1988

Which is not to say a lot of off-beat comedy hasn’t come Michael Lojkovic’s way since he moved to Monterey in the late 1970s from Chicago. There was the eccentric courtier Osric in Pacific Rep’s FORTINBRAS. There was the title role in MR. WHATNOT, where he dressed like Harold Lloyd, moved like Buster Keaton, acted like a lovesick Charlie Chaplin and didn’t speak a word of dialogue. Or the more recent Narrator with a whole lot of words to say in MPC’s THE ROCKY HORROR SHOW. "That was a new experience, breaking down that fourth wall and talking directly to the audience."

So far no Ionesco or Jarry - but a writer whose work seems to dog Michael’s footsteps - is Charles Dickens. Playing a disruptive Method Actor named Larry Vauxhall in MPC’s INSPECTING ‘CAROL’ put him into the thick of a farce about theatre CHRISTMAS CAROL disasters. For Michael, it was only the latest in a succession of appearances in versions or variations of the Dickens classic, like his Scrooge with an Irish accent in Ramie Wickdahl’s imaginative "parachute" CAROL in the SRO.

"The first CHRISTMAS CAROL I did, I was Marley’s Ghost. Director Peter DeBono had seen a version done by A.C.T. in San Francisco where they flew Marley's Ghost in from the rafters! Peter wanted to do the same thing at MPC, so they needed a lightweight Marley. And that's how I made my Mainstage debut - waiting on a swing suspended above the action on stage, to be lowered down via cables attached to a parachute harness I wore over my costume. With real chains velcroed to my wrists and ankles, and plastic ones wound about my torso, I'd clank around, do the scene with Scrooge, return to hit my mark, and then up, up, up and away I'd disappear."

INSPECTING 'CAROL' MPC SRO Theatre

Michael continues, "The Technical Director, Dan Beck, realized I'd be stuck up there until the curtain call, so a plan was hatched to add a suspended desk and a stool up there in mid-air. Until the night I accidentally un-Velcro'ed a leg iron and nearly bonked Jim Jensen's Scrooge in the head. The desk and stool plan was scrapped, and Jim played the rest of the run looking anxiously up into the flies."

Michael's first encounter with theatre was as Rumpelstiltskin in the 2nd grade. "I remember going to change into the costume my mom made for me, frolicking through the empty hallways of St. Eulalia's!" Michael's next stint took him to a bar that was doing Open Mic in Traverse City, Michigan. He was fifteen. The act was built around a hand puppet borrowed from his 5-year-old niece and jokes he had copied on file cards from the routines of Steve Martin. "Nothing was original, but I found an audience and its responses very alluring," he says.

As a student at Wheaton Central High School in Illinois, Michael organized a radio club, which did comedy skits on local stations. He also took a College of DuPage improv class taught by B.J. Johnston, who had trained another Wheaton alumnus, John Belushi, years earlier. On the opening day of Johnston’s class, Michael’s original skit, "The Yugoslavian National Anthem," was such a hit that he was asked to join a local comedy troupe called Thirty-Second City ("Like the big-time Chicago comedy team - only with a shorter attention span"). Influenced heavily by Monty Python and Saturday Night Live, all members of the troupe pooled their talents together to come up with sketches and routines. "I thought it was all going along swimmingly. We played a club in Chicago, got an overwhelming response from the crowd, came off stage to find out everyone wanted to split up!"

When he moved to the Monterey Peninsula in December of 1978, Michael was so impressed by a double bill staging of CHAMBER MUSIC and FRAGMENTS, directed by Peter DeBono, that he decided to take Peter’s MPC Beginning Acting class. "As part of his introductory talk to the class, Peter spoke about the way actors use props. I’d brought a fruit bowl I’d borrowed from my uncle, so I threw some plastic fruit in the air and asked, ‘You mean like this?’ When Peter caught a piece of fruit and said, ‘Yeah, like this!’ I knew I’d come to the right place."

Improv and developing his own material have always been important to Michael Lojkovic (NOT pronounced 'La-hoe-vick'). "I fight a battle with having to say somebody else’s words," he admits. A line from INSPECTING ‘CAROL’ expresses it trenchantly. "In Act 2 I say, ‘We spend our lives saying crap someone wrote who can barely speak in a public situation, and that’s their idea of credible speech.’"

PHILADELPHIA HERE I COME MPC Mainstage - 1982
Stephen Moorer & Michael Lojkovic

An assignment with a script that had plenty of credible speech came when he shared the lead with Stephen Moorer in Brian Friel’s PHILADELPHIA HERE I COME, staged in 1982. The play explores the character of hero Gar O’Donnell by contrasting O’Donnell’s public (Lojkovic) and private (Moorer) persons. The experience was a break-through. "If you had your ears set right you learned so much. Working in that kind of a production, with people like Betty Fowlston, Don Ross and Morgan Stock, teaches you things like stage etiquette - what’s the protocol in theatre." Michael recalls the night he and Stephen earned the respect of their elders during that show. "A sound cue that was earlier dropped suddenly popped up in the middle of the next scene, which was not correct. As a result, we'd realized we left out an important piece of the exposition. I remember the experienced veterans looking bemusedly at Stephen and myself during intermission; we were pouring over the script with the sound guy, determined to re-insert about five pages of dialogue in a way that would not interrupt the continuity. Somehow in the 2nd act we pulled it off, and we came offstage thinking we'd made theatrical history."

CHARLEY’S AUNT MPC Mainstage 1986 Michael Lojkovic & George Goncalves

Michael went on to his favorite role, the classic cross-dressing Lord Fancourt Babberley, in a 1986 MPC production of CHARLEY’S AUNT. Playing that part had a kind of absurdist reprise when he made his professional debut two years later with a San Francisco company doing an interactive murder mystery called BAR NONE. "The premise was simple: have a bar owner who was an S.O.B. so that the patrons and staff all had reasons for wanting him dead. Every night the audience were given a chance to review the clues and decide who was the culprit. If you won the vote, you got to tear into your big dramatic confessional speech."

Michael played a city supervisor whose guilty secret was that he was...a transvestite! This meant two elaborate costume/make-up jobs, one extroverted male with "these big dark goggles to hide the false eyelashes," the other introverted blond female as a patron named "Rusty French." Act 1 ended with the bartender asking, "What’ll you have, Rusty?" and Rusty replying, "Anything with two straws." Through one of the straws she then blew what could have been deadly poison at the hated bar owner. "The money was good - and I made the Chronicle's pink section, so I could say I'd finally made it in show biz. But the role really began to get to me. The wig and make-up - not to mention nine months of having to shave my legs!"

Came contract renewal time and Michael wasn’t at all sure he wanted to go on with BAR NONE. "I went to a place called Tommy’s Joynt on Van Ness Avenue to think it over. A bigger-than-average woman bumped against me at the bar - only I had enough background by that time to recognize that under all the gear this ‘she’ was not a woman. When the bartender asked for her order, she said, ‘Anything that has got two straws.’ That was enough. I quit the show."

Cast against type in the the late Nick Zinides’s memorable early 90’s presentation of OUR COUNTRY’S GOOD, Michael briefly put aside comedy. As British Marine Lieutenant Ralph Clark he was the one sane, stable and integrated character in a collection of eccentric Australian convicts. The script’s exploration of the profound effect that performing a play has on the lives and attitudes of the criminals parallels Michael’s thinking on the value of theatre. "Theatre brings vitality to the imagination. . .If you’re lucky, you learn about yourself. You share a part of your soul with every character you play. At the same time, in the unwinding process called rehearsal, you confront the director, you rub against fellow actors, stumble through the awkward blocking, and suddenly, it's opening night."

A love of music and a spirit of adventure figure in what he considers the most interesting (and absurdist) event of his life. "It was when I rode the rails from Redding, California, back home to Chicago to visit my family. Two classmates from MPC had dropped me off in Sacramento, and I planned to thumb my way from there. But a guy who picked me up told me I ought to do what he’d once done - ride the rails, starting from Redding, which had the largest freight yard west of the Mississippi. He said to avoid Union Pacific because they hit you with pepper spray. Stick to Southern Pacific and I’d probably be all right.

THE DIVINERS MPC SRO Theatre 1986

"Well, my roommate had loaded my backpack with military C-rations, so I had $40 and enough food. I decided to try it. Pretty soon I had teamed up with a hobo, who explained the categories of hobos as we rode in the darkness through 'the land of seventeen tunnels,' the Sierra Nevadas. 'Y'see, a tramp will work, but a bum don't wanna, and a vagrant might just wanna steal your kit.' The next day we were walking the rails between rides; I began to think this was really the way to live. So I started singing Bob Dylan songs till the guy told me to shut up. I guess I was bringing a lot of romantic ideas into what was just his 24-hour-a-day world!"

A FLEA IN HER EAR MPC Mainstage 1983

In a moment reminiscent of "O Brother Where Art Thou?" Michael and his travel companion stole a pie off a windowsill - "but I felt kind of guilty about that - and the rail stock we rode on got worse every day 'til we spent the last night in an open coal-loading car. I left at Council Bluffs, Iowa, and got on the first Greyhound bound for Chicago."

Michael varies his acting work with gigs as a musician and singer. He’s tried doing theatre and music at the same time but found it doesn’t work well. So, continuing his job at Gateway Center, a residence for adults with developmental disabilities, where he’s just been selected as Employee of the Month, he’ll take a break from the stage now that INSPECTING ‘CAROL’ has closed. He's looking forward to the annual New Year's Eve Bagtones gig, and then he will concentrate on keyboards and vocals with a band called Guru Pillow.

"Music is very similar to acting, and I'll quote something I recently heard on the radio from the British noctogenerian intellectual, Professor Freeman Dyson, 'It takes 100 mistakes till you get it right,'"