Theater Community Celebrates Life of John Kishline

John Kishline in ‘Success’ being performed at the Kamani Auditorium in New Delhi on August 10, 2011. Photo from the U.S. Embassy New Delhi (CC BY-ND 2.0)

It was a lovefest at Next Act Theatre on Monday night as the Milwaukee theater community and many other fans of John Kishline gathered to celebrate his life.

Kishline died June 23 at age 78 from complications of lung cancer, after a long career on the stage.

Perhaps best known for his 30 years as a core ensemble member of the internationally acclaimed experimental group Theatre X, he had a second act after its demise performing with Next Act Theatre (in nine productions), Theatre Gigante (in 16 productions) and other groups. All told, he performed in 28 states and in productions in Holland, England, Wales, Ireland, Sweden, Germany, India and Japan. He wrote plays for Theatre X and Next Act, and directed shows, too.

Kishline also performed in four movies, including a small part in the 2009 movie Public Enemies starring Johnny Depp, and he donated his time and talent to Spare Change, a short film created in 2010 through the Collaborative Cinema teen mentorship program of Milwaukee Film.

He also wrote poems, played golf and loved fishing and camping, all of which were touched on, along with many other themes, in last night’s celebration, which included 12 speeches, texts by others that were read, a staging of a portion of Kishline’s play Faust: An Entertainment, music performed by John and Jim Sieger, who grew up with Kishline in Kenosha, and a song by Victor DeLorenzo, longtime Violent Femmes drummer, who performed with Kishline in the early days of Theatre X.

Yes, it was a long celebration, with lots of tears and lots of laughs, and a final touch: a recording of Kishline near his death reading a poignant poem he wrote. “Kish gets the last word!” promised the Next Act promo for the event.

Among friends, he was typically “Kish” rather than John. But we learned that a couple of actresses who performed with him called him “Kishalicious,” recalled actress and director Mary Kerr.

With his good looks, piercing blue eyes and strong, tall presence on stage, Kish had a Gary Cooper or Henry Fonda vibe and seemed a “stoic man of few words,” Kerr said. But upon getting to know Kish, she realized “he was a man of many words. He was more like Peter Fonda, an old hippie.”

“He had much to say and found many ways to say it,” joked his close and longtime friend, veteran Milwaukee actor James Pickering.

The portion of Faust presented made that clear, with its ironic musings on earth’s six major civilizations and their xenophobic views of each other.

“He was the philosophical one,” said Hollywood actor Willem Dafoe in his texted remembrance of Kishline. Dafoe got his start acting with Theatre X in the early 1970s. “The time I was in Milwaukee was formative and precious,” he recalled, “and Kish was a big part of that.”

“Theatre X couldn’t have survived without Kish,” recalled actress Flora Coker, who joined the company in 1970, one year after its founding. Kishline joined the troupe two years later. It operated as a collective and he did whatever needed to be done, designing the lights or sets for numerous productions. Kishline co-designed the sets for the company’s 1978 Off-Broadway staging of its play A Fierce Longing, which was praised for its visuals by The New York Times and won an Obie Award for the production design.

But by 2002 the company was having morale and financial problems and had a bitter breakup, chronicled in a feature story by Milwaukee Magazine. Kishline was devastated by this but found his refuge in theater, getting cast in a Milwaukee Rep production of Edward Albee‘s A Delicate Balance in 2002. “I needed that,” he once wrote, “because I was reeling from the implosion of Theatre X only a few months before, and whatever claim I had to being an actor and an artist was tenuous.”

The director of that production was Ed Morgan, then the Rep’s associate director. “What I valued most about Kish was his authenticity,” Morgan recalled in his speech.

“He had this knack of seemingly doing nothing on stage but getting everything,” recalled David Cecsarini, the retired artistic director of Next Act, who directed Kishline in many shows.

Both Morgan and Cecsarini became close friends of Kishline. Morgan and Kishline collaborated on the writing of two plays, and Morgan directed Kishline’s play Success, previously staged by Theatre X but revised (with Morgan’s help) in 2011 for a six-city tour of India sponsored by the U.S. State Department.

The original play was based on Kishline’s interviews with business leader Sheldon Lubar, former Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist and the late advertising executive Dennis Frankenberry, among others, about success and its costs in our culture. The play’s protagonist was an advertising executive who helped elect a conservative president of the United States. The revised version included a part for an Indian actress, playing a woman politician.

Kish’s wife, Deborah Clifton, co-starred with John and Ed Morgan in the production, and yes, it was a success. Dating back to 1976, when Clifton joined Theatre X, she and Kishline acted in many shows together. Responding to questions for a 2005 article about theater couples in Milwaukee, they noted they were on again, off again until they “happily got together” in 1986. They were married on Valentine’s Day 1989.

With his curious mixture of pride and humility, Kishline could be very charming, as shown by an interview in India (in English) about the touring production of Success. “Can you tell me how you felt about your performance last night?” the interviewer asked.

“Oh, I thought it was adequate to passable to maybe good,” Kishline said with a laugh.

Kishline was a hard worker. To support himself and his family, he did painting on the side for decades, noting on his LinkedIn profile that he painted 200 houses. He was “a jack-of-all-trades who could fix anything or build any of his wife’s ‘great ideas,'” his family wrote in an obituary.

Kishline was not religious, his son Sam noted, but had some tolerance for the Unitarian Church. “He once said the only time Jesus Christ is mentioned at a Unitarian Church is when the janitor trips on the stairs.”

Kishline was a huge fan of the playwright Samuel Beckett (hence his son’s name) and played Vladimir in a 1989 production of Waiting for Godot, with Sam playing the small but crucial part of the young boy. J.R. Sullivan, who directed the production, told the crowd at Next Act Theatre that he loved Kishline’s “integrity and honesty,” and that Beckett’s play “was the quintessence of Kish.”

From his deathbed, the last words Kishline spoke were a quote from the Beckett play.

He was a performer right to the end.