So That Happened

by Jon Cryer

  But it was fun to be surprised by people you’d written off as not made for this. One slightly overweight, frizzy-haired girl named Randy seemed particularly miserable, and liked to show people the dotted line she’d written in pen on her wrists. She wasn’t a singer, but she was cast as one of the singing von Trapp children in The Sound of Music, only the joke—which Randy was in on—was that she was the one von Trapp child who couldn’t carry a tune. They even put in a line to help set up the genuinely funny moment when she croaks out a monotone lyric. It proved that with ingenuity and effort and participation, there could be a place for everybody.

  With the intensity of the place, and practically no time to do anything but eat, drink, breathe, sleep, and shit theater, it’s not surprising that I learned a lot about performing at Stagedoor over my four summers there. I learned what I could do, and what I couldn’t.

  When they did Chicago, I really wanted to play a supporting part, Roxie Hart’s ignored husband, Amos. I knew I was right for that, but I was pulled into playing the lead in the musical Pippin, an atrocious production in which I fully stank. It’s also a strange memory for me in that during one scene, in which Pippin first experiences the pleasures of the flesh, the director had two twelve-year-old girls smear whipped cream on my arms and then lick it off. Top that, Charlie Sheen. Or rather, don’t. Please don’t.

  Sometimes the sheer number of plays and musicals you could be exposed to amounted to an education in itself. Sometimes they’d unearth a lost treasure like the 1937 Rodgers and Hart musical Babes in Arms and knock it out of the park. Since nobody knew it, it would feel like new. I might be wrong about this, but I got the impression we were the first place to stage the musical Working—adapted from historian Studs Terkel’s interviews with people about their jobs—after its short-lived 1978 Broadway run.

  One of the key acting lessons I picked up was during my time on Working. I was cast in multiple roles—as was every other cast member, which was how it was done originally—and one of those characters was a Latino who sings a lamentation about migrant workers called “Un Mejor Día Vendrá.” Before that, though, the character has a monologue about the incredible toil of grape picking, and during read-throughs I would deliver it with all the emotional weight I could muster for how crushing this guy’s life must be.

  But Jack Romano would always stop me and say, “No, you can’t feel pity. You’re living it. You have to be strong in spite of it. You can tell people about it, but nobody wants to see you pity yourself.”

  “Okay,” I said, “but this guy has to pick until his fingers bleed, and then he’s singing about a better life. How can I not convey that?”

  Jack kept arguing. “You can’t be this sad guy. That’s you; that’s not him.”

  Eventually he took the part away from me, and put in Gordon Greenberg, who performed it with some self-pity, but not nearly the amount I gave it. Ultimately I understood. We were a bunch of fairly well-off—and in some cases, quite rich—city kids who hadn’t been exposed to the kinds of lives depicted in these plays. It helped me realize that just because Jon Cryer feels a certain way about a character, that isn’t necessarily what the writer intended, or what an audience wants to see. People want to see others fight against their lousy circumstances, and what I was doing with the migrant workers was wallowing in them. I was also surprised that I didn’t harbor any ill will toward my replacement, Gordon, who went on to have a storied directing career, incidentally. I understood that what I wanted wasn’t what was best for the show, and that taking it personally would have been a waste of energy.

  As it turns out, I’d have more than a few chances to put that mind-set into action as my career got going. But that’s for later. (Don’t you love foreshadowing?)

  * * *

  It was apparent to me after a couple of summers at Stagedoor that a handful of things were true: I was going to live forever, I was going to learn how to fly (high), I would feel it coming together, and people would see me and cry.

  Clearly I would have to go to the New York High School of Performing Arts.

  In 1980, just before my second summer at Stagedoor, the movie Fame came out, and made going to a high school geared toward the arts look like . . . well, pretty hellish, actually, a powder keg of pressure, ambition, and fated choices. But it sure was a glorious hell: hardworking, talented kids spilling their guts out to make it as an actor, singer, or dancer. Since I’d now decided that acting was my path in life, going so far as to take Jack Romano’s winter classes in Manhattan at the Hotel Carter, I wanted to get into the Fame school, or the other noteworthy public school dedicated to art, Music & Art on West One Thirty-fifth Street. David Dennis, who’d always had a talent for drawing, was already in Music & Art, as was my singing sister, Robin. It seemed natural I would apply.

  My mother had another idea, however. Though she expressed some misgivings at her son jumping into the same profession she’d struggled at for decades, she took my desire seriously enough to look ahead at post–high school. Since I would surely be applying to a college with an acting program, she suggested I approach high school as an opportunity to show a college how well-rounded I was. I’d already have numerous summers at Stagedoor, winter acting classes, and working at the Equity Library Theatre on my application.

  “That part’s taken care of,” Mom said. “If you go to Bronx Science, a strong math/science school, colleges are going to be much more open to bringing in that guy, rather than the applicant who’s all about the arts.”

  When Mom suggested this, there was no invisible hammer being swung down. It was still my choice. But her logic was sound, and I agreed. I applied to the Bronx High School of Science, one of America’s top science magnet schools, and got in. It’s not as if there wasn’t an affinity in me for what the school had to offer. Space was especially interesting to me, ever since America had touched down on the moon when I was four. All that stuff enchanted me. I would write to NASA asking for autographs, and I’d get sent press packets with photos that I treated like gold. When Skylab got in trouble because one of its solar panels didn’t open, and they had to jury-rig that big gold umbrella to keep it from overheating, that was some pins-and-needles shit! When other boys were trying to figure out how to lock lips with girls, I was marveling at how the Apollo hooked up to Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft—they had different atmospheres, people! That was not a guaranteed match. How would we know it would last for those two?

  The problem in going to Bronx Science, though, was running up against the wall that was the limit of my interest in math and science. I was an arts guy now. I had an outside outlet for it, so I never really cared that much about high school. Plus, it was instantly hard, and after always being a top student, I was now falling behind. I had to take classes like meteorology and oceanography. I failed my first class, mechanical drawing, necessitating my taking it again. Sure, now I can hand a furniture builder a sweet schematic for an armoire, or impress an architect with a detailed, dimensional representation of a guesthouse. But at the time I was flailing and thinking, I’m not going to be an engineer, so why am I here again? I was a nerd, yes, but for musical theater. These were much different nerds, budding tech wizards who dreamed of owning personal computers someday and treated punch-out cards the way I did a play script. Surely these people would never amount to anything!

  Bronx Science was the kind of place in which school battles were Rubik’s Cube challenges. Whispers would go through the hallways.

  “It’s Yin Fan versus Hwang Lee at four by the greenhouse!”

  “Not those two guys!”

  “Be there or be a rhombus!”

  Then, at the appointed time, you’d see two students with those faddish 3-D gewgaws attached to key chains, facing off against each other. But the object wasn’t making each side a different solid color. That would be too easy. These geeks were speed-turning to make elaborate, multicolored, predetermined patterns. It wouldn
’t surprise me if other contests involved blindfolding, tying one hand behind the back, and walking a rooftop ledge at the same time. These guys were hard-core. Bronx Science had the questionable distinction of having the only Ultimate Frisbee team that, to a man, understood the aerodynamics of the Frisbee.

  Creativity at Bronx Science was manifested in different ways, and occasionally I had to applaud. The school prank that involved releasing forty live lobsters on the second floor of the west wing was truly awe-inspiring. (How much could that have cost? How were they transported alive?) I even made a small contribution to the school’s culture of discipline-appropriate antics when Senior Day arrived my junior year. Many seniors liked to fill their hands with shaving cream, creep up behind the new kids, and transfer that pile of foam to the head, neck, and back of the targets. I laughed, but also noticed the pitfalls. A mark might hear that distinctive airy gurgle of the Barbasol can discharging shaving cream. If he runs, who wants to see a senior with a sad face and a handful of cream and nobody to blooosh? Could the need for stealth be taken out of the equation?

  I found the solution in the same toiletries aisle. I put an aerosol spray top over the can of Barbasol and voilà! You can coat somebody with shaving cream from a good four or five feet away, and by the time they hear the sschhhhh, it’s too late. Done and done. Yes, I brought this innovation to the Bronx High School of Science, but did they put up a picture of me in the hallway? No. Maybe this has something to do with the fact that I ate lunch alone the entire time I was there, and ignored plenty of kind requests from well-meaning nerds to engage with me socially. I just didn’t care enough about school to be engaged at Bronx Science.

  Much like that last year at junior high, my overriding thought was, Get me back to Stagedoor.

  * * *

  I made all kinds of great friends at Stagedoor. My best new friend at camp was a kid from Long Island named David Quinn. Like the other David in my life, this David was also outgoing, gregarious, and charismatic, but completely undeservedly to my teenage eyes. He was this bespectacled, tubby Jewish kid who for fun would walk around shirtless, fold his nipple inward, and have it talk to people. This was his ventriloquist act, a nipple that sang the popular songs of the day (“All the boys think she’s a spy; she’s got . . . Bette DA-vis eyes!”) And somehow, some way, he got more action than I ever did.

  Mostly this was because David Quinn was the type of adolescent heterosexual male who had the balls to just walk up to girls he thought were beautiful and essentially proclaim, “Hey, we should make out!” Make those kinds of good-natured overtures often enough in a sea of two hundred and thirty girls, and eventually you’ll close a deal. David was beloved everywhere at camp, and not just because he was a gifted performer who could sing and act. (While I was relegated to the background in Oliver!, he was winning over all as the Artful Dodger.) The owners, teachers, and counselors just loved him, so he could go anywhere he wanted. And though he and I were cordial passing acquaintances my first two summers there, once we roomed together beginning my third year, we became inseparable.

  By the third year, you start to pick up on how to make life easier. David Quinn and I got to camp early our third year in order to switch out the crappy bunk beds in our room with the higher-quality bunk beds down the hall in one of the other rooms. We got ours moved out, and were halfway into our room with the better bunk beds when Jason, the guy who ran the camp, caught us. Shit.

  “Uh, what are you two up to?” he asked.

  I was about to fess up when Quinn spoke first. “We were going to move out these beds, because we didn’t want bunk beds,” he said. Smooth. What looked like going in could just as easily be going out.

  “No,” said Jason. “Put those back in your room.”

  Sure thing!

  It felt like a good omen for the year, narrowly avoiding getting caught with our bed switch. That third year, David Quinn and I shared a room with another David—keep track, people—named David Bache, and a kid named Adam Warshofsky (it was a theater camp in upstate New York, folks; there were going to be a lot of Adams and Davids). Collectively we were known as the Boys of Room 116, and our particular specialty was performing in-room parodies of the camp’s shows for whoever cared to see: counselors, campers, teachers. David Bache was always curious about who the gay students were at camp, even though he seemed categorically ignorant of the fact that Adam, the kid in the bunk above him, was translucently gay. Meanwhile, David Bache was throwing himself into his role in our drag-show version of The Sound of Music, which we literally held in our closet. He readily wore sweatpants on his head as Maria and stayed in the closet until we’d sing a line from “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?” after which he’d click on the lightbulb and act out whatever it was: climbing a tree, scraping a knee (“Oh, fuck!” he’d shout hilariously), or displaying “curlers in her hair,” which were toilet rolls.

  Years later, when I’d heard David Bache had ended up marrying a lovely guy named Glenn, it occurred that perhaps he was asking who was gay because subconsciously he was just looking for members of his tribe.

  David Quinn and I, meanwhile, had a list of that year’s Stagedoor girls tacked to the inside of our closet, and we’d scratch off the names we weren’t interested in. But while David Quinn was quietly going about methodically cutting a swath through the female campers, I was coming to the realization that it wasn’t lack of opportunity that was holding me back, but unmitigated dread. I was still a romantic at heart, but I simply couldn’t imagine a girl I was attracted to actually wanting to be with me in return. My sense of myself had by this time become completely infused with my staunchly held belief that I was deeply unattractive. So I was certain in every fiber of my being that no girl would ever refer to me as a “hunk,” or “boss,” or my favorite slang compliment of the 1970s, “foxy.”

  I did make out with a girl for the first time at camp. Her name was Teri Ryan, and she was a vision of early eighties teenage-gal hotness: a beautiful gum chewer from Long Island with Sasson jeans and a big pink plastic comb with the handle sticking out of her back pocket for easy care and feeding of her richly feathered hair. She smoked clove cigarettes, which lent her mouth a faintly sweet-and-sour taste when we kissed. I loved it. But the overriding emotion I felt at the time was one of astonishment that a girl that many people (not just me) thought of as attractive was willing, nay, actually interested in kissing me. We never had any kind of relationship after the aforementioned incident; nor did we even speak of it, so I attributed the kiss to a brief psychotic episode on her part.

  By the end of my third year—David Quinn’s fourth—he and I had the camp wired. We were killing it in our shows, routinely getting cast as leads, and coming home with armfuls of accolades at the season-ending awards show. Curfews were supposed to keep everyone in their rooms by ten p.m., but we’d routinely remove the medicine cabinet between rooms, which left a hole big enough to squeeze through for quick escapes. I also rigged a device with rope that could turn off the light in your room once the door to your room was opened from the outside. Thank you, nerd school! Then again, by a certain point, we simply defied curfews openly by hanging with the counselors, because they all knew us.

  We stepped it up the fourth summer, our last, by scoring a room to ourselves—no third roomie to bring us down, man—and running the canteen, which used to be a bar off the playhouse but was now a place to sell candies, sodas, and frozen treats. Kids would hang out there during their free period between the last class after lunch and the start of afternoon rehearsals. David Quinn and I ran the canteen for the owners, and with that kind of responsibility, we might as well have been in charge of the Federal Reserve. As for whether all collected moneys at the canteen made their way into the camp’s coffers, I don’t remember so good. Who wants to know? Talk to my lawyer.

  That fourth summer at Stagedoor, when I was seventeen, was also noteworthy, because I was there for only one four-week ter
m. Not out of any dissatisfaction with Stagedoor, though. In fact, the camp had already helped me discover what I wanted to do, and now it had helped me take the next step. The previous year, with ambitions to learn as much as possible about acting, I asked Jack Romano, now a champion of mine, if he would write me a recommendation letter to the summer Shakespeare program at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. It was a big-deal program, something I felt I needed in my education as an actor, and I appealed to him as a graduate of the school to put in a good word for me. He said yes, and wrote a kindly letter attesting to my skills and commitment to the craft. It must have done the trick, because I was accepted to the program—thanks, Jack!—but it cast an interesting light on my time at Stagedoor that last year. Everyone at the camp knew I was heading to the Royal Academy after the first summer session. I was living the dream for a lot of the attendees, but the vibe I got from them wasn’t jealousy. It was a mixture of eagerness and excitement for me.

  My last show there was the classic fifties factory-strike musical The Pajama Game, directed by Jeanine Tesori, who would later go on to be a prominent composer/director. I was playing Sid Sorokin, the factory superintendent who falls for the pretty, feisty union head nicknamed Babe. After the last performance, I went backstage, shed my costume, put on my clothes, grabbed my packed bags, and headed to the car, where my mother awaited. What happened next, she and I differ over in terms of its meaning. As the car pulled out of the driveway, my days at Stagedoor officially behind me, campers ran after it yelling, “Jon! Jon!” Mom likes to think of them as groupies, because it’s not a bad zero-to-hero narrative in her mind that the roly-poly, barely assertive, and showbiz-skeptical junior high kid with slumped shoulders she first dropped off years ago was now an ambitious, focused, beloved theater-camp alumnus awash in adulation from teenagers.