A Comedy & a Tragedy

by Travis Hugh Culley

  The commedia dell’arte popularized character clowns with names, relationships, even genealogies. Punch and Judy come from this tradition. The clowns Romeo and Juliette come from this tradition. But the most beloved clown in the Renaissance was the child servant Arlequino, a slave taken from his family in Ethiopia. His innocence was what made Arlequino so endearing, but he was more than endearing. Like that of an early Charlie Chaplin, his innocence could be ironic or subversive. He could even be a critic. He was uneducated, untaught, but he was not without his wits or wiles. His naïf humor was understood by all who were acquainted, and it got him into all sorts of trouble. His illiteracy, his lack of education, became the premise of more than one scenario. Arlequino would be sent with letters because he could not read them. Arlequino, was always sincere, was charged with stealing a loaf of bread, even when he had been given it. He was often made the scapegoat, and yet he never doubted his friends. Why would he? His happiness came from the belief that everything he was told was true.

  Arlequino suffered, and he knew the whip, but he seemed to have no ability to sense the injury of servitude or his estrangement from family. He had moments of sadness and moments of glee. Had he been assigned by royalty, he’d have been a page. Like a page, he left his home without grief or remorse, and accepted his servitude under Pantalone. He was a fool inasmuch as he now believed himself wealthy. He had horses to feed, and stables to clean. He had friends who loved him and reciprocated his affection for humanity.

  One day, Pierrot and Colombina are going to the ball when they find Arlequino cleaning. Children as they are, they wonder why it is that Arlequino was not invited. He doesn’t know. The friends find his absence unacceptable, and the scenario then develops around the problem that the servant boy has nothing to wear. The friends gather, and their solution is extraordinary. Each of the children going commits a swatch of his or her gown so that from them an outfit for Arlequino can be fashioned. At the ball, all of the children arrive with diamond shapes cut out of their own garments. At the center of the ball is Arlequino dancing, wearing only the patches he’d been given. This is the origin of the diamond-patterned costume that universally distinguishes this prince of fools.

  My audition for New World took place on the third floor of a downtown building. I stood in knee-high matching white Converse high-tops bound up tightly with a red lace on the left shoe and a black lace on the right. I wore a pair of green pants, a blue-and-purple plaid shirt, and a colored bandanna on each wrist. I waited in the hall with fifteen other students who were quietly reciting their lines, practicing their gestures, and walking through their auditions. No one talked. We were too nervous. When my name was called from the doorway, I found nine teachers seated along one wall of a small carpeted room. These were my “jurors.” I said hello and gave my name. I said I would be playing the part of Stony, from Marco Polo Sings a Solo, a play by John Guare. The monologue is absurd, but meaningfully. Stony, who you think must be stoned or at least a bit off his rocker, rants enthusiastically that scientists have had the wrong idea about the intelligence of vegetables. By the end of it, he says that human beings are plants, arguing that:

  We are what we grow out of.

  The nine jurors looked back at me, coldly. They each had a name tag. “Cindy” looked at “Andy,” “Jim” looked at “David.” Then “Dr. J” asked me: “Could you please do the piece again? A little slower this time.”

  I turned, left the room, and walked back up the hallway. When the door closed, I then took a breath and repeated my entrance—this time to some laughter: “Hello, my name is Travis and I will be performing the part of Stony from Marco Polo Sings a Solo…” They sat with me through the whole routine again, chuckling. After I was done, there was a little interview. I was asked a few simple questions, like why I had laced my shoes up that way. I said they were lucky I had matched my shoes at all. “I usually don’t.”

  “Fair enough,” one teacher said.

  Another asked me to tell them about the character I’d been performing.

  “Stony? Um, he’s one of those guys who are too smart for their own good,” I said. “He sees that everything is connected to everything else, and that, for him, is sometimes…too much information.”

  “Too much information?” one teacher laughed.

  “But that’s who Stony is,” I said. “To him, even a flower can be too much information.”

  After being excused, I heard one of them say: “I like him. He’s cute.” I was in.

  Mother came back from Daytona depleted. There had been no funeral. A brief mention was made of Uncle B.J. by a priest where he had been given Communion. Grandmother and Grandfather sat in the pew together. He asked my mother not to make him cry. B.J. was cremated, placed in an urn, and then put away in a closet. B.J.’s death was too much to deal with, and now it was spring. Things were changing. Mother had gotten a new job as an employee counselor at a big telecommunications company. She bought a new wardrobe, did her hair, and decided to quit smoking. She’d always hated cigarettes, she said. From the first puff, she lost all ability to smell. She couldn’t tell good meat from rotten meat, and often handed us plates of food to test. When she came home from a twelve-step program bearing flowers she was hoping to catch a hint of their aroma.

  When I asked if there had been any news, she said, “Of what?”

  “Of B.J.? Does anyone know if he killed himself or not?” I asked rather bluntly. I thought there might have been some investigation.

  Mother, surprised by the question, reminded me that there needn’t be any more discussion of our uncle B.J.

  “Why is that?”

  “Kill yourself, that’s what you’ll get.”

  “Mom?”

  “That’s what happens.”

  In some way, my name would also be taboo that season. When the list of accepted students had first been circulated within the school system—I would learn this much later—my former acting coach from Norland called the offices of New World School of the Arts and raised her concern. “You cannot be accepting Travis Culley,” she said. “It really wouldn’t be good for the school.” According to her description, I was unruly, undisciplined, and a constant source of distraction. She said I’d only be a troublemaker.

  The administrator who received the call explained that she would have had to be on the selection committee to influence the names on the list. She was not on that committee, and therefore she could not influence their decisions. The list was published with no changes.

  On the day of orientation at New World, I rode the city bus downtown. I arrived early and took a seat in the back of the auditorium. I worried I would be surrounded by strangers. Then I saw Elaini and Valerie from the bus ride to Norland. There was Avi, Bruce, Adam, even Elida and Claudia, the dancers who’d performed with the juggling troupe, traveling from school to school with me in the seventh grade. These were my friends, all of whom I had missed dearly. I ran to them. I was a bit taller, darker, my hair was longer, but I was embraced by my friends as the same innocent page I used to be.

  New World was located in the heart of downtown, spread out among seven or eight different buildings on Second Street and First Avenue. Our academic classes took place in the buildings of a partnering institution, Miami Dade Community College. The theater department was located with the music department inside an old bank building off campus. The dance department had studios in a warehouse across the street. The art department was in a vacant Chinese restaurant. In this odd arrangement of buildings I had access to some of the best art and academic teachers in the school system. We’d been brought together from all over the county to share our skills, to discover the potential of our collaboration, and to develop our talents in this unique conservatory training program.

  At New World we could say what we wanted, do what we wanted, and imagine the reality of anything we could dream. In exchange, we would have to be committed to developing in our chosen disciplines. I had to be willing to be at school from early
in the morning until late at night, attending rehearsals and performances. There were few breaks, no sports, and little rest. This would be the case for all students, and it was the only realistic strategy for success. The reverse was also true: the surest chance of failure belonged to that student who, for behavioral or academic reasons, showed a wavering commitment. I could be cut for having anything below a C average. I could be cut for excessive absences. I could be cut by the theater department if I did not maintain a standard of excellence or show some growth throughout the year. In each department, there would be juries at which we were expected to perform at our highest level in front of a board of our teachers. This was when our progress would be formally measured. Barbara Anders, one of our two school counselors, was blunt. She knew what a thin line there was between being original and being “a problem.” Our very existence as students here would hinge upon how we would navigate this “slippery slope.”

  To support our originality, and to give us seriousness as students, we were given no dress codes and no bells between classes. There would be no more hall passes, ever! As students, we would be essentially set free. Sylvan Seidenman, the other counselor, spoke up about the meaning of “freedom” in this context. “You come to class if, every day, you think you belong in this environment and you want this chance.” Alan Weiss, the principal, said that we would need to help keep the school’s image healthy and focused. We were in a “fishbowl,” he said, and “everyone was watching.” He and Richard Klein had built New World on the model of the LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts.

  I came home vindicated. Before my mother and brother, before my father too when we’d visit him, I had accomplished the impossible. By all accounts, my method worked. One way or another, I had gone from being an illiterate nobody to being one of the luckiest kids in the nation.

  I returned to Thomas Jefferson, eager to tell my friends about my new school, but Gene-John’s desk was empty. Over lunch, Ray told me. Again, he’d been outnumbered. This time Gene-John had been leaving school. As the door locked behind him, four older kids trespassing on the property cornered him by the doors of the administration hall and started taunting. Their slaps turned into punches. Gene-John knocked on the doors for help, while the others tried to wrestle him to the ground. He shook them off and started pounding at the little window in the metal doorframe. In three punches, he cracked the window, shattering the glass, and began bending out the metal screen. With one arm inside, he found the breakaway bar and pulled the door open, shouting for help. The doors of the administration offices locked one after another all the way down to the library.

  “Why won’t you help me?” he cried, as the outsiders followed him in, fists clenched and swinging. Gene-John did not swing back. Instead he put his hand through the safety glass of the red box on the wall and took hold of the fire extinguisher. By the end of the fight, all four were running away from the schoolyard, but Gene-John kept swinging, throwing the cold cylinder at the fluorescent lights that hung in the ceiling, shattering the plastic diffuser and exploding the bulbs. He continued down the hallway, wrecking everything he could with the red tank until there were no lights, only white fumes billowing out of the doorways. I saw the wreckage, and I finished the year wearing black high-tops, talking to nobody.

  New World’s first official day of school was like a festival. I walked through the busy crosswalks and navigated the sidewalks speckled with working people, traffic cops, and homeless people. Then I was surrounded by artists, kids with blue and purple hair, denim jeans pinned together with safety pins, striped and brightly colored socks and shoes. A mohawk walked through the crowd. Skirts, shorts, and tank tops gathered around the entranceway. There were musicians who looked like artists, artists who looked like actors, actors who looked like dancers, and dancers who looked like musicians. Of the four hundred students who began the program, each was unique in some way.

  Immediately, I knew this was a place that did more than take learning seriously. It was developing new pedagogies. The teachers saw each student as a future educator, or as someone like themselves who would be able to create lasting works of art. The teachers understood this power. Many of them were professional artists themselves. Even the academic teachers were creative people. They had been chosen from all across the district, like the students had. The curse of Mr. Orsini had finally, and completely, been lifted.

  Now, I met Mrs. Leone. She talked about the meaning of found work, the inescapability of childhood as a subject, and even the shapes of books. At one point, Mrs. Leone showed us what a book was. There was a problem: most of the books in class had been written in already. She borrowed a sketchbook from Guy Samuels and opened it to a blank page. She held the book by its spine. “See this? If you imagine yourself standing here on one side of the page and you look across the fold to the other side of the page, you see the day coming.” She took hold of one piece of paper and demonstrated by flipping the page. “The next day you stand in the same position you were in, and you see the day coming. Every day is like every other.” She kept turning pages. “The book was built as a calendar to explain the passing of days, how it is that the sun passes over the plate of the earth. Any planet in our solar system passes over the earth this way, so anyone can read a book as though planning on a future event or horizon.”

  Like Mrs. Leone, many teachers would allow us to turn in our assignments in creative formats, and, because of this, I could pass as an average student, whatever average meant here.

  Between classes, students would gather into small groups, free-styling, imitating our teachers, or performing musical numbers. In the afternoon, a parade of clowns, we went to our acting classes to have all those charms met with critique.

  It was difficult to hide my fear of reading from my acting teachers. They were training us to take a piece of writing and translate every word of it into action. They saw behind the process. In every way, the theater was a threshold for learning literacy because it depended upon a full and exact understanding of actions.

  In Cindy Gold’s class we were to choose a sonnet by William Shakespeare and memorize it. She handed out long pieces of paper on which sonnets had been formatted so that each was about the size of a cookie. I clung to this paper, curious about these poems that I could see and investigate all in the blink of an eye. Cindy said, “Acting is more than reading. Acting is about unlocking the meaning behind words, and sometimes that means choosing. Make a choice, and don’t hold back.”

  Ellen Davis, in her infinite humor, sashayed about the classroom with a scarf, reciting Hamlet’s soliloquy to the actors. She was our voice teacher and had a kind of immortality born from the fact that, in the arts, people who have been through very difficult times often thrive. Ellen was a survivor of the Holocaust, and in class she was sprightly, charming, and totally irreverent.

  She showed up one day in a poppy-red dress and red shoes, which bore a remarkable likeness to the poppy red of our plastic chairs and the color of one wall. She danced around the middle of the room, illustrating how easy it is to be theatrical if you are aware of your environment. She stood back. “Don’t I look wonderful?” We cheered. “If you are talented or not, if you are beautiful or if you are disgusting, one choice is all it takes to be theatrical.”

  In Ellen’s class, we all waltzed about talking to each other with excessive diction. It was infectious, really. Soon, classmates began calling each other “good fellow” and “Syrah!”

  “To the latrine, my fellow!”

  “Alack! Thrice forth we go!”

  “My kingdom for a toilet!”

  “Verily!”

  “A toilet! A toilet!”

  I leapt, pirouetting through the halls kicking a footbag, a page of Shakespeare crumpled in one hand.

  The Allegory of the Cave

  The first year at New World had been something more than a cornucopia of artistic experiences. Being a student here meant becoming more sophisticated about the nature of conve
ntions. There was always another way to look at things—you simply had to borrow another set of eyes. To hear voices was to have a gift. In a theater lecture by our dean, Jorge Guerra, a Peruvian avant-gardist of international renown, we were told about Plato’s allegory of the cave: “Imagine three people sitting in a room with no windows. They’ve lived there all their lives…” When he got to the part about one person getting up from his chair and walking out of the room, experiencing form and shape for the first time, kids were sitting at the edges of their seats. “Everything was different,” he said. “There were whole new dimensions available to perception, to thinking and feeling. There was body, form, a source of all of the voices they’d been hearing in the cave. All of the mysteries had been laid bare.”

  At home, as long as I left on time and returned as expected, it didn’t matter what I did at school. With Dad gone, Mom had assumed absolute command. There could be no visitors, no friends in the house, no disobedience. She had gone from being the gentle negotiator to being the sole ruler and enforcer. There was no turning back. She was still in a streak of panic. She wore fret on her face, and cursed my father, telling me at one point that she hoped I would never forgive him. She resented being locked into a mortgage with two teenage boys to feed.

  I thought she should try to accept the situation; Joe and I weren’t that much of a burden these days. We were making our own money. I had gotten a job selling novelty gifts at the mall. Joe had gotten a position at Sears selling televisions. But ten months of traveling between home, school, and our places of work meant cutting back on certain graces. I walked in the door, tatterdemalion, unwilling to share the news of my happy day.