It’s tradition that every older theater has its own ghost. If so, Madison’s Broom Street Theater is home to a bearded figure in a beret, who shuffles out before every show to declare — out of one side of his mouth — that this is the only company producing real theater in the city. Perhaps even the world!
To celebrate its 50th anniversary, Broom Street has launched a retrospective honoring the spirit and words of its longest-serving artistic director. Keep It: Plucked from the Corpus of Joel Gersmann runs Oct. 11 through Nov. 2.
“Born of a fervent anti-war movement percolating out of the nearby campus of the University of Wisconsin, the Broom Street [Theater] was founded with advocacy in mind,” noted The New York Times in Gersmann’s 2005 obituary.
In a remarkable feat, Gersmann’s successors have continued to operate the black box theater, deepening its involvement in the community and diversifying the voices heard onstage. At 50, it has become one of just a handful of theaters surviving their counterculture roots. “We’re in an amazing situation for a theater company our size,” says Doug Reed, who has served as artistic director since July 2017. “We own our building outright, and we operate in the black with no advertising and very few major donors.”
So strong is its position that, as part of the anniversary celebration, all shows this season have been presented free, though “goodwill offerings” are accepted. Perhaps symbolic of its longtime unconventionality, the theater — 1119 Williamson St. — has never been on Broom Street. The name comes from an early rehearsal space.
Gersmann served the company for 35 years, until his death of a heart attack at the age of 62. For 29 of those years, Gersmann provided a colorful and idiosyncratic end-of-year reading list for Isthmus.
“Joel surely was a genius who seemed to understand human nature at its base and core levels, as well as its grandest,” writes Kevin Lynch in an email. Based in Milwaukee, the former staff arts writer for The Capital Times and The Milwaukee Journal blogs at kevernacular.com.
Gersmann, he says, “thrived in a realm of intellectual ferment, a polymath incessantly probing and turning over dirt, and sometimes gold, in the fields of culture.”
Gersmann’s plays were often dynamic, raucous and rapid-paced. In a 1982 interview with The Capital Times, Gersmann told Phil Davis that cross-fertilization of ideas from many minds gave the group its high energy.
Scott Feiner, writer and director of "Keep It!," has catalogued thousands of photos, videos, programs and scripts from the theater’s storied history.
But in truth, despite the feeling that shows had been workshopped or assembled through improvisation, every single word of Gersmann’s plays was carefully scripted. As a playwright, he specialized in biting, eclectic satire. His titles include: Notes from a Vietnamese Phrase Book; Houdini: The Jew from Appleton; Son of Jesus; Sexy Priests; and Ulysses Won’t You Please Come Home.
“We’re the thinking persons’ theater and we like to deal with forbidden subjects. We do not merely entertain,” he told Davis.
After Gersmann died, Dean Robbins, former Isthmus editor, compiled some of the gems Gersmann had shared over the years. “Real art, when you see it, you come out changed. And most Americans these days can’t live with that uncertainty. The younger generation is alienated from the arts, and the artists who are left sell out to commercial interests,” Gersmann said. “Every so often I get an idea that some people understand, and that’s about all I can hope for.”
In all, he produced, wrote or directed more than 200 plays. The current anniversary show, Keep It, collects scenes from many of them. There will still be narrative, however.
“That is my challenge,” says director Scott Feiner, who has chosen and assembled the scenes. “They do connect, from one to the other.”
In fact, he says, there are scenes that resonate even more strongly today. For example, he notes Gersmann’s 1996 Cookies for My President.
“It’s about a 9-year-old who becomes president because people are fed up with politics,” says Feiner.
The man and legend were captured in Filthy Theater, a documentary film by Dan Levin, featured in the 2012 Wisconsin Film Festival. It is available on Vimeo, where the film’s description calls Gersmann “the lone genius playwright.”
“In what can only be called an epic run of creativity, Gersmann baffled, entertained, and infuriated his audiences, his friends and his actors,” writes Levin.
The Brooklyn native was prone to bursts of anger. Gersmann occasionally banned performers and at least one reviewer (me — twice). In doing so, he inadvertently enriched Madison’s theater scene. Broom Street refugees went on to form other local companies, including Mercury Players Theatre and TAPIT/new works Ensemble Theater, and spread out around the country to continue to experiment.
“I think that people who worked with him understood that he could turn on people,” says Feiner, who serves as board secretary and historian. “That happened whether you had worked with him for years and years, or who worked only one show with him.”
One of Gersmann’s special targets was the National Endowment for the Arts.
Its support had been early, longstanding and critical, a tribute to Gersmann’s ability to write brilliant grant proposals, little known even at the time because he signed them with board members’ names, without their knowledge.
But then, “In 1990, shortly after staging a production called The Chicken and the Chickenhawk, written and directed by Mr. Gersmann, about a sexual relationship between a man and a boy, the company lost its federal arts financing,” reported The New York Times.
In truth, Broom Street was a drop of water in a wave. Under fire since 1981, the NEA was fighting for its life after coming under fire from conservatives for funding works such as the homoerotic photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ.” In 1990, Sen. Jesse Helms proposed shuttering the NEA. It barely survived, changed its grants structures, and even experimented with having recipients sign “anti-obscenity” clauses.
But Gersmann took it personally. “I became terrified; I was outraged,” he told Isthmus. The NEA became a whipping boy in his pre-show speeches.
Given his outsize personality and enormous body of work, it’s tempting to view Broom Street even today as “Joel’s.” But other directors, playwrights and artistic directors have carried on the tradition over the theater’s half century. And the story of the theater’s founding is perhaps wilder and funnier than anything he ever staged.
The Daily Cardinal; Jentri Colello; Ryan Wisniewski; Amy Kucharik
Stuart Gordon and Carolyn Purdy-Gordon, top left, founded the theater in 1969. Heather Renken, below left, and Callen Harty, upper right, and Doug Reed served stints as artistic director after Joel Gersmann died.
“I always say that I got Broom Street pregnant, and Gersmann married her,” says Stuart Gordon, speaking from Los Angeles.
Among the writer-director’s many films are Re-Animator (1985), Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989), Body Snatchers (1993), and David Mamet’s Edmond (2005). Known for his horror credits, he often casts his wife, Carolyn Purdy-Gordon.
“And then,” she jokes, “he kills me.” Together, they founded the theater troupe that evolved into Broom Street. Both were students at UW-Madison in the late 1960s. Young people back then had a lot to say, and many turned to theater to say it. How else to magnify your voice in the pre-internet, pre-video age, when newspaper type was still set by hand?
After a series of provocative plays produced by Stuart, under the auspices of Screw Theater, at the end of September 1968 came what The Wisconsin State Journal called “The biggest flap of Madison’s theater decade.”
It was Stuart’s interpretation of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. The pirates were Chicago police, who in real life had violently put down a riot at the Democratic National Convention just a few weeks earlier. Captain Hook was that city’s Mayor Richard Daley. In the extended allegory, pixie dust was pretty much what you would expect a hippie to call pixie dust.
The State Journal critic described its “colorful, psychedelic scenery, far out music, and nude girls.” Dane County District Attorney James Boll charged Stuart and Carolyn with obscenity. Conviction could result in $5,000 fines, five years in jail, or both.
A private showing was given a few days later to an investigating audience of 50, including Madison’s chief of police. City Attorney Edwin Conrad walked out. “Madison is not ready for London, Paris, or New York,” he told the State Journal.
“We are not a board of censors,” he added, making a remarkably fine distinction. “I prosecute. I don’t judge.”
When cast and crew returned for their next show, they found the doors to the venue — the former Fredric March Play Circle — locked from the inside. They managed to sneak in. The Memorial Union shut off the electricity.
So the company and waiting audience marched up and over Bascom Hill, to the Commerce Building (now Ingraham Hall). There they did two performances back to back.
This dynamic mural is now on the back wall at Broom Street Theater, during the run of "Keep It!: Plucked from the Corpus of Joel Gersmann."
The outraged D.A. appeared on local television, pleading for audience members to come forward to testify. None did, but the university denied further use of any campus facilities.
“So we started our own theater company, and that was Broom Street,” says Stuart. He and Carolyn married, and used their gift money to form the new group.
Stuart later returned briefly to the UW, in 2002, to teach. And as for Carolyn, “I can finally come out,” she says. “I was arrested and charged with obscenity. But I think the statute of limitations has run out.”
After what the Gordons describe as a rebellion within Broom Street, they formed The Organic Theater Company. City officials continually blocked use of venues, and they moved their company to Chicago. There, besides touring internationally, the acclaimed theater collaborated with Edward Albee, David Mamet, Roald Dahl, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and Wendy Wasserstein.
Back in Madison, a remarkable number of experimental companies formed, did a few shows, and then vanished. They included Another Day, The Apple Corps, The East Side Amazement Company, Mad-City Players and New Madison Theater Ensemble. Kentucky Fried Theater relocated to Los Angeles, launching the careers of David and Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams. Their most famous film is probably Airplane! (1980).
Gersmann’s Broom Street survived by carving out its own niche, and launching home-grown luminaries. They include comedian Charlie Hill, actor-director André De Shields (now on Broadway in Hadestown), playwrights Gip Hoppe (whose play Jackie spend some time on Broadway), Bryn Magnus of Chicago’s Curious Theater Branch, and Paul Wells, founder of New York’s Dysfunctional Theatre Company.
And, through the decades there was Gersmann, who took over after the Gordons. After residing in a series of temporary homes, including St. Francis House Student Episcopal Center on University Avenue, and the top floor of what longtime Madisonians will recall as Stillwaters, in 1997 Broom Street purchased a former body shop and radiator repair building, where it has resided ever since.
Gersmann continues to cast a long, dark shadow over the theater. His trademark satire was born of anger.
“Yes, great cultural and political institutions stood in his path, but he was too subversive to bow to any, even though he understood their meaning and relative value,” recalls Lynch. “That subversiveness was a vital aspect of his worldview. Broom Street was his weapon, a Swiss Army knife-on-steroids that took on many bizarre and comic forms.”
And bizarre and non-comic forms, too, such as bans, tantrums and more. After a bad rehearsal, Gersmann would threaten to close the theater. “During the early days,” says Feiner, “he threatened to kill the entire cast.” He had a tame board of directors. Broom Street was essentially his own.
There have been three artistic directors since Gersmann’s death. Callen Harty, a longtime Broom Street vet, was the first. Today he serves as board secretary at Proud Theater, which he co-founded. The nonprofit serves LGBTQ+ youth statewide through its six chapters, including such farther-flung locations as Green Bay and Wausau. In 2010, Heather Renken, who had already helped found Madison’s Kathie Rasmussen Women’s Theatre, was named artistic director.
Their objectives, and Reed’s, were similar: to increase diversity. Even early, Broom Street under Gersmann was accused of a wearying sameness.
“It was very clever at first,” a one-time trouper told the Daily Cardinal in 1974, “but it’s been going on for four years. Underground theater in this town has become Joel’s monopoly. Sometimes it’s funny, but it gets to be tedious.”
Harty, Renken and Reed have sought more playwrights, directors and performers of color, more women, and players from different backgrounds, sexual orientations and viewpoints. “If you have an idea for a play, we want to hear about it,” says Reed. “We will give you the freedom and the space to pursue it.”
There has also been another, quieter mission. “The ghost of Joel was there the whole time,” says Harty of his term. “We, as a theater, wanted to return it from autocracy to community, because that is what it should have been from the beginning.”
Gersmann himself might even agree. In 2002, after his first heart attack, Feiner visited him in the hospital.
“He told me ‘the angry person is going to have to go away if he was going to survive.’”
And, in a way Gersmann does survive: Broom Street is thriving.
Says Stuart Gordon, “I am absolutely amazed.”
For more on Joel Gersmann, click here.
