Attack of the Theater People

by Marc Acito

  There it all is, everything I need to turn Chad in to the feds, and I have no way to tape it. I’m a failure as a spy. I’m a failure as an actor. And, what’s worse—what’s far, far worse—I’m a failure as a human being. Because of my stupidity and greed, I helped Chad get information that made money for Rich Whiteman, the religious wing nut who would rather see people like me dead.

  Suddenly I feel like I’m going to be sick, like there’s something gnawing at my gut, trying to devour me from the inside out. Gavin signals for the check, then just makes it worse by assuming the best, telling me it’s a good thing I got away from this creep before he tried to turn me into a spy.

  Our Specials Tonight returns, handing Gavin his credit card. “I’m sorry, Rabbi O’Casey,” he says, “but your card has been rejected.”

  Gavin’s face goes slack, like a marionette whose puppeteer suddenly had a stroke.

  “That’s all right, vaiter,” I say. “Ve can use mine.” I pull my credit card out of my wallet and hand it to him.

  “Thank you, Rabbi…Zanni.”

  As soon as he’s left, Gavin says, “I thought you said you didn’t have any money.”

  “I don’t. Let’s go.”

  We rise and make our way to the door.

  “Excuse me,” Our Specials Tonight calls across the room. “Excuse me!”

  “Faster,” I say, but, being deaf, Gavin doesn’t hear me.

  “Stop them!”

  I push on Gavin’s back and two renegade rabbis tumble onto the sidewalk. We both seem to understand that this is the kind of neighborhood where the cops come right away, so we dash across Lexington Avenue, a taxi screeching to a halt and blaring its horn.

  As we round the corner I start shedding clothes, pulling off my hat, coat, and prayer shawl, then yanking at the curls bobby-pinned to my head, pulling fistfuls of fake hair off my face. Seeing me, Gavin does the same. By the time we reach the subway, shivering in our shirtsleeves, we look like two sweaty waiters on their way home from work. Tomorrow morning, the residents of East Sixty-ninth Street are going to find a trail of Hasidic couture and wonder why two of God’s chosen people suddenly evaporated. A Rabbi Rapture.

  The following day I call the credit card company and tell them I left my card at 47th Street Photo and, when I went back to get it, it wasn’t there.

  “Sure,” Natie says, “blame the Jews. Everyone else does.”

  In the weeks that follow, I stake out Chad so I can “accidentally” run into him and record an incriminating conversation about his trading of Hibbert & Howard.

  It’s not as easy as it sounds.

  Every afternoon I go to the coffee shop in the lobby of his office building, getting jacked on refills while masses of humanity pour out, cascading down the steps and into the ground like a waterfall. I keep thinking of Sondheim’s “Another Hundred People”:

  It’s a city of strangers….

  And every one of them has a life, just like me. They leave and go home to friends or families or roommates. Even the most misanthropic must know at least ten people, and each of those ten knows ten more and ten more after that, multiplying onward and upward until thousands become millions and millions become billions. Coming and going every minute of every day. The enormity of it makes my head spin, although that could just be the coffee.

  I thought when I got into Juilliard that I would become something special, that I would live a life set apart from and above the maddening throng. But as I sit here watching that throng I realize that I’m just one of billions of people, most of them with dreams that will never come true. One tiny ant in a colossal colony, an extra in a big cosmic picture show.

  It sucks.

  As the crowds go and come, my mind wanders and I keep forgetting to look for Chad. It takes over a week before I finally spot him striding out of the building like a lifeguard rushing into the water. I follow him, but he flies down the steps and into a waiting Town Car.

  He’s virtually untouchable. Every day he leaves his apartment in a taxi, gets driven to Wall Street, then reverses the process. There’s no bumping into him as he walks to the subway, while I pretend I’m on the Upper East Side visiting Ziba, or on Wall Street, where I have no business being.

  I have even less luck on the weekends. Sutton Place is not like my neighborhood, where Lizzie could wait on my stoop for hours. Sutton Place has doormen who brush you away like dirty snow and threaten to call the cops. I manage to get in some surveillance from a pay phone on the corner of First Avenue, but can’t linger there long enough to be effective.

  The Friday-the-thirteenth deadline from the SEC is less than a week away, and I’ve got nothing. Literally. I have $139 in my bank account, $133 for my share of rent, which is due on the fifteenth, and $6 for the rest of my living expenses. I trudge home in the cold, my head congested with impending doom and a burning sinus infection.

  I’m just passing the Nowhere subway station when I notice one of the many mad vagrants who wander New York’s streets every day. Grizzled and prematurely old, he wears a baggy overcoat and a woolly hat.

  “Will you help me?” he cries. “Won’t someone help me?”

  Pedestrians circle around him, immune to beggars, lost in their Walkman worlds. Unlike everyone else, I make eye contact with him. There’s something different about this guy.

  He holds up a bank deposit envelope, the kind you use at ATMs. “Can you help me? I-I-I found this and I don’t know what to do.” His face is tanned with a layer of city grime.

  I look inside the envelope and see half a dozen antique coins. While the only thing I know about numismatics is the definition of the word (courtesy of Natie’s coin collection, such a Nudelman thing to collect), the largest coin does say 1864 and has a portrait of someone with the regal profile of Marian Seldes. I close the envelope, noticing that there’s a phone number on the outside.

  “Someone probably dropped these on the way to the bank,” I say. “You should call this—”

  The guy presses his hands to his head, like he’s trying to silence the people who live there. “No! No! No! No! No!”

  “Okay,” I say in the most therapeutic tone I can muster on short notice. “It’s okay. How about if I call for you?” He gives a hesitant nod and follows me to a nearby pay phone. I dial.

  “Sterling residence. This is Clark speaking.”

  “Uh, hi, my name is Edward Zanni and this…um…gentleman on the street handed me a bank envelope—”

  “You found our coins!”

  Clark Sterling immediately launches into a monologue about how relieved he is, that his wife will be so pleased, and if the person who found them would just come right over to the East Side, there’s a $100 reward.

  I relay the good news to the guy, who responds in the same disoriented fashion as before:

  “I’m not goin’…I just wanna…” He covers his eyes and, for reasons known only to him, starts singing “Camptown Races”:

  Camptown ladies sing this song,

  Doo-dah, doo-dah.

  I speak into the phone. “He’s kind of freaking out.”

  “Listen,” Clark Sterling says, “I hate to ask you this, but I have to get those coins back. Is it possible for you to get to an ATM and give him the $100 yourself? I’ll pay you back, of course. And just to make it worth your time, I’ll pay you an extra $100, as well.”

  A hundred bucks for doing a good deed? It’s a sign from the gods. I must be owed from some self-sacrificing past life as a goat-snuggling serf.

  I explain the situation to the crazy guy between doodahs, then get the Upper East Side address from Clark, who tells me he’ll reimburse me for a taxi, as well.

  I go to the ATM, sneering at the lady who sneers at me for bringing a smelly street person into the bank lobby. I give him the money, tell him not to buy booze, then hail a cab. I love hailing cabs. It matches my vision of the life I’m supposed to lead. As we sail through the park, New York suddenly feels sunnier and prettier to me, the Manhattan
of Gershwin songs or Woody Allen movies.

  I arrive at the Park Avenue address and tip the driver generously—I’m being reimbursed, after all—then hop out of the cab with the exuberance of a movie star exiting a limo at a premiere. I approach a mustached doorman clapping his hands together to stay warm.

  “Hi! I’m here to see Clark Sterling.”

  He laughs, revealing a gold tooth. “Yeah, you and about ten others.”

  I must appear as confused as I feel, because he says, “There’s nobody here by that name.”

  “But…”

  “Look in the envelope.”

  Twenty-nine

  Thoughts rattle around my brain like sneakers in a dryer: How did he know about the envelope? What’s going on? Oh, my God, I just emptied my bank account to a total stranger. My hands trembling, I pull open the envelope and find a half dozen quarters. The crazy guy must have switched them on me. Except he wasn’t crazy. He’s a con artist. An actor. If I weren’t so hosed, I’d appreciate the verisimilitude of his performance.

  I stagger down the street, my brain in a fog. A hundred bucks, gone. Plus cab fare, which is just cruel. I mean, he’d already gotten my money. Why did he and his cronies have to stick me with cab fare, too? How could someone be so vicious? At least my own brand of swindling is a victimless crime. (Okay, I did dine and dash. But that was an honest dishonest mistake.) I mean, when Natie and I bought Pharmicare options, no one got hurt, right?

  Right?

  As I once again trudge across town, cursing the malevolent syndicate that preys upon trusting innocents like myself, nagging doubts about my own innocence start to nip at my heels. Is it possible that whomever we bought the options from had to hold on to the shares until the options expired? In which case, they couldn’t dump the stock when it plummeted. If someone owned Pharmicare at $30 a share and committed to selling it to me at $35 a share, but it went down to $10, that meant they lost, let me see, 750 shares times twenty equals,…$15,000? Did I do that?

  I don’t want to know.

  The pressure—both in my sinuses and my life—finally gets to me and I sink into a Nyquil-induced coma for a few days. Natie periodically hydrates me with herbal teas, mixing Sweet Apple Chamomile with Sleepytime for sweet dreams. He and Willow offer to make up the difference on the rent while stalling on the utilities by sending the phone company the check for the electric bill and vice versa. I do my best to ignore the February thirteenth deadline from the SEC, praying that Reagan’s pledge to reduce the size of government means the office is understaffed.

  This cold must be going around, as I start getting calls to substitute usher. Of course I take them, infecting the old ladies and guaranteeing job security for me and Natie, who takes the gigs so he can pay back Paula. Maybe it’s the head cold, but what I see onstage depresses the hell out of me. There are only fourteen shows playing, most of them ranging from at-least-it-didn’t-suck disappointing to what’s-that-smell awful. The lone bright spot is John Guare’s House of Blue Leaves, which has a monologue that would be perfect for my reaudition to Juilliard. That is, assuming I don’t go to jail. For several nights in a row I fidget in the back of the theater, restraining myself from leaping onto the stage because the actor playing the role is totally underplaying it, which is wrong, wrong, wrong. I mean, the character is plotting to blow up the pope because his father doesn’t pay attention to him. He’s so crazy he gets mistaken for retarded. I would make a meal out of that role. I’m sure the only reason this Ben Stiller got the part is because he’s Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara’s son. It’s obvious he’ll never amount to anything.

  Even more dispiriting are the audiences. Up until now, I never really noticed who goes to Broadway shows. I guess I was too wrapped up in my excitement at what was happening onstage to look. But as I meet the Bridge and Tunnel crowd face-to-face, I discover that a disturbing number of them are the kind of people who, when asked about the show, will tell you about their seats. The middle-class New Jerseyites I was rebelling against when I decided to become an actor are the very ones I’m going to have to entertain. Suddenly my dream of glittering Broadway stardom doesn’t shine quite as much.

  Disillusionment! The Musical.

  The dream dims even more when an usher at the Gershwin gets pneumonia, resulting in my first long-term temp assignment. When I tell Kelly I’m going to be ushering Starlight Express, which goes into previews next week, she says, “That’s great! It’ll be like we’re working together.”

  Sure. At this performance, the role of the bitter spectator will be played by Edward Zanni.

  As a swing, Kelly doesn’t perform at the first preview, so she’s waiting for me in the lobby after the show. As I descend the escalator (the Gershwin being one of those newer theaters that feels like a hotel) she smiles and gives a Miss America wave, not in a too-many-teeth Miss Texas way, but as if she were from some low-key, likable state, like Kansas or Vermont. She wears her new Starlight Express satin show jacket, which is the Broadway equivalent of the varsity letterman jacket, announcing to the world that she’s one of the cool kids.

  A more evolved person than I would marvel at it, asking her to model it, then jumping up and down, screaming, “Look! You made it!”

  So that’s what I do, summoning every acting skill I have to simulate euphoric delight. By way of contrast, I’m clad all in black, so I can blend in. That’s my job. To be blendinable. Blendinadvertent. Blendinadequate.

  “So?” she says, as blithe and untroubled as spring. “Whadja think?”

  What did I think?

  To call Starlight Express garbage is an insult to sanitation workers. A noisy, epilepsy-inducing assault on the senses, it is the Chuck E. Cheese of musicals, a show so astonishingly vapid it makes Cats look like A Lion in Winter.

  I know it shouldn’t bother me so much. I mean, it’s only a musical, right? But the show inflames me with rage. I feel soiled by it. Abused. Cheated. I want to hand out flyers that say, Warning: This performance contains material that may insult your intelligence.

  Don’t get me wrong. I’m not opposed to light entertainment: Guys and Dolls; Little Shop of Horrors; You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown—these are frothy diversions that at least have a satiric edge to them, shows that entertain without condescending. But the Greeks did not invent theater so we could spend sixty bucks to watch The Little Engine That Could. They invented it so we could have an emotional catharsis. And the only emotion I feel at Starlight Express is the desire to flip the circuit breakers and send everyone home.

  What did I think?

  “It’s astonishing,” I say.

  “Really?” Kelly says. “You’re not just saying that?”

  Of course I’m just saying that. Don’t push your luck.

  “No, no, no,” I say, gauging her reaction for signs of irony. “I just can’t wait to see you do it.”

  “Wow,” she says. “I really thought you’d hate it. C’mon, I’ll show you the set.”

  She links her arm through mine and I see she has a wrist brace, on which is scrawled, Kell on Wheels, Kell-raiser, and Cats is for pussies.

  “What happened?”

  “You should see the girl I ran into,” she says. “She got ten stitches. Now we have our own unit at St. Clare’s on standby.”

  This isn’t theater, I think; it’s vehicular homicide.

  Kelly leads me through a door to backstage, which, I have to admit, makes me feel pretty cool.

  Of course, it’s not like I haven’t been backstage at a Broadway show before. I know this makes me sound like a colossal dork, but back in high school we used to wait at the stage door for autographs. Sometimes, if there were just a few of us, we’d get invited backstage. But that was as a fan, an outsider. This time it’s as a friend.

  Being a newer building, the Gershwin has none of the dusty romance that its name implies. It’s just concrete hallways with fluorescent lights. Still, there’s an electric vibe in the air, and the cast is pumped with the excitement of th
e first preview. Seeing them up close—makeup streaked, costumes half-off to reveal sweaty T-shirts, heads encased in wig caps—gives me an ineffable thrill.

  As much fun as backstage is, with its giddy dancer banter, I feel the stage itself calling to me like sonar. I’m relieved and excited when Kelly finally leads me into the wings.

  Wings are appropriately named because they’re the part of the theater that allows the play to take flight. Dizzyingly tall as a Gothic cathedral, they have a hushed mystery to them, and I feel compelled to lower my voice even though the show is over. The wings are my favorite place to watch from, because you can see what’s happening on-and offstage at the same time. It’s like being able to watch the whole world at once, one part brightly lit, the other in shadow. I imagine this is how astronauts feel. Or people who die and come back.

  As we hover in the wings, Kelly points out the components of the three-story set, which looks like a discotheque for androids. With a budget of $8 milion, Starlight is the most expensive musical ever mounted on Broadway, and it looks it. Three steel bridges connect stage right and stage left: “Kong,” which hangs overhead like a chandelier and can tilt, fly, rotate, and do everything but wash the costumes; the “Teeter-Totter,” which allows the cast to skate uphill from the stage to either side of the second level (and down again), depending on whether it’s teetering or tottering; and the unimaginatively named “Front-of-House Bridge,” which looms thirty feet up, parallel to the proscenium. Each bridge comes equipped with hydraulic gates that lower like guillotines to prevent the actors from flying off into space, which has already happened once. “This shit’s dangerous,” Kelly says. “It’s like skating on a building while it’s being built.”

  As much as I hate the show and everything it represents, I can’t help but admire the actors. The sheer athletic achievement of racing up and down ramps and movable bridges thirty feet in the air at thirty miles an hour—plus doing flips on roller skates—is nothing short of remarkable. It gives new meaning to the word training.