Actors and Killers, Cults and Madness
A theater troupe walks a fine line between sanity and monstrosity amidst the Zebra Killers.
We sat in a circle on a ratty carpet in the basement of a San Francisco warehouse. A dark-haired middle-aged woman perched on a metal chair clutching her clipboard. She regarded each of us in turn. “This is not your usual six-week rehearsal with a two-week performance. We’re on an exploration.”
She opened a well-worn copy of Jersey Grotowski’s Toward a Poor Theater and read aloud. “The theater must recognize its own limitations. If it cannot be richer than the cinema, then let it be poor. If it cannot be as lavish as television, let it be ascetic. If it cannot be a technical attraction, let it renounce all outward technique. Thus we are left with a ‘holy’ actor in a poor theater.”
Murmurs of accent rippled through the group as she turned to another bookmark. “His actors were so vocally and physically skilled that they could communicate clearly through sounds and movements. The actors would create inner harmony and peace of mind that would keep them healthy in both mind and body. Grotowski actors believe that acting is a search for self-knowledge and awareness. Their style of training taught them to break free of limitations and realize their full potential.”
She raised her eyebrows and punched the air with her pencil. “That is where we are going! We’ll work four hours a night, five nights a week, for six months, evolving a play from our explorations and improvisations.” And with those words, in the fall of 1973, we turned our bodies, psyche, and souls over to Cecile Pineda, director of the Theater of Man.
For weeks, we developed a common language through Grotowski exercises such as Sound and Movement. One actor would move to the center of a circle of actors with a gesture and non-verbal sound. Another joined the actor and took the sound and movement from them, transformed it, and passed it on to another actor.
This liberated us to move and vocalize without inhibition or thought. Often the results proved so hilarious Cecile asked us to restrain from laughter. It became the backbone of our process, along with improvisations.
At first, our improvisations were non-verbal — how would you sit on a bench if you were waiting for a lover? Had lost your dog? Your hemorrhoids bothered you? We improvised as animals, trees, sounds, and clouds.
For the first hour of each rehearsal, we warmed up with yoga or dance, or even massage, always finishing with vocal exercises. Our bodies were our instruments and we tuned them together as an organic orchestra, opening ourselves to sense another’s intention and express it physically without words.
Peter Brooke had recently legitimized and lionized experimental theater when the Royal Shakespeare Company toured A Mid-Summer’s Night Dream. Actors flew across the stage on trapeze, juggled plates on sticks, and performed on stilts in a marriage of dance, acrobatics, and drama. We embraced the cult of experimental theater, hoping Cecile’s process would transform us into an ensemble of emotional truth and create a powerful play.
There would be nudity in the performance, so we shared a nude day at the beach. There were some round bodies, lots of thin ones, and two fabulous builds in the group, John’s and Kari’s.
John had been a convict, and he was absolutely ripped. He carried himself with a feline grace, strutting with his pelvis thrust forward and his hands trailing behind in a sort of sexual parade. When John crashed at Kari’s apartment and she was mesmerized by the ripple of his muscles just lifting a coffee cup.
Kari was a swarthy, Jewish girl from the Bronx with wild curly hair that, along with her breasts, paid no attention to the laws of gravity.
One night a week, we rehearsed ensemble improvisation naked until diminutive Carol complained of being trapped in a “fuck sandwich.” After that, nude exercises were choreographed.
Our play would be based on Bomarzo by Mujica-Lainez. The novel followed Count Orsini’s life, a sixteenth-century, homosexual, hunchback, Italian prince, and rival of the Medici clan. He killed his brother and possibly others, but his fame came from the bizarre garden he created on his estate. Monstrous rock sculptures portrayed mythical creatures, screaming portals, elephants crushing foes, men ripped apart, and larger-than-life horrors set in a bucolic forest near the town of Bomarzo.
Orsini, a treasure trove of psychological torment, proved perfect for Cecile’s exploration into a Pandora’s box of symbolism, trauma, psychosis, and the fine line between sanity and monstrosity.
We researched Jungian symbolism and Etruscan myths and used them in our improvisations. A leader would non-verbally orchestrate the others into movements and sounds until Cecile called “Freeze!” One night Cecile brought Goya’s sketches of war for the exercise and we froze in the same position as the drawing, which we had not seen — a pile of bodies in a mass murder.
As we were piled in a ghastly display of carnage, the bloodied bodies of shooting victims were discovered with increasing frequency around the city streets and near our rehearsal space. Killers randomly shot down people caught alone on the street, at phone booths, or bus stops; a chilling scenario for those of us that walked or took buses.
Newspapers named them Zebra Killers, supposedly because of the radio channel police used to track them, but most citizens associated the name with the fact that it was black-on-white murders. After rehearsals on Friday, we congregated down the street at Hamburger Mary’s, but the dark streets of the warehouse district felt ominous.
The work of an actor in our theater laboratory demanded we strip away artificiality, remove masks and abandon defenses. An actor became an emotional live wire that could electrify a character with pure something…What?… Truth? I guess that was the lingua franca. Were you present? Honest? In the moment?
This quest for the holy grail of acting could not and would not remain in the rehearsal studio.
It got into my bones.
I realized I was not honest, present, or using truth as my language. I peered into the depths of my dark side, searching for the universal anima of torment. I ventured behind the curtain of my haphazardly crafted self-image into complete darkness — the unknown — who would I be there? I had no plan. I found myself defenseless, raw, open — it made me feel a little mad, in the quaint meaning of the term, not crazy — never crazy, not me — just a melancholy sadness of introspection.
Then we went deeper. We shared our dream journals — not so much in words but in their emotional truth — openly using our pain, our grudges, and our psychic burdens. And when all that was fully ripe to rotting, we came together and shared ourselves in rehearsal. We improvised with deep personal honesty; exchanges were made; hearts were shared; vulnerabilities opened to the whole group. We became a family on a psychic plane — not sharing our day-to-day burdens but the ones that haunted our dreams.
Throughout the fall, my mood darkened with the weather. My body dwindled to a wiry reed. My heart cracked open its stoic cocoon. I didn’t know what to make of this softer self. I had been so cocksure of myself when I had trained at the American Conservatory Theater, but now waves of anguish, loss, and sadness swept through me. I listened to melancholy music. Sorrow burned me down, but I was drawn to it like an emotional arsonist.
The script we received had been transcribed directly from our improvisations. I thought our work would only serve as a starting point for better writing, but it seemed our process was the product. Cecile assigned roles and we began blocking scenes and rehearsing a nude ensemble dance evoking the Minotaur and Medusa.
A squall of emotional darkness permeated our rehearsal space and seemed to shroud San Francisco that winter. The self-inflicted trauma of our inner explorations began to show. Some broke down in tears to be consoled by Annie, our stage manager and resident rock of stability.
One night, Debbie screamed when she saw a man peering into our half window to the sidewalk. We were supportive and concerned. Debbie got a ride home after rehearsal. I thought she was being overly sensitive, but the Zebra Killers struck that night just a block away. Citizens huddled in groups at bus stops, fearful of each approaching stranger. The killings piled up as our psyches dissembled into raw emotions that we acted out in the rehearsal space.
We finally performed our play, Stoneground, in the Firehouse Theater, a bare brick-walled space. Except for a scaffold and the exit stairs, there was no set. It wasn’t a terrible play, but there was no one to root for. Orsini drew sympathy as a vulnerable youth crushed by his father, but when he starts killing everyone, there was no hero, just violence, his twisted dreams, and the garden statues he infused with his nightmares.
The first two performances went as planned, but the cast was disgruntled. We called an all-company meeting before the next show, where the troupe vented their frustrations.
“The play is incomprehensible!”
“It doesn’t reflect the work we’ve done.”
Cecile’s asked, “What do you think Stoneground is about?” and was met with silence. She started to explain that the dream sequence of the labyrinth and Medusa symbolized the tortured recesses of Orsini’s mind and his fear of women.
Stephanie interrupted her. “If we can’t understand our own play, how will an audience? I love the work we have been doing for months. I think it’s powerful. Are we really avant-garde, or are we trying to fit into some cookie-cutter mold? Isn’t our work brilliant enough to trust? We should throw out the script and use it as a framework for more exploration!”
Arguments split the cast. Most were ready to gamble on Stephanie’s challenge, but a few of us protested. I said, “We worked on this for months and I want to perform. I don’t care if the audience gets it or not. Some will, some won’t. So be it.”
No one could reconcile that, after all our work, Stoneground was a flop. Cecile consented to let us try an improvisational performance.
That night we opened in the usual way, but scenes quickly lost any crafted nuance. It might have made more sense with only sound and movement. Mid-way through the third scene, Carol said, “I’m bored.” The cast agreed, dropped the rest of the scene, and lunged into the next one. On it went until intermission, or maybe “half-time” would be more fitting because it seemed like a fast-paced game of writhing and screaming.
At intermission, Cecile demanded that we play the second half as written. I don’t think anyone thought what we were doing was working, so we complied. Afterward, Cecile closed the show for good. After six months of work, we had only performed three shows.
In the days that followed, I missed the cast and rehearsals. I felt like I was falling from a great height with no landing in sight. It was terrifying and thrilling to be so unmoored — to be swept along by invisible winds of fate and mind, attuned to the intention of others but rootless in myself. I assumed that was what an actor needed and realized why actors were so ethereal, if not just plum crazy.
A few weeks later, most of our troupe met again to help mount Dance Spectrum’s production of Totentanz at Grace Cathedral. Greeting each other with joyful hugs and laughter, we installed the set for opening night. I tied thick ropes from the catwalks of the cathedral to drape ninety feet below along a line behind the altar.
That night, under the great vaulted arches of the cathedral, their performance transported me through the medieval dance of death, a parade of the holy and profane, penitents lashing themselves with cat-o’-nine-tails, priests and sinners, peasants and noblemen. The ropes, waved by the dancers, became the flames of hell, and, in the end, Death dragged his great black robe over everyone, saint and sinner alike, as all perished in the sweep of the plague. Brilliant!
Afterward, we went to the opening night party at Dance Spectrum studios. A swirl of dancers and actors filled the space. As more people were arriving and clogging the stairs, a fire broke out in the studio. A chaotic evacuation ensued, climbing down the metal fire escapes or pushing down the stairs in a panic.
We gathered our troupe and retreated to Kathy’s Victorian apartment in the Haight, where we smoked pot and drank cheap wine until we fell asleep in piles around the living room.
In the morning, with classical music, omelets, coffee, and joints, our moods lightened, which led to the kind of discussions that made me love actors — philosophical, creative, and funny. We deconstructed our ambitious failure. Totentanz had beautifully performed the darkness we had tried to express. We had explored the rich emotional trauma of our lives and dreams and the psychopathic life of Orsini, but it had only been an emotional roller coaster ride through a house of mirrors.
Stephen, the old lion of our troupe who had portrayed Orsini, summed up our experience in his rumbling purr, “We were but a tale…told by an idiot…full of sound and fury…signifying nothing.”
Debbie quipped, “Don’t you mean full of Sound and Movement?” We rolled on the floor in laughter. This quickly evolved into a spontaneous dance, all of us writhing and gyrating crazily through the pot smoke in the morning light.
Although we swore to keep in touch, few of us did. We went our separate ways, spinning out into the constellation of theater and San Francisco’s cultural evolution. That spring, they arrested the Zebra Killers who operated out of the Self-help Moving Company three blocks from our rehearsal space. San Francisco’s fear and paranoia rolled away like fog.
Jerzy Grotowski stopped giving performances from his workshops the next year, having realized that “unstructured work frequently elicits banalities and cultural cliché from participants.”
Years later, when Peter Brooke wrote about Midsummer Night's Dream, he chronicled what a failure it had been when they first tested it on audiences and it took months of further development to make it the phenomenon it became.
Stoneground never had the Bard’s words to carry its structure, only our raw psyches and the confusion of our human condition dancing madly in the nude.
