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| Home> COF Articles: Hailey's Comet |
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American Theatre - March 2002
IN THE 1998 PBS DOCUMENTARY "SAM SHEPARD: STALKING HIMSELF," the usually reticent playwright admitted to a thematic bloodline running through his jagged portraits of tortured American families, from Buried Child to True West and beyond. "It's about isolation and a sense of community, " he said, gently acknowledging a personal debt to Samuel Beckett's thorny view of exile and banishment. Shepard also confessed that he was scared of airplanes. Obviously, his fear of flying didn't mean much to me when I first traveled to Hailey, Idaho, in July 2001, to write about Company of Fools, an up and coming theatre group run by a visionary couple, artistic director Rusty Wilson and his wife, associate artistic director Denise Simone. Why Hailey? The company had mounted a month long revival of True West, directed by and starring a local resident who was, oh by the way, Hollywood superstar Bruce Willis. And while Willis is an actor better known for die hard, Dolby enhanced movies in which cars explode at an alarming rate, I liked his more contemplative turns in character driven films like Nobody's Fool and Mortal Thoughts. Go to Idaho? Hell, yes. It would be a good story, following Willis as he resurrected his neglected theatrical wiles courtesy of Shepard's twisted American symphony in a town, apparently, in the middle of nowhere.
 At first, the truly true West, high desert terrain of south central Idaho feels isolated to anyone accustomed to the teeming canyons of midtown Manhattan, the crooked byways of Greenwich Village or the glass and steel cliffs of the Financial District. That is, to anyone familiar with the New York that existed prior to mid September 2001, a city still unscathed by smoke, stillness and uneasy silence. It was a far different America back in mid July of last year, before the terrorist attacks, so I flew to Idaho without Sam Shepard's choking fear of airplanes or my understanding of what words like "community" and "isolation" have come to mean to New Yorkers recovering from Sept. 11, 2001.
It was exactly two months earlier the afternoon of July 12 and Boise petulantly huffed like a stifling hot oven the moment I left the airport. As I drove from the southern reaches of Boise, I hooked up to Hadeslike Highway 84 for 40 minutes before snaking along the desolate, sagebrushdense plains of Route 20 for nearly two hours, heading I hoped toward the Wood River Valley. Aside from Evel Knievel's failed Snake River Canyon jump and onetime Ketchum resident Ernest Hemingway's 1961 shotgun suicide, I didn5t know much about Idaho.
Neither did New Jersey native Denise Simone when she and her husband Rusty Wilson were coaxed westward by Bruce Willis, Simone's longtime friend and Montclair State College (now Montclair State University) theatre classmate. The two friends both hung out in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of New York where Willis tended bar the two even contemplated auditioning for the Actors' Studio together. When asked how her friendship with Willis as survived all these years, Simone who resembles a more comely Rosanna Arquette hasn't a clue. "Maybe I pulled him out of the Nile in another life," she offers wryly.
While Willis made the jump from Hell's Kitchen to Hollywood, Simone and Wilson who met in 1982 while touring with the National Shakespeare Company eventually left New York for Los Angeles before making their way back to Wilson's home state of Virginia. It was there during a tenure with Theatre Four, a children's company that a creatively frustrated and admittedly depressed Wilson had a theatrical "epiphany" in 1991.
"It became suddenly clear to me that the rest of my life was going to be about clarity, so I could fulfill whatever human and artistic potential I had," he earnestly explains. The couple held weekly dinner discussions to hash over ideas for a company with like minded colleagues, including John Glenn and R.L. Rowsey. Ten years later, Glenn and Rowsey both relocated to Hailey, to carry on as Company of Fools's production manager and managing director, respectively.
"We started out working in our Richmond garage," recalls Wilson, grinning sheepishly. "It felt like the Moscow Art Theatre in winter because there wasn't any heat." After getting started in 1992 with virtually no funding and despite serious setbacks (a house fire, for example), Company of Fools finally presented its first performance in 1995: Something Unspoken: Two Evenings of Tennessee Williams One Acts took place in different rooms of Richmond's historic Hanover Tavern.
After catching Company of Fools's 1996 production of John Patrick Shanley's Danny and the Deep Blue Sea while filming in Richmond, Willis suggested that Simone and Wilson relocate to Hailey. The couple and their fledgling company would be able to use Hailey's Liberty Theatre, a circa 1930 movie house that Willis and ex wife Demi Moore had purchased in 1994 and had thoroughly renovated into an elegant, fullyfunctional theatre.
"WE BOUGHT THE MOVIE HOUSE KNOWING that it certainly wasn't a venture to make money," says Demi Moore, a supportive board member who is one of the company's most loyal champions. " [Buying the Liberty] was more about supporting the community. By maintaining the theatre and improving its quality, we reflected the love we had of being here." Moore has taken a hiatus from Hollywood and the stress that entails to settle full time in Hailey and concentrate on mothering her three daughters, ages 7 to 13. She likens Hailey to a vision of small town America in the 1950s. "There's something about the way it feels," she says dreamily, "the open space, driving down Main Street. It just resonates with me in a comforting, wonderful way."
Like Moore, Rusty Wilson felt at home the moment he saw the small, gritty western town, hugged by stark, rolling hills dotted with evergreens, sagebrush
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