Down With Dogs, I: Very Small Theatres Part 3

A week later, we're gathered for rehearsal in the cozy little third-floor blackbox in which I was beginning to feel very comfortable. Victor has asked us to have a seat before rehearsal begins, we're running the show today and the late October crispness outside has everyone in a generally festive mood. We're sitting and Victor is standing on the stage, looking at us, making eye contact with all of us. It's an awesome technique, this silent eye contact thing. Like emotional Epsom salts, it draws to the surface whatever needs to be extracted. I've been meaning to use it for years, now. It goes on for about three minutes, and then he looks down at the floor. One wonders if one has done something wrong. Then there's a somewhat sheepish glance up at us, like he's got a secret or maybe he's going to tell us that the whole soulful eye-searching thing he just did was a joke (which it may have been). But no! He gives a little jump as his pocket makes a noise, takes out his cell phone (Victor always seemed to have a cell phone, even before they were easily-obtainable) and, glancing at the number, his eyes widen. He looks at all of us, uncertainty writ large in his expressive face, then makes a decision, saying, "Excuse me," before heading the eighteen feet or so to the lobby. We hear him say, "Hello?" as he reaches it, and his mellow voice working its magic as we breathe a collective sigh of release. Even though I know his tricks and techniques, I can attest to their power: Victor is like a master stage magician, one who explains the illusion even as he performs it -- and somehow never fails to amaze.

Fat Sister: The eyes on that man. I'm steaming like a Christmas Pudding.

[Momentary silence as the rest of us shudder inwardly.]

Ballerina: That phone call looked important.

Professor's Wife: Christ, I forgot to call my agent. Do you guys think there's time?

Ballerina: Time for ... ?

Professor: Probably not. 

Victor [still on his phone in the lobby]: Hah! Really.

[Silence in the theatre.]

Victor (cont.): Oh. Well, no. I understand perfectly.

Fat Sister: Mmm-hmm, I'll bet you do.

[Sound of everyone's eyes widening in discomfort.]

Ballerina: I wonder if it's the playwright. 

Edward: Unlikely. His schedule has altered drastically. He is never available when this play is rehearsing, and if we tailored our rehearsal to his availability, we suspect he'd off himself just to avoid being here.

Fat Sister: Pshh. Wow.

[Weird little silence. Ballerina has turned to look at Fat Sister and keeps looking at her.]

Professor's Wife: Did he really change his schedule?

Edward: It's a mystery. But whenever we ask him to come in, he's got eye surgery or goiters or Dengue Fever --

Fat Sister (overlapping): Okay, am I the only one here who feels like you're the millstone dragging us all down?

Ballerina: Um ...

[Silence.]

Edward: I'm sorry -- was that for me, I didn't catch everything ...

Fat Sister: Jeezus. You're like a whirlpool of negativity.

Edward: I'm actually a portable Kenmore, but my rinse cycle is worth the price.

[Professor, Professor's Wife and Ballerina laugh. Which is very kind of them.]

Fat Sister: You're talking about a man's life's work. You're talking about his goals, his dreams.

Edward: I'm talking about his schedule.

Fat Sister: What the fuck is wrong with you --

Victor walks back in and Fat Sister's eyes are on him like worship on a Christ-y, all aglow with the stained-glass certainty that this man will finally see her talent and make her famous. Also, cock. I see all this in an instant and realize that Victor needs to carefully tailor his final chat with the cast tomorrow, perhaps even set aside some time for her personally. She's going to be heartbroken, even without three extra soliloquies, one diatribe and a Balcony Scene. I'm writing a note to myself (warn Victor) when he speaks:

"I have some news. I've just been hired as a last-minute replacement at Second Stage, and I need to go in today. Now, in fact -- I'm late, considering that the other guy flaked on a Company Meeting they've already started. I've spoken to Charles about it, and he agrees: a job at Second Stage is too good to pass up. So. Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls, let me introduce your director: Mr. Edward Hightower."

Ballerina (overlapping): Awesome!

Professor (overlapping): Nice!

Professor's Wife (overlapping): Oh, that's good. That's so good for you, Edward.

[Short silence.]

Fat Sister: Hm.

Victor is smiling his I-know-a-secret smile. For all his acting ability, he has a massive tell when he's being clever: he loves how clever he is. It's all over his face. But nobody would ever believe such an obvious tell is a tell, they read all sorts of other meaning into it. Again, a master magician. His face says, "I'm lying to you," his words say, "I'm sincere," and your mind automatically wraps these into a justified lumpia of alternate meaning, easily gobbled and satisfying because it fits your need and fills the space left open by that part of your mind which perceives truth. His lie is nourishing. Perhaps because he's not lying, or not trying not to lie. The kernel of honesty is better than loaves and fishes.

"I need to leave, right now, but I'll be back in a few days to see how things are going," Victor is saying, shouldering his bag -- his coat, somehow, already on. "Edward, they're all yours. What are you going to do first?"

"Run the show," I say, outwardly calm.

Fat Sister pshaws loudly. Victor's eyes narrow, he glances in her direction and then shakes his head as if to say, "No, that's kooky, I can't have heard what I think I just heard." He launches himself toward the door, smacking a folded scrap of paper into my hand as he goes.

"Excellent plan. See you all soon!" Victor is gone. The foyer door opens, closes. Distant NYC sounds fill a moment of deep silence and it's very cozy for that long moment. I don't want to move. Feels like the sounds from the courtyard in Rear Window. Then I breathe and catch a waft of the crisp air outside from the open windows in the two front offices. I sit up and say, "Well, then. Places for the top of the show, please."

All of the actors move to their spots. Except Fat Sister. She's reading her script. 

Professor: Fat Sister? It's places.

Fat Sister continues to read her script. The intensity! As though her script was a donut.

Edward: That's places, everyone. 

Fat Sister is deeper into that script than the wrighter will ever go.

Edward: And ... begin.

The actors pause a moment, glancing from her angry intensity to my pleasant, beaming face. I can tell that she wants to start a fight, and that this is the way she plans to do it: refuse to go on, get me angry, start yelling, get me off balance so that I yell things that might get me fired, and then Victor will come back and she'll have her mellifluous-voiced Daddy back. Truly, glancing at her, I see a deeply troubled eight year old girl whose father just walked out. My heart breaks a little. Am I right? Who knows? But why push it? I nod to the actors who are in places and they begin.

They're doing their stuff there, she's fuming and rocking over there, and I'm here pretending to be totally focused on them, pretending that this is all perfectly normal. I sip my coffee. Actually, at that time it would have been a Venti Quadruple-shot Peppermint Mocha, because I didn't know that those could make me fat, yet. So I sip it and yum yum yum it's delicious and -- whoops -- Fat Sister has just stormed stompy-like out to the lobby. Slight hesitation from the actors onstage, but I nod at them and waft-waft with my left hand as if to say, "Everything's all right. This is exactly as planned. Fat Sister is following my instructions to the letter."

Her first scene is coming up and everyone seems scared or uncertain at the prospect of whatever she will do next. I realize this, it hits me: she's so angry that we're all off-balance. This is not how it should be. I start to get a little riled up at this. One person is behaving badly, and this is negatively affecting the entire show. We've had so much to contend with in our little temporary family that to have this shit shoved in our faces when Victor has just left is an insult. I start to feel insulted. We're almost at her scene. I realize I should say something, take her to task, chastise her in some fashion. I take another sip of my mocha in preparation, crumpling the paper in my left hand as I do so. I gasp a little, remembering the forgotten note, snarfing the mocha and doing the best spit-take of my life to date. Mocha sprays all over the seats in front of me and I'm coughing like a poltergeist in the TB ward. I need to say something, my eyes are watering and I can't stop coughing. The actors are game -- I'm helping them prepare for an audience with all this coughing. They settle in, really starting to roll now that things are so natural. I make a mental note to try this next time I'm directing: cough constantly so they'll be prepared for the matinees. 

One final big cough and I'm putting the mocha on the far side of my bag to my right as I'm turning to get up, but where to put the paper? We're on the last couple of lines of the scene, but I unfold the paper anyway, insatiable curiosity wrapping me in her siren song. It's a note, and it reads,

"Tag! You're it. Fake phone call. At Starbucks. Let's get a drink when you're done. At the bar. Ignore Fat Sister. Or read this poem:

Maybe she's angry
Because she poops
Through her vagina

Victor"

I laugh out loud, and there's a hiccup in the scene. It's not a moment where they expected a laugh. Actors in a poor comedy are starving for laughter and feel much better when they get it, but in this case there's nothing to justify my laugh. It's a repeated line, old information, nothing needed. And it's the last line of the scene. The actors shift to their next spots, and Fat Sister is supposed to enter from UR, ready to harangue her brother for writing yet another bestselling novel instead of putting his nose to the grindstone. Silence. 

Silence.

I pick up my script and read her first line, "What?! You're writing another bestselling novel -- again?! Just because the last one was a bestseller?! What are you thinking?!"

Professor: It's my passion, I can't help it.

Fat Sister enters from the lobby, stepping into the scene and playing it like normal. She's full of smiles. The run-through is fine. The show is as good as it can get without a rewrite, and people are almost perfectly off book. We could open tomorrow, but we still have, what, two more weeks?

During my intentionally brief notes session afterwards, Fat Sister raises her hand and speaks before I point to her. "So do I enter from the Lobby now, are you changing Victor's blocking right away or something, or can we get a warning in the future if you're going to change the blocking like that without telling us?"

Edward: Um ... no, you're supposed to enter from Up Right. As Victor staged it.

Fat Sister: Then why did you have me enter from the Lobby?

Edward: I'm sorry, I must have not been clear. When I called places --

Fat Sister: I had a phone call to make. 

Edward: Great! So, the blocking hasn't changed. Great work everyone, see you in a couple of days.

They hesitate. I nod at them, smiling, and they grab their bags and go. Fat Sister lingers like she wants a fight, but I go right up to her, smiling, with the intention of hugging her. Why? No idea. I think because I sensed that she would loathe it, and I was quietly seething. So I'm walking toward her, smiling, arms opening for a hug, and she turns and sprints out of the theatre, eyes wide in alarm. It's satisfying, so I sit down and chuckle for a minute. 

Of course my first day directing a play in Manhattan is plagued with angry challenge from a difficult actor. What else did I expect? After Boston, this seems to be right on track. It hits me that I almost fell for her tactic: the stomp out to the lobby was her ace in the hole, and I managed to let it go. Anger spikes in me, followed by the suspicion that I should just ignore her behavior. This is the kind of thing I would have blown up at in Boston. I grab my stuff as the next cast is moving in to the space, confident that I've got Fat Sister all figured out and that nothing she can do will trip me up any further. In one sense, I was right.

In another sense, I couldn't have been more wrong. 

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?