Late Night’s Morning After

For a decade, Late Night Theatre has been home to the wildest, most gender-fucked, burlesque satires Kansas City has ever known. Last week, founder Ron Megee announced that heaping debts and skyrocketing rents have finally killed the party. Here, the stars of Late Night tell their epic tale.

Ron Megee: In late 1996, we started Late Night Theatre with The Birds at the Westport Coffee House. We called it that because we were only doing 11 p.m. shows. I wanted Late Night to be a company, so the people cast for The Birds went on to do Stepford Wives.

David Wayne Reed: I’d fallen in love and just broken up, and I was tired of not acting. That New Year’s Eve of ’97, I made a proclamation: I’m going to audition again. The first one I saw was for The Birds.

Megee: It used to be so improvisational that you wouldn’t know we had a script. When we’d revisit the early shows later, lots of those improvised bits would now be scripted in.

Reed: Philip Blue Owl [Hooser] shoved a whole Twinkie into Ron’s mouth one night in Stepford Wives. Ron couldn’t talk, and he had to get through the scene. From then on, every night, Ron ate a Twinkie.

Corrie Van Ausdal: The first show I saw was the Stepford Wives in 1997, when I was 19. It had a profound effect on me. I moved back to Ohio but kept my LNT program and would take it out and look at it and wish I could be part of such an awesome theater. It’s one of the reasons I decided to move back here after college.

Reed: People kind of started looking at us like we were stars. Ron, Jon Piggy Cupit, DeDe Deville, Philip Blue Owl Hooser — these are the faces people associate with it. Ron was already a local celeb, which helped. We all rode his coattails a bit at the beginning.

Gary Campbell: I must say that Ron Megee always paid his actors and designers for their talent. This could be part of LNT’s downfall, but Ron wouldn’t have it any other way.

Reed: Other theaters would say things like “Here’s 50 boxes of secretary outfits.” People really wanted to help us out. We were the weird little sisters.

Megee: We did Valley of the Dolls, The Birds and The Stepford Wives at the Kemper. Crosby Kemper loved our theater, and he hooked us up. The year Crosby found out his Georgia O’Keeffe was fake, we hung a big Georgia O’Keeffe on the wall. When the birds were attacking me, I pulled it off and I said “Here! Make them go through this! Don’t worry — it’s fake!” It was so much fun. Crosby would pay us, I think, out of his own pocket. He’d sit in the front row.

Reed: Outside [at The Stepford Wives at the Kemper in August 1998] were lines upon lines. Throngs! At the opening, when we wheeled in our shopping carts, we had to go all the way around outside and come in through the crowd in the gallery, and I can still hear those wheels rolling and our heels on the marble that whole long walk through that crowd — and I’m getting chills. It was ceremonious. And we were so fucking beautiful.

Megee: We moved into the Old Chelsea, which used to be a strip club and porn theater. Cleaning it out and getting the seats redone and just getting rid of all the heroin needles cost us almost $5,000. There was so much sex stuff. We auctioned off that porn for years. In August 2001, they told us the building was sold. It was going to be knocked down.

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Late Night rang in 2007 with Justin Van Pelt singing “Voulez Vous” by ABBA.

Campbell: On September 10, 2001, we had our big “Eve of Destruction” party. It was a huge event, with people with sledgehammers tearing out walls and pulling light fixtures out of the ceilings to take home.

Megee: I cut a hole through one of the booths and knocked it down just when we started Queen’s “The Show Must Go On.” We all stepped through in panties and dirty underwear, and Missy Koonce carried a tub of real fire. We did a whole ritual onstage and performed our asses off. It went on for three hours and concluded with Jon “Piggy” Cupit doing a Carpenters piece outside and shooting fireworks out of his twat. Then we all went home, went to bed, and the next morning the World Trade Center collapsed.

Megee: I took money out of my 401(k). My sister [Carol Megee] took money out, Missy Koonce took money out, and we got [a new space] at 1531 Grand. We got a contractor who said he could pull it together for maybe $18,000. When it was all said and done, it was two to three times that amount. That was how we started spiraling down.

Reed: This is how communities develop. The gays and the artists go in and renovate, and then when it’s posh, the rent goes up. We helped it, and in turn it killed us.

Megee: In five years in that space, we did 21 different shows. Our shows went from The Birds in ’97 costing $2,000 to Scary Carrie Christmas costing $17,000. We had 24,000 people come through the doors. Mother Trucker had 2,500 alone. God, that was a great show. David writes real scripts.

Darryl Jones: We’re an eclectic group of personalities who, more often than we probably realize, substitute for absent family.

Megee: It took a year and a half to get a liquor license. But that was profitable — we would have closed after the 10th-anniversary Bonanza if we weren’t selling liquor. Bonanza‘s liquor sales paid for The Birds, and The Birds‘ liquor paid for 9 to 5.

Reed: We were going to end last year, but I saw 9 to 5 as a chance to chip away at the debt. Chadwick Brooks and I worked our dicks off raising money for 9 to 5.

Megee: When the Democrats were in office, there was money for the arts. People were happy to hand money over. Now, it’s sad. With two years of Republicans left, the foundations of the arts are crumbling underneath us. They want to destroy all that. I really believe it. All of my friends are poor these days. We’ve been having parties where everyone brings a covered dish to feed each other.

Van Ausdal: At the meeting when the word came through, I looked around at the gang, and it somehow seemed right that this chapter was ending. Increasingly it seemed to be less fun for Ron and Carol.

Megee: My 401(k) was done, and my sister was bankrupt, and the debt was piling up — but I really felt if we kept the magic going that things would be fine. I have to pay off the debt, and I will. I’m not the kind of person who would leave that out there.

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Reed: It kills me that Ron’s taking that on.

“Time Warp” from the Late’ Night’s Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Kimberley Queen: This feels like Laverne and Shirley went off the air, my dog died, and Town Topic quit serving double cheeseburgers at 3:15 a.m. all rolled into one.

Reed: Late Night Theatre was the most exciting chapter of my life so far, and I’m glad to have the memory.

Megee: Sometimes you look back and realize we really lived a decadent life. We still do. I love it. I have no regrets. I want to keep being decadent keep finding ways to shake up this city.