by Floyd Skloot
In rehearsal, I worked on maintaining various movements at the edge of control. I wanted my leaps and spins and loops to be as wild as I could make them without losing balance or missing a beat. There could be no flailing, wings waving in the air, no stumbling, no bumping into things. The Cock’s antics had to be graceful. O’Casey’s stage directions called for gliding and weaving, not stomping and storming. A dancer, not a fullback.
For weeks, I choreographed and practiced routines on the flat, empty stage until the set could be built. It would have sloped walls and fences with slender surfaces I needed to prance upon or leap over, a table and stools to avoid, and the rickety two-story facade of a house from whose windows and doors I needed to appear. Once the set was ready, any entrances, exits, and dance routines that weren’t to be done on the stage’s flat foreground had to be rechoreographed halfway through rehearsals to accommodate the narrow, angled spaces I’d now perform them on.
I worried about the way my moves had to keep being changed. I needed to practice what I was going to do, get the steps down, prepare myself so that it would all feel innate, because in performance the stage would be crowded with people and props, I was going to take up a lot of space, especially with my wings expanded, and I might not be able to see clearly.
Then, the day before dress rehearsal and three days before opening night, my costume arrived. Its sheer bulk plumped me up to 190 instead of 150 pounds, a 27 percent increase in the load my legs would carry. And my weight was now radically redistributed, altering balance. To achieve a rooster-like upper body, I wore a heavy, protruding rubbery coat, and my legs were encased in yellow tights and densely feathered knickers. A tail, stiff and thick and feathered, bent at ninety degrees and hanging all the way to the calves, protruded from my coccyx. I was like a gymnast whose work on the beam suddenly included a loaded backpack, shoulder pads, baby sling, and dangling whoopee cushion. The soles of my feet, covered in slick material, couldn’t be relied on for traction. Seeing clearly might be the least of my problems.
The first time I ran down atop the sloped fence in costume, momentum carried me past the planned leap-off point. I landed in a heap on the stage with my tail sticking up and one wing trapped under my gut. I was unable to right myself. The director ran down the theater’s aisle toward the stage yelling, “Somebody straighten up my cock.”
The first time I attempted the goose-step late in scene 1, a march-like dance done in a trio with the concertina-playing Messenger and his beloved Marion in her naughty maid’s costume, I raised my right leg as required and toppled over backward, taking Marion down with me. In scene 2, when I had to race onstage in complete darkness while a top hat got transformed into the Cock between flashes of lightning, I couldn’t stop before smacking into a cluster of characters poised beside the house’s front porch. In scene 3, “weaving a way between Mahan at the table, and Lorna, circling the garden,” my feet went out from under me and I slid into the small round table like a runner stealing second base, sending it flying into the wings, stage left.
I was a danger to myself, the cast, the set. And, suddenly, a burden: because my hands were strapped to a stick inside the wings, enabling me to approximate a flapping motion and to hold the wings out stiffly, I could no longer climb the ladder backstage to access the house’s upper story window from which I needed to thrust my head and issue “a violent and triumphant crow” in the middle of scene 1. A cast member, who was six foot eight and played the village’s Sergeant, was recruited to lift me onto my perch.
I had two days in which to rechoreograph all twelve of my appearances onstage, incorporate them into everyone else’s actions, and remember them well enough to help us all remain safe, in sync, and in character. I considered wearing my Cock’s-head to class and on campus so I’d get accustomed to the limits of vision, but decided against it.
Then, a few days after the play opened, I came down with tonsillitis. This made crowing a serious challenge. Dancing too, in the heat of fever and stage lights and a forty-pound costume. When not needed onstage, I would take my Cock’s-head off and wonder about the possibility of a Cock contracting tonsillitis. I didn’t know at the time, but according to a website called “Poultry Community,” chickens do actually have tonsils: “The pyloric tonsil is a novel peripheral lymphoepithelial organ of the gastrointestinal tract in the chicken. It forms a complete lymphoid ring at the beginning of the duodenum.” This might have been a small comfort to me.
There was no understudy. For three days during the play’s run, I was confined to the college infirmary, missing classes but allowed out for evening performances. The director visited every day at noon, and the Sergeant escorted me to the theater every evening at seven. And there, for ninety minutes a night, I went about my business as the incarnation of erotic power, that badass bird, the dark prophet of the life-force.
I loved playing the Cock. There was some lingering embarrassment when I moved among fellow students outside the theater, the concern that they thought my being cast as a rooster meant I wasn’t a good enough actor to play a human. But I felt I’d overcome a range of physical and technical problems, found within myself a reservoir of resilience, and made a valuable contribution to the production by being irrepressible.
An old friend from the Green Room Theatre, the late Gary Blackton, once told me by e-mail that while he didn’t remember much about our performances together in Measure for Measure, he did recall being in the audience for Cock-a-Doodle Dandy. “What I do remember is you as a rooster. Man, you had so much energy. That’s what the play was about, the Irish Church’s defeat of life-energy. And there you were, crouched in a corner, then jumping all around the stage, running on the walls, flapping your wings. You became the rooster, all right.”
My roommate and best friend through those Green Room Theatre days, Lou Hampton, was one of the group’s star performers. But he didn’t take part in Cock-a-Doodle Dandy, and when I asked him this week what he recalled about my performance all those years ago, he said, “the only detail I remember from the play is you, standing on a wall.”
What Gary and Lou recall may not sound like much, but in fact just being able to stand on that wall in my Cock regalia, and being able to communicate zest for life, turned out to be noteworthy accomplishments for me. I’d prepared to perform in one body but was required to perform, overnight, in another one instead. I’d found a spirit and emotional flexibility I didn’t know I had.
Playing the Cock required me to put my body first, in typical sixties fashion. Make Body the foreground of my being, and liberate it from Mind. I needed to be nothing other than what I was in the moment onstage: a 190-pound Cock. This was astoundingly liberating for me, always so conscious and worried about my stubby body. And I was required to work with the body I had, the one I brought on-stage, which was not the body my body and mind remembered from rehearsal, or even from the remaining hours of the day.
At the same time, playing the Cock taught me I couldn’t always rely on my body, couldn’t depend on it to remain as I knew it, from moment to moment, or to assume it would do what I wanted, or what it had done before. This turned out to be excellent preparation for what illness and aging demands of us across time.
Interviewed by the college newspaper shortly before opening night, the director said cast members “find opportunities in this particular play to make self-discoveries as actors and as individuals.” This was the last thing I expected to be true of me as rehearsals began, and I found myself cast as a rooster. But Cock-a-Doodle Dandy was not, it turned out, so much about sexual liberation as it was about liberating the body itself.
I discovered, during those winter days in 1968, a different kind of life-force than I thought I was looking for in playing the Cock. Though I found the one I was looking for too, with the woman I’d begun dating as rehearsals began. But I also found a core place in myself that I’ve come to associate with adaptability, the capacity to deal with sudden and unplanned-for obstacles, the sorts of challenges for
which there is no relevant rehearsal. That’s ultimately what made the Cock such a force, made him the epitome of those instinctive and creative urges that men suppress at their peril: his unquenchable passion to live fully, to do what he was called to do—his cocky, passionate dance—even as counterforces sought to still him.
5
* * *
THE BOTTOM SHELF
On Novels I Keep Trying and Failing to Read
I love William Styron’s novel Sophie’s Choice. I’ve just never been able to finish reading it. Once, I got to page 312, a little more than halfway through the Vintage paperback edition. But usually I stop much sooner, unable to face yet another protracted scene of the paranoid schizophrenic Nathan Landau’s crazed behaviors, vicious diatribes, escalating threats, devastating exits. I know these “mysterious vicissitudes of his mind and mood” are meant to be harrowingly dramatic, accumulating intensity and alarm as they foreshadow doom. They’re meant to make readers feel what Nathan’s targets feel, to make us identify with Nathan’s abused, self-loathing Polish lover, Sophie Zawistowska, and the novel’s overwhelmed narrator, Stingo. But for me the scenes just lose edge and interest as they recur two-three-four-five times, adding little about the characters, whose responses remain essentially unchanged. I get the point already.
Not only Nathan’s eruptions but everything vital in the novel is pitched to extremes, a tonal and dramatic feverishness that soon becomes wearisome. Sophie’s past and present degradations, for example, are relentlessly extravagant. Presented in fragmentary flashbacks, the wartime loss of her parents, husband, and way of life in Cracow; her arrest and deportation by the Nazis; her terrible experiences at Auschwitz are all relived in prolonged, close detail. I understand the intent, Styron’s decision to provide maximum clarity about such awful events, and to personalize the Holocaust from the unfamiliar angle of a non-Jewish victim. But the flashbacks are slowly woven among scenes from the novel’s present setting in which Sophie endures a hideous, public, faint-inducing humiliation in the Brooklyn College library followed by a grotesque New York subway molestation followed by utterly incapacitating illness and chiropractic mishandling along with Nathan’s ongoing torments, Stingo’s soaring lust, and adoration from her English teacher. The “beautiful body” she lugs around like a burden, and which so many male characters make demands upon, possesses a “sickish plasticity” and “sallowness,” signs that it was “not wholly rescued from a terrible crisis.” Early on, Stingo intrudes upon her privacy and sees her toothless face, further shattering Sophie’s facade of balance. Meanwhile, as Styron doles out the misery, Stingo is repeatedly brought to shame in his most sensitive areas—his writing, sexual cravings, southern heritage, conflicting needs for fellowship and solitude—and even Stingo’s father must get beaten up during a visit to New York.
Styron’s compounding of fulsome calamity strains credibility, supersaturates my tolerance, numbs my responses, and, perhaps most problematic, diminishes what Sophie had endured under the Nazis by making it just one more among all the awful things, a matter of scale.
While my resistance to these scenes and dynamics escalates, so does the urge to skip yet another digressive backgrounder on the Nazis or on the history of the Old South. Stingo’s familiar erotic fantasies and scarcely credible sexual encounters grow unendurable to read. Sophie’s English farcically re-refalters, despite Styron’s declaration that after her “first few months” in America “her difficulty with the language” was “soon overcome.” Stingo stews and struggles and stews and struggles with his writing, fellow boarders step from the wings for needless cameos illustrating “the intense Jewishness of the little scene,” narrative repetitions require Stingo to keep noting, “As I have said …” And I can’t go on.
I recognize that my reaction to Sophie’s Choice may be a bit off-kilter. After all, the novel is an enduring classic, ranked #96 in the Modern Library Board’s list of 100 best novels of the twentieth century, and #57 on the Radcliffe Publishing Course’s rival list. Amazon.com currently shows an average rating of four and a half out of a possible five stars posted by 186 readers.
But the experience of reading is at its best a passionate and quirky one, informed by all sorts of needs, expectations, experiences, prejudices, situations. I know that the way Sophie’s Choice gets to me, then loses me, says at least as much about me as about the novel. I’m defeated by its excesses, though most readers are not, and though I realize that a preference for concision and understatement are essential qualities of my taste in fiction, I return to Sophie’s Choice again and again. That’s what gets me: I keep coming back. Because there’s so much about the novel that appeals to me, especially when I’m not reading it, I delude myself into thinking I’ll handle its flaws. This is irrational reading behavior, but I feel certain I’m not alone in it. There are strong personal forces at work when we choose what to read.
Sophie’s Choice begins in the exact time, place, and milieu where I was born: summer of 1947 in Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighborhood, which Stingo several times calls “the Kingdom of the Jews.” I remember a house next to my Grandma Kate’s that was just like Yetta Zimmerman’s, where the novel’s main characters live. It was painted a vivid yellow (instead of Yetta’s pink), and filled with Morris Finks and Moishe Muskatblits and Lillian Grossmans, with Nathans and Sophies whose outbursts were easily audible and who would rush out the front door and dance down the stoop as they struggled into coats and spat angry parting remarks. I remember “the Church Avenue station of the BMT” right near that yellow house, and the neighborhood’s “pickle-fragrant air.”
The personal resonance of this setting attracts me deeply, and I always begin the novel with a joyful eagerness to experience Styron’s sense of this familiar place. Especially as it was at the time I was born, which of course I can’t remember. It’s nearly a home movie. I yield to the opening passages with something like my full soul. “One of the pleasant features of that summer which I so vividly remember was the weather, which was sunny and mild, flower-fragrant, almost as if the days had been arrested in a seemingly perpetual springtime.”
It’s not that I need to identify so closely with a fictional world in order to engage with a novel, but rather that such a rare confluence of time and place adds a provocative layer to my interest as a reader, and further enriches the way fiction can illuminate a reader’s life. So my entanglement with this novel has a serious private dimension, a characteristic that defines nearly all the novels I end up unable to stand but unable to resist, over and over.
Sophie’s Choice is narrated with a mixture of nostalgia and horror by a mature writer looking back on his early twenties, when he was setting out on his first real writing project—a novel that would establish his name—and leaving behind the vividly sketched, heartless publishing industry where he’d been working. I’m enticed by this element as well, the writer and his shadowy experience across the years, the older writer making fictional use of his early writerly experience. As I age—I’m now sixty-six—the attraction intensifies.
Another lure is Stingo’s powerful and positive connection with his father. I never had this with my own father, a man who was seldom home, who seldom spoke other than to command or to argue with his wife. Injured and dying so young, he was barely a presence in my life, and—especially once I reached Stingo’s age and began to write—that presence was confined to a few memories. I can’t recall the sound of his voice.
In Sophie’s Choice, the letters sent to Stingo by his father, their affectionate and concerned tone, their kindness and engagement with Stingo’s life, stir me. So do the old man’s generous gifts, his consideration, the way his son’s interests are paramount in his thoughts. I like, at least initially, the way they talk when Stingo’s father comes to New York for a visit. The way they look out for each other. As with so much else in this novel, the father-son relationship grabs me and touches an emotional need that is at the heart of my enthrallment with fiction. But then it too begins to los
e its draw as Styron drags things out, repeats, elaborates, lavishes more language on by-now-familiar material.
Perhaps because I’m so drawn to the novel, and love the way its world opens for me, I end up feeling betrayed. The narrative and characters, at first so compelling, are sabotaged by the narration and characterization. The story stagnates as Styron’s authorial mannerisms, his elaborative style (“I began to do, or undergo, or experience what I believe is known as a slow burn”) and riverine storytelling, become a barrier rather than a portal, and the novel’s voice, so seductive and compelling, grates as it drones on. The aspects I most admire become the very things that put me off. I skim to see how the plot works out, then declare myself done.
What usually happens next is that I trade in my copy at a used bookshop, or recycle it if I’ve scribbled on the margins (False! Overdone!). Then a few years later, filled with enthusiasm, convinced that this time I will finish the novel, that I’ve moved beyond whatever made me lose patience last time and am ready again for Stingo’s intimate presence, the Brooklyn setting that means so much to me, the intensity of emotion and character, I purchase a replacement copy and start all over. This is a process that has been going on for thirty years, since the novel first appeared and I bought it for $12.95 in its spare, off-white hardback edition with the brown writing on the cover. I believe I’ve tried to read Sophie’s Choice five times now, and spent over a hundred dollars—adjusted for three decades of inflation—on a book I’m deeply drawn to but can’t actually stand.
