In Iowa: Rolling Toward Peoria

By RICHARD CONNIFF

Across the aisle of the bus, two cast members struggle to recall whether they had their last schnapps party in West Lafayette or East Lansing. It was definitely butterscotch schnapps. -- Could it have been South Bend? A night in Omaha (or was it Iowa City?) remains memorable for klieg lights and a good soda machine. The bus driver, meanwhile, wonders whether it was in Madison or Des Moines that he last had his vehicle washed.

The past is a glittering blur. Let us attend to the questions of the moment: Where are we right now, and how far do we have to go to the next stop? The answer is that we are on page 3 of the itinerary, and today we will be traveling about this far (here the bus driver spreads his thumb and forefinger) on the map.

We are on the bus, and that's what matters. Indeed, we are on a bus-and- truck tour, a theatrical institution of small renown wherein cast, crew, orchestra, props and scenery pile into buses and trucks to barnstorm the country. This particular company is spending five months on the road doing mostly one-night stands. They wake up in time to make the bus, travel much of the day to a new theater, play their parts, then adjourn to a hotel till bus call the next morning. Thus pass strings of small cities: Harlingen, McAllen, Corpus Christi; Pueblo, Albuquerque, El Paso. Four months into the tour, everyone is tired, everyone feels cut adrift, almost everyone suffers from a cough known as the "bus crud." The play, coincidentally, is a musical confection, On the Twentieth Century, about the giddy, romantic life of theatrical types traveling cross-country.

Judy Kaye, one of the stars, has met her fiance in the cast, and their lives are so giddy and romantic that the two of them have formed a prenuptial death pact: if either even considers doing a bus-and-truck again, then . . .

Her co-stars, Imogene Coca and Frank Gorshin, are more sanguine about life on the road. Gorshin, who is tired of doing Kirk Douglas impressions, wants to show that he's serious about theater, and it's hard to get more serious than a bus-and-truck. Coca, who has been performing for nearly 70 years, simply loves the stage. For her, the bus-and-truck is a succession of opening nights. The most fun she ever had in theater, she says, was one night in Davenport, Iowa, where we have just arrived, when she was on an earlier tour. The bus made it to the Adler theater, but the truck didn't. The cast had to improvise with furniture from the Blackhawk hotel down the street; for the sound of a telephone ringing, they used a cowbell.

There is a theater crowd in places like Davenport, which is why bus-and- truck tours exist. The doyenne here is Mary Nighswander, a little old lady who wears her white hair in a bun and speaks telegraphese ("Knit it myself," she asserts of her sequined cardigan). Nighswander runs the Broadway Theatre League, which has been bringing bus-and-trucks to town for 27 years. She has a $25,000 check in her pocket for tonight's show. If she doesn't hand it over by intermission, she says, "the cast sits on the curtain for the second act."

If audiences are paying their $20 or $30 a seat for glamour and a taste of the theater life, the theatrical types say they signed on with the bus-and- truck mainly for the money. The members of the company all collect a per diem expense, and the idea is to live on the per diem and stash the paycheck for when they get back to New York. "You need a nest egg in this business," says Bruce Daniels, a lead, "so you can survive while you're out trying to get . . ." -- his voice deepens and Tivoli lights blink on in his eyes -- "that starring role." Meanwhile, they double up at hotels to save money. Back in Utica (it was definitely Utica), several musicians missed the bus and had to pay their own fare to Indianapolis; they lived four to a room for the next month. Not only is the pay good but there is no time to spend it. On a schedule of up to eight shows a week, with hundreds of miles between venues, "you usually have time to take a shower or eat, not both." Apart from the show, the big event most days is the one-hour lunch stop. The cast favors shopping malls and K marts for the chance to spread out and avoid familiar faces. Once or twice a month there are "golden days," when the company neither travels nor performs. "Golden days," says Kaye, "are when you do your laundry."

But the cast's schedule constitutes idle luxury compared with life on the crew bus. At 7 on a Thursday morning, 31 hours out of Davenport's Adler theater and six hours out of the Coronado in Rockford, Ill., the crew bus sits at curbside in Peoria, a black bomb emitting oily blue smoke. The bus shudders intermittently as crew members wake and drop down out of their bunks. It shudders three times for Joe Burns, prop master: when he sits up and bangs his forehead on the bottom of the overhead bunk, when he flops back again on his pillow and, finally, when he throws aside the packing blanket and rolls out of bed.

"Good morning," says Roger Franklin, a stage manager.

"Who says?" says Burns.

But Franklin, who did his first bus-and-truck in 1954, is dauntlessly cheerful. "An exciting day before us," he declares, putting on an artsy accent. "Bringing the-ah-ter to the masses." Franklin nips at a bottle of Maalox and goes off to work singing "It's a beautiful day in Peoria" to the tune of Mr. Rogers' theme song. Burns starts his day with Mountain Dew, because he has checked the label and found caffeine prominent among the ingredients.

^ The crew seldom sees the inside of a hotel. They generally hit the road around 1 a.m., when the lights and scenery are packed up after the night's show, then start unpacking it again with a local crew at a new theater at 8 the same morning. They have a delicate and demanding job. The scenery and equipment fill two 48-ft. truck trailers, and some theaters aren't big enough to accommodate the whole show. Some theaters aren't fit to accommodate any show. Burns is still muttering about one theater where the local crew chief, a plumber, counterbalanced 800-lb. light pipes and pieces of overhead scenery not with the customary lead weights or even sandbags but with old toilets and radiators.

Peoria, which has a roomy new theater, goes smoothly. No one in the local crew shows up under the influence of cherry Robitussin, as happened at an earlier stop. No one threatens a sit-down strike, as happened when Burns lit up a cigar in the truck trailer in Madison.

A Chicago skyscraper rises on stage right, with the Chrysler Building on stage left. The main set, a luxury sleeping car on the Chicago-New York run, circa 1930, comes together in between.

As half-hour approaches, the members of the cast arrive and start to shake off the bus blahs. It is only another show. It is only Peoria. An actor, pretending to be blase, puts on a whiny voice and sings, "It's time to be theatrical again/ It's time to pull out all the stops again." Still, there is an audience out there, and the cast can never get enough laughter and applause. As she rushes offstage in the first act, Kaye remarks, "It's a very user-unfriendly house." Gorshin, who is perennially down, declares, "It's just one of those nights when nothing goes right. So I guess I'll go home and blow my brains out." The audience, of course, thinks everything is going fine, and at the curtain it rewards the cast with warm approval.

The actors bask momentarily in the applause. And then, almost before they have left the stage, the crew swarms over the set. A starry sky gets folded up and tucked into a basket. The sleeping-car set begins to tremble under the ratchetting of half a dozen socket wrenches and quickly comes apart in 40 pieces. Someone shouts, "Hit it!" And a dozen men bully a light rack onto a truck, wheels humming and clattering up the aluminum ramp.

At 12:45, a little more than two hours from the curtain, Burns slams shut the back door of a truck and drives home the lock in a single move. "We gone," he shouts. It is time to get back on the bus. Bloomington, Ind., lies just a few hours ahead.