'Angels in America'

On Thursday and Friday evenings, 2 and 3 December, my theater friend Diana and I trekked over to far West 42nd Street to the Peter Norton Space of the Signature Theatre for their revival of Tony Kushner’s two-part epic, Angels in America. The inaugural production of Signature’s season devoted to Kushner’s plays, this is the first revival in New York since the play’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway début in 1993, which I saw. (The play, or really plays, opened serially, Millennium Approaches opening first on 4 May ‘93 and Perestroika premièring seven months later, on 23 November. Each play won the Tony for best play its season.) The play was commissioned by the Eureka Theatre Company in San Francisco in 1987 and Millennium Approaches was staged there in 1991; Perestroika, which was being written as Millennium was in rehearsal, was presented in a staged reading. Productions followed in London (National Theatre, 1992 and ‘93) and Los Angeles (Mark Taper Forum, 1992) before it débuted at the Walter Kerr Theatre in New York. In 2003, it was aired on HBO in a star-studded adaptation that swept the Emmys, its medium’s top award. Angels has not been out of production somewhere in the world, in theaters large and small, since it first opened here. It’s taught in high schools and colleges “with the same reverence as ‘Death of a Salesman’ and ‘A Streetcar Named Desire,’” as the New York Times’s Patrick Healy reported, though not without controversy. It’s had an influence on young playwrights to one degree or another and has affected the way we consider homosexuality and AIDS, two of the themes central to Kushner’s play, which he dubbed “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes”—not a small ambition. (I find it interesting that Kushner called his monumental play that and not “A National Fantasia on Gay Themes”; it says something to me that the playwright considered that his themes, his ideas, his points are national, but seen through the prism of homosexuality. It says he isn’t writing a “gay play”; it’s an American play, even if the sensibility is gay.)

I’m going to assume that I don’t need to précis the plot—which is complex enough to require gobs of text to summarize coherently anyway, so I’ll trust that you all either know the play by now—you’ve had over 17 years!—or can find a summary somewhere on line. Suffice it to say that Kushner touches on a lot of American history and culture, including Roy Cohn (a major character in the play), Mormonism (several characters are LDS’s—and there are even scenes in the Visitors’ Center up near Lincoln Center), American politics, global warming, our health-care system, and, of course, the AIDS epidemic, in full swing when Kushner began writing Angels in 1988, the end of Ronald Reagan’s second term. (Gay activists frequently targeted Reagan and his administration for not responding to the AIDS crisis quickly, often claiming the conservative politicians dismissed the deaths of homosexuals.) In fact, Kushner writes about so many substantial ideas that the play ought to be a top-heavy, everything-including-the-kitchen-sink drama. But it isn’t. The director has a helluva job to do, not just because it’s a big play—two plays—but because he needs to keep all Kushner’s thoughts in balance and afloat. This play has always intrigued me, both as a piece of theater—there were moments when I saw it originally where my mouth literally dropped open, I was so astonished—and as a piece of literature, but I don’t think I’d want to take it on myself. It would scare the shit out of me! As the New York Post’s Elisabeth Vincentelli said, “it's a bitch to stage.” (The play also has more of the juiciest acting roles ever written in one play than any script I can think of. No wonder all those stars wanted to do it on TV!)

The Signature Theatre Company, for those who don’t know it, devotes each season to one playwright. (Following Angels, STC will present Kushner’s The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures, a co-production of the New York première with the Public Theater, and The Illusion, an adaptation of Corneille's L’Illusion comique.) Kushner, of course, is a firmly established presence on American stages, the author of A Bright Room Called Day; Slavs!; Homebody/Kabul; and Caroline, or Change, a musical with composer Jeanine Tesori; as well as adaptations of S. Y. Ansky's The Dybbuk and Brecht's The Good Person of Sezuan and Mother Courage and Her Children. (He also wrote the film script for Munich and has published several books.) Kushner’s won the Pulitzer Prize, an Emmy, an Oscar nomination, two Tonys, three Obies, and an Olivier, and is the first recipient (in 2008) of the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award (the largest theater award in the U.S.).

By the time I saw Angels, which began previews on 14 September, it had already been extended from its original closing date of 19 December three times, running now until 27 March. (Much of the cast will change in February, according to an STC announcement.) The Signature revival of Millennium runs three hours and 15 minutes and Perestroika, three hours and 50 minutes (both including two intermissions). The cast of Angels, under the direction of Michael Greif, consists of eight actors playing the 20-plus roles in both parts. (The Broadway original was the same; the TV adaptation expanded the named cast to 11.) Among these, Bill Heck, who played Paul Horace Robedaux, the stand-in for Horton Foote’s father, with such sensitivity in Orphans’ Home Cycle (also at Signature) last season, plays Joe Pitt, the sexually confused Mormon Republican; in his stage début, Zachary Quinto, known from his portrayal of the young Mr. Spock in the last Star Trek movie (2009) and as Sylar, the implacable villain in the sci-fi TV series Heroes a few seasons back, is Louis Ironson, the secular Jewish liberal who is the lover of Prior Walter, the super-WASP at the center of Angels’ helical plotlines.

Angels has what Patrick Healy dubbed “its own unusual, unruly structure”—partly, I imagine, because, as Healy also describes the play, it’s a “fever dream,” a nicely apt characterization. David Savran calls the form “camp epic theatre” and cites Kushner’s own characterization, “Theatre of the Fabulous.” Kushner’s subtitle clues us in to what he’s created: fantasia in music is defined as “a free composition structured according to the composer's fancy” without concern for form or style. Dramaturgically, that’s what Angels is. When I saw the Broadway version, it was a study in artistic energy and I was incredibly exhilarated at the stupendous theatricality of it all. (In my habitual definition of good theater, that it must have something to say and say it theatrically—I’ve repeated this often by now—Angels is possibly the perfect example, meeting both my criteria in spades. I can think of a dozen plays that fit my definition—Amadeus, Equus, M Butterfly, Hadrian VII, Indians, The Seven Streams of the River Ota, The Street of Crocodiles among them—but Angels in America, as it was staged on Broadway, must be at the top.)

Healy continues that Angels is “sprawling and audacious—seven hours long with scenes set in heaven and with an angel crashing through the set to bless an AIDS-stricken man as a prophet.” That man is Prior Walter who, as I just noted, is the connection point for the swirling plots of Angels; Roy Cohn is essentially the evil twin of this function. If Prior is represented by the Angel of America who names him a prophet, Roy is his opposite, the devil incarnate, “the polestar of human evil”; Prior, however, is the center—the most abject of humans: afflicted with AIDS, haunted by ancestral ghosts, and deserted by his lover, yet anointed a prophet by The Angel. Kushner accomplishes something that I’d have thought was impossible, or nearly, from a dramaturgical perspective: he creates a story that covers a gallimaufry of topics and narratives, but they never quite spin apart into the chaos into which they ought by rights to devolve. I’m no playwright, and certainly not one who could tackle as complex a concept as Kushner’s Angels, so maybe this is all easier than I think, but the miracle the playwright pulls off here, I believe, is based on the presences of Prior and Roy (and the omni-presence of AIDS somewhere in almost all the aspects of the plot) which hold everything together. (In my discussion of a system of structural analysis developed by Michael Kirby which I’ll be publishing on ROT in several weeks, I describe one device called Character Structure that stitches a play together by the constant presence of specific characters. This would be a prime example of that application.) Without Prior or Roy, the play should fly apart like sparks from a firework pinwheel. With them, it’s still remarkable to me that it doesn’t anyway. That part’s magic; even as a dramaturg, I can’t explain why it all works—but it does. (Okay, I’ll acknowledge that the director has a lot to do with making the parts all coalesce, a daunting task without a doubt. Greif had to toe a fine line: keeping the parts assembled without trying to turn Angels into a travesty of the well-made play. It has to seem like it’s about to deconstruct itself at any moment, but doesn’t. Like the world must have seemed to gay men in 1985 and ’86, the years in which most of the play is set, when AIDS and near-certain death was staring them in the face and no one seemed to care.)

Kushner said about working on the play in the late ‘80s: “An apocalyptic consciousness crystallized during the writing. I felt something huge taking place. Millennial events! I think the play is about what was happening, about the end of containment as an ideology.” I didn’t articulate my own feelings about the play back in 1993, but I think that my response was informed by the idea that Kushner was writing about inclusiveness, or non-exclusiveness. “Containment,” said the playwright, “is the idea that there is some sort of viral presence in the body or the body politic that has to be proscribed or isolated or crushed.” Those old enough to remember the Cold War will recognize containment as the doctrine employed by NATO against the Soviet Bloc and other communist powers such as China, Cuba, and North Korea. But containment wasn’t just practiced against global political enemies; as Kushner saw, the American establishment used it to marginalize and suppress challengers to its hegemony. “Containment demonizes the other,” he explained, “whether it’s Communism or AIDS or Jews.” (We see it in action today, too—attempts to marginalize and disenfranchise minorities, women, gays, immigrants, Muslims.) The playwright felt that the country was “in the middle of this huge political upheaval of Ayn Randian selfishness” with an Orwellian cast in which “selfishness is generosity” and enriching the wealthy was good for everyone else. Kushner, writing about what he also calls Individualism, observes that we’ve paid a price for maintaining that American myth “and the political economy it serves, Capitalism”; 1987, after all, was the year of Wall Street’s “Greed Is Good.” In an interview, Kushner called Reagan an “ego-anarchist,” which I take to mean that he and people like him saw themselves as a kind of law unto themselves, outside the common restrictions and social constraints by which everyone else abides, so that they could declare, “If I do it, it’s right.” “All this insanity suddenly became the common sense of the day,” he perceived. Containment is “a politics that comes completely out of fear,” Kushner concludes, “as opposed to out of hope.” A lot of plays tell a lot of truths from the stage, many of them universal and eternal—but what Kushner articulates in Angels in America is the core of what moves me and informs my social and political beliefs. There are many other points Kushner’s making in Angels, but it’s to that to which I responded when I first saw Angels, I think. It’s in the script, of course, but it takes the cast and director to make sure we see and understand it. (That’s Play Production 101.)

Kushner’s also written a treatise on selfishness and selflessness—or, at least, caring. The characters Roy Cohn and Louis Ironson are the selfish ones, looking out for their own needs and wishes irrespective of what anyone else wants or needs. Kushner’s Roy, of course, is supremely self-centered and advises others, like Joe Pitt, his would-be "Royboy," to follow his lead. “You do what you need to do, Joe,” Roy instructs. “What you need. You.” Louis is selfish because he’s afraid to connect and runs away from difficult entanglements—and he suffers for it. Joe is also self-serving, leaving Harper, his troubled wife, but he does so out of his own confusion. The character Belize, the professional caregiver—he’s a nurse—is the example of selflessness. That’s not a good word here: Belize isn’t Mother Teresa, but he does look out for others. As much as he hates Roy, Belize takes care of him and even counsels him forthrightly on his illness—a gift Roy abuses, of course. (Belize takes his payment in the end, though. When Roy dies, Belize steals the huge private stash of AZT, hard to get without the kind of pull Roy can muster, and distributes it to his AIDS-infected friends. Before he can do so, however, he must make Louis, the secularized Jew, say Kaddish over Roy’s body.) Kushner remarked that when AIDS hit the gay community and outsiders were afraid to help, the community came out to care for its own sick; even other sick people helped care for those more ill. (The opposite of individualism, Kushner believes, is collectivity, other words for which include cooperation and collaboration. Brecht, Kushner asserts, was committed to this notion as “an ideal and an achievable political goal,” but which the supporters of individualism and self-interest malign as socialism.) Belize demonstrates that kind of concern for others. Roy dies for his sins; Louis and Joe learn the lessons, to some extent, of theirs and, at the end of Perestroika, try to work their ways back. Louis may succeed to a degree, but Joe is rejected by Harper (who nonetheless takes his credit card). Joe, of course, like Roy, has two sins for which to atone: his betrayal of Harper and his politics, which he never confronts. (Kushner, we must note, describes himself as a “red-diaper baby.”) It isn’t a clean conclusion, but it offers a kind of hope: the ‘80s have turned into the ‘90s and the Reagan era of the self is out and Clinton’s term of feeling our pain is about to come in. The world is being “restructured”—ready to “crack wide open,” as Louis rejoices in the play’s epilogue.

Ben Brantley, in his New York Times review, asserted that viewers would compare the Signature revival with the original Broadway production. I found, however, that that first version is so far in my past that I don’t really remember anything but the most general impressions. Maybe other spectators have more specific memories and are making comparisons, but I found that I was seeing Michael Greif’s staging pretty much for itself. I was also reminded of two things as I sat in the audience for the second act of Millennium: first, that the acting at Signature shows is excellent as a rule—I can’t recall ever seeing a bad acting job even in plays for which I didn’t much care—and that Tony Kushner can be a great playwright, by which I mean “crafter of plays” not just a writer of scripts. I didn’t like Homebody/Kabul very much, but my reaction as we were leaving the theater after Millennium was, “Whatever else went on, that was a piece of theater.” (Of course, I maintain that a lot “else” went on, but we’ll get to that.)

Greif has maintained the theatricality of the script even on the small and technically limited stage of the Norton Space. It’s a rather low-tech production, by the way: stage hands move the set fragments that create the various locations by hand in low light, which is much more noticeable than the unobtrusive sliding on and off accomplished for the multiple sets of last year’s Orphans’ Home Cycle. (These stage hands, dressed in black like Kabuki koken, appear fairly often not just to move the sets around, but to assist actors with on-stage costume adjustments and to unhook The Angel’s flying wires and reattach them when she lifts off at the end of her scenes.) This is really the only misstep I can discern in Greif’s production concept. Mark Wendland’s set is just too busy; there are large sections representing other parts of the play’s milieu that stand unused in the dark while a scene unfolds in a space perhaps a third of the stage area. There may be a point in this encroachment of one part of the play’s world on another—often the “wall” of one space is actually part of a set next to it so that, for example, in the bathroom at the courthouse where Louis and Joe work, the sink seems to be coming off the back of a storage shelf from another room. In a universe where Roy’s tentacles—“Next time around . . .,” he orders just before he dies, “I wanna be an octopus”—reach out not only into Joe and Harper’s world but into Louis and Prior’s, and one person’s hallucination actually forms part of someone else’s dream—the delirious Prior and the Valium-addicted and distracted Harper cross over into each other’s visions—it may make sense for there to be many mansions in this house, but as a performance element, I found it distracting and confining. (In comparison to the published reviewers I read, I’m almost alone in this opinion.)

The other main element of the stage design are Wendell K. Harrington’s projections (something of a trend on New York stages just now) which enhance both the realistic scenes (rain, snow, Central Park’s Bethesda Fountain, and so on) and the fantasy/hallucinatory ones (a snowscape in Antarctica, clocks and timepieces in a council chamber in Heaven). These work excellently and have a more artistic dynamic than the omnipresent multiple sets, which seems a matter of practicality more than art.

Several reviewers made the point that Greif’s presentation of Kushner’s structurally and thematically ground-breaking play, which has gone on to influence writers all across the Western world and to expand what we may expect from theater, is softer and less astonishing than George C. Wolfe’s Broadway production. Some found this an asset for a 21st-century return to the play, but others felt it has reduced the play’s impact on the spectator. Having already admitted that I only vaguely recall the Broadway staging, I can’t speak for anyone else, but although I found the presentation a little less startling—the subjects and the staging techniques have all become much more common in the ensuing 17 years, after all—I had no trouble reacting with a frisson of excitement. In a way, I think, the familiarity of both the play as part of our late-20th-century culture and the tactics employed to communicate its narrative and philosophical points make it easier to listen to what Kushner and his characters are saying and respond to the play with a cooler, if that’s a way to put it, head and heart. If Greif hasn’t found new ways to shock us to replace the ones Wolfe used 17 years ago, then maybe that’s all to the good—dramatically if not theatrically. (The show doesn’t lack for theatricality in any case. We’re talking degrees here.)

As for the acting, I return to my earlier point that the STC always assembles excellent casts to begin with. That’s certainly down to the director’s casting sense, and Greif has put together a top-notch company for Angels. If Frank Wood stands out for his portrayal of Roy Cohn, that’s mostly because Kushner wrote him the juiciest part. (Actors have often said that villains are the best roles in most plays and movies, but I suspect that writers have a similar sentiment when they write their characters. The devil, as they say, always gets the best lines. Kushner’s said that his original inspiration for Angels was Roy Cohn’s death in 1986, especially when the dramatist read Cohn’s obituary in the liberal Nation, which took great glee, apparently, “over his demise.”) Still, Wood makes the absolute most of the part, easily competing with his more famous predecessors Ron Leibman (original Broadway cast), F. Murray Abraham (Broadway replacement), and Al Pacino (HBO film). He relishes each line and each scene right up until the end when Roy, in his delirium, tries to put death on hold, having confused one of the bells and whistles on his hospital monitor with his ringing multi-line telephone back at his office. He’s just been disbarred, but he’s still working the phones just as he was when we meet him in his first scene.

One of the most impressive cast members is Robin Bartlett whose principal role is Hannah Pitt, Joe’s unbending and unsentimental Mormon mother. But Bartlett plays several cross-gendered parts, including Rabbi Chemelwitz who, in the prologue to Millennium, delivers the eulogy for Louis’s grandmother; Henry, Roy’s doctor who delivers the diagnosis of AIDS; and Aleksii Antedilluvianovich Prelapsarianov, the World’s Oldest Bolshevik who delivers what Scott Brown of New York mag aptly called the malediction at the beginning of Perestroika. (Bartlett also gets to play the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, Roy’s haunting vision; she’s the one who delivers the news to him that he’s been kicked out of the legal profession, the one thing in the world he loved.) The rest of the small cast, all of whom play multiple parts, are solid, credible, and tuned in. It was in great part the rendition of Kushner’s lines that made me stop briefly and remark to myself how good the writer’s work was here. The cast handles the moments of poetic flight as well as they do the more prosaic-seeming speech. (Like most apparently realistic stage speech, Kushner’s language only sounds like ordinary people talking. In reality, no one you and I know could speak that way without a lot of craft.) As Belize, Billy Porter is swishier than Jeffrey Wright was, but the strength and innate kindness of the character shine through and Porter can still be a scary bitch when the need arises, as when Belize deals straightforwardly with not just Roy but also Louis. Quinto, whose dark aspect served him so well in both Star Trek and Heroes, makes a solid but wounded Louis, playing well on the Jewish guilt syndrome—this man takes everything seriously—and Christian Borle’s Prior is flighty but stubborn and heartbreakingly needy while still managing to be funny and human. (I recall someone remarking that Stephen Spinella, a very skinny actor who played Prior on Broadway as well as in San Francisco and L.A., was the sickest-looking well man he’d ever seen; Borle doesn’t match that bodily aspect of the character; nonetheless, he’s entirely convincing as a physically and emotionally stricken man.) The fear he evinces, which ranges from abject to nearly campy, rings as true as I could imagine it ought to be. And the doomed relationship between him and Louis, established as much by Quinto’s slow, and only partial, turn-around as by Borle’s steadfastness, puts them squarely at the emotional center of Angels (even though they spend most of the play apart).

(A few words about the character of Ethel Rosenberg’s ghost in the play. Several reviewers remarked that Kushner was making a claim for Rosenberg’s innocence, which has been essentially challenged by revelations from Soviet-era documents released after the fall of the Communism. As I understand Angels, the question isn’t her guilt or innocence regarding the passing of atomic secrets to the Soviets, but her trial and the death penalty she received. Roy Cohn’s culpability isn’t in convicting an innocent woman, but in interfering with the case by pressuring the judge to sentence her to death. According to Kushner’s notes, there’s historical record that Cohn, who was the Assistant U.S. Attorney on the case, had improper communication with the judge hearing the case and that’s what condemns Roy in the play.)

Bill Heck, in a role that in some ways is like Paul Horace Robedaux because both men appear stalwart and steady—Prior calls Joe “the Marlboro Man”—pulls off the dichotomy between Joe’s outer appearance and his inner turmoil quite nicely. As Harper, Zoe Kazan, whom Scott Brown thought was miscast, seems wholly appropriate to me: looking like a corn-fed country girl who, despite her strict Mormon indoctrination, is spinning out of control mentally. (She calls herself a “Jack Mormon,” a term that apparently means a lapsed or apostate LDS.) In addition to her need for a couple or three Valiums to get through the day, she’s agoraphobic and obsessed with the hole in the ozone; Harper’s an unlikable character—Joe’s flight isn’t entirely his own failing—but Kazan makes her tolerable and even important. If Kazan looks like “an elfin child bride,” as Brown wrote, it just makes her abject confusion and psychological foundering the more painful to see. (I’ll give Brown the benefit of the doubt and suggest that between October, when he found Kazan unconvincing, and December, when I saw Angels, she’d located the key to the role.)

Having said that Kushner demonstrates first-rate playwriting in Angels, there is some of the script that bears scrutiny. My friend Diana complained that much of the text is monologues, even in the multiple-character scenes. She brought up Louis especially as a character who speechifies even when he’s talking with someone else, but that’s supposed to be the way Louis is—he bulldozes through a conversation without really listening to anyone else—so he’s not a good example. Still, even if Diana’s correct, and she is to a degree, it doesn’t bother me. (Some reviewers saw the speeches as arias—and some really are.) A lot of epic scripts tend in that direction; it’s the nature of the play. Angels also tends to wax sentimental from time to time, especially when it comes to the AIDS crisis and those suffering from it. That’s certainly understandable, particularly when we consider when Kushner started writing the play—it was the same time and the same impetus that launched ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), the radical activist group started by another playwright, Larry Kramer. Terry Teachout in the Wall Street Journal complained that this made the play trite; I’m not sure that triteness is what bothered me, but it cloyed at those times. Now, some sentimentality is apt for Angels because part of Kushner’s big point is that emotion, feeling, and love are the ways we as a society can return to the kind of democracy he feels America is meant to be—with what he calls a sense of communitas—rather than the upside-down one it had become under the influences of the McCarthys, the Nixons, the Reagans, and the Cohns. (Louis even throws Joseph Welch’s recrimination of Joe McCarthy up to Joe Pitt: “Have you no decency, sir? At long last? Have you no sense of decency?”) Perhaps what I’m complaining about, then, isn’t sentimentality, but sentimentalism.

A bigger problem, especially since the actors all managed to pull off the sentimental excesses creditably, is the length of the play. Even in two parts, seven hours is excessive. Kushner himself acknowledges that some scenes can be cut (although he doesn’t think they should be), and two two-hour plays could have handled the material well enough, I’d think. The scenes in Heaven, especially the council scene, and the extended scene of Prior wrestling with The Angel are among the overlong moments, and the epilogue at the end of Perestroika seems gratuitous. (It’s ironic that the play’s first director, in a 1990 L.A. workshop, was Oskar Eustis, who is a dramaturg. Dramaturgs are to theater what editors are to publishing. What’s more, in a 1994 interview, the playwright described that council scene as one that wasn’t performed in the original productions “because it just didn’t play,” yet it was reinstated for this revival. That’s the opposite of editing!) In fact, Perestroika, the longer of Angels’ two parts, is much less muscular and vigorous than Millennium—and I remember feeling that way when I saw it on Broadway in 1994. (Trying to tie the Soviet restructuring to the American body politic in 1986 seems a logical stretch as well—the fit is forced and strained.) I felt as if Kushner, having several ideas left over and a few story strands unresolved, chose to write another four-hour play instead of trying to incorporate the best of the remaining details into the stronger and tighter Millennium. (When I was in the army, it used to be a tradition for a departing officer to invite his friends and colleagues to his quarters just before his household’s packed up for transport. He throws a “left-over party”—the guests drink up all the left-over booze, making up whatever drinks they can come up with using what’s on hand. That’s a little the way I feel about Perestroika: it’s a left-over play.)

But Angels in America is a gigantic play, so even big mistakes and lapses leave an awful lot of really good theater. I’ve been to plays, even recently, both big ones and small ones, that went seriously off the track (or were never really on it to start with), and it was hard to sit through them. I’d come out of the theaters feeling unhappy and cheated, wondering why someone would produce such a play (I asked that very questions recently after seeing Kopit’s Wings; see my report on ROT, 26 November). But Angels is still an exhilarating experience in the theater. WSJ’s Teachout wrote that it’s Kushner’s “willing[ness] to take chances instead of sticking to off-the-rack theatrical models” than makes Angels what it is. In a way, its faults make it even more astounding, because it tries so much and if it fails now and then, that just points up the successes, and grand successes they are, that propel the play and its production onward. If the details of the plots are dated—AIDS is no longer an automatic death sentence and Reagan is gone—they can be seen as metaphors for what we have now: the health-care dilemma looks a lot like the residue of the AIDS crisis and George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Tom DeLay, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, and even Sarah Palin are heirs to the Reagan legacy. (And that’s not even considering same-sex marriage and “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” both current questions yet to be sorted out.) The issues Angels raises haven’t been resolved since 1988 or 1993. “The world only spins forward,” says Prior at the end of Perestroika. And so does Angels in America.

[With the third extension of the production, there may still be tickets available for Signature’s Angels in America. The houses were entirely full the nights I saw the production, and I know that STC has announced that there are no more subscriptions available for the season. If there are still seats available for Angels, there won’t be for long (and the price will have gone up from the $20 cap that STC maintains through a grant for its originally scheduled runs), so I strongly recommend that any reader interested in catching this worthwhile theater experience contact the theater now (212-244-PLAY; www.signaturetheatre.org).]

Short Takes: Theater War Stories

Anyone who’s been in the theater for any length of time has “war stories,” those tales of mishaps, odd occurrences, or touching moments that happen while a show is in rehearsals or performance. Some are familiar—because they happen in some form or another to so many actors—and some are unique, even incredible. 

I didn’t have a long or successful career on the stage, but between my amateur days and the short professional period I managed, I gathered a baker’s dozen or so tales of the weird and bizarre. I hope you find them amusing, or at least interesting. So, here goes . . . .

MARAT/SADE AND HOW THE ASYLUM TOOK OVER THE INMATES

When I was in college, the Washington and Lee University theater staged a production of Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade. I believe there are many stories from actors who performed in this play around the world, especially those of us who played the asylum inmates and had to feign mental illnesses for the length of the rehearsals and the run. I know that castmates of mine recounted some difficulties adjusting to the real world; I had two.

It was tradition at W&L to have the cast party opening night after the performance. Usually, the director of the university theater, who also staged most of the plays, hosted the party at his house, but the cast party for Marat/Sade was at the apartment of the student actor who had designed the set. 

Now, a little personal background is necessary here, so bear with me. This play was produced in my junior year, as I recall. I had finished high school in Switzerland where we’d spoken mostly French outside our classes themselves, so when I arrived at college back in the states, I was fairly fluent in French. 

Though there wasn’t much need for this skill, I discovered that when I got really drunk, I started speaking French. (I can only assume that this was so; I didn’t remember it afterwards, but friends, roommates, and frat brothers all told me that that’s what happened. They could never tell me what I had said, however, because I was speaking colloquial French!) 

Now, at the cast party, I had had several drinks, of course—isn’t that what a college theater party’s for?—and I decided that I’d reached my limit. I would finish the drink I had in my hand and that would be it for the night, I told myself. 

What I hadn’t realized apparently was that the drink on which I was sucking put me over the edge, and the last thing I remember is putting on my coat to leave. According to accounts from others, I never got out the door. I stayed around and recited the entire play in French! 

Now, the second factoid you need to understand is that the previous year, I’d read the play for a class, in anticipation of the staging which had been announced. The class was German, however, so we read the text in Weiss’s original version. (Okay, yes, I studied French, German, and even Russian in college. I also took a non-credit course in Italian one of my profs offered on the side.) 

I’d never read nor even seen the French translation of the play, so I must have just translated it on the spot, though how I knew all the lines, not just my own, is beyond me. People at the party were apparently impressed, though.

As amusing as that tale is in retrospect, the other residual problem I had from working on Marat/Sade was less funny. 

The play had already closed by this time and our lives had all gone back to our usual college routines. A week or so after the show closed, I was eating breakfast in the fraternity dining room and I was pouring myself a glass of milk from a half-gallon carton on the table. My roommate was sitting next to me and he decided it would be funny to put his finger on the bottom edge of the carton to keep me from tipping it up far enough to pour the milk. 

He was being playful, just kidding around, but I flew into a rage and went absolutely nuts. I quickly realized what I was doing, going off on my friend for no reason, and stopped myself, but everyone there, including me, was shaken at my almost-violent response to such a minuscule provocation. 

It never happened again, thank goodness, but I decided that the exaggerated response was some delayed reaction to the weeks and weeks of work I’d done on a character who went apoplectic whenever someone touched me. 

One exercise in rehearsal involved each of us alone on stage while the director triggered our chosen phobia. I was crawling around on the set, cringing and writhing as the director shouted “Touch! Touch! Touch!” from the house. 

That’s how I was supposed to respond whenever another cast member came into physical contact with me, even by accident, during rehearsal or performance. Of course, it was all supposed to be acting, artificial behavior . . . but shit happens. You know?

THE EMPEROR’S NEW CLOTHES AND THE CHINESE INVASION

I took part in a lot of theater at college, and in the spring of my senior year, the wife of the university theater director and another faculty wife put together a performance for children that was to tour Rockbridge County, performing in elementary schools and local libraries. 

The production, The Emperor's New Clothes, was sponsored by Washington and Lee and our neighboring school, the Virginia Military Institute. Aside from the two directors, W&L’s contribution was the use of the theater and its facilities (shop, make-up, costumes); VMI principally donated the use of an army deuce-and-a-half with driver to transport our set and props around the rural county. The cast and crew were open to anyone from the Lexington community, students and townies alike, and we got a lot of support, moral and material, from the town. 

Among these were some truly gorgeous authentic Chinese robes and gowns provided by a local minister who’d done some missionary work in China. You see, our version of ENC was set in China (and yes, I admit we did do yellowface—we were still naïve about political correctness back in the ‘60s), so the costumes were most appreciated—and truly stupendous to see!

Once we started touring the show, our routine was pretty regular. We changed into and out of our performance kit at the W&L theater as there were usually no facilities at the schools and libraries where we performed. We then drove to our bookings in a convoy of cars behind the VMI army truck. 

After one gig, I was driving back with our stage manager in his car, following the army truck with our sets and props, and the car broke down on the road. 

The convoy stopped and we all got out along the side of the road, still dressed in our Chinese costumes and wearing our yellowface make-up. The truck driver, who by regulation had to be dressed in uniform, was also on the roadside. 

A few cars on their way to Lexington passed us as we were standing around, and one had apparently rushed back into town and reported that the Chinese had invaded Rockbridge County. It must be "official," the messenger insisted, because there was an army truck and a soldier in the invading forces! 

We found out about this when we finally got back to Lexington an hour or so after the story started to spread around. What a hoot! (This being the late ’60s, some Lexingtonians never did believe it wasn’t so.)

KIDS SAY THE DARNEDEST THINGS!

After I graduated from college, I had several months to wait before reporting for active military duty. The university theater director offered me a short-time job working in the theater shop until I had to leave, so I was back in Lexington for most of the fall term the next year. 

When the two women who’d produced ENC the previous spring proposed a children’s acting workshop, I asked my boss (whose wife was one of the project’s initiators) if I could be relieved of some of my hours to participate. He readily agreed, not surprisingly, and I took over a third-grade class. 

Among my students were the sons of two professors I knew, one was one of my German profs and the other an English prof who was a supporter of the theater (and whose wife was the other instigator of the children’s workshop). 

The program lasted several weeks and though I’d never taught any theater or acting before this, much less a class for children, I figured out a pretty successful scheme of games and exercises, culminating in a final project for the last day. 

I had to experiment a little with my nascent teaching method, and the nine-year-olds and I got to know each other a little along the way. They all knew, for instance, that I was going into the army soon after the workshop was over and they were old enough to be aware of the Vietnam war looming beyond the cocoon of the college town. Some, I recall, had older brothers who were either in the service or waiting to get their draft notices. 

On the last day of the workshop, when we were all saying goodbye, the English prof’s boy came to me and, in all sincerity and well-meaningness, said, “I hope you don’t have to go to Vietnam and get killed.” At the time, of course, I had no idea where my impending military service might take me, but I’ve never forgotten those words from a little nine-year-old boy. 

(I didn’t go to ’Nam. As readers of ROT will know, I fought the Cold War in Berlin, not the hot one in Southeast Asia. Maybe a little boy’s wishes were heard somewhere where fate is determined.)

AMATEURS!

I didn’t do any theater in the army until I reached Berlin. A group of GI’s eventually started our own theater troupe, but the official outfit, run by the the Special Services section, was the American Community Theatre on the headquarters compound. 

I did several productions with the ACT, including the Stephen Sondheim musical Company (30 May-3 June 1973), but the first show I did there was Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth (5-7 May 1972). I was originally cast as the doctor, but for reasons irrelevant here, I ended up playing Chance Wayne. (It wasn’t often that I got to play parts originated by the likes of Paul Newman, so believe me, I was thrilled, even in an army amateur production!) 

We weren’t very far into rehearsals when I noticed that the actress doing Princess Kosmonopolis didn’t seem to like her lines because she began dropping them a few at a time. Why the director didn’t notice this or, if she did, put a stop to it, I don’t know; I never thought to ask at the time. 

I didn’t say anything, either, and because so many of the Princess’s early lines have important exposition in them—between her and Chance, most of the backstory is revealed in the first scene, for instance—I started picking up her lines and adding them to my own. By the time we got to opening, I was practically doing a monologue with the Princess as an audience—and, as far as I know, no one noticed.

One night shortly after we opened, I got word through the backstage grapevine that the assistant director had decided to go on as an unannounced extra in the bar scene in Act II. I was livid. You just don’t do something like that! I said that if I found the guy on stage, I’d kill him with my bare hands. 

The word had apparently gotten back to the AD and someone told me he was hiding from me upstairs in the Special Services offices. I went to look for him between the acts to warn him not to pull a stunt like he planned. Well, I found him on the second floor and I think he would have shit his pants if I hadn’t calmed him down. 

Remember, I was a military intelligence officer and a lot of people had an inflated idea what we could and might do—James Bond, Derek Flynt, and Napoleon Solo were all still popular heroes at the time—and I never disabused any of my acquaintances of their fantasies. I just allowed the guy to believe that he might very well die if he appeared on stage that night. As Bill Cosby once said, “A lie’s as good as the truth if you can get somebody to believe it.”

[I recently found the program from this production among some mementos my father stashed away.  (My parents had come to Berlin during the run of Sweet Bird in 1972 and saw the show.)  This man was billed as “Executive Director” and he was a PFC listed as an Entertainment Specialist in AG Special Services.  (“AG” stands for Adjutant General [Corps], the administrative branch of the Army.)]

On another evening, the first scene was ending. It’s a two-hander with the Princess and me in the hotel bedroom and it ends with the lights coming down as we’re returning to bed after smoking a little hash. The curtain falls as we get back in bed. 

But that night, it didn’t. The scene was coming to an end, we’re making our way to the bed, the lights are dimming, dimming, dimming . . . and there’s no curtain! The Princess and I, by now in bed and under the covers, are whispering to each other, “What should we do?” “Should we wait until someone notices the problem?” “Should we just get up and walk off stage in the dark?” 

But no one seemed to notice that the curtain hadn’t closed and that two actors were stuck on stage. Finally, we had no choice. We got up and quietly walked off stage in the semi-darkness with as much dignity as we could muster . . . and I exploded as soon as we were clear of the wings! 

Where was the curtain-puller? How could no one see that she hadn’t shown up? How could the stage manager not notice that the curtain stayed open? 

I eventually calmed down, of course, and the show went on (doesn’t it always?) and finished without further incident. No one from the audience ever said anything to me about the strange way the first scene ended that night.

In a later play at the ACT, I served as production manager for Allen Boretz and John Murray’s Room Service (6-9, 14-16 July 1972), a farce about theater itself. One night, the actor who played the doctor wandered back onto the stage after he’d exited to the off-stage “bathroom,” staring at his finger, because he said he’d gotten a splinter! 

We were dumbstruck. Even if he had gotten a splinter, why in hell come back on stage? Go backstage and get first aid if necessary—what were we going to do for him? 

Amateurs!

A HATFUL OF RAIN AND THE DISASTERS THAT ALMOST WERE

After Room Service, a small group of us decided we’d like some continuity of contact from show to show, so we formed a theater group independent of the Berlin Entertainment Center (the new name for the ACT). 

One of our members was an air force tech sergeant and he got the Tempelhof NCO club to sponsor us. We got a large meeting room for our home, both for getting together between productions for exercises, discussion, or scenes and monologues, and as a performance space, with the addition of a portable stage platform (intended really for lectures and recitals). 

The tech sergeant’s wife was a former Brit, so we formed a sibling relationship with the British military theater group, the British Amateur Theatre Society. (‘Amateur’ doesn’t have the same derogatory connotation in England as it does here. It just means people who do something purely for the love if it.) 

Taking BATS as our model, we decided to call ourselves the Tempelhof American Theatre, or TAT (21 October 1972), and set about selecting and mounting our first production. 

We chose a children’s play (The Wonderful Tang by Beaumont Bruestle, 21-22 December 1972) and it was a great success with audiences from the U.S. military community in Berlin, even landing us on a local AFRTS children’s show to tape a cutting from the play for broadcast. 

After a 1967 adult farce (Peter Ustinov’s Halfway Up the Tree, 29-31 March 1973) and a bill of one-acts (19-22 July 1973), we were ready to take on heavier fare and we selected Michael V. Gazzo’s A Hatful of Rain (1-4 November 1973). 

The 1955 script is about the effects of the drug addiction of a young man on his family and it’s a pretty rough, naturalistic melodrama. (Think The Man with the Golden Arm without Sinatra and the horn.) I played Mother, the dealer who supplied Johnny with his drugs, a very nasty guy. 

One afternoon during the run of the show I was out on my usual gig, doing background interviews or other rounds in the military community. In my job, we wore civvies, so unless you knew us or were part of our unit, there was no way to know that I was an officer. 

I had just gotten out of my car, an unmarked station vehicle with the green license plates of a private automobile rather than yellow staff-car plates, and was approaching a building not far from the headquarters compound. An air force NCO who’d obviously seen Hatful stepped between me and the entrance. 

He told me in very precise terms that if he met me in a dark alley, he’d kill me because I was such a bastard in the show. He was neither joking nor being ironic—he really thought I was Mother, the dope dealer who kept Johnny hooked. 

The guy was bigger than I am, so I didn’t want to tangle with him even if I thought that would be a good idea, so I did the only thing I could do. “I’m a lieutenant, sergeant,” I said in my most authoritative voice. “You don’t want to be held for threatening an officer, so back off!” 

He did . . . but I decided then wasn’t the time to give him a lesson in suspending disbelief and stage fiction versus reality. (I did take it as a compliment to my acting, though. I’ve always been pretty good at playing pricks.)

Hatful was also TAT’s entry in the annual USAFE play contest; the CO of Tempelhof had specifically requested we represent the air base in the competition. We won the best play award and had to take the production to Ramstein Air Base to perform before the chief of staff of USAFE (15 December 1973). 

Now, we hadn’t planned the show to travel, so the sets weren’t designed for transport. Instead of muslin flats, for instance, we had made our walls of homosote. Nonetheless, we disassembled everything and prepared it for shipment by plane from Tempelhof to Ramstein—a benefit, we thought, of being an air force group. 

At the very last minute, our set was bumped for a helicopter tail section and we had to scramble to find other means to get the set to Ramstein. We were traveling on the military train to Frankfurt, and we got the set on the train, too, and arranged for a truck to meet us to drive the set to Ramstein, about an hour away from Frankfurt. 

Everything was fine, we figured—except that when we got to Frankfurt, it was drizzling and the truck was open with only a tarp to cover the set pieces. We got to Ramstein in the afternoon, examined the set, and found that it had survived intact, except for some missing paint here and there on the pea-green walls. 

By the time we got the set reassembled for that evening’s performance—we needed a quick rehearsal on the new stage—most BX facilities were closed and we couldn’t get any paint to touch up the marred walls. 

I pointed out that the color was awfully close to pea soup, and that the deli, the small convenience store on a military base, was still open. So that’s what we did—repaired the damaged paint with Campbell’s condensed green pea soup! As the TD at my college used to like to say, “Necessity is a mother . . . .”

We didn’t get our full run-through, but we tested the new stage with a few spot scenes just for the sake of movement, crosses, entrances, and exits. What we—or, more precisely, I—didn’t realize was that the actor playing Johnny, the junkie hero, had caught a stomach flu sometime before we arrived and he was ill. 

He wasn’t sick enough that he couldn’t perform one show, so he went on like a trouper, but he was so weak (and we hadn’t rehearsed the move earlier) that when I shoved him during our confrontation scene, he reeled downstage and nearly fell off the set! Guess who was sitting right down front center. Yup—the event’s host, the USAFE chief of staff, right in whose lap Johnny would have landed had he not managed to stop himself in time!

It didn’t help matters that the stage at the Ramstein theater was steeply raked, something we were in no way used to or prepared for. I’d never played on a raked stage (and never have since, either), and they look deceptively easy if you’ve never encountered one before. 

So the stage sloped down to the proscenium—what real difference does that make? Well, Johnny’s near mishap was one thing that could have happened—and here’s another unanticipated consequence of a raked stage. 

In one scene, after I’d been smoking a cigarette in Johnny’s apartment, I toss the butt on his floor and stomp it out as a show of disrespect and power. Well, I did all that—and, before I could step on it, the cigarette rolled down the raked stage, which was covered with a rope-like carpet I assume was potentially flammable. 

The butt simply got away from me and rolled toward the apron and the front row where the one-star general was seated. And I’m “casually” trying to reach my foot farther and farther down the stage to stop it and put it out. I know that lit butt is going to set the floor cover on fire and the performance and the theater will go up in flames and smoke, sending the general fleeing out into the late-December night. 

I think we all—or at least I—froze and watched for what seemed like minutes as the glowing cigarette made its way toward the general, his aide, and his staff. That’s the closest I’d ever come at that point in my life to a heart attack.

ROMEO AND JEANNETTE AND THE SCENE ANOUILH NEVER WROTE

When I returned to the states, I had decided to go to grad school in theater. I got into an MFA program in acting and I was cast in one of my directing classmates’ thesis production, Jean Anouilh’s Romeo and Jeannette. This is a family play, and one scene is getting ready for a meal and then sitting down to eat it. Part way into the scene one of the characters is supposed to enter. 

The problem was that there are two very similar moments—the character has two exits but only returns from one of them—and the actress got them confused and missed her entrance, leaving us all stranded on stage; she wasn't even in the wings. So the rest of us just improvised an entire little domestic scene about preparing to sit down to dinner that Anouilh never wrote—until the stage manger could find the actress and get her on stage and we simply picked up the scripted dialogue. 

Apparently, except for the director (who had conniptions—a director friend says that's why they die young), no one had any idea we were making up a scene as we went along. I recall it being several minutes, but it must have been much less in reality. 

In any case, the audience—some of whom were our acting and directing classmates—just thought it was a slow moment in the script until after the show and we copped to the improv. (One of my castmates was one of my own undergrad acting students, and others were in the audience; they were mightily impressed!)

DEVIL TAKE THE HINDMOST AND THE SPECTATOR WHO WASN’T RUDE

Over the years, I’ve witnessed a few occasions when an actor had to address someone in the audience outside the performance. I was at a performance of Little Foxes on Broadway (1981) when Elizabeth Taylor stopped in mid-speech to admonish someone up in the balcony who was taking flash photos. (Taylor said she wouldn’t continue until the photographer stopped or left the theater.) 

In another instance, in Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea at Circle in the Square uptown with Vanessa Redgrave (1976), John Heffernan, on stage right by the railing that separated the audience from the performance area in that peculiarly shaped theater, paused in a line and looked at a couple of women right down front and said to them, "Are you through?" Clearly they’d been chatting while he was acting! 

Well, when I was doing my own thesis performance (in Bill Mastrosimone’s thesis play, Devil Take the Hindmost), I had one scene right down front in a tavern set. I was at a table with a camp-follower character I had picked up. 

At one point, I heard snoring. It persisted, and I thought it was someone in the front of the house who'd fallen asleep and was being rude and inattentive. I was just about to say something, remembering Heffernan's actions . . . when I realized it was my camp follower, who was acting having gotten drunk and passing out at the table next to me! 

I almost embarrassed myself. (I’d never noticed her doing that before—I think the actress had embellished the bit without telling me.)

OOOoops!

MISALLIANCE: BLACKOUTS AND HEATWAVES

After my second year in grad school, the theater department mounted a summer rep season with imported pros from New York City mixed in with the graduate actors. I was cast as Gunner in Shaw’s Misalliance so I continued to commute out to New Jersey every day for rehearsals and performances.  

This was the summer of 1977 and while we were in rehearsal on the evening of Wednesday, 13 July, we got the word that there’d been a massive power outage in the city. 

I drove back into Manhattan afterwards—I was also chauffeuring some of the New York actors—and the streets were in chaos, without street lights or traffic signals. It was also eerily dark in a city where you can ordinarily read a newspaper on a street corner at midnight. 

The next morning, I packed up my dog and moved in with two classmates who had an apartment in town. The power began to be restored in New York the next day, but my dog and I camped with my classmates—I think I bought food as rent—for a few additional days because it was easier at the end of the rehearsal period; I went to rehearsals and performances (which started a week later) as before, but for a brief time, I was a local. 

One benefit: since I wasn't home to open and close the fridge door all the time, everything in it, including the freezer, survived.

Misalliance was just at the mercy of the elements that summer (which, irrelevant to this tale of woe, was also the Summer of Sam). Right after the blackout, caused by a lightning strike, we went through one of those periodic heat waves we used to get here regularly once or twice a summer—90+/100° temperatures. 

It was bad enough under stage lights with just the normal heat of summer, even though the theater was air-conditioned; I tend to sweat easily and profusely anyway, but Gunner starts out the play hiding in a "Turkish bath," which was a wooden box on our set. Then that heat wave hit, and the a/c went out. 

I wore a gray Glen-plaid suit in the play, but when I came off stage at the end of the first act, it looked black! (The professional actor playing John Tarleton had the same problem I did. We'd compare costumes backstage to see how bad it was going to be out there for us.) 

I stood on stage (after climbing out of the Turkish bath) with sweat literally dripping off my face. Besides the fact that it stung if it dripped into my eyes—that's distracting—I also knew how disgusting it must look to the spectators near the front, all that sweat flowing off of me. 

I think that was one of the most physically uncomfortable performances I ever had to endure. The severe heat lasted from 13 to 21 July—nine days.

My college theater director used to tell us, "Suffer for your art." Do you suppose this is what he had in mind?

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST AND THE BIG BLUFF

When I first started studying theater, which was in college where I took a single semester each of acting and directing (the only offerings then available at W&L), I thought I’d decided pretty definitively that I’d never again direct a play. 

The directing class required a one-act as the final exam and I told myself (and anyone else who wanted to know) that I didn’t think I was smart enough or stupid enough to do that again. I wasn’t smart enough to be able to coordinate all the things that a director has to do and know to be good, and I wasn’t stupid enough to get myself into that situation again, having experienced it once. 

In grad school, I was required to direct one-acts each of my first two semesters and I chose plays that were as easy to stage as I could find. I was determined that those would be my last directorial efforts.

Well, the best laid plans and all . . . . After I finished the MFA and set about to find work as an actor on New York stages, I found myself accumulating stage experiences I wanted to apply on the other side of the footlights. 

I’d been directed, for good and ill, by so many different kinds of directors, I was formulating ideas about how to work with actors and I wanted to try them. I’d been working for an Off-Off-Broadway company for about a year or so, doing mostly classics and a few original scripts, and I eventually asked the artistic director to let me direct something there. He agreed in principal; it was just a matter of finding an appropriate script and a slot. 

One evening when I was at home, however, he called me. The cast of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, a couple of weeks into rehearsals, had fired its own director! They’d become frustrated with his work because he hadn’t blocked the show, hadn’t given them any character notes, and, despite fervent requests, hadn’t made any cuts in the script. 

The artistic director asked if I would consider taking over the production. I watched a rehearsal—the cast was working on its own for the time being—and agreed to accept the job. So, except for three school one-acts, this was my first directing gig, and my first ever with a professional cast. 

In addition to not wanting to upset the cast any more—they were floundering and had acknowledged that to me when I watched the rehearsal—and not wanting them to see that I didn’t know what I was doing, I consciously chose actions to appear more secure and authoritative than I really was. It was a deliberate strategy, because I didn't want the cast to feel they had just jumped from the frying pan into the fire, so to speak. 

I decided, first, not to tell them that I'd never directed pros before, then to make very specific decisions about text cuts (that was the straw that caused the rebellion) and tell them exactly what was in, what was out, and what we could discuss. 

I made some specific directing notes, mostly blocking, and worked out some physical business to insert, and I made some very specific character notes—all pretty arbitrary and basic stuff, but I deliberately selected these actions so that I'd seem to be in charge and on top of the situation (even though I wasn't—I was just SWAGging). It was all a choreographed act I figured would carry us into the rehearsals far enough until the work itself became a focus. 

One thing that worked in my favor, of course, that I couldn't have known about was that the cast was so desperate for some guidance and real direction that they glommed onto my efforts like Velcro! The bluff worked, but mostly because the cast was really ready for it. 

(After the play opened, and we had our opening night party, several of the cast, drunk by then, very forcefully said they'd work with me anytime again and that I was a real "actors' director." That's when I told them that this had been my first professional gig. They were shocked—and I was delighted!)

ALADDIN AND THE REALLY UN-MAGIC MOMENT

Not all theater war stories are amusing; some are quite frightening. 

Shortly after I began working in New York as an actor, I joined a group that was working out of the historic Provincetown Playhouse near Washington Square. An actor with whom I’d worked at the theater where I directed my first play asked me to join the American Theatre Arts Project, which he’d helped start. 

The opportunity to work in the theater where Eugene O’Neill had gotten his New York start (there was still a permanent cyc on the stage which he’d helped build and which bore his initials!) was nearly irresistible, so I joined the company. 

I talked to some of the ATAP leaders about starting a children’s theater program and they were receptive. It was almost Halloween, so we decided to test the idea, to see if there was enough interest and audience for a regular program, by staging a Halloween show. 

The performances were a success (aside from having scared the crap out of some poor little boy sitting down center), so we went ahead with a full-length children’s play. I chose Aladdin, a version of the famous fantasy by my friend Kirk Woodward, and, because the shows were in the daytime, the company’s actors weren’t all available; I had to break one of my own rules and take a part in the play as well as directing the production. As a result, I was on stage when a near-disaster struck during one performance. 

In the middle of a scene, when one actress, an older woman, was supposed to make an entrance and carry on an important prop, she went up. She went up so badly that she not only couldn’t remember her lines, but she couldn’t remember anything about the play or the story. 

The stage manager threw on a few costume bits and made a quick (and unexplained) entrance on the fly to bring on the necessary prop, and as soon as I got off stage, I went downstairs to find the actress and see what had happened. She was understandably distressed, and we were all anxious, too, not knowing what was happening to her. 

We managed to finish the performance and, as far as I ever knew, no one in the audience felt anything was amiss. But the actress went right to her doctor as soon as she could and learned that she’d suffered a mini-stroke in the middle of performance. 

The memory loss was temporary, thank God, but she was advised to quit the business because the emotional pressure that goes with acting could trigger a more severe stroke and endanger her life. She was a lovely woman, very nice and even-tempered at all times, but her stage career was over, she said. 

As relieved as we all were that she’d gotten through the episode, we were all still shaken by the experience. (This was over 30 years ago now, and considering her age at the time, I’m sure the actress has died since then. I don’t know if she ever went back on the stage; I assume she didn’t.)

ROMEO AND JULIET ARE LOVERS: SOMETIMES, YOU JUST DON’T SEE THE FUNNY

While I was trying to make a career as an actor, I reconnected with a friend from my teens, a young woman who was trying to break into producing. She put together an unstaged reading of a play, Romeo and Juliet Are Lovers by Jules Tasca, so that a composer and his agent could hear it because the composer was considering turning it into a musical. 

My friend asked me to take a part in the one-night event and, of course, I agreed. (We always supported each other’s work, but besides wanting to help her out, a reading for a playwright, a composer, and their agents might mean other pros would attend, too, and it was a chance to be seen by people who influenced casting and hiring. Enlightened self-interest, as it were.) 

I picked up a copy of the script and decided to take a long weekend at my parents’ vacation home on Cape Cod with just me and my dog in the late-fall off-season. I hung around the house, sat on the deck wrapped in a blanket like old scenes aboard ocean liners, and walked along the beach with the dog. And read the play. 

Romeo and Juliet Are Lovers is a farce that posits that the two Shakespearean lovers didn’t die at the end of the original play, but married and lived on into middle age. Tasca’s play is about Romeo and Juliet’s life as Romeo experiences his mid-life crisis and the two see their son fall into the pattern of young love that had so dramatically affected their lives as teenagers. 

I read through the play several times, and the faux-Elizabethan speech and the silly situations and jokes just didn’t seem funny to me. I was sure the whole thing would lay an egg at the reading; I couldn’t see why the composer (I never learned his name) would want to musicalize it. But, I’d made a commitment to my friend, and it was only for one evening.  

We were supposed to get together at the Vandam Theatre (now the SoHo Theatre) in SoHo for an hour or so before the reading and run through the script, get any necessary pointers from my friend, the director, and Tasca—not really a rehearsal, just a familiarization. 

Well, we met as scheduled, and started to read the play. It was absolutely hilarious. We were almost literally rolling on the floor! We couldn’t get through more than a sentence or two without breaking up and interrupting the dialogue. The parody of Shakespearean language was so outrageous when spoken that it transcended the silliness I thought I’d seen when I read the text to myself.

Of course, we calmed down by the time we had to read the play in front of the invited audience. (They did the laughing then.) Unfortunately, the composer decided not to do the musicalization and the collaboration never happened. (The play’s been published since then—1984, Aran Press—but I’ve never heard of a production anywhere.) 

I learned a powerful lesson that evening.  Plays, especially comedies, can often play far better with live actors than they read on the page.  (The play’s been published since then—1984, Aran Press—but I’ve never heard of a production anywhere.) 

THERE ARE AGENTS . . . AND AGENTS

A funny exchange took place on an episode of the late TV series Numb3rs (2005-10, CBS), the show with the math genius and his FBI-agent brother. The crime under investigation had taken place at the house of a movie star where a lot of hangers-on and wannabes are always hanging out. The FBI agents arrive and encounter a couple of would-be actors out front. 

The G-men introduce themselves as Agent So-and-So and Agent So-and-So, and the actors immediately try to give them their headshots and flyers for a showcase. The actors ask them what agency they’re with, and even when the agents tell them, “The FBI,” the actors continue to think they're talent agents. 

The same thing happened to me years ago, but in reverse. When I was doing showcases and OOB productions in New York, I had an acquaintance and castmate in a 1981 production of Much Ado About Nothing who was a retired FBI agent. 

I knew that, and, of course, he knew I’d been an MI Special Agent myself in the army only a few years earlier at this time (I’d gotten out of the army in 1974). (We're all "Special Agents," regardless of the federal agency—except the Marshals Service, who are . . . well, “Marshals.”) 

So one day when my actor-friend introduced me to a companion who'd come to see Much Ado, he called him "My friend, the agent." I assumed he was also a former fed, and I asked him if he and my castmate had worked together somewhere—and other agent-type insider chit-chat. 

He wasn't that kind of agent, though. He was a talent agent doing his due diligence by seeing his friend in a showcase. When I saw this scenario playing out backwards on Numb3rs, I couldn't help chuckling all through the scene. I'm sure no one else in the entire country thought it was that funny! Humor, like beauty, is in the eye (or, perhaps, psyche) of the beholder.

BELL, BOOK, AND CANDLE AND THE MOTHER OF ALL SNOWSTORMS

Weather once again raised its beady, little head in 1983. I was directing John van Druten’s Bell, Book, and Candle in Jersey City for a March run and I traveled by PATH train from New York City and then local bus to the church where the theater company had its home. 

It was a Friday, 11 February, and we were rehearsing in the daytime, all day. It began to snow that morning sometime, but I arrived in Jersey City before the snow started accumulating, so everything was okay getting to the church. We worked all afternoon, uninterrupted and without paying any attention to what was happening elsewhere in the world. 

By the time we finished in the evening, however, it had been snowing all day long, a major blizzard, and the streets were calf-deep in fresh snow and the busses either weren't running or were all jammed up somewhere down the line. (Later, the average snowfall for Jersey City that day was recorded at 18 and 21 inches.)  

I had to walk all the way back to Journal Square, the PATH station, down the middle of the street because that was the only area that was packed enough to traverse.  I don't know how long the walk was—one-and-a-half or two miles, I'd guess—but it was a loooong, cold walk! 

I was fortunate that the PATH trains were running without serious problems or I'd have been stuck in New Jersey with no way to get home and nowhere to stay the night.

“Dante update neither divine nor comedy”

by Kyle Smith

[After the Johnny Knoxville movie Jackass 3D hit theaters on Friday, 15 October, my friend Kirk Woodward alerted me to Kyle Smith’s review in the New York Post. As I don’t read the Post regularly, I’d never have caught this review, particularly since the Jackass movies (this is the third, not counting the TV series) aren’t of much interest to me so I wouldn’t have made a survey of the critical reception the film received in the media. If Kirk hadn’t recommended that I have a look at Smith’s review because “in all our discussion of reviews, here’s something I think we didn’t expect,” I’d have missed something really quite wonderful.

[Readers of ROT will know that Kirk is the author of The Art of Writing Reviews on which I commented at length (“The Art of Writing Reviews by Kirk Woodward, Parts 1-4,” 4, 8, 11, 14 November 2009). In addition to my commentary on Kirk’s book, I, too, have written about reviewing and reviewers, notably in “On Reviewing,” 22 March 2009. Neither Kirk nor I, as he noted, anticipated an approach like Smith’s. I'm just guessing, of course, but I got the sense that Smith didn't really want to review Jackass. It's his job and he was handed the assignment, so he couldn't just blow it off, and writing a "serious" review would have been dull--both to do and to read, I imagine. I mean, what can you say about a movie that plays to the absolute lowest taste and intellect? No one really cares how this movie is reviewed: the people who like the Jackass flicks aren't going to care if some newspaper writer doesn't like it, and the people who share his opinion aren't going to go to it anyway. So what's the point? But Smith found a way to do something interesting while still fulfilling his responsibility: telling us what he thought about the movie. There’s a lesson here for all writers, including students, who are required to write about something in which they find little of interest or value. In that spirit, I’m reprinting Smiths review as it was posted on the New York Post’s website on 14 October (and published in the paper the next day). ~Rick]

When Dante ("Inferno," Canto XXII) wrote that "the captain made a trumpet of his ass," he could not have known how shamelessly he would be ripped off by "Jackass 3D," which shows a guy not only playing a trumpet out of his butt but also deploying his sphincter to blow up a balloon and tootle a party streamer.

Johnny Knoxville is fond of strenuous dumb-dude laughter (each segment features a few seconds of stunts followed by a long interlude of Johnny and his boys standing around whooping it up – the movie comes with its own laugh track). The idiocy is just an act.

Knoxville would never admit to such loser taste, but he and his friends are obviously scholars of "The Divine Comedy," from which they plagiarized all of their ideas and disguised them as silly stunts to infect the minds of American youth with 14th-century epic poetry. It's time someone called him out on this insidious campaign; why can't movies be mindless entertainment free of subversive educational agendas?

Consider: Both Dante and Knoxville are about halfway through life, each starring as narrators playing themselves. "I'm Johnny Knoxville." "I'm Johnny Knoxville. I'm Johnny Knoxville." What kind of film has its main character keep introducing himself? It cannot be that Johnny considers his viewers so deep-fried of brain that they forget who he is every five minutes. No, it's a clear parallel with Dante – who mentions himself even more times than Johnny.

A line from Canto I of "Inferno" could be used as the tagline for "Jackass 3D": "You shall hear the howls of desperation . . . as each of them laments." Dante's " 'Tis true I said to him in jest/that I could rise by flight into the air" (Canto XXIX) leads directly to Knoxville riding a Jet Ski up a ramp and flying into a hedge. Dante is tormented by a leopard, a lion, a she-wolf; Knoxville gets head-butted by a buffalo, a ram, a bull. Dante "entered on the deep and savage way" to get closer to God; Knoxville's journey leads to a climactic scene with a deity from the holy trinity of "The Gong Show" – Rip Taylor.

"The Divine Comedy" deals in poetic justice; in "Jackass 3D," a guy who thinks he is going to prank a friend (the sin of treachery!) is himself pranked by his friends – and subjected to his worst fear, being trapped in a snakepit.

A corpulent man – a human hog, you might say – is victimized by a real hog who gleefully consumes an apple placed in the glutton's ample pink buttocks.

The vainglorious Steve-O, proud of his bare, gym-built, copiously tattoo-decorated torso ("even the French can't match such vanity" – Canto XXIX) will find himself bungee-jumping inside a portable toilet. The outcome? Take it away, Canto XVIII: "I saw souls in the ditch plunged into excrement that might well have been flushed from our latrines . . . I saw somebody's head so smirched with s - - t, you could not tell if he were priest or layman."

Oh, and one more thing the comedy of "Jackass 3D" has in common with "The Divine Comedy": Neither of them is funny.

[What gets me most here is how Smith, even while taking a humorous approach that clearly is meant to make fun of the movie itself, still manages to tell us what he thinks of it (even though, until the last sentence, he doesn’t directly state his opinion). I especially like the part where Smith upbraids Hollywood for sneaking in so much surreptitious education. It’s delicious—and effective—use of irony. I'm not familiar enough with Divine Comedy to be sure Smith got all his refs right, but I'll bet he has, and the parallels he constructs, not entirely tortured, are terrific. So are the parallels he finds between Knoxville and Dante themselves. I think this may be one of the best reviews of a bad movie (in the opinion of the reviewer, of course) I've ever seen. I don’t know Smith’s writing, but I tip my hat to him as a writer and as a reviewer.]