“One hundred forty-two times, Sue.”
“Par for the course…” She turned to plod to the kitchen. “There are a lot of passed-out people in my bedroom and one might be dead. You’ll help identify them, won’t you Emma?”
Emma said sure.
“That dip’s good isn’t it?” she said, pointing to the bowl we’d nearly finished off. “All night long people were asking for my recipe. It’s famous—I do it every time! Susan’s famous Cucumber Delight!”
1975
IT’S 1975 and I didn’t know anything before I moved to New York. Am I in Actors Equity? No. Does my ŕesuḿe impress anybody, including my mother (“Come home son, come home…”)? No. I go door to door, theater to theater, look I’ll do anything, I say. Well, so will 300,000 other struggling actors. Who do you know? I don’t know anybody. My connection, the casting director guy, didn’t work in theater anymore, as it turned out. You don’t know the New York Struggling Experience unless you’ve been faced with: the Possibility of Having to Crawl Home. You opened your BIG MOUTH and now you have to crawl home, with your high-school class going: “Ha ha ha Gil, you loser—guess you couldn’t DO IT,” followed by girlish, derisive laughter. No way. I was not going home. I might die on the streets of Manhattan sharing Ripple with the winos, but that’s all right. I’m not going home. Discouraging as it was, heartbreaking and grinding and dispiriting as it was, I would continue to march to audition after audition.
The Time I went to the Audition from Another Planet:
“Hello people, my name is Ira Forrest and this production we’re casting is Experience 27.” Ira Forrest was a middle-aged hippie, his thinning hair combed over his bald head. He had the beginnings of a potbelly which didn’t prevent him from wearing a tight muscle T-shirt with Experience 26 lettered across it. As he paced with his clipboard giving us his ŕesuḿe, we noticed his assistant, this zitty, pale twenty-year-old (maybe) who was unhealthily emaciated, wearing shorts which exposed these hairy toothpick legs. “… And some of you have been, no doubt, following the Experience series which I’ve authored, and perhaps you’ve heard of my work with the Northwest Co-op Theater Consortium in Portland, Oregon…”
Nope.
“This is Ryke, my assistant, and his input will be invaluable in our selection today.” Ryke stiffened his neck as we observed him.
“You’re wondering, I suppose,” Ira said laughing slightly, “why all of you are together out here on the stage. We’re not going to audition one by one—that’s old, that’s regressive theater. We’re going to go through a series of exercises and through my observations—”
Ryke cleared his throat.
“Through our observations, we will make our selection. But first two cardinal rules of this process. One, this is not competitive. Yes, some people will get a part, others will not”—and here he raised his voice until it filled the hall—“but that is not, NOT to say that you don’t have worth, have value, have talent. I want that understood. All of you repeat after me: I have worth.”
We have worth.
“I have value.”
We have value.
“I have talent.”
Yeah yeah, we got talent. We also were told to shake the hand of the person beside us and introduce ourselves. I’m Gil. The woman beside me—good-looking, about my age—was Francine Jarvis.
“And the other cardinal rule of this process”—and here he seemed to melt, to look imploringly, vulnerably up at us—“is that I’m your friend. Yep. It’s that simple. What we have here, yes, is an audition, but it’s also the beginning of a long and sincere … friendship.”
“Geeeeez,” muttered Francine.
“Any questions?” yelled Ira.
Someone from the back row: “Uh, Mr. Director—”
“Ira, please. And if you see me on the street, I would hope you’d stop me and say hello Ira, because look people…” He almost choked up. “I’m here for you. My ideas are a conduit, a platform for your talents. I’m nothing without you.”
(“He’s nothing anyway,” whispered Francine beside me.)
“You got that? Good,” he said, sitting down with his clipboard, having not answered whatever question the boy on the back row wanted to ask. “Now. We’ll start with a teamwork exercise. You are…” And then the artistry of his idea carried him to his feet again. “… You are a pond. Close your eyes. Yes, right now, close your eyes. It’s autumn. It’s autumn in the woods, in the woods near a pond. Can you see it? Now all of you are the pond. Now I’m going to take these Styrofoam balls … Ryke, where are my Styrofoam balls? Have you seen my Styrofoam balls?”
Ryke: “How would I know what you did with them? I guess wherever you left them.”
Ira, under his breath: “I was hoping for a spirit of cooperation, Ryke deeeeearest, but if you’re going to be sniffy about every little request—”
“Who’s being sniffy? You don’t value my input anyway. You’ve been blocking me, Ira. You’ve been blocking me all day—”
“I have not been blocking you. What makes you think I’m blocking you?”
“I’m not going to discuss it now.”
Then more tense whisperings passed between them, as we shuffled on stage. Ira was back soon enough:
“All right, you’re a pond—all of you the surface of the still autumnal pond. Now everyone stand in circles, touching—I want touching, I want connections…”
We connected.
Ira found his box of Styrofoam balls and pitched one after the other into various parts of our pond. We shimmied and jiggled and hula-ed pretending to be a rippling pond, depending on where the balls landed (that is, when Ira’s throws reached the stage).
“Next exercise…” Ira came from the wings with a ratty-looking blanket. “Everyone under the blanket! Ryke, will you help me spread this out?” Ryke reluctantly made his way to the stage, complaining at the lack of support, the blocking, there were denials of blocking, accusations of suppression, denials of suppression, and after a tense private three-minute meeting offstage, Ira returned all strained smiles, with instructions.
“We are now going to enact Evolution! You will be creatures progressing from the slime, on your bellies, crawling from under the blanket, and evolving, growing, changing…” As he said these words he evolved and allowed his gesturing hands to grow and change and flutter. “Some of you will be birds, some of you will evolve into mammals feeding your young, I want to see suckling, nurturing, we’ll see primates, some horses, some…” Ira seemed stuck for an animal.
“Gerbils,” suggested Ryke.
“Yes, gerbils,” cried Ira, enthusiastically. “I’m glad you contributed that, Ryke. Thank you, I want to thank you for your input.”
Ryke looked slightly mollified.
“What are you going to evolve to?” Francine asked me in a whisper. “I think I’ll be a kitty cat.”
Just as joylessly, I said I’d stay primordial slime—I mean, someone has to stay behind and be protozoa. I noticed a few auditionees slipping away toward the door.
“Everyone under the blanket!” yelled Ira. He then began to narrate the big bang, the history of the universe, the earth cooling down, volcanos erupting (he would erupt, making noises like: KUSSSHHHHH, BRRRRRRRGGGG, BOOOOMMMM), then the age of the dinosaurs, squawking beasts …
“Now everyone,” he said, coaching, “put the noises of your animal with your gestures…” The stage exploded in a melee of meows and moos and barks and grunts. “Yes! Yes! That’s wonderful! I see … yes, I see you, young man, that is a fine lion—beautiful roar—yes, you’ve thrown yourself into it … I see you’re going to attack that—what are you dear? An ibex? Yes, they attack, they kill—it’s the jungle!” The auditionees started rolling around pawing and scratching each other. All except Francine who was doubled over in laughter.
THEN we got to be circus performers and we all were free to pick what we were (I, fittingly, was a clown). THEN we were a machine and we had to touch each other and intercon
nect (I was a piston going up and down). THEN we were all sea creatures under the ocean (I decided to be a motionless bed of kelp). THEN we had to be forms and shapes—each of us had to be a gesture that expressed our innermost soul: “No blocking allowed!”
Ira clapped his hands after this to bring us to attention. Then he raised his hands high above his head so we could see the giant sweat stains on his T-shirt. “Bravo! Bravo! You’re working for me! Bravo, I say. There was some superb inter-relating—didn’t you think so, Ryke?”
Ryke, sulking again, barely audible: “Uh-huh.”
“And now,” said Ira, lifting himself, huffing and puffing, onstage. “Now, the centerpiece of Experience 27, like in 18 and 24 of the series, will be the Assumption of the Earth Chief, in which the Earth Chief, the prime Speaker, the bearer of the logos, is conveyed by the supporting tribe…” Far from the confusion I felt, some of my fellow auditionees were nodding seriously, understanding this drivel. “So what we’re after now is the bearing, the assumption of the master. Now I…” Ira cleared his throat, and shuffled a bit, “I will be the Master of Experience 27, re-creating my role of chieftain from 18 and 24 which had a similar processional—”
“It was Experience 17,” Ryke said from the orchestra seats.
“It was 18, Ryke,” snapped Ira. “I wrote it, I ought to know which experience it was—”
“Oh you’re always right, aren’t you? It was 17 where the troupe carried you around the stage and up and down the aisles—I’m sure of this Ira, because I helped co-write some of that.”
Ira, now irritated, repeatedly cleared his throat in short bursts: “No Ryke, if I’m not mistaken it was Experience 16 I allowed you to help me construct—”
“ALLOWED me?”
After Ryke eventually stormed off to the printer’s office (“I might be back tonight and then again I might not…”), Ira had himself picked up by the assembled auditionees and passed around between groups of people, who held him high as they could overhead. The auditionees were told to make a chanting wooooooing noise as they held him aloft, and Ira recited something like poetry: “We touch … we hold … we touch … we are a oneness … we celebrate the beingness of being…” This part of the audition came to a close when a fragile contingent of short men and slender women couldn’t support Ira’s weight and dropped him, all of them crumbling into a heap on the stage. Ira just laughed:
“Mercy me! These things happen…” Then he clutched the arm of one of the boys, ruffled his hair. “I love the physicality of the theater, the touching, the inter-relating…” He slapped the boy’s thigh, then put an arm around his shoulder.
Francine whispered: “Byyye-bye, Ira. Time to split.”
Yeah, let’s get out while we can, I said.
Francine and I walked to the subway stop together and we laughed about what had happened and shared all our other crackpot stories from auditions. I ventured we ought to get together sometime. She said yeah, wasn’t it a shame she had to rush off. I said, can I call you? She said yeah, sure, and had a pen in her purse but no paper. I hoped she’d write her phone number on the balled-up Kleenex and she did and gave it to me.
My first phone number in New York! You’d have thought I would have gone home and had it plated in gold, had it raised upon a DAIS, built a SHRINE for it, but instead I managed to lose it. I’m sure, by the way, Francine Jarvis was the Great Love of My Life—if I’d not lost that Kleenex, history would have changed, like Abraham we’d have founded a nation, a people …
There was the Time I was standing in line to go out onstage, and I made idle conversation with the guy before me and discovered we had the same audition piece. There was the Time the audition was a private audience with the director who explained how he could not direct someone he hadn’t known sexually at least once. There was the Time it was so hot and miserable backstage waiting to be called, that I fell asleep and missed my audition slot. There were countless times that I traveled down to the theater to learn the play was cast, the audition was canceled, my résumé (all lies) didn’t get by the audition manager.
There was the Time I Walked Out of An Audition:
There was this petite little blond woman who went onstage before me. We were auditioning for this experimental work and the call was for lots of young people. Here we were.
“All right, love,” said the director, this paunchy man in a flowered shirt, a gold chain around his neck, rose-colored sunglasses, very earnest, very pleading. “Tell me about yourself, Diane…”
“Uh, don’t you want me to do my piece?”
“No, I don’t, dear. Tell me about yourself.”
This revealed that the girl had been brought up in Jersey, went to high school, got started in acting, she and her mother still lived in Weehawken—”
“Your mother’s divorced?” asked the director.
“No,” she said, “my father passed away—”
“How?”
She looked around as if for support. “Well he, uh, had cancer. Lung cancer. He was a heavy smoker, he—”
“Did you love him?”
“Well yes, I—”
“Did you tell him? Before he died?”
She was a bit irritated now. “Well yes, I did but I don’t see what this all has to do with—”
“Tell me about the night he died. I want to hear about it.” The girl was quiet a minute. “If you can’t share pain, if you can’t bring us inside your life, the door’s over there, you have no place in this production.” The girl cleared her throat. “Go ahead, leave if you want to—”
“No, it’s all right,” she began unsurely. “My father—”
“You didn’t call him Dad?”
“No, not really. We said Father in our family—”
“You weren’t close to him were you? You were distant, you were a stranger when he died.”
“No,” she said defensively, “it wasn’t a perfect relationship but I’m sure he knew I loved him—”
“Not if you didn’t tell him, baby!”
“What the hell business is it of yours?”
The director, now energized, laughed. “That’s right—fight me, fight me. Come on—tell me you loved him and he knew it all his life. You wanna fight, we’ll fight…”
This director closed in and intimidated and needled her into telling him about the night of her father’s death and as tears rolled down her cheeks she mentioned that since she had been caught as a teenager in bed with a boyfriend by her father that he had never been warm to her and he had always preferred her little sister for some reason …
“Say it, say it!” said the director, who must have thought these catharses were important, that he was doing good necessary work.
“I never said I loved him,” she sobbed, breaking down and bending over, holding herself.
I left before my turn.
The Time I Almost Got a Role but Walked Away:
“That’s great!” yelled the director in this particular audition, a young wiry man with a pointed beard. “I don’t have to see any more.” He pointed at me. “I don’t care if you can act. I want someone who looks like you—I want your body type, your looks. I don’t care if you’re a grocery clerk.”
Gee, thanks a lot.
“Now let’s get Pamela out here—Pamela!” Pamela, I gathered was my possible co-star. “Pamela, this is…” The director checked his clipboard. “This is Gilbert Freeman. Kiss him.”
Pamela kissed me, without hesitation. “Okay, Mr. Limpermann.”
She had flat, bitter breath, this big groping teethy mouth—
“And again and again and again…”
More kissing. Pamela groaned with pretend passion. It seemed like bad porn-film acting to me.
“Are you hot for her, Gilbert? You want her, you have to have her, here, right here on the stage!”
I thought he just meant figuratively.
Pamela started unbuttoning her blouse.
WAAAAIIIIT a minute, I say. I didn’t think th
is was a production with nude scenes.
“It may be, it may not be, I have to see,” said the wiry director, all seriousness. “I have to see if you work together. Can you make heat for me, people?”
I said my clothes were not coming off and I was not copulating with Pamela onstage, I was sorry. And everyone looked at me as if I was some fugitive axe-murderer. Look New York, I didn’t want to be psychoanalyzed, I didn’t want to cry, I didn’t want to screw onstage, I didn’t want to show my naked body, I didn’t want to sleep with all the directors in town. Acting? You remember acting, don’t you? The thing they do onstage? The thing auditions—I assumed—were all about? ISN’T ANYONE IN 1975 INTERESTED IN MY ACTING TALENT?
The Time I Got Asked to Leave the Stage:
I had seen a part advertised for someone in their mid-thirties for a family drama and I got it into my head that, weary and defeated as I was, I could convince people I was early thirties. Quite horribly, I had this idea it was perfectly zany and wild and one-of-those-experiences to audition for something I wasn’t quite right for. If it paid off then it was one of those gutsy moves you hear about, one of those audacious famous auditions, like Brando’s. I acted my little heart out, I gave them anger, rage, hurt, pride—
“Excuse me,” said the director, clapping his hand on the back of his clipboard, now standing, looking angry. I suspect I’ve done something wrong here and so I quit acting.
“You’re answering the ad in Backstage?”
Uh, yes sir, I—
“You don’t look thirty-five with ten years of marriage under your belt.”
Well I think I could play—
“Little boy, you can’t convince me you’re SIXTEEN—you’ve got a baby face, anyone ever tell you that? If there was a role up for a fourteen-year-old I’d be happy to see you … How old are you?”
Uh twenty-five, I lie, adding four years.
“Oh great, twenty-five!” said the director, laughing a he-is-not-really-amused laugh. “What’s your name?”
Gil Freeman, sir and I—
“You are wasting our time, Gil Freeman, and we don’t have a lot of time. We said thirty-five, we meant thirty-five. Do you know how to read? Learning how to read will help you in this business…” And he went on, sarcastic, grouchy, tired at the end of his long day, not abusive enough to make me dismiss him as a jerk, but just abusive enough to make me dismiss me as a jerk for being there. I just wanted to die and be quietly buried back in Oak Park.
Emma Who Saved My Life Page 6