Front of House: Observations from a Decade on the Aisle (5 page)

On September 13, 2001, I got on the bus to go to work. I was dressed in black, as per usual, and I had an American flag ribbon on my shirt.

After the attacks on the World Trade Center, Broadway theaters stayed closed for three performances: the evening show on Tuesday, September 11 and both matinee and evening on Wednesday, September 12. On Thursday, all productions resumed performances.

The only people on the express bus with me were the driver and one of the first responders. A lot of businesses were still closed, and nobody who lived in the Tri-State area was going into Manhattan unless they absolutely, positively had to do so. As we drove through midtown, everyone was quiet. We didn’t need to talk about what had happened; we’d all witnessed it.

Since I worked nights, I’d been home and sleeping when the first plane hit the Twin Towers. A frantic phone call from my aunt had woken me up. Our apartment was several miles due north of the World Trade Center, and I could see the Towers from my bedroom windows. I’d spent the day numbly looking out those windows at the smoke billowing from the buildings and fielding calls from concerned out-of-town friends and relatives.

My mother, who worked in the Village, came home on 9/11 with ashes in her hair. It could have been far worse. She’d originally planned to shop in the mall below the World Trade Center that morning, which would have put her at Ground Zero at a very bad time. Thankfully, she’d changed her mind and gone straight to work, further uptown, instead.

The Theater District was silent and calm, and heavy smoke hung over the deserted streets. When I alit from the bus I nearly gagged; the stench in the air went right down my throat. It was an indescribable mix of fuel, chemicals, burning flesh and smoke. I know I will never forget it. Neither will anyone else, I’d imagine. If you talk to any New Yorker who was in town on 9/11, that stench is probably one the first things they’ll mention to you. I’ve heard some people describe it as the smell of death; that’s very accurate, in my opinion. It lingered around Times Square, reminding all of us of what had occurred downtown.

I was working at the Cort Theatre at
If You Ever Leave Me…I’m Coming With You,
a comedic play written and performed by the husband and wife team of Joseph Bologna and Renée Taylor. The house manager immediately called a meeting with the staff. We gathered in a circle, solemn and quiet. There was nothing to say. Some of us had experienced 9/11 more directly than others, but we were all numb and horrified. My friend Sheila, who was also steady at the Cort at the time, worked downtown during the day. Just as my mother, she’d had to run for her life. The house manager stared back, as shocked as the rest of us, and then cleared his throat and told us about the security measures they were adding to the theater. Security on Broadway was already tight; now it was going to be Fort Knox.

I don’t remember what the count was that evening, but I’d be surprised if we had more than a hundred people. Who came to see a Broadway comedy three days after a national disaster? Well, for one thing, there were a lot of tourists trapped in Times Square. The airports were still closed, so anyone who was in the city on vacation or business was essentially stuck there for the time being. There were also many people who lived in Hell’s Kitchen or the Garment District and couldn’t go anywhere. Whatever the reason for their presence, the patrons who visited our show on September 13 simply wanted to escape for a few hours and distract themselves from the disaster that was still haunting every heart, dominating every television channel and poisoning the air outside.

Our show’s opening montage had originally concluded with an explosion. It goes without saying that the production team had hastily excised that particular sound effect. Instead, Renée Taylor and Joseph Bologna walked onstage together, broke the fourth wall and directly addressed the audience.

They knew it was hard to judge what was appropriate to do during a national tragedy, they said, but their job was to make people laugh. They hoped that they could temporarily take everyone’s mind off the horror downtown. The small audience weakly applauded. By the end of the performance some of them were chuckling, and there might even have been a laugh or two. It was a needed respite from the death and destruction outside.

It was, however, a brief respite. A number of Broadway shows closed the next Sunday due to the sudden, drastic drop-off in ticket sales, and mine was one of them. There was no closing party; there was neither a sense of completion nor cause for celebration.

When I called for sub assignments, my boss, Erin, told me apologetically, “I don’t have a single show for you.” With so many theaters dark, work was hard to come by. I ended up filing for unemployment and staying on it for over a month. Thankfully, they waived the waiting week so we started getting our benefits right away.

In a way I was grateful. Given what had happened, I didn’t really want to go outside. Without a show I didn’t have to. I could sit in the apartment and try to process it all. Of course, if I looked out the window I could still see smoke hanging ominously over lower Manhattan.

Broadway eventually bounced back. By mid-October I was scraping up a few performances every week, and by November I was working steadily again. 9/11 hung over our heads for a very long time, however. Although none of us really discussed it, I think that most of the house staff was edgy. Whenever I saw an unattended backpack or purse on a chair, I immediately called security. I looked more closely at the people who attended the shows and paid special attention if they seemed to be studying the theater’s structure more intently than normal. In the past I would have chalked up these people as theater enthusiasts, but in light of the recent tragedy, I suspected them all of having ulterior motives.

That heightened sense of suspicion never really went away. Even in my current line of work, even now, fourteen years later, I am usually the first to call security when I see someone acting even slightly erratically. I’m the first to report unattended parcels; the first to keep an eye on people who ask too many questions about the building layout. Enhanced vigilance and a touch of paranoia are what I carried from 9/11.

Serrated Playbill spines. Small shadows along the walls. A gray flash zipping between the seats. Chewed boxes. The theater mice made their presence known in ways large and small.

This isn’t a commentary on the cleanliness of the theaters, either. There’s a frequently quoted statistic that in New York City there are three or four rats for every human. If you walk down the streets of Manhattan or take a subway, you won’t doubt this figure in the least. When I was bored while I was waiting for a train underground, one of my favorite games was to look at the tracks and play Spot the Rat. It doesn’t require much effort; if you look down long enough you’re liable to see a bunch of them. That’s life. It’s more problematic when they actually come onto the platforms; and it’s downright traumatic to be trapped in a moving train car with a panicking rat.

Anyway, I bring it up because it should give you a clear idea of the magnitude of New York City’s vermin infestation. That specific 4:1 stat looked at rats, but their smaller cousins are certainly plentiful, too. Show me an older building in Manhattan that doesn’t have rodents, particularly if it’s in close proximity to the subway system and has a basement, and I will show you a unicorn. It’s best to assume that every building in Manhattan has mice; it’s best to pray that they don’t have rats, too.

The theaters did their very best to keep the mice and rats away, but since they were surrounded by subway tunnels and so many other old buildings with subterranean levels, it might have been a futile endeavor. Even if they got rid of every single mouse, new ones could always find their way in. Theaters are warm spaces with many places to hide and many things to eat; they’re very attractive to both people and rodents.

One summer at
The Graduate,
the mice carried out a veritable reign of terror. One of the supporting actresses, Alicia Silverstone, was a vegan and an ardent animal rights supporter, and we heard that she had requested that the theater refrain from killing the mice. As a result, they came out to say hi fairly regularly. At the other end of the spectrum, the feral cat that lived outside the Belasco earned his keep by taking care of much of the rodent population. The Belasco Kitty was deadly efficient and his presence was greatly appreciated; steps were taken to ensure that he was fed and had a warm place to sleep. He was, however, a messy hunter. The porters were sometimes faced with the horrifying task of cleaning up the decapitated rats that Kitty deposited in the stage door alley.

When I reported to my aisle at work, I would sometimes discover that mice had nibbled the stacks of Playbills during the night. At first I didn’t realize what I was seeing; I thought perhaps the bundles had been dropped or caught in a door. After a while I learned to carefully inspect the Playbills before I even started preparing them for the walk-in, and to immediately throw away anything that had been partially eaten. Fortunately, the mice usually only got to the top few Playbills, and the rest were unscathed, but occasionally I had to discard entire bundles. For the money people paid to come to Broadway, I wasn’t about to hand them mouse-chewed programs.

More troublesome were the mice that appeared during performances. They were afraid of neither noise nor crowds, so they’d strut right down the aisles. Usually, however, they were savvy enough to stay out of danger; they simply scampered along, freaked a few people out, and vanished before they got into trouble. I’m convinced it was a game for them.

The baby mouse at
The Phantom of the Opera
wasn’t so lucky.

It was adorable, and it was sitting at the back of the orchestra in the middle of the aisle, curiously sniffing around. I spotted it at the exact moment that the house lights came up for intermission and the audience started spilling out of the seats. I rushed toward it, hoping to shoo it back into the safety of the vents.

“Don’t…” The word left my mouth a second too late, and I was horrified to see a teenage girl in flip-flops stomp on the mouse. She apparently didn’t realize, or care, that she’d stepped on a living creature, and she kept walking without breaking her stride or her conversation. I really, really don’t want to believe that it was intentional, but to this day I have to wonder how the body of a small animal was imperceptible to someone in thin flip-flops.

I fought through the crowd to get to the mouse. It was still alive, but it was mutilated, broken, and apparently in an extreme amount of pain. A cluster of patrons gathered and watched as it writhed in agony on the carpet. All I could do was make a tent out of a Playbill and place it over the baby mouse, ask everyone to disperse, and call the porter.

The porter arrived almost immediately, scooped the poor mouse onto a shovel, and took it outside. He was a kindly, compassionate man, and I knew that he would humanely, or at least very quickly, put the mouse out of its considerable pain and misery.

For the rest of the evening, though, all I saw was its tiny, shattered body. For the rest of the night I was chilled by the knowledge that there was a teenage girl in the audience who had stepped on a living creature, left it in agony, and kept walking.

When you work in a theater, your schedule isn’t exactly a traditional nine-to-five deal. You’re working weekends, evenings, and holidays. You have only one day off every week. You might have long periods of unemployment when your theater is closed, during which time you might have to re-accustom yourself to a daytime schedule.

Broadway ushers are required to report to the theater an hour before curtain. Since most shows went up at eight o’clock for evening performances, I didn’t have to be there until seven. For Wednesday matinees, my call time was usually one in the afternoon. Every now and then there would be variations on this theme: Sunday matinees; earlier curtain times on Tuesday nights.

When I lived in the Bronx I usually didn’t make it home until midnight; when I lived in Manhattan, my commute was understandably much shorter. How do show folks commute, anyway? If they are typical New Yorkers, they might not know how to drive. If they’re transplants or grew up in one of the outer boros and they do have a license, they’re probably still not going to be driving to and from work. What with the expensive and elusive parking, the tolls and the traffic, bringing a car into Manhattan can be extremely unwise. As a result, a majority of theatrical employees opt to take mass transit, use a bicycle, or walk.

Public transit service can be infrequent in the evenings, though, depending on where one is going. Since most shows let out at ten or eleven at night, it can be a problem, and theater folks sometimes end up dealing with long waits for the next bus or train. This is especially true with express buses, Metro-North, the Long Island Railroad and New Jersey Transit. Not everything runs around the clock like the subway system, either, and some neighborhoods are totally cut off from mass transit late at night. The last bus or train of the evening might be dangerously close to the time the curtain drops at end of the show. If you’re ever waiting for an autograph at the stage door and an actor runs past you without stopping, don’t assume he’s a jerk. He might just be trying to ensure he’s on that last pumpkin coach home.

Show people aren’t the only ones who work night schedules, of course; New York City is full of people on evening and graveyard shifts. If you walk around Penn Station at three in the morning (I’m not actually suggesting you do this; we’re talking hypotheticals) you will find scores of weary workers.

For me, there were some distinct advantages to working nights. Night schedules are compatible with my natural circadian rhythm, because I’m a type B person. I always have been; I wager that I always will be. I do my best work in the dead of night; I’m barely functional in the morning. This isn’t dependent on the amount of rest I get, either. I can get eight, ten or twelve hours of sleep; if I have to be at work at seven in the morning, I’m still going to be a zombie. My personality actually changes once we hit midday. When I was in school, my worst grades were typically in my first class of the day; the As appeared in my afternoon and evening courses.

Since I was home during the day, I got a lot done. Most people have to take off from work to go to doctor’s appointments or bring their cats to the vet. I didn’t. I had all the time in the world to run my errands in relative peace. I could hit the supermarket at eleven in the morning on Tuesdays and beat the after-work rush. I was always home when UPS deliveries arrived. I could go to school or find other work or volunteer opportunities during the day.

When I lived in the Bronx and took an express bus to the theater, there was another lovely perk: I went against rush hour traffic. There were perhaps twenty people on board the bus with me. I’d occasionally see buses heading in the opposite direction as I looked out the window; they were invariably standing room only down to the front doors.

Since Broadway people work later into the night they also tend to sleep later in the morning unless they have a second job. When I was in college I got up at six because I had early morning classes, but I was always in such a state of fatigue that I frequently nodded off at school. Later, I was able to sleep until nine. That might sound lazy to anyone who is accustomed to already being at work at that hour, but it just gave me the eight hours of recommended rest.

It can be exceptionally hard for night shift workers to relate to those on traditional schedules. They tend to think you’re lazy when you tell them that you sleep later, for instance. What they forget is that evening workers are just starting out when the nine-to-five sorts are finishing up for the day.

I recall an incident when I was trying to get a doctor’s appointment at a local community clinic. I was in the throes of one of my respiratory infections, I was coughing up phlegm and I was so exhausted that I could barely stand upright. The center did take walk-in patients, but you had to be there at eight in the morning, when the doors opened, to get a spot. The line for walk-ins started at six. Since the clinic was a low-income facility that worked on a sliding scale, and it also happened to be clean, bright and well staffed, it was very popular with uninsured and underinsured people on the West Side.

I tried to explain to the nurse on duty that I was ill and needed to see a doctor. When the walk-in system was mentioned, I told her that it was almost impossible to get there so early in the morning, since I worked nights. She sized me up, shook her head, and told me in a patronizing voice, “Well, just try to get up earlier, okay?” It was clear that she didn’t get it, and that she thought I was just a lazy ass who didn’t want to get out of bed in the morning.

The other negative to night and weekend work, and it is a large one, is that you have to take time off if you ever have any desire to engage in activities that other adults enjoy. Concerts? Parades? Workshops? Fuggedaboutit. And friends? Good luck. If you have friends who work on traditional nine-to-five schedules, you can forget about seeing them. They’re working when you’re home; you’re home when they’re working. On the holidays when they have time off you’ll be doing extra performances. It takes effort to maintain friendships in such circumstances.

However, it is entirely doable. I’m a firm believer that we make the time to see those who are important to us, regardless of what else is going on. For years my interactions with my best friend were largely sandwiched between shows on Saturdays. She worked a conventional schedule so we couldn’t see each other during the week. When I was over at
Phantom
I had Sundays off, but she went to church activities all day long. However, she loved Broadway, so she frequently came into the city on Saturdays to see shows. If I had an early shift at the Saturday matinee, we’d meet up, spend four hours hanging out together, and then head back to the Theater District. We became masters at finding fun things to do in the city that did not take us too far from Broadway. We even saw the sights like tourists; there were trips to MoMA, the Pierpont Morgan Library, Rockefeller Center and the Empire State Building. In the evening she’d go to her Broadway theater to see the show she’d chosen; I’d go to mine, to work.

This tactic worked out well with other people, too; we met for lunch between shows on matinee days. I had a handful of friends who were night owls like me; they sometimes met me at the theater at ten or eleven, and we took off to enjoy nocturnal New York together.

During my last five years at
Phantom,
I started calling out for performances so I could see my friends more often. We were allowed to take off two shows a week, and I decided to take advantage of that flexibility. When I was rocking out at an Aerosmith concert, gazing at Van Gogh’s
Starry Night
at MoMA or feeling the ocean breeze as I watched a Cyclones baseball game with friends, I always thanked the stars for the opportunities I had.

Regardless, when one is marooned on a Broadway island, one inevitably begins to forge friendships at the theater. Proximity matters. Working closely, spending every weekend and holiday together and attending cast parties tend to be bonding exercises. The only problem is that the confidence is, in many cases, misguided. There are all sorts of caveats in business magazines about not confiding in your colleagues; those are unwisely ignored in Broadway theaters. Everyone tends to forget that by and large, any closeness might be as fake as the scenery flats on the stage. Nothing’s real, and once you walk through the door in the set you’ll find yourself staring at the bare brick wall at the back of the stage.

You hang onto your delusions, though. Sometimes it works out and you do find genuine friends. Other times you end up with pizza buddies with whom you can chat between shows. All too often, however, any relationships formed, and any personal information shared with colleagues, will become convoluted and may be used against you later.

Why? Broadway people love gossip. The he saids, she saids and they dids are of paramount importance. You spend two hours discussing a mishap at another theater because there’s simply nothing else to talk about that everyone can agree on. And once you fall into this quagmire of gossip, it’s hard to extricate yourself again.

When you’re having an early dinner between shows at the little diner on 9th Avenue, you need to watch what you say; everyone around you is probably connected to Broadway in some fashion. Walking down 43rd Street, stopping at the supermarket at eleven at night or coming up out of the subway at Times Square, you’re liable to run into someone you know. Hell’s Kitchen is like Mayberry, when it comes down to it. A very catty, flashy version of Mayberry, but a small town nonetheless.

And as in all small towns, the gossip flies. It soars. It travels around underground networks, and if something of note happens in one theater, everyone else will know about it the same week. More likely, the same day.

I discovered just how potent this network was when I became a regular at the Majestic Theatre, home to
The Phantom of the Opera.
It really wasn’t a surprise; I’d been a steady sub there for almost a year and everyone believed I would get the next open spot. When I did, it was without much ceremony; the chief turned to me, said, “You’re in,” and went back to her work. Nothing changed; I had the same locker as always and was assigned to the same aisle. It was a relief financially, since it meant that I didn’t have to worry about work from week to week.
Phantom
wasn’t showing any signs of closing any time soon, so uninterrupted employment on Broadway was probably guaranteed for another ten years, if I wanted to stick around that long.

A few days later, I was in the elevator at the Equity building when another usher stepped in. We exchanged pleasantries, but for some reason, the atmosphere was tense. As we arrived on his floor he suddenly turned to me. “I heard you got transferred. You always do land on your feet.” He exited the elevator without another word. I was stunned. I’d thought I was on good terms with this usher, and we’d gone out to dinner together a number of times, but he was genuinely angry that I was at the Majestic. I didn’t even need to ask how he’d found out; I knew that the Broadway grapevine had worked its horrible magic.

I ambled down 44th toward the Belasco Theatre. The doorman was standing outside, and he smiled at me. “Congratulations on the Majestic!” This one left me dumbfounded. The Belasco was dark and between productions; there weren’t even any ushers working there at the moment. Who was talking about me, and why? And was there really so little happening on Broadway that I was an interesting topic of conversation?

I later discovered that at least two ushers at other houses were angry that I’d been made a permanent staff member at the Majestic. They were bitching to their friends, and the word was getting around. And the more I heard, the more I decided that the gossip-mongers were downright pathetic.

Oscar Wilde once said, “There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is
not
being talked about.” I get where he’s coming from. On the other hand, I’d posit that being talked about in a negative fashion is worse than both of Oscar’s choices.