On Making Off: Misadventures Off-Off Broadway (14 page)

“
So, at one point, when he’s 22 or 23, he’s performing the second of two modern-music concerts in Germany,” she started.

“
The night before, there had been a riot. The Germans, it turns out, didn’t love this new ‘modern’ music. That, and the fact it was the ’20s, and they were all still pissed about losing the war. So, on the second night, he walks out on stage. The audience claps politely. George then orders all the attendants to close and lock all the exits. Can you believe that? You could never do that today. He tells the audience he will not tolerate another riot and that he has brought a gun to ensure everyone behaves. And he pulls a gun out of his tuxedo and places it on the piano! An American pulling a fucking gun out on a bunch of Germans in the ’20s. I mean, if he were French, he’d be dead in a second.

“
Anyway, he puts this gun on the piano and says, ‘Anyone who misbehaves will be shot.’ Silence. Then, he sits down and plays his full concert without a peep. How fucking cool was this guy? Now, I got this from his autobiography, which I’m pretty sure he half made up, but who cares, right? It’s a great story.”

She looked at me, waiting for a reaction. How could I say “no” to playing a guy like
that
? It’s like saying “no” to playing James Bond. So, I arrived at the photo shoot, dressed in black pants, a white shirt, and a secondhand tuxedo jacket two sizes too big. Not the most fashionable but perfect for concealing a gun.

The photographer arrived with a camera that looked at least 50 years old.

“
Wow, we’re really going for period here, aren’t we?” I joked.

“
It’s actually the same kind of camera that took pictures on the moon,” said Deborah, correcting me.

“
I hope the quality’s better,” Bobby said. “Those moon pictures are kind of fuzzy.”

“
We’re working with much better light,” said the photographer, as she kicked open the legs of her tripod.

I wasn’t sure about that. The light is pretty good on the moon, the bright side of it anyway.

The trouble started when we began putting on our makeup.

The Expatriates
didn’t take place in a real time. We were not in Paris, 1927. Our play took place in a purgatorial realm where we could easily jump through time and hit all the juicy moments of our characters’ lives. To set this up, we were going to exhume these people, quite literally, from a coffin on stage.

Our makeup needed to be ghost-like. Not bloody and decayed like a zombie, but more like a ghoul—a ghost with weight. We’d discovered that a light dusting of white on our faces created a nice image of a spirit…dead without being too monster-ish.

Once we determined the exact intensity, everyone got behind the white dusting, but we agreed less about the eyes. Sunken eyes with the white dusting would be too monster-like, so we needed to find a different direction. Lolly wanted everyone to have what she called “Big Eyes.” She kept walking around the room encouraging us to lay the eyeliner on thicker. Since I didn’t fully understand, I asked Lolly to apply my makeup for me, and she jumped at the opportunity.

“
You guys,” she said as I looked up, “the eyes need to really pop!”

I could see her widening her own eyes as she stared into mine, working the pencil back and forth across my lower lid.

“
You’re entering this world for a second time. You know you’ve been dead for however long, and now you’re walking back into the world of the living, and there’s all this life around you to absorb. It’s like your eyes are swollen from taking in the richness of everything. I want to see the word ‘AWAKE’ in your eyes. You’re awake!” She leaned back to take in my whole face. “See! Like this.”

The Girls craned their necks to look.

“
That’s too much!” Andrea said. “We don’t want to look like clowns.”

Andrea had just lobbed a Molotov cocktail into the center of the room. The conversation exploded into a heated argument about the subtle differences between clowns and Dada.

Not knowing much about either, I carefully extracted myself, dragging Bobby outside for a smoke with me. I was, at that moment, an actor, not the producer, and I was going to do what my director told me.

I guess I could have predicted this argument. Everyone had so many roles to play, so much invested, and such varied ideas about the project that without a tremendous ability to yield, fights were inevitable. As we climbed onto the fire escape, voices were amplifying and the name-calling began.

When we returned, everyone was quietly applying makeup and double-checking their clothes.

“
Are we almost ready to start shooting?” I asked hopefully.

“
I’m ready,” said the photographer, turning on her light tester.

“
I’m just about ready, too!” said Deborah, in her best Zelda Fitzgerald voice.

We all did a double-take. Not only had she painted on the thick black eyeliner as Lolly had instructed, she also drew black eyelashes that radiated out from the bottom of her eyes.

“
Now that’s what I’m talking about!” Lolly said, clapping. “That looks awesome!”

She was right. It
did
look awesome. It conveyed AWAKE very clearly. Andrea, as Dorothy Parker, and Kathy, as Sara Murphy, had also done a great job of abstracting not just their eyes but their lips as well. The four of us looked otherworldly, familiar, and interesting.

“
This is gonna be awesome!” said Bobby, as Lolly began arranging us on the platform.

We assumed angular positions, held them for a while, and then moved to the next pose. As the camera flashed, Lolly would call out directions.

“
Look here! Big Eyes!”

“
Look there! Big Eyes!”

“
Randy, look left, Big Eyes! Kathy, look up, Big Eyes!”

After we posed and made Big Eyes for a solid 20 minutes, Lolly abruptly stopped the action and walked over to me, opening an eyeliner pencil.

“
We’re missing something.”

When she approached, I instinctively opened my eyes and looked up, but she tilted my head down and turned my face to the side and drew what felt like two lines on my cheek. “There we go!” she said out loud, as she guided my head to turn the other way and drew two lines on my other cheek.

“
What are you doing?” Deborah gasped.

“
I’m putting Xs on your cheeks,” Lolly replied.

The Girls responded in a chorus of disapproval, each one talking louder than the other.

“
What for? That makes no logical sense?” Andrea managed to condense their rising discontent into a precision response.

“
Who cares about logic? Do you think these people cared about logic? Do you think any of them were worried about logic? I mean, it’s just an X. It’s X marks the spot, X for Expatriates, X’d out of existence. Take your pick. It’s the Dada X.”

Lolly was on a roll. Her creative juices were flowing, and she wasn’t backing down.

“
But that’s not what this play is about!” Kathy barked.

“
Well, that’s what this photo shoot is about,” Lolly countered.

“
But these pictures have to convey what the play is about. We can’t just make shit up!” said Kathy.

“
Why not?” Lolly asked. “George Antheil was never in a room with these people. Dorothy Parker wasn’t buddy-buddy with the Murphys and Hemingway. We’re making a lot of shit up. A lot of shit that’s going to make for a great fucking play.”

“
Not if you’re putting Xs on our faces!” Kathy said.

“
No Kathy,
because
I’m putting Xs on your faces.”

Lolly’s tone demanded the conversation be over. As the only one who actually
had
Xs on his face, I felt it best not to get involved—either that, or I just don’t like confrontation. Andrea, sensing this route was going nowhere, tried a different angle.

“
Isn’t ‘decay’ the theme we’re working with here?” she asked.

“
Yes,” Lolly replied.

“
The idea that as a fruit ripens, it gets more colorful?” Andrea continued.

“
Yes.”

“
Sweeter-smelling?”

“
Yes.”

“
Better-tasting?”

“
Yes.”

“
And that this moment comes just prior to the fruit rotting? In fact, can it be said that the ripening is actually the beginning of the rotting process?”

“
Yes.”

We were all riveted, waiting for Lolly to say something more than “yes,” as she’d been talking ad nauseam on the topic of decay for the past two weeks.

“
And this is our allegorical approach to depicting this era and these people. They are living at the very sweetest moment in their lives and in the country. The brightest, most colorful seconds before they descend into putrid-smelling decay and eventual death.”

Andrea had done it! Her elegant wording got that entire room to understand the concept for the very first time.

“
Yes,” Lolly said simply.

“
Well, then why are you putting Xs on our faces?” Andrea asked.

“
Because I don’t have any rotten fruit,” Lolly said flatly.

“
Randy!” Andrea cried, turning toward me. “Say something.”

I didn’t know how to help the situation. I really didn’t give a shit about the Xs. I just wanted to take some pictures. I was the model, not the artist. I looked over at Bobby to see if he might have an objective opinion, but he was too busy containing his laughter over the rotten fruit jab. The room fell into a silence for a moment.

“
Look, you guys, I’ve already got a lot of shots,” our photographer offered. “I’m sure we have more than enough to work with. I only have one roll left anyway. Why don’t we call it a day?”

“
That sounds like a great idea,” Andrea said, as Kathy and Deborah followed her into the kitchen and began removing their makeup.

“
Well, let’s at least take a few with the X-faced George Antheil,” Lolly said.

She sat me on a stool, gave me a stack of papers, and told me to start throwing them into the air while looking at the camera—which is how we used the last roll of film.

“
What are these mysterious Xs on his face?” people would later ask. “What do they mean?”

We didn’t know, but when we got the proofs back, we knew we’d have to start looking for an answer. Because the shots of this man with Xs on his face, levitating paper, were dynamite.

FIRE-FOOD

“
HOW DARE YOU!” I screamed as I stood, launching the wheeled executive chair out from under me. “I specifically asked you what this meeting was about, and you told me it was about work. Work! Not feelings. Do you remember that? I told you if this was about your feelings, I wasn’t available.”

My voice echoed through the maze of cubicles and conference rooms on the 43
^rd
floor of the Investment Bank where The Girls worked as night secretaries.

It was past 10 p.m., and the bankers were gone. I discovered I could be a different person in this environment. We held a lot of our meetings in the conference rooms of Fortune 500 companies. It was a million-dollar set for a thousand-dollar theater company. Here, I could channel my Wall Street callousness. Here, we did most of our photocopying and supply-shopping. It’s not stealing, we told ourselves. It’s an “involuntary corporate donation.”

Kathy finally spoke up.

“
I knew you wouldn’t come if I told you what this was about.”

“
Of course, you did. You knew because I told you. And you lied to me anyway. Shame on you.”

“
Will you just listen to us?”

“
I’ve sat here for 20 minutes listening to you. You’re feeling vulnerable. You’re feeling abused by Lolly. You’re feeling like the show has moved in the wrong direction. I hear you. But guess what? I’m tired. I’m anxious. I’m mad at Lolly. The show never moves in the direction you think it’s going to—and that, my friends, is called making theater. Put your fucking feelings away. We open in two days. We got shit to do. We’ll talk about feelings after we open.”

The room fell silent, and then just to emphasize the obvious, I slammed my fists on the table. “I am
furious
with you!”

Kathy burst into tears and ran out of the room. Andrea and Deborah followed, shooting hateful glances at me on their way out. Bobby rolled my chair into the back of my knees. I sat and took a breath.

“
Dude,” Lolly said. We sat in silence for another minute. I wondered if Lolly was going to ask me why I was mad at her, but she didn’t. That would be a feelings talk, and we were on the same page about saving that shit for a different day.

“
That was awesome,” she said finally. And she burst into laughter.

A smile cracked the corners of my mouth. As angry as I was, I felt a small sense of satisfaction. The Girls had lured us down there under false pretenses. Bobby tried to calm Lolly down with a disapproving look. But she’d been counting on this for a while, and she was going to enjoy it.

Despite her satisfaction, we couldn’t mask the fact we had a disaster on our hands. The company’s morale had been in a freefall since the beginning of the summer. Tempers had flared up on multiple occasions. Up until this moment, I’d managed to maintain my cool. While bullets flew around me, I’d kept my head down and charged forward, guiding the group toward the finish line.