The night we performed for William Hurt

It’s William Hurt’s birthday today.

Back in the day, when Twitter was still a thing, I would often write long stories which occasionally went viral. My story of meeting William Hurt was one of them. When I deactivated my account, I lost those stories. Recently, someone reached out to me via DM, someone I don’t know, who told me she loved the William Hurt story, as a young actor herself, and wondered where it was, since she found it inspirational. I told her I would re-tell it here, and decided to do so for his birthday.

When I was in Chicago, the first play I got cast in was Clifford Odets’ Golden Boy. This was an ensemble company, with a regular roster of actors, and they had a reputation for putting on visceral and exciting productions (this was their second Odets, I believe), with a devotion to deeply connected acting. I signed up for an acting class, run by this group – it’s how I met my great friend Ted, one of the teachers. This was how I got looped in to this group. Normally, they cast mostly from within their ensemble, but they needed someone to play Joe’s sister, married to the cabbie. My friend David was cast as the cabbie.

It was a very intense rehearsal process. They were a very insular group. Cult-like, I might say? David and I were welcomed, but “outside” the main dynamic. There were romances and unrequited loves going on, a lot of drama. They were struggling financially. The company felt like it might be on its last legs. None of this impacted my experience. It was my first show in Chicago, and it was Odets, one of my favorites! I was determined to have a good time and I did.

The show opened and we got good reviews but the audiences did not come. It was rough. There were times when just 15 people showed up, for a 99-seat theatre. Our run was long, six weeks or something. I’m sure the company was draining money, although I was separated from those anxieties. I was also having a blast with M., whom I had just met, and in fact the “tsk tsk” message from M I describe in that post happened across the street from the theatre where I was rehearsing Golden Boy.

One of the company members was a guy named Michael, a great actor and an entertaining presence, albeit a little intimidating. Michael was kind of over the whole thing, the drama of the company, the fact that we got copious notes after each performance, long into the run, even when it became apparent that basically nobody was coming to the play. The director gave Michael a note on something and Michael drawled, “Sorry, I just froze with all eight eyeballs on me. I’ll do better tomorrow.” He was necessary comedic relief.

Michael must have read an interview with William Hurt somewhere where Hurt expressed a yearning to get back to the theatre (where he got his start), how much he’d like to find a passionate theatre ensemble to involve himself in. He was a member of Circle Rep. He missed that kind of artistic community. A light bulb went on in Michael’s head and he wrote William Hurt a letter, telling him about our theatre company and our current production of Golden Boy, inviting him to come check it out if he had the time. I don’t know the details of how this occurred and how Michael figured out how to get to Hurt. I am assuming this was a hand written letter not a phone call.

At any rate, none of us knew Michael had done this, and suddenly we got the word Hurt would be coming to the show the following night, or that weekend, or whatever. He must have contacted Michael to arrange. There was excitement but also trepidation. We had had to cancel some shows because literally nobody showed up. Sometimes we did the show to just a handful of people. Sometimes we waited until the last minute – literally a minute before 8 p.m. – before admitting defeat and canceling the show. It was demoralizing. What if William Hurt was the only person who showed up? He was literally flying in to see it. We cringed at the thought. We would look like a bunch of losers to him!

This is exactly how it went down.

He – and his friend – were the only people who showed up that night. I think we had maybe 10 reservations, which was horrible enough, but on the night William Hurt came, those people were no-shows. As I said, we regularly canceled shows, refunded tickets to the three people who showed up, gave them tickets for another night. But on this particular night, we couldn’t cancel. We had to go on and do the whole damn play for just two people, William Hurt and his friend.

To date, this is one of my most surreal moments as an actor. We played the thing full out, we played the show, we could do it in our sleep. Hurt sat about 10 rows back, and of course if there are only two people in an audience, you are fully aware of them. You can FEEL them. I so wanted to be anywhere else. I said to Michael backstage, “This is horrible. I feel so ashamed.” Michael, in his fedora, said, “Fuck that. Do the work.” He was right.

Side note: one of the lessons of this story is that if you are an artist and you feel like you want to invite so-and-so, or extend an invitation, or request their presence for whatever reason … write that letter. They might say no, they might ignore you but … you never know. They might just accept the invitation.

We came out for our bows. In this company, we didn’t do individual bows. We bowed as an ensemble. We didn’t pretend we had a full house. We all bowed directly AT William Hurt. I still remember his glasses gleaming through the darkness of the theatre, but I could also see his face, reflecting the light coming from off the stage. And as I bowed his way, I felt a little jolt when I saw the tears literally pouring down his face. These weren’t gentle trickling tears. He was openly weeping.

Afterwards, we all went out into the lobby to say hello to him. It was such a strange situation. The impulse was to apologize and be self-deprecating about the clear failure of a play we were in. I’ve been in bad shows. Shows I never in a million years would have invited William Hurt to come see. Or, hell, my parents. This was not a bad show. I was proud of it. It was just kind of a heartbreaking situation. So what do you do? Hurt was still a mess. The lobby was this small space, and I think someone bought a bottle of wine or something. Nobody had any money. Hurt said, in tears, “That’s one of the most beautiful theatre experiences I’ve ever had.” I will never forget him saying that. I so wonder what we looked like to him. This brave earnest theatre company doing a play for no one. Listen, I’m not saying we were brilliant, but for sure we had to have seemed like the purest distillation of the acting impulse and theatre impulse on the planet, because we were pouring our hearts out for an empty theatre. He truly couldn’t even speak.

We didn’t go out to a bar. We didn’t grab a bite to eat. We didn’t even provide him with anything! We didn’t “splurge” on a cheese plate. We had NOTHING. I do remember tiny cups of wine, so someone clearly brought it. It never occurred to me at the time, “Maybe we should pool our money and buy some snacks and drinks for him …” We sat on the floor in the small lobby and talked for a couple of hours. We lost our shyness. There was no hierarchy. He didn’t lecture us. It wasn’t a one way conversation. It was basically Hurt talking with all of us. We were all on the same level pursuing the same thing. Hurt talked about our work, and also shared stories of his own work. Doing American Buffalo, how he thought about acting, what he felt about it, what he missed about live theatre. The atmosphere was very specific. We weren’t all hyped up after our show. It’s not fun to do a show for two people, even if one of them is William Hurt. We were drained and yet hyped up at the same time. I think Hurt was in the same state. He seemed jazzed up, it was so obvious he loved being with us.

I can be almost 100% certain that he, too, would never forget the night he flew to Chicago to watch a group of young actors perform Golden Boy just for him.

Finally, it was around 2 in the morning and time to go home. We all were almost delirious with exhaustion. The mood felt soft and gentle. We all had to go to our day jobs the next day, come to the theatre the following night, do it all again. We left a little reluctantly. I don’t remember the details of how this next part actually happened but it went something along these lines. Normally after the shows, we’d go out for a drink as a cast, blow off steam, and then part ways, or head to the L to go home (or … to meet with M., in my case.). But this night, it was so late (early), Michael offered to drive a couple of us home, if we didn’t mind riding in the back of the truck. The prospect of dragging my exhausted ass to the L and face a 30 minute ride back to my neighborhood was NOT attractive. So I took Michael up on his offer, crawling into the back of the truck with a couple of my castmates.

William Hurt did not come to the show in his own car. He hadn’t hired a car. There of course were no taxis around at 2 in the morning, and Michael said, casually, “You need a ride?” Hurt said, without hesitation, “Yes!” His friend got in the front seat with Michael and Hurt joined us in the back. And off we went into the cool autumn Chicago night. Nobody spoke. We would have had to shout over the wind and engine, and besides we were all talked out. I was almost asleep, the wind battering our faces, and Chicago’s skyline – the most beautiful skyline in the world – glittering and gleaming all around us, not a skyline at all, but our world. We were headed downtown to drop Hurt off at his hotel. First stop.

I remember looking over at Hurt one or two times as we drove along, in the open air, like we were a bunch of farm hands. He sat there holding his arms around his knees, and he looked absolutely ecstatic. In the true sense of the word. The sharp angles of his face and its expression made him look like a wood carving of a medieval saint. He looked ecstatic. I’m serious. I saw … “Life gets busy and cramped and you forget the joy of what you are doing. Don’t forget this moment.” He, a big Hollywood star and Oscar winner, was feeling this, crammed in the back of a pickup truck with a bunch of sleepy 20something actors.

When I think of William Hurt, this is what I see. I see him applauding us in the empty theatre, his glasses gleaming, tears pouring down his face. And I see him in the back of the truck, face lifted into the wind.

“If all the film in the world burnt down today, you’d still have acting.” — William Hurt