Friends: A Love Story (9 page)

My eyes got wide. Fortunately, we were lying down, so he couldn't see them. “Yeah, man, I did hear that. That was wild, right?”

“Yeah, man.”

That scared me; I didn't go out anymore after that. But I had done what I needed to do—scream.

I struggled in front of everyone all summer. It was frightening. It was agonizing. Eventually I had a breakthrough. As I was performing in the balcony scene in
Romeo and Juliet,
the emotion that was supposed to accompany my text suddenly flowed through me and I blew up the scene. Everyone said, “Oh, my goodness!” My performance was so compelling, and I'd overcome such a block, that they rushed toward me and lifted me up in the air. As I began to understand how to access and use my emotions, I became a different person. Suddenly, I developed a newfound confidence. I realized that I didn't
have to hide my emotions all the time. When I was confused or in pain, I could use them—I could put them into a scene. Knowing that was so very freeing; I was on top of the world with glee! At the end of the summer my family drove through Massachusetts on their way back from picking Cecilie up from her flight back from Germany, where she had been stationed for three years in the army. After her grades had dropped, she'd had to leave Michigan State. “Just pick which branch of the military you're going into,” my father had told her, “because you're not going to just sit around here.” Being in the army instead of college had taught Cee her lesson. She later graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Northeastern University in Boston.

During their visit with me they saw me carry a spear in the play
Twelfth Night.
My dad was thinking, “This is what you've been doing? Okay….” But I could tell he was proud of me.

By the next summer I received another grant to apprentice at Shakespeare & Company. I had become comfortable with my ability to let my emotions flow through the words, which is what the audience connects with and what makes a performance levitate. This gave me a way to channel emotions I was feeling but not expressing, personally. I just took off. I had discovered my gift and I was on fire! During that time I began to think more seriously about studying acting in grad school. My Shakespeare & Company voice teachers warned me to make sure it was what I really wanted to do. “Acting school is hard and very expensive,” they told me. “And three years is a long time to remain focused if the real reason you're going there is to find an agent.”

Now that I was receiving praise for my work and felt a lot more like a real actor, my ego, which had already begun to blossom, really began to grow. That second summer I publicly criticized the performances of some of the professional actors in the program. “I don't understand what they're doing. Emotionally, they're not doing anything.” Whether my comments
were right or not was beside the point. Who was I but some college kid who had a gift he'd recently discovered? And where did I find the gall to publicly expose that the pros were struggling? Among the equity actors I became a pariah. Being so insensitive as to publicly embarrass people who were more accomplished than me was just one example of how I struggled in my personal life. I didn't know how to deal with my feelings in life or in relationships. I didn't have the tools, so I depended on Ahren. She was much more prepared for life than I. She could never be defeated; she always had a plan A, B and C. If something didn't go my way, I didn't have the tools to say, “Oh, well,” and shift gears. When it came time to come up with options, I would shut down. I didn't know how to solve problems. Instead, I would just sulk; I would get blue; I would get moody. Ahren would think, “Oh, God. He's down again,” and would navigate around me. But when I was feeling crazed, Ahren would calm me. “Courtney, you're fine. It's going to be okay.” She was my emotional center.

 

Come graduation that spring of 1982, I told my parents, “There are no awards. No big show. This isn't going to be like Country Day. The things I've been doing, nobody knows about it—least of all, the Harvard community. So just come and let's celebrate.” And celebrate we did!

My mother arrived a few days before my dad, who couldn't get off from work. She got there in time to see me star in
A Lesson from Aloes
by the South African playwright Athol Fugard, over at Boston Shakespeare. I was too young to do the lead role, but the director and leading company actor, Henry Woronicz, was a big fan of mine, had said, “Just grow a beard and let's go.” I was amazed when I was able to go onstage, finish the play and not blank out on all those lines. My knees were actually knocking. Mom saw the play with the rest of her family. She was blown away when I came out onstage in my sixties outfit—a hat, a suit and
a narrow tie. She said afterward that I looked like her father. My mother came back and saw the play again with my dad. Until then, they had been thinking, “We spent all this money to go to Harvard and the boy wants to be an actor?” which I'm sure was a nightmare for them, although they never expressed it. Now they thought, “He's got a gift. He's got to do this.”

Especially after doing such a big role I wanted some training so I'd learn how not to be so nervous as to allow my nerves to defeat me—that's why I wanted to go to graduate drama school. All the members of the acting clique at Harvard were applying to Yale down in New Haven, Connecticut. I knew that's where I had to go. Other than that, I didn't know anything about Yale, except that the actress Meryl Streep had gone there. My goal was merely to learn how to stand onstage without my knees shaking. Everyone was saying, “Courtney, you're going to get in. You're so good!” But I didn't know—I didn't know anything. Plus, I was burnt out from all that I done while at Harvard. I didn't want to apply right away. I wanted to take some time to rest, choose the pieces I wanted to perform for my audition and practice my lines. I also wanted to make enough money to visit Ahren, who was going out to the American Conservatory Theater (ACT) in San Francisco. For a year I lived with my uncle and friends and worked the midnight shift as a security guard at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Copley Plaza Hotel.

Working the midnight shift left me free to deal with just the art and my thoughts. I practiced the lines of the scenes I'd use to audition while I walked the floors. As I rehearsed the monologues, I'd look for their emotional heat, since expressing my emotions was now my strength and I was so emotionally available. I said those pieces to myself for nine months. They dropped so far down into me that I knew every nuance in them. I reached a point where I couldn't say them anymore to myself; I needed to share.

It's funny, but as important as that audition was, I don't
remember the audition itself; I only remember that in the moments immediately before it, I was off in my own thoughts and some tiny little ol' dog with a big bark ran up on me from out of the blue and scared me so bad I almost peed on myself. Fortunately, nobody saw how high I jumped. However, Earle Gister, head of the acting department at Yale, and Larry Hecht, who headed acting at ACT, told me they will always remember my audition. A few weeks later I received my acceptance letter. I was standing on my friend's front porch, which overlooked a cemetery, and opened the letter and I said to myself that this can either be a very good day or a very bad day. But either way, because of this cemetery, I will always remember it. When I saw that I had gotten in, I screamed. It was a life-changing moment. But my joy was immediately tempered with, “What about Ahren?” I called her right away. We both paused, unsure of what to say. When we realized we had both gotten in, we screamed together. The odds of that happening seemed like a million to one!

 

Ahren's parents were paying for her schooling. Mine could barely pay for Harvard; I'd have to pay for Yale. I didn't get any financial aid since I was under twenty-five years old and the school wouldn't replace what they believed should be my parents' financial contribution. I would have to pay for drama school myself, but I didn't have any money. I couldn't believe I had gotten in but wouldn't be able to go because I couldn't pay for it. It felt like my wings had been clipped. I was distraught and started having what I now know were anxiety attacks. I was so stressed I was freaking out. At one point I shifted to working days, but dealing with all the visitors and their questions made me anxious. When I'd reply, sometimes I'd hear myself talking gibberish.

Frantic to figure something out, I talked to the dean at Harvard who used to run Yale's drama school, who was a supporter of mine.

“They're telling me I'm not going to be able to go there because I can't pay for it. Do you think there's some corporate sponsorship I could get?” (Oh, how naive of me!)

“Why do you want to go to Yale?”

I was shocked that he tried to dampen my joy.

“What do you mean, ‘why do I want to go to Yale'? Because I want to get trained at the best school in the country!” I felt devastated. Betrayed. Just like the counselors at Country Day who didn't think I'd get into Harvard. I never sought his advice again.

I did, however, call the financial-aid folks down at Yale. They were a lot easier to deal with. They encouraged me, “Come down here and talk to us and we'll see if we can figure something out.” We did. While I was on campus I met a few of the students. Charles Dutton, John Turturro and Angela Bassett took me out to the Gypsy, the drama school hangout.

 

It wasn't until after we arrived on campus that fall that the Yale drama school administrators learned that Ahren and I were in a relationship. They were in complete shock; apparently, that had never happened before. Earle Gister told us that they never accept student couples because it's hard on the rest of the class. But Ahren and I had gone to different colleges and applied from different coasts, so it never occurred to them that we knew each other. Hundreds of people from all over the country had applied to go to Yale. Only fifteen had been accepted into our class. Three of us were black. Ahren and I were two of them. And we were a couple. I thought it was amazing! We just knew it was a miracle. Between being immature and the big ego I was developing to hide my insecurities, it went right to my head.

The first week of school was amazing. We met the acting school's dean, Lloyd Richards. I hadn't known he was black but now that I knew, I took pride in it. Later I would learn he was also one of the most renowned master acting teachers in the
entire United States. My voice teachers from Shakespeare & Company also taught at Yale, so I already knew them. And Ahren and I did well when we students performed our audition pieces in front of each other. In fact, I was so excited that I went out and cut my hair into a Mohawk.

“Why did you do that?” Ahren asked me when she first saw me post-haircut.

“I don't know—I just felt like doing something to celebrate!”

“But why?”

“Because I was happy. I was excited!”

“You know something, Court? You're wild.”

“Yeah, it's crazy, right?”

I was really so excited that my dreams were coming true. In many ways life couldn't be more perfect. But though I appeared confident from the outside, on the inside I felt intimidated. I didn't feel that I belonged. I had participated in Shakespeare & Company but I had no technical knowledge about acting. Acting is emotional but it's also technical. You have to know the technique of it. Some of the other students knew more technique than me. The women in our class were very, very, very strong—dramatically, comedically and personalitywise. They blew most of the men away.

Ahren and I rented an apartment in New Haven about a mile off campus. I'm sure our parents were thinking, “Oh, they're shackin' up?” But it didn't faze me. My folks hadn't raised me in the church or put those types of values in me; they couldn't say anything now. Soon after that I came home with a puppy—a gorgeous, yellow shepherd Labrador we named Bottom after the character Nick Bottom in Shakespeare's play
A Midsummer Night's Dream.
On a typical day I'd go running with Bottom at six in the morning (Ahren wasn't a morning person), school would start at eight, we'd have classes until two and, after first semester, we'd typically rehearse until one in the morning. On top of that, I had a work-study job washing dishes
at the Yale Cabaret and cleaning the Yale Repertory Theater, and we had to do our classroom work and learn our lines. I'd ride my bike to school and she'd take the car so one of us could return home to walk Bottom during the day. (How crazy was that? It was like we had a little baby.) Unfortunately for him and for us we didn't know the first thing to do with him. We'd be gone for over twelve hours a day. Bottom would tear up the house. But we loved him like a child. Ahren was always dragging him into bed with us. I counted on his playfulness to break my melancholy moods. Bottom was my lifeline. You couldn't break his joyous spirit to save your life. But with all this going on, by the end of the day I'd be a little numb. Fortunately, by now I had learned to share Ahren with my classmates. She developed her set of friends and I had mine, but we were all one class.

My favorite class was fencing, which is all about quickness—whoever attacks and gets back on defense the quickest will score the most points and will win. Initially, we were all loving and gentle with each other in fencing class. Eventually we realized it was a great place to take out our aggression. At that point, it was on! Between my athletic ability and competitive nature, I was one of the best in my class. Academically, I studied hard and soon took to the work. In acting class when we'd explore scenes, my partner and I would rework the same scene over and over and over, each time making it more dense and rich. Our classmates thought the point was to work a scene and move on to the next one. At the end of the class, Earle Gister, our first-year acting instructor, complimented my partner and me because we had explored that one scene so deeply. “Now, that's the way to explore a scene!” he told us. I could feel the whole class shrink. I achieved by the end of the first semester what I had set out to achieve by coming to Yale in the first place—I could now stand onstage without my knees shaking. I was most proud that I had accomplished my goal.