by Berger, Glen
Julie had been out of New York five days. I was being a total sneak. But I got over it. I had discovered a theatreful of anxious coworkers. Actors stopped me as I headed out of rehearsal rooms, designers stopped me in the lobby, stage managers stopped me backstage. And I had more than one conversation at the urinals. All of them wanted to respectfully offer me their perspective on the show, their casualness barely hiding a desperate hope that the creative team was cooking up something that would keep the show running, because they believed in the show and, more to the point, their jobs were on the line. Julie and Michael Cohl (who was decompressing down in Florida) were returning to the theatre January 3, along with Bono and Edge. The expectation from seemingly everyone in the Foxwoods was that substantial revisions would be announced then. I told them nothing. I didn’t want to start any rumors. I really didn’t want to cause trouble. Lord knows I didn’t want to undermine Julie’s authority.
“I know in my bones you can do this,” Bono wrote from Ireland. “If you can sell [Edge and me] on a way forward that we three can sell Julie . . . [we] will defend your instincts. We understand your ass is on the line here as much, or more than ours.”
My ass was grateful for the recognition.
“We all adore Julie—the whole creative team,” I wrote back. “So surely there’s a way for accord to come.”
Julie, meanwhile, was trying and failing to find a respite from the show. From Mexico, she sent me an e-mail late one night as if she were the Green Goblin—the Goblin’s disdain for the hoi polloi making him a useful persona for venting frustrations.
Don’t you get it Boy!? The audience just wants high-flying stunts and fun! Forget the story we want to tell. They ain’t interested. SO if just makin it shorter is your way of solving the problem maybe you right . . . Who are we foolin with SPIRITUALITY, MERCY, COMPASSION, TRANSFORMATION, RESURRECTION, ILLUMINATION AND SHIT?
Tongue-in-cheek, of course. She signed it, “Love J.” And you could hear it all in the phone call still later that night: the frustration with “commercial” expectations; the struggle to get her head around various dramaturgical proposals; and also the love. You could hear that too. We’ll be fine. Come January 4, the whole creative team would meet. We’d find consensus, and we’d be just fine.
• • •
Thirty-eight years before the first preview of Turn Off the Dark—thirty-eight years to the day—a Broadway show opened at the newly built Uris Theatre. The 1972 show was Via Galactica, starring Raul Julia, and I had never heard of it, but in the January 1, 2011, edition of the New York Times there was a remarkable editorial written by the daughter of two of Via Galactica’s creators. I was home for twenty-four hours to celebrate New Year’s Eve with the family, and I sat in bed that next morning experiencing the curious sensation of reading a New York Times editorial addressed exclusively to me.
Investors in the production knew Via Galactica was going to be the most expensive musical ever staged. . . . But in my house, growing up, it meant many other things: Regret. Heartache. Disappointment. Failure. . . . I was 12 when my parents’ musical opened and closed. After a decade in the works, it lasted a fleeting seven performances.
I glanced at my children jumping on my bed. They were thrilled daddy was home from Turn Off the Dark, if just for a day. “As early as I can remember,” continued Jennifer George’s melancholy editorial, “Via Galactica was in the air.” Queasy, riveted, I read on. I read how actors were flown in the air, except for all the times that the rigging failed. How “Raul once got stuck in the spaceship and hung helplessly over the orchestra for 20 minutes until stagehands extricated him.” How “a production that had seemed like a sure thing . . . went over budget.” How “there were delays, . . . injuries.” How, at the climax of the show, the protagonist “had to choose: stay in the place he knows . . . or go with [an alien woman] to the stars,” which was, in essence, the second act climax of Turn Off the Dark.
Is there really nothing new under the sun?!
If the article had run on nearly any other day, my young ones wouldn’t have been nestled next to me as I read how, years after the play closed, Ms. George’s father “would still talk about things he would have done differently. Via, as he called it, would send him walking to the refrigerator late at night, reliving it in his mind.” The family was never the same after the show closed.
It was as if I were getting a personal visit from the Ghost of Christmas Future. Picturing myself sighing in front of an open refrigerator in a tatty bathrobe—that was far too easy to imagine. I already had the bathrobe and the refrigerator—all I needed was the Broadway flop. Christ in heaven, that wasn’t the future I wanted for myself or for my children.
“May everyone connected with [the show] have an old age with no regrets.”
In Ms. George’s blessing, she had laid out the stakes for me, and they were stark. Any hope for any future serenity rested on what happened in the next two weeks. Furlough over, I caught the bus back to Manhattan.
• • •
The evening of January 3, Edge and Bono gave me a ring. Could I meet at Edge’s downtown apartment for a chat? Julie didn’t arrive in New York until later that night, so it was just the three of us. It was the first time I had been in a room with Bono and Edge without Julie. It felt wrong. But after five years of collaboration, surely the cowriter of a show could be in a room with the composers without a chaperone. And it was just a little chat about the state of the script. Nothing was said that hadn’t already been said to Julie. Nevertheless, were we going to tell Julie about this meeting? No. Because, unreasonably or not, Julie wouldn’t like the fact of it. And the last thing we wanted to do at this sensitive juncture was breed distrust. Of course, if she ever found out that we’d met, it would breed even more distrust. So in the name of trust, we were surreptitious. And dysfunction was born.
• • •
Julie, Michael Cohl, and I were in the VIP room the next afternoon. Michael arranged for this casual meeting—just the three of us—so he could hear the latest plans from his cowriters. He was hoping somewhere in these minutes we could have a civilized airing of Plan A. Talk first, however, was of Chris Tierney, who was in the Good Morning America studio that morning with some of his colleagues taking questions from George Stephanopoulos. Chris looked implausibly good—chiseled, relaxed, and still free of animus. Under his clothes he was wearing a torso brace covered with stenciled images (of Spider-Man, of course), but on camera there was nothing suggesting that his life-threatening fall was only two weeks ago. If the show was running in May, Chris would be swinging all over the theatre again.
Which brought us to the nub of the meeting: if. We had twenty million in advance ticket sales through April. Not bad at all. But did those sales reflect how our actual show was being received? No. Most of those sales were generated before word of mouth—good or bad—could make an impact. There was also a certain percentage of ticket buyers who wanted to see the show for the same reason some people watch NASCAR. Riedel quoted one audience member as saying, “You want everyone to be safe—but it would have been awesome to watch if something had happened.” We were not going to be generating any more accidents. I mean—geez—we better not. In short, Turn Off the Dark was floating on top of a publicity bubble at that moment, but it was a bubble, and bubbles pop.
“Sorry, but speculating on ticket sales,” Julie counseled me, “isn’t your bailiwick.” She was right. And she used the word “bailiwick,” bless her. So I switched gears and, with some gentle prodding from Michael, described again—with my inevitable stuttering and downcast eyes—Plan A and the rationale behind it. Julie said she really didn’t want to hear the idea ever again. I was prepared for that. I had a Plan C up my sleeve—a compromise between A and B that kept “Deeply Furious,” but made some smaller cuts and adjustments that combed out a lot of the matted dog hair in the second act. Julie had valued colleagues not involved in Turn Off the Dark who were tentative about delivering unvarnished opinions direct
ly to her. Based on the notes that had trickled back to me, they would approve of Plan C, so I dove into an outline of the—
“Glen, you’re not making any sense.”
“Oh. Okay, I’ll start again—because I think that the—”
“Stop. Just stop.”
Fuck. I tripped the wire. Now words were blasting back at me with the heat of a furnace. She said if I kept introducing new ideas, she wouldn’t be able to keep working with me. She said I didn’t know what I was talking about.
“You don’t trust me as a writer?”
“Not right now I don’t,” she said shaking her head. “Not right now.”
She shrugged with a rueful smile to let that sink in. The subtext was “You were always meant to be ‘the words guy.’ Leave the story to me.” And when I opened my mouth to push back—(could this really be the first time I had ever pushed back?)—I was met with the fury of a hurricane making landfall. It was finally me—after over five years of watching from a safe distance as her weather systems turned folks into debris—it was my turn. I looked at her face. There was no sign that we were chums. No sign that she even recognized me. And I didn’t see the woman I knew either, as I peered through the bolts of crackling flame coming straight at me; as I dodged her black cloud of sharp-taloned crows, her fang-bearing hounds made of hellfire, her . . .
In the original schedule David Garfinkle drew up in 2006, we were going to have seventy-two preview performances of Turn Off the Dark in Chicago, and then we were going to have several weeks to make changes before moving to New York to deliver another thirty-five preview performances. So what would be happening at this moment if we hadn’t performed these last thirty previews under the klieg lights of New York City? If we didn’t have an opening night bearing down on us? If, instead, we were less than halfway through a run of out-of-town previews? Would this meeting (which would turn out to not be a meeting so much as a wrecking ball to a friendship), have ever happened? Would the confabs at this juncture have been focused and fruitful, because we wouldn’t be inside a pressure cooker that was boiling away our faith in each other?
All I know is I hate getting yelled at. Hate it. Always have. Especially when my intentions are pure; when I mean no harm. For God’s sake, we were talking about plot points. In fact, I don’t just hate getting yelled at, which would be damaging enough to a relationship. No. I resent it.
I don’t remember how the meeting ended. I remember going up the stairs back toward the lobby. I was trembling, and embarrassed by it. Michael Cohl had stayed mostly silent through the meeting. He now had an arm around me; he gave me a reassuring squeeze on the shoulder.
“Just keep doing what you’re doing,” he said.
“Oh yeah?” I said grimly. “And what’s that?”
“Being the better man.”
Cold comfort. I preferred it when the lady and I were gleefully shouting ideas to each other across the train tracks. I still had high hopes for that night, though. Bono and Edge were seeing the show for the first time, and afterward they’d be attending a meeting back in the VIP room with Michael, Jere, and a sampling of folks from the creative team. One way or another, we’d make headway.
Act One that night went without a glitch. Clearly Bono had been bracing himself for disappointment, because at intermission he bounded backstage as excited as a six-year-old.
“That was one of the best things I’ve ever seen onstage. Ever.”
Some of the most endearing aspects of Bono were on display right then. Earnest in his hyperbole. Unabashed in his enthusiasm. He was primed to take his month’s worth of concern all back.
“There’s still the second act,” I reminded him.
“Well if it’s anything like the first, we’re in great shape.”
“You’ll see,” Julie said, knowing full well what was going to happen.
Bono returned after the second act looking like his dog had just died. Edge was more measured in his reaction. But the ending, in particular, was driving Edge nuts. It just didn’t make sense.
The meeting I was pinning my hopes on was now convening in the VIP room. Bono led off, saying Act Two turned into The Arachne Show, with three tantrum-throwing songs in a row. Julie said the three songs were very different in both tone and content, and the show required all three. Michael wondered aloud if perhaps Glen had some alternatives to put on the table. My moment had arrived. And I sounded as mealymouthed as ever. Julie flicked away the ideas with disgust.
Edge took a turn, raising some of the same questions about the ending that he raised three years earlier, but before he could gain any traction, Julie turned the tables and asked Bono and Edge when they were going to fix the lyrics, because the lines in several of the songs were so opaque, they were hampering her ability to deliver a clear story.
So we had the songwriters critiquing the book, and the book-writer critiquing the songs, and the temperature was rising in the VIP room. Bono made another sortie, but Julie was well entrenched in her pillbox with plenty of ammunition.
And why wouldn’t she be?
In Pleasantville, New York, a month before dance rehearsals for Turn Off the Dark began, Elliot Goldenthal and I were with Julie at the Jacob Burns Film Center’s ninth anniversary celebration. The speech being delivered in her honor explained that she was being presented the award for “her uncompromising vision . . .”
A month earlier she was in the Marriott Marquis ballroom, hearing those same three words as she picked up her New Dramatists Lifetime Achievement Award. “Her uncompromising vision . . .”
Receiving her MacArthur Foundation Fellowship; her Guggenheim Fellowship; her Brandeis Creative Arts Award; her Dorothy B. Chandler Performing Arts Award, her Emmy, her OBIEs, her Tonys—she sits and listens to the world reiterate yet again that she is being rewarded for being uncompromising—her uncompromising vision, uncompromising . . .
And now she’s only twenty-three, and she’s hiding behind a banyan tree near Lake Batur, in a village square lit only by the moon. She’s in pain, because a piece of rock made a deep and dangerous gouge in her leg when she took a fall while hiking on a live volcano the day before. And now she’s hiding because a procession of elderly men has suddenly appeared in the square wearing elaborate costumes. For the next thirty minutes, they perform a Balinese war dance—hands splayed, now fluttering, with knees in deep pliés. And now they’re stepping gingerly on their heels, now stamping, now suddenly squatting, now swaying, eyes wide as if in a trance . . . And where’s the audience? Julie looks around. She’s alone. Only after the dancers finish do villagers finally enter this square in Trunyan to hang a theatre curtain for an upcoming performance. Julie realizes that these men were indeed performing in front of an audience, but the audience wasn’t human. This was theatre for the spirits, theatre as devotion. Years later, she’d explain that this was “performing in a way that is not just for the critics or the writers or the money or the audience, but is a giving back. It’s a responsibility to who you are as a person in the world.” At the very end of the day, the artist is answerable to one producer: the producer of Life, of Existence. And with that producer, there is no compromising.
Back in the VIP room in the Foxwoods Theatre, Julie was sitting there listening to Bono with her arms folded and digging in her heels, but she was digging those heels into a patch of dirt by that banyan tree because a part of her has never left that spot.
But, man, it sure looked like ego-fueled pigheadedness. Bono had finally had enough. Raising his voice, he told Julie that she could fix the script problems or not fix the script problems. As for Edge and himself, they’d work on the music, “because at least that’s something we can do, and our reputations are on the line.”
Folks began to file out of the room. And that’s how we were leaving it?
Plan A, by all appearances, had been rejected. And as I sat there on the couch watching everyone leave the room and wondering where we went from here, Jere bent down and whispered into my ear before he he
aded out the door: “But you’re right.”
And the thought bubble over the bewildered writer’s head contained no words. Just punctuation.
!?!!?!!
• • •
NUCLEAR BOMB DETONATES DURING REHEARSAL FOR ‘SPIDER-MAN’ MUSICAL
NEW YORK—In yet another setback for the $65 million dollar Broadway musical Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark . . . a thermonuclear device detonated during the first act of Tuesday night’s preview performance. “The bomb should not have gone off at all,” said lead producer Michael Cohl, adding that the explosion that vaporized most of Manhattan was “not that unusual” for a major Broadway show still in development.
The day after the VIP room meeting, a tickled Michael Cohl entered the auditorium, eager to share this article in The Onion, the satirical newspaper, choking with laughter as he read the last line out loud:
Despite the setback, Cohl told reporters that he is more optimistic than ever about the production, saying that director Julie Taymor and composers Bono and the Edge were disintegrated in the explosion.
Bono would later confirm what I was beginning to suspect: Michael Cohl must be a helluva poker player. How worried was Michael about the state of things? You couldn’t tell. Was he going to lean on Julie any harder? He was playing his cards too close to his chest for anyone to figure out. If only I could convince Danny that the show was in dire straits. Surely he could then convince Julie. But Julie was already on her way to convincing him that the scenes with Arachne would work once she and Danny restaged them.
All these years, it was a given that Turn Off the Dark would be a hit. There was never talk about whether or not it would succeed on Broadway. The talk was always about all the other productions we’d have up within the first three years. Or about which actors Julie would cast for the feature-film adaptation. The idea that this show—with all the effort and inspiration that had been devoted to it—might be gone forever by this time next year . . . it was literally too much for certain people to grasp. The very real possibility of closing had to be driven into them. But how?
