My girlfriend, Coco, has been waylaying Peter Michael Goetz every time she sees him at Sea Change. “Didn’t you play Benjamin Franklin in ‘1776?’ ” she’ll ask him, and he’ll shake her hand warmly and tell her yes, yes he did. He’s been in almost 100 productions at the Guthrie. You can name almost any play and he’s been in it.
Last time she did this, she told him, “I just realized where else I’ve seen you. I mean, of course I’ve seen you in a million plays, but weren’t you also in the movie ‘C.H.U.D.?'”
“C.H.U.D.” is a perfectly trashy horror film from 1984 which boasts an unexpectedly extraordinary cast, including Daniel Stern, John Heard, and a brief appearance by John Goodman. It details how toxic waste under the streets of New York has been turning the homeless people who live in abandoned subway lines into murderous, sharp-toothed monsters. “C.H.U.D.” stands for “cannibalistic humanoid underground dweller,” by the way.
We’ve been obsessed with it for years, in large part because the DVD of the film contains a terrifically funny commentary track, mostly involving the cast mocking their own presence in the film. At one moment the entire cast realizes they didn’t get paid money they were promised, and all unanimously decided to go on strike against the commentary track, refusing to comment on the film but instead repeating profanities over and over.
When Coco mentioned “C.H.U.D.” to Peter Michael Goetz, he gasped. “I’m still close friends with the director!” he declared. “I’ll have to call him and tell him you mentioned the film to me! Poor guy never made another movie.”
Goetz is in the Guthrie’s production of George Bernard Shaw’s “Arms and the Man,” which has been in previews for a week and opens — tonight? Tomorrow night? I’m never clear on how previews work. Anyway, there’s a performance tonight, and I guess the official opening is tomorrow night, when I’ll be going. Whenever it actually opens, when Peter Michael Goetz is at the Guthrie, there are always a lot of stories about him, which nobody will ever tell me. I’ll start to overhear something, and then people will notice I’m listening in and shut up. Apparently, he’s something of a prankster. But, hell, if nobody will talk to me about it, I’ll talk to Peter Michael Goetz himself.
So I sat down with him. I was overdue for an interview with him anyway — he’d been part of the Guthrie’s performing staff for more than a decade, starting in 1969, and has returned with great frequency ever since to appear in plays. If somebody were ever to do an oral history of the theater, he’d be the first person to talk to.
“So you like backstage stories,” Goetz told me. “I have a few.”
There was, for instance, his notorious missed entrance from “The Winter’s Tale,” decades before the recent Guthrie production. There is, as you may know, a gap of 16 years between the first half of the play and the second, and Goetz, who was playing Polixenes, the king of Bohemia, left the stage to prepare for this, removing his wig and adding makeup to make himself appear to have aged. As he was doing this, a stagehand found him in the dressing room. “You’re missing a scene!” the stagehand told him.
He laughed. “Don’t tell me that,” he told the stagehand. “You’re scaring me.”
‘Methinks I hear the king’ …
The stagehand wasn’t kidding. There is a line that signals his entrance: “Methinks I hear the king.” The actor who had this line had been repeating it, over and over, and then pausing, expectantly. Goetz rushed to the stage, undressed, gray haired. Unsure what to do, he hid behind some scenery and poked his head out, calling out his dialogue through a curtain.
Speaking of entrances, Goetz also told an anecdote about performing in “Arsenic and Old Lace.” It was an afternoon production, and, at that time, the afternoon usher staff was all volunteer, and so either left or took seats in the theater after the show had started. Well into the production, the doors to the theater opened, and two old women came in, clutching their tickets. They walks down one aisle, and then crossed the trench in front of the audience and went up another aisle. They then exited.
A few moments later, they entered on the other side of the theater, and once again worked their way down the aisle. When they got to the front of the stage, they walked right up onto the stage. Goetz stopped his performance, and they looked at him. “Can you help us find our seat?” one asked.
“What could I do?” Goetz said. “I helped them find their seat.”
Goetz also tells of when the Guthrie performed plays in repertory, running several plays simultaneously. For a while, he was playing Lenny in “Of Mice and Men” one night and on another night he played a Mechanical in “A Midsummer’s Night Dream.” One night he forgot what play he was in. He shared his dressing room with several other cast members, and they exchanged pleasantries, so accustomed to seeing each other that it didn’t occur to Goetz or the other actors that he was dressing as Lenny while they were dressing for “Midsummer’s.” They walked out to the stage together, waiting for their entrance, and a moment before he had to take the stage, he noticed the other actors were in Regency costumes. He quickly threw off the wig he was wearing as Lenny, but otherwise had no choice but to perform in overalls. As it happens, this is pretty much what the Mechanicals wore in the Guthrie’s touring version of the play a decade ago, so maybe Goetz was just ahead of the curve on that.
To leading roles, the hard way
It was while he was playing Lenny that the theater’s then-artistic director, Michael Langham, took him aside. Goetz was a heavy young man, and as a result had been cast in character roles, but Langham asked him if he had ever considered losing some weight. There were lead roles coming up that he might be right for, if he was physically the right type.
Goetz immediately went on a crash diet. He stopped eating and spent hours every day on the theater’s treadmill, losing 50 pounds in six weeks. This netted him the starring role in “Becket,” Jean Anouilh’s satirical take on the relationship between King Henry II and Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury.
“I fainted during preview,” Goetz said. “I was in a fog.”
“It wasn’t the performance I am happiest about,” he continues. “I couldn’t get a handle on the character. I couldn’t even recognize myself.”
Goetz also told me one of those stories that people shush themselves from telling when I’m around. There’s a scene in “Arms and the Man” in which Goetz, playing Major Paul Petkoff, goes to produce something from a coat pocket with a cry of “What’s the meaning of this?” In the play, the item he is looking for is missing, but one night, during rehearsal, Goetz hid something in his pocket and produced it.
He had gone backstage and removed his own underwear and placed it in the pocket.
“Of course, we won’t be doing that in front of a live audience,” he told me.
