Blake Montgomery admits he’s a fool. A year and a half ago the 34-year-old actor and director committed his life savings and an inheritance–roughly $300,000 total–to the Building Stage, a warehouse theater on the near west side where he wanted to present original “clown theater” for free. “I have no company, I’ve had no hit show, I have no reputation, I’m charging no admission, and I have a huge fixed overhead,” he says. “And ‘clown theater’–people have no idea what I’m talking about. It’s all stupid.”
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Local business owners were the toughest sell. “All the meatpackers down here are terrified of losing their control of this area,” he says. “You know, you come out here at 2 AM, there’s 40 or 50 huge refrigerated trucks just lined up everywhere. And that’s how it’s been for 50 years. They see audiences with cars as a problem.” Eventually Montgomery had to promise the Randolph/Fulton Market Association that audiences would behave responsibly (“They’re worried about drunk people pissing in the street”), that he’d never complain about industrial noise during performances, and–most frightening to him–that he’d maintain 20 parking spaces. Currently they’re available gratis in the gravel lot beside his building. “But if some developer comes along and offers my landlord a good price–and I see the condos going up two blocks away–I can’t compete with that. I’ll be out.”
Montgomery grew up in Wilmette and went to Middlebury College, where he became convinced he’d never be a mainstream actor. He wasn’t interested in conventional acting, relying on sense memory and psychological naturalism, and didn’t buy the notion that “if you’re an actor, you’re not allowed to have any thoughts about what the artistic process is. Since I had ideas, I was obviously a director.” On something of a whim he enrolled at the Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theatre in Blue Lake, California. “The first month studying clown theater changed my life,” he says. “You’re just up onstage, nothing prepared, no script, you’re lost, it’s absurd, what do you do? You know, Waiting for Godot. The rhythm of the world is tripping and falling. That’s what my theater is about.” After a year in California he spent 18 months in Minneapolis studying corporeal mime with the Margolis Brown company.
Since then Montgomery’s been paying the $3,000 monthly rent out of his savings. Next weekend his second show, Dust Bowl Gothic, opens. This droll, almost hallucinatory ensemble-created piece, complete with roving country western band, reimagines the couple in Grant Wood’s painting American Gothic as tragic players during the Depression, with the wife taking off for parts unknown and the husband choosing to hunker down on his dying farm. “It’s about the problem of moving on,” Montgomery says, “how we cling to a barren landscape, to a once comfortable past, even if it’s killing us.” Like Hamlet, the show will be free. “I want this place to be as much a laboratory as a theater, and for people to invest in that process of development,” he says. “I don’t want this to be about product and consumption.”
Where: Building Stage, 412 N. Carpenter
