Then there are the straight (not necessarily literally) theater geeks. We often have cats or children or both cats and children named Stella or Maggie.* Tragically, we not only name our offspring after characters, our roles often bleed into our lives. I once dated someone who instructed me to hand-wash his underpants because “Hamlet doesn’t do laundry!”
Show people, all kidding aside, are often humanists who want to tell uplifting and impactful stories. However, there are other, saner careers in which to pursue these lofty ideals that don’t involve wearing pancake makeup and delivering dialogue like, “I’ve been building hot tubs in Kuwait. They’re very popular ’cause it’s a nice way to relax with your wives.” That memorable line was spoken, without a trace of irony, by the enormously talented and genuinely philanthropic George Clooney when he was on The Facts of Life. But it’s like what David Mamet says about people who pursue a life in the theater: “Those with something to fall back on invariably fall back on it. Those of you with nothing to fall back on, you will find, are home.”
At New York University, I discovered a rarefied variety of show person: the experimental theater artist. The avant-garde movement questioned the relevance of the kind of “legit” theater I’d been exposed to growing up, promoted social and political change, and was possibly unhygienic. Our studies included spending a great deal of time rolling around on top of each other naked. If you’ve ever been to a corporate retreat where you work on “building trust” by closing your eyes, falling backward, and having the group catch you, this is much like that, except for us, building trust was an extreme sport. One particularly memorable assignment involved a noted performance artist convincing us to run barefoot and blindfolded through the streets of downtown New York—he really missed his calling on Wall Street.
This theater aesthetic was pioneered by French surrealist playwright Antonin Artaud in the 1920s. Artaud theorized in his seminal writing on the Theater of Cruelty that Western theater had fallen into a lassitude and needed a lacerating wake-up call. Not everyone goes to the theater for a lashing “assault on the senses,”* but that it was an unpopular art form was a bonus. I felt special being a part of something that most people couldn’t possibly understand. I can only assume that supporters of a return to the gold standard are attracted by a similar outsider status.
There might be some sort of genetic predisposition toward ideologically driven fraternities. I was warned against just this kind of thing by my grandmother Frances. One of her aunts had to be begged to leave when the family was emigrating from Russia, because she was a Bolshevik sympathizer. She wound up as a union organizer in a garment factory, never married, and might have even “liked girls.” There was also a cousin who was rumored to have fallen under the spell of this very same degenerate theater crowd and ended up driving a cab, but I was undeterred. I had no plan B.
I’m going to include here a few sentences from the mission statement of Mabou Mines, one of the theater companies whose aesthetic and esprit de corps spoke to me: “The most incendiary of experimental ensembles. Originally associated with the conceptual art movement, performance art and minimalist music, Mines is an artist-driven ensemble confederation, generating original works and re-imagined adaptations of classic works through collaboration among its members.”
If you are not moved to your core by those words, congratulations, you are no doubt living a life of moral virtue and are probably gainfully employed. When I read this kind of manifesto, I am tempted to sell my wedding ring, hitchhike across the country, and build sets for their next production.
Even more intoxicating to me was that this world was organized much like the FLDS faction of Mormonism, minus the unflattering rayon dresses, starched hair, and prohibition against drinking coffee. In the absence of the promise of fame and fortune, these theater companies were led by visionaries running the gamut from benevolent dictators to maternal or paternal gurus who attracted grateful acolytes. Bingo. I had found my people.
A month into college, the avuncular Richard Schechner, founder of the Performance Group, whose bacchanalian production of Dionysus in ’69 was legendary in the experimental world, gave a lecture on the connection of rituals and rites of passage of the ancient world to modern theater to my Introduction to Theater 101 seminar. “I want to follow you around,” I announced to him afterward. His ex-wife was already my acting teacher and our class took turns babysitting his son; I promptly enrolled in the Performance Studies department, and would have offered to shine his shoes given the opportunity. As it happened, Schechner was directing a Jacobean tragedy and he needed a young actress to play a lady-in-waiting trying to wheedle her way to a higher status in the royal court. It was a perfect match, given my desire to suffer stylishly onstage. The next thing I knew, I was starring in a production Off-Broadway at iconic producer Joseph Papp’s Public Theater, home to the New York Shakespeare Festival. I had no idea Schechner had a reputation for encouraging women to follow him home. He was a father figure, a mentor, a guru, you name it, and, for the record, he never made a pass at me.*
The Public Theater houses numerous stages within its walls. Mabou Mines was performing in one space and a concert adaptation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice in Concert, starring Meryl Streep, was closing out their run. Streep can channel sadness like nobody’s business. She wept while hitting the high notes! I must have seen that show a dozen times, hoping to one day be known as the Meryl Streep of my generation. At my costume fitting, I was issued a pair of knee pads to wear under my Jacobean-style gown. Sliding them on, I saw that Meryl Streep’s name was crossed out and mine was written in its place. That’s the closest I’ve ever gotten to becoming the Meryl Streep of my generation, but it seemed like an auspicious beginning.
The play closed before it opened. I resumed my classwork, headed to London for a semester abroad, and had just returned to New York when my dad phoned with the news that his latest business had gone belly-up. There was no money for me to continue my education. My parents declined to share their tax returns with me, effectively nixing my chances of getting financial aid.
Just like Mobile, this belly flop was years in the making. What did them in was Abscam. In what became an infamous sting operation in the late 1970s, an FBI agent posed as an Arab sheik and offered congressmen (or entrapped them into taking, depending on which side of the transaction you were on) bribes for casino licenses and building permits. The FBI rented a yacht and invited local businesspeople to give the sheik some social cred. Is it any wonder my dad was invited into the fold? Casinos? Kickbacks? A mysterious investor with millions to spare? My mother says she knew that the whole thing was fishy because they were served Cheez Whiz on Ritz crackers at a cocktail party. Despite being raised in a working-class family, she has always had an innate elegance and an eye for quality. They never went to another party, but when the sting came to light, my parents were investigated, as often happens in these sorts of situations, and the IRS opened an audit. That’s how it came out that they hadn’t filed their taxes in years, although that information wasn’t shared with me until much later. All I knew at the time was that once again, it seemed like the floor had dropped out from beneath us.
Armed with the confidence you can only muster when you’re nineteen and have been cast in exactly one professional production, I was certain I could find a place in the theater scene, but downtown New York was gentrifying; theater companies weren’t expanding and couldn’t absorb us next-gen avant-wannabes. I needed to start a theater family of my own, and I needed to make money to do that.
I worked odd jobs and pounded the pavement, as the saying goes, sliding my picture and résumé under the doors of casting offices all over town until one day I got lucky. In the early 1980s, at any hour of the day or night, the saddest clothing sale in North America was taking place in Greenwich Village, on the corner of Astor Place that was home to the 1,800-pound sculpture known as the Cube. The bedraggled denizens of the Lo
wer East Side sold the clothing right off their backs, and that’s how a grubby black leather motorcycle jacket saved my life. I put that jacket on and didn’t take it off for the next four years. Wearing that jacket, I was able to get cast as “punky but non-threatening chick” in commercials and landed the role of a gang girl on the soap opera Guiding Light. My Brechtian-alienation style of acting didn’t play well in this arena, but the head writer, Pamela Long Hammer, a former Miss Alabama, took pity on a fellow Southerner. A part that was scheduled for a handful of appearances turned into three years of intermittent employment.
A group of us formed a collective to try to catch the proverbial last wave of the avant-garde scene. One of our fellow students, Peter, emerged as our director. That he was Austrian carried a lot of weight with us because the favored writers of the alienated include those barrel-of-laughs crowd-pleasers Kafka, Wedekind, and Büchner. Peter wore vintage suits with pants held up by rope in lieu of a belt. He smoked Gitanes, was squatting in the back of an art gallery, and carried his belongings in a cardboard suitcase. He appeared to have emerged straight out of a Beckett play. We didn’t work on traditional acting skills like diction, projection, and script interpretation. We were more interested in dating each other and dreaming up ways to make an audience work as hard as possible to understand what we were doing.
Our first outing was a meditation on the loss of innocence and the death of glamour, or maybe it was the other way around. We got ourselves booked at the Pyramid Club, a downtown venue.*
We premiered with our exploration of innocence, the highlight of which was when a talented sprite of an actress got her period for the first time. This effect was to be achieved by breaking a sandwich baggie filled with ketchup in her panties. We never rehearsed this pivotal moment, but the concept seemed plausible. After her several failed tries at clapping her legs together hard enough to break the bag, I reached over and squashed it myself, which was greeted with hilarity from the audience. The condimented actress and I vowed we would always remember this as our worst moment onstage. We were wrong.
For the next week’s installment we were set to depict the decline and fall of glamour by evoking the silent-film era. Footage of us frolicking in an abandoned lot wearing vintage gowns was to accompany our performance. On the evening of the show, three of us posed in a series of choreographed gestures, but the projector broke down, as did the tiny portable cassette player with our soundtrack. Ever resourceful, our director jumped onto the stage and beat out a rhythm on a mop and pail. As we slowly sank to the floor, a metaphor for our demise, people yelled, “Come on, die already!” during the entire half hour it took us to descend to the stage. We couldn’t have been more pleased with the response.
In what we hoped would be our splashy international debut, Peter secured funding for us to stage Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen—Murderer, Hope of Women—a play so controversial that the author, Secessionist painter Oskar Kokoschka, was run out of town following its premiere.* We were to perform this colossal downer at the Vienna International Theater Fest, a prestigious gathering of pretentious artists. When I told the producers of Guiding Light about the gig, my character was written off the show under the pretense of a very long European vacation. How Gina Daniels, who was trying to wheedle her way to a higher status in Springfield, afforded this vacay was as mysterious as the comas people were always falling into on those shows. These flights of fancy have never troubled the audience for the soaps. When I landed at the Munich airport, I was swarmed by a group of American soap fans.
“Oh my God, it’s Gina Daniels,” they cried in unison. “Soap operas are real!”
Once in Vienna, we worked and lived communally, even sharing underwear.* How were we received? From the moment we stepped onstage, the crowd booed. When I swung a real dead chicken over my head as I paced the stage, the audience seemed just as confused as I was. The play was about something important. Love, loss . . . poultry? It really didn’t matter. We were engaged in heated late-night discussions of art in broken English. I took up with a local, drank kaffee mit schlag, and went to work each day in a palace. I was in heaven.
When we returned to New York we were invited to stage the show at the Guggenheim Museum. It was the dead of winter. We had small, polite audiences, mostly docents of the museum. After the show, the audience cleared out quickly and quietly. I trudged home alone through the snow each night. The notoriously cruel John Simon summed up the production in New York magazine with one word: “WHY?”
That was the last show we did together. The movie Wall Street came out, with its catchy tagline “Greed is good,” and with those words, materialism officially supplanted nihilism in New York. My fellow experimental theater classmate Wendy Hammers remembers the exact moment she knew the climate had changed: “The day a Gap opened up on St. Marks Place in the East Village. I stood on the corner and cried.” It was only 1987, but the eighties were officially over.
We drifted apart. Peter headed back to Austria, others to academia, and I concentrated on getting work in television and films. I threw in my lot with another kind of show people, show-business people, people who were interested in building careers, not tearing down commercial theater. Actors working in television and films often forge fellowships of sorts, especially on long-running shows, but on big-budget productions, money, power, and celebrity can divide casts into castes.*
Once in Los Angeles, I scored a gig as one of Candice Bergen’s ill-fated secretaries on Murphy Brown. Secretary Number 10 was an actress who came to work in character as, you guessed it, Maggie from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Eliza Doolittle from My Fair Lady. It launched my comedic television career. I didn’t even own a television at that time.
I am fortunate to have enjoyed the perks of working on big-budget productions. Among them are unlimited access to fresh coffee and having someone knock on the door of your private dressing room to inquire, “Do you have time to try on a cute skirt?” As a writer, I spend a lot of time on coffee runs to and from a shared office with writers whose company I truly enjoy. It’s a privileged existence. Still, I can’t tell you how much I wish someone would ask me if I have time to try on a cute skirt. Yes. “Yes, I would love to” will always be the answer.
Given my early exposure, the drama bug is like a virus lying dormant in my system and it doesn’t take much to trigger a full-blown case. In 2013, I was offered a juicy role in a play by a well-regarded playwright, but what really sweetened the deal was that the production ran through the holiday season. A night at the theater provides audiences a welcome respite from those carbohydrate-laden meals from Thanksgiving through New Year’s, and working in the theater provides the perfect excuse for begging off your family’s festivities.*
It had been several years since I’d done a theatrical production and I assumed that at this point in my life I was immune to the kind of bonding that had taken place in the casts of my youth. We were scheduled for three weeks of rehearsal at a theater located deep in the San Fernando Valley. The Valley has an undeservedly bad reputation. There are neighborhoods with quaint restaurants and friendly enclaves where kids shoot hoops in the street. Then there’s this part of the Valley: chop shops, warehouses, and parking lot barbecue pits smoking the kind of mystery meats that make me question if we should really be letting our cats roam freely on the streets.
The theater was located in the shadow of the clown. That’s the thirty-two-foot, luridly bright, neon, macabre mascot of the landmark Circus Liquor in North Hollywood. Alicia Silverstone gets mugged in Clueless right under the clown. Snoop Dogg features the clown in one of his videos. It says something about the clientele that Circus has its own line of baby apparel. Try not to imagine who would put their baby in a Circus Liquor onesie. Just don’t do it.
The transition from writing desk to rehearsals was disorienting. Despite working with the actors and support staff for eight hours a day, sharing meals and coffee breaks, during the first week of rehear
sal, I couldn’t remember anyone’s name. I managed to learn that one of the actors in the cast voiced a small mammal on my son’s favorite animated cartoon series, and I came home every night and announced, “I’m working with the squirrel from Rick and Morty.” And every night Ezra would correct me: “Bill plays a raccoon on Regular Show.” I had such mixed feelings that I kept getting lost on the way to work and arrived so tardily every day I was sure I’d be fired within the week.
I was playing a tough but benign Jewish mama, circa 1940. The majority of the cast was in their early twenties and playing, to hilarious effect, the grade school classmates of my eleven-year-old daughter. By this time, I’d already portrayed a mother on-screen, but this was the first go-round as the matriarch of a theater family.* The show featured several holiday pageants, so dozens of wigs and elaborate costumes, and an outrageous number of props, were foisted upon us. “Where the fuck is my frankincense?” you’d hear whispered above the din as actors furiously swapped out their Pilgrim hats for Magi headpieces. It was a colorful chaos that reminded me of the themed birthday parties I hosted when my son was little, and something cracked open in my heart.
Resistance is futile. I was the first person in the cast to say, “I love you,” as we left the theater each night.
Casts typically make the holidays festive. Our dressing room resembled a department store window: we had a tree and a menorah, candy canes were hung from the makeup lights, we secret Santaed, and I was more than happy to let my onstage role translate to production mother hen.
I stepped in to broker truces in dressing-room squabbles recognizable to anyone from a large family. “Meghan gets to have her wig put on first every night, it’s not fair! I’ve got to get onstage too” sounds a lot like “Heather’s been in the shower so long, it’s not fair! I need to get in the bathroom too.” One afternoon during the run of the show, I spent hours rummaging through my bedroom closet. “Girls, I’ve brought clothes, some of my favorite things, and I’m sure there’s enough for all of you!” I said as I entered our dressing room, brimming with maternal affection. They tore into the loot. A few choice pieces were meted out, but most of it was deemed uncool. They’d treated me with exactly the same deference as my actual child. Roasted!*
Wherever You Go, There They Are Page 3
