The Legendary Independent Eye at Fringe Fest

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Independent Eye's 2015 performance of King Lear

Off the Cuff spoke with a couple who were vital in the development of theater in the 1960s and ‘70s, the Independent Eye’s Elizabeth Fuller and Conrad Bishop. This talented duo of storytellers will be bringing the solo act Survival to this year’s Milwaukee Fringe Festival on Saturday, Aug. 25, 6 p.m.

How did the Independent Eye come to be? You originally came to Milwaukee in 1968 to pursue careers in academic theater.

C.B.: But after the first year, we started getting a little bit disillusioned with the prospect of spending the rest of our lives in academia, and started a theater company, Theatre X, thinking at that time that it was just going to be something on the side. That suddenly became a Frankenstein's monster for us.

E.F.: But a nice monster!

C.B.: So, we left teaching and continued work with the company for five years.

E.F.: We were very happy with touring and the rest of the company was getting to the point where they just couldn't hack that anymore. So, we hived off and started a new company, the Independent Eye, and in order to not be competing, we moved to Chicago.

C.B.: We toured out of Chicago for three years and then were getting really tired of going out for maybe 12 weeks at a time and then coming back and trying to find a parking place in Chicago (laughs). We just arbitrarily moved east to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, not intending to start a theater there, but just as a place to hang our hats. But, you hang your hat, and then suddenly a building grows around it, and we wound up in a beautiful hundred-seat theater doing a subscription season and doing all kinds of series, and so on, and continued to tour because that's what paid the rent. Kind of going crazy with the work, and discovering “wait a minute, why do I want to run a resident theater?”

E.F.: So, we uprooted, and we sold our building to our colleague, who was forming a new company of her own, and we saw to it that at least for a while, that remained a performance space. And then we moved to Philadelphia and we made the same mistake all over again! We got a beautiful place and we renovated it and we started performing in it, and then we started doing a season, and we discovered we’ve just done the same damn thing again! And then we moved to Sebastopol, California in ‘99 and we very carefully did an end run about that by virtue of the fact that we don't have a space that we can perform in, so we're safe (laughs).

Tell me more about why The Independent Eye has gravitated toward touring.

C.B.: The impulse has always been touring for two reasons. One, because you meet every conceivable kind of audience. And the other being, we can create a show and keep it in repertory as long as somebody wants to see it, and then it grows, it grows like a child. You don't really want to have your child and take a picture of it and throw it out the window. Even if it gives you problems, you prefer to see it grow (laughs).

What inspired you to move from theater into novel-writing?

C.B.: Sometimes it's like fishing where you think the bite is a minnow and it turns out to be a sturgeon (laughs) - it expands [beyond what you expected]. That's one reason why we've gone through so many genres. We’ve written realistic plays. We've written comedy sketches. Survival is a solo piece, where basically Elizabeth sits there talking and gets up and moves around the table a couple of times. Or [we’ve also done] radio drama or puppetry.

E.F.: The story often has its own agenda.

C.B.: The first [novel project] was adapting a play that we had produced a couple of times and was quite successful.

E.F.: We wanted to keep telling the story.

C.B.: We’ve done a lot of kind of cross-genre things. Doing radio drama, which is an entirely different kind of thing; doing puppetry. And when you start a story, the genre sort of asks its own questions. A couple of our books have been adaptations from plays, and all kinds of new things come in, about character, about setting. We're getting on in years and there are not too many more national tours that we will go on. It’s nice to have a medium where you can just sit.

E.F.: When we moved to California, we naively thought, this is cool, we have now just made ourselves three tourable, two-person pieces. … Now we’re going to marry California, and we’re going to go right back into touring [after raising two kids and sending them to college] and make our living the way we always have.

Surprise! The touring market had gone stone-dead, belly-up, floating on the top of the water. …We thought, let’s do a regular radio show – we can commit to this, because we’re not touring. So for three and half years, we produced a regular radio show called Hitchhiking off the Map, and you can still find all 94 programs on our website for free listening, so we thought, ‘Ok, we’ll stay home and send our stories out on the road. …The wonderful thing about radio is when you get a chance to make it really as good as you can and when you’ve got it right, then it's that way forever.

C.B.: It’s the illusion of immortality.

E.F.: So our fiction writing is just one of [the genres we’ve worked in]. once it’s between covers and it’s a good book and people read it and pass it around, it’s there until the book falls apart.

What moves you to create?

E.F.: We are absolutely astonished and curious and amazed by the contradictions of human behavior; the long distances in what people say they want and what they actually do. And what they need, and what they make themselves available for. There’s just all these incredible contradictions; this age we’re in right now is particularly rife with them – it’s almost like a rotten garbage dump of them – it’s not the first time – and so, these stories, every now and again, a nugget - it's like an itch in an oyster becomes a pearl.

I think we don't have much of a sense of the destination, what was at the end of the story. It's not really about that, it's about the journey. and it's often about the realizations that the people involved in the journey make in the process of losing their stuff at the rest stop and so on.

Where have your decades of touring taken the Independent Eye?

C.B.: We’ve performed in 38 states; we've had resident theaters in Milwaukee; we did a couple of seasons in Chicago before we moved to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and Philadelphia, and now we live in Sebastopol, California and we do some work locally, but not a whole lot.

E.F.: Our audiences have been everything from high schools to prisons to art centers. We do do things in real stages where they have a light board and the chairs are padded and people pay money to come and sit in them, but we also do things where basically we're in one corner of the Churches Fellowship Hall and people are sitting on folding chairs and came in and said, ‘Yeah, but where’s the movie screen?,’ because they’ve never seen live theater before. And so it’s been every kind of circumstance, and I can't say that one of them is preferred to another. It's one of the things that keeps us on our toes-- we have to always be adjusting to new circumstances.

For more on Independent Eye visit damnedfool.com and www.independenteye.org. You can also find Elizabeth Fuller and Conrad Bishop 7 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 23 at Boswell Books for a reading from their most recent novel, Galahad’s Fool.