Revenge of the Nerd

by Curtis Armstrong

  He was just the first, though. We had started with thirty students and by the time we had graduated in the spring of 1975, there were fewer than twenty of us, and we were so close we couldn’t imagine life without the others. But it’s been years, even decades since I’ve spoken to any of them. I don’t imagine a day passes, though, that I don’t think about them.

  By the time I left the Academy in April 1975 as a member of the Studio Company, I had performed in plays from Eugene O’Neill to Ben Jonson; from Arthur Schnitzler and Chekov to Shakespeare. I was a passable stage fighter, proficient in mask work of all kinds, had created my own clown—whose name was Sharkey, and who I never found particularly funny—and was actually something of an expert in commedia dell arte. I had gone into the Academy completely unable to dance. I left the same way.

  But I had also met Terence Kilburn, the associate dean of the Academy and then artistic director of Meadow Brook Theatre. Terry had been a child star on radio and in Hollywood and I had recognized him instantly as the original Tiny Tim in the classic Reginald Owen A Christmas Carol, and from the Robert Donat version of Goodbye Mr. Chips. He has also been featured as Billy, the very wise and tactful page, in the 1939 Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce version of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. He was a gentle, kind man with a welcoming presence, and a world of stage and film experience. I liked him instantly and he was to prove instrumental in the next step in my journey.

  MEADOW BROOK THEATRE/ROADSIDE ATTRACTIONS

  1975–1976

  Sometime around the middle of our second year at the Academy, one of my classmates and I hatched a plan to form our own theater company after graduation. The core company would consist of those of our class who chose to join us. Others would be welcomed in after undergoing an abbreviated form of that which we had undergone. It would be called Roadside Attractions and would be itinerant at first, performing at art fairs, Renaissance festivals and anywhere else that would have us, for nothing. Eventually, the dream went, we’d have our own theater, where we would perform a combination of new plays and classics, modern and ancient, which would be directed by the very teachers who had just spent two years directing and instructing us. What could go wrong?

  As it happened, nothing did. We were driven and inspired by that sixties/early seventies spirit of independent and political action, which often found expression in just this sort of hand-to-mouth theatrical adventure, from Steppenwolf to the San Francisco Mime Troupe. Our teachers agreed to direct and, in some cases, continue to teach workshops, for free. Some of our company chose to go their own way, but around half of the class joined us. We were all just brimming with confidence and idealism. We had our youth and health and strength and were confident that, if nothing else, starving together would be better than starving alone.

  Lavinia Whitworth was my co-conspirator in this scheme. While we were technically co-founders of Roadside Attractions, there was never any question who was the real brains of the operation and it was Lavinia. She was several years older than most of us, far more experienced in life and art. She was funny, knowledgeable, bawdy and driven. A good actor but probably even a better director.

  Lavinia and I spent our last few weeks at the Academy scouring downtown Detroit for our theater. We came up empty. Even downtown, the rents were out of our league, enough so that we realized we didn’t really have a league to start with. Eventually we decided to take a chance on the overall-more-arts-friendly city of Ann Arbor. We had no better luck there, until one day we were hired—actually hired—to do a clown act for children at a run-down suburban mall called Arbor Land, located halfway between Ann Arbor and an adjoining college town, Ypsilanti. It had been built in the 1950s with all the design touches that miserable decade had to offer. It was an outdoor proposition, with absolutely nothing whatsoever to commend it except that in the very center of the place were a set of steps leading down to a storage/meeting room area, which we felt would serve us very well as a lobby and black box theater.

  It had probably, at one time, been an air-raid shelter. The walls were made of metal, there were no wings, the acoustics were horrible, it probably sat fifty people on metal folding chairs. It was hot in the summer, freezing in the winter, impossible for audiences to find, and we would have to take all of our belongings with us at the end of every day, props, costumes—even the set. But it was rent-free. It was perfect.

  We took possession immediately and began work on our first “main stage” production, a revue based on the cartoon strips of Jules Feiffer. There was a similar revue already running in small theaters around the country, but it had played New York and we knew the royalty payments would be out of the question. Rather than do it anyway, and trust that no one would ever find out, we assembled a completely new set of strips and gave it a new title: Feiffer in the Flesh. I wrote a letter to Feiffer’s representative at the time, told him what the deal was and could he give us a break on the royalties. He wrote back giving us permission to use the material saying only that, in return, Jules would appreciate a letter thanking him and telling him how it all worked out.

  (A couple decades later, I contacted Feiffer again, asking for an original strip of his choosing that would be sold at a fund-raiser for the Fund for the Feminist Majority, a feminist organization based here in Los Angeles that I’ve long been associated with. The strip arrived practically return mail, with no conditions—even a thank-you letter—attached. They don’t make them like Jules Feiffer anymore.)

  Everyone took what part-time jobs they could get to sustain themselves. Aiming high as always, I started as a day laborer, down around the railroad tracks. A bunch of us would gather there before dawn, glowering at our shoes, smoking cigarettes and grunting monosyllabically, waiting for someone to show up with an open truck to take us someplace to do something. We were paid in cash and it was just enough to keep us in cigarettes.

  Then I became a janitor at a little art gallery/framing store on Main Street, but as you can imagine, there wasn’t a lot for a janitor to do in an art gallery, so I got another custodial job at a women’s clothing store at the new mall just off the 94 freeway. I can’t recall the name of it, but a women’s clothing store gave me a chance to express myself. In no time, I had gone from cleaning toilets to dressing and undressing the mannequins in the window. This was handy because at last I was able to figure out how the snaps on brassieres worked. It wasn’t really practical experience, though, as the mannequin wasn’t trying to undress me at the same time and I wasn’t doing it in the dark.

  We all roomed together in various houses and apartments around Ann Arbor, and one of my most memorable was a room at the top of a condemned house on Fifth Street just off the railroad tracks that boasted a wider variety of vermin than I’d ever seen. The wall-to-wall green shag carpeting extended into the kitchen and had, on close inspection, not been cleaned since the Eisenhower administration. The resulting rich mixture of cooking grease, smoke, rodent feces and generations of food and alcohol ground deep into the pile made up an aroma better imagined than lived with. The constant rumbling of the adjacent trains made sleep a theoretical concept, and appeared to be literally shaking the house down around us. The last straw for me came one night when I arose from my mattress in the early hours for a drink of water. I heard a crash that shook the house and on returning to my room found a large wall unit had crashed onto the bed.

  I moved into Lavinia’s unfinished basement, where I slept on a mattress. During rainstorms, a sort of young river flowed past my bed, gathering in a still lagoon at the far end of the room. There were no lights, and I used an oil lamp when writing, which added to the sense of mid-nineteenth-century squalor. In Ann Arbor, as Sherlockians might put it, it was always 1895.

  We had set out to do eclectic theater, and eclectic we were. After the Feiffer show, we went on to Carlo Goldoni’s commedia play The Servant of Two Masters. But at this point, fate intervened in the person of Terry Kilburn of Meadow Brook Theatre.

  Kilburn had planned to
open his 1975 season at Meadow Brook Theatre with A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Of Shakespeare’s fairy band, the part of Oberon was given to the flamboyant audience favorite, Eric Tavares, that of Titania to New York actor Susanne Peters, and the part of Puck to me.

  This period of late summer 1975 marks the real beginning of my acting career. I had just finished two years of intense technical training and was only months into the establishment of Roadside Attractions. Being offered a role like Puck at a regional theater like Meadow Brook may sound like watered whiskey to some, but to me it was utter intoxication.

  Our production of The Servant of Two Masters had actually garnered some attention in Ann Arbor. One night we were seen by a local man who was looking to open a dinner theater in his nearby restaurant, the Spaghetti Bender. He decided, bless his heart, that a bawdy, partially improvised eighteenth-century Italian Renaissance commedia dell arte production was just what his patrons were looking for and booked us. So just months into our existence, we were being paid to perform an original production in a dinner theater.

  I was playing the lead in Servant, the titular wise and unscrupulous servant, Arlechino. The part was physically demanding, like doing a combination of dance and stand-up for two hours a night. With Midsummer Night’s Dream, my weeks became ridiculously full.

  Since I was technically a “local hire,” Terry Kilburn was under no obligation to put me up in the theater’s housing, so I was still sleeping, if you can call it that, in Ann Arbor. Midsummer didn’t open until the beginning of September, but we had full rehearsal days six days a week for almost a month. So I would get up in Ann Arbor in the morning, drive two hours to Rochester to start rehearsals at 10:00 a.m., work until 5:00 p.m. and then drive to Ypsilanti for curtain at 7:30, then drive back to Ann Arbor for bed. Then up again to do it all again until our contract at the Spaghetti Bender finally concluded just days before the first night of Midsummer Night’s Dream.

  None of the actors in the Meadow Brook productions were stars. Most of them you have never seen or heard of. Many of them, though, were known all over the country in the regional/repertory and summer theater circuit. This web of small-to-medium-sized theaters and opera houses was the bread and butter for stage actors of the time. Even small towns and universities had them, professional and semi-professional houses that booked union actors for one show, or six, paying them a sustaining wage, if not a living one. Many New York–based actors never set foot on a Gotham stage, because they were too busy traveling: doing productions in Cincinnati, seasons in Fort Lauderdale, from Rochester, Michigan, to Rochester, New York, from Providence, Rhode Island, to Fayetteville, Pennsylvania—any town that boasted a stage, a bed and paid Equity minimum. If you had the talent and the luck and the commitment, you could go months, even years, working regularly, if not constantly. When you weren’t working, thanks to the union, there was unemployment compensation. It wouldn’t be much but it would help hold you over until the next theater called.

  Here are some names: Eric Tavares, Cheryl Giannini, Robert Grossman, John Peakes, Jim Corrigan, Fred Thompson, Peter McRobbie, Richard Riehle, Bill LeMassena, Booth Coleman, G. Wood, Jeanne Arnold, Susanne Peters, George Gitto, Paul Barry, Michael Allinson, Michael Egan, Kevin O’Reilly, Jack Aranson, Ian Stuart. I wanted to be these people. Well, some of them I didn’t really want to be, but I wanted their lives, their stories and their experience.

  I was able to romanticize their lives even as I saw the loneliness, bitterness and jealousy that absorbed some of them. I was consumed with wanting a life like theirs even when I saw aging ex-soap stars furtively consuming flasks of alcohol during shows; hearing wonderfully funny anecdotes about third, fourth, even fifth marriages shot to hell. Even while seeing, and occasionally indulging in, sexual liaisons rooted in boredom, sadness or even contempt.

  And the drinking, to one degree or another, was an indelible part of the culture. Most of us managed it well enough but during one production at Meadow Brook years later, I got a bleak lesson in one of the road’s most insidious traps.

  One of the actors I worked with during those years was an American, but one who had numerous credits in London and Dublin as well. His marriage—which one or to whom I can’t recall—had ended and his daughter, maybe fourteen at most, lived most of the time with her mother. This man was a drinker, and a world-class one. None of us objected because usually he was wonderful company when he was drunk. Which was, like many of us, most of the time he wasn’t on stage.

  Then his daughter came to visit for a few days. He was on his best behavior during her stay. He’d go back to his trailer after the show with his sweet girl and was basically the perfect dad. Didn’t even have a drink in his room. Until about two o’clock one morning when he cracked and showed up at my door, pale, shaking and begging for a bottle. Not a drink, he said, a bottle. To go. And behind him, stricken, with tears in her eyes was his child, looking imploringly at me, shaking her head and mouthing, “No. Please.”

  Some times were harder to romanticize than others.

  It would be a few years before I could truly claim to have joined their ranks, but this was the world I aspired to. Not the sodden, broken alcoholic side, nor the side that saw the future as an endless series of lonely hotel rooms, broken families and missed opportunities. For me there was nothing but hope in my future. Meadow Brook was the first brick-and-mortar stage that I would call home but it wouldn’t be the last. Just a whiff of the unmistakable backstage scent would brighten my eyes and flood endorphins into my brain. I already had a work ethic, but working with these people taught me a thing or two about onstage discipline, at least. Thanks to them, I learned what “professionalism” really meant. It was a lesson that many young actors who got their start in film or television never had the chance to learn, but you couldn’t survive in the theater without it.

  As important as my teachers like Will Young and Duane Thompson were; as valuable as Russell Grandstaff and Dan Fleishhacker had been at university; as essential as Liz Orion and Alex Gray, Jessica Woods and Jim Tompkins and Al Ruscio and Ron Mangravite, Kate Williamson and Kate Fitzmaurice had been at the Academy, it was the people I started working with at Meadow Brook and many other theaters who were to be my most important mentors.

  I went back to Roadside Attractions with the same passion and determination I had had from the beginning, but Meadow Brook had proved a watershed moment. It would be two years before Terry hired me again, by which time I had moved to New York and already started performing in showcases and small off-off-Broadway productions. But once he did, I started working regularly, for money that mostly paid the rent. There were national tours on the horizon and bigger theaters. Regional theaters and summer theaters and repertory theaters. The theater had ceased being something possible I played with and had become something definite I had chosen. Fortunately, it had chosen me, too.

  I would eventually become a member of the Colonnades Theatre Lab, where I was featured in a well-received Wolf Mankowitz play, The Irish Hebrew Lesson. I would do a national tour of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Hugh Leonard drama Da; then a pre-Broadway tryout of the Colonnades cult sensation Moliere in Spite of Himself, with the great Richard Kiley, which closed out of town. With each of these, the auditions got bigger. In time I was reading for Broadway plays, though managing to avoid being cast in any of them. Some of these, like the one-on-one with playwright Peter Shaffer on the Broadhurst stage to replace Tim Curry in Amadeus, were so exhilarating I didn’t even care about losing the part.

  I loved the theater past expression. I loved it with the irrational fullness that made the prospect of being even in a “quality” motion picture seem like the worst kind of selling out. As for television, well, there existed in the U.S. no TV show fine enough for me to appear in. And commercials were things that we “trained actors” didn’t even acknowledge. That’s the kind of theater fundamentalist I had become.

  A period of about three and a half years took me from the Academy of Dramatic Art, to th
e co-founding of Roadside Attractions, to the move to New York. My future as a stage actor appeared written in indelible ink, its arc an inevitable thing.

  Except, it wasn’t.

  ENTR’ACTE

  NEW YORK—1976

  My decision to leave Roadside Attractions and start my career in New York in earnest was made scientifically: by taking a 1976 calendar, closing my eyes and jabbing my finger down on an arbitrary date. It was August 11.

  I must have really wanted to go. Money was still tight, but I had at least the potential of a growing career as a regional stage actor in Michigan. Roadside Attractions had suffered from chronic income deficits and some internecine conflicts, but there were discussions of moving to an actual theater in Detroit, which was promising. There were a lot of reasons to stay.

  And yet it was on August 11, 1976, that I arrived, friendless, in New York, a city I had never so much as visited. My way had been smoothed somewhat by Susanne Peters, who had played Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Susanne lived in a sixth-floor cold-water apartment on Sullivan Street in the Village, with a bathtub in the kitchen and a toilet in the hall outside. She was going on a tour for over a year with the John Houseman Company and needed someone to sublet the place and look after her cat. Nevertheless, despite having a roof over my head, I’m not sure I could’ve made the move in cold blood.

  I arrived at LaGuardia on a beautiful summer afternoon and took my seat on the shuttle to Grand Central. As I looked out the window, a man with the largest penis I had ever seen was peeing on my bus. Tourists were taking pictures of it. The shock of seeing an appendage of that size caused the symbolism of the act itself to elude me completely.