Director of exuberant plays and movies was inspired by Albany Park upbringing
Stuart Gordon, who co-founded Chicago’s influential Organic Theater Company and later directed zestfully ghoulish movies that reanimated the horror genre, was influenced and inspired by his upbringing in Albany Park.
Mr. Gordon’s death, at 72, was reported Tuesday by Variety.
Before he became an acclaimed Hollywood writer, director and producer working on cult films like “Re-Animator” and family movies like “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids,’’ before he was in the vanguard of Chicago’s dynamic theater scene, working on “Bleacher
Bums” and “Warp,” he was part of an energetic youth group at Temple Beth Israel, then in Albany Park, along with a good friend, folk singer Steve Goodman.
“It was a totally golden group, a wonderful, creative set of people,” said business consultant Neesa Sweet, who in the mid-1960s was also in the group at the large reform temple, which drew kids from Von Steuben, Mather and young Stuart’s alma mater, Lane Tech High School.
He lived on Keystone Avenue within blocks of Temple Beth Israel, where he created many plays, parodies and songs. At 14 or 15, “he made a complete sort of burlesque of ‘Oedipus Rex,’ ” said Gary Mechanic, a friend since childhood.
After college at the University of Wisconsin, he returned to Chicago and generated feverishly inventive shows at the Organic Theater Company — co-founded with his wife, Carolyn Purdy-Gordon — where he was a director and creative director.
Actor and friend Joe Mantegna said Mr. Gordon had a profound influence on his life and career. “The reason I made the ‘major leagues’ is because I played on a great farm team, the Organic,” Mantegna said Wednesday.
“I always felt like he was our Steven Spielberg, in a way. He was the guy with imagination. [I mean], when I think of ‘Warp,’ ” Mantegna said, referring to a sonically swashbuckling 1971 Organic play co-written and directed by Gordon. It was billed as the “world’s first science-fiction epic-adventure play in serial form.” Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert said it “anticipated ‘Star Wars.’ ”
In a rave review of “Warp,’’ Sun-Times critic Glenna Syse wrote, “if you have ever fantasized about tilting the Earth a bit off its axis, if you ever read Marvel Comics, if you have ever daydreamed about being a superhero, I suspect you will join the cheering section.”
Before Lane, Stuart attended Volta grade school with Goodman and Mechanic, who said they were among “the weirdos in our grammar school.”
With another friend or two, they built rockets and filmed home movies inspired by the slapstick of Buster Keaton. They also made prank phone calls in which they pretended to be quiz show hosts.
At Lane, young Stuart and Mechanic collaborated with another friend who would become a longtime writing partner, Dennis Paoli. They formed a satirical comedy group, “The Human Race,” Mechanic said, playing discotheques and coffeehouses. They auditioned for the Playboy Club but were told “we were a great act, but we just weren’t blue enough.”
During his time at the University of Wisconsin, film classes were overbooked, so he started studying theater. In Madison he met actress Carolyn Purdy. She told the Chicago Daily News she was a “Susie Sorority” who became smitten when she first saw her future husband, who resembled a “Chicago hood.”
“He had on boots and a leather jacket, and that’s all I needed,” she recalled.
In Madison he started the Screw theater, which created an uproar in 1968 with its production of “Peter Pan.” In it, “Peter became the leader of hippies, Captain Hook became Mayor Daley, and the pirates became the Chicago police, all going on an acid trip in a Neverland populated by naked females,” according to the book “Blood on the Stage, 1975-2000: Milestone Plays of Crime, Mystery and Detection.” He also established another theater troupe in Madison: Broom Street, now one of the oldest in the Midwest.