by Jon Cryer
Before you judge, though, consider the alumni: Robert Downey Jr., Natalie Portman, Zach Braff, Lea Michele, Amy Ryan, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Josh Charles, Mandy Moore, Michael Ian Black, and countless accomplished composers, writers, and directors. Nothing to sneeze at there.
In 1979, though, it was mostly just a place to spend the summer and maybe have some fun.
I wasn’t privy to the traveling-chorus bus experience. My mother drove me to Stagedoor that first year, so it took arriving there to realize how ill prepared I was for the gung ho nature of it. I had an interest in acting, no doubt, but not enough to take seriously the clearly stated requirement that I have a song and monologue already prepared. The reason the camp holds auditions right off the bat—what, no orientation mixer with soft drinks and name tags?—is because there’s no messing around at Stagedoor. Not only were your days filled with classes in everything from vocal technique and stage combat to movement and dance and seemingly anything related to theater, but afternoons and nights were rehearsal time for the many shows in the process of being staged. Back then, stints at Stagedoor were two months, composed of a pair of four-week sessions, with one show every two weeks. Sound intense? It was. Throw in the requisite festival-week production, and you had nine shows in eight weeks. (They eventually changed it to three three-week sessions, with one show per session, so it’s infinitely more manageable than when I was there.)
In that respect, Stagedoor is camp: boot camp, for whipping a stage show into shape.
So auditioning that first day is really just to show the camp’s directors what you’ve got so you can be placed in a show, since every attendee has to go somewhere. The kids who know this, and care about snagging plum roles—the ones with full-on stage dreams who sing cast recordings in their sleep—bring their A games. Nothing brought home more to my newbie eyes the seriousness of the venture for many campers than watching this kid named Michael crank up a vigorous “Willkommen,” the famous opening number from Cabaret, for his audition in the camp’s Playhouse theater. Michael had his sheet music for the pianist. He had a top hat and cane. He had tap shoes. He also wore bright green Lycra dance pants—interesting—and sported noticeably big prescription glasses, which admittedly kind of undercut the flamboyant Weimar Republic decadence he was after.
I was impressed, puzzled, and appalled. What had I gotten myself into? I was there to hang with David, and indulge the acting thing a little. I didn’t have anything like that ready, so I sang “Happy Birthday” and read from a book of monologues I hastily borrowed from a fellow camper. I was terrible, which I guess made me perfect as a nameless street urchin in the chorus of my first show that summer, Oliver!
When I started taking classes at Stagedoor, I initially bristled at the amount of deep study being applied to acting. It all seemed like a parody of thespianic pretension, and frankly it seemed a little dumb to me. Per the wishes of the camp’s artistic director, Jack Romano, a man for whom digging deep was everything, the director of our Oliver! wanted everyone to come up with a backstory for the characters we played. I remember thinking this was a bit silly, especially for someone like me, who wasn’t even officially a character in the show, just a lowly chorus member. But that was the idea: Everyone’s important! The show works only if each person onstage is fully committed to being a flesh-and-blood person with a name and a past and a present.
It’s the kind of exercise that naturally brings out the theatrical in some, so I watched as the urchin crowd around me morphed into a collection of humpbacked, one-legged, or one-eyed orphans. Everyone else’s elaborate character work seemed to manifest itself in bodily injuries and deformities. Even Charles Dickens would have eyed this crowd and thought, Yikes! Too much. I mean . . . um. Wow. (For some reason, I picture Bob Newhart playing Dickens.) For my street ragamuffin, I chose the name Toby, and while I gave him a suitably grim history in which his parents died of cholera, I also made him able-bodied. It’s the first time I can remember making a calculated acting choice based on setting myself apart: Everyone’s doing one thing, so I’ll do something different.
As the weeks went on, I was slowly warming to the idea that acting exercises were kind of interesting rather than ridiculous. Meanwhile my pal David Dennis, who roomed with me that first year (along with a boy named Billy Goldstein), continued to smirk at how seriously these singing/dancing/acting campers took everything. David preferred to hone his skills at decadence and rule breaking. For instance, David and Billy were adept at convincing camp counselors to buy us cheap Ernest & Julio Gallo jug wine. (This was the time of the comedy Meatballs, when your counselor just might be a who-gives-a-shit Bill Murray–esque college kid biding his time for school credit.) I’m sure the places I send my children for the summer are staffed only by future Rhodes Scholars and neurosurgeons.
David and Billy quickly became camp legends for their antics. They disappeared from camp once for an unsupervised walk into town, and nobody would ever have known if David’s mom hadn’t coincidentally called the camp that day to say hi. Increasingly worried-sounding PA announcements of, “David Dennis? David Dennis? Please go to the office now,” in five-minute intervals were the only giveaway that something was up. (A counselor found the two in town, and their reappearance in the common area brought the whole room to a silent halt, as if famous outlaws had been captured.)
David and Billy were also notorious for “raiding”: sneaking into the girls’ rooms, or smuggling girls back to theirs. David’s whole reason for going to Stagedoor, in fact, had to do with the girls-to-boys ratio. It didn’t matter that in this pre-Glee era, theater camp was so spectacularly uncool. There were maybe forty boys to two hundred and thirty girls, and at least half those boys were gay. So if you were one of the twenty or so straight boys, it was the proverbial fish-in-a-barrel situation. I remember in my last year an eleven-year-old Josh Charles being constantly surrounded by adoring fourteen-year-old girls. Was he talented and charming? Sure. Did those odds help? Absolutely. That’s what drew David back to Stagedoor. But it wasn’t enough to keep him there, and that first summer of mine—his second—was also David’s last.
I, meanwhile, was beginning to think I’d found the only thing that mattered to me, and I eventually came to wonder why Stagedoor couldn’t last all year long. I didn’t need David to enjoy Stagedoor, after all. My mother likes to tell people the moment she knew it was all over for me, when I’d found my calling and wouldn’t want to do anything else. After Oliver! I was cast in a tiny role in an ecologically minded musical called Earthlings. Though it seemed Stagedoor was perfectly fine staging adult fare like the Nazi-era Cabaret, the French song revue Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, and the play Equus—about a boy sexually attracted to horses—I was stuck appearing in something that was aimed at bored schoolchildren who need a cheery lesson in preserving the planet. But I did my part. My character, a businessman, is introduced with the line, “Joe was a very rich man.”
I walked forward and said, “I’m a very rich man.”
Howls of laughter roared back at me, and Mom—who was there for that first performance—says she instantly detected a glint in my eye, a glint that distinctly signaled, “Must. Keep. Doing. This.” After that, every laugh I got in the show was like another little hit of some amazing new drug, one that simultaneously reduced my regularly inflamed lack of confidence and bolstered my ego. Once I figured out that being funny onstage was what I was good at, I was officially hooked.
Suddenly Stagedoor Manor wasn’t a mere summer holding pen for over-the-top kids with attention issues and dress-up complexes; it was a breeding ground for what I wanted to do in life. Acting-class exercises, like the one in which you lie onstage pretending to sleep, then wake up to discover you’re in a crystal forest—which must be conveyed without speaking—felt indisputably necessary as a budding actor. Can’t you see I’m leaning against a crystal tree? Can’t you?! It’s right here!
These an
d many other illustrious drills came from the skewed mind of artistic director Dr. Jack Romano, who was a key figure for me and many Stagedoor alumni. A Jewish Cuban émigré who had legendarily attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, Jack was very outspoken and passionate about stagecraft. That ardor for acting occasionally resulted in a chair being thrown across a room, or—in the case of a one girl’s less-than-satisfactory singing—pulling his hair and shouting, “You sound like a fart in a ballroom!” He could be cruel, but it never came off as true cruelty—it was always imbued with the feeling that he wanted you to be better. He also had a kind of built-in ridiculousness that undercut anything unkind he might say. With his Caesar haircut, thick accent (he pronounced focus as “fuck-us”), and impish grin, he was difficult to take offense to. He was a great, mesmerizing teacher you couldn’t help but follow into the craziest corners of your imagination. He cared about it all, and he made you care about it.
Getting praise from Jack felt better than anything else, and one day I felt particularly inspired to knock him out. A favorite exercise of Jack’s was something he called the subway improv, in which the edge of the stage represents the lip of a subway platform. The backstory is that there’s a serial killer on the loose, a detail I gather was inspired by the notorious Son of Sam murders that had terrified New Yorkers only a few years prior. Everyone plays a citizen entering the subway, and without explicitly saying so, you had to make some kind of acting choice that communicates this citywide fear. Jack would then clap his hands to signify the train coming into the station, which would end the exercise.
The improv started, and I came in with a deliberate sense of playing up the weird and creepy. I whistled “Strangers in the Night,” and self-consciously drew attention to myself as if I were, in fact, the serial killer himself. But then Jack started clapping, and as the imaginary train pulled in, I revealed that I wasn’t the serial killer, but instead someone committing suicide. I jumped off the edge of the stage as the train approached, and with that, Jack’s jaw dropped and he let out a horrified gasp.
“Nobody ever did that in this class! I’ve never seen that,” he said, seemingly out of breath. This was from someone who’d taught quite a few acting classes by this point.
That was a good day.
Not so good was the day a few years ago when I discovered this story had morphed over time and become attributed to noteworthy Stagedoor Manor alumnus Robert Downey Jr. It’s even been published as an invention of Robert’s in Mickey Rapkin’s entertaining book about Stagedoor Manor, Theater Geek. Well, I’m here now to correct a historical wrong through this memoir and say, I’m the one who jumped! I’m the gasp-inducing suicide! You know what Robert Downey Jr. was famous for? Getting care packages of pot from his counterculture filmmaker father! (A close friend of mine was Robert’s roommate one year—Iron Man and I were never there at the same time.) I’m sure his acting was impressive, too, but let’s set the record straight on who rocked the subway improv, of which my example was cited by Jack Romano in Stagedoor classes for years afterward.
Moving on.
After that first summer at Stagedoor, and getting swept up in the collaborative mojo that went into putting on a show, I went back to 104 for ninth grade feeling like a seasoned professional. It was still a nice surprise, though, to jump from chorus member in West Side Story the year prior to a more prominent role that year, playing fifties rock star Birdie in Bye Bye Birdie. I had been spoiled by the talent at Stagedoor, so I expected to be surrounded by plucky strivers and gifted performers. I discovered instead that all the good singers had graduated last year, and the kid hired to play the lead—Birdie’s manager—was the exact opposite of the light-on-his-feet guy who originated the role, Dick Van Dyke. This kid couldn’t move, or sing, or even speak without droning. Of course, the general lack of talent also explains why I landed a plum role, so I couldn’t get too mad about it. Birdie ended up being a charmless show, and after my summer, I was already developing a haughty sense of what was good and what was amateur hour. In other words, all I could think was, Get me back to Stagedoor.
Don’t get me wrong: Stagedoor Manor shows weren’t all good. In fact, some were terrible. But Stagedoor productions, which I participated in over four glorious summers, were fascinating examples of the ups and downs of instinctive decision making and willed creativity. When there are only two weeks to put up a show, you have to do everything quickly, stick by the choices, and fly or fall based on them. The quality varied wildly, since the same pool of people was involved in every show. If an obviously going-places Natalie Portman is in your play, that’s great, but she might be starring opposite a never-going-anywhere Joe Nobody. Sometimes it’s an experimental idea that crashes and burns, like the all-female Godspell I saw, in which Jesus—played by my sister, Robin, who attended only one Stagedoor summer—is a theater director, the disciples are the cast of a show, and in the end Jesus is crucified by the stage manager. That metaphor didn’t make sense on any level whatsoever, except (perhaps not surprisingly) to the production’s director, but the spirit of experimentation was nonetheless exciting.
Sometimes the spirit of creativity and need to have an “experience” made for something memorable. I played Pilate in a psychedelic-inspired Jesus Christ Superstar, and that was especially insane. During the climactic crucifixion scene, Pilate sings, “I wash my hands of your demolition! Die if you want to, you innocent puppet!” as he cleans the blood off his hands. We decided it’d be cool if when he washed his hands, suddenly instead of their being clean, there was actually more blood on them (“You’ll never be clean, Pilate!”) We accomplished this by surreptitiously switching the water bowl with one filled with stage blood while the audience’s attention was elsewhere. Well, that little effect just ignited dedicated drug-using camper Jenny and the fanatical shroom-taking contingent of friends that she had in the front row, and she started losing her shit and screaming as if it were a horror movie. This, in turn, ignited more screams from the whole audience until it got so out of hand, we had a real Passion of the Christ state of affairs on our hands. Truly weird for a camp full of Jews.
Technical issues sometimes made for creative if problematic fixes. At Stagedoor, four or five shows were going at all times, but the main productions were at either the fifties-style modern-designed playhouse theater—formerly a nightclub when the place was a Catskills resort—or in the barn, which was a terrible place to put on shows, because it was, well, a barn. A barn is not a place where you wanted to spend a lot of time during a muggy summer. Also, the makeshift stage in the barn had metal bars spanning its width, holding the “walls” of the stage up, which often created strange shadows when light was directed at the performers. Kids would be singing and then there’d be a long black shadow across their faces. It looked like those photos of illicit behavior in which people’s eyes are blacked out by strips. Throw in the nagging sense that you were sitting in the firetrap theater, and the barn was hardly a beloved space. (The barn did burn down, ultimately, and a beautiful new legitimate theater there was built in its place.)
During my first summer there, Equus (the weird horses/boy psychodrama) was at the barn, and The Sound of Music—featuring Robin as one of the nuns—was being staged simultaneously at the playhouse. Both shows required rotating sets to change sceneries, with the young actors who were last onstage themselves physically pushing the sets around between scenes. But in the barn, the rollers weren’t smooth enough and made a horrible noise. It was especially unfortunate, then, that Jon Luks, the talented choreographer who was directing The Sound of Music, managed to piss off his tech crew with some last-minute demands, because in the dead of night they took all the wheels off the Sound of Music sets and put them on the rotating Equus set. Great for Equus, whose set now rotated silently and with ease, disastrous for The Sound of Music. Great for me in the audience at the beloved musical, too, because I got to see:
My sister and two fourteen-year-old
girls dressed in nuns’ habits finish singing “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?”
“How do you hold a moonbeam in your ha-a-a-a-a-nd . . .”
The lights go down.
Polite applause that dies down quickly.
In the darkness, the sounds of a scuffle. Urgent whispers.
As my eyes adjust, I can just barely make out the three nuns as they put their shoulders to the side of the abbey set, pushing with all their might, legs churning, huffing and puffing, struggling like the offensive line of the Atlanta Falcons to move the (now immobile) scenery.
They let out a collective, “Uuuurrhhrhhhhr!”
And finally screeeeeeaaaach, as the abbey set grudgingly turns around and becomes Maria’s bedroom. But only halfway. The nuns let out another tennis grunt: “Hurrrrrnnnggggg!” Another screeeeeeeeek! And the stage is set for Maria’s entrance. Lights come up to catch three dog-tired nuns trudging stage left.
At least I was entertained.
Although Stagedoor’s reputation now is such that there’s a wait list, which guarantees any given class is studded with showbiz wannabes, when I went the vibe was still loose enough that there were invariably kids there who still didn’t know how they fit in. It was somewhat of a dumping ground for kids nobody knew what to do with. I remember a lisping loner named Ellen who wore a Greek fisherman’s hat and glasses, and who would sit on a rock in front of the main building and bark, “Leave me alone! I want to be by myshelf!” It rubbed people the wrong way, and when she had to deliver an S-studded line in a show—which came out as, “New York ish full of pot shmokers, shpeed, and L-ESH-D”—I saw the director stifling a giggle and realized, Holy shit, giving her that line was deliberate.