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Her dramatics at Stanford University lasted three years. "Every day was a happening," she says. "I wore an elf costume -- red pantaloons, vest and hat, all festooned with blue pompons -- and lived with my boyfriend in a tree house, dining on vegetables we stole from the experimental garden. One day, for a linguistics presentation, we threw pies at each other, then tossed tiny parachutes at the other class members. The professor gave us both A's." And now in May '68, here is La Pasionaria Sigourney, set to exhort the students with quotations from Chairman Mao's Little Red Book. But it is missing from her tote bag. She grabs her address book (same size, same color) and waves it above her head, declaiming her memorized Mao. "They responded wildly," Weaver recalls, "and we marched off to the ROTC building and set it afire."
Sigourney found it tougher igniting her teachers at the Yale School of Drama. "Yale was a joyless experience," she says. "It almost destroyed my career. I had so much confidence when I got there, and so little when I left. For six months they wouldn't cast me in a play, and I was forced to perform in the campus cabaret." Poor, lucky Sigourney. For it was there she teamed up with Christopher Durang, who would soon torch off-Broadway with the blazing sitcom absurdism of Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You and The Marriage of Bette and Boo. Says Durang, 37: "I'd written an anarchist musical called Better Dead than Sorry. Sigourney sang the title song while receiving shock treatment. It was the first time I got a sense of how charismatic an actor she is."
With Durang's acute perception that "there's something extremely funny about a beautiful woman being silly," a great friendship was born. She gave him class; he gave her sexy roles. Sigourney played a murderous multiple schizophrenic Electra figure in Durang's Titanic, a woman who dates a bisexual analysand in Beyond Therapy. Together they wrote and performed Das Lusitania Songspiel, a deliciously rancid Brecht-meets-Broadway parody, and Naked Lunch, a fake interview with Voracious Starlet Sigourney Weaver that, in expanded form, may soon be a major motion picture. "She is a very strong collaborator," says Durang. "The furthest-out ideas come from Sigourney. I, however, type faster." Of their paldom, Weaver says, "We have so much fun ( together. Our friendship is in a class all by itself. It's the icing on the cake of life."
The cake itself came in two slices: first career, then marriage. In the seven years since she won her first starring role, in Alien (in 1977 she had a walk- on role in Woody Allen's Annie Hall), she has made seven films, including two that are still unreleased in the U.S.: Half Moon Street with Michael Caine and the French-language One Woman or Two with Gerard Depardieu. Weaver the stage artist refuses to condescend to cinema. "There's a purity in film work," she observes. "It takes courage, leaping into the void every day on set. You can't hold back; you can't come back to it the next day. It's a one- shot deal, just like life."