by Jon Cryer
Now, up to this point, the one that haunted me specifically was sort of a combination of the “different play” and the “naked” situation. I’d dream I was playing Eugene in Brighton Beach Memoirs and everyone else was doing Sweeney Todd. Plus, I was also nude and holding some sort of cricket bat. And Orville Redenbacher was playing Mrs. Lovett. But as terrifying as this was, it was also perversely comforting, because I was pretty sure that particular scenario was very unlikely to play out in real life. Not the different-play part, or even the naked part, pretty much just the Redenbacher portion, ’cause he’s totally dead.
Well, I’d like you to know that now I’ve got a new nightmare, one that I actually got the chance to live through.
But first, I got to live something of an actor’s dream scenario. Allow me to explain. To my surprise, the ream of paper that David Beaird handed me was no boring exercise in artistic indulgence but rather a full-throttle, holy-shit, grab-you-by-the-throat, magnificent piece of writing (although, yes, a little long). I finished it in one sitting and immediately let David know I wanted to do it.
And thus began a several-year process of workshopping it, submitting it to theaters, and begging producers to mount a production. Turns out, nobody in their right mind—in the United States, at least—wanted to touch it with a ten-foot pole. But in 1993, an enterprising young British producer named Kate Danielson finally saw its potential and got the Lyric Hammersmith Theatre in London to take a shot. What’s more, British Equity was willing to allow two American actors to be in the production. I was both gob-smacked and chuffed (which are Britishisms for “speechless” and “thrilled”). This would be my British theatrical debut, with a great part, in a play that I loved, at the legendary Lyric Hammersmith Theatre. That’s right, theatre with an “re”! This was no small potatoes. The Lyric had a terrific reputation for groundbreaking plays and musicals, and the theater itself had survived two world wars and was known far and wide for its beautiful performance space. Designed and built in 1895 by legendary theatrical architect Frank Matcham, it had been lovingly restored piece by piece in 1966. We could not ask for a more perfect environment for our production.
As David and I packed our bags and jetted off, we were joined by Leland Crooke, an actor of such enormous and remarkable skill that he’s the living embodiment of the injustice of fame in the entertainment industry. If the business were fair at all he’d be as well-known as Daniel Day Lewis. He’s that good.
We arrived in London exhausted but elated and made a beeline for the home of our play. When Kate greeted us at the door and led us into the lobby of the theater, I took the opportunity to sneak a peek at the stately performance space. Kate noticed my prying and said, “Beautiful, isn’t it?” then added, “That’s where they put on their marquee productions. We’ll actually be doing our play in the studio.”
Wait. What?! We were not going to be thrilling audiences on the Lyric Hammersmith’s main stage? The one designed in 1895 by legendary theatrical architect Frank Matcham? That survived two world wars? And had been lovingly restored piece by piece in 1966?
As I managed to blurt out a bewildered, “Oh,” she gestured toward the stairs, and as we descended she continued. “The studio is where they put on their edgier productions; it’s really a better place for our play.” And with that she flung open a dilapidated set of double doors to reveal the “studio,” so-called because it’s much more inviting to tell performers they will be playing in the Lyric Hammersmith studio than the Lyric Hammersmith basement. It was what they call a “black box” theater, basically a room painted black, crammed with seats, above which lights are hung from rafters. I was disheartened but not discouraged. This would just have to do.
The first week of performances made it clear to me how difficult it is to launch a new play by a foreign playwright whom nobody has ever heard of. We played to tiny audiences, their tininess only enhanced by the fact that the theater itself was tiny to begin with. But people seemed to enjoy it. I worried about what critics would think, given that they’d be attending the show along with only about a half dozen other patrons. “I don’t give a shit about the critics,” David would bluster, then add with a grimace, “I mean, have you ever actually met those people?”
Now, because we weren’t on the main stage at the Lyric, we were officially considered a “fringe” production. Fringe productions don’t get the same treatment that the big-budget West End shows get. Even if critics had attended the first week, their reviews wouldn’t actually hit the papers until their respective editors felt that there was enough room to print them. So for the first three weeks of our four-week run, not one single paper ran a review.
Consequently our audiences remained minuscule. We soldiered on bravely. Performing for British theatergoers is still a thrill, even if you can count them on one hand. The British actors who’d gamely come on board had turned out to be a notable group of thespians in that to a person, they were dedicated, good-natured, inspired, and professional. Not a nut job or asshole among them! And while our UK colleagues enjoyed themselves immensely, they were baffled as to why a play that they been so excited about hadn’t gotten a press reaction.
But when the deluge came it was sudden and monstrous. We got word one night that a few papers would run notices the next morning, so we stayed out extra late drinking that night in order to grab the editions as they first hit the newsstands in the wee hours of the morning. When they arrived, David, his girlfriend/assistant, Shevonne, and I each grabbed whichever issue was closest. Drunkenly pulling issues of the Daily Mail, the Evening Standard, the Daily Telegraph and The Times off the stands while simultaneously trying to appear as though you really couldn’t care less about what the reviews say is harder than you think. We frantically spread them out on the ground and scoured them for any sign of a reference to our play.
Now, when one happens upon a review of someone’s work in a publication and one is in the presence of that particular someone, one’s first impulse is to read the review aloud, to include everyone in the exposition. However, if you’ve gone through the excruciating experience of a read-out-loud review that veers into highly insulting territory, you’ll understand when I say that virtually every actor I know squelches that impulse and reads reviews silently.
That is, until you come across a line like the one I read in the Telegraph:
“The play is a glorious and sometimes disgracefully enjoyable triumph!”
When you hit a line like that, you shout it to the rooftops.
I stammered, “Hey, guys . . . this one says, ‘The play is a glorious—’”
“‘Nails you breathless to your seat!’” screamed Shevonne from behind her open Evening Standard. “‘A spectacular feat!’”
Just then I spied the headline of the Daily Mail review in gigantic letters: “A Triumph of Genius and Faith!”
“Holy crap!” I shouted as Shevonne held up a copy of What’s On, shouting, “‘One hell of an evening out!’” Now we both screamed. And just as shit was getting crazy, I noticed that David was, once again, suddenly, eerily calm.
But this moment was different. This was the moment that I got to watch as my friend David read The Times review that opined that his play was “as if Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and an American Joe Orton had collaborated on a play.” That’s right: One of the most influential papers in London had just compared him to, arguably, the three greatest English-language playwrights of the twentieth century. Too bad he didn’t give a shit about critics.
The lines around the block started the next morning. With only a week left in the run, seats were at a premium. We were excitedly informed that fistfights had broken out. This was probably not true, but we actors are easily duped when people tell us that audiences simply must see our work, lest they resort to physical assault. The Lyric extended the run for a couple of weeks but then ran up against visa limits on the American actors. So we played our last wee
ks to packed houses, hoping there might be some other life for the play.
A month later, after Leland and I had come back to the States, the word came. We were asked to move the production to the Old Vic Theatre (again, with the “re”!), the esteemed playhouse where Lord Laurence Olivier had founded the National Theatre. The illustriousness of our new location was mind-blowing enough, but what really pleased us was that we were finally going to be able to stage 900 Oneonta in a space big enough to capture the grandness of our production.
The play itself is a rip-roaring piece of Southern Gothic. I used to refer to it as the play Tennessee Williams would have written if he ever tried crack. But then I found out that it was completely possible that Williams had, in fact, tried crack, and the result was not this play. That being said, 900 Oneonta follows Dandy (played by Leland Crooke), the ancient, dying patriarch of a wealthy, rotten-to-the-core Louisiana family, and his efforts to find a suitable heir to his vast fortune. The only trouble is, his heirs are fuckups and he’s in the midst of a massive coronary, which, as you would imagine, imparts a certain urgency to the proceedings.
Dandy spends the first act making out his will while confronting his brood with every awful unspoken truth he’s kept hidden over the years, cackling with glee as they scramble to get a piece of his legacy. I played Gitlo, the spineless, craven, frenetic grandson whose attempts are particularly desperate. Complicating Gitlo’s efforts is the fact that the only one in the family Dandy has any actual affection for is my character’s wild-eyed, redneck, heroin-addicted brother, Tiger (you can get away with these kinds of names in a play that takes place in the American South, but place it pretty much anywhere else and people will just laugh you out of the theater). Our alcoholic, incestuous, bipolar mother, Persia (see?), and broken, nymphomaniac sister, Burning Jewel (oh, for Pete’s sake), round out the squabblers, with the dad, a maid, a priest, and a lawyer on hand to witness whichever way this fiasco turns out.
The play rockets along manically, but then, the first jolt: At the end of the first act the main character, Dandy, the motor for all this action, dies. The guy the whole play is about is gone. Where the hell do you go from there? Well, the second act starts with the disclosure that due to a curious proviso in Dandy’s will, Gitlo’s brother, Tiger, inherits the entire fortune if he merely signs on the dotted line. If he fails to do so within an hour, though, the estate will be donated to the local church. Tiger is also demented enough to throw it all away just to spite the rest of his kin. Without any break in avarice, the second act explodes into an even more frenzied struggle, this time to convince Tiger to keep the money and “save” the family.
Just when all looks lost, into the middle of all this bursts Tiger’s half-caste prostitute girlfriend, Palace (sure, why not), a character we’ve heard about through the entire play, but not seen until now. Palace rips through the family with the purity and power of a tornado, blasting their hypocrisy and greed and setting Tiger straight. Her character knocks the play on its ear and catapults the action to its shocking conclusion.
Palace was an electrifying, star-making role, and when the production moved to the Old Vic, Sophie Okonedo joined the cast to play her. Sophie would go on to be nominated for an Oscar for Hotel Rwanda and win a Tony for A Raisin in the Sun, but at this point she was still an unknown—albeit a gorgeous, shatteringly talented one. Her friend Ben Daniels also joined the cast to play Tiger, which was ironic in that while he was playing the doomed, surly, lunatic junkie, he was actually a very sweet, jovial man.
During rehearsals, I’ll admit that at first I wondered if this soft-spoken, apprehensive, British Nigerian Jewish girl and this lovely gay guy could pull off these hot-blooded, fucked-up, backwoods, hooker-and-dopehead Louisiana lovers. But my concerns could not have been more misplaced. Once performances began, I used to look forward to Sophie’s big entrance in the second act every night. I had the honor of her cue line. After a marathon of high-decibel infighting, Tiger has just given away all the family’s money to the church. Everyone’s devastated. Burning Jewel is weeping, Persia is passed out on the couch, and Gitlo (me) turns on Tiger furiously, spitting (in my Southern accent), “You didn’t have to do that! You didn’t have to ruin all our lives!” (I pronounced it “lahvs,” because, you see, I am a master of dialects.) There’d be a dramatic pause; then Sophie would charge on from stage left, bellowing, “Tiger! Did you took that money or not!” and proceed to wipe up the stage with all of us. It was fun to be there for Sophie’s instant command of the stage, and exhilarating to watch her stun the audience before steering the play to its end.
In retrospect, I suppose I should have seen it coming. The show had been running for a couple of months to enraptured crowds, the theater was a joy to play in, the new set was spectacular and haunting, and I was performing in a critically adored, honest-to-God West End hit. Something had to go wrong.
Sophie’s main mode of transport around London was her bicycle, but one day she’d had an accident. We suspected it was a bit more serious than she let on, but she was nothing if not a trooper. She showed up to work, took a couple of painkillers, and vowed to carry on despite her injury that day. The show must go on! We cherished her dedication.
As performances go, that night’s was turning out to be a fairly unremarkable one. The audience was a little less responsive than usual, but that was it. We still had time to bring it around. The second act proceeded in a very businesslike manner, but I hoped for a little spark to ignite our rapport with them. An actor never knows what will suddenly engage a crowd in a new and special way. It could be a tiny moment of intimacy, slightly different timing on a joke, an instance of true spontaneity, or (ominous chord) something else entirely.
The descendants fought as they did every performance. Tiger, as he did every night, gave away the money. The family lay scattered about the stage in shell-shocked dismay. Burning Jewel was crying, Mom was passed out, I turned to Tiger, as always, and howled in rage, “You didn’t have to do that!” And then I added a hint of self-pity to my reading of the last bit: “You didn’t have to ruin all our lah-ves!”
And then there is that dramatic pause.
That very long dramatic pause.
That dramatic pause that is now milking the moment a little bit too much.
That dramatic pause that is now a big, long, unnerving, and gaping dramatic silence as all of us on the stage realize:
There’s no Sophie.
Eyes grow wide. Panicked glances dart among the cast. Tiger is dumbstruck. Burning Jewel has stopped all pretense of sobbing, and our mom, supposedly in a stupor, has secretly opened the peeper facing upstage to surmise what the hell is going on.
In an only somewhat pathetic attempt to deny the obvious, I trot out probably the oldest tactic in the actor-trying-to-hold-the-show-together arsenal: the repeat-the-line-again-and-hope-the-right-thing-happens-this-time gambit.
I work myself into an indignant growl: “You didn’t have to do that.” I add a “No!” for good measure and then yelp with increased volume, “You didn’t have to ruin all our l-a-a-a-a-ahves!”
More silence.
I strive mightily to resist the urge to turn around and look stage left to see if maybe, just maybe, she’s just hanging around there, waiting to come onstage. I hammer my gaze at Tiger. However, he no longer seems like Tiger. He seems a lot more like Ben Daniels, a nice, concerned guy whose eyes plead with me to figure out what to do next. That’s it; I can resist no longer. I turn stage left, only to realize to my horror that my character has no reason to look that way, unless he is, say, expecting a character we’ve never seen before to burst onstage and bring the play to its conclusion. I whip back around and lamely continue my angry tirade with the only epithet that comes to my mind at that moment: “You . . . jerk!”
Ben can’t seem to muster a reply. More agonizing silence.
My mind races. Shit! If Sophie doesn’t come on, there is n
o way to end this fucking show! We’re screwed! Is there anything I can say here? Jesus Christ, anything?! Fuck! There has to be someth . . .
Just then I remember a monologue that my character used to have at this point in the play but that had been cut for time. Amazingly, it jumps to mind. Maybe if I vamp long enough she’ll show! I launch in: “Y’own fuckin’ lah-f so shot to hell, no ’mount of good fortune fallin’ on ya like this here today . . . fell right on yo’ head!”
Ben’s eyes, already saucers, distend further.
I continue. “No. You had to pull everybody else down.” It occurs to me that Ben has never heard this monologue before, because it was cut in previews of the first production, when someone else played Tiger. He thinks I’m just making this shit up off the top of my head. I blunder on. “You ain’t gonna live long, brother. I can see into the future here, all a sudden, an’ I see you dead.” Ben looks more and more alarmed with every word. “Real fuckin’ cold.” He must be thinking, Jon has lost his bloody mind.
It’s now when I take another gigantic pause in the hope that somehow, some way, Sophie has gotten to stage left and has just been waiting for a gigantic pause (such as this one) to shoot into the action.
Nope.
I take a deep breath and menacingly finish off the monologue: “Ain’t a threat; it’s a promise. You’re dead, Tiger. So live fast. You a walkin’ ghost.”
