Ike Holter Hits the Wall Skating at the Steppenwolf Garage

You would have a hard time missing Ike Holter in a crowd. Blazing down streets on his roller blades, gliding through crowds with his carefree attitude, this 26-year-old Chicago playwright is always on the move. Occasionally I see him at parties, with his addictive sense of humor calling out to you “Holl-ler” as he glides up with a smile. It is not unusual for Ike to attend numerous events on the North side all in one night, skating from place to place with his backpack in tow. He sat down with me, a rare occasion for this man, on an unusually cool August night to share some red wine and answer some questions about his life, career and his upcoming Steppenwolf Garage series production Hit the Wall.

“I grew up in a residential neighborhood of old hippies in Minneapolis. It’s funny I still don’t know how to drive a car because I rode my bike everywhere.” We talked about his family and the trials and tribulations of growing up. “I am adopted. I should probably say that. Both my parents are white. My dad was a tall skinny white guy with an Afro who hung out with all these radical black people in the seventies and my mom is chill. They’re not hippies - just liberal.” He is the youngest of six kids, four of whom were adopted, “You know that ABC Noah’s Ark show? It was all about this family with these multi-generational kids, I remember thinking that was really my family too.”

I asked him how his sexuality was accepted in that environment.

“People were very liberal toward it, the thing is, I would have liked to have seen more gay role models in TV or film, or had read about it. I came out when I was fifteen in 2000. I got ridiculed pretty often; even before I knew what I was, they knew what I was. I remember thinking I have no way of finding literature about what people are calling me. I mean this was before Google,” he said with this deep infectious laugh.

When he got to high school he was the president of the Gay Straight Alliance and started to find his voice in theatre writing and directing plays.   He applied to DePaul University in Chicago; the only school he applied to. “I gave them every play I had written, got a scholarship and was so thankful. I moved to Chicago at 18.” Ike eventually participated in a nine-month residency at the Playwrights Center back in Minneapolis when he was 23.

“It was bizarre, it was like ‘I‘m going back home but not really, living in my own apartment Sex in the City style but ‘hey parents what’s up?’ It was a stagnant pace, things are so internal there; here you can have a life in the theatre and also live here but in Minneapolis you are only working at six to ten theatres in the city so all the actors are circling from theater to theater and writers don’t exist there. What’s good about Chicago is that it has a network that has been around for a longer time, you can sustain yourself through teaching but in Minneapolis there wasn’t enough cross-pollination.”

I asked him about his work and if there was a central theme to his plays.

“If there is one thing that has gone through all my shows, it’s dealing with something through lightness and not addressing it until you have to address it. I have this show going up at Steppenwolf and it’s about civil rights and people are ignoring this oppression until something breaks and then they are forced to deal with it.”

Holter wrote Hit the Wall with his company The Inconvenience, part of the Steppenwolf Garage series, this fall where he is a founding company member. The play follows ten different perspectives on the Stonewall riots in Greenwich Village in New York in 1969, which launched the beginning of the Gay Rights Movement in this country.

“I was in seventh grade learning about The Stonewall Rebellion in a history class. My teacher said maybe two sentences about it saying how there was this big riot and how gays beat the police. I was so fascinated when I heard that, so I have always had that in the back of my mind.”

The Inconvenience was applying for the Garage Rep series when Ike heard that the theme was “War on the Home Front”.

“Immediately I was like Ok, I think I know what I want to do with this. Every writer has five plays where they are saying ‘give me an excuse to write this.’ None of the characters existed. I just knew that I wanted to write about this event. I have never written historical fiction, but this is something that I feel in my blood.”

He had a thirty-two day deadline to write the play. The application itself was quite long and he jokes about how he sent the play, after rewrites and looking it over at 11:58 pm, with only two minutes left before the deadline. Steppenwolf contacted them soon after and informed the company that they had made the final six and eventually were chosen as one of the three plays to be performed in the Garage this season.

“I wrote it with our aesthetic in mind, The Inconvenience mixes mediums and with this piece we have a band onstage for pre-show, there is an art exhibit, there is even a dance number in the piece, so I really wrote it for my company.” The Inconvenience started with twelve members, some of which Holter met at DePaul, who all lived together in a large loft apartment in the Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago. “We were actually there to work, we are going to have bat-shit parties, but that is after we work. This wasn’t just people living together, this was the idea.” The cultivation of this situation inspired Ike and he started to turn out shows at a rapid pace. He has worked with American Theatre Company, EP Theater Company, City Lit, and several shows through his company and others. Nothing Without A Company, another company he is a member of, have performed site specific shows since 2005 and have produced seven of Ike’s shows.

“It reached a breaking point in 69, because when you think about the sixties everyone had their moment of liberation or revolution and the gays were the last one. It was hot, it was two weeks before Woodstock and there was a breaking point. When that something broke, whatever it was, within forty-five minutes of the cops raiding this New York bar, people started to get angry and were screaming at the police for the first time. Because usually when the authorities raided a gay bar, papers were there and they took pictures and you were published as a pedophile in the paper the next day. But for this one night no one ran away when they were kicked out of the bar. Some people say 200 people were there, some people say 800 people were there, but something happened. They pushed the cops back into the bar and set the bar on fire, beating up cops and overturning paddy wagons. It was the first time where the gays fought back and this went on for a weekend.”

I asked about how many films have discussed this event and he told me that there has been only one fiction film about the riot and it was a German film.

“I don’t know why there haven’t been more films. The images are so dramatic, a drag queen fighting a cop, a twink throwing a Molotov cocktail through a window…but I also like riot movies; Do The Right Thing (1989). I am interested in the anatomy of a riot, and to see if it mattered.”

He goes on to say how no one can pinpoint the exact reason why it happened so he wants to show everyone’s perspective on the event from the police to people who were rioting. The playwright is approaching the work from a multicultural queer angle, so half the cast will be black or Hispanic.

“It’s not just a white gay story, which a lot of people pretend it is, it’s also a lesbian story, it’s also a transgender story, it’s also a story about people. There is a quote that a lot of people say ‘The people that fought the most had the least to loose’ like homeless gay youth that were kicked out of their house when they were 16 are throwing bricks at the cops because they were like ‘ You are in my home and if you take this bar--”

At this point he stopped and said “I’m sorry, I get very emotional about this, my god I’m sorry.” He took a moment, a deep breath and then said, “There are untold stories from a generation of multicultural youth and I don’t want to escape this one. Because when I was kid growing up I wanted stories about that.”

Hit the Wall runs from Feb 3^rd to April 8^th at the Steppenwolf Garage (1624 N. Halsted St., Chicago 60614)

- Jon Wilson