Friends: A Love Story

by Angela Bassett

  My mother arrived a few days before my dad, who couldn’t get off from work. She got there in time to see me star in A Lesson from Aloes by the South African playwright Athol Fugard, over at Boston Shakespeare. I was too young to do the lead role, but the director and leading company actor, Henry Woronicz, was a big fan of mine, had said, “Just grow a beard and let’s go.” I was amazed when I was able to go onstage, finish the play and not blank out on all those lines. My knees were actually knocking. Mom saw the play with the rest of her family. She was blown away when I came out onstage in my sixties outfit—a hat, a suit and a narrow tie. She said afterward that I looked like her father. My mother came back and saw the play again with my dad. Until then, they had been thinking, “We spent all this money to go to Harvard and the boy wants to be an actor?” which I’m sure was a nightmare for them, although they never expressed it. Now they thought, “He’s got a gift. He’s got to do this.”

  Especially after doing such a big role I wanted some training so I’d learn how not to be so nervous as to allow my nerves to defeat me—that’s why I wanted to go to graduate drama school. All the members of the acting clique at Harvard were applying to Yale down in New Haven, Connecticut. I knew that’s where I had to go. Other than that, I didn’t know anything about Yale, except that the actress Meryl Streep had gone there. My goal was merely to learn how to stand onstage without my knees shaking. Everyone was saying, “Courtney, you’re going to get in. You’re so good!” But I didn’t know—I didn’t know anything. Plus, I was burnt out from all that I done while at Harvard. I didn’t want to apply right away. I wanted to take some time to rest, choose the pieces I wanted to perform for my audition and practice my lines. I also wanted to make enough money to visit Ahren, who was going out to the American Conservatory Theater (ACT) in San Francisco. For a year I lived with my uncle and friends and worked the midnight shift as a security guard at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Copley Plaza Hotel.

  Working the midnight shift left me free to deal with just the art and my thoughts. I practiced the lines of the scenes I’d use to audition while I walked the floors. As I rehearsed the monologues, I’d look for their emotional heat, since expressing my emotions was now my strength and I was so emotionally available. I said those pieces to myself for nine months. They dropped so far down into me that I knew every nuance in them. I reached a point where I couldn’t say them anymore to myself; I needed to share.

  It’s funny, but as important as that audition was, I don’t remember the audition itself; I only remember that in the moments immediately before it, I was off in my own thoughts and some tiny little ol’ dog with a big bark ran up on me from out of the blue and scared me so bad I almost peed on myself. Fortunately, nobody saw how high I jumped. However, Earle Gister, head of the acting department at Yale, and Larry Hecht, who headed acting at ACT, told me they will always remember my audition. A few weeks later I received my acceptance letter. I was standing on my friend’s front porch, which overlooked a cemetery, and opened the letter and I said to myself that this can either be a very good day or a very bad day. But either way, because of this cemetery, I will always remember it. When I saw that I had gotten in, I screamed. It was a life-changing moment. But my joy was immediately tempered with, “What about Ahren?” I called her right away. We both paused, unsure of what to say. When we realized we had both gotten in, we screamed together. The odds of that happening seemed like a million to one!

  Ahren’s parents were paying for her schooling. Mine could barely pay for Harvard; I’d have to pay for Yale. I didn’t get any financial aid since I was under twenty-five years old and the school wouldn’t replace what they believed should be my parents’ financial contribution. I would have to pay for drama school myself, but I didn’t have any money. I couldn’t believe I had gotten in but wouldn’t be able to go because I couldn’t pay for it. It felt like my wings had been clipped. I was distraught and started having what I now know were anxiety attacks. I was so stressed I was freaking out. At one point I shifted to working days, but dealing with all the visitors and their questions made me anxious. When I’d reply, sometimes I’d hear myself talking gibberish.

  Frantic to figure something out, I talked to the dean at Harvard who used to run Yale’s drama school, who was a supporter of mine.

  “They’re telling me I’m not going to be able to go there because I can’t pay for it. Do you think there’s some corporate sponsorship I could get?” (Oh, how naive of me!)

  “Why do you want to go to Yale?”

  I was shocked that he tried to dampen my joy.

  “What do you mean, ‘why do I want to go to Yale’? Because I want to get trained at the best school in the country!” I felt devastated. Betrayed. Just like the counselors at Country Day who didn’t think I’d get into Harvard. I never sought his advice again.

  I did, however, call the financial-aid folks down at Yale. They were a lot easier to deal with. They encouraged me, “Come down here and talk to us and we’ll see if we can figure something out.” We did. While I was on campus I met a few of the students. Charles Dutton, John Turturro and Angela Bassett took me out to the Gypsy, the drama school hangout.

  It wasn’t until after we arrived on campus that fall that the Yale drama school administrators learned that Ahren and I were in a relationship. They were in complete shock; apparently, that had never happened before. Earle Gister told us that they never accept student couples because it’s hard on the rest of the class. But Ahren and I had gone to different colleges and applied from different coasts, so it never occurred to them that we knew each other. Hundreds of people from all over the country had applied to go to Yale. Only fifteen had been accepted into our class. Three of us were black. Ahren and I were two of them. And we were a couple. I thought it was amazing! We just knew it was a miracle. Between being immature and the big ego I was developing to hide my insecurities, it went right to my head.

  The first week of school was amazing. We met the acting school’s dean, Lloyd Richards. I hadn’t known he was black but now that I knew, I took pride in it. Later I would learn he was also one of the most renowned master acting teachers in the entire United States. My voice teachers from Shakespeare & Company also taught at Yale, so I already knew them. And Ahren and I did well when we students performed our audition pieces in front of each other. In fact, I was so excited that I went out and cut my hair into a Mohawk.

  “Why did you do that?” Ahren asked me when she first saw me post-haircut.

  “I don’t know—I just felt like doing something to celebrate!”

  “But why?”

  “Because I was happy. I was excited!”

  “You know something, Court? You’re wild.”

  “Yeah, it’s crazy, right?”

  I was really so excited that my dreams were coming true. In many ways life couldn’t be more perfect. But though I appeared confident from the outside, on the inside I felt intimidated. I didn’t feel that I belonged. I had participated in Shakespeare & Company but I had no technical knowledge about acting. Acting is emotional but it’s also technical. You have to know the technique of it. Some of the other students knew more technique than me. The women in our class were very, very, very strong—dramatically, comedically and personalitywise. They blew most of the men away.

  Ahren and I rented an apartment in New Haven about a mile off campus. I’m sure our parents were thinking, “Oh, they’re shackin’ up?” But it didn’t faze me. My folks hadn’t raised me in the church or put those types of values in me; they couldn’t say anything now. Soon after that I came home with a puppy—a gorgeous, yellow shepherd Labrador we named Bottom after the character Nick Bottom in Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream. On a typical day I’d go running with Bottom at six in the morning (Ahren wasn’t a morning person), school would start at eight, we’d have classes until two and, after first semester, we’d typically rehearse until one in the morning. On top of that, I had a work-study job washing dishes at t
he Yale Cabaret and cleaning the Yale Repertory Theater, and we had to do our classroom work and learn our lines. I’d ride my bike to school and she’d take the car so one of us could return home to walk Bottom during the day. (How crazy was that? It was like we had a little baby.) Unfortunately for him and for us we didn’t know the first thing to do with him. We’d be gone for over twelve hours a day. Bottom would tear up the house. But we loved him like a child. Ahren was always dragging him into bed with us. I counted on his playfulness to break my melancholy moods. Bottom was my lifeline. You couldn’t break his joyous spirit to save your life. But with all this going on, by the end of the day I’d be a little numb. Fortunately, by now I had learned to share Ahren with my classmates. She developed her set of friends and I had mine, but we were all one class.

  My favorite class was fencing, which is all about quickness—whoever attacks and gets back on defense the quickest will score the most points and will win. Initially, we were all loving and gentle with each other in fencing class. Eventually we realized it was a great place to take out our aggression. At that point, it was on! Between my athletic ability and competitive nature, I was one of the best in my class. Academically, I studied hard and soon took to the work. In acting class when we’d explore scenes, my partner and I would rework the same scene over and over and over, each time making it more dense and rich. Our classmates thought the point was to work a scene and move on to the next one. At the end of the class, Earle Gister, our first-year acting instructor, complimented my partner and me because we had explored that one scene so deeply. “Now, that’s the way to explore a scene!” he told us. I could feel the whole class shrink. I achieved by the end of the first semester what I had set out to achieve by coming to Yale in the first place—I could now stand onstage without my knees shaking. I was most proud that I had accomplished my goal.

  Because of the work we’d done at Shakespeare & Company, Ahren and I were more emotionally available than most of our classmates. They wanted to know where we had learned what we knew about emotions, and we told them. They began to understand the importance of voice class and breath work (you access your emotions through your breath). But once people began to pay attention to me, it opened up a can of worms. And I didn’t have the skills and wasn’t mature enough to deal effectively and sensitively with people who were impressed with my ability. I didn’t know how to navigate my growing success as an actor.

  That summer I worked at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut, where Yale’s Dean Richards was the artistic director. The theater center was bustling with new playwrights, new plays and actors. My insecurities surfaced. Walking into the lunchroom on the first day felt as nerve-wracking as being back in kindergarten. “Who’s going to sit with me? Am I going to have to sit by myself?” And after I performed for the first time up there and people praised my work, I didn’t know how to emotionally deal with the attention—especially from the women. I was spinning out of control. I tried to apply my acting techniques to aid me in decision-making. Because some decision-making processes used in acting—such as flipping a coin—are very arbitrary, it was a deadly combination. But I wouldn’t learn that until much later in life.

  By the second semester of our first year, all of the newness of drama school had rubbed off, and Ahren and I were thrown into the casting pool with the other students. Yale is a production-based drama school. At any given moment, its forty-five students are writing, directing and acting in about forty plays. NYU is more of a studio-based school—they may do two shows a semester. Now that we were also acting, things became more intense. Our second year at Yale was about Shakespeare and we broke down the Shakespearean plays to the word, the sentence, the punctuation and meter. We literally had to beat out the rhythm of the whole play. The rhythm tells you what’s happening emotionally. Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum. In Shakespeare the rhythm is the play’s heartbeat—it even tells you how to breathe. I found all the detail overwhelming, so I stayed with my head in my notebook. I knew I had to stick with it to get it. Now, putting things in order, I loved it. It spoke to my upbringing. Once we started doing the scene work, it all came together for me—the emotional and the technical. I started flying!

  In the meantime, one of the young women in our class had become our class star. From first semester, Earle kept repeating, “This kid’s brilliant.” She did have extraordinary talent. The rest of us knew she would be very successful. But the second semester of our second year, our acting teacher pushed her and made her bring her scenes back. There was no reason. He was just pushing her buttons—he set her up. She wasn’t used to getting corrected, so it took her out of her element. The teacher sensed her fear, proceeded to pick her apart and exposed that her work ethic was weak. It showed me that the warning that my voice teacher had given me was correct—three years is a long time to be going to school to get an agent.

  That same semester over at Yale Rep, which was once of the most distinguished regional theaters in the country, August Wilson was producing a new play called Fences. Lloyd, who was going to direct the play, asked Earle if he could cast a student. Earle suggested me. I didn’t know I was being considered for a part, but in the meantime I read the play and thought it was fantastic. One day Ahren told me, “Something big has happened. Go look at the casting board!”

  “I’m in a hurry, Ahren. Just tell me. What is it?”

  “Go look at the casting board.”

  When I saw my name I almost fell down. This was not an ordinary student production—it was an August Wilson play! Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom had just played on Broadway and been nominated for all sorts of Tony Awards. I was in shock! But I knew this was a direct relation to the hard work I was doing in my classes with Earle.

  Now I was in an August Wilson play but I didn’t know upstage from downstage. Lloyd didn’t give me a lot of direction; he assumed everyone was well qualified to perform their role. He treated me like Cory, my seventeen-year-old character. I was so mad at him! I wanted to be treated like James Earl Jones and Mary Alice and Charlie Brown and Frankie Faison, Ray Aranha and the other adults—I wanted to be in the group. On breaks they’d be talkin’ and laughin’, and I’d be off to the side by myself. Every now and then I’d try to chip in. Lloyd would look at me as if saying, “Did somebody ask you something, boy?” I hated feeling like a little boy—seen and not heard. What I didn’t know at the time was that he was teaching me.

  We spent an entire week sitting around the table reading the play over and over, stopping and starting, asking about this moment and that moment. Inside I was thinking, “What are we doing? Can’t we just get on our feet?” I didn’t realize we were charting the emotional course of the play. By the time we got up on our feet to begin blocking, I realized I didn’t know anything about my character because I had been wasting time. Now I had to do the emotional and physical work at the same time, which is very difficult. Lloyd had been waiting for me to ask some questions so he could actually direct me. Now we had finally gotten to the part of the play where we were blocking my entrance, and August’s stage directions read, simply: Cory enters.

  But how? I wondered. What was he doing? What did he have on? What does he say? How does he enter? And when is somebody going to tell me what to do? Because I was too insecure—yet acting like a know-it-all—to ask any questions, Lloyd pulled me aside after I had upstaged James Earl.

  “Courtney,” he told me gently, “if James was any other star, he would tell you himself, but I’m going to tell you. The way you’re positioning yourself when you’re talking to James, you’re upstaging him,” he explained.

  “Oh, that’s what upstaging is!” He was teaching me stagecraft.

  At one point it dawned on me that, like Cory, I had played football when I was younger. I had been a quarterback; quarterbacks have cadences. I should apply what I knew. So I stood off to the side before my next entrance and said quietly, “Blue fifteen. Blue fifteen,” then entered the scene.

  “What
did you say?” Lloyd asked me.

  “Nothing.”

  “No, Courtney. What did you say? Just say it louder, Court.”

  “Say it louder?”

  I took off from there. Now when I entered I had a whole thing.

  “Blue fifteen. Blue forty-two.” I ran onstage, dropped my book bag and stuff, and dropped back like I was throwing the ball. “The quarterback fades back….” I threw the ball to myself way up in the air like it was a long bomb then caught it. “Touchdown! WE BAD! YEAH, WE BAD!” Then I did an end-zone dance.

  I had finally started to click onstage, but personally I was completely discombobulated. In addition to learning the play, I still had classroom work, a work-study job, a girlfriend, a dog/child and classmates who wanted to know everything that was going on and not only envied the opportunities I was experiencing, but my relationship with Ahren. I was overwhelmed. I couldn’t talk to anyone about what I was going through; it didn’t feel safe. I couldn’t talk to Ahren because I felt guilty that the woman who I loved and who had gotten me started in this part of my life wasn’t a part of what I was doing. I couldn’t talk to my parents because they didn’t know anything about this world. And I couldn’t talk to anyone in the play because they were treating me like a child. (I didn’t realize they were intentionally treating me like my seventeen-year-old character.) I had no place to put my fears and insecurities, which were considerable and overwhelming. I hid behind a facade of competence, which worked well—onstage.

  By third year I’d come into my own. My outlook shifted inside and I began to think more about my own interests. My classmates resented me. I didn’t know how to deal with it. There were times when I wasn’t very sensitive to them, other times I tried to ignore them and times when I tried to divert the attention by diminishing myself. None of the approaches worked. In my defense, I was dealing with an incredible amount of success in a very short span of time. None of my classmates had to deal with the pressures I was under. On the outside I looked and behaved—acted!—like I was incredibly happy. But on the inside there were times when I was a wreck.