by Jon Cryer
Relief pitcher is an apt metaphor, really, since Brighton Beach Memoirs opens with Eugene Jerome, teenage dreamer and fanatic for America’s pastime, throwing a baseball and delivering a long monologue about the sport. The scene required me to throw the baseball twenty-five feet or so, and the way the production had it set up, it’d hit a corrugated-metal sheet and angle offstage into the wings. Well, I practiced that throw religiously up in the chorus dressing room. That long space, filled with mirrored tables and cots for sacking out, was where I used to warm up during my brief time as an understudy. During that period, though, I was always in street clothes, because Matthew Broderick was never a no-show.
But now I was warming up dressed for the part, thinking, This is it; you did it; you’re here. And being infinitely reminded of such because all those mirrors were reflecting back at me a made-up, outfitted Eugene Jerome, and it wasn’t Matthew Broderick. (I’ve never looked in a mirror, incidentally, and gotten confused—just so we’re clear on that.)
That first show I was so in my head and on autopilot—spitting out the words, terrified about missing a single one—that I couldn’t enjoy any of it. The goal simply was, Get through it alive. If I say all the words correctly, audibly, and in the right order, to the right people, and at the appointed time, then it will be over. Over for that night’s show, that is. Then there was the next night. Shooting a movie is the province of “only once.” That’s all you need; then you move on to a new scene. Theater is eight times a week.
The late Meshach Taylor told a story about playing Lumière in Beauty and the Beast on Broadway after the show Designing Women ended. In the wake of the cushy, a-few-lines-a-week sitcom job, performing night after night as a singing candelabra was a workload shocker. One night, he sneaked a break to get a much-needed breather in the alley, only to discover the actress playing Wardrobe, still dressed as an armoire, taking a moment for a smoke. “Man, this eight-shows-a-week gig is kicking my ass,” he said. His cabinet-clad colleague took a puff and snorted derisively.
“Broadway ain’t for pussies.”
It isn’t, I learned. And I’ve never even had to dress like a piece of furniture. As you keep doing it, however, your attitude about it shifts, priorities become apparent, and a certain ingrained efficiency takes over. This was a bona fide Broadway hit I was in, but unlike Torch Song Trilogy, in which fifteen-year-old David is a third-act character accent bouncing off whoever plays the lead, Eugene drives Brighton Beach from beginning to end. He’s the engine, the person playing him needs to be a star, and if I ever needed a reminder of that, the guy who originated it won a Tony Award for Best Actor. Good luck, kid! Getting my sea legs those first weeks was the first time I felt like a professional in show business.
But that fucking baseball throw, for Christ’s sake. I’ve mentioned that I’m not athletic, so naturally the first thing I have to do in my debut as a Broadway lead is get a ball from my hand to a designated area—not even a spot, an area—just offstage. This proved problematic on a regular basis. I managed to miss that target in every possible way, until once the baseball shot back out across the stage and into the audience, where a guy in the front row ducked and let it hit his female companion full in the face. Much more shocking than the fact that I’d thrown another errant pitch was the fact that chivalry was apparently now dead. I had to ask the poor woman for it back, but fortunately—perhaps with visions of further airborne dangers in her mind—she handed it over instead of throwing it.
Other pitfalls arose out of becoming comfortable with the show. Speakers backstage allow everyone—wherever you are—to hear the show, so you can know when to get ready. I got a little too cozy once during some downtime, and when I heard the speaker go silent, I thought, You know, that’s not a dead speaker. That’s the sound of nobody delivering my lines onstage. There’s nothing like missing an entrance that sends adrenaline through you so fast and hard you fear it’ll seep out of your eyeballs.
“Going up on your lines” is the term for forgetting them, and those are the moments when you find out just how awesome your fellow actors are. Joe Breen (who went by Patrick) played Eugene’s older brother, Stanley, when I was in the show, and he saved my ass at least three times when I (figuratively) dropped the ball onstage. One particularly memorable instance happened during a scene that required me to lie down on a comfy twin bed and feign sleep, until the moment I had to get back up. I lay down—and promptly fell asleep. Joe was the one who woke me up, because he was supposed to be asleep in the next bed.
Suddenly I hear this hushed, “Jon? Jon!”
“Hmmm, yeah?” [Slight yawn.] “What’s up?” [Dawning realization.] “Shit.”
Believe me, the one time I got to help Joe out when he went up on his lines, I was grateful to be able to return the favor.
When Stanley Tucci—who’d been understudying Joe—eventually replaced him, Stanley’s performance was a learning experience for me, because he was completely different from Joe, but no less powerful. With my role, I was essentially doing a Matthew Broderick performance, with changes here and there, because Matthew’s had been such a master class that I didn’t want to throw it off too much. I wanted to crescendo in the same places, stress some of the same points. But Stanley showed me how valuable committing to a completely different approach and making that work was. It certainly helped keep the show fresh for me each night.
The other fond memory of Brighton Beach Memoirs was my dressing roommate, Anita Gillette, who played my aunt. I was starstruck because not only had I seen her on Broadway a handful of times, but she had played Jack Klugman’s wife on Quincy. So I was beside myself. But two things helped bring that down to earth: how completely encouraging and nice she was, telling me great stories about how long she’d been in the trenches, and the fact that this beautiful woman would change right in front of me. My keyhole days with Shelly were definitely behind me. At any rate, Anita’s friendship meant a great deal to a nervous, eager lad such as myself.
By the time my run in Brighton Beach Memoirs was over half a year later, it was long enough to feel like a genuinely maturing experience. It also felt as if it was ending too soon. It was a highly rewarding show to be part of. Neil Simon’s play was just the kind of crowd-pleasing hit that makes any hardworking stage actor feel great by the end, because the audience rapport with that show is phenomenal. They’re with you all the way through, and it’s an energy that’s a pleasure to feed off of.
I’d also successfully erased the bad memory of getting fired by shepherding the role of Eugene in this beloved show through another stretch of performances, and handing it off to someone else. (Nobody wants to be the actor who’s there when the show closes.) The clincher, though, to my satisfaction, was that I got asked to pitch in on Simon’s follow-up, Biloxi Blues, which had opened during my tenure in Brighton Beach.
In a scenario I was eerily familiar with, Biloxi was having troubles with their Matthew Broderick understudy. They wanted me to be Matthew’s fill-in, but still perform in Brighton Beach, so that meant if Matthew couldn’t go on uptown, I’d literally have to take off my knee pants at the 46th Street Theatre, run up Eighth Avenue, and put on army fatigues at the Neil Simon Theatre on Fifty-second Street to do Biloxi. And my understudy would go on that night in Brighton. If that isn’t a vote of confidence, I don’t know what is.
I said no. It was looking like it was time to move on from playing Eugene Jerome, and something else had come along that proved too impossibly good to pass up.
Chapter 8
This Is Just How We Are!
It’s fitting that awkwardness has been a keystone to a lot of the comedic roles I’ve played over the years. I am, to put it mildly, not inherently comfortable with my body, especially regarding its many signals and uses in social interactions.
For instance, I’m genuinely flummoxed by the high five. If someone in my vicinity extends a palm up, out, and above the head in anticipati
on of a celebratory slap, they might as well have handed me a bow and arrow and told me to pierce the apple on top of a boy’s head. I can’t high-five. Where gregarious, friendly types see an extension of natural camaraderie with that gesture, I see a test of coordination and accuracy. I wasn’t good at sports in school! Why do I have to let everyone know that when my fumbled fling of the arm produces not a confident thwack but a noiseless graze of the outer fingers? Call it a high two-to-five and I can maybe perform.
There are those with innate facility for these types of things. I require advanced planning. I didn’t just make up that “Try a Little Tenderness” dance in Pretty in Pink when the cameras rolled. That was hard, choreographed, practiced work. Same with high fives. I now know that the trick to a good high five is to look at the other person’s elbow. Line up the elbows, and you will hit the hand. And yet, I am so much more grateful for the friends with whom our greetings are established, well-practiced forms of contact with wide margins for accuracy. Hugs, for instance. I’m good with hugs.
My discomfort with my body stems mostly from a sense growing up that I wasn’t manly enough. I equated strength with masculinity as a kid, and while I wasn’t really that aware of gay culture in my preteen years, junior high is when certain ugly epithets bubble up like noxious gases and create a standard-bearer for your sense of self-worth. I wasn’t worried I was gay—I knew I liked girls—but I certainly became concerned with the message I was sending out in mixed company.
How I sat, for example. In junior high, I got this creeping sense that the way I parked myself in a chair was not testosterone-appropriate. Unguarded, without thinking, I sit with my legs crossed at the knee, arms crossed and resting on top, and both wrists in full limp.
And when I do this, I look very relaxed. For a nineteenth-century English fop. Or a PBS talk-show host. Or, if you’re a heathen bully, a girl. So whenever I was among my peers—girls who invariably sat the same way, and boys unafraid to splay themselves across any piece of furniture with their crotch as a focal point—I began to worry that my default sit might be a serious impediment to how I was perceived. It triggered a hyperawareness in social situations: I would sit my usual way, stop cold, then quickly untangle my limbs and try to look, for lack of a better word, butchier. What I must have looked like, however, is an incredibly antsy person.
Then one day my mother unearthed a picture of my dad and showed it to me. It was taken at a rehearsal for some play, and the frame was filled with theater folk, some midpose, others at rest, males, females, all sexualities and stripes probably. But there in the corner is my father, sitting with his legs and arms and draped hands crossed in exactly the same way, and damned if he wasn’t the coolest motherfucker in the room.
It was an epiphany. “This is just how we are!” I thought. I got it from my dad, and if he could make not caring about it into an expression of confidence, there was hope. Ever since, I’ve owned my admittedly effeminate-looking mode of sitting.
Years later, I was at my son’s school basketball game when I noticed something significant. He was sitting on the bench—because that’s where us Cryers live at the basketball game—and it was in the familiar way I had fully come to expect from the males in our family. But then he suddenly snapped out of it and affected a more macho, athletic posture, more the way his teammates were sitting. I recognized that self-consciousness, and I flagged that moment in my brain.
A few days later, he saw me sitting the way I do, and he made fun of it.
“You know,” I told him, “I always used to think I shouldn’t sit like this. But then I realized, You know what? This is what it looks like. It’s what makes me feel comfortable. Now I own it.”
I could see a glimmer of recognition in his eyes. “Yeah!” he said. “That’s how I sit, too!”
And with that, we had a genuinely nice bonding moment over our initial shame about how we sit, and how pointless it was to feel that way. Genetics aren’t always something we have to fight. In fact, had my mother handed me off at birth to be raised in the wild by a band of gorillas, then discovered by naturists and painstakingly reintroduced into polite society, I would still sit like this. And if you said anything negative about it, I would snarl and try to rip your face off, because I’m a gorilla in this scenario, remember.
Chapter 9
And Another. And Another.
Like many movie-mad youngsters in 1984, I saw Sixteen Candles and found it really funny and perceptive about teenagers like myself. On one level it was no surprise to me, though, because its writer/director, John Hughes, was someone whose work I’d admired for years in National Lampoon, the magazine that also originated the “O.C. and Stiggs” stories.
The Lampoon was a truly special monthly journal for a horny teenage boy who liked to laugh at naughtiness—the pieces were irreverently funny, and occasionally a page was augmented by photographs of women with exposed breasts. This made-for-adults publication talked of sexual practices I couldn’t begin to comprehend, and bodily fluids with which I had maybe only nominal knowledge. There was a big decision to make when I held a National Lampoon in my grubby teenage hands with my filthy teenage mind—Am I in the mood to laugh? Or jerk off?
“Why can’t it be both?” I proudly declared.
John Hughes’s stories were more of the laughworthy kind, but one in particular was an adolescent boy’s fantasy come true: a hilarious, darkly comic yarn called “The Spy Who Wore Nothing,” about a kid who wakes up in the middle of the night when a gorgeous woman climbs through his window. She informs him he’s actually a deep-cover secret agent, and they have a wacky adventure during which she’s naked. Let me clarify: It was this adolescent boy’s fantasy come true. I can’t speak for the rest of them.
Anyway, when the script for Pretty in Pink came my way, with Hughes on the ascendancy as a filmmaker to watch—he’d also written the movie National Lampoon’s Vacation—I was thrilled. Here was a guy who’d just hit one out of the park with Sixteen Candles and had an eagerly anticipated movie ready to come out (The Breakfast Club), and I had a shot at the next one in the pipeline. That’s an exciting feeling for an up-and-coming actor, the sense that you’re now in the mix when it comes to what’s new and hot.
Expecting something broadly comic like Sixteen Candles, I was surprised to discover that Pretty in Pink was closer to a tightly focused, small-scale drama with moments of humor. Hughes’s teenage muse and new “it” girl, Molly Ringwald, was set to play Andie, a working-class high schooler who has an emotionally fraught crush on sensitive rich kid Blane, and a loyal friend and torchbearer in one Philip “Duckie” Dale.
I read the script and immediately loved Duckie, who countered his more pathetic turns of personality with a supreme swagger and biting wit. Basically, he was the guy I wanted to be in high school. Even in a school full of nerds, I was the outsider nerd—a lonely theater geek in a den of science geeks. Likewise, Duckie finds himself on the perimeter of his own group of friends when his unrequited love for Andie is threatened by her attempt at upwardly mobile romance.
This was somebody I could live inside. This part was mine.
I prepared like crazy for the audition: working the lines, working the lines, working the lines. I had two scenes ready to go. I headed over to the Gulf & Western Building and met director Howard Deutch, and was quickly reminded that he had a passing acquaintance with my family. He used to vacation on Fire Island, where my mom would rent a house every summer. That was a miserable stretch for a pudgy, nonathletic kid who’d rather spend time in movie theaters than sit on a beach and stare at the Atlantic. I didn’t love being in the ocean—it’s salty and wet. And sand—ugh, it’s so . . . sandy. But lo these many years later it was nice to feel an instant rapport with a movie director over shared memories. Besides, Howie is an amiable, friendly guy anyway, and I would have felt comfortable in that audition had we not had anything in common.
As for what I wore, I opted
not to dress the way I thought Duckie would look. Audition wardrobe is a tricky proposition. It’s one thing if you’re reading for the part of a lawyer—then it’s usually a good idea to wear a suit, because it does grant you some authority. But for this I went in my standard audition wear: button-down shirt and jeans. Choosing a costume before the filmmakers even know what they want is a risk. Let them be inspired to imagine a costume on you based on the thrill of your performance, I say.
I read the first Duckie scene for him, and Howie really liked it. Then he asked me to read the second scene. Always a good sign when you get to read a second scene instead of getting a “Thank you!” or “Do you need us to validate your parking?”
Then he asked for another scene.
And another.
And another.
Each time, he’d say, “Can you read this next one?” And I’d answer, “Sure!” (What am I going to say? “Sorry, no. I have a crossword puzzle I need to finish”?) Then I’d go out into the hallway with the other actors—none of whom I recognized—and learn the next scene, while the others would go in one by one the first time. Usually, returning to the waiting area with all the eager aspirants is a vaguely dispiriting experience, even if you’ve had a good audition. It’s like a cold reminder of the odds. But I was going out, going in, going out, going in, and that gave me this surging confidence that I had a really good hand in this particular round. As an actor, this kind of experience has been known to mentally transform the other hopefuls in the hallway from plucky equals into a class of performer beneath you. This is a supremely uncharitable attitude, and it feels great.
By the end of my hour or so there—a long time for an audition—I had read practically every Duckie scene in the movie. Would we now move on to Andie’s lines? Blane’s dialogue? Could they be thinking of making Pretty in Pink a one-man show? Of course not, but when you’re this high you let yourself think silly shit. At any rate, I left the building filled with the vaulting hubris of someone who believes they’ve utterly, truly nailed it. It was a belief reinforced by hearing that I was being called back, this time to read with Molly Ringwald, and for John Hughes. Howie also talked to me about Duckie’s big lip-sync number in the record store where Andie and her friend Iona work, and did I have any ideas?
