Comedians Defying Gravity

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Editor’s note: Chicago playwright, novelist, actor, director, and disability rights activist Susan Nussbaum died April 28 of pneumonia at 68. Playwright Mike Ervin, who collaborated with Nussbaum as cowriter on the comedy revue The Plucky and Spunky Show and whose 1999 play, The History of Bowling, was directed by Nussbaum, remembers his friend and mentor.

Everybody should read Susan Nussbaum’s novel Good Kings Bad Kings right now. Drop everything you’re reading or doing. 

Not only will it be one of the most satisfying reads you’ve had in a long time, but you’ll  understand why so many of us in the disability community are so broken up about her recent death.

When you read Susan’s book, you’ll hear clear and powerful voices telling the story of disabled teens in Chicago who have been dumped in a dead-end, state-operated segregated school for disabled youth. In the end, you’ll be sad that there is no more of this writing to come.

What comes through loud and clear in this book and all Susan’s writing about disability is her intense love for the disability community. But she wasn’t a touchy-feely, huggy person in the least. She expressed that love by undertaking projects that were exhilarating to those who participated in them. That project could be a street protest or a mutual support group for disabled girls or any number of other things.

I owe a debt to Susan for a lot of things, but mostly for getting me involved in the Chicago theater scene more than 30 years ago. My impact on Chicago theater may not have been monumental, but its impact has been monumental on me. I’ve met some of the finest, most admirable people I’ve ever known, and had some of the most fun, while doing my theater work.

Susan (and another guy whose name I don’t remember) wrote a disability-themed sketch comedy called Staring Back that was produced at Second City e.t.c. in 1983. Susan performed in it, too. I was jazzed up watching it. I’d never seen disability matters handled with such skewering humor! It was about time! That was the kind of stuff I wanted to write.

A few years later, Susan asked me if I wanted to write her next show with her. Of course I jumped at the chance. The result was another disability-themed sketch comedy called The Plucky and Spunky Show, which was produced at the good old Remains Theatre in 1990. The cast included Susan and another wheelchair user, a Deaf person, and a blind person.

I had never written for stage or been involved in theater in any way before then. Hell, I’d only seen a handful of plays. But I went on to write a play called The History of Bowling and it was produced at Victory Gardens Theater in 1999 and 2000. Susan was the director both times. After that, a play Susan wrote called No One as Nasty appeared at Victory Gardens and I helped with the production. These plays featured protagonists with disabilities. 

I’m real proud of all that. What I enjoyed most about being a theater collaborator with Susan was that our senses of humor were so in sync. We were both big fans of sarcasm, dark humor, and absurdity. Working on a show with her was exhilarating for me because it was a lot of laughs.

I have one more Susan story to tell. It doesn’t have anything to do with theater but it must be told.

Susan proudly called herself a socialist. She once told me that her dream partner who could satisfy her every need would be a “Marxist-Leninist wheelchair repairman.”

So of course Susan was one of the people who arranged for some disabled people from Chicago to travel to Havana to break bread with some disabled Cubans in 1988. Once again I was fortunate to be included in one of her projects. One day we Chicagoans were sitting outside in Cuba having lunch in perfect tropical weather. Susan began dictating a letter to another woman in our group, who was armed with a pen and writing pad.

Susan dictated, “Dear Esteemed Comandante.” The rest of us at the table ribbed her mightily for writing a letter to Fidel, telling him how enamored we are with his country and inviting him to visit us. What a hopelessly gringo thing to do, we all said. Good luck getting that letter to Fidel, and even if you do, fat chance he has time to meet with us. He’ll probably just laugh about what gringos we are.

A few days later, a stop on our itinerary was a rehabilitation hospital in Havana. As we spoke to the head doctor, our tour guide, Lilia, mentioned the letter. And the doctor said, “I’m a member of the Central Committee. I’ll see Fidel this afternoon. I’ll give him your letter.”

On the day we were to head back to the states, Lilia said, “I’m gonna miss you guys. Can we have a little party in the hotel lounge?”

So we all gathered in the hotel lounge and after a few minutes, in walked Fidel and his entourage, which included the rehab doctor. Fidel stuck around for two hours and talked with us about the Bible, public transportation, and a whole lot more. Earlier in the trip, Susan developed lung congestion and spent a couple days in a Havana hospital receiving respiratory therapy. Susan told Fidel about her hospital stay and mentioned that she received a bill for $250. Fidel apologized and said the only reason she received a bill at all was because she wasn’t a Cuban citizen. Susan assured Fidel that she wasn’t complaining about the bill. How much would two days in the hospital with respiratory therapy cost in the U.S.?

Shortly after Fidel left, the rehab doctor returned to the lounge and picked up the phone. He said to Susan, “I’m calling the hospital, Fidel said to cancel your bill.”

Can you see why so many people miss Susan so damn much?

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Walking down North Avenue with his bulky Home Depot purchases in tow, George Blakemore sparkled in a glistening metallic-toned ensemble he painted himself. “I think that we all are artists,” he said. “We all use our imagination and we all are creative. There was a Black gentleman that died called Mr. Imagination who would say everything begins with the mind. When you saw me and thought, ‘I would like to take a picture of this gentleman,’ it started from your mind. And so, even though you are a reporter for the Reader, that’s an art too because you are creating. 

“We all are artists because everything comes from the mind. And during the COVID-19 that was good therapy for me, and it would be good therapy for everybody to do something creative. Some people might sew, and might sing, and might dance, and all of that is using your imagination,” Blakemore said, always generously bringing his attention to the person he’s talking to. It is fair to say he interviewed me as much as I interviewed him on that bright Sunday afternoon earlier this spring. 

Activist and artist George Blakemore on North Avenue in Spring 2022. Credit: Isa Giallorenzo

“I paint Chinese umbrellas and I do canvas also. During my birthday party, they had a lot of my artwork there. A lot of people who came over made a purchase, and some of them gave me a little present,” says Blakemore, grateful for the 80th birthday party that the organization Ex-Cons for Community and Social Change (ECCSC) had just thrown for him. 

“I just thought it was wonderful that these young men and women were there to honor me. They are ex-offenders who are free now, and they’re doing good things in the Black community. I like to push positive things because there’s so much negativity that’s going on in our community. This is a grassroots organization whose founder, Tyrone Muhammad, stayed in the penitentiary for 21 years. Now he’s out trying to make positive contributions,” Blakemore explained.

An activist himself, Blakemore reminded me he’d been featured in the Chicago Reader 2015 People Issue, which presented him as “The Concerned Citizen.” That profile by Deanna Isaacs showcased Blakemore’s extensive history of attending meetings of local governing bodies and speaking his mind whenever he could. “The citizens have a responsibility and the elected officials have a responsibility. All of the above have dropped the baton,” he said in the article. 

A jaunty scarf and hat in a similar design complete the ensemble. Credit: Isa Giallorenzo

In his activism, Blakemore—a former civics teacher—fights for Black people to receive goods, services, contracts, and jobs in Chicago and Cook County. He considers those to be reparations that the Black community deserves. Having arrived in Chicago in 1970 at the end of the Great Migration, Blakemore said he has mixed feelings about the city he now calls home. “I’m working to make a better, more inclusive Chicago, where all people can benefit from living in this beautiful global city,” he said.

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As a child I hated subtitles. The words constantly multiplying and changing on the bottom of TV screens distracted me from the scenes in shows and movies. Sometimes the white words overlaid on a black background moved at a quicker pace than what the characters onscreen were actually saying and spoiled what was to come. I’d rather the educators who screened educational specials at school turn the boxy 90s televisions off altogether.

Obviously, a distaste for captions spoke to my privilege as a nondisabled child who had an option to dislike them in the first place. But surprisingly, subtitles have grown on me as an adult. As a lover of many things Black, I love watching films created in other countries like Nigeria, South Africa, and even France (shout-out to Netflix’s Lupin). As my film and TV palate has expanded, I’ve learned of the innate multiculturalism of most Black folks in the African Diaspora (not just in America) that translates onscreen. It is quite common for scenes in these films to have characters who converse in Pidgin English (a mix of a local language and a version of English) or two other languages separate from English altogether. As much as body language is also a very communicative tool, missing even a few words can shift an understanding of what’s happening in a story. Subtitles help put the pieces of these conversations together.

Subtitles are also quite useful for those of us looking to become more confident in speaking another language. I am years from my high school days of studying French and even further from my days learning Spanish in grammar and middle school. Immersing myself in non-American entertainment has renewed my interest in remembering and enhancing my French-speaking skills; it’s also made me want to learn local languages like Bantu people’s Lingala, which isn’t as readily available to learn unless you are in community with Congolese or other Bantu people. Those once-pestering words on the bottom of television screens I now see as an opportunity to refresh and expand my communication.

As beneficial as they may be, subtitles have their faults. Late last year, conversations around Netflix’s Squid Game, one of the streaming service’s most viewed series, brought to light how poor transcriptions in the show completely shift the understanding non-Korean speakers likely have of the storyline. As a native English speaker, it’s a question I often ponder: Are the subtitles presented accurately capturing what’s being communicated onscreen? Still, I’d argue that turning on your subtitles here and there is a great start to expanding your knowledge of other parts of the world.

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“Candyman. Candyman. Candyman. Candyman. Candyman.” The repetition is a summoning spell which repeats the past in the present. Horror is a sound you can’t stop saying.

Bernard Rose’s 1992 film Candyman repeats its summoning spell as an echo that turns words into sounds and back again. Set around the Chicago housing project of Cabrini-Green, the movie features protagonist Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen), a white anthropologist studying urban legends. She becomes fascinated by the story of Candyman, a Black artist in the 1890s who painted the picture of a white woman, fell in love with her, and was duly murdered. His hand was cut off and replaced with a hook and his genitals smeared with honey and exposed to bees. 

Candyman supposedly haunts Cabrini-Green, which stands on the ground where he was killed. If you look in a mirror and say “Candyman” five times, he appears, whispering loving, terrifying promises. “I am the writing on the wall, the whisper in the classroom.” Tony Todd’s incredibly sensuous voice drips with honey and blood. To say his name is to summon forth a sweetness of sound and terror; the pain, as he says, is “exquisite.”

Philip Glass’s soundtrack for piano, pipe organ, and chorus mirrors the repetition in the summoning spell. His iconic minimalist iteration, sketching the same figure over and over like images in glass, forms a backdrop for the boxes of Cabrini-Green, stark identical apartments and identical apartments stacked. Glass’s insistent, stark hum collapses, at key moments, into the white noise buzz of massed bees, the carefully ordered divisions of space and sound pressed together into a single trauma crawling on the rib cage, an iron hook dragged through a honeycomb.

The most famous theme from the film is “Music Box,” in which Glass’s characteristic repetition mirrors the tinkling loop of a child’s toy. “Music Box” is introduced early in the film; it’s the background music for one of Helen’s interviews, in which an informant tells her the story of Candyman. 

Per the informant, a woman was babysitting when a lover came over. The babysitter tells him the story of Candyman, the story in the story culminating in the repetition of the name and the wet sounds of death. 

Glass’s music is a theme for the baby. But its maddening loop is also an auditory mirror of the loop of story which is also the loop of history. The past is a story repeating in the present. Horror is a sound you can’t stop saying.

Nia DaCosta’s 2021 Candyman sequel/reboot is scored by Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe. His incidental music is influenced by Glass, holding up a kind of buzzing electric mirror to Glass’s crystalline compositions. 

Lowe does reproduce one piece from the original score, though. Glass’s “Music Box” theme is used in a scene that reprises and retells the events of the previous film. 

In a flashback sequence told through artist Kara Walker’s eerie shadow-puppet cutouts, we see Helen Lyle start to investigate Candyman and then go insane. She makes snow angels of blood and throws a child into a fire. 

Glass’s music tinkles and chimes as the words grind on, echoing the horror story campfire tale of the first movie. The story the shadow puppets tell here is garbled, though; in the “real” events of the first movie, Candyman, not Helen, was the murderer, and the baby lived. To reflect this, Lowe adds ambient hiss and echo. The music box fades toward white noise buzz, space and sound collapsing into a single trauma, a bloody hook dragged through a honeycomb.

The “Music Box” theme has a final, clearer rendering at the end credits of the 2021 film. By this point we’ve walked again through the razed, gentrified landscape of Cabrini-Green. The baby rescued in Candyman, artist Anthony McCoy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), has become ensnared in the story, learning to his sorrow that Candyman isn’t one ghost, but a genre, or a hive. A Black man who moves into a house in the wrong neighborhood; a Black boy executed for a crime he didn’t commit; a Black man accused of putting razor blades in candy—they all die and are born again as a story of death. Racist violence repeats in a predictable path, like a bee following a scent trail. 

Kara Walker’s puppets reprise each story in a ritual of dark and light as the music box repeats its unending theme. The movie is the music is a sound is a story is a word. Candyman. Candyman. Candyman. Candyman. Candyman. Horror is a sound you can’t stop saying.

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Several decades after the metamorphic transition from silent to sound, a 1981 article in the New York Times observed that “a live musician is rarely seen at a movie except as a member of the audience.” 

That’s not untrue with regards to one Dennis Scott, who can often be found sitting in the first few rows of the main room at the historic Music Box Theatre. But unlike other audience members, he’s enjoying the movie after playing in between showtimes on the majestic theater organ affixed to the left of the screen, a sonic behemoth that for many is now an essential fixture of the experience.

The aforementioned Times article was about the dearth of live silent film accompaniment, a tradition lost to its heyday but which has since enjoyed periods of revival in limited exhibition venues. Scott has been the Music Box Theatre’s house organist since 1992; in 2011 he started a monthly silent cinema series that continues to this day.

“It was the music,” he says of his deep affection for the pastime. “I always just loved the music, and I loved the sound of a theater organ.”

Scott is one of several musicians in and around Chicago for whom live silent film accompaniment is a regular gig. Another in this cadre is Dave Drazin, who accompanies on the piano and has done so at the Gene Siskel Film Center for nearly 40 years, a job he landed quite fortuitously. 

“They were showing something—I don’t know what—but I just walked in, and there was a piano on the side. I asked the house manager if it would be alright if I played the piano for the movie, and he said he would ask the director. He came back and said OK. So I just played, and then the director said, ‘We need a guy like you.’”

A longtime hot jazz aficionado who studied music in college, Drazin has often utilized his predilection for extemporization, improvising scores on the spot. Jay Warren, president and cofounder of the Silent Film Society of Chicago, takes another tack, the traditional photoplay organist instead referring to his accompaniment as a “compiled score.” 

Warren relies on themes for different parts of the film, a tactic imparted by his “unofficial mentor” Gaylord Carter, a renowned organist, film accompanist, and composer who is credited with having helped revive public interest in silent cinema, leading to its initial renaissance.

“One thing we [learned] is not to overplay the film,” says Warren. “You want to be the background. You want to embrace the film; we don’t want to be the star of the show. You should forget about us.”

For Scott, who for many years worked in advertising and PR and thus knows how to captivate an audience, authenticity is key. He prides both himself and the theater on maintaining high standards of exhibition that honor the nuances of silent cinema.

“In this part of the country, [we do] the most authentic presentation of silent films, because we can do 35-millimeter. We can also do variable-speed 35-millimeter, which very, very few places can do. If a film is shot at 20 frames per second, we can show it at that speed.”

He’s especially proud of the organ itself, which he and his husband spent three and a half years restoring. Soundwise it’s digital, with all the effects viewers would have heard back in the 1920s; the console, however, is from 1929, like the Music Box itself. 

Scott, Drazin, and Warren are the most prolific working accompanists in Chicago, whose names you expect to see connected with a silent film screening; however, they aren’t the only ones. 

For example, Chicago-based musician Maxx McGathey has recently composed and performed original live scores for Robert Wiene’s 1924 film The Hands of Orlac and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger (1927).

A few weekends ago, internationally celebrated musicians Min Xiao-Fen and Rez Abbasi accompanied the 1934 Chinese silent feature The Goddess for an event copresented by the Silent Film Society of Chicago at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts.

Comfort Film, a program of Logan Square’s Comfort Station, offers a yearly Silent Film and Loud Music series. Past pairings include Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), with music from Kassi Cork, Vince McAley, and Anthony Forgrase; F.W. Murnau’s Faust (1926), with music performed by Mexican rock band Los Black Dogs; and ​​Oscar Micheaux’s 1920 film Within Our Gates, accompanied by Paul Giallorenzo and Ben LaMar Gay.

“[It’s] a way to expose our younger audience to these classic films.” says Comfort Film programmer Raul Benitez. The limitations are none; participants are given free rein both in selecting the film and devising their accompaniment. “Every screening is a surprise,” he says. “We even had a band edit a film.”

Keyboardist Kassi Cork doesn’t consider herself especially well versed in silent cinema, but she was nevertheless drawn to the prospect. “There is a history of music performance, primarily organ and piano, for silent film accompaniment that has always intrigued me as a pianist,” she says. “I grew up in a town that still had an organist play before movie showings, and there has always been something magical about that.”

Though new to it, Cork’s process in imagining an accompaniment is similar to that of seasoned practitioners. “While watching the film I create an outline of the overall plot, including mood and ideas it might give me.”

As far and wide as silent film accompaniment reaches in Chicago, spanning melodies from the silent era to music not yet even conceived during that time, there’s one thing these musicians have in common: the film is the thing, the guiding force behind what they do. 

“People ask me if I look at the screen,” remarks Scott. “I say, I always look at the screen, that’s more or less my sheet music.”

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