On Making Off: Misadventures Off-Off Broadway (18 page)

RETURN OF THE JAZZ AGE

“
The war to end all wars has ended,” I say to the audience, as I emerge from inside the large fireplace on stage. “And Americans everywhere are celebrating! Many U.S. citizens have moved overseas where the dollar is strong and life is easy. These days, fashionable Paris is filled to the brim with American artists and intellectuals who have found a new home in the city of lights. We caught this glittering crowd...”

A loud banging from stage left interrupts me. On the other side of the red-framed glass door, the ghostly faces of Zelda, F. Scott, Ernest, and Dorothy plead to be granted entrance. After several more interruptions, I acquiesce, and the literary luminaries, with Big Eye makeup, burst onto the stage to tell their stories.

The Beggars Group had begun a transformation. We no longer subscribed to the traditional mechanics of making theater. We were moving into a highly collaborative, egoless space of creation. We were no longer operating with titles. There was no director, and nobody would be credited as the writer. It was a play created and presented by The Beggars Group. Sure, if you walked into a rehearsal and asked someone who the director was, they’d probably point to Lolly or me, but we’d deny it. We insisted on clearing the proverbial stage to allow for deeper participation from all the artists in the room.

As the characters dance their way onto the stage, I look up and see Dickey in the booth. Aside from Lolly and me, every face of the new Beggars Group is a fresh one. A week after the company split, I met Dickey at Saints, my local watering hole, where I processed the company's troubles with a small group of friends. When Dickey overheard the conversation, he immediately introduced himself, his technical theater experience, and his desire to hone his fund-raising skills.

It’s strange how simply these things happen sometimes. Lolly and I had spent hours fretting over finding the right people to join the company, and here a key player simply walked up and introduced himself as if cued by a divine stage manager.

I give him a nod, and with a clap, the lights on stage change.

Not only was the show different, so was the theater. Located on East Eighth Street (or St. Marks Place), Under St. Marks is one of those theaters you could walk by 100 times and never know it was there. A small marquee at eye level hangs next to a set of stairs that leads to the 50-seat black-box venue in the basement. Rumor has it that before becoming a theater in the 1980s, the space was a den for a coven of witches.

Its many unique details—the narrow stairwell descending into the musty subterranean space, the red-framed glass door, exposed plumbing that snakes across the ceiling, and a stage-right wall made entirely out of crumbling red brick—make it the perfect backdrop for our play set in purgatory.

“
No, no, no, no, no, no,” says Jenny, as her pitch-perfect Dorothy Parker. “I’m serious, George!”

She is referring to Zelda’s obsession with ballet-dancing, a historically more accurate and visually more interesting replacement for her book as the central focus of the play.

“
Of course, I saw her,” Dorothy continues. “The sight was not a flattering one. She looked tall and awkward, and there was something grotesque about her intensity. One could see her muscles stretch and pull. Her legs looked muscular and ugly. One held one’s breath until it was over.”

Jenny, another miracle find, required a little more searching. After we had alienated most of our friends, Lolly and I needed to cast the show the old-fashioned way—through auditions. Finding actors in New York City is a daunting challenge, not because there is a lack of talent, but because there is such a glut of it.

One ad in the trade paper immediately inundated us with headshots. My mailman even scolded me, demanding I get a P.O. box to receive such huge volumes of mail. How were we supposed to know 500 people wanted to be in our nonpaying off-off-Broadway play in a basement? Two solid days of sifting through piles finally narrowed us down to a reasonable number of actual auditions. We spent a full day seeing people, and the moment Jenny walked into the room, we knew she was our Dorothy.

Jenny and I finish our scene just in time for Harrison, playing F. Scott, to stumble into the action.

“
George, I hope tonight is a really terrible party. I hope someone begins throwing up in the toilet closet. I hope there are infidelities and bad manners and fistfights and sodomy. I hope there is a murder! I’m bored of the suffocating Paris salons filled with the literati pontificating, discussing whose farts are the more artistic!”

After he speaks for a short spell, I clap my hands and the scene shifts.

George Antheil, now the ringleader of the production, keeps our characters in line by stopping scenes before they go too far. Besides the tuxedo and my brilliant command of the stage, what separates me from the others is the two Xs on my cheeks. Yes, the Xs have made a comeback.

The theory behind the Xs is still a little all over the place. You could say once a character realizes he needs to let go of his past and move on, his face is X’d out and he is allowed to disappear into the fireplace. Why would someone want to do that? We didn’t know. But we decided not to think about it too much. We decided to be intentional in our vagueness. We wanted to give the audience something to think about. So as not to confuse them too much, we lay it all out with a little song, backed by a brilliant three-piece improv jazz band called the Gold Sparkles.

“
I am dead! Do you hear me folks? That’s what I said. No one wants to die, but they do. And perhaps you will die someday, too.”

The Gold Sparkles were Lolly’s idea. She was adamant we have live music at all our shows. Canned music is what you get when you go to the movies. Live music is what you should get when you go to live theater. The only problem with live music, though, is that you need musicians. And unlike actors, it’s hard to find musicians who will work for free.

Lolly had seen one of the Gold Sparkle’s shows and immediately fell in love with them—more specifically, with Charles, the band’s leader. So, she invaded her savings account and secured their services for a whopping 2,000 dollars. I didn’t have that kind of money, but I can safely say they were worth every penny of Lolly’s. They gave the piece a texture and resonance that provided for our viewers a passport to the roaring ’20s.

Finally, Zelda enters the fray. Extra dolled up and ready to play, Lolly springs onto the stage with all the life of an 18-year-old.

“
I am a salamander who can walk through the hottest of fires,” she says to Scott from atop the fireplace. “You’re the one who sings across the meadow. The one with the red hair.”

While we still aren’t making a whole play about Zelda’s descent into madness, we are certainly playing with it more. Starting with her growing manic obsessions, we follow her progression until she is sent off to the hospital. Lolly is so fully committed and so wonderfully talented, watching this fall into madness is frightening.

Harrison would throw her down to the floor in one of their dramatic fights, and the theater would shake. A clap from George’s hands would stop everything, and we’d change on a dime to a happier time.

The scene-shifts are quick and clean and highly stylized, thanks to another Beggars Group newcomer.

Fannie is an attractive, extremely charismatic, and highly aggressive woman. With a cartoonishly high-pitched voice, she is at once an excitable and thoughtful “Daddy’s little princess” slumming in the city. She also happens to be a great dancer with big ideas, so Lolly and I enlisted her to help with the movement. She rounded out our team of young, bold, and committed theatrical practitioners.

After a few scenes of some lighter moments, like Scott worrying that the size of his penis can’t satisfy his wife (a fear he cures by showing his pecker to Hemingway), the play concludes just as the previous version had, by wading through the darker periods of our characters’ lives. Howling horrors Dorothy. Shotgun Hemingway. And Zelda, losing touch with reality, slips away from her husband and the world. “I was supposed to be…” says Zelda, striking her best ballet third position and reaching out to her husband.

“
You were supposed to be my heroine,” he replies, as he Xs his face and disappears into the fireplace.

The show is still a little too abstract for some theatergoers, but we were finding our style, and the audience members who get it, really get something.

But most importantly, we were invigorating artists and generating a tremendous amount of energy around the company. Making theater is contagious. This is probably true of many things, but of theater I am certain. And people around us were getting the bug.

After the show, we’d pack our props while the Gold Sparkles riffed, and then we’d head out into the East Village in search of a warm place to eat, drink, and imitate the brighter events of our subjects’ lives. When I look back to that time, my favorite picture is the silhouette of Lolly and Charles lagging behind to kiss under a streetlight.

“
The war to end all wars has ended, and people everywhere are celebrating.”

PART IV

DO IT!

THE ALIENS HAVE LANDED

I have no idea what is going on. I never see any portal open. No passage from outer space. I certainly don’t see any aliens. Maybe I’m not supposed to see aliens and portals. Maybe I have to be stoned out of my mind. Or maybe I just have to believe. But I’m not on drugs, and I just can’t get myself to believe that the wild group of people running around the stage in ridiculous costumes and body paint are aliens. And to make matters worse, they keep asking me to join them. They want me to participate. The more they ask, the more I resist. I hole myself up in the technical booth of Under St. Marks Theater protected by a nest of cables. Someone has to run the lights.

I was all for producing a “happening” to promote our next show,
Do It!,
but what is going on down below is not for me. They keep asking, but I am determined NOT to become a Prudenian.

A few months earlier, before the holidays consumed our attention, Lolly and I had spent several days piecing our puzzle of how to fill the four-week slot at Under St. Marks in April. We originally planned a production of George Bernard Shaw’s
Major Barbara
. But that was the old Beggars Group. We were the new Beggars Group now, and we needed to find a new project.

“
We should do it!” Lolly said, as she bounced a ball off my bedroom ceiling one day.

“
Do what exactly?”

“
We should do
Do It
!” she smiled, looking at me.

It took me a moment to realize she was talking about
Do It!,
the book written by Yippie founder Jerry Rubin. I’d come across the book years earlier at a used bookstore in Tempe, Arizona. After two minutes of flipping through it, I knew this wild and exciting portrait of the 1960s counterculture movement would make a great play. It’s chaptered out perfectly, almost cinematic in its structure. With hundreds of photos and graphics,
Do It!
is exaggerated, impassioned, and wildly entertaining—a book to be experienced rather than simply read. This kind of book floated through college dorm rooms being recited aloud at one o’clock in the morning—which is exactly what happened when I brought it back to my school.

“
We should totally do
Do It!
” I repeated as I rifled through my closet to find my copy. Some of the many good things about doing
Do It!:
It’s fun, it’s funny, and it has plenty of action. But the best part was I’d already tested the book’s collaborative applications.

When I was struggling to do something creative in L.A., I invited 10 people to my house to make a show out of the book in 24 hours. We called it Crash Theater, and it worked. We mounted 30 minutes of the book in one day. If it worked in 24 hours, imagine what we could do in several months.

Back at Under St. Marks, the Prudenians prance around the stage in a very loose improvisation of
The Odyssey
. At least that’s what they tell me. I can’t seem to find the story amongst the chaos. I can’t tell which Prudenian is playing which role. Truth be told, they all blend together with their cardboard hats, torn fabric costumes, and sloppy body paint. This show contains all the chaos of a first-grade Halloween parade.

The only people who stand out are the three monks. They stand out because they wear monk cloaks and because they play instruments. They’re called the Moon Monks—even though they don’t come from Prudenia. They come from Atlanta, so I am told.

Now that we had decided to do
Do It!
, we began a full-blown recruiting campaign. We had pulled off the second production of
The Expatriates
with a little more than a dozen cast and crew, but we knew this next project would require three times that many people.

While Lolly and I shared very similar theatrical visions, our recruiting methods couldn’t have been more different. Her idea of generating interest was to produce a portal opening where aliens called Prudenians come to earth to tell an ancient Greek story. My idea of recruiting was…