Heart of Glass (19 page)

I felt embarrassed by how horrid I was in the play—it was like Nina at the end of Chekhov's play
The Seagull
, where she talks of being onstage and knowing she's acting badly and doesn't know what to do with her hands. It was painful to
come out from behind the curtains after each performance and not have anyone say something nice to me. I'd sneak home, my head low. I was lost in the part, and it showed.

Toward the end of the season, a director and old friend of my dad's, Ed Call, came to see the plays. He was going to be directing John Osborne's kitchen-sink drama
The Entertainer
, with Daddy playing the lead—a washed-up, bitter music-hall performer named Archie Rice—and Ed wanted to see me read for the role of Archie's daughter, Jean. It was a great role, and I'd be working with my dad again—and at the Guthrie.

Unfortunately, Ed saw my horrible performance in
Love's Labour
, but also my wacky take on
Merry Wives
, in which I thought I showed some comic chops. Not that comedy was what was required for the role of Jean—she is a disappointed daughter, trying to make sense of her postwar life, against the sadness and bleakness of England at that time and her father's unhappy marriage to her alcoholic stepmom.

I met Ed in the ground floor of the department store, where we'd rehearsed the plays before moving to the golf-course stage. I was even more nervous because Mark, who ran the Shakespeare festival, was there—the two of them together felt a little like a firing squad. I made it through the scene but felt distant from the material and frozen with fear. I knew in the first thirty seconds of the audition that I wasn't going to get the part.

“You know, Wendy,” Ed said after I'd read, “you should really think about getting some training.”

I nodded, not knowing what else to say. I stuck my hands under my armpits, tapped my foot, and pursed my lips, in an attempt to show that I was tough and didn't need his fucking job.

Ed saw right through my act. “I mean, you're really good, but if acting professionally is what you want to do, you need a program. You need to go to school. You know they're starting one up at the Denver Center.”

Oddly, I hadn't heard about the new program until now.

“Thanks, Ed.”

“Jesus, when are these goddamn Lawlesses going to leave me alone! See ya around, kid, and think about what I said.”

Ed ended up casting another actress named Wendy, Wendy Makkena. She had more experience and was gangbusters in the role. I was jealous, but she was better for it than I would ever have been.

At the end of the summer, my phone rang again—it was Peter, the guy at the Denver Center. He offered me an “as cast” contract—basically small roles and understudying leads for the season—which both surprised and disappointed me. Maybe my tryout before I came to Idaho hadn't gone as well as I'd thought. Then I remembered what Ed had said about going to acting school and the program starting up there.

“Peter, thank you so much for the job offer, but what I really want to do is get some training. Would you consider admitting me to the new conservatory there instead, in lieu of offering me a contract?”

He said yes. I was twenty-four years old and going back to school—for the third time.

chapter eight

WILD, WILD WEST

The National Theatre Conservatory (NTC) was a three-year graduate acting program affiliated with the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, a multimillion-dollar arts complex with three theaters. Coincidentally, my stepmother had been asked to be the managing director of the theater company—she'd left the same position at the Children's Theatre in Minneapolis when the artistic director, John Donahue, had been arrested for having sex with underage boys. My father was staying in Minneapolis but would visit often, and it was nice knowing some family was around.

Our school was in the old jail building around the corner from the theater. It was under the stewardship of Allen Fletcher, who, along with William Ball, had founded the American Conservatory Theater (ACT) in San Francisco.

The NTC's first class was composed of students from ACT whom Allen had invited to come with him to the new
program. Some went straight into the second-year class, and I was in the first, along with nineteen others. We were going to have scene study and acting class in addition to training in voice, movement, the Alexander technique, ­phonetics, speech, dance, and singing. Many of the faculty Allen had brought along from ACT; others would be hired from around the country. Guest instructors, such as the well-known Shakespeare teacher David Hammond, would be coming in to teach specific skills.

The plan was to spend two years studying and then, in the third year, be paid a stipend and act in the resident company. We were all awarded scholarships of various amounts—mine allowed me to stretch the last of the money my grandfather had left me and cover the three years.

Acting school was, for me, a way to commit to the profession, to finally fill that lonely place inside me with something that captivated and drove me. I wanted to land, to no longer drift aimlessly from place to place. After a lifetime without guidance or structure, I hoped it would be good for me. As always, I was looking for a home.

I was here to learn who I was, and what kind of an actor I wanted to be. I was terrified. Since many of the people in my class had known each other at ACT, I called upon my new-girl-in-town bravado—Wendy Lawless, breezy world traveler and bon vivant—honed over years of constant moves with my mother and sister. Putting on a plucky, insouciant front, I tried hard to put my insecurities aside and concentrate on trying to learn. I didn't have to be the best—
it wasn't about that. Still, many days I felt like jumping off a tall building. I'd take a running leap off, eyes wide-open, hurtle through space, and land in a net held by my classmates and teachers. After a while, I started to find conquering my initial fears and doubts exhilarating.

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 tem
porary, 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 astronaut 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.