“I am very proud to have served my time as one of the enlisted weirdos at both the U of I and the Station Theatre.”
During his time as a student, Offerman performed at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts and other area venues like Urbana’s Station Theatre. As a sophomore, he was cast in his first role with the Theatre Department as Alan in Picnic by William Inge. Offerman describes Alan as, “the milquetoast college boy who is publicly emasculated when Hal poaches his girlfriend Madge and she chooses to acquiesce to her animal desires, succumbing to Hal even though he has trouble written all over him!” On opening night, Offerman had a run in with the Urbana Police Department which caused him to miss his 6:30 call time for the 8:00 pm performance. He arrived just in time for the curtain to rise. “I sprinted into the dressing room with about seven or eight minutes to get it together. Slapped on some makeup and threw on my loafers and yellow cardigan. Alan, remember? Our assistant director, Mike Seagull, a friend, had gotten wind of my predicament and covered for me with some little white fabrication or other, and before I knew it, I was clumsily blubbering through my crying scene in act 2. Most definitely the best crying scene I’ve ever delivered.” [5]
Nick Offerman as Alan in Picnic
Over the next several years, Offerman appeared in a number of plays including Twelfth Night, A Christmas Carol, A Little Hotel on the Side, Biloxi Blues, Three Sisters, and Coriolanus. [6] He and his classmates organized their own stagings in a local free theatre space. “Outside of classes, shows for school, and part-time jobs, we were mounting our own productions of Brecht and Pinter and our own rock-and-roll renditions of Shakespeare,” Nick writes. “While our standards, or production values, were very high, our virtually nonexistent budgets caused those values to require a lot of elbow grease.” [7]
Offerman (right) as Antonio in Twelfth Night, April-May 1993
