San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Theater innovator played with form
Marin creator known for experimental, immersive approach
“High School,” the first sitespecific production by Sausalito-based Antenna Theater, was a sign of what was to come in Chris Hardman’s 40-year run of presenting experimental and immersive theater. There was no stage, no seats, no lines for actors to speak, no theater. It was set in the hallways at Tamalpais High School in neighboring Mill Valley, and each ticket-holder was given a newfangled Sony Walkman and then left to walk the hillside campus on an audio tour created by Hardman.
That debut, staged as part of the Bay Area Playwrights Festival in 1981, was the introduction of “Walkmanology,” a concept in which spectators, whom Hardman called “audients,” moved individually and continuously through a non-theatrical location such as an abandoned gas station or a beach while listening via headset to a cassette tape that included interviews, sound effects and snippets of music.
Walkmanology was an innovation that moved beyond the cognoscenti and into the mainstream when Hardman taped testimonials from former guards and prisoners at Alcatraz and turned them into an audio tour that launched in 1986. The sound guide has since reached 45 million people and is still in use, now through a digital player.
Those taped segments, which have expanded to audio guides for the Texas School Book Depository and the Great Wall of China, can be traced to Hardman’s time living on a 19th century Sausalito tugboat, where the founder of Antenna Theater and its subsidiary Antenna Audio made his home and worked until the old tug burned to the water line in 2006.
Hardman then moved onto dry land in San Rafael where he was at work on his last project, “International Orange.” He’d recorded interviews with Golden Gate Bridge painters, and was working on a sculptural component of paintbrushes dipped and dried, when he died at home on Feb. 1.
The cause of death was organ failure, said his wife of 43 years, Annette Rose. He was 73.
“Chris was very, very funny and the most energetic, consistently working person anyone has ever seen,” said Rose, a former Marin County supervisor and mayor of Sausalito. “He never took a day off and probably not even a minute. He was just a
fount of new ideas about ideas.”
The ideas came rapid fire, resulting in an average of one fully staged production per year, for which Hardman designed and made the costumes, usually involving unique head-covering masks worn by the performers. He built his own sets, which later became a line of furniture he called “Hardman’s Slotology,” a spinoff of “Hardman’s Walkmanology.” He created his own Fourth of July parade in Sausalito, where his tug was docked, and invented his own calendar, which followed the seasons, not the months, and was in commercial production for 17 years.
“Chris was extremely confident and virtually egoless,” said Rose. “He had zero angst.”
He also had zero fear of failure. “High School” (which was revived in 2002) came the same year as “Vacuum,” a romance in which dancers performed to a soundtrack of interviews Hardman had recorded of door-to-door salesmen and their female customers. The production sold out the War Memorial Opera House in 1982. Next came “Pink Prom,” 16 teenage actors in gowns and dinner jackets, each couple dancing to a different style of music through the headphones.
Word got around, and Antenna Theater was invited to produce works in Mexico City, in London, and for an arts festival at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.
“Chris had a global reputation for his profound and lasting innovations in experimental theater, yet many of his most moving works were intensely local — celebrating local venues like Tam High and Rodeo Beach,” said Stewart Brand, co-creator of the Whole Earth Catalog and the Long Now Foundation. “He took immersive theater to new levels.”
This was recognized by Esquire, the slick New York magazine that celebrates “Man at His Best.” In 1985, Hardman was included in the “Esquire Register,” a cover story announcing America’s New Leadership Class of people under 40. Hardman got a four-page spread under the headline, “Is Chris Hardman Sabotaging American Theater or Is He Saving It?”
Hardman did not think the question merited an answer, recalled Rose. He wasn’t trying to sabotage theater, he was trying to expand the concept. This is how he approached everything, including birthday celebrations. For Hardman’s 40th, he devised an event called “Homage to My Youth: One Foot in the Grave,” and climbed into a coffin supplied by the late Chronicle cartoonist Phil Frank. Gathered guests sang “Poor Chris Is Dead,” which he’d re-written to the tune of “Poor Ned Is Dead” from Oklahoma.
Among the attendees shaken by the experience was Hardman’s 4-year-old daughter, Trent, who portrayed an angel at what she described as “daddy’s first funeral.”
“I’ve discovered that I’ve got to be motivated by a story or idea that can save the world,” Hardman once told the Chronicle. “Then the struggle is to keep it clear enough for other people to get it.”
Christopher Linden Hardman was born June 3, 1950, in Seattle. When he was an infant his parents moved to Los Angeles so his father, Ric Hardman, could pursue a career as a screenwriter. He wrote scripts for “The Rifleman,” starring Chuck Connors. Hardman grew up in the Hollywood milieu and palled around with John Landis, later director of “The Blues Brothers” and “Animal House.” Inseparable, they attended Oakwood School in the San Fernando Valley and Goddard College in Vermont, home base of Bread and Puppet Theater.
Hardman dropped out, attracted by the opportunity to make a go of it as a full time puppeteer. This is what got him to Marin County, as a mask maker for the Renaissance Faire, then held in Black Point, Novato. He also liked to perform as a court jester, putting on one of his masks and hanging upside down in trees to startle customers walking beneath.
Hardman moved to Sausalito in the early 1970s, attracted to the minimal rent charged to live in an abandoned shipbuilding shed on the waterfront. He later moved onto the tugboat and became a 20-year fixture in the Sausalito houseboat community.
Hardman’s first arts organization, a collaboration called Snake Theater, produced “Auto” in an abandoned Mohawk Gas Station in Sausalito. It also created the Sausalito Fourth of July Parade. (The parade outlasted Snake Theater, which dissolved in the late 1970s.) Hardman then went out on his own with Antenna Theater, started in 1980.
In 1995, Antenna staged “Skin & Bones/Flesh & Blood” at the Marin County Recycling Center in San Rafael. The big steel door rose up and the “audient” was summoned into a dark warehouse with bulldozers and giant stacks of cans as props.
This compelled Robert Hurwitt, the longtime theater critic for both the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner, to call Hardman “one of the more reliably inventive creators of theater in the Bay Area for the past two decades.” Hurwitt wrote in a review, “His unique method of building scripts from snippets of taped interviews — with people in the field the story is about, supplemented by scientists and others who amplify its social or metaphorical significance — usually results in densely multilayered works.”
A few years later, Hurwitt reviewed Antenna Theater’s production “Magic Bus,” which, of course, involved climbing aboard a moving school bus that happened to arrive half an hour late. Screens covered the windows and ’60s newsreels provided visuals overlaid with taped testimony from the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary and Ronald Reagan.
Martina Gross, a Berlin-based documentarian, was so moved by the moving bus that she ended up producing a 55-minute report on Hardman for German Public Radio in 2017.
“Chris’ work had something alchemistic and shamanistic for me,” said Gross via email. “Liberating theater and transforming an audience into active participants of the play they were suddenly part of, they were creating.”
Hardman will get a public send-off at the Sausalito Fourth of July Parade. Antenna Theater, 50 strong, each cast member in a different mask of Hardman’s design, will form up along with his own marching band “Mirror Mortals,” wearing costumes of blindingly-reflective materials.
“Chris absolutely loved parades,” said Rose. “He probably would have added something to this parade that we haven’t thought of, because he always did.”