British expatriate Dale Goulding never intended to go into theater. “If I’d had a job,” he snickers, “I wouldn’t have gone into acting.” And he certainly never dreamed he would wind up cofounding a theater company with a Bulgarian director in Chicago.
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One day Goulding gave a friend a lift to an audition. “They asked me to improvise something. They liked what I did and asked me to join the troupe. We rehearsed, and I said to myself, ‘My God, this is better than working in a factory.’” He worked with the company for two years, eventually going to London to perform in Critical Paranoid Self-Analysis, or Work in Progress. Directed by a member of the Grotowski Theatre Laboratorium, the show did fairly well in London’s West End, in part because this working-class critique of Thatcher’s England proved popular with the well-to-do.
A tall, thin, dark-haired man with a long face, Peyankov, who’d just spent a year touring his country in a small company, was tired of the “imaginary social realist” aesthetics of the state-sponsored, state-run, increasingly unpopular theater. Goulding took his artistic complaints seriously. The two met a number of times in a coffee shop attached to the Theatre of the Armed Forces, where Goulding was performing, and slowly hatched a plan: Peyankov would travel to London, officially to study English theater, but really to cofound a theater company with Goulding that would put on shows in the tradition of Grotowski’s “poor theater.”
Peyankov’s message was only too clear, and the new government closed his show down. “It was a little close to home,” he says, his eyes shining with amusement.
While he was there Goulding met an actress and director from Sarah Lawrence named Nancy Normile, and they subsequently married. He also met two American students, Lou Anders and Eric Spitz-Nagel, who encouraged him to do what they were planning to do–move to Chicago. A move Peyankov, now writing from there, also encouraged.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Charles Eshelman.
