The main idea behind our first year of school was to strip us all down, erase everything we thought we knew about acting, and—when we were broken of all our old tricks—to start rebuilding us, hopefully into better performers. More than a way to free myself from any prior notions I had about acting, I also saw this time as a way to break free of the past. That was over and couldn’t hurt me now, and no amount of replay would change it. I’d already mucked through my macabre childhood—how much harder could this be?
The first two weeks were a crash course of exercises as the class got to know each other by playing theater games so that we would bond as a group and become a unit. We played charades, red rover, and a game I’d never heard of before called hunter/hunted—one person is blindfolded (the hunter) and placed in the center of the room, and everyone else (the hunted) has to cross the room, one by one, without getting caught. We did trust exercises where we took turns falling backward, expecting that the rest of the group would catch us, or we led each other around outside in pairs, taking turns being blindfolded. We performed our monologues for each other. Dancing, living, singing, breathing, and tearing our guts out in class together was simultaneously invigorating and exhausting. Getting in touch with my raw emotions during the day, I had trouble sleeping at night and dreamed vividly about being chased by monsters or my bike hitting a rock and going over a cliff. People got pinched nerves in their necks, headaches, and torn tendons. There was a fair amount of crying, and many shoulder rubs were dispensed among us. Quickly, the class morphed into a little dysfunctional family of sorts.
I liked many of my classmates right away. M.E.—short for Mary Ellen—had brown hair she washed in laundry detergent because she didn’t have any money to buy shampoo. She wore headbands, holey jeans, and white boy’s T-shirts, and her eyes popped ever so slightly out. M.E. had a tony lockjaw accent, which I suspected was a put-on. Maybe that’s why I felt drawn to her—she was a bit of a phony, and so was I. We’d find odd bars to go to with the class—such as the Buckhorn Exchange, the oldest restaurant in Denver, which served Rocky Mountain oysters and had walls covered in gruesome stuffed animals.
Two of my classmates, John and Jen, were the resident “parents,” whom everyone flocked around because they were newly married, the only couple in our class and sort of still on their honeymoon. They were still unpacking their wedding presents, and Jen would bring her homemade bread to school for us to gobble down. I liked just sitting at their kitchen table, watching them be domestic, the way I had with Pete and Jenny at Ninety-seventh Street.
Rounding out the group were JB, Graham, and Anna. JB was a rangy jock from Indiana who’d been a track star in high school and had a sunny, laid-back disposition that made him easy to talk to. Graham was the tall, dark, and handsome guy in the group, with a loping walk and a sly smile, a practical joker who’d put plastic flies in my drink or on his tongue. Anna was statuesque and had fluffy, layered, dark blond hair, a booming voice, and fierce brown eyes.
NTC had some kick-ass teachers. Ethan, our main acting guru, was like our Yoda. He was blunt, brilliant, and kind of a drunk. In his late thirties, he wore John Lennon–tinted spectacles and shuffled into class looking as if he’d slept in the park. His shaggy, long brown hair hung perilously close to the cigarette he always had going, threatening to set fire to his unkempt beard. Even when he conducted class lying down with a wicked hangover, he had this amazing ability, using one or two sentences, to zero in on what was lacking in a scene or an exercise. Our voice teacher, Bonnie, was tiny—barely five feet—and had clearly compensated for her size by developing a huge persona. Bonnie sported a Saint Joan haircut, had big sea-glass-blue eyes, and was passionate about absolutely everything. She threw herself fully into teaching us to use our voices. We spent a lot of time in her class bent over with our mouths hanging open—drooling onto the floor—or massaging our faces, and saying “Aaaahhh” to relax our jaws and tongues. She tolerated no crap, called us on our laziness and our bad habits, and pushed and challenged us in every class. “Tears are a garbage can!” she’d bellow when someone started to fall apart in class. “Especially for women!”
After all the game playing and trust falls, we were broken up into two groups and were told to choose two-person scenes with a partner, which we’d periodically be doing during the year. I chose to do Our Town with Jeff, who had a soft, rumpled face and sad eyes; he seemed to have so many original ideas and impulses. We’d meet up to work on the scenes after school and perform them in class at the end of the week, in front of the teachers and our classmates.
At the end of the day, we’d all limp home, wiped out after a day of classes. I was living in a studio in the Capitol Hill area of the city, near a few of my classmates—John and Jen, M.E., and Graham. JB and Anna were living in cheaper digs on the wrong side of the tracks with roommates. If we had the energy, M.E. and I would get a drink or go to a movie after school, or Graham and I would go get a burger at Chesby’s, a local watering hole that served killer martinis. Graham’s girlfriend was an actress in the company and was working all the time, so he sometimes stopped by for a chat.
One night about a month after school started, a bunch of students—along with Ethan and a few of our other teachers—went out to the Wazee, a bar and restaurant in the industrial part of town that had great burgers and pizza. Ethan’s protégé and our assistant acting teacher, Ned, was there, too. We were all sitting at a line of small tables pushed together, listening to Ethan talk about gestalt therapy and watching him chain-smoke.
I was talking with Nancy, our dance teacher, who was sitting next to me. She was petite with a black bob haircut that made her look like Louise Brooks. I adored her class—Contemporary Movement Technique—which she claimed she made up on the spot every time. It was a mélange of ballet, jazz, and modern; it was all very free and fun. We leaped and spun across the floor, forgetting our bodies as they flew through the air.
I could see Ned at the end, working the table, and making his way toward me. I hadn’t talked to him yet but had seen him around the building. He was barely taller than me and had short, brown, tightly curled hair. His face was smooth, like a boy’s, as if he had never shaved.
When he reached my seat, he knelt down beside me. “Hi, I’m Ned. You’re Wendy, right?”
I nodded. He was wearing black jeans and a black leather motorcycle jacket because, as I later found out, he was from New Jersey and worshipped Bruce Springsteen.
“So, where you from? Back East?”
“Yeah, New York, Boston.” The short answer.
It turned out he had gone to Tufts, in Medford, Massachusetts. We talked about the Boston music scene for a while. He smiled at me constantly, and I got the feeling he was flirting with me, but I dismissed it, as my radar for such things was rusty and, although he was just a few years older than me, he was also my teacher.
After that night at the Wazee, I often felt Ned’s eyes burning into my skin, in class, in the hallway, on the sidewalk in front of school. I tried to ignore that I had developed a little crush on him, convincing myself that it was just temporary, that soon he would do something that totally ruined it for me—pick his nose or fart—and I’d be off him. But that didn’t happen. Instead, he continued aggressively flirting with me, and I started to flirt right back, but perhaps not as fervently. After being on my own with no man for so long, I was ashamed of how desperate I felt, how much I looked forward to his somewhat brazen attention. I tried to keep at least the semblance of a boundary between us; he was my teacher, after all. I certainly didn’t want anyone, especially Ned, to know how love-starved and pathetic I felt.
One day, we were all lying on the floor in his class doing a visualization exercise, and he came over and sat on my stomach. I was flustered and worried by what my classmates might think. I looked around nervously, but no one was paying attention and everyone else’s eyes were closed.
“I heard about your astron
aut exercise. Ethan told me that at the end, the two of you looked like a painting. That’s awesome.”
The day before, in Ethan’s class, after avoiding taking a turn for as long as I could, I’d finally volunteered to go up and do what he called Given Circumstances—an exercise in which he gives you the who, what, and where of a scene, then puts another actor in it with you who has no knowledge of what’s going on. Ethan took me out of the room and told me that my husband was about to go to outer space, and that we had one hour to spend together before he was taken to quarantine for the flight. The trip was dangerous, and he might not return. Ethan and I went back into the room, where I set up a space—moving furniture and props. Then Ethan chose Jeff, with whom I was working on an Our Town scene, to be my partner. I threw myself into it, and Jeff was amazing, intuitively picking up on some of the details and the seriousness of the situation. At the end, I had a vision of the rocket ship exploding and him being a million miles away; I broke down.
“Please don’t go,” I pleaded, tears running down my face. “I’ll die if you leave.”
“I have to go.”
I ran to him and threw myself into his arms. “Why?”
“For the world,” he replied solemnly.
The exercise had only lasted seven or eight minutes, but I had never felt that sort of electric connection with another actor or the truth of playing a scene moment by moment. I was, in actor talk, completely “in the now.” That coup de foudre realization made me see everything that was wrong with my acting up until that point. It hit me, suddenly, that this was why I had come here.
“Yeah, it was incredible,” I said now, looking up at Ned from my space on the floor.
“Well, everyone’s talking about it.”
Feeling shy about all the attention he was paying me, I laughed. I couldn’t remember this happening to me ever before with a guy, and I was drunk on it.
The next day, I saw Ned in the hall and ducked into the library—hoping that he would follow me in, my heart racing. He did, and we were completely alone. He walked right up to me, hugged me, and kissed my cheek.
“I like you a lot,” he said, smiling in his adorable way.
“Aw.” I reached up and tugged on the sleeve of his leather jacket, too bashful do anything more forward, in case what I thought was there really wasn’t. “I like you, too, Ned.”
He looked at me, turning his head to the side, and put his hand on my forehead. “Are you having your period?”
I was, so I felt completely freaked-out that he’d guessed. “Um, yes. How did you know?” I was mortified, discussing menstruation with my acting teacher and my crush. All of a sudden I felt twelve years old.
“My dad is a gynecologist,” he replied matter-of-factly.
“Wow. Weird. Well, I have to go to class.” I crept over to the door, checking the hall to make sure no one would see me leave, my heart pounding, my face flushed.
And that was it—but I ran it over and over in my head a hundred times, each time feeling the delicious flip my tummy made as I thought of that moment, his eyes, his smile. It was fun to torture myself. I waited, wondering what would happen next.
He invited me out to dinner, which neither of us ate because we were so distracted by each other. We were like a screwball-comedy movie team with a quick back-and-forth banter to all our conversations. After he paid the check, we walked out to his car, and once inside, a marathon make-out session started—we each could scarcely breathe; it was as if we were inhaling each other. He drove me home, and I was surprised when he didn’t want to come inside. It was for the best, even though I just wanted to throw him down on the car seat and fuck his brains out. He wanted to take it slow, and I was eager to keep our relationship a secret—for now—which only added to the thrill of it all.
Back at school, we students danced, sang, learned phonetics—which seemed useless to me—practiced our a’s and o’s, and had Alexander technique with teacher Michael Johnson-Chase, whom we called MJC for short. I learned that F. Matthias Alexander was an Australian actor born in 1869 who started having vocal problems while he recited his speeches. He stood in front of a set of mirrors to try to figure out what was causing him to lose his voice. He observed that he pulled his head back and lowered his chin when he spoke—MJC called this “chicken necking”—which pinched his larynx. He developed a method, which became famous internationally, of correctly balancing his head on top of his torso, which then led Alexander to discover that the entire spine could be lengthened—allowing a postural flow to the body. We all ran around school with our heads floating on the tops of our spines.
Jeff and I performed the George and Emily scene from Our Town in which they walk to the soda shop and she tells him how stuck-up she thinks he’s become. It went fairly well—and it was Ethan’s favorite play.
“There’s a reason this play gets performed all the time—it’s iconic. Our Town is like ground zero, man. It’s life, death, and that fucker time. I’m telling ya, if actors connected with this piece, it would heal a lot of shit we encounter along the way.” Ethan listed around the room, pulling on his cigarette, holding a Styrofoam cup—the contents of which I couldn’t guess. “Wendy, you really have to cry in the scene—confront him, you are so pissed off at him. Let him have it, you know?”
Ethan pulled me into the corner and asked me what I found attractive about Jeff. I said his hands, which were large and soft with thick, long fingers. Then Ethan took Jeff aside and whispered something to him. Jeff nodded.
We did the scene again, and Ethan seemed pleased. “At the end, you know, I was really beginning to see the soda shop.” He smiled as he said it. Praise from Ethan—our leader! I was over the moon.
• • •
My stepmother and I usually got together once a month—she often treated me to lunch or dinner out, a welcome respite from my student fare. That October we met at the Café Promenade—a charming old-school restaurant in Larimer Square, a trendy shopping district in downtown Denver. The maître d’, Fred, always made a fuss over her. He reminded me a bit of Jackie Gleason. Though very overweight, he moved like a dancer, dressed nattily, and was so incredibly charming that you almost didn’t notice his size.
“Mrs. Lawless and Miss Lawless! How wonderful to see you, come right this way,” Fred boomed, showing us to a corner table, theatrically waving our menus in his gigantic hands as he waddled across the room.
Because Sarah and Daddy were living in different cities, rumors were flying around the regional-theater community that they were separated and even getting divorced. My stepmother found this hilarious.
“It’s ridiculous, isn’t it?” she said over lunch after Fred left us. “I’m telling you, it’s the most perfect way to be married. I think Katharine Hepburn said something once about how couples should live next door to each other and just visit now and then.” Sarah laughed and lit a cigarette. I couldn’t help but think of my mother’s long-term affair with my ex-stepdad, after their divorce. After we had moved to London and he had remarried, they rekindled their romance—as if the distance of an ocean between them had made it easier to be together. Maybe being in a part-time, commuter relationship was the key to happiness—tethered together instead of handcuffed, with enough room to keep longing alive.
Sarah switched topics. “So how is school going, cookie?”
I filled her in on my classes, my favorite teachers—Bonnie, Ethan, and MJC. I didn’t mention Ned; I was worried that she’d think I was a floozy, or that I wasn’t taking my studies seriously enough.
“Well, I’ve certainly noticed a change in you since you’ve been at the conservatory. You’re so focused and sparkling. It’s wonderful to see.” She smiled and gave my hand a little squeeze.
“Really?”
“Yes.” She sipped her glass of red wine and looked at me intently. “I’ve been meaning to tell you for a while that your father and I t
hink of you as the child we would have had together.”
“Thanks, Sarah. That makes me very happy.” I meant it, but I also felt a tinge of guilt about being favored over my sister.
After she’d paid the check, we walked out of the restaurant into the chilly evening.
“I’ll see you soon. Always feel free to come by my office, okay?” She hugged me.
• • •
I was working with Graham on a scene from a dated kitchen-sink drama called A Hatful of Rain. He played Polo, the supposedly no-good brother of my character’s—Celia’s—junkie husband. Polo is in love with Celia, and she is pregnant with his brother’s child, so the scene is loaded with tension and the unsaid, and both our characters experience a meltdown. We rehearsed in my kitchen late at night.
After we ran it a few times, we were both sort of jazzed by all the conflict in the scene—I’m supposed to throw a glass of water in his face, and he confesses that he loves me.
“I thought that went pretty well—you?” I was trembling slightly.
“Yeah. I have to tell you something.”
“What?”
“I’m crazy about you.”
“What?” I sputtered.
This seemed preposterous to me. Graham had a gorgeous girlfriend, Liz, who was the star ingenue in the company—he could have any girl he wanted. He was good-looking in a conventional, strapping, telegenic way, with broad shoulders and a head of thick brown hair. I’m sure it upset him that his all-American looks and build caused people to regard him in a sex-slob way. Everyone probably thought he’d just move to Los Angeles after school and become the next Tom Selleck. But he wanted to be a serious actor and worked hard at his craft.
Heart of Glass Page 17