank McCourt). But she never gave up on the local small-fry performance artists or the home-grown variety acts. “Suddenly I could put an avant-garde artist in front of a mainstream audience,” she says. “And hey, if the audience doesn’t like it, I’ve got a Mexican girl waiting in the wings who can really twirl a rope.” As the shows got larger, they also got fewer and further between, and eventually slowed to a trickle. Now that Murphy is a wife and mother, this revival is like a dodo-bird sighting.

True to form, Milly’s 21st anniversary show features some of the old guard from Chicago’s performance scene—Paula Killen, Matthew Owens, John Conners—and better-known Orchid alumni such as Nora Dunn, Robbie Fulks and Poi Dog Pondering. For one evening, Chicago can be performance-art paradise again.-

Milly returns to the Park West July 19.