Frostbite was first conceived in 1989 in St. Louis, Missouri, as a response to several news articles reporting various cases of people dying of hypothermia in their homes and on the street during the exceptionally brutal winter that year. One such article described finding fish frozen in a solid block of ice inside an aquarium, their attendant sitting frozen nearby. Another story revealed that one victim of the winter had been found with his toes nibbled off by a rat, apparently while he was still alive.

I wondered how this could happen, and when it did, why no one seemed to be too concerned about it. But in a large metropolitan Midwestern city, with millions of people depending on gas or electricity to heat their homes, finding less than a dozen who for one reason or another couldn't keep warm enough was, I suppose, "not too bad, considering the numbers involved", and "nothing to start a revolution over".   Of all the problems with everyday living, this one doesn't really stand out as a priority.

Especially since it doesn't touch most of us where we live.   It is something that happens "to them", not us.  No big deal. More people die each year from carbon monoxide poisoning than from freezing to death, and those stories rarely make the papers at all.

But "what if" it did happen to someone we knew or to someone we loved? How would we feel then? I set out to explore this question, just as an exercise in "artistic hypothesis".  What conditions would be necessary to create a story that involved people who actually became actively involved with this "back-page" story?  How could we justify creating characters who would risk prison to avenge their perceived wrongful death of their mother?

When I went to live at the Actors Studio-West in July, 1989, I started creating a story outline based on the premise "Nobody cares until it happens to them", using revenge as the vehicle to carry forward the circumstances of the story. The outline developed into a seven-scene, one act play outline, which I had hoped to offer as an Actors Studio "project". When the managing director at the Actors Studio-West died suddenly, leaving no one to step into his place, I filed the outline, and it remained forgotten for eight years.

Returning to St. Louis, I formed a "method" acting workshop in 1992, and began training local actors in the techniques and procedures of Lee Strasberg and Constantine Stanislavski.  The actors trained with me for sixteen months, until I decided to suspend the workshop until I could find a building to convert to a theatre where we could apply "the work" to production.

Two years later, after an extensive search and several failed attempts at offers, I found a building, and my wife and I founded "TheatrGROUP", where many of the original members of the workshop rejoined us. We continued the workshop while spending over a year converting the old storefront to a theatre. Once converted, the members of the workshop were eager to get into production.

I had promised parts to any member who wanted to be in a play here. Twelve signed up.  A three month search for "the right play" (a cast of 5 men and 7 women with a story which would "illuminate the life of the human spirit") ended in frustration.  I announced we would do an original, and pulled Frostbite from its dusty old file.

The original outline was written for three characters: two brothers and the head of the gas company. One brother, a decorated Marine Corps Vietnam veteran, now paralyzed from the waist down, conspires with the other, recently released from prison after serving time for burning his draft card, to kidnap the head of the gas company, take him to a cabin deep in the Missouri woods during the cold of winter, strip him of his clothing, place him in front of an open window and let him see what it feels like to start to freeze to death. They would do this in retaliation for the death of their mother, who had frozen to death Christmas day after having her gas shut off for non-payment (her Marine Corp son had sent her money from Vietnam, but she forwarded most of it to her other son in prison).

All we had to do now was to justify nine more people in the story, and expand it to two acts. We decided to improvise the story outline. Finding justification for each new character in the story became a major obstacle. This story simply didn't need all those people to communicate its message.  Under what circumstances would twelve people be intimate enough with each other to be conspirators in kidnapping, and possibly murder (we didn't know at this time if the "gas man" would die or not)? What kind of people would come out of their nice warm homes to spend Christmas in a primitive cabin in the frozen Missouri woods?   Who are they, and why do they exist in this plot?

Starting with the original three characters, we improvised the outline, looking for any opportunities to introduce other characters.  What we ended up with at the early stage of development (the first two weeks of rehearsal) was a group of sixties radicals with a common goal.  I began scripting from the improvisations.  I thought we were getting somewhere.  I was wrong.  It just didn't work.  Nobody cared about the radicals.  They were too radical.

We moved the location from the cabin to an inner city, lower income apartment, changing a few of the characters to tenants who knew the deceased mother of the two brothers, and making one of the actresses a "hippie" returning from San Francisco to visit her brothers.  Another actress became the apartment manager who found the dead mother in her apartment.  Before long, the cast consisted of two brothers, their girlfriends, a hippie sister and her "spirit guide", an apartment manager, the head of the gas company, the wife of the head of the gas company (who was to appear as an hallucination), a nurse who lived in the apartment complex, a tenant who knew the mother, and a black Vietnam veteran whose life was saved by the other vet, now a paraplegic.

The brothers, their girlfriends and the black vet were still "radicals".  The improvs were becoming very interesting and very intense.   But it still didn't work.  We just couldn't believe that the apartment manager and the nurse would be a part of such a dangerous plan.  And "hypothermia" seemed such a minor cause for the radicals, who should have been fighting against the war, or some other hot topic of the day (1969).

At this point, one of the actresses dropped out, under stress. The uncertainty of the story, the constant changing and rearranging of rehearsal schedules to accommodate the cast, the "fact" that I was "ruining our work by giving everyone a part in a play that didn't seem to need more people", and I was "biting off more than I could chew", and "treating the actors disrespectfully" had become too much for her.  At the same time, the actor playing the black vet quit because of "unexpected business commitments" in Los Angeles. Then the actress playing the nurse quit because of health concerns.

Now down to a cast of nine, we continued the rehearsal process. The story originally began with a prologue setting up the events which would follow.  Act One, scene one opened with the brothers and the vet dragging an unconscious" gas man" into the apartment, hanging him upside down by his bound ankles, stripping him, placing him in front of a window, opening the window and letting the freezing process begin.  The girlfriends were to come in later with "groceries", and the apartment manager was to discover the plot accidentally.   We still had plans for the wife of the "gas man" to appear in act two as an hallucination of the hypothermic "gas man".  Later, the two "hippies" would drop in from San Francisco, "tripping" on LSD, to pay the brothers a Christmas visit.

We tried this scenario for two more weeks.  It just wasn't working. During this time, the actors were valiantly trying to justify anything they were asked to do.  They were given an ever changing outline of "story points" to improvise, and fought their way through each moment of the story.  My obsession with perfection strained the nerves of everyone at one time or another.   I had given the cast a list of "shared objects of concentration" which included creating 1) Christmas, 2) 1969, 3) the freezing winter,4) relationships, 5) place, and 6) "Mom" (Personalization).

I barked, shouted and screamed incessantly to keep the actors concentrated on these objects. I suggested sensory choices for some of them. And, since they are very talented, they were able to concentrate on these shared objects, and it helped the development of our story tremendously.  We studied the effects of hypothermia (I passed out a dozen pages on the subject downloaded from the Internet).  We studied the events of 1969, utilizing a "time line" that covered all the major world events from 1967 through 1969.  We researched gas company policies (phone calls to a supervisor at the local gas utility company were received with cautious attention).   Walter Peterson (Tom) spent weeks at the Veteran's Hospital observing and questioning paraplegic war vets, asking those in wheel chairs about personal  ways they use their wheelchairs as extensions of their bodies.  We had private rehearsals to develop and / or "fix" relationships between actors and their respective characters.  How could they be "in-love" in the story when they had quite opposite feelings in "real life"?  I tutored the two actors playing Vietnam vets using my own personal experiences as a Marine Corps Vietnam vet.

After several more weeks of rehearsal, the story began taking a form that was becoming more and more believable. We no longer had radicals. We had a family reunion. The girlfriends were now wives.  Pat Wickwire, recently released from prison, brings his new wife Linda to see Tom Wickwire and wife Margie after a two year separation.  He finds Willie Dowell, a Vietnam vet whose life was saved by his brother, also visiting Tom for the Christmas season. The hippies arrive unexpectedly from San Francisco near the end of the first act.   Willa, the apartment manager, had found Mrs. Wickwire in her apartment.   She had since befriended Tom and Margie, who kept the lease on the apartment after Mrs. Wickwire died. Alvin Gardner, "the gas man", is no longer kidnapped, but he still ends up, to "prove a point" (at his own insistence), in a chair freezing to death at the Wickwire apartment.

We improvised this way for another several weeks. We still couldn't find the ending for the story.  Would Alvin freeze to death?  All the other story points were smoothing out, starting to have a life of their own.  I found myself telling the cast, "I'm actually starting to believe this could have happened this way." 

However, this crystallization of our crude initial outline did not make the rehearsal process any easier.  The actors still had no scripted dialogue, with two exceptions for short scenes between the brothers. They were now memorizing "story points", which they would improvise each night, not quite knowing for certain what each would do or say in the improv, but still getting the points across.   It had been my intention to flesh out the script with tape recorded transcripts carefully edited to include only that which was necessary to move the story along.

Now the actors were digging into strong emotional choices for certain scenes.  Now they were fully utilizing the procedures of our work: "relaxation", "sense memory", "concentration", "substitution", "justification", "the magic if", "affective memory", "personal objects", "relationships", "place", etc.  Whenever they would begin "anticipating" the direction of the improv from the repetition of previous rehearsals, I would guide them back to spontaneity by adding something new, or taking something away without affecting the story points.  We discovered that maintaining "the illusion of the first time" was no less difficult when repeating an improvised story than a scripted one.   I discovered actors splintering into groups to "plan out" where the improv could go, and to "set in stone" certain "bits" that worked well during a given rehearsal.

But it was easy for me to see when they did this, because the life on the stage then took on a certain predictability, a staleness which became "acting" as opposed to "living" onstage.  Naturally, I couldn't let this direction develop.  When I would bring this problem to the attention of the cast, many of them became nervous. They found it hard to "trust" that concentrating on simple objects (cold, 1969, relationship, place, etc.), and making a wholehearted effort to listen to each other onstage, rather than just "hear" each other onstage would be enough to carry them fully in their lives onstage. So we had a constant struggle with this play, as actors do with any work in which they are involved.   But I am there, the "third eye", shouting, barking and screaming until I get my way.  Thank the muses they trust my opinion and forgive my cursing.

Most directors like to formally "block" a play, directing the actors to move from one area to another on the stage at various points in the story.  This "blocking", which I consider akin to choreography for dancers, is often dictated by the director's own sense of "movement", or "flow", or keeping the action on stage from "stagnating" by having some kind of movement to capture the attention of the audience.  I personally feel that this approach to life on the stage can too often lead to superficial movement of actors, dependent solely on the discretion of the director.  Unfortunately, at times directors will "move" actors onstage just for movement's sake, not really knowing what else to do to keep "the life" vibrant.  They become nervous if "life" onstage seems "still". 

My approach to "blocking" is derived from the so-called "method" acting procedure, concept or "technique" known as "justification".  Justification means, simply, "only do something onstage if you are fully justified in doing something onstage" (obviously this does not mean to ignore obvious stage directions included by the author of the story.   We believe there's no need to cross from stage left to center stage without a reason which stems from an "internal need" to do so.  Hopefully, we would like that "internal need" to be supplied by an actor so immersed in the life of the character in the story that it becomes organic.   I directed the actors in Frostbite to go nowhere onstage unless they felt they "had to" (and the words "had to" doesn't include "had to because I was nervous just standing or sitting in one spot for so long").  In effect, after explaining "justification" to the actors, and assigning justification exercises in the Sunday workshop, I let the actors block the play with this idea in mind.  When executed faithfully, with the actor fully trusting that "inactivity does not necessarily mean lifeless, or "boring", the result is more often the logical, realistic behavior (and resulting movement) that occurs in life under similar circumstances.  In life, if we have the opportunity to observe situations of intense interest, what holds our attention most is the inner life of the persons (actors) involved in these situations (scenes).  We are drawn in by the emotional and psychological states of the participants in these dramatic events.  And we know, instinctively, that any movement that occurs during such real-life "scenes" springs logically and naturally from the real-life "actors" in the situation from an internal impetus - an increased activity in response to a stimulus - born of "necessity".  The key phrases here are "response to a stimulus" and "born of necessity".  In Frostbite the actors learned to recognize any stimulus that created within them a response born of necessity which therefore "justified" their resulting movement onstage.  When the actors are artistically concentrated, fully alive with the human thoughts and emotions one might expect from real-life counterparts experiencing similar circumstances, movements are perceived by observers as logical "for the specific moment", and the actor has approached closer proximity to what we like to call "scenic truth".  As the director of Frostbite, I could never have directed the movement on the stage with such realistic complexity as presented by my talented cast when trusting in this simple concept.

As it turned out, I never scripted the play.  I made a decision that, if the cast approved, we would perform the story each evening with only the story points as our script.  We would tie together these story points with the logical behavior we had learned during the course of 12 weeks of rehearsals.  We would carefully avoid the temptation to "play it safe" by repeating elements of performance that "worked" in a previous night.  From the time we arrived in-house, we would refer to each other always as the person we knew in the story, not the person we knew in life.  We would keep true to the concept that this play has no "star", only a group of real people living real lives under unusual circumstances.  I lectured  that In true ensemble acting, every actor in a story is a "star" in his or her own right, and the willingness and ability to "blend in" with the others onstage, always resisting temptation to draw attention from the audience to oneself for that "special approval" actors seem to need, would direct that approval to all equally, where it rightfully belongs.

We didn't know the ending until three days before opening.   Now, a week after opening, the ending is going to change. That's what we will concentrate on at our Wednesday evening "run through" before hitting the boards again Thursday.  The actors are acclimated to this procedure by this time.  This is how they wanted to do this play, and now they are doing it this way, and doing it very well. What they ended up with is eleven pages (very large typeface) of "story points" to memorize. What they have accomplished on the stage is an incredibly believable story, filled with love, joy, hate, sorrow and most other colors of the human emotional spectrum.  The play is at times intensely violent, intensely sad and at other times intensely funny.

Normally, after a performance, we invite the audience to meet the artists, to ask the artists any questions they would like  answers to, or to give their impressions of what they observed in the play. It's been a rewarding experience for all of us. Several audience members have thought that Walter Peterson (playing Tom Wickwire) is actually a paraplegic, and that Jerry Adams (as Willie) once served in the military.  We have had several comments about the level of believability achieved by the actors onstage: "It drew me in." "I thought it was very realistic." "It didn't look like actors up there, it looked like real people." "How did everybody remember where to go on the stage?" "That was just like my family at Christmas." "The hippies brought back so many memories." "It was on the cutting edge of perfection."

I can't conclude this chronicle without mentioning something else I have found to be amazing about this process.  We are a company of actors.  The only non-actor here (although he wants to be, and will be) is our technical director, Joe Tuttle.  While they were working their 9-5 jobs and rehearsing this play, the actors also found time to locate and deliver set-pieces (including a full kitchen), props (personal and shared), distribute flyers and posters throughout Metro St. Louis, research, locate and obtain their costumes, do their own hair and makeup, work on publicity and advertising, design and arrange printing for programs, help each other with rides to the theatre, and accomplish literally every other aspect of production normally handled by staff and crew.   I couldn't have done it without them.  And I've never seen anything quite like this in my 22 years as a professional actor.  What a company.

What is written here are only memories I have retained through twelve weeks of rehearsals. I was too busy directing to bother with writing notes.   It's all still in my head.  I thought I'd better jot something down before I forget it.

I'm also creating a personal diary of this project to protect the tender feelings of the actors involved, who at times hated each other passionately, and hated me passionately, but always returned to the love they have for each other as artists, and their love for me as the guy who wouldn't let them take the easy way out on the stage.  I put them through "boot camp for actors" here.  After this, anything else they do should be easy.

This work is something entirely new to the St. Louis area.   The actors were so real on the stage, that audiences became too involved in their lives to know when an act was over, or when the play had ended.  Even after final blackout, following an intensely physical and violent finale, the audiences sat spellbound until the lights came up on actors who were too emotionally drained to bow.

Once realizing the ending of the play was at hand, the audiences would break out into spontaneous and unanimous ovation.

Two weeks before closing, I had to play the part of the gas company executive because the actor who originated the role had to do another show.  He hadn't counted on our extended run.  My actors had to live with their teacher on the stage.  It was a joy to illustrate "in the flesh" the applications of our work for them.   Hopefully they realized that if they were learning something from their engagement onstage with me, I also was learning something onstage from my engagement with them.  Every role is a new learning experience.  We learn from each other, regardless of what "level" of success we've earned, or "time in the 'biz" we've accumlated.  If we fail to realize that, something artistic within us has died.

The first week of our extended run, the actress playing the wife of the paraplegic vet had a nervous breakdown, and had to leave the show to recuperate.  Rather than replace her with another actress, I eliminated the part of the apartment manager and assigned the role of the wife to the actress who had played the apartment manager.  With a few adjustments applied during the Wednesday evening run-through, the story points were kept intact.  After all, the play was originally created for a cast of three.  I guess if it had been necessary, I could have eliminated all but those three roles.  How convenient.