It seems like happiness ignores all navigation
Sometimes freedom comes when you have lost your way
I changed the course of my imagination
And took a turn that leads to come what may
I don’t know where I’m gonna go
Right now that’s about the only thing I know
—“Providence” (Thornton/Andrew)
I DIDN’T GROW UP WANTING TO BE AN ACTOR OR DIRECTOR BECAUSE WE didn’t have that many movies where I grew up. We had one movie theater where I would go and see Don Knotts in The Reluctant Astronaut, but that’s all I knew about.
I did my first play when I was in the third grade. Our class did “The Three Billy Goats Gruff.” If you remember, it was a kids’ story about three billy goats that were trying to cross a bridge where a troll lived, but the troll wouldn’t let them cross because it was his bridge. I played the middle billy goat in that. It wasn’t anything big—it was just a little classroom play—and after it was over, I never thought about it anymore.
When I was in the fourth grade, I was a shepherd in the school Christmas play, and that was the first play I did in front of an audience. It was my first big role. I wore a burlap bag they had made into my costume, and I had some kind of a stick for a staff. The first word I ever uttered onstage in front of an audience in a play was “Hark.” That was my one line. After I delivered my one line, another shepherd was supposed to say something, and then the guy playing Jesus got all the rest of the lines. On my cue, I stepped out with my staff and my burlap clothing and I said, “Harp.” I had this one-word line, and I said it wrong. Instead of “Hark,” I said, “Harp.”
I was really shy in large groups of people. I was convinced that everyone else’s family had more money and that my peers had more acclaim than I did. I wasn’t the captain of the football team or the president of the student council, I wasn’t any of that shit. I was just this bucktoothed hillbilly kid that lived in town and was never picked out for anything. Later, I started playing baseball, and I was successful at that so I became more popular among some people, but most of my friends were rejects like me. We had guys in my high school who were really outgoing. Guys who would get up in front of class and sing a Perry Como song. I would always sit in the very back of the classroom.
My parents were both college graduates—my dad was a teacher, my mom was an English major—and I was a dumb ass. I had a learning disability that I didn’t even know about at the time. I’m severely dyslexic and can barely read. I also had what they now call ADD, I guess, because I don’t retain what I can read. But I just wasn’t generally interested in school, except for history. I thought history was a subject that was worthwhile. I never understood quite why math and algebra and all that shit was important, unless you wanted to be an algebra teacher.
One time I said to my Algebra II teacher, “I don’t understand a subject where they give you the answer and you got to figure out how you get the question. That doesn’t make any sense to me. I know how you add one and two, I understand that. But how do you add an x to a y? It’s like saying, how do you add a cow to a tomato?” She told me, “What if you want to be a building engineer one day?” I said, “Ma’am, I promise you, I swear to you on my life that I’m not going to want to be a building engineer.” As far as I was concerned, I was going to be in a rock-and-roll band or pitch for the St. Louis Cardinals. Those were the only things I had any interest in. But she never did like me, she was always mean to me. I think the real reason she didn’t like me was because one time I was wearing some double-knit pants, as we did in those days, and there was this girl in our class who was amazing. She was like Elke Sommer. I was at my desk and she was at the board, working out a problem. She had this little skirt on, and it kind of went up when she would reach up there. I got a hard-on in my double-knit pants, and then I was called to the board and it wouldn’t go down. It was kind of like something out of Porky’s. So I went to the board and I just stood out there, like a whole tent in my double-knit pants, because they had a lot of room in them. I didn’t ask for this thing to do that. It’s later, when you get older, then you start asking it to do that. But back then, at that time, I did not ask to get up in front of the algebra class with a tent in my double-knit pants.
After that incident, that algebra teacher just really wouldn’t tolerate me, but I passed that class somehow, with Ds. Maybe she just wanted to get me out of the school, I don’t know.
Needless to say, I made shitty grades in everything. When I saw that you could take drama class, I thought, This will be great. There will be chicks in there, and maybe I can even get a good grade because how hard can it be to get up and be the scarecrow in some fucking play?
The woman who taught my drama class, and this is a name I’m happy to mention, was a woman named Maudie Treadway. Mrs. Treadway wanted people to be who they were and not just sit there with their thumbs up their asses. When I started this class, I didn’t know anything about drama, so I would sit there and write short stories and things like that. The class would be doing a scene on the stage, and I would sit there in the back of the classroom alone and write on my own.
One day I was writing a play about a bored guy and his wife in a Kmart. We didn’t have a Kmart in our town, and going twenty miles away to Kmart in Hot Springs was a big deal. I wrote this story about Kmart with all this funny dark shit, and Mrs. Treadway came back and got on my ass about not paying any attention to what was going on onstage.
“If you don’t want to be in this class, you don’t have to be,” she said in her booming voice. (Mrs. Treadway was a big woman, with a big voice.) “What are you doing back here anyway? Doodling?”
“No, I was writing this story,” I said.
“Oh, really? Let me have it.”
She took my notebook away from me, and I thought it was going to be one of those “if it’s so important why don’t you share it with the rest of the class” kind of things, but it wasn’t. She kept it, and the next day she came up to me and said, “I read your story and it was brilliant, I love it. How would you like to do that onstage?” This high school drama class, in Arkansas in 1972, wasn’t exactly the center of the theater world. The curriculum was fairly standard. We had the different textbooks where we’d learn about who all the playwrights were, and at the end of the year the class would put on the senior play, which was always some kind of goofy shit, and then that was it.
All of a sudden, Mrs. Treadway was doing something that was unheard of. She was asking a student to do his own original story that he had written in the back of the class and play the character. High school drama teachers didn’t do that in Arkansas in 1972, but Mrs. Treadway did, for me. Everything I’ve accomplished since, I can trace back to this woman, Maudie Treadway.
Mrs. Treadway cast a girl from the class, and this girl and I did the story I wrote, which was about a bored husband and wife going through Kmart. I figured Mrs. Treadway must have liked how it turned out, because after that she started letting me direct my own scenes in class.
One day she kept me after class and said, “I’ve been teaching high school drama for a living for a long time. You don’t know what it’s like to be a drama teacher in a small town in Arkansas where nobody really cares, but let me tell you right now …”—and I was sixteen years old when she said this, and this is an example of how acting teachers can be helpful—she said, “Let me tell you something right now. You can do this. I’ve never had a student in one of my classes I actually thought was a real actor. You are. And you’re a writer. You ought to try to do this one of these days.”
Later, I starred in my senior play. I originally took drama class because there were girls in there and I thought it would be an easy A, but it turns out I liked it and I was good at it.
Mrs. Treadway died not too long after I graduated from high school. I was a pallbearer at her funeral.