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At first glance, Eric and Missy Thibodeaux-Thompson
don’t betray their years lived on the stage and in the
director’s chair. They don’t pepper conversations with
Shakespearean monologues or obscure theater lingo. No spotlight shines on
the couple.
Small details betray the seasoned theater
veterans’ identities: Eric and Missy refer to most jobs as
“gigs,” they harbor a fondness for stage combat, and their
penchant for funny quips and astute detail confirms that they are natural
performers. Eric, 45, and Missy, 41, have crisscrossed the
country — acting, directing, and teaching in Lincoln, Neb., New York
City, Charlotte, N.C., and Atlanta — before landing in Springfield,
where the married professors run the five-year-old theater department at
the University of Illinois at Springfield. The program, a ground-up operation, offers three
classes and a practicum each semester, along with two to three full-scale
productions a year. With continued growth in enrollment, money in the
university’s budget, and Eric and Missy’s enthusiasm for the
stage, UIS will be ready to offer a theater minor before much longer.
Eric remembers vividly his first trip to the capital
city. After flying in from Atlanta, he hopped a small plane from a Chicago
airport. As the plane descended toward the Abraham Lincoln Capital Airport,
Eric recalls, he looked out the window, thinking, “Why are we going
down? There’s nothing out there — we need to go up. “[The plane] kept going down, down, down, and
then, at the last second, ‘Ah, OK, there’s a little bit of
pavement,’ ” Eric says. “I got out of the plane, and then
I saw there is indeed a very nice city here.”
Springfield — or, more specifically, the
capital city’s theater crowd — returns the sentiment. Though
the two are quick to note that they don’t want the theater program to
turn into the “Eric and Missy Show,” they are hyped during
introductions by Margot Duley, dean of UIS’ College of Liberal Arts
and Sciences, as Springfield’s answer to Katharine Hepburn and
Spencer Tracy. “I knew they both had a lot of credits
professionally,” says Gus Gordon, co-founder of Gordon Productions
and chief meteorologist at WICS (Channel 20). “We’ve got these
two great new performers and also just great people.”
The creative control enjoyed by the professors
— because of support from a progressive administration, Eric says
— allows them to fill a niche in the Springfield theater community.
Over the Moon Productions, Gordon Productions, the Springfield Theatre
Centre, and TriCara Productions, plus a variety of summer musical-theater
troupes and other groups, consistently stage plays, but in a town so rich
with musical theater Eric and Missy’s dramatic productions, such as
Tennessee Williams’ Period of Adjustment
and Lee Blessing’s poignant Two Rooms, are a nice
addition.
“[UIS Theatre] adds some new amazing shows that
wouldn’t get produced otherwise,” says Gordon, an 18-year
local-theater enthusiast. “There’s a place for many different
types of theater. I think they have created a little niche for themselves,
and that is wonderful.”
In addition to their preferences (Eric is a confessed
“Shakespearean nut,” Missy an August Wilson fan), the
professors offer a training stage on which students and community members
alike can strengthen their acting chops.
When the theater program was revving up, students
weren’t knocking down the doors of the Studio Theatre for auditions,
and community members were key players then, and still are today, Eric
says. “The theater community is pretty friendly, as
far as I’m concerned,” Eric says. “It’s not a
cutthroat thing; it’s the opposite.”
Last fall Leigh Steiner, a community-theater veteran
and co-founder of Over the Moon Productions, sat in the director’s
chair for the faculty-and-student showcase Two
Rooms, the story of a husband and wife who
have been separated, starring Eric and Missy. “[In the play] the couple never talk to each
other together, so you really want people who have nonverbal communication
with each other,” Steiner says. Although the characters Eric and Missy portrayed in Two Rooms were separated
under grave circumstances — Eric’s role, Michael Wells, is an
American being held hostage in Beirut — the Thibodeaux-Thompsons are
no strangers to living apart themselves. “We’d spent so much of our lives together
apart,” Missy says.
Eric and Missy were set up, or at least it seemed
that way when the then-Eric Thompson, from Minneapolis, and Missy
Thibodeaux, of St. Charles, La., sat down next to each other at a
multiplex. They were expecting a group outing on the University of
Nebraska-Lincoln campus, where both were candidates for master’s
degrees in fine arts, specifically acting, but their hands were the only
ones in the popcorn bucket. “Pretty much since then we’ve been
inseparable,” Missy says. “That’s true. You can pretty much trace
it back to that, and she still hasn’t shook me loose,” Eric
says. Fifteen years later, Eric and Missy can still rattle
off the date: Jan. 18, 1992. Eric finished his degree that year, but instead of
blowing town for brighter spotlights and bigger stages, he stuck around for
two years while Missy finished her MFA, taking temp jobs, scoring the
occasional acting gig, and generally being a “Gary Great Guy”
as Missy nicknamed him. “With one hand she was planning her own wedding
and with the other she was putting the final ink on her thesis,” Eric
says. “I had it easy. I was just riding around on my motorcycle,
ready to go.”
The summer after graduation, the newly hitched pair
got paying gigs at the Wisconsin Shakespeare Festival — Eric onstage,
Missy in the box office — but after their time up north the pair had
a shared destination in mind: New York City. “We were pretty determined to go back to
Lincoln, box everything up, and move to New York City, because that was on
both of our life checklists,” Eric says. “We shared that. We
both wanted to put [in] a stint of time in the Big Apple.”
The Thibodeaux-Thompsons settled into an apartment on
the edge of Alphabet City, an artists’ enclave made famous in the
musical Rent.
Eric’s and Missy’s things were still in boxes when the phone
rang. On the other end was a friend they’d known in Lincoln, offering
Eric his first New York gig. “I didn’t even audition for it, and
I’m getting a role offered to me.” Eric says. “I remember
hanging up and turning to Missy, saying, ‘Wow, this is a great
omen.’ ”
The couple knew better than to relax, though; booking
jobs in the fickle world of the performing arts wouldn’t always be so
easy. They didn’t hit Broadway running, but Eric and Missy did get
work. “We loved New York,” Eric says. “To
be real, we didn’t set the world on fire, but we did get hired as
actors and directors, and I think we got hired more than we thought we
would.”
Eric and Missy fell in with the Theatre-Studio Inc.,
then stationed in Hell’s Kitchen. Among other gigs, Missy directed a
couple of Samuel Beckett short plays and Eric served as director for a
one-woman show in which Missy acted. As exhilarating as the New York acting scene was,
Eric and Missy knew that they wanted to get their feet in the door to the
academic world. They decided that they would go wherever the first break
came, regardless of which of them got it. Missy auditioned for a resident-professional position
at Cornell University, in Ithaca, N.Y., and a month later received what she
calls “the nicest rejection letter” of her life. About a week
before the semester started, Missy got a call: There was an opening for her
after all.
“I tell students, ‘I don’t care if
I’m 12th; I got the gig,’ ” Missy says. Missy moved to Ithaca; Eric stayed in their Manhattan
digs. It was the first of many times that acting work took them in
different directions. With no e-mail or cell phones and a five hours’
worth of highway between them, the bus was the only way for Eric to travel
— and, he says with a laugh, sometimes even the bus didn’t make
it. “It was one of those things. Is that what we
really wanted? No, but that’s where the work was. It was a
gig,” Missy says. The importance of “getting the gig” was
something they both understood. After the job at Cornell ended, Missy still had the
teaching bug, and Eric wanted a piece of academia too. Missy got the first
appointment: a teaching job at University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
Eric hopped from Winthrop University in Virginia to the University of
Virginia’s College at Wise to Georgia Perimeter College, a four-hour
drive from Charlotte, before finally landing at Spelman College, in
Atlanta. “We’ve done it a gazillion times now.
Even when we were dating, the first summer Eric was in Omaha and I was on
the other end of the state,” Missy says. “All of them, we set a
limit. I think three weeks was the max we would go without seeing each
other. We would figure it out somehow.”
But before Eric was hired at Spelman, Missy learned
that she was pregnant. They weren’t living in the same city at the
time, but the news had Missy packing her things and moving south.
“She had the more important job, frankly, than
I had, but she was willing to give it up at that point in time because of
Emma [the couple’s daughter] about to make her grand entrance, so she selflessly came
down to Atlanta, where we bought a house,” Eric says. When Emma was 3 months old, Eric applied for a
tenure-track position at Georgia Perimeter College. He didn’t get the
job. “There were a few long afternoons when I was
literally walking down the pavement thinking, ‘How am I going to earn
a living? I’ve got a little one at home, got no job’ — it
sounded like a song,” Eric recalls. The tune changed when Missy got a call from Spelman,
asking her to step in as the emergency replacement for a member of the
theater faculty. She had just given birth to Emma, now 6, but told the
university that her husband was in the same line of work, with a similar
résumé. They both came in for the interview, and Eric was
hired for an academic year.
During that year Eric mailed résumés to
institutions around the country, and he was asked to travel to Springfield
for an interview. UIS was looking for a professor to spearhead the creation
of a theater department.
Sangamon State
University, the forerunner of UIS, introduced a theater program —
headed by Guy Roman — in 1971, but after his 1981 departure the
program sputtered out. It took 21 years for theater to be resurrected at
UIS.
In 2001 and 2002, UIS introduced three academic initiatives: music,
forensics, and theater. The school hired two professors to fill the first
two programs in 2001, and in fall of 2002 Eric took on the task of
launching UIS Theatre. “We had to hire someone who could start the
program from scratch,” says Margot Duley, the dean of liberal arts,
“everything from developing classes to recruiting students and
members of the community to act in plays.”
But Eric’s work didn’t stop there.
Cultivating a theater program also meant drawing preliminary set designs,
coordinating box-office functions, handling publicity, and developing a Web
site, Duley says. “He really was a one-man show,” she adds.
The solo act became a duet when the university hosted
a national search to add a second professor to the theater department and
Missy surfaced as a finalist. “She emerged very much in her own right as the
leading candidate,” Duley says. “I think she and I make a pretty good
team,” Eric says. “Of course, there was some wondering of
‘I hope my wife doesn’t get sick of me.’ ”
After taking the gig, Missy chose her office. In
University Hall, there were two desks available: One was approximately 20
feet away from Eric’s office, and the other shared a wall with it.
Missy chose the workspace 20 feet away.
Since the department’s inaugural production
— Terrence McNally’s comedy It’s
Only a Play, in October 2002 — more
people have attended shows every year, and the number of students
auditioning has swelled, Eric says. “I really love puffing up my chest about this,
and I can say, ‘Hey, there are slightly more people attending than
last year,’ ” Eric says. “It ebbs and flows, but if we
were a bar graph we are zigzagging upward.”
Missy directed Picnic, by William Inge, a month ago, and Eric’s production
of Williams’ Period of Adjustment will not hit the boards until April, but the two are
already talking about the next season. “It’s really important to me that we both
don’t just do plays written by middle-aged white guys,” Eric
says. “We need to do plays written by women, written by
African-Americans, and plays written by people of different sexual
orientations.”
Eric admits that Missy is probably quicker to
consider the woman’s voice than he is, and the truth is, although
Eric made the final decision, even before Missy became a professor she was
throwing scripts Eric’s way as possibilities for the UIS Theatre
season. “For our poor, glorious, fabulous daughter
Emma, dinner talk is shop talk, man,” Missy says. The Thibodeaux-Thompsons’ schedules fit
together like gears. Eric and Missy teach different classes, and when one
is directing the other takes house duty. Bringing on a third member to the theater faculty is
the department’s next goal. Currently the Sangamon Auditorium staff
makes up the difference by creating sets and lending technical expertise,
but acquiring a design and technical faculty member would open the door to
a minor in theater. “We’re slowly adding more theater
classes,” Missy says. “We’re building a nice core of
students and new ones every year, so it’s really nice.”
UIS is in a growth stage since recently becoming a
four-year university, and, depending partly on student interest and partly
on university finances, Duley says that she can see a minor in theater in
the not-so-distant future. “Now we have to get in line and be
patient,” Missy says. “It’s happening. Slowly, baby
steps. It’s something that we’re working toward.”
Tonight Eric directs Student-Directed
Scenes, a collection of scenes from the
American Realism genre directed by students in his “Directing for the
Theatre” class, at the Studio Theatre, in the Public Affairs Center
on the UIS campus. On Dec. 22 and 23, Eric and Missy reprise their roles as
Mr. and Mrs. Cratchit in the Gordon Productions reading of A Christmas Carol: 1940s Radio Show.
Contact Marissa Monson at mmonson@illinoistimes.com.
This article appears in Nov 29 – Dec 5, 2007.
