XL Cover Story: Austin through the 'Weird' looking glass

In a play about, um, a bumper sticker, David Steakley steps through the looking glass to gather the eclectic voices of Austin

By Patrick Beach | Photos by Amber Novak
Sept. 29, 2005

Keep Austin Weird.

One of Lee Eddy's roles is that of a can of Spam, a nod to the city's annual Spamarama.

As a slogan, isn't it a wee bit desperate, a bleat whose three words translate as, "Please keep Austin weird, by which we mean patronizing indigenous businesses established by old hippies"?

Isn't the very act of making that a slogan an admission that Austin is, at some unquantifiable pace, as water erodes rock, like sands through the hourglass, even now in the process of becoming "not so weird," approaching something recognizably borderline normal?

And if we can agree that we're witnessing some epic battle for Austin's soul, can it be said for certain that Austin can be kept weird? Will the weirdness change color like twilight? Or will we simply wake up one morning and the lava lamp won't work anymore?

More to the point, what does it say about a city so in love with itself that its leading professional theater creates an original production about a slogan about itself, oftentimes performed in front of the very people who spoke the words that make the script?

We're about to find out. After a couple of weeks of shakedown previews, Zachary Scott Theatre's years-in-the-making production about the most self-satisfied, self-referential city in America's cherished eccentrics and eccentricities, "Keepin' It Weird," makes its official premiere Saturday. Culled from some 260 hours of videotaped interviews and boiled down to an effect-heavy multimedia extravaganza that runs almost three hours with intermissions, "Weird" is Zach and producing artistic director Dave Steakley's bid to hold a mirror up to the city — and perhaps stake out a shelf-stable, "Tuna"-like franchise for Zach in the process.

It comes with recorded music, live vocals, blasting air horns, fire, a car and one live pig. It is the most unwieldy thing Steakley has attempted in his 14 seasons at Zach.

Six degrees of Eddie Wilson

The notion of oral history as theater is not new. It goes back at least to the Great Depression when the Federal Theatre Project created "living newspapers" and other theatrical documentaries. In fact, Steakley had previously produced "The Laramie Project," an oral history of the Matthew Shepard case, and added filmed memories from Central Texas women to his production of "Tapestry: The Music of Carole King."

So the model was set. Roughly six years ago, he saw a show by Culture Clash, a Latino comedy troupe, in San Diego.

"It was a third in Spanish, and about characters I didn't know, and it was one of the best theater experiences I've ever had," he said.

Steakley came home and started a file: "Show about Austin."

Then the whole "Keep Austin Weird" thing happened. A fight over three words.

Red Wassenich, an Austin Community College librarian, said he generated the slogan and made the original Keep Austin Weird bumper stickers July 2000. In 2002, Book People and Waterloo Records & Video distributed bumper stickers to protest a real estate project near their South Lamar Boulevard/West Sixth Street shops that would have included the chain store Borders. Outhouse Designs in South Austin trademarked the slogan in fall 2003. The company sells T-shirts, koozies and trucker hats with the slogan.

In other words, what began as a grass-roots movement appeared to be branded, commodified, commandeered by the Man.

"I was interested in pursuing Austin through the lens of that statement," Steakley said, sitting in his office at Zach. "There were a lot of differing opinions about that slogan."

Steakley and about seven others were dispatched with video cameras to conduct interviews, initially looking for unusual, eccentric "Kelso-like" Austin characters, as he said. But as one interview subject led the interviewer to three more, the project became less 78704-centric.

Many, many, many interviews were harvested. VIPs to nobodies. Political types, business people, artists, musicians, filmmakers, lawyers, activists, moms, dads.

Eddie Wilson, of Armadillo World Headquarters and Threadgill's fame, was an eight-hour interview.

Liz Carpenter. Cactus Pryor. Richard Linklater. Will Wynn. Johnnie Guffey, a waiter at Jeffrey's since time began. Spike Gillespie. Willis Littlefield from the Bells of Joy. The very Kelso-like American-Statesman columnist John Kelso.

The other side of the oasis

Who better to play Realtor and art car enthusiast Aralyn Hughes than Aralyn Hughes?

In the middle of the interviews, the Midtown Live nightclub burned, members of the law enforcement community text-messaged ugly things as they watched, and the Race Issue barged to the front of Austin's quarrelsome and endless conversation about itself.

In his interview for Steakley, club owner Cash was angry. My club is burning, he said, and these cops, who work for me, are joking about bringing gasoline, not even knowing if anybody is still inside or not.

Interviews with Cash and others helped Steakley gain "a recognition that circumstances had not improved in many ways."

Epecially east of Interstate 35. This despite the fact that East Austin — commonly and reductively labeled as the city's minority enclave — had materially improved and diversified in recent years. (70 percent of blacks don't live there, according to the Capital City African-American Chamber of Commerce.)

Central Austinites, who call their part of town an oasis, seem blissfully unaware of these ongoing racial antagonisms. How many of them know that Hyde Park, now the cradle of Austin liberalism, began as an explicitly whites-only settlement?

"Early on, I heard a lot of Austinites lament the loss of the small town," Steakley said. "That small town exists; it's just on the east side. Seeing Austin through other eyes opens you and disappoints you and exalts you."

Preservation society

The umbrella theme remained, however: How does Austin preserve what's unique about it in the face of growth and change? As it happens, the interview with David Ansel, aka the Soup Peddler, captured the dilemma.

"You're meeting me at my very lowest point, the end of the weird Austin story, the end of this magical little thing . . . See, I don't really deliver on the bike or make the soup anymore," Ansel said in his interview.

Steakley thought, That's it. That's what the whole thing is about.

That was in June. The interviews had been transcribed and trimmed to about 30 hours. Like a sauce that simmers for days to reduce, Steakley was cutting and cutting. Like America's involvement in Vietnam, Steakley's commitment increased gradually but steadily. Now he wondered what he'd gotten himself into.

With the cast picked, rehearsals began in a classroom at Zach before Labor Day. Artist and installation supervisor Alejandro Diaz worked on the W-E-I-R-D letters, floor-to-ceiling things. W: red. E: green. I: Yellow. R: blue. D: red. The letters were festooned with all kinds of themed stuff — Lone Star cans, foil, feathers, pots and pans, a guitar, a functioning microwave oven. A globe-spanning armadillo is painted on the floor. A symbol of Eddie Wilson's nefarious plot for world domination?

Longtime comedy performer Les McGehee plays Wilson, and the script really is six degrees of Eddie Wilson. The guy pretty much does know everybody in town, and many of the show's characters can at least indirectly be connected to him. But "Keepin' It Weird" is more than a headlong dive into Austin's famously deep pool of curdled nostalgia. Even cast members who've been around a long time found they only knew pieces of the story.

In 'Keepin' It Weird,' Andre Meadows, left, plays Bells of Joy's Willis Littlefield.

In a bold instance of casting against type, famed Clarksville eccentric and Realtor Aralyn Hughes, she of the pig art car, was cast as ... Aralyn Hughes.

"I didn't know any of the characters I'm playing besides myself," she said.

"I didn't know the 37th Street lights," said Doug Rutherford, who plays Brewster McCracken, Turk Pipkin and others.

"What surprised me was how everybody at the Armadillo is still here," said Robert Newell, who plays the Soup Peddler (in superhero costume), Will Wynn and more.

What began as about a five-hour script when the cast first read it was still being cut. When the stop-and-start tech rehearsals began, the script changed nightly. A couple of weeks ahead of the official debut, and it felt like it would take that long just to work out the technical challenges.

McGehee poked his eye with a microphone. Hughes tried driving her car from backstage into the theater, but even with an exhaust hose there were fumes. Costume changes turned on a dime. Wigs flew. Cues were missed.

In other words, this is the reason they have rehearsals. Steakley was unfailingly calm, at least externally, and encouraging, even as his sleep deficit grew.

"Great," he told McGehee during a run-through of "Eddie: The Musical." "Same thing. Sing that first line as if you were selling it, not singing it."

McGehee: "But I'm still singing it."

This number, it should be noted, includes a dancing chicken-fried steak and a joint.

One night, Steakley turned to Lee Eddy, who plays, among other things, a can of Spam, and said, "This is where we bring in the kitchen sink."

When the actors weren't on, sometimes they left the theater to drill their lines. Sometimes, when Steakley was ready to do a scene with them in it, this became a problem. It was time for Hughes to drive her pink car on stage, for instance, and she seemed not to be in the building.

"Find her, please," someone said into a headset microphone. "We need her in the car. Do not let her leave the car."

Steakley very politely ordered a lockdown.

"You can't wander off," he said. "I know you want to run your lines but do not make us hunt you any more as we do these notes tonight."

Hughes was found, was wheeled on stage, began to speak and was stopped.

She blended her two monologues and skipped a section.

The night of the first preview, a maypole-like contraption that evokes the Zilker Christmas tree fell from the ceiling. A CD skipped. The pig had gas. Bad.

Some in the audience weren't sure the third act fit. After the fun and frivolity in the first two acts about the city that Salon magazine famously said likes to think of itself as Paris in the 1920s, there was all this depressing stuff about race.

Plus it seemed too long in previews. Sometimes there's a fine line between a standing ovation and stretching your legs.

Waiting for Leslie

"We keep mumbling about whether the third act is too heavy," Les McGehee said before a Sunday preview a few days later. "But it's true."

And so it is. Just about every word in the show was spoken by a real person. Some of those real people have been in the preview audiences. Liz Carpenter was there the first night. So was Kelso. Some people, McGehee wryly noted, petitioned for years to be a part of the story; they're certainly not going to skip an opportunity to see some approximation of themselves onstage.

Can actor Les McGehee, left, be as enthusiastic as deli owner and former mayoral candidate Marc Katz, right? See the show and find out.

And yet the cast isn't quite sure how they'll be received by their subjects. Fred Cantú said he liked the play but didn't recall saying anything so amusing.

"Their interviews onstage are different, for them to hear people laughing at what they say," said Rutherford.

Much of it is funny, is weird. There's a creepy video clip of "Crazy" Carl Hickerson that closes the first act that will be going through every audience member's mind when their heads hit the pillow at night. After the video screens, Lee Eddy reports trauma counselors are available in the lobby.

By this point, "Keepin' It Weird" is pretty much ready for prime time. It flows. It runs faster. Steakley is pleased enough with the show's progress that he allowed himself six hours' sleep the night before — double what he'd been getting for many nights before.

More than anything, the show is a valentine to Austin from Austin. Whether your family has been here for eight generations or you got here just after Liberty Lunch closed (oh, Austin was really something then, blah, blah, blah), like Dorothy said, there's no place like home.

"I grew up moving every four to five years," said Barbara Chisholm, who plays Daryl Slusher, hair stylist Rhonda Peters and more. "I've lived here 17 or 18 years. It's my first experience living in one place a long time. It's deeply touching and deeply personal to know what a home town is. It's about becoming part of a tapestry. It's ongoing, but there's a richness to being part of this community and this play."

Of course, everyone in a community has their own version of who's in that community. After Spike Gillespie saw the Sunday preview, she said, "I know 90 percent of the people in it, so it's like a party at my house."

Yet there's one person mentioned in most every interview who's not in the production: Leslie Cochran, everybody's favorite cross-dressing homeless person. Even though Cochran is "Mickey Mouse for our town — everybody has to get their picture made with him," Steakley said, he's also a polarizing presence. As Steakley noted, there's a reason Godot never shows up. So while characters talk about him, Leslie's not a character.

So of course there was Leslie, looking rat fabulous, right there in the first row. You can keep him out of the play, but you can't keep him out of the theater. Like the band Jelly Jar sings, "Man, that's Austin." We celebrate our bums, our bats, our men with breasts, our barbers who make prayer shawls out of hair.

Maybe, as our souperhero claims, this is the end of the weird Austin story. At least someone wrote it down. At least you can say you were there for it.

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pbeach@statesman.com; 445-3603