The book title says a lot in a few words: “Scream! Bleed! Take Off Your Clothes!” (University of Chicago Press). It is a book about a wild and wonderful time that set fires in the city’s cultural landscape, sparked by a visionary named Stuart Gordon and his band of merry talents that formed and performed as the Organic Theater Company.
This outfit was described by former Tribune critic Richard Christiansen as “venturesome, innovative, energetic, improvisational, and always on the edge of disaster or triumph … a small but powerful and influential force in fostering the talent and shaping the personality of the city’s theater scene.” The late Christiansen was an encouraging witness to the decades that formed, as David Mamet put it, “the most influential epoch in American Theatre.”
The book, packed with photos, is written by a literary ensemble, if you will: Mary Griswold, a one-time set designer for the company; Cordis Heard, an actor, teacher and former ensemble member; Jim Rinnert, a writer, artist and AIDS activist; and actor Mike Saad.
They write that in the wake of being tear-gassed at the 1968 Democratic Convention here, University of Wisconsin students Gordon and his soon-to-be-wife Carolyn Purdy returned to Madison and staged a version of “Peter Pan” with all cast members in the nude, a production that Johnny Carson talked about on his “Tonight Show.” It had university regents and local politicians outraged and cops in the audience. When Gordon and Purdy got married, they used the cash from wedding gifts to put on shows and, soon enough, head to Chicago.
Gordon had been born and raised here, Purdy was from Wisconsin, and the book does a fine job capturing the times, especially the Chicago theater scene, just beginning to flex its creative muscles. There was Paul Sills, who had co-founded The Second City in 1959, but had moved on to create Story Theater. There was Jim Shiflett, who created the nonprofit Community Arts Foundation and founded Dream Theater and later Body Politic; William Russo and his Chicago Free Theater; Bob Sickinger and his Jane Addams Hull House Theater, and on and on.
New theater spaces were opening, such as Kingston Mines, and the territory was fertile for experimentation and nurturing for growth. Backstage one night, Sills listened to Gordon tell of his troubles in Madison, and said, “You should bring your company to Chicago. They’ll leave you alone here.”
And so it began, with a production of “Animal Farm” in 1970, followed by “Odyssey” and a few others. And then came “Warp! Episode I: My Battlefield, My Body,” which opened just before Christmas in 1971, described as “The World’s First Science Fiction Epic Adventure Play in Serial Form,” and a certified success. It ran at the Body Politic on Lincoln Avenue for a year and a day and, in a major gamble, was produced in New York for, as Gordon said, “The best reason of all. I wanted to be rich and famous.”
That was the first Organic show I saw and it got killed in New York. “We got mugged,” Gordon said. Back in Chicago, there came a steady stream of shows in different spaces but an ensemble that would include such actors as Joe Mantegna, Bill Norris, Jackie Taylor, Dennis Franz, Gary Houston, Richard Fire
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, Meshach Taylor, Jack Wallace. Andre de Shields, Joseph Martinez, Roberta Custer, Bruce Taylor and talented others.The next production likely to jump vividly to my mind after “Warp!” was “The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit,” adapted from a Ray Bradbury short story, and starring Mantegna and Franz at the Leo Lerner Theater and about which Bradbury wrote in a letter to Gordon, it “filled me with such joy and laughter as cannot be told.”
“Bloody Bess” came next, followed by an early work by David Mamet, then living alone in the Hotel Lincoln with, as Gordon recalls, “Plays pouring out of him … like water from a fountain.”
Gordon described an early draft of the Mamet script as “a series of two-character scenes in which everybody talked about nothing but sex. Two waitresses, two cops, two investment bankers, and so on. … It had hilarious dialogue but, guess what, no story.” But it did have a title, which Gordon said “could sell a (expletive) load of tickets.” And so was born “Sexual Perversity in Chicago,” and it is fun to read about research conducted in the Original Mother’s saloon and how Mantegna had to turn down one of the roles and his part went to Warren Casey, already famous as the co-author of “Grease,” Chicago-born but by then a huge Broadway hit. The cast also included Custer, who would also be in that play a couple of years later about baseball.
That was called “Bleacher Bums,” one of Chicago theater’s greatest hits. It came along, the book tells us, when “the company was broke. More broke than usual.” Gordon “suggested a clown caveman show” and then Mantegna said, in essence, “What about the Cubs?”
That gave birth to the joyous phenomenon called “Bleacher Bums,” research for which involved going to games and sitting in the left field bleachers (seats were $1.75) and “watching, listening and soaking up the sensations at the ballpark. They created the fictional left field bleachers in a raucous and delightful and riotous fashion. Mantegna did most of the writing but always credited the cast with helping shape the show.
It was a big hit, a seminal play in the city’s theatrical history, which includes nearly three dozen shows. But that was, as you will read in clear-eyed detail, “the last successful project of the company.”
It is something of a wonder that a book written by four distinct personalities has such a strong narrative drive and compelling flow. (Rinnert died in 2025.) The authors also give credit to John Paoletti, an ensemble member and designer, who had begun interviewing people for an oral history of the Organic in 1992, four years before his death.
By 1985, Gordon and his family were off in their Toyota to some successes in Hollywood, but this book punctuates the importance of his time here. When he died in 2020, the headline of his obituary by the Tribune’s Chris Jones was, “Did one person invent Chicago theater? If so, it was Stuart Gordon.”
Near this fine book’s end, you read, “Although the Organic Theater Company was the most original, innovative, and prolific Chicago theater ensemble of its time, fifty years later it is unknown to most young Chicago theater artists.”
That is a shame. But this marvelous book should remedy that and provide not just a few ideas but perhaps inspiration for the latest gang of theater “kids” in town. Though it will be impossible to recapture the exuberance and, indeed, the magic of the bygone era, what’s the harm in trying?