It is a wedding of circus and theatre.

This is a tale of how two people meet and marry. Their union is a living metaphor for another kind of marriage which eventually produced an offspring that has a little of each in its genetic makeup.

Jeff Jenkins and Julie Greenberg are both natives of Chicago. But that ends the list of the things they originally had in common. Julie graduated from the University of Illinois with a BFA in theater and then went on to study Shakespeare at the National Theater of Great Britain. She was also a member of the first American company to study and tour kabuki theatre in Japan. Jeff, on the other hand, went to Ringling’s Clown College right after high school. After graduating, he toured with The Greatest Show On Earth for two years.

Upon ending his association with the circus, Jeff moved back to Chicago to start a Loop theatre, hustling acting roles wherever he found them. While on a shoot for Bud Light commercials he met Julie who had also returned to her hometown and was similarly looking for acting work. They met up again on the set of an independent film shot in Asheville, NC. Far from home and friends, they gravitated toward each other and became friends. Jeff was moved to invite Julie to join his group of actors to practice tumbling and clowning. Marriage seemed the next logical step, and it was taken this past August.

In the meantime, in 1994, Jeff was offered the job of running Circus Smirkus while its founder Rob Mermin was on a sabbatical, serving as co-Dean of Clown College with Dick Monday. Jeff had known Dick from when they were in Clown College together. He went down to watch the school’s auditions and was introduced to Mermin. Five minutes after the introductions, acting on Dick’s recommendation, Mermin asked Jeff if he would like to "run my circus?"

Jeff saw the offer as an opportunity to develop the work he had been doing with Julie. "I told Rob that my partner and I had an act that we did together." So the couple hurriedly put together everything they could do in an act that ran about two minutes.

But it was okay with Mermin. He handed them the keys and left.

The first conclusion Jeff and Julie came to, after looking around at the staff and young performers was that their act was not very good, but it was all they knew how to do.

From the beginning their work together was an amalgamation of their two backgrounds. Jeff knew circus. Julie knew theatre. As a result, the act they had put together had a little of both in it, and that gave them some measure of confidence that they had something to bring to Circus Smirkus.

"We brought a theatrical background to Circus Smirkus, which it didn’t have before," Julie says. "We started choreographing acts and directing them to tell a story. But what we knew about acrobatics didn’t compare to what the Russian coaches knew. What they came to us for was help in telling a story."

Alexander (Sasha) Milaev was the principal acrobatic coach. His father was a big star in the Soviet circus. One of the foremost of the entire system. He ran the circus school. Sasha came to America expecting that everyone would know him because of his father’s reputation in Russia. That was his first shock.

He was a very formidable figure, who according to Jeff and Julie, looked a lot like Stalin, big, barrel chest, with a Stalinesque mustache, steely blue eyes, very handsome. He was not a force to be taken lightly.

On the first day of practice all the kids who had passed the audition gathered in the barn. The coaches were all lined up on one side and the kids on the other. Sasha took the floor to deliver the opening comments (with Alla Youdina translating). He ended by saying he wanted all the kids to show him their tumbling skills. In the estimation of Jeff and Julie some of them were pretty good tumblers for Americans.

Once they started demonstrating what they could do, however, the color drained from Sasha’s face. When the kids had all finished, Sasha silently turned around and walked out of the barn. Alla leapt immediately into the breach. "It’s all right," she said in her Russian-accented English. "Don’t worry. He will go cry. But don’t worry he will realize that he is here in America. He will wake up and he will be strong. But for now he needs to go cry a little."

Sure enough, just as Alla had predicted, Sasha showed up the next morning and began coaching.

Once on tour, when the training schedule was less intense for the troupers, Jeff and Julie apprenticed themselves to Sasha. He started coaching them on the side, which was a great experience for the two young Americans. "Sasha realized we had never been to a school, that there was no school in America for us to go to get his kind of training."

"If you are going to train with me," he told them, "You need to know that sometimes I won’t be nice (and he wasn’t) but you need to do what I tell you. We start with the handstand." The only handstand he would allow them to do that entire summer was in a crouched position, often while being smacked with a long stick.

During their second year with Smirkus Jeff and Julie worked with two other Russians, Vladmir Avgustov and his wife Zena. Avgustov not only understood American speech, but also came from a much more humble background than Milaev. They worked with their American counterparts, off and on, catch as catch can, for the next several years. The thing the two Russians had in common was that they wanted to share their knowledge, and they employed the same technique. They would give a student all they knew if he were serious. Which is the opposite here. American circus people, Jeff and Julie have found, are very guarded and stingy about teaching.

The couple came back from Circus Smirkus with lots of new skills and nowhere to use them. Depressed, they decided to write a show of their own. "We sat down and wrote and we were very full of ourselves, pretentious." Julie admits. That was in January of 1997.

About the only thing they felt sure about was the name. In their imaginations they saw a group of performers who got together at midnight and made magic, in the way that Circus Smirkus felt like magic. "It started out as an excuse for us to do our act," the couple freely admit. The writing, they also acknowledge now, got very schmaltzy. As an antidote they started going around to see other theater in Chicago. They were very disappointed in what little physical theatre they saw. They decided they would have to do something different. They would put the circus into the theatre.

Next they began to explore what it was that bothered them about what they were seeing and what irritated them about it. Finally they started writing about things they knew something about. For Julie it was the theatre, and for Jeff I was circus. What they came up with was a parody of serious theatre.

"We wanted to see people do things on stage that we, as an audience, couldn’t do ourselves and be generous and humble about it. So we would set the characters up on a pedestal by doing something incredible, and then have them do something ridiculously human, and have to fight to regain their dignity," Julie offers by way of explanation. "We came up with the idea of a classic acting company doing a classic scene, a kitchen sink scene which happened to be straight out of A Streetcar Name Desire. We wanted the circus to literally bust down the door and walk in and have the circus people try their hand at Shakespeare and vice versa and each make something better than they could have done working independently. In other words we were working out our philosophy of theater/circus. So, among the characters, we had the know-it-all director, who had to give director’s notes; the critic (who was actually the villain); the equity actor; the mime, who had to deliver an obscene monologue in order to be considered a legit actor."

"Our wish list for that first company was a dream. Steve Smith was going to direct it," Jeff recalls. "Out of the 18 we thought about, we got none."

Instead they turned to a group of people they had been working with in Chicago at the time. They all came from different backgrounds. Some came from circus, some from theater, opera; there was a carpenter. "We couldn’t offer them anything," Julie points out, but they were interested, at least tentatively. "All we asked was that they bring some kind of skill. We didn’t care if they could act, so long as they had some kind of skill, which was our first mistake," Julie says now. "Because we found out we could take great performers and give them a skill." But there was no way to turn an acrobat into an actor if he was imbued with the needed spirit and energy.

"Basically we worked with what we had in town," she says. "We put some of them up in our spare bedroom. They were in town and the price was right."

The script evolved to accommodate the people they had. Ironically, the show clicked on stage but offstage, Jeff quickly adds, "the company couldn’t have been more dysfunctional. Some of the people in the show brought acts they weren’t too excited about changing to fit our show." It was a case of life imitating life. Or reality living up to its critics. A marriage between circus and theatre is always touch and go—at least in this case it was.

"In all fairness a lot of that was our own fault because we started out to do a six-week run and then be done with it," Julie adds, jumping in as she usually does to keep the conversational ball in the air. "When it took off we didn’t have the foundation to keep a company together, and suddenly there was a company. We made a lot of mistakes."

What they finally came up with was a three-page outline. Most of the comedy, however, was planned in advance, and the only changes were what acts we could get and plug into the scripts. We wrote it, directed it, starred in it. There were very few production people backing them up. In the show’s first four weeks there were 12 people in the show. Four more were added when they moved to a bigger theatre.

After the first six weeks in the 60-seat theater, turning as many away, the couple knew the show had to go on. They started making phone calls, asking how high the stage was and how much was the rental.

The Ivanhoe, where they eventually wound up, was way too much, and so they never called back. They never even bothered to negotiate. Instead the owner of the theatre called them. Julie’s brother Michael negotiated a contract that gave them a chance. "We lost our shirt for the first three months. But once the weather broke and the Bulls’ season ended, we took off," Jeff remembers, thanks in large part to an adoring press, which seemed determined to help them succeed.

Public relations, by the way, has always been one of the couple’s long suits. Julie is particularly savvy in getting and holding the attention of the media. By way of sharing their success the couple began paying the cast. Originally there was to be no pay. "It was a big adventure, and we told them if we turn a profit we will pay you. Opening night we surprised them with a rehearsal stipend. We paid them at the end of six-week run and for the extra two weeks and all through the Ivanhoe run," Julie points out. But, they soon discovered, money brings problems. "Some people were appreciative," she says with a tinge of ruefulness, "but it brought out the worst in others, because they expected it, and then demanded it. You can’t buy loyalty."

After nearly a year’s run, the couple was exhausted and depressed. "We felt we were the only one’s not growing," Julie says. "We were finished."

Nyangar Batbaatar had seen the Midnight Circus’ first show and tracked the couple down to an old firehouse they were using as a studio. He began to attract others. Without having to go out and look for them, a new company of people who shared their vision was beginning to take shape.

"We ran the studio like Hovey Burgess did his on the Bowery," Jeff points out. "Anybody who came could participate both they had to do something. Nothing was organized. They came out of the woodwork. Some of them were legit actors who wanted to do something more physical. We had a dozen or so regulars. They worked out just for the sake of working out. Even when no money was involved they kept telling Jeff and Julie "Whatever you need. We want to be here."

Having survived putting a show together and a year’s run, Jeff and Julie are now a team, indivisible. They interrupt freely, continue each other’s thoughts, both they function as if they were a single unit. But they never contradict each other—well, hardly ever.

St this point it is Julie’s turn to take up the tale; "We were approached to do a new show, to open the season at the Theater on the Lake in 1998. There were months and months of meetings."

"They had committed a lot of money, which was more than we ever had," Jeff butts in.

Back to Julie: "We felt burnt out, but eventually we had to sit down and write the new show, which eventually got down to Shakespeare. It always comes back to that. We even held auditions found some great people. We discovered they’re out there.

"Our first mistake in our first show was thinking these people were irreplaceable, so whatever it took to keep them we did. At the sacrifice of Midnight Circus and to Jeff and Julie." One of the performers, Andrew Adams came out to Chicago from New England specifically to join the cast. They worked out a script with a writer, and miraculously this time everyone got along. It was almost too easy. "We thought we had to suffer," concludes Julie.

During that remarkable run at the Ivanhoe, Paul Binder, of the Big Apple Circus, finally decided to drop by and see what all the fuss was about. Afterward he told the couple that their show reminded him of the Big Apple in its early days, when it was just a handful of hippie performers. Jeff and Julie were invited to join the company as clowns. They were flattered but declined. Then four months later an offer cam from New York to buy the Midnight Circus lock, stock and barrel. Jeff and Julie were offered position on the creative team of the Big Apple Circus, which wanted to adapt the show to the one-ring tent. Eventually they wound up, thanks again to Julie’s brother Michael who is their business manager, licensing the rights. The result, of course, is Oops, The Big Apple Circus Stage Show. That contract, the two concur, gave them renewed confidence in their work. What they were trying to do had been validated. The money gave them the freedom to do another show, which they couldn’t have done otherwise, despite Theater on the Lake.

The studio plays an important role in the work of the Midnight Circus. "The studio is like our big sandbox," Jeff begins. "We got all our toys there."

"Having studio is important, a necessity," Julie says embroidering the thought. "It’s ours. There’s lots of tradition and history there. It is also something of a home, a place the company members can identify with and know they are welcome. We get together with our company to rehearse regularly. We have company classes. We practice together. People are being creative. This ensemble looks forward to the next show," Julie says before Jeff can add, "People are taking the time to perfect their craft." They both appreciate watching people work who have a commitment to a particular style of performance. "This didn’t happen in the first company," Julie notes.

"We never practiced together," Jeff says, adding the period and amen to Julie’s thought.

The couple, both 31 years old, is looking forward to several new projects that are already in the works and which will continue the work they have been doing, trying to get the circus and theatre to live together in compatible bliss.

Ernest Albrecht

SPECTACLE