On Making Off: Misadventures Off-Off Broadway (28 page)

“
I don’t know. It’s like we’ve lost our sense time and place. You know. Like we don’t know what day it is, or what month even. I don’t know. I feel like we should be doing something that’s helpful with that.”

She wasn’t making sense and retreated back into her folded arms.

“
Theater that is the equivalent of giving blood…” I said. “Don’t you think that’s asking too much from the art form? I mean… I don’t know, it seems like we could really set ourselves up for failure there. Trying to be provocative and entertain is a tall enough order. Giving blood… I don’t know.”

“
I’m talking about doing something that important,” Lolly said, standing up. “You know. Giving people that feeling.”

“
No, I don’t,” I replied.

“
You know the feeling you have when you’ve given blood?”

“
No,” I replied.

“
Haven’t you ever given blood?”

“
No.”

“
You’ve never given blood? Dickey, you know what I’m talking about, right?”

“
No,” Dickey said.

“
You guys have never given blood?”

“
No, Lolly, gay men haven’t been able to give blood since the ’80s,” Dickey said.

“
That’s fucked up,” Lolly replied. “Anyway, it feels good, because you’re giving a piece of yourself. Life. It’s profound.”

And she stopped there because she could see we got the point but were no longer going to endure the metaphor. Picking up one of the many magazines strewn on the floor, Lolly began to read. Dickey and I followed suit, and we sat for hours taking turns reading articles and columns that we found funny or profound.

“
Why don’t we take these articles, and put them together into an evening called
Stopping the World
?” Dickey suggested. “We have a lot of material and all this funny stuff from
The Onion
to keep the show light.”

“
Like a living newspaper,” Lolly said.

“
Exactly!” Dickey said. “And they’re having a big art night at The Space in a couple of weeks. I’ll bet they’d let us do it there.”

“
Oh, you’ve got to be kidding,” I said. “It’s a great idea, Dickey, but The Space?”

“
It will be good, Randy Anderson. We’ll talk about what everyone is thinking about in a theatrical setting, where people can share in their fears, and hopes, and what-ever else they’re experiencing.”

“
And it’s all found text from current newspaper and magazine articles,” Lolly said, jumping to life for the first time in hours.

“
I love the idea, but The Space?” I was outnumbered.

Two weeks later, we arrived at The Space on a clear, crisp night. The Empire State Building was perfectly framed in the large factory windows. The whole place was already crawling with poor, smelly artists. The politicians’ jars must have been overflowing.

We hadn’t been out to The Space since our
Do It!
production, and we noticed absolutely nothing had changed. Apparently, we were the only people who bothered to clean anything. The energy was frenetic, but I couldn’t tell why. Was it because of all the funky art? Or was evil still present? I became nervous about being vulnerable in this environment. We spent a half-hour wandering the galleries, analyzing art, and striking up conversations with smelly artists, killing time before our 8 o’clock curtain.

I don’t know exactly where the rumor came from or who started it. Maybe the evil presence got the ball rolling, but all I know is Lolly came up to me and said she had heard the Empire State Building had been attacked.

“
We can see it from the western windows,” I said. “I saw it when we came in.”

We ran over to the room with the windows to the west. And there, framed in the giant factory windows, was nothing.

“
Holy shit!” Lolly said. “It’s gone.”

“
It’s gone,” I repeated.

We ran to find Dickey. He’d already heard about the attack from someone else and was frantically searching for anyone who might have a radio or more information. We found Fannie and Harrison and gave them the update. We were genuinely scared, and our panic grew with each minute.

“
How is it that none of these art projects is a radio?” I asked. There were Barbie installations, “yarn art,” collections of matchbox cars, so I could only assume there was a working radio glued to a cat somewhere.

“
This is an art gallery, Randy, not a science fair,” said Fannie as we continued running through the space, informing everyone we knew about the tragedy.

Most of the artists listened to our story about the vanishing building with curiosity but only moderate interest and certainly no alarm. It was only then that I began to sense the many kinds of drugs pulsing through The Space. Everyone was too hopped up on whatever to care that our city had been attacked yet again. After 10 minutes of searching for any kind of communicative device, we grew fearful we’d be trapped in Queens…and that we’d be stuck at The Space, a fate worse than death.

Our panic escalated. We started running from room to room announcing that terrorists were dismantling our skyline. The drugged-out, smelly artists just looked at us in unexplainably funny ways. Some laughed and went back to what they were doing. Others began following us around until we had a parade of people moving from room to room. Finally, we assembled in the common lobby where we made the decision to save ourselves.

“
We’re fucking out of here!” Lolly shouted to the room, and we descended the stairs and went out to the street. We were absolutely out of our minds, talking a mile a minute about the terrible the energy at The Space and how we prayed we’d make it back to Manhattan when we ran into Scott at the subway entrance.

“
Thank God, you’re OK,” I said, giving him a hug.

“
Of course, I am, why wouldn’t I be?” he asked. “And why aren’t you guys at The Space getting ready for your show?”

“
The Empire State Building has been bombed,” I said, and everyone else jumped in with all the details we’d conjured up in our minds. Scott held his hands out in an attempt to slow us down.

“
You guys, I was just at 34
^th
Street. There wasn’t any bomb. The building is still there. Look!” He pointed over the rooftops.

Sure enough, there was the Empire State Building slowly being revealed by the passing cloud.

“
So…shit,” I said. “Wow.”

“
Should we go back?” Dickey asked.

“
You guys gotta do the show,” said Scott. “I came all the way out here.”

“
I don’t know,” said Lolly sheepishly. “I don’t think we can go back up there after the way we left.”

It was true. We had made a pretty big fuss about a terrorist attack.

“
Well, I’m not going back,” I said. “That place is messed up. There is nothing but bad energy in that space. Every time we’re in there, something bad happens. I hate it, and I never want to go back there ever again.”

Nobody wanted to argue with that, so we got on the N train and got the fuck out of Queens.

We heard later that our “performance” was very well-received. The smelly artists and their friends were all impressed with our acting and thought the interactivity was a nice touch. They really liked how we commented on the new culture of fear in our society but would have picked a less obvious target for our fake terrorist attack.

The artists all agreed that performing throughout the entire gallery was spectacular. These were, after all, people who didn’t like to sit in one place for very long. And while they all understood our piece had to end with us leaving the building, they wished we had come back for a curtain call.

The Space debacle wasn’t merely a stumbling block, it was a sign we had fallen flat on our faces. We were struggling with how best to serve our audience, ourselves, and our craft. For the past two years, we had produced over a dozen shows and at least a dozen more single-night events. We were always working on two or more projects at a time, with another three in the pipeline. Ideas seemed to flow effortlessly.

But now, we had nothing. No ideas, no projects, no prospects. It was a head-on collision, 60 to zero in one second. Our collective concussion was severe.

“
I think I’m gonna paint that wall,” Lolly said one afternoon staring at the longest wall in our living room.

“
Just as long as you don’t paint over my footprints,” I said, referring to the blue footprints running parallel to the floor across another wall. It was a late-night project of Big Rob’s and mine. I dipped my feet into the paint and he lifted me as I walked them across the wall. It was no easy feat, and I was very proud of the work.

“
Don’t worry, I won’t.”

I watched for a while as she drew orange lines in random patterns. Then, she’d work in some gray highlights. Eventually, I got inspired and, after a trip to the bodega for a six-pack, began working on my own wall. We worked through the night. The colors were erratic and the designs chaotic, but the room burst to life in a way we’d never thought possible. It was warm and inviting, even though one of my paintings was a series of explosions.

“
We should do a show here,” I said, looking around at the oranges, blues, and grays.

“
Here?” Lolly asked.

“
Yeah, nothing crazy…a reading, or an evening of music. Something about the room feels safe, like a coffee shop in Amsterdam.”

“
Of course, you’d feel safe in an Amsterdam coffee shop.”

“
Well, maybe ‘warm’ is the word I’m looking for.”

“
No, ‘safe’ is the right word. It feels safe.”

The following Saturday, we produced a reading in our living room. We invited a friend to read a story she’d been working on and asked Jay to play an acoustic guitar score behind it. We bought some track lighting and a dimmer for the “stage,” carved some jack-o’ lanterns, filled the room with wine and baked goods, and invited everyone we knew. Nobody declined.

That evening was the theatrical equivalent of giving blood. With all that had happened and all that was happening, people simply wanted to come together. And we’d created a safe space where they could do just that. They entered, and we took their coats. They ate homemade apple pie and banana bread while chatting with strangers. Then, we all sat down, drank wine, and listened, like children, to a story, safe in the flickering lights of an indisputable October.

HOME

For those who know or those who just happen to be there, the show starts in the bar across the street from 85 East Fourth Street. There at around 7 p.m., you find a Frenchman and an Englishman bickering about the endless subjects a Frenchman and an Englishman can bicker about. Never raising their voices, their arguments are playful yet permanent. After finishing five beers between the two of them (the fifth being consumed by the winner of that day’s wager), they walk across a bone-dry street under the giant domes of their doorman umbrellas and enter the Kraine Theatre.

It is the spring of 2002, and this is the beginning of
The Expatriates
, the final movement in The Beggars Group’s second act.

The struggle to generate work had become intense during the winter leading us into 2002. The only thing we’d done since the October reading was
More
Making Out in Japanese
, a silly “sex seminar” play based on a travel guide. The world had changed so drastically, we were unable to regain our footing. Desperate to see the world as we had before, we reached for those familiar foreigners,
The Expatriates
, to help guide us home. We must have understood on some level this would mean the end. We had to. Why else would we have constructed the play we did?

By the time our two porters arrive in the lobby, it’s crowded with patrons. Noj, playing the Frenchman, cheerfully ushers the first party into the theater, holding his umbrella over their heads. The houselights are dim, and the sounds of a rainstorm fill the space. A quilted curtain, made of found fabric just thin enough to see through the threads, hangs in front of the stage. In the center of the curtain, we project the word HOME.

Noj discourages the patrons from taking their dark, storm-swept seats and leads them through the curtain, into the light, to the onstage café, complete with several small tables and complimentary wine at the bar. Dickey, our bartender, hands them each a program and offers them a drink. Patrons either stand or sit with their drinks and eventually notice a table with two seated people who don’t quite look like fellow audience members. It’s F. Scott Fitzgerald and Dorothy Parker, quietly chatting. Are they having an affair?

We wanted to re-create the play from the ground up, so we brought in performers we could trust, people who would bring as much to the play as they would to their performances. Harrison would reprise his role as Scott, I would play George, Lolly would play Zelda, Jenny would return as Dorothy Parker, and we invited Kevin to tackle the role of Ernest Hemingway. It is, for our company, an all-star lineup.

By 8:05 p.m., the Kraine stage buzzes with mingling audience members while others move to the house to secure a good seat. Ernest Hemingway and Zelda join Dorothy and Scott, and their conversation is no longer quiet.