Down With Dogs, I: Very Small Theatres

While I lived in Queens, my friend Victor Maog contacted me. He was directing a play at The Vital Stage, 3rd Floor, corner of Dyer and 42nd Streets, a few doors up from Playwrights Horizons. Impressive location for indie theatre projects, and the play was exactly that: one of many in a festival of short plays. The entire conceit of the project -- rather well conceived, I feel -- was that playwrights would submit original plays that had never before been produced anywhere; part of the deal, to which all accepted wrighters agreed with a dated signature, was that they would work with and trust their directors: if the director felt that the piece needed to change in some way, they would discuss it and the wrighter would make the changes. I saw almost all of the plays in that festival, and many -- if not most -- were very good or great and had benefited from collaboration between wrighter and director.

The reason that Victor brought me on board had two levels: the first was that, excellent friend that he is, he wanted to give me an opportunity to be working and directing in theatre right away. He heard my idiotic plan to get a non-theatre job and "save up" for what it was: blind stupidity. Wonderful friend that he is, he never said a word about that stupidity -- instead saying, "Hey, I have this project coming up. And it conflicts with another thing I've got at Second Stage about two weeks in. Why don't you come on as my assistant director, and when the conflicts start I will hand the reins to you and you will get your first chance to direct on the isle of Manhattan?"

I was a very great fool at that time; it's probable that I am possibly an even greater fool today. But I knew enough to say yes. And I'm delighted that I did. In spite of what came next.

The play that Victor had agreed to direct was about a very famous, fictional, bestselling novelist. This novelist has hit a wall, major writer's block, and can't get anything done. He is also a biology professor at a local university, where the motto is, of course, publish or perish. Because he hasn't published anything in a while, his job is in danger. So as he's fighting all this internal stuff, he is suddenly visited by a very attractive young ballerina, complete with tutu and toe-shoes. She appears and disappears in between the various discussions the writer has with his increasingly frustrated and therefore unintentionally antagonistic wife. The main conflict in the play is centered around the writer's desire to be writing and his inability to do so, his wife's desire to see him remain gainfully employed by this major university and thus stay focused on his familial commitments. The writer, however, is falling in love with the ballerina. So when he's not writing, he's discussing writing and such with this very attractive young woman who is wearing the theatrical equivalent of nothing at all. He feels like he's cheating on his wife, she begins to feel cheated upon, things build to a climax and are eventually resolved as the writer has an epiphany and -- shocker! -- begins to write a play about a writer plagued by writer's block who is visited by a mysterious young ballerina who teases him into a sexual frenzy and thus inspires him to write.

Guess what? The ballerina was his muse! I know you didn't see that coming. 

Simplistic as the story appeared to be, it had heart and some very good moments in it. Victor, however, had not bothered to read it. He asked me to read it. I did. He asked me to join him in casting the play. I did. We watched auditions, he read various people in the roles, he tried all sorts of wildly inventive things (including veering dangerously close to casting a 250 lb. woman as the ballerina; the more he read her for that role, the more pissed off she became), and eventually he consulted me on every aspect of casting, taking my word as gospel and trusting me completely. The show was thus very well cast. I suspect that he did all of this on purpose to make me feel useful to the project and a part of the process. He confided in me that he didn't actually care about this show, it was something he'd sent a resume in for on a whim and when he got the call he'd had to look back through old issues of Backstage to remember what the job had been. I am fairly certain that he hadn't actually read the play, because his responses to every line seemed genuinely surprised / dismayed / amused -- whichever was called for. However, Victor likes to keep something secret, and here I am spilling the beans: he is a superb actor. So he may have been using his superior acting skills to get me deeply involved in the process. Truly, though, I really don't believe he'd ever read more than the title before the first day of auditions.

The show was cast, we got started on rehearsals, and the meetings with the playwright began. On walks between the theater and local bars or diners, the playwright confided the following to Victor and myself: he was a frustrated writer who made his living as a High School biology teacher; his wife was really, really angry with him for spending so much time writing instead of being focused on the family; there had been some sort of kerfuffle and things had come to a head but then resolved nicely. And for me, the only really dismaying point: this play had in fact been produced before; ten years earlier, the wrighter had produced and directed it himself in the cafetorium of the very High School in which he teaches. It had, he assured us, been wildly successful; and everyone in the school as well as everyone in his small town in New Jersey had been wildly enthusiastic about this, his magnum opus. All thirty minutes of it.

The problem I suspected we would meet around the next corner: the wrighter's complete emotional attachment to the material as it was, and a resulting unwillingness / inability to see it altered in any way.  I warned Victor. He was not concerned. I detailed my argument with sharp bullet points of gestures between the Times Square station and the building which housed the Vital Stage:

* The character is a writer who teaches biology; the wrighter is a would-be writer who teaches biology.
* The character's wife is / was angry with the character for the conflict between his commitment to his muse and his commitment to his family; so, too, for the wrighter.
* The obvious pride of the wrighter in having produced and directed it all on his own in the hinterlands of New Jersey; his increased pride at having it selected as part of a festival of one-acts at an independent theatre company on Fabulous 42nd Street in New York City!

These tersely-voiced and oft-repeated bullet points were met with calm and relaxed assurances from Victor:

1. Every wrighter in this festival has agreed in writing to collaborate with the director and alter his play as the director asks, thus ensuring that this is a festival of vital (get it?) theatre -- living, breathing work.
2. If it becomes an issue, we meet with Charles, Artistic Director of The Vital Stage, who will arbitrate and generally find in favor of the director -- though nobody wants to see a play cut from the festival.
3. The wrighter will eventually see the light when everything comes together -- it is safe to trust that everything will all work out. (Translation: in two weeks, I will be making a lot more money on a far more interesting project: a musical to be directed by Mark Linn-Baker; by that time, this will be your problem and we will be so far into this project that you will not be able to alter it in any way. But I truly appreciate your passion and I love your friendship, my friend.)

Sure enough, the actors had a lot of questions. Victor would note these questions and bring them to the attention of the wrighter. The wrighter would respond that he is okay with things the way they are. Victor counters with further questions, stemming from inconsistencies brought to light by the original and still unanswered questions. The writer maintains his position, digging in until he is entrenched in an artistic foxhole, shoring up his defenses after every Maogian bombardment and maintaining strict adherence to his unbending boundaries.

Not knowing that I was also a source of questions -- and perhaps more of a dangerous geyser than a gentle fountain -- the wrighter confided further to me: he hadn't just written, produced and directed this play in the cafetorium of the school where he works -- he had played the leading role of the writer/teacher caught at the crossroads between creative and procreative responsibility. This was, I realized at the time, probably the final nail in the coffin of any possible changes to the script. However, as my entire purpose in walking him to his car that night had been to find a gentle ingress of revision, I simply nodded and asked some polite questions about the hotness of the girl who played the ballerina in that first production. Then I believe that I took it up a notch and made some jokes about special meetings after rehearsal to "work the tip -- I mean the scene -- into the right spot."

The way he stumble-stopped and turned to me, face alternating between ashen and beet red, half laughing like I'd just said the funniest thing in the world oh my ho-ho-ho that's gigantically hilarious, and half gasping like a man suffering the first in what is destined to be a long line of inconveniently-timed myocardial infarctions, told me everything I needed to know. That knowledge brought me to my own artistic crossroads: Machiavellian promise or gentle diversion of topic?

The Machiavellian Promise goes like this: "That's right, motherfucker, I know. I know what you did. And if you don't allow us to change your play as we see fit and make it into the theatrical masterpiece it will never otherwise be, I'm going to tell everyone in the theater and everyone you bring to see this mediocre piece of shit that you fucked the ballerina. YOU FUCKED THE BALLERINA! [echoing in the parking garage, convenient for me, he's clutching his chest and backed up against his Ford Explorer ("almost paid off")] So now you have to ask yourself: 'What matters more: my reputation? Or my perception of my control over this production of my play?' Because there's something you need to know, fucko: you can always revert your play to its currently ridiculous, piddling namby-pamby suburban scraped-off-my-shoe status, once the show has closed. And good luck with your tenure at the High School, because your train stops here. Now: what's it going to be? Your way? Or mine?"

The Gentle Diversion goes like this: "Man, I am so distracted by the hotness of Estelle. Holy shit! When Victor cast her, I was like, 'Thank you! Thank you! Please let me help her with any quick changes!' But now that she's here in those toe shoes and tutu every night, it's all I can do to refrain from jizzing all over her thighs when she bends over to pick up that book! Is it wrong of me to try to fuck an actress in this festival?"

Guess which one I went with?