Just as Dave had helped me out with a job, Didi came to my rescue on the apartment front. Her fiancé, Michael, had a small, dark, dumpy bachelor pad on the interior of a building on Amsterdam Avenue in the Eighties that he wasn’t quite ready to give up, so he kindly let me sublet. It was cheap and close to my old neighborhood; I didn’t even have to change dry cleaners.
Despite the apartment and the job, I felt despondent and restless. I hadn’t had a serious acting job in months and was anxious because my career seemed to be over. I was busy, dashing around the city to pick up scripts, clocking some hours at Bouley, spending a week answering an office phone on the East Side here and there. I continued my sessions with Elaine, who graciously allowed me to pay her when I could. Didi sent me on many auditions—I was the callback queen, but callbacks aren’t a job. Then at the end of March 1989, I went down to the Public Theater to try out for a production of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. The director, JoAnne Akalaitis, was an avant-garde theater legend who’d been one of the founding members of the experimental theater group Mabou Mines. She had flaming-red hair, cropped short and spiky, wore retro, thick-framed glasses and black pants and jackets like a punky teenager, and had a ghostly pallor that made her look as if she’d never been outside.
The leading-lady role in the play, a princess named Imogen, is the longest woman’s speaking part in Shakespeare and quite difficult. After I read one of the speeches, I mumbled thanks and started gathering up my stuff.
“I feel like I’ve met you before.” JoAnne was chewing gum and turned my résumé over in her hand. “Is that possible?”
“I don’t think so.” I shook my head. She was probably a year or two younger than my mother, but was nothing like her. JoAnne had a warm, maternal, matter-of-fact manner. I guessed she got along well with her kids.
“There’s just something very familiar about you.” She smiled and asked me to come to the callback on Saturday.
The callback was more of a combat and movement class led by a fight choreographer. Afterward, JoAnne told me she wanted me to be in the play, but she laughed and said she didn’t know what I would be doing in it yet. I said great, ecstatic for the chance to work with a director of note and at the Public Theater, too.
She cast me as a lady-in-waiting to Imogen, who was to be played by Joan Cusack. The bonus was that I would get paid a much-needed extra $20 a week to understudy her. I had one line—“The Queen, my lady, desires your highness’s company.” My character didn’t even have a name. But I didn’t care, I was working. The company ran the gamut, from actors deeply rooted in the experimental theater, to classically trained ones from Juilliard and Yale, and included Don Cheadle, Wendell Pierce, Peter Francis James, Frederick Neumann, Joan MacIntosh, and Michael Cumpsty.
I could tell that a few of the actors didn’t enjoy JoAnne’s directing style, but it was so out there, I found it all fascinating. We did a big group warm-up, dancing onstage to African music before each rehearsal, then we’d lie on the floor as she’d read us Artaud. We did mudra exercises—a series of formalized hand and face gestures—and moved around the stage in slow motion. She didn’t like doing table reads, so everybody was up on their feet the first day, running scenes. All the movement in the court scenes was stylized, to accentuate all the artifice and intrigue. JoAnne was well-known for having male nudity in her productions; the villain Iachimo’s first scene was in the buff in a massive bathhouse, and the young men who lived in the forest, played by Don Cheadle and Jesse Borrego, wore practically nothing—leaping around the stage in loincloths. This might have explained why they were always being followed around by packs of teenage girls. I was so jazzed—me, in a show with hot and legendary actors at a world-famous theater? Even though I had a small part, I felt as if I’d arrived. With so little time onstage, I often sat out in the house watching rehearsals and scribbling down Joan’s blocking. JoAnne, who’d started out as an actress, treated everyone in the cast the same and was nurturing and direct; when she’d get mad at someone, or about something, she’d yell—and then it was over. She didn’t hold grudges. I admired her style. I felt drawn to her in a mommish way. She seemed so strong, sure, and so much her own person.
One day at rehearsal, she introduced us to the show’s composer: “Hey, everyone, this is Phil. He’ll be doing the music.”
“Phil” turned out to be Philip Glass, arguably the most celebrated living modern composer as well as her ex-husband. For the next few weeks, Phil hung out with us, watching rehearsals and scribbling in a notebook. I was agog, not just because he was famous but because he and JoAnne were divorced and yet working together and enjoying each other’s company. Their ex-relationship was more successful than any of my relationship relationships.
Soon after rehearsals began, I started dating a man, Isaac, I had met at one of Didi’s parties. A divorced Jewish lawyer with a four-year-old son, he was smart, funny, and nine years older than me. He was a little goofy looking, tall and wiry, with big round eyes and tightly coiled hair that he kept short. He wore expensive suits and had a spacious apartment on the Upper West Side and a beach house on Long Island. I would spend the night at his house but would always move to the guest bedroom early in the morning so as not to confuse his little boy, Eli. Isaac’s ex lived in the same building, a few floors below, and Eli moved back and forth between apartments. Having grown up with a ever-changing roster of my mother’s boyfriends, I tried to be especially sensitive toward Eli, who was chattery and blond with huge blue eyes. I’d always hated it when some guy my mom was dating tried to muscle in and act as if he were my dad or offered to buy me stuff so I’d like him more. I sort of waited for Eli to come to me; I let him take the lead. And it worked.
“Wanna pway bawl?” He sniffed and ran his sleeve across his nose.
“Sure.” I resisted an impulse to grab him and kiss him to death, which would have scared him.
Soon, the maid was doing my laundry and leaving it neatly folded on top of the washing machine, and Isaac would bring me a cup of delicious coffee in a fine china cup on a tray in bed. I’d watch him get dressed for work, and he’d ask me if I needed anything. He knew I was always strapped for cash, so he never hesitated to pick up the check for fancy wine lunches at Café Luxembourg or late-night steak-frites at Florent, a greasy-spoon bistro in the Meatpacking District after the show.
“Do you have any money?” He knotted his luscious Italian silk tie expertly one morning before heading off to his law office.
“I have a couple of bucks.”
He rolled his eyes comically and took his wallet out of his jacket breast pocket, pulling out a twenty. “Jesus, take this. I don’t want you starving to death. The life of an actress!”
I took the money and thanked him. I didn’t feel badly about it, because I knew he didn’t care, and it was only twenty bucks. That didn’t even qualify as Holly Golightly’s $50 for the powder room. Let alone my mother’s grand piano or washing machine.
During a long technical rehearsal, I was lying on a table backstage, getting in a little power nap, when JoAnne stopped in the hall next to me. I opened my eyes.
“I just realized where I know you from.” She was chewing gum and had her hands on her hips. “I babysat you when you were three or something.”
“Really? Wow.” I tried to imagine JoAnne in capri pants, little white socks, and Keds. I was having trouble.
“Yeah, it was summer stock in North Carolina—Chapel Hill. I played your dad’s daughter in A Man for All Seasons, and I used to take you and your sister to the public swimming pool on the day off.” She grinned widely at me, clearly happy to have solved the mystery.
Then she asked me how my mother was. I said I didn’t really know, that we were sort of estranged.
“Hmm, well, it must be her fault. If a kid isn’t speaking to a parent, it’s always the parent’s fault.”
“What did you think of my mother? What was she l
ike back then?”
“Pretty. Thin. She seemed, I don’t know, disappointed by her life. Like she thought it was going to be this fairy tale, and it wasn’t. I felt sorry for her, to tell you the truth.”
JoAnne’s pity surprised me. I had never had any sympathy for my mother. To me, she was this gorgon who suddenly flew out of the darkness to swoop down on me and do her best to make me feel small and unloved. Her mantra was to replay her abandonment by everyone she loved—the most recent escapees being my sister and me. Through therapy, I’d begun to see that I was far stronger, and higher functioning, than I—or she—gave myself credit for. My mother could never overcome her horrific abusive childhood, but perhaps one day I’d be able to look upon my mother with some degree of forgiveness, even compassion for her, as JoAnne seemed to.
• • •
The show opened—and it was eviscerated in the press. All the papers said it was a dud, a bomb. The day after the scathing reviews came out, the cast and crew were summoned to the theater a half an hour early. Joe Papp, the founder of the New York Shakespeare Festival and the Public Theater, stood in the house to greet us. He seemed tall, but perhaps that was his towering presence. He was a strikingly grand man, elegantly dressed in a suit, with a wiry head of unruly graying hair, an impressive and handsome nose, and furry, caterpillar eyebrows that framed his energetic, lived-in face. Before he even opened his mouth, I felt as if I’d follow him into a burning building.
JoAnne was nervously chewing gum, arms folded across her chest, pacing a piece of carpet next to Mr. Papp. She cleared her throat. “Hey, everyone, Joe has something to say.”
The great man smiled and nodded and then said in a perfect mid-Atlantic accent, “I want you all to know how proud I am of this production. The critics are wrong. They simply do not understand what JoAnne is—what all of you are— trying to do. This is a production of vision, of ideas, and they must be made to see that. And they will. I’ve invited all of them to come back next week for a special performance. I know that, after they see Cymbeline again, they will toss out their reviews and proclaim the show a triumph.”
We all clapped, thrilled. Our leader had spoken; with stars in our eyes, we ran backstage to get ready for the evening performance, believing that we weren’t in a turkey.
The following week, as the critics from Time, Newsweek, and the New York Times found their seats in the theater and the actors’ half hour was called, Joan’s makeup table at the end of the row in the ladies’ dressing room sat empty. Since I was her understudy, I felt a little nervous, but figured she was just running late. We’d had the day before off, and she’d flown somewhere to meet her boyfriend. She was probably stuck in traffic coming from the airport. But another fifteen minutes went by, and she still hadn’t turned up. Suddenly, at five minutes to eight, Mr. Papp strode into the dressing room, surrounded by an entourage. I had my wig on and my long skirt, but no top. Standing there in my bra in front of the artistic director of the Public, I started to have a creeping sense of doom. Holy shit, I’m going on for Joan. It all seemed to be happening so fast, but in slow motion, like a car accident—time sort of stopped. I was having trouble breathing.
Mr. Papp regarded me, looking me up and down. “Is this the understudy?” He made a theatrical, sweeping arm gesture in my direction. The entourage nodded yes, heads bobbing up and down in unison, while I felt as if I might faint.
He looked me right in the eye. “Are you ready to go on? Do you know the lines?”
“Um, yes, Mr. Papp,” I croaked. “I know the first half but might have to be on book for the second act.”
“So you need to carry a book? There’s no shame in that. Someone get this girl a book!” he thundered, and a minion scampered away to find one.
“Let’s get this young woman into a costume!” he bellowed, and another member of his posse ran to get Joan’s clothes.
I nodded weakly as they started pinning me into her costume—a long, voluminous, rose-colored nightgown—for the first scene. Joan was quite a bit bigger and taller than me.
JoAnne, who had been lurking in the corner chewing her nails, walked up to me and took my shoulders in her hands, fixing her steely gaze upon me. “Just do it,” my former babysitter said solemnly.
Frantic, I shoved quarters at my friend Sharon Washington, who played the other lady-in-waiting, to call Didi from the pay phone in the greenroom and let her know I was going on.
After the terror, I began to feel excited, even eager, to get out there. I was about to go onstage at the Public Theater in a leading role, and I thought suddenly I might even be quite good in it. Maybe this was my big break! As I exited the dressing room, all the women kissed me and patted me on the back. I walked through the greenroom—the other actors cheering me on and applauding. I could feel the adrenaline coursing through my veins. Brilliant and invincible, I would conquer New York and receive the key to the city.
Practically levitating, I turned into the hallway to the stage and ran smack into Joan, who was frantic and jabbering a story of being stuck in traffic on the Grand Central Parkway. As soon as I saw her, water came pouring out of every pore in my body. Drenched in flop sweat, I had an immediate, piercing feeling of disappointment—I was sorry that she’d shown up, I was so convinced that I was ready. It was not my big break, after all.
In June, after we’d been running for a month, my old boyfriend Graham showed up in New York. I hadn’t seen him since our last year in acting school—after the sweater incident—where we avoided each other in a civil fashion. I’d heard he and his girlfriend had broken up, and he’d moved to Seattle, where he was acting in local theater and working in a coffee place. He’d recently sent me a letter, care of my friends Jen and John, that cried out for some kind of declaration on my part. I hadn’t responded.
I got him a comp to the show, and we walked across the street to Indochine afterward for a drink. Indochine had become the cast hangout, a restaurant that looked like a decadent café in a jungle with palm-frond wallpaper, wicker chairs, and whiffy hostesses who looked like fashion models. I could tell he’d hated the show; almost every one of my friends who’d come to see it thought it was a disaster. But I could also see that he was bothered that my fellow cast members came up to me to say hello after we’d grabbed tall, metal stools at the bar. I’ll admit I enjoyed it—not only that I was working as an actor and he was not, but that I was liked and settled while he was still trying to find a place to land. Maybe I had moved on.
“What are you doing in the city?”
“I’ve moved to New York.” He smiled and turned his scotch on the rocks around on the cocktail napkin.
I noted, with some amusement, that he looked out of place in this downtown world, with his quarterback looks and preppy clothes. “Really? What happened to Seattle?”
“Christ, it rained all the time. I’m over it. So whaddya think?” He lit up a Camel Lights.
“About what?”
“Me moving to New York.”
I signaled the bartender to bring me another Maker’s Mark. “Great. If that’s what you want.” I was determined to keep things light, whatever game he was playing.
“I found an apartment, and I think I got a gig bartending on the Upper West Side that starts in a few weeks.”
I smiled and chewed my lip. There was a silence.
“Are you seeing anyone?”
“Um, yes, actually. A lawyer. He’s a really lovely guy.”
Graham nodded and fiddled with the little plastic straw in his glass. “Well, maybe when I get settled, we can meet for coffee or a movie sometime.”
“Okay, sure.” I shrugged, nonplussed.
He walked me to the subway, and we exchanged a chaste hug. Our eyes met briefly before I turned—pretending not to see the baffled look on his face—and walked down the steps. I didn’t have time for his games; I was busy working and taking care of myself
. I was my new priority, not some old boyfriend.
Cymbeline closed at the end of June after a sold-out run. The show was never re-reviewed, but with the word on the street that it was a stinker, flocks of haters and curious theater folk came to see what all the fuss had been about. So we played to packed houses every night until the end. It was bizarre performing the show to a wall of silent onlookers, who were clearly mystified by JoAnne’s interpretation of the play—as if we were in an underwater tableau vivant or a freak show that no one understood.
With the closing, I was once again an unemployed actress. I registered with another temp agency, Rosemary Scott, which had a single-room office in a generic Midtown building where three motor-mouthed women in knockoff Chanel suits barked into phones nonstop all day. Despite my inability to type or even file, they managed to book me into jobs, answering phones mostly. I worked in a posh furniture showroom in Midtown, at a Japanese bank so close to the top of the World Trade Center that I could feel the building sway slightly in the wind, at a supplier of office equipment where they kept me for two weeks just because I made them laugh.
After work I’d meet Isaac for drinks at fancy bars or the University Club, where he was a member. I was staying over at his apartment quite a bit, then going out to his place in Speonk on the weekends. Robin came along one weekend, and we attempted to cook Isaac dinner. We burned the roast chicken, and our risotto was a yellow puddle of goo. We giggled at Isaac when he refused to eat it, and we ended up going out to eat.
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