Hailey's Comet

A visionary company—and Hollywood star Bruce Willis—lure a reporter to Idaho's True West.

By Kara Manning

AUSTIN: There’s gonna be a general lack of toast in the neighborhood this morning. Many, many unhappy bewildered breakfast faces. I guest it’s best not to even think of the victims. Not to even entertain it. Is that the right psychology? 
LEE: (pauses) What? 
AUSTIN: Is that the correct criminal psychology? Not to think of the victims? 
LEE: What victims? 
AUSTIN: The victims of crime. Of breaking and entering. I mean is a prerequisite for a criminal not to have a conscience? 
LEE: Ask a criminal. 
(True West, Sam Shepard)

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 Hades-like Highway 84 for 40 minutes before snaking along the desolate, sagebrush-dense 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 one-time Ketchum resident Ernest Hemingway’s 1961 shotgun suicide, I didn’t 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 has 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, fully-functional 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 and ski lifts. Denise Simone, however, had a tougher period of adjustment.

"She was in total mourning," says Wilson, laughing, as the couple and their 12-year-old daughter Russell tuck in a quick pre-True West dinner at a packed Thai restaurant on Hailey’s Main Street. "Denise was virtually in a coma for six months after we got here."

Denise smiles and bites into an eggroll. "Yeah, but then I woke up."

"It was a real leap of faith," Wilson admits, looking gratefully at his wife. "But things have evolved in a beautiful way."

LEE: I don’t need my thoughts swept off to Idaho. I don’t need that!

After a friday night performance on a cool summer night, a grizzled Bruce Willis bows to boisterous applause alongside the True West cast—Chad Smith (Austin), Rusty Wilson’s former SUNY Purchase classmate Andrew Alburger (Saul Kimmer) and Danielle Kennedy (Mom)—who all stand ankle-deep in the post-performance wreckage scattered across the suburban kitchen set. A renegade Cheerio is plastered to Willis’s damp forehead, his too-loose pants droop dangerously and he’s soaked to the skin—not surprising since Austin and Lee spend much of the play guzzling beer and champagne, killing Mom’s plants, making stacks of burnt toast, wrestling on the floor and upending cereal boxes, crockery and furniture.

"They started rating the mess," reveals Moore a month later on the phone. "During the last week, one of the drawers popped out and hit Bruce in the eye. So he finished the run with a really nice black eye." 

This July night, appearing slightly exhausted, Willis bows again, smiles broadly and claps Smith on the back. He sports a sincere—not a celebrity-cool—look of pleasure and radiantly soaks in the approval of a sold-out house of over 250 of his Blaine County neighbors. Earlier that day Willis proudly announced that the entire run had sold out that very day, as if he were vaguely surprised that could happen, even in Hailey.

Bruce Willis moved with Demi Moore to Idaho in 1992 after falling in love with the area during a ski trip. "We were both looking for a place to raise our kids outside of Los Angeles and not expose them to the toxicity of [that city]. It’s a toxic place in many ways...like emotionally," says the surprisingly soft-spoken Willis. Though the couple is now divorced, their relationship is amicable, and both are committed to raising their girls in Hailey. "I can go to the hardware store and shop or get something to eat and be left alone," says Willis, perched on one of the theatre’s plush crimson chairs, exuding Buddha-like calm just two hours before stalking on stage as the sociopathic Lee. He chews on an oatmeal cookie, snitched from the concession stand. "I didn’t come here because I thought this would be a good place to do theatre," he says. "That happened afterward."

AUSTIN: What if I come with you out to the desert?
LEE: Are you kiddin? 
AUSTIN: No. I’d just like to see what it’s like.
LEE: You wouldn’t last a day out there, pal.

To a newcomer, the long road to Hailey is daunting. After passing arid, brown-dust and brush ranges where Oregon Trail pioneers starved in bad winters, the terrain gradually shifts from dry scrubland to dense green pastures and sprawling cattle ranches. Bellevue, the town just south of Hailey, appears congenially western (the Sawtooth Rangers rodeo ring bolsters the area’s cowboy image), but the gleaming array of corporate jets and private Cessnas at Hailey’s airport coolly reflects the moneyed population of the resort towns Ketchum and Sun Valley just up the road. But Hailey, a former mining town, is an ordinary working person’s community of just 4,600 people. A quaint farmer’s market hawking lemonade, fresh corn, grilled hot dogs and prairie flowers is just across the street from Company of Fools’s office and class space, housed in a one-time restaurant called The Mint. Locals gab over a brew at the Red Elephant Saloon or order vegetable lasagna at Hailey’s Italian restaurant, DaVinci’s, where owner Larry Schwartz, another New York transplant, happily attributes the restaurant’s buzzing scene to crowds coming from as far as Boise and Twin Falls to see True West.

"So many times arts organizations are on the periphery battling to prove that they have an effect on the economic impact of a town," says Rowsey, who as the company’s managing director attends Rotary and city council meetings. "The business leaders know that the hotels and restaurants in Hailey have benefited so much from this production."

"The theatre is so supportive of people’s dreams here," says Suzy Hart, a vintage clothing store owner from Ketchum, dawdling over a cup of coffee at the Cucina Café. "Denise and Rusty have added a more East Coast flavor to the town, which is really desirable." Page Shelburne, a new Fools board member who owns an Inuit art gallery in Ketchum put it most succinctly: "I moved here in 1996, went to see Fool for Love, sat in the sixth row, paid $12 for a ticket and was blown away that you could do that in Hailey."

Even Moore, who has skirted any spotlight for over three years, is a quiet but active presence in her community’s theatre. Not only did she do a reading of Donald Margulies’s Dinner with Friends for the company recently, but she also supervised the wardrobe for The Philadelphia Story and designed the costumes for the production of Warren Leight’s Side Man—a feat Moore says sent her madly scrambling through her own collection of vintage wear and cruising eBay for good cyber-deals on dresses. 

So on a warm weekend in mid-July, True West fever was palpable everywhere in Hailey. Scores of True West posters were plastered on shop and café doorways like Company of Fools flags. A long, crooked line of Teva-clad hopefuls huddled by the Liberty Theatre box office hoping to score a last-minute ticket. Hailey, the community so often shuttled aside—in Willis’s words—like the "red-headed stepchild" of Sun Valley and Ketchum, was squarely asserting itself as Idaho’s maverick theatre metropolis. Whether you ordered an espresso at Tully’s Coffee or rented a VHS copy of The Sixth Sense at the Video Depot, everyone in town, not to mention Ketchum, Bellevue and Sun Valley, was talking, incessantly and passionately, about theatre.

MOM: Picasso! Picasso! You’ve never heard of Picasso? Austin, you’ve heard of Picasso. 
AUSTIN: Mom, we’re not going to have time. 
MOM: It won’t take long. We’ll just hop in the car and go down there. An opportunity like this doesn’t come along every day.

Since relocating to Hailey in 1997, Company of Fools has fueled the Wood River Valley theatre scene, already home to a half-dozen other theatre groups, including the New Theatre Company and the Sun Valley Repertory. Thanks to the added presence of the 30-plus-year-old Sun Valley Center for the Arts, it’s not surprising that Hailey’s upper-crust neighbor, the surreal town of Sun Valley, was deemed one of the nation’s top 20 art locales in 1999. 

"As someone who lives here and has the double payoff of being an actor and the board president of Company of Fools," explains Danielle Kennedy, the petite, gravel-voiced actor who plays the pixilated mother of Lee and Austin, "it’s gratifying when you go into the bank or the coffee shop. All the locals love theatre and they’re always asking me, ‘So...what is the company doing next?’"

Since arriving in Hailey nearly five years ago, Company of Fools has challenged the theatrical expectations of its audiences, choosing a bold, even risky road when creating a season. Having already connected with established playwrights like Leight and James Still, they hope eventually to develop new plays. For area students, the company has established two much acclaimed in-school programs: Stages of Wonder for elementary school pupils and the Blaine County Academy of the Arts’ Theatre Component, a two-year, daily training program for 11th and 12th graders.

"They’ve done the most extensive outreach in the schools," says Heather Crocker, director of SVCA’s humanities and education program. "They’ve made a commitment, taken it into the classroom and formalized it—more so than most of the other theatre organizations."

LEE: Hey, do you actually think I chose to live out in the middle a’ nowhere? Do ya’? Do you think it’s some kinda’ philosophical decision I took or somethin’?

"Before we founded the company we had become very disenchanted in the commercial acting world," Wilson explains. "Most of the companies that Denise and I would work for or job into, well, the thought was always: What are the people gonna buy? I realized that for me, this was a big red flag for an absence of a point of view. Are you a follower or a leader in the community? If this is a business venture, go sell tires! So our philosophy is that we’re going to do the work that is true for us and that we think is important to share with the community at large. I really do believe that if you’re true to your mission, you will find your audience."

That fervent belief was right up Willis’s alley, and Company of Fools debuted their first Hailey production in 1997 in a splashy way for a small town—with Bruce Willis’s first return to the stage after 13 years, as an actor and director, co-starring with Simone and Wilson in Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love. As if revisiting a sentimental, less glitzy time in his career, Willis decided to resurrect the very play and role—Eddie—that gave him his big break as a New York actor.

"I understudied for Will Patton," recalled Willis. "As soon as I got the job, he gave his notice, so I had to learn the part really quickly. I ended up doing 115 performances of it at the Douglas Fairbanks Theatre on West 42nd Street. So many things happened in my life because of that [role]—I got an agent, I was sent out to California for an audition for Moonlighting…and I got that job, but I moved away from theatre completely."

After stepping on stage for Fool for Love in 1997 ("I was as nervous as I’ve ever been in my life," admits Willis), taking on True West in 2001 as a director and actor seemed a logical next step. "The play just flies," he explains. "That’s such a reward, because it doesn’t happen often. It certainly doesn’t happen in films. You may get a taste of it in a specific scene, but this is a two-hour-and-five-minute play and from top to bottom, it breathes and sweats." Willis was seduced by the mercurial, dark role of Lee, a character that, he says, "frightened" him—and that he had long wanted to play. "It’s a challenge to be terrifying on stage, to scare the audience and, at the same time, show real, human moments." 

After Willis and Wilson recruited Company of Fools actors Smith, Kennedy and Alburger, the group began an intense, five-week rehearsal period, six hours a day—a relatively short period given the Company of Fools-preferred method of long, exploratory rehearsals of up to nine weeks. After rehearsals, Smith and Willis would spend time together, developing a closer, more brotherly bond. 

"I’d go to his house, have dinner and we’d talk about things," says Smith, a 28-year-old actor who is also the company’s technical director. "We got comfortable with each other, which really helped. Bruce is very generous with letting you know that you’re doing well. As an actor himself, he knows what actors need and is very supportive."

As a man who has negotiated his share of box-office blockbusters (and disasters), Willis’s insight on the character of Saul Zimmer, the insidious Hollywood producer, was according to Alburger, "very helpful." Willis says he told Alburger to play Saul "as a heartless bastard."

"He didn’t give me any specific names," says Alburger slyly. "He just let me know that there are people [in Hollywood] who would sell their mother for points on a movie if they could."

Willis blithely hoists himself onto the Liberty’s brand new thrust stage, walks on the set, rummages in a kitchen drawer and pulls out a pack of cigarettes. He lights up and sits cross-legged on the carpeted boards. "I knew the play was a lot of work," he says, exhaling thoughtfully, "and it would be a big hill to climb, but I didn’t realize how big a hill until we started doing it."

That steep ascent took a tragic, personal turn for the actor that summer. Willis’s 42-year-old brother Robert Willis, a website designer, was battling the last stages of pancreatic cancer during the play’s rehearsal period. The distraught actor shuttled between Hailey and his brother’s bedside until Robert’s untimely death on June 26, just three days before True West’s premiere.

Wilson and Simone were struck by Willis’s emotional fortitude, and imagined the play offered the actor a haven from the "uncontrollable chaos" in his own life. As for Willis, he admitted that he brought Robert "on stage" with him each night. "As an older brother to my younger brother who passed away, I had a whole encyclopedia of brother tricks and brother memories, and they’re in the play," says Willis softly. "I’ve actually incorporated some of my grief into the performance. Not a falling-apart kind of grief, just…subtle things." A filmed production of the play, to be televised early in 2002 on the Showtime cable network, will be dedicated in Robert’s memory.

Throughout the play’s intense rehearsal process, Willis asked Wilson, Moore and Simone for their input on its progress. "I think it’s helpful to get objective eyes to help in that way," explains Moore, who is known affectionately around the company as "the cleaner" for her astute observations. "It was a dynamic that evolved—Rusty and John Glenn appreciated my advice and opinions. They’d call me during rehearsal or when the play got up on its feet." Moore laughs, admitting that it’s curious, considering she has only one Off-Broadway show on her entire theatrical résumé. "I’d come in and ‘clean up’ as the objective eye. And whether they liked my feedback or not, I felt that I could be of service, and I was happy to do it."

Moore says that she’s willing to do anything for Wilson and Simone to support their theatrical vision—from lending her own furniture for a play’s set to babysitting the Wilsons’ daughter. "The camaraderie of the company makes it such a pleasure. Everyone’s jumping in, everybody’s supporting Rusty’s vision and seeing what we can all do."

True West first previewed at the Liberty Theatre, on June 29, with general admission seating, unlike the rest of the run. "There were people lined up for six hours outside," recalled Chad Smith. "But boy, when they came in they were the rowdiest crowd we ever had! We had the roots of the town here that night, because it was a $10 night, and they didn’t have reservations. The response was unbelievable. That was our first night with an audience, and it was like—wow!"

Unlike the play’s gala opening night—complete with a raucous, cowboy-themed party—True West closed not with a rodeo-worthy blowout, but with a quickly organized, intense four-day shoot for the Showtime network, which in the past has aired Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, starring Brian Dennehy, and Neil LaBute’s bash. Instead of filming a continuous performance of True West, Showtime director Gary Halverson chose to shoot the play scene by scene—blocking and then taping—in front of an invited audience of Hailey locals. Adjustments were made in lighting and costuming. An accompanying 15-20-minute documentary about Willis, the cast, Company of Fools and the tiny town itself was also filmed.

Showtime executive producer Mark Zakarin says that he and his crew were heartened and inspired by the theatrical fervor they discovered in the middle of Idaho’s windswept Wood River Valley. "Theatre isn’t just New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and London," says Zakarin. "Theatre is a whole bunch of very talented people who live in communities like Hailey all across America—people who really care about presenting works of substance and character to their communities. That in itself is terribly inspiring."

AUSTIN: Stay here, Mom. This is where you live.
(she looks around the stage) 
MOM: I don’t recognize it at all.

One month after True West closes, Rusty and Denise report that they—and the company members—are hoping to develop a project based on the stories of the Old West, through the words of writers like Bret Harte, Willa Cather and John Steinbeck. Rehearsals for their fall production of Danny and the Deep Blue Sea are set to begin any day, slated for an October 2001 opening. Later in the season, they would take on Richard Nelson and Shawn Davey’s musical adaptation James Joyce’s The Dead, directed by Wilson and featuring True West veterans Andrew Alburger and Danielle Kennedy—and even Bruce Willis and Demi Moore’s eldest daughter, Rumer.

Two months after my return from Idaho, on an impossibly beautiful morning in mid-September, the world changes. I receive an urgent e-mail from Simone. It’s two days after the attack on the World Trade Center, and she wants to know if I’m okay. I write back, "Yes." But as any New Yorker knows, that’s a bit of a lie. And I don’t know how to tell her, after everything that’s happened in the last week, how difficult it is for me to write my own name, let alone an entire article about a theatre in Idaho. July seems far, far away.

That weekend after the attacks, staring at a blank computer screen, I think about airplanes and the gut-twisting fear I’m experiencing. Out of the blue, I remember the old Sam Shepard PBS documentary. I think about "community and isolation" as I walk the deserted streets of Manhattan island in the September dusk, passing candlelight vigils, dazed children holding their parents’ hands too tightly, subway walls shrouded with desperate, photocopied flyers begging for information about the missing and dead, and crowds hoarsely cheering exhausted rescue workers trudging to the still-smoking Ground Zero. I see television coverage of Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick leading The Producers cast and audience in a tear-stained chorus of Irving Berlin’s "God Bless America." And suddenly, in a sad but comforting way, New York didn’t feel so far from tiny Hailey, Idaho.

Kara Manning is an American Theatre Affiliated Writer, with support by a grant from the Jerome foundation.

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