by Sands Hall
“Like what?” the actor said.
“As if you have your teeth clenched. Why are you doing that?”
The woman in the scene melted into the audience. The actor began visibly to quiver. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
The teacher imitated him, not unkindly, making his jaw immovable and talking through and over it. As soon as he did, we saw what he’d observed and we had not. There was a bit of laughter, flattened by a look from him.
The actor flushed. “I don’t want—”
“Come here.” As the teacher held out a hand, a big paw, the room seemed to darken and focus around the acting space. “It’s as if someone has hold of you, your jaw.”
The actor backed up a few steps, shaking his head. “It’s just the fall I took when I was skiing a few years ago. I had to have stitches.”
The teacher studied him. “Before that.”
The room was silent. Tears pooled in the actor’s eyes. Again he shook his head.
“Before that,” the teacher said again.
“Just braces. I had to have braces, like we all do, when I was twelve or so.”
The teacher reached a hand and took hold of the actor’s jaw. In front of us the actor became a boy, and the boy let him.
“Before that.” The teacher moved the chin in his hand gently from side to side. “It’s as if someone has hold of you. Does someone have hold of you?”
The boy began to cry. Also to nod. The teacher released his jaw and waited.
“Just like you did,” the actor finally said. He was weeping. “She’d hold my chin and force the spoon in and I’d try to keep my mouth shut because I didn’t want it!”
The teacher studied him. “Let’s be sure to talk later,” he said. “Next scene?”
The acting problems unearthed in the next few scenes weren’t as dramatic, but we could see they were holding the actors back in some significant way.
“That was amazing,” Kate and I raved, as we joined the group bumping its way out of the room.
Someone next to us said, “You do know that guy’s a Scientologist.”
“No!” we said.
“That stuff he was doing? That’s Scientology.”
Horrified, Kate and I looked at each other. As one, we shrugged. “It was still amazing.”
And it was. He seemed to have located a buried memory that not only appeared to be holding the actor back from a successful career, but that might be affecting his whole life. I don’t remember being aware of this teacher’s name: Milton Katselas. But less than two years later, after I’d fled Manhattan for Los Angeles, I almost immediately found my way—at the time it seemed like mere coincidence—to his acting class.
at a table in a restaurant, on a stool in a bar, sitting cross-legged on a chair full of pillows in his living room, my brother radiated brilliance, confidence, power. His friends, talented and astonishing bees, supped at the honeycomb of his light; he was the wax that held us all together. He did not smoke so much as suck his cigarettes, inhaling simultaneously through nose and mouth. He picked up a mug of coffee, which he drank black, by gripping it with an entire hand. If coffee wasn’t to hand, beer was, and vodka, and, increasingly, whiskey. Mary matched him beer for beer, shot for shot.
She’d told me, early on, that she and Oak would eventually live in a New England farmhouse. I easily envisioned this: Oak churning out literary bestsellers in a cozy attic while children romped below. There’d be Irish Setters, walks through fall leaves, mugs of spiked cider.
But that wasn’t the man she married.
One night, I inveigled them to come to dinner by telling them of the jeroboam of Johnnie Walker Red left as a house gift by a visiting friend. As I served up spaghetti that Mary did not eat in favor of another inch of scotch, the conversation centered around the newly formed League of Theatre Artists, which Oak had been instrumental in creating, and which included all of our friends. We were currently rehearsing a three-woman version of Othello.
Mary drained her glass. She and Oak were drinking the scotch like wine. But it meant they’d come to dinner. Once Mary was home from work, she liked to stay home. As I hefted the bottle, which was so enormous it was a joke, and poured them each a bit more Johnnie Walker, she said that she hated actors.
Oak stirred, uneasily. “That’s not a jeroboam, it’s a Methuselah,” he said. Typical, that he carried the names of relative sizes of wine bottles in that brain of his. “Maybe even a Nebuchadnezzar.”
I was still holding the huge bottle. “You hate them!” I said.
“Yes. Hate them.” Her lips were pinched in fury.
The room darkened. A huge winged creature had slid through the brick wall and was hovering over us, dimming even the candles flickering on various surfaces.
“But—why?”
Oak, sitting cross-legged on my rug, lit a cigarette. He wore the slightest of rueful expressions. Mary leaned across the board perched on bricks that served as dining and coffee table. “Look at what they do for a living. Just look at it!”
“You mean act?”
“I mean lie.” Her face was venomous. I thought for a moment that she might throw something. She reached for Oak’s cigarette, took a drag, and almost spat out the smoke. “What they do for a living is lie!”
For the first time, I realized that their marriage had a terrible hole in it. And in spite of having been raised in a family where wine was often served, it was also the first time I sensed that alcohol—hard liquor—could shift a mood so quickly and palpably.
I got up and made coffee, into which they both poured more Johnnie Walker Red.
my first glimpse of Schoharie Creek, the stretch of shallow water and sharp rocks that would eventually claim my brother’s brain, did not seem ominous. It was just a wide, twinkling stretch of water running alongside the small town of Lexington in Upstate New York. It was crossed by a suspension bridge that led to what had once been a popular Catskill resort. The property, owned by the family of a member of the League of Theatre Artists, was now home to the Lexington Conservatory Theatre.
Oak was LCT’s artistic director; its executive director was a friend from UCI, Michael VanLandingham—Vano. The “campus,” as it was dubbed, had for some years been used for a children’s camp, and there was already a Barn Theatre. Oak and compatriots converted an old billiard hall into the River Theatre. The company lodged in the old hotel, where two showers and three toilets were made to function. There was even a detached canteen, with not only a stove and fridge, but plates and forks and tables and chairs. Meals were cooked and served and cleared in rotating shifts. All of it just hours away from Manhattan.
I wasn’t part of that first Lexington season. The Colorado and Oregon Shakespeare Festivals both called with offers; I chose Oregon. But even as I delighted in the deep text work, performing outdoors in Ashland, and working with friends I’d met the previous Colorado summer, I felt I was missing out on something big. In comparison to what my friends were up to in Lexington—creating new theater! acting in new plays!—Ashland seemed stodgy and old-fashioned. It did not occur to me that playing Cordelia in King Lear at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival could be seen as an excellent step in a growing career; I don’t remember thinking in terms of a career. At the end of the summer, turning down an offer to stay on for Ashland’s winter season, I returned to New York.
The all-you-can-drink Sunday brunches were now studded with anecdotes of Lexington Conservatory Theatre’s magical first summer. The season had included my brother’s adaptation of Frankenstein, a dark and eerie production that had been hugely successful. I heard what it took to create theater in a barn, tales of wondrous acting moments, whispers about trysts in the moonlight, laughter at the delights of “summer camp with art,” and about the thunderous applause from audiences startled to find such magic in an abandoned Catskill resort.
/> I was determined to be part of Lexington’s second season, and was, turning down offers from both the Oregon and Colorado Shakespeare Festivals. Along with other company members, I moved into the old hotel, choosing a room on the top floor; many a night, Kate and I crawled out onto the roof carrying wine and my guitar. Home is where the heart is . . . we sang. The road curves on and on . . . I edited bios for the program; devised recipes to feed dozens out of donated zucchini, brown rice, and vats of peanut butter; and acted.
The summer’s productions included John Ford’s ’Tis Pitty She’s a Whore. Ford’s script, about a brother and sister who, Romeo and Juliet–like, cannot have each other, is full of mayhem and swordplay, violence and death. Already dismayed by the play’s subject matter, I watched with dazzled horror as Oak, directing, reveled in making the production extra violent. He and his actors developed grisly stage-fights that included massive amounts of spilled blood. Oak cackled with glee as he oversaw the trial-and-error creation of a most persuasive gore, made of peanut butter, food coloring, and cherry Jell-O.
Even then—and particularly in retrospect—the violence, the blood, the glee seemed like the worst sort of hubris. A kind of purposeful taunting of the gods, until they paid attention, and flung their retort.
i remained convinced I was fat, even when I could see that my clothes hung off me. In an obsessive need to keep off the weight I’d lost, I created an equation of calories as money: I could “spend” only eight hundred a day. My daily practice included a jog along the East River, followed by meditation and sit-ups and leg lifts. Burning calories, I walked everywhere, all the while making incessant mental lists of the calories I was consuming, which, if written out, might look like this:
Egg 80
Toast 70
Apple 80
Carrots (2) 40
Tea w/milk 15
Banana 80
Salad w/ dressing 100
Roll 100
Wine 100
Some camera was always aimed at me, watching how I walked down a street, how I ate, what I ate, my silhouette. I was often exterior to myself, watching, judging. I wanted to be perfect—whatever that meant, it seemed possible—and perfection included being thin.
I was so chronically underweight that I stopped getting my period. I had yet to hear about anorexia, but it’s clear, now, that the mental disorder had me in its grip.
Mary, too, was excruciatingly thin. And in spite of her feelings about actors, she decided to spend that second summer in Lexington. She and Oak could have had their pick of rooms in the hotel, but they slept in the lobby. Actually, they perched in the lobby, surrounded by open suitcases, scattered clothes and shoes, and overflowing ashtrays. I don’t remember her ever joining us in the canteen for meals. But one day, as she and I were driving around Poughkeepsie putting up posters, I watched her cram—there is no other word for it—three cherry Danishes into her mouth. I began to wonder if she could only eat, she would only eat, when she was away from the theater. A Persephone pulled to the underworld of LCT, perhaps she thought she’d be trapped there forever if she accepted anything from us: a scoop of peanut butter, a piece of toast, a bed.
This self-imposed proscription didn’t apply to beer. My brother’s drinking was already legendary; no matter the time of day he seemed to have a container of something alcoholic nearby. Mary, too. Mostly cans of cheap beer. Sometimes jug wine. Now and then cups of orange juice and vodka. Whiskey. The dancing-in-the-fountain Fitz-geraldian delight of the early days of their marriage began to slide toward something grim.
One morning she showed up with a black eye.
What happened? we asked.
“Oh, this squirrel ran out in front of the car.” Her once curly red hair was turning a muddy brown, and uncombed, looked like a Brillo pad. She touched fingertips to a cheekbone. “Oak had to brake, hard. I hit my face against the dashboard.”
There was another conclusion to be drawn, but none of us wanted to imagine it. Although I recalled that night with the Johnnie Walker—her glittering eyes, the inch of liquor tossed like peanuts to the back of her throat, the way the energy in the room had swirled, suddenly, into something so dark. If she hated actors for lying, what did she think of playwrights, who created those lying lines?
By midwinter 1978, as things were gearing up for LCT’s third season, it was clear to all of us that Oak and Mary’s once heady, passionate relationship had turned ugly. Booze was everywhere. Neither showered, both smelled. The apartment stank, too: crumpled beer cans and overflowing ashtrays littered every surface. The trash container sometimes held several vodka bottles. A palpable tension seemed to surround them most of the time.
your brother’s had an accident
Inspired by Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci: A Tragedy in Five Acts, Oak was working on his own version of the dark and demented Cenci legend: an infamous sixteenth-century Italian aristocrat abuses his wife and children, but, because of his wealth and power, his actions, known though they are throughout the city of Rome, go unpunished. His wife and daughter Beatrice eventually manage to kill him. The pope decides to have them publically executed, in spite of a protesting outcry from the people of Rome. I vaguely understood that the story made Beatrice into some kind of symbol of resistance against tyranny, but other than that, had no idea why Oak might be drawn to it. It just sounded like the kind of bloody, weird thing that had always attracted him. Beatrice and the Old Man would open LCT’s Season Three.
But again I wouldn’t be part of things. I’d been cast on a soap opera, The Guiding Light. I was ashamed of having accepted the job, believing that in doing so I’d eroded all my artistic integrity. (It’s hard to believe now, but at the time, among my friends—among “serious” actors—there was a powerful ethos against accepting such work.) Even though my brother had talked me through all the good reasons to be on a soap, including the experience and the money (“You can throw some of it at the theater company”), I’d cried myself to sleep after saying yes. I comforted myself that it wasn’t a running role—my character was scheduled to be part of the storyline for just eight weeks—but as I waved goodbye to my uncorrupted friends heading to Lexington, it flitted across my mind that I might be glad to be away from the tension-filled wire that encircled my brother and his wife and therefore, to some the degree, the entire theater-making enterprise.
Exteriors were filmed in the Bahamas, a delightful interlude, before cast and crew returned to Manhattan. We’d shoot indoor scenes at CBS studios. But I wasn’t called for a few days, and wanting to see my friends, and to be there for opening night of Oak’s new play, I caught a train. Oak picked me up in a hearse. Its long interior ideal for transporting lumber and other set-building necessities, it had been donated to the theater by a local company. Oak had errands to run, and he ran them driving far too fast, a can of beer lodged in full sight on the dashboard. He seemed distracted, mutedly angry. The narrow roads near Lexington were lined with tall grass, and particularly in the twilight it was hard to see very far ahead, much less around a corner. As Oak skidded around curve after curve, I closed my eyes and gave myself over to the death I was sure was coming our way. But finally we rattled across the Lexington Bridge. Across the street from the old hotel, Oak jerked to a stop and I slid from the car, amazed to be alive. Shooting gravel, he gunned the hearse up the long driveway to the theater.
I paused to take in an enormous black and red fabric poster that was strung between two trees: beatrice cenci and the old man, a bizarre comedy by oakley hall iii. A dagger, blotched with gore, pointed to the production dates. From the tip of the dagger, a large gob of blood fell toward the phone number: call for the gory details.
It made me shudder. And even as I greeted friends, things felt weirdly off-kilter. A grim sensibility pervaded the campus.
In the morning, I found Oak in the strange little hut he used as a studio. He was standing, looking down at his
typewriter, which was on the floor along with an array of loose pages and books and a snarl of dingy blanket. I assumed he must wrap this around himself, against the dawn chill, as he sat on the floor, cross-legged, typing. He was holding a plastic glass full of liquid as yellow as unhealthy urine.
“Oak,” I said. “Is that wine?”
He smiled, his dark eyes full of both mischief and sorrow, and rotated the glass in the sunlight floating through a cobwebbed window. “Sauterne,” he said. “Rotgut.”
“It’s nine in the morning!”
He shrugged and ran dirty fingernails through hair that looked as if it hadn’t been combed in weeks. “I’ve been writing,” he said, “not that it matters.”
As awful as he looked, and even though his body odor was rank, and even though he was drinking at 9:00 a.m., I admired him. He was such an artist, for one. (True artists, I was convinced, were tortured and troubled; it took a long time to understand that one could be an artist and be settled and content.) His writing schedule, for another. He wrote every morning, rising long before dawn. Nothing ever got in the way of that.
“I’m looking forward to seeing Beatrice,” I said, to say something.
He shook his head. “The actors hate it. I kind of hate it.”
the show opened that night. At first I did laugh at what appeared to be a “comedy” that was clearly “bizarre,” about a brother chained beneath the stairs by a wizened father who seems to like his daughter a little too much. But as the play unfolded, I shrank in my seat, horrified. The father seduces/rapes his daughter. The brother, attempting comfort, ends up having sex with her, too. Beatrice manages to kill the father she hates so much and is tortured to death for doing so. And just as we think she may have attained some otherworldly peace, as she mounts the stairs to Heaven, eager to be greeted by her Heavenly Father, we discover that He is the same father as the one she thought she’d left behind, and their terrible relationship expected to continue.