by David Adjmi
In Dreams
ON THE MORNING of September 8, I walked through the plaza at Lincoln Center. Past the granite-rimmed fountain, and the New York City Ballet, and the soon-to-be-deracinated City Opera. Past the State Theater, where my mother took me to see The Nutcracker—and the Vivian Beaumont, where I saw Six Degrees of Separation. Whiplash swirls of pastel blue and cadmium peeked through slits in geometric mazes of rimmed glass nested inside high-vaulting panels that formed the façade of the Opera House, where I made a right turn, walked past a reflective pool, ascended some steps, traversed a second small plaza, and entered the Juilliard School.
The beige brutalist cube of the exterior yielded to a strangely uninviting interior; it bore the phenotype of late-1960s modernism with its blunt geometrics, its token homages to abstract art and primitivist sculpture. I gave the security guard my ID, walked through the turnstile, and wended a series of hallways toward the conference room where I was to meet Wallace and Gloria, the heads of the playwriting program. It was a two-year postgraduate program with no formal degree—and quite small, only eight students in toto. The program was only a few years old but already extremely prestigious. David Auburn, a recent graduate, won the Pulitzer that year, and David Lindsay-Abaire (whom I knew from Sarah Lawrence) wrote Fuddy Meers, which was a big hit. I’d gotten an agent my last year at Iowa, and I’d won prestigious residencies, but was still what was called an emerging playwright. The days when producers like Joe Papp would take risks on unknown writers were long gone; funding dried up, the climate was more conservative, and most writers did not get New York productions. Playwrights had to be vetted in advance, and Juilliard was considered a golden ticket.
Inside the building everything was wood paneled: the elevators, the classrooms. The chairs and sofas were all upholstered in browns and dark oranges. There were windows but no one ever looked out of them—what was the point? The building was a monument dedicated to its own exaltation. The hall was a glittering procession of platonic forms: ballerinas and ringlet-haired Adonises, alabaster-skinned girls in Capezio. Everyone seemed sculpted from marble. Everyone looked like a Caravaggio, or a Degas sculpture.
I entered the conference room, whose walls were flanked with giant paintings of august-seeming historical people. The two other first-year fellows were there, Frances and Jenny, and we introduced ourselves and made small talk. Eventually Gloria and Wallace breezed in, chatting as they walked, slowly, whispering like the people in the library. They sat at the other end of the large boardroom table, not acknowledging us. I kept waiting for them to do something cute—wave or wink, something that would undercut the formality of the august boardroom, but no such respite came. They were as famous as playwrights could get. Gloria won a Tony Award, and I adored Wally’s plays since Cathy introduced them to me back at USC.
Wally had a belly and wore a long-sleeved oxford shirt and khaki pants. His graying, neatly trimmed beard framed his jesuitical features. He looked a little like a monk, and Gloria looked like Nefertiti. There was something Egyptian and regal in her carriage. She wore a gold mesh bracelet and a gold chain around her neck; her earrings were gold, too. All that gold looked good on her. It made her seem burnished, added to the hieratic splendor she seemed to want to cultivate—even her makeup sparkled. She wore that pearlescent lipstick my mother’s friends had. She even wore one of those inevitable Loehmann’s-curated slacks-and-top affairs they all had—and she had The Purse, with its scaly, asymmetric patches. But where those women lacked ambition, Gloria had the imperious toughness of a self-made woman. Her face was carved with tiny lines, indices of some spiritual hurt I imagined she’d endured. Clearly this was someone who knew about pain, but she gave the impression of having transcended or transmuted the pain into a sort of Egyptian glamour.
The two of them continued to whisper privately for a while, and when Gloria turned her attention to us it was like a conductor tapping a baton. The writers all sat up; we adjusted ourselves in the high-backed chairs. We had to tell them what we had done with our summers and what we were working on. Julia spoke first. She told us she had developed her play at a conference earlier in the summer. “What play?” Gloria demanded. “What conference? Be specific.” Then I talked about my residency at the Royal Court Theatre—a guest instructor at Iowa gave them my Doll’s House adaptation, and I’d spent that whole summer in London seeing British theatre and workshopping my play. “Who was the director?” asked Gloria. “What was the setup?” The whole orientation proceeded along these lines, with Gloria batting questions in her coldly juridical way while Wallace sat alongside her, quiet and somewhat recessed. At some point (and it felt arbitrary) Gloria rose slowly, signaling wordlessly that our time was over. She exited and Wallace trailed behind. Once they left, there was the sense of oxygen entering the room again, like we were shaking off a dream.
The literary manager, Rob Cortlandt, entered with his mop of freshly shampooed hair and ushered us into a large gymnasium where the second-year actors were delivering monologues. The rafters were packed with silvery young people. The second-years bounded around the room with calisthenic vigor. They seemed so young, like children. They had the unnatural ablated openness of people in cults—their skin seemed ripped off and all the raw nerves exposed. Each time someone finished a monologue, people whooped and hollered and stomped. Then someone else would spring to the center of the room and the actors would shriek and stomp and bang their fists at the air. Jessica Chastain was there—she had her hair in cornrows and did her monologue from Romeo and Juliet; when she finished, everyone screamed tribal, lung-shredding screams and stomped their feet so hard the floor tremored. Everything was overly heightened, too delirious. I started to settle into the delirium and its rhythms when the exultation suddenly gave way to misery and despair. The students were keening and wailing, the room now throbbing with collective anguish. The actors had all clustered together in a group hug, a cirrus of Capezio and Lululemon. The teachers became somber too. Then everyone started to sing a song, something in honor of some person they all knew, we couldn’t make out the details. I looked over at the other playwrights who seemed, like me, slightly dislocated. “Can we leave?” Jenny whispered.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“What’s happening?”
Jenny managed to sneak out a side door, and Frances and I eventually followed suit.
“Jesus Christ,” said Frances.
We all looked at one another and broke out laughing.
Outside, people disported themselves on mezzanines and toted string instruments in large black cases. The sun was round and pink and gave off a delicate heat. I looked out over the mezzanine to the Opera House, where they were preparing for the MTV Music Awards. “I wonder if we can get a free ticket to that,” I said to Jenny. I was already plotting new ways to leverage my status as a Juilliard student. I was important, after all. My success felt inevitable: a fruit ripe for plucking. I felt the sunlight beating on my skin that beautiful warm day as I contemplated all the treasures in store for me, treasures heaping with glorious spoils.
Three days later, on the eleventh, I was supposed to have my first class, but instead I spent the day glued to video clips of towers crumbling, human beings falling to their death, people sheeted with ash and trawling like zombies through lower Manhattan. Outside my mother’s house a thick oyster-gray ash covered the lawn. There was a constant blare of sirens. People were sobbing on the streets, on the subway—they just spontaneously broke into sobs.
A month later, when we finally had our first class, it felt bathetic and pointless. No one wanted to think about writing plays. We were traumatized. People sobbed all through class. When Gloria asked someone to volunteer to bring in pages to read the following week, no one raised their hands. Eventually, if only to puncture the awkward silence I agreed to bring something in, though I had no new pages and was, frankly, nervous about showing my work—to Gloria in particular.
I kept thinking about something she said at orientat
ion: “At Juilliard, we write very quickly.” The we was not a royal we, it was prescriptive, an ordinance. “And we don’t rewrite our plays,” she continued. “Playwrights write one draft. You can make a few changes and that’s it.” This sent me into a minor panic: what if I needed to write more than one draft? I chafed at the rigidity. I was back at the yeshiva again with all its rules and protocols.
My instinct, then and now, was to rebel, so the following week I ended up bringing in ten pages of the most experimental, crazy thing I’d ever written. As soon as we read the pages aloud, I knew I’d made a terrible mistake. The writing was deliberately awful, in a “conceptual” way: there was no plot, the characters were dehumanized zombies. When we finished, Gloria reached into her purse and fished around abstractly for her cell phone. There was a weirdly long silence as she checked her messages. Then she flipped the phone shut. Her overlong fingernails plucked the surface of the table with an aggressive clack. “Well,” she trilled, “do you actually need comments on this, or can we just move on?”
The whole experience was humiliating, but I’d learned my lesson—and I felt certain I could redeem myself. The following week during class, Dawn expressed concern that the protagonist in her new play was not likeable enough, and Gloria began to give her advice on how to make characters more likeable, but I interrupted her. I felt I had an interesting gloss, a provocative take on the subject. I thought this would be my opportunity to earn my slot in the program: I could offer a nuanced yet heterodox view of drama. “I actually don’t think writers should try to make their characters likeable,” I said. “Lady Macbeth isn’t likeable but she has a strong action to play, and that makes her compelling!” Gloria canted her head slightly; the slits of her eyes began to narrow. I briefly scanned the table: everyone seemed vaguely distressed.
At Iowa we were taught to challenge one another—there was an easy colloquy between students and teachers—but apparently at Juilliard it was considered a faux pas to violate the teacher-student hierarchy. I felt myself panic but struggled to finesse it in the moment: “Or like Medea . . .” I continued. “She also . . . you know, she’s not really likeable.” But as I continued the fatal slope of my argument I felt the room grow submerged in an awful, tumid silence. I waited for one of my colleagues to rush in with an affirming Yeah! or Well, on the other hand . . . but they were all too savvy to get involved. Gloria was now glaring down at her purse through her nostrils, the vaguest hint of a smirk tilting her expression. I wasn’t fully aware of it, but the smirk was an omen: my fate in the program had been sealed.
A few weeks in, Gloria began to strike a greater intimacy with the class: she regaled us with anecdotes about her life and famous writers she knew, she offered little aperçus about the business and life, semi-self-ratifying speeches about what she cynically referred to as “the industry”—warnings about how we were not to let anyone take advantage of us, that she was looking out for our best interests. And this was essentially true: she cared about the other writers. She’d make coy mention of plays she saw with Noah or Dawn, drinks they had together over the weekend. Once, I overheard her making plans with everyone for some barbecue at her house in the Hamptons to which I wasn’t invited. But Gloria and I had no personal relationship. I knew I was not the intended audience for her filigreed compliments and cautionings.
When I talked in class about a play I’d loved, she dismissed the writer as a hack. When I had a copy of some book I was reading on the seminar table, Gloria ambled over lightly, curled around the edge of the table like a kitten, picked up the book, and gave it a cursory look. “Who’d ever want to read that?” she growled, before dropping it indifferently back on the table.
It was five or six weeks after my first go-round before I found the courage to bring new pages to class. I had just the beginning of something—it was rough, but it had a nice raw energy. We read it aloud in class and people laughed, they seemed to like it. I tried to avert my gaze from Gloria, but it was impossible not to look at her; she drew the gazes of the room to her as if by a magical thread. Her face seemed plastered in a frown. “Are you trying to write cardboard characters,” she said. “Or are you trying to write people?”
The way she said the word “people” made it sound like I wasn’t really a person, how would I even remotely know the workings of the species?
“People,” I replied with a slight aphasia—I was afraid to say too much, as it was so easy to say wrong things that would incur more cruelty—but something in my response caused Gloria to break out laughing. I didn’t know if the laughter was malign or if there was something in my terse reply that was genuinely funny to her. I smiled an awkward smile to smooth over my humiliation, but the smile only redoubled it. Jets of adrenaline blasted into my blood. I wanted to speak up. I could say things, smart things, but my thoughts were now frozen and remote. I scanned the table, soundlessly beseeching my peers to save me, fight for me. After an excruciatingly long interim, Wally spoke. “It’s stylized writing,” he said. “It’s not psychological, and it isn’t cardboard. It’s something else.”
With that, Gloria’s smirk dissolved, the storm clouds vanished.
“Great,” she said, chewing on a gummy peach.
Wally successfully diverted the current of her thoughts. Or maybe she got bored by her own predation—the cat dropping a half-chewed mouse for a piece of bright string.
Later that night the writers all went out for drinks at Nick & Toni’s.
“She’s hard on you because she cares,” Jeanette intoned solemnly.
“Gloria can be tough,” said Dawn, who was picking from a tiny bowl of glossy black olives.
“She’s a strong personality,” said Rebecca. “And it’s a tiny program. Not everyone is the right fit.”
“Yeah, like Sam,” said Noah.
“Who’s Sam?” I said.
“He wasn’t asked back,” Noah said.
Juilliard was officially a one-year program but most students, practically all, were invited to return for a second year. It seemed like a terrible snub not to be asked back.
“Sometimes it turns around, though,” said Rebecca. “Cindy Morton and Gloria didn’t have the best chemistry at first, but then Cindy became her favorite.”
“Maybe one day I could be her favorite,” I said, clinging to whatever shreds of hope I could. “Because right now I feel like our chemistry isn’t so great.”
Rebecca practically choked on her martini. “OBVIOUSLY,” she screamed, gasping with laughter.
I laughed too.
The following week I saw the new Coen brothers movie in Chelsea with Brian, a playwright who’d gone through the program a few years back. Afterward we had coffee at Big Cup, and I spilled my guts. “She hates me.” I swirled my coffee around in the ceramic mug with a tiny spoon. “I keep trying to make it better and it keeps getting worse.”
“You can’t fight Gloria,” Brian cautioned. “You’ll never win.”
“What should I do?”
“Write the kind of play she likes.”
I thought Brian’s advice was a little cynical, but he was right. I had to be pragmatic. I wasn’t interested in another lonely pyrrhic victory. Gloria was a gatekeeper, and the theatre world was small and gossipy—and I didn’t want to end up thrown away like that mythological Sam person the writers talked about. I didn’t want to end up like Jean Endicott, munching angrily on chicken Caesar salad and rankled by the success of my peers. I wanted to go to Tony Award parties, and have extended runs of my plays at Playwrights Horizons. I wanted success.
Gloria told us our job as playwrights was to “let the audience know when they can go home and have their dinner,” which I found incredibly depressing at the time, but maybe she was right. It was a capitalist society and plays were commodities. You had to market yourself to survive. You had to be likeable.
When I got home that night I deleted the new play from my hard drive. If there was something I could do to grease the wheels of equanimity—if I coul
d hold up an olive branch, anything—I would do it. I tried looking for common ground. I knew Gloria liked musicals (she had written a few, and she’d been working with a composer on something new, she talked about it in class) so I decided to see one. I hadn’t been to a Broadway musical for a decade, maybe longer. I got a half-price ticket way up in the mezzanine to something called Thoroughly Modern Millie.
As I watched the musical, I kept thinking about Gloria and how much she would like it. I laughed along with my fellow audience members, and hummed the songs, and felt myself situated in the very epicenter of the human experience. The musical was likeable, and by liking it, I myself felt likeable. With every shimmy of Sutton Foster’s beaded dress, with every clack of her heels, I felt more and more there was an order to life and that I had my likeable place in it; the likeability was a breastplate to shield me from attacks. The likeability of the musical would saturate my very essence, and when the seroconversion was complete, I could write from that place of likeability, and my stories could be universal. From my velvet-cushioned seat at the Marquis Theatre I could feel an invisible chain linking me to the farthest reaches of the stratosphere.
I strutted into the classroom the following week beaming with useless pride. When we got to the moment, as we did every week, when Gloria asked us what plays we’d seen, I raised my hand—practically exploding with excitement. “I saw Thoroughly Modern Millie,” I said, “and I thought it was fantastic!”
Gloria looked at me like she’d swallowed arsenic. “How anyone could ever like something like that,” she said, “is completely dumbfounding to me.”
The warm liquid joy I felt just seconds earlier froze over into a block of ice. And it was suddenly as if I too had swallowed arsenic, and I too was poisoned by some strange intransitive property, some principle of necromancy. It was like a Shakespearean tragedy with two poisoned lovers dead at the end, for seemingly no good reason—except we weren’t lovers, and it wasn’t tragic for Gloria because, like Juliet, her arsenic wasn’t really arsenic, it was just a bad taste in her mouth. She changed the subject, smiled again. It was just a tiny snag, a useless detail she could flick away, a stray ash. But I was poisoned. As I sat there across the acre of polished table, the chasm of planked wood that separated us, I felt the poison spreading inside me, coursing through my blood. My eyes began to shut; I could hardly keep them open. I felt drugged, more tired than I’d ever been in my life. After class I staggered to Times Square. I tried to shake off the bad feeling. I walked through Shubert Alley, with all the posters and oversized placards I loved as a boy, but now it felt tainted and debased. I was sick to death of this city with its giant monuments and shining lights and marquees. I staggered to the subway. On the ride back to Brooklyn, I could barely stay awake. The cells of my body felt desiccate and sick.
