Urban legend

HOUSTON ROCKS IT The TUTA remount of Uncle Vanya features Chicago vet Houston, far right.

Photo: Vojkan Radonjic

Over coffee at an Edgewater café, actor Gary Houston is describing how he got involved with TUTA, the scrappy, semi-underground theater company with whom he’s remounting last year’s acclaimed production of Uncle Vanya in the Chopin Theatre’s basement.

“My audition for it was to sit around the table at their offices and do a reading of the whole play. That was my audition,” says the 62-year-old actor, who eventually secured the role of crusty professor Serebryakov. “Before that, I’d auditioned for Huddersfield [in 2006]; they said at the time that they couldn’t afford an Equity contract.”

Wait, Gary Houston has to audition for storefronts?

It’s a jarring realization, considering the length and breadth of Houston’s theater work. The St. Louis native’s career encompasses an abundance of seminal moments in the evolution of Off Loop theater, from the original 1971 production of Grease at the old Kingston Mines to taking over from Dennis Franz in Bleacher Bums. This guy’s door isn’t getting knocked down?

Arriving in 1968 as a grad student at the University of Chicago, Houston (who had done theater as an undergrad in Ohio) got his first glimpse of the nascent Chicago scene. “I think the first play I saw was Galileo, when Jim O’Reilly”—who would lead the Body Politic in the ’80s, and whose son Beau would found the Curious Theatre Branch—“headed the Court Theatre as an appendage of the U. of C. They called it the Court because they performed in the courtyard of Mandel Hall,” he recalls.

Houston found employment as an editor at the Sun-Times, working on the Sunday Show section under longtime arts editor and theater critic Herman Kogan. “It put a crimp in some possibilities because I had to be there on Thursday nights. That’s when we put the baby to bed,” he says. “I got in plays where I could. I was terrified I wouldn’t be able to do Grease because of Thursday nights. But [cowriter] Jim Jacobs said, ‘Nah, we’ll just do it weekends,’ thank God.”

When New York producers picked up Grease, they streamlined and sanitized the raunchy Chicago book. The Kingston Mines cast members were offered the chance to re-audition for their parts, but Houston chose not to—not because of the changes, but because “I liked my job,” he says. “I never regretted not being part of Grease’s future.”

Houston remained at the Sun-Times until 1977, when “a new regime” took over the features department; rather than accept a demotion, he departed to focus on theater full-time. That same year, he directed Steppenwolf’s first foray in the city limits, Wallace Shawn’s Our Late Night at the Jane Addams Hull House on Broadway. “The actors did okay and I did okay, but the play got panned,” he remembers. “So I think that’s considered a failure in their history.”

Later, Houston helped create E/R, a long-running hit for the Organic that became the basis for a sitcom made by Norman Lear’s production company. “It was a gamble,” he says, recalling contentious negotiations; some within the company wanted to develop it as a serious movie instead. The sitcom deal won out. “It ran 13 episodes, and that was it,” Houston says wryly.

The dry-humored actor works some in film and TV—most recently portraying blowhard pundit John McLaughlin in Watchmen—but eschews long stints away from Chicago. (He and Hedda Lubin, Grease’s original Frenchy, wed in 2004 after three decades of cohabitation.) And he keeps auditioning for theater.

“It would be nice to be asked. But you’ve got to be much bigger than me to get that,” the actor says. “I was just in Mauritius [at Northlight], and every night they’re talking about next season. ‘Amy Morton is directing Awake and Sing with Rondi Reed and Mike Nussbaum,’ and you hear this, ‘Mmmm!’ in the audience. ‘A Life with John Mahoney.’ ‘Mmmm!’ You have to be on that ‘Mmmm!’ level, and I’m never gonna get there.”

Uncle Vanya reopens Saturday 23 at the Chopin.

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