8-18-06
The 20 Year Orchid: Brigid Murphy
Murphy, in the early ‘90s, as Millie.
The first time I saw Brigid Murphy as her alter ego, Milly May Smithy, was in 1989 at the old Club Lower Links in the basement of Links Hall (the space now occupied by the Underground Lounge). Murphy approached the stage from the rear of the extremely low-ceilinged room.
On stilts. Wearing a huge puffy wig. It was as if Tommy Tune decided to pop in at a marionette theatre.
Though her performances as Milly are infrequent these days, when they write the history of performance art in Chicago, Murphy deserves her own chapter. With “Milly’s Orchid Show,” she created a vaudeville-meets-Grand-Ole-Opry extravaganza, a place where comedians, monologists, filmmakers, musicians, jugglers, lariat twirlers and just about everyone else you can imagine got a chance to strut their stuff in a nightclub setting. (The show started out at Lounge Ax but grew to its greatest prominence during regular performances at Park West.) Blue Man Group had its first Chicago gigs with the Orchid Show, and David Sedaris was a regular back when he still lived here. New York-based monologists such as Eric Bogosian and David Cale made guest appearances.
Murphy never limited herself to just Milly (though that persona would certainly be sufficient for many artists). She is also a dancer, filmmaker, and musician who played saxophone for Poi Dog Pondering for many years. She has been focusing in recent years on teaching solo writing and performance workshops and directing solo work, but the range of her contributions as a performer, curator, and teacher are all being honored by Live Bait during this year’s Fillet of Solo Festival. Murphy will receive the theatre’s 2nd James Grigsby Award for “Exceptional Achievement in the Art of Solo Performance” in a ceremony and performance at Live Bait on Aug. 26th. (Grigsby, a solo performer and teacher who died in 2002, was one of Murphy’s mentors at Columbia College Chicago in the 1980s.)
Murphy in 2006.
Murphy grew up in several places around the Chicago area and attended high school in Oak Park. Art runs in the family – her grandfather was a terra cotta artist who worked on entertainment emporiums such as the Chicago and the Uptown Theatres, and her mother is a visual artist who has done several public mosaic installations and teaches children in Uptown. But her eclecticism doesn’t just include artistic interests.
“I always loved theatre and dance and music and all that stuff, but I also loved science,” explains Murphy. “So I actually started out as a physics major at Loyola. I thought, ‘I’ll just keep having art on the side.’ And then I went, ‘Ah, I think the art on the side isn’t going to be enough.’ I left and went to Columbia undergrad for dance. I knew I wanted to do dance, and I knew I wanted to get a degree. I saw this choreographer, Chris Clark, do this piece at Columbia. And it was a spectacular piece, like a Fellini film. And I thought, ‘Oh my god, if that’s modern dance and he’s teaching at Columbia, then that’s where I want to go.’”
While at Columbia, Murphy also studied with the legendary Shirley Mordine. “Mordine really laid the foundation for what it means to create,” maintains Murphy. “There are these basic foundations of aesthetics, and you can carry this into any medium you work in. When you make something, this is what you want to do. You don’t want to Mickey Mouse, you don’t want to mimic. You don’t want to make it literal – these really are the principals of making anything.”
“Milly’s Orchid Show” started up not long after Murphy graduated from Columbia (she got the initial idea for the perpetually optimistic wannabe country chanteuse during a visit to Nashville). “I’d started doing performance stuff in New York because I’d been working with Jim [Grigsby]. I had stopped being a choreographer because I was feeling like the modern dance thing was too restrictive. But my first thing out of the box was actually Marc Smith [founder of the Uptown Poetry Slam]. Marc came to my senior concert and he said, ‘Hey, I’m gonna start this thing over here at the Green Mill and I don’t know if you want to do that stuff you do.’”
Despite regular slots with the Poetry Slam, the performance scene in Chicago discouraged Murphy. “I was performing around Chicago, but it was really limited. It was like a gig at Randolph Street Gallery once a year, and a bunch of benefits. I said yes to everything. I performed on top of bars. I did everything. I had to make a decision whether to move to New York or stay here. And literally on a plane home from New York I thought, ‘Well, I don’t want to move, so I guess I’ll make something that I think is missing.’”
Inspired by New York-based shows and venues like Avant Gardarama and King Tut’s, Murphy decided to create a showcase that would break down the walls between the worlds of the nightclub, art gallery, and comedy club.
“I wanted to make it vaudeville-ish. I wanted to mix in magic and all that stuff. I wanted to make it not precious, because everyone took all that performance stuff super-seriously,” says Murphy.
Sharon Evans, artistic director at Live Bait, recalls that she first met Murphy because the younger artist was a fan of Evans’s show Candyland, about the doomed candy heiress Helen Brach. After that, they found themselves being booked together at various events.
“We started overlapping in the [performance] scene. I remember one time [the nightclub] Neo did a fashion show and they wanted to have performance people come out in between the models. I was doing something that was sort of literary. She roller-skated down the runway and started playing her boom box, and I thought, ‘She’s got balls.’ The thing is, back in those days, there weren’t even that many female comedians. There weren’t that many women being funny. In solo performance work, men led, like Eric Bogosian. Brigid has always been an original.”
But though the show was never less than a blast to see, putting it together “was never easy,” maintains Murphy.
“I had a stable of people I would always go to, like David Sedaris and Cheryl Trykv and Matthew Owens. They were regulars. But then for all the other stuff, I was always seeking it out. ‘Oh, look at these little kids who are the lariat champions from the Mexican rodeo. Oh my god, they’re amazing.’ Or, ‘I want a marching band. Where do I find a marching band?’ I’d get these ideas, and then I’d have to go find them. I decided I wanted a marching band in the summer, which is the worst time to find them because all the schools are out.”
But the greatest difficulty Murphy faced arrived in spring of 1993, when the then-28-year-old was diagnosed with a particularly aggressive form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Since she didn’t have health insurance, Trykv, Sedaris, and a raft of others (including Murphy’s friends at Jam, who ran the Park West) put on a benefit called “Let’s Face the Music and Dance.” Murphy recalls, “That benefit was amazing. It was the closest thing I ever got to seeing an Orchid show [from the audience]. It was so moving and really gave me something to look forward to.”
After an intensive treatment regimen that included brain radiation, spinal injections, and oral chemotherapy, Murphy felt well enough to join Poi Dog Pondering on tour in spring of 1994. She detected some lumps in her lymph nodes and found out that the cancer had returned – this time at Stage 4. Her best chance for survival was a bone marrow transplant, but doctors didn’t hold out much hope.
“They told me to get my affairs in order. Basically, they said to me, ‘You have more hope than we do.’ It was about going to the wall and sitting with death and understanding that there’s nothing to fear. It’s just love.”
Evans recalls visiting Murphy in the hospital on the eve of the transplant. “There was a table in her hospital room that was turned into an altar, and people would bring inspirational objects. She involved that creativity, even in her recovery.”
After the success of the transplant, Murphy went back to school at Columbia, this time to study film. One of her first teachers was Joe Steiff, who has just completed an encore run in Fillet of Solo of his autobiographical show, Golden Corral. The piece, which chronicles Steiff’s experiences as a gay man growing up in Appalachia, was created in Murphy’s writing and performance workshop. Steiff describes Murphy’s early work as a filmmaker as “what some people would call more expressionistic, but then there would also be comedies that were more like what she would show at Milly’s.” He remains particularly fond of a short film she did that meditated on her illness. “It’s based on an experience she had in the hospital, and it’s just her looking at her hand and talking in a voice-over about that and how she was feeling at the time. It was just so poetic and personal and authentic.”
The search for the authentic voice is the guiding principle for Murphy’s work as a teacher. Says Steiff, who had never performed solo work before studying with Murphy, “She’s really incredibly insightful and really good at recognizing the small moments and details in stories that convey a lot of meaning.”
“What’s great about the teaching is that it uses everything in my background,” says Murphy. “My movement background, my producing background, my directing background, my film background – it uses absolutely all of my skills, including my writing skills. So it’s really great.”
And much as the “Orchid Show” brought all kinds of artists and performers to the stage, Murphy’s classes contain performers who want to learn how to write better, writers (like Steiff) who want to learn performance techniques, and painters who aren’t sure what they want to do, but want to find another medium to share their stories.
“We’re all telling the same stories,” maintains Murphy. “For centuries, we’re telling the stories of betrayal and loss and love. But the clothes are different.”
Murphy continues to do her own writing and filmmaking. Her thesis film at Columbia, A Prince in the Projects, made its debut in the 2000 Chicago International Children’s Film Festival, and her screenplay Maggie Was Here was a finalist in the 2002 Sundance Writing and Directing Lab. She has written a musical play about her experiences as a cancer patient, Without a Song, which debuted in a workshop production with the Goodman last June. Murphy also helped inaugurate the opening of the Goodman’s Albert Theatre. (One of Murphy’s closest friends was the late Goodman press director, Cindy Bandle, who lost her battle with breast cancer a year ago.)
But though she doesn’t think she’ll host a 20th-anniversary version of the “Orchid Show,” Murphy also continues to curate variety shows when the mood strikes. She and her husband, Marc Grapey (former artistic director for Famous Door) own a second home in Michigan, and Murphy recently put on a Milly May-style country hootenanny at a town park. But teaching remains her primary love these days.
As a survivor of cancer, she would also like to start a postcare group. “I feel like this work that I do could have two really great branches – one creative, one healing. I think they’re all really healing, but one is for show. One is to present something to the world, whether it’s in book form, painting form, whatever. Maybe the other version is – who knows? I think it’s the same process, and what I love about the work is that it’s designed so that anybody can do it. That’s what I love about these classes. More and more for me, the performance aspect is not as important. At the moment, this is what I’m doing, and I love it.”