Theater Geek

by Mickey Rapkin

  To compete in this increasingly crowded marketplace, camps are expected to offer top-notch facilities and professional staff. Newer theater programs are courting high-profile teachers to compete with the better-established camps. The acting coach Howard Fine is one of the principal instructors at Deborah Gibson’s Electric Youth, a new camp program based in Los Angeles. “We’re living in the day and age of American Idol, where everything seems instant,” says Gibson, the pop singer who made her Broadway debut in Les Misérables in 1992. “You can win your career on television. But you can’t sustain it without the training.” She added that she was able to recruit Fine by explaining to him that children are “just little adults.”

  Stagedoor Manor’s reputation is global. In 2009, the camp attracted kids from forty-four states and from countries as far-flung as Thailand and France. Each summer, the camp’s staff offers master classes in acting and voice. There are tutorials in makeup, lighting, and set design. And while it is tempting to think of a theater camp’s artistic staff as some sad Waiting for Guffman sketch, the staff at Stagedoor is a mix of seasoned professionals and graduate students. In 2008, Jacob Brent directed Rent at Stagedoor; in the off-season, he helped cast the original Broadway company of Billy Elliot. Travis Greisler, another Stagedoor director, made his Broadway debut in The Who’s Tommy at age nine and (more recently) assisted Tony nominee Michael Greif on a Manhattan workshop of a new musical, Mrs. Sharp, starring 30 Rock’s Jane Krakowski. In 2009, Justin Mendoza—a Stage-door Manor music director—had to leave camp early, because he was hired to do that same job for the national touring company of the Tony-winning musical In the Heights.

  What distinguishes Stagedoor Manor isn’t just the level of education, it’s what they’re teaching—and how they’re teaching it. The Stagedoor Manor ethos: Learn by doing. Or more specifically, Learn by doing grown-up (and, some may say), age-inappropriate material. While a standard high school drama program might include chestnuts like Fiddler on the Roof and Oklahoma!, Stagedoor Manor pushes the envelope. The camp has showcased productions of Bertolt Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle and Federico García Lorca’s “rural trilogy,” which includes The House of Bernarda Alba and Blood Wedding. Not to mention a controversial Stagedoor presentation of Carrie: The Musical, a bloody cult piece that played a grand total of five performances on Broadway in 1988 before closing at a loss of $8 million.

  “Stagedoor is a pretty special animal,” says comedian and former camper Michael Ian Black (Comedy Central’s Michael and Michael Have Issues). “It’s a lavender animal. It’s a lavender, sparkly, bedazzled animal. I played a smarmy child molester in Runaways at camp. There’s a rape scene in that show. Theatrical kids are happy to enact rape scenes. They’ll do whatever they’re asked.”

  Besides top-notch training and envelope-pushing productions, there is now the chance to be discovered. These opportunities have increased exponentially in recent years, as visits to Stagedoor by casting agents and managers have become a more frequent fixture of the summer. In 2008, the composer Jason Robert Brown scouted children for his Broadway-bound musical 13 at Stagedoor Manor. Jennifer Rudin (formerly of Disney, now a talent manager) refers to Stagedoor as “one-stop shopping.” Emily Gerson Saines, Cynthia Nixon’s manager, signed the young actor Sebastian Stan after seeing him in a Stagedoor Manor class. (Having since made his Broadway debut opposite Liev Schreiber in 2007’s Talk Radio and completed an arc on Gossip Girl, Sebastian Stan is now the rare young actor with both serious theatrical credibility and CW cachet.)

  Many theater industry veterans say that precocious careerism has become more common among young performers. In 2006, the producer David Stone, an alumnus of French Woods (where he played Wilbur in Charlotte’s Web), invited children from his former playground to see The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee on Broadway. Stone recalls a Q and A after the show: “These kids asked the most sophisticated questions. Like, ‘How do you get an agent?’ ‘What’s it like to do the show every day?’ Questions about an actor’s process.”

  The actress Bryce Dallas Howard isn’t surprised at the precocious nature of this new generation—at French Woods or elsewhere. Bryce spent two summers at Stagedoor Manor in the 1990s. “Stagedoor is a camp of little grown-ups terrorizing each other,” she recalls. “And it was fantastic.”

  The stakes, or the perceived ones at least, are rising exponentially for these campers. Larry Nye, Stagedoor Manor’s director of dance and a professor at Southern Connecticut State University, shares a revealing anecdote: “At Stagedoor, we often have agents in to see workshops and performances. If someone strange walks in—and it could be the maintenance guy—and sits in the back of the theater, the kids will say, ‘Who is that?’” Larry usually tells them it’s an agent, even when it’s not. “Anything to get a performance out of them!”

  If there is any question that Stagedoor Manor has matured into a singular entity, this next anecdote should settle that. In 2006, Courtney Love (reformed grunge queen, widow of Kurt Cobain) came to Loch Sheldrake to see her daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, in a production of the musical Leader of the Pack. “They gave my daughter a shit part,” Courtney says. “She was in, like, some tertiary chorus line. It really pissed me off. The girls at camp called her horrible names. They were awful to her. I had to have Drew Barrymore—her godmother—call her at camp. I asked her to have them say over the PA system, ‘Frances, you have a phone call from Drew Barrymore,’ so the kids would stop making fun of her. But it was a character-building experience. Frances has been sheltered her whole life in Los Angeles. She had to stand up to these girls.” Perhaps to inspire a little fear in the Stagedoor community, Courtney dressed up for the visit, so her presence would be known. “Honey, I was head to toe in red, you don’t even want to know. I went as Joan Crawford.” That wasn’t the end of her theatrics. Not by a long shot. At lunchtime, Courtney got into a fight with a hot dog vendor who’d set up shop at camp for the weekend. Punk rock to the end, she tried to pay for her meal with a hundred-dollar bill. When the vendor refused to make change, Courtney Love threw up her hands in frustration and shouted: “Who do I gotta fuck around here to get a hot dog?”

  Still, her daughter returned for a second summer. “She couldn’t wait to go back,” Courtney says. And the kid in Courtney Love understands why: “I wish I had a fucking Stagedoor when I was a child. I used to forge my parents’ signatures so I could try to be the Rose Princess in Portland.”

  What really grabs you on a tour of Stagedoor Manor—what gets lodged in your throat—isn’t the boldface names or quirky anecdotes. It’s the graffiti. Backstage in the various theaters, campers armed with permanent markers have scrawled their names on the walls. In some cases, not just their names but wildly detailed résumés of their times at Stagedoor Manor. Skylar Lipstein: Judas in Godspell (2002). Jean Valjean in Les Misérables (2003). Guido in Nine (2004). Dana Steingold: Martha in The Secret Garden (1999). Sally in Me & My Girl (2000). Robin in Smile (2001). The Witch in Into the Woods (2002). These names are like comprehensive rosters from thirty years of campers—similarly disaffected theater geeks, pioneers, and talents who made a home in Loch Sheldrake.

  As I walk backstage—at Stagedoor Manor’s Elsie Theater, and then at the Jack Romano Playhouse—scanning the names of former campers, it occurs to me: while there are certainly plenty of recognizable names among them, many more are unknown. Stagedoor Manor is the proving ground, the place where talented kids from around the world come to test their skills and see how they measure up. Some will go on to long careers in the arts, others to fruitful work in vastly different fields. But while the camp’s profile may have spiked in recent years, Stagedoor is not really the Mickey Mouse Club, churning out prefab stars. I think it serves a more important function, especially for those unknowns.

  Summer camp is a crucible, a place where lasting personality traits are formed. Camp provides children with a place to experiment, a place to explore different aspects of their personalities in a safe
environment. Such is the social import and merit of summer camp that social scientists have devoted lives to studying the effect of that two-month period—on self-esteem, on behavioral growth, on a host of variables.

  But unlike other camps, at Stagedoor Manor teens and tweens are socialized to be performers—not jocks, or cool kids. The camp opens the door for them to a life onstage and makes real the possibilities that a high school star like me could only dream of. And in doing so, Stage-door has changed the course of many lives, including Michael Ian Black’s. The camp introduced him not just to a community of actors but also to his first manager. Black recalls signing with the manager Shirley Grant after she spotted him in a Stagedoor Manor production. “She sat me down,” he says. “I felt like a horse being inspected. She had me turn in profile. She was looking at my teeth. She was feeling my balls.”

  My visit to Stagedoor Manor as a journalist was an opportunity to observe a cross-section of aspiring performance talent, and to ask broad questions about what talent is—what defines it, who identifies it, how it is cultivated in this age of reality TV. In June 2009, I took three weeks off from my job as an editor at GQ magazine and moved into an outbuilding at Stagedoor Manor. During that time, I ate every meal in the camp’s dining room. I sat in on rehearsals, tech meetings, late-night stitching sessions in the costume shop. I sat in the main office, the infirmary, the kitchen. I later interviewed nearly one hundred of the camp’s alumni to trace the history of Stagedoor Manor, to piece together changing attitudes about the arts, about ambition, about sexuality.

  I worried for some of these kids. I worried that the camp, simply by the nature of its success, set artificially high expectations: that if you worked hard, you could not only make a career of this, you could be a star. I wondered at the self-confidence (where does it come from?) these kids needed to carry on auditioning despite near-constant rejection. Because even successful actors, I found, still struggled with these concerns.

  “When I was in my twenties, no one knew what to do with me,” says Julia Murney, who attended Stagedoor in 1983 and 1984 and made her Broadway debut in 2005’s short-lived musical Lennon before taking over the role of Elphaba in a celebrated turn in Wicked. “I wasn’t an ingénue,” Julia explains. “I wasn’t a plucky young soprano at twenty-one. My tone, my bone structure, my visage—my everything was just more mature than my age. I got a lot of, ‘Oh, you’re neat. But we don’t know what to do with you.’ Once I got into my thirties, I could play those roles. And that was all great. And when things are starting to fly, you’re surrounded by people who say, ‘You’re gonna do this and that! And fancy glittery unicorns are going to fly through the air!’ It’s thrilling. And you start to think, You know what? Glittery unicorns might be really cool!”

  But as late as 2009, when she was appearing in a workshop of a Kander & Ebb revue with designs on Broadway, Julia was considering walking away from it all. “It’s a weird life to subscribe to,” she says. “It can beat the hell out of you. Right now, I’m in a spot where I’m thinking, Do I want to keep doing this? There’s stuff I’d like to do in theater. But I’ve not necessarily felt like I’m gonna die if I don’t get to.”

  To make matters worse for these aspiring thespians, all of the training in the world can still only get you so far. There is still that indefinable thing that, apparently, cannot be taught. “It is difficult to cast children,” says Francesca Zambello, who directed Disney’s The Little Mermaid on Broadway. “Theater camp can teach you craft, but you need that It factor.” Or as Mama Rose says in Gypsy, “You either got it or you ain’t.”

  Where did those unknown names from the backstage graffiti wind up? When the dream of a big Broadway opening turned into the (lesser) dream of regional theater, which gave way to the reality of bills and mortgage payments, did they look back at those head shots with regret? Or were those early head shots more like soccer trophies, which is to say souvenirs of a childhood time well spent?

  I kept coming back to something Stagedoor’s production director, Konnie Kittrell, told me. “Parents will call and say, ‘Tell me the truth: Does my kid have any talent? Am I wasting my money? And I’ll say, ‘If your child finds something in this experience—finds an outlet they need, or finds self-confidence—how could you say it’s wasted money?’”

  And yet, there was hope—a spike in opportunities for child actors, and certainly more than enough to dangle a carrot. In 2008, a revival of Gypsy opened on Broadway with roles for seven children. Billy Elliot, which opened in 2009 and may never close, employs seven boys plus a ballet class full of cutesy girls in pink tutus and tights. Finian’s Rainbow opened in October 2009 with roles for three kids under the age of fifteen. And then there are the opportunities at Disney and Nickelodeon, networks whose original programming is now making household names out of America’s camera-ready juniors in a way that was inconceivable even a decade ago.

  Theater Geek is the story not just of a camp but of four decades of unique (and uniquely American) teenagers coming of age. For thirty-five years, Stagedoor Manor has asked for blood from its campers, and in return it has opened their eyes to a new worldview. When Stagedoor opened its doors in 1975, it was one of just a handful of summer camps devoted to the arts. Now, with hundreds of these camps out there, with Fox’s Glee suddenly making it cool to perform in a troupe wearing matching vests, with gay high school kids (and even precocious middle school kids) coming out earlier—and without incident—what is the role of theater camp in this new era?

  I spent the majority of my time at Stagedoor Manor with three campers—three exceptional teenagers in their final summer at camp before heading off to college. It was a unique snapshot, each of them caught between childhood and adulthood. I spent time with their casts, in rehearsals, and backstage before shows. I stayed so close because I was afraid I’d miss something important if I stepped away. But also because I fell in love with these kids, and was inspired by them—and their own acts of self-discovery—every day.

  Amy B. Harris, a Stagedoor alumna and co-producer of HBO’s Sex and the City, sums up the transformative power of a session at camp perhaps better than anyone else. “I was playing a homeless kid in The Me Nobody Knows,” she says. “And I had a big monologue about being a druggie. I didn’t shower for a week. I was trying to be Method about it. I’d have dirt under my fingernails and I’d think, Good. That’s what it’d feel like to be homeless!” This was the early 1980s, and Amy’s father was coming to visit for the performance, which was a minor coup: “I think my mom pushed him to let me come to camp. Before my dad saw me in The Me Nobody Knows, I think he thought of me as athletic and sporty. I remember thinking after the show, this was the first time he’d really seen me.”

  CHAPTER 1

  It’s Showtime

  IN THE COZY LOBBY OF WHAT WAS ONCE A CATSKILLS HOTEL, nearly three hundred children sit, crammed in and anxious. It is day three at Stagedoor Manor, and in just a moment these campers will learn which roles they’ll play in one of the thirteen shows to be produced in the next three weeks. And the wait—the interminable wait!—will be over.

  The vibe in the wood-paneled room is tense, the subtext of every conversation: God, I hope I get it. Campers flit about. Some sing aloud to themselves as they walk. The kids refer to this unconscious vocal expression as “singing Tourette’s,” acknowledging that while the humming is certainly annoying, no one in this situation could reasonably be expected to control the sound any more than someone suffering from Tourette’s syndrome could be expected to silence his outbursts. When theater geeks get anxious they also tap-dance. The actor Sebastian Stan (Gossip Girl) was a camper here not too long ago. He describes that moment when the cast lists go up. “It’s nerve-racking,” he says. “It’s that same nervous adrenaline you find later in life after a professional audition, when you’re waiting for that miracle phone call.”

  Stagedoor Manor campers have been known to cry on these mornings—both tears of joy and those born from seemingly life-end
ing disappointment. The musical’s the thing. But not everyone can be cast in that session’s hot show. “At Stagedoor, I was cast in The Utter Glory of Morrissey Hall,” says Mandy Moore. “I think it was produced on Broadway once. It closed during intermission.” (Actually, The Utter Glory of Morrissey Hall—a musical about a British headmistress, so popular at Stagedoor because it has an abundance of female roles—played seven previews and one performance on Broadway in 1979 before abruptly shuttering.)

  The big show this session is still a secret. All thirteen titles are. And for three days these would-be thespians speculate, needle, debate. In an effort to rustle up some information on the still top-secret program, they badger the weaker staff members, pleading: “Just tell me what show you’re directing.” In fact, the anticipation was so terrible in 2009 that the night before the shows were revealed the entire camp was shipped off to the Middletown Mall to the movies. The off-grounds escape was meant to distract from the anxiety—How many people does he need?—not that it helped. “We talked about the shows the entire bus ride,” says Rachael Singer, eighteen, who was beginning her final summer at Stagedoor. Over breakfast, on the morning the cast lists were to be posted, Rachael sat in the back of the cafeteria plainly nervous, mindlessly twisting a black hair tie in her hand and barely touching her food. If her friend Harry Katzman was similarly anxious, you wouldn’t have known it by looking at his plate. It was licked clean.

  Harry Katzman, eighteen, has dark curly hair, the ample physique of Zero Mostel, and the nearly translucent complexion of someone who spends an awful lot of time indoors. Two days earlier, walking into the lobby on the first day of camp, he was dressed in a striped T-shirt and pale blue jeans rolled up to the calf. He entered the space like Eva Perón in Evita, beckoning the peasants to him. Small girls approached Harry. Former co-stars and assorted hangers-on wrapped their arms around his body and hugged him tightly.