The Grand Union. Wendy Perron

language might sound. “I never would have thought of doing that without the context of all these people doing very strange things all the time. So it did stimulate characters in me that I didn’t know I had available.”⁷

      In the realm of character, he could be quite loud, boisterous, and even crude. During the 1975 Guthrie performance Gordon cast him as a contestant in a TV show. As a kind of sophomoric frat guy named “Marvin,” he became pushy (“Let’s get on with this show”) and yelled to Dilley to pump the crowd. In the same performance, he colluded with Gordon in talking about how to pick up women. They did it in a funny, absurdist way, but in that particular scene, he was not the thoughtful Douglas Dunn that most of us know.

      Douglas rose to the greatest challenge of Grand Union: to make something out of nothing. “The fun for me was to walk in just blank, just completely blank, and to make oneself available to different degrees with other people about what would happen.”⁸