On Making Off: Misadventures Off-Off Broadway (16 page)

“
Randy, I really need your help,” she pleaded. “I’m at a pay phone by the basketball courts on 22
^nd
Street. What are you doing right now?”

She was clearly upset, but why was she at a basketball court?

“
What’s going on?”

“
I just really need your help. Can you meet up with me? I don’t know what I’m doing.”

I wanted to say, “You’re playing Fire-Food, how hard can that be? Just burn and eat baby, burn and eat!” But I knew better than to tease a desperate woman. Instead, I agreed to meet her at court number three, wherever that was.

When I arrived, she was sitting on a park bench, slumped over, mumbling incoherently. If I didn’t recognize her, I’d have sworn she was a crazy homeless woman.

“
Well, it looks like you’ve got this part nailed,” I said, sitting next to her.

“
Randy, thank God you’re here. Help me! I’m so confused. I don’t know where I fit into this play! I keep asking Lolly, and she keeps talking about nourishment and how I fuel life.”

“
And fire…” I interrupt. “The fire is death. How you take life away.”

“
Yes! And while that makes perfect sense when we talk about it, I don’t know how that’s supposed to justify my presence on stage.”

She stood up, looked around, paranoid, and whispered, as if the pigeons contained recording devices, “I mean, what am I doing in this play?”

Her eyes were crazy. She had a hopeless look I read as the first move toward walking away from the project. A jolt of dread shot through me.

By this time, I no longer had faith that Lolly could bring reason to this Fire-Food business. Fire-Food was dragging the play into a performance-art realm not unlike watching naked lesbians smear peanut butter on one breast, jelly on the other, and...

But I couldn’t tell this to Fire-Food. A civil war was breaking out inside The Beggars Group, with Fire-Food as the wild card that kept everyone off balance. The perfect distraction, Fire-Food was like an alien spaceship landing in the field at the battle of Gettysburg. The North and the South still wanted to kill each other, but what the hell was that round metal object floating off the ground over there?

If Fire-Food left, the play might take a turn for the better, but then Lolly and The Girls would be forced to reconcile their differences, a process I was certain would end badly. I had to preserve this delicate balance for the sake of the play. So, I rolled up my sleeves and dug in.

We worked for two hours: reciting poems, running around the court, screaming at the top of our lungs, doing cartwheels. We did sense-memory exercises, improv games, and after we had tried everything we could think of, we sat on the bench to catch our breath.

“
Randy, I feel so much better. Right now, anyway.”

“
Yeah, that was fun.”

“
I still don’t know where I fit in the play.”

“
You don’t,” I said, and she looked at me hard.

“
No, I don’t.”

“
That wasn’t a question. I said you don’t. You don’t fit into this play, and you have to stop trying to figure it out. You’ll just drive yourself crazy.”

She looked at me, wanting more. I didn’t have more, so I just rearranged the words and repeated myself.

“
Fit. This play. You don’t. Crazy yourself will drive.” My fun was serving no one but myself. “You shouldn’t be in the play. You have no place in it. But you are in it, so just do what you’re gonna do, and stop worrying about it.”

“
Wow, Randy, that was honest,” said Fire-Food, with great relief.

I could see her carrying the weight of the whole play on her shoulders. She believed somehow, if she didn’t understand why Fire-Food was there, the whole play would be ruined. But now she was free to just be Fire-Food, whatever that meant to her, and move on, play be damned. I left her there, dancing around the court exploring the levity of lapping flames. The best ones she’d done all day.

Per Lolly’s request, our first technical rehearsal was to be more of a dress rehearsal. We hadn’t actually worked in the space, and the set pieces were all brand new to us, but with only two rehearsals in the theater before we opened, we needed to make the most of our time. In full costume and make-up, I crouched inside the coffin-shaped piano, clutching a fistful of papers, waiting for my cue. Mere moments before I was to pop up through the lid throwing papers, Lolly stopped the action to make some adjustments.

We were only 10 minutes into the play, and she’d stopped us at this place at least 15 times already. It’s not unusual to stop often in a technical rehearsal, but very few of her adjustments had actually been technical. Lolly stopped our rehearsal to give direction to the actors, all of whom had been expertly biting their tongues. Meanwhile, I’d been crouching inside this coffin/piano for a good 40 minutes. Each time we stopped, I’d adjust my position a little to prevent my legs from falling asleep. Patience is the actor’s backbone. I just had to breathe and relax.

“
Lolly!” a shout came from the booth. “This is OUR rehearsal! You can work on acting stuff outside the theater!” The stage manager finally asserted herself. “Please, let us get through this so we know what we’re doing.”

Everyone on stage smiled as Lolly marched back into the darkened audience. Watching her slink into her seat, I realized Lolly was just as unhappy directing as everyone else was about her directing. She didn’t want to be in the audience. She wanted to be on stage. She wanted to perform. The reasons for her behavior suddenly came into focus.

The action resumed, and once again, I adjusted my squat, poised to jump. Finally, I heard my cue, threw open the coffin lid, stood up, and began tossing papers into the air. “Manifesto…” was the last thing I heard myself say.

Here’s a short history of all the times I’ve passed out.

Once, when I was an altar boy, I locked my knees during the endless Christmas mass communion. Some lovely old lady, who had noticed my sways, caught me before I hit my head.

Second, I passed out in a bar bathroom. The toilet seat had cut off circulation to my legs and when I stood, everything went black. Nobody caught me that time. Instead, I awoke to angry knocks on the door demanding for me to hurry.

Third, I fainted into a snowdrift. I looked up at a billboard in the middle of a snowy New York night and, for no reason, I just slumped over. Maybe it was aliens? Maybe I was mugged? A snow bank broke my fall that time.

And fourth, I passed out after smoking some super-sticky skunkweed, which, I’m convinced, could have tranquilized a whale.

And now, Fainting Number Five.

The actual passing out is rather uneventful. Usually everything gets fuzzy, like the snow on an un-tuned television, and then everything stops. The real excitement comes when you wake up. Your position has shifted. Time has skipped. And it takes a few moments to regain self-awareness.

I opened my eyes to see a group of white ghoul-like faces with crazy eye makeup lit very brightly from behind. They were all staring down at me as if I were some unusual road kill. I glanced toward my feet and saw my torso encased in a coffin. Unsure of what was up and down, I couldn’t tell if I was rising out of, or falling into, this container. I heard someone running away, shouting for an ambulance, and everything came back into focus.

“
Don’t call an ambulance,” I said in my fullest voice. “I’m going to be fine. Just give me a second to catch my breath.”

I reassured everyone I had simply been squatting too long and, when I jumped up, my blood pressure had probably dropped too fast. It was nothing to worry about, and I demanded we all get back to work.

The Girls took this fainting spell as a sign. A sign Lolly had hijacked the show. Her potential to cause physical harm was illustrated by my dramatic tumble out of the coffin.

They were right. Lolly had hijacked the show. I couldn’t argue with that, but we had built this airplane together, and The Girls needed to have a little more faith in its construction. The plane may not land where we wanted it to, but it wasn’t going to crash. The show was going to go on. Babies were not going to die. We were just making theater.

We managed to finish the rehearsal, get our notes from Lolly, and leave the theater by 6 p.m. Bobby and I had been home for 15 minutes when the call came from The Girls. They were convening an important meeting, not about feelings, in their office building at 9 p.m.

And that’s how The Girls lured Lolly, Bobby, and I to this downtown office conference room, where we had no real business being in the first place.

The Girls congregated in the bathroom for almost a half-hour before Kathy emerged and asked to speak with me privately. We made ourselves comfortable in Jonathan Klein’s office. You could tell Jonathan Klein was a big shot by the photos of his perfect family, perfect boats, and perfect views of the harbor. New Jersey’s skyline is such a disappointment.

Kathy apologized for coaxing me downtown under false pretences and realized that, after the fainting episode, I should have been resting. But she, too, was terribly concerned about her own physical well-being. I recognized this as either total horseshit or some weird appropriation of another person’s feelings, as her role as Sara Murphy was the least physical part in the show. But I let it pass and apologized for raising my voice at her.

We agreed we had all worked too hard to let the project fall apart now, and while our differences of opinion were most likely permanent, we did have Fire-Food to consider. Not to mention the rest of the cast, who’d all put in so much time and energy. With the shake of our hands, we decided to forge on with the understanding we would discuss everything once the show closed. Then, and only then, would we all sit down and have a postmortem, where feelings of all kinds could run wild.

When we emerged, Andrea was handing out car-service vouchers as a peace offering. Free rides home in the backseats of black sedans waiting downstairs, compliments of the Investment Bank. Of this you can be sure: Running a ragtag theater company requires resilience and resourcefulness. And working at a bank generates a deep well of both.

POSTMORTEMS KILL

Show time! The largest endeavor of The Beggar Group’s short history is about to begin. After more than a year, over 1,000 man-hours, countless involuntary corporate donations, and an endless supply of will, we’d finally arrived. FringeNYC was in full swing.

With the drama of the rehearsal process now behind us, we Beggars put on our best faces. We spent the first two days checking out other FringeNYC shows, handing out postcards, and drumming up as much business as we could. And those efforts paid off.

Our first audience was quite large and, like most festival audiences, hard-core and very vocal. Most had probably seen two other shows earlier that day and would see another after dinner. These were theatrical connoisseurs, an ideal audience to test our new show.

The lights dim, and the show begins with our stylistic exhuming of our characters through the coffin-shaped piano. It’s alternately weird and funny, and the audience chuckles. Once the ghoulish overture finishes, the play begins in earnest. The audience seems engaged during the first 10 minutes, which is mostly well-written exposition, fast and crisp, crucial for an hour-long play. The audience laughs at the appropriate moments, and attentively listens to our characters’ frustrations surrounding Zelda’s book. Surprisingly, they love the goose-fucking song. I don’t know if it was the break in the rhythm of the play, or its naughty nature, but they laugh and even clap when it ends.

And then, 15 minutes into the show, Fire-Food makes her entrance. Bare-breasted and intense, she stomps onto the stage with all the presence of Medea. Taking her place center stage, she lets out a cry that sets off car alarms on East Fourth Street. Everything on stage literally screeches to a halt as she gives birth to Zelda’s book. With great moans and screams, she pulls from underneath her flowing skirt a large prop book filled with blue pages. Her performance is so realistic, the absence of blood is shocking.

Temporarily deafened by Fire-Food’s labor sounds, the biblio-birth puts our audience on the defensive. “And here comes the Living Theater crap,” I hear a woman in the audience mutter.

Fire-Food literally stops the show. She just stops the whole fucking show. There may as well have been a 6.5 earthquake right under the building. The cord that connected the play with the audience has been cut, and this was just the beginning of the fun. Things only got stranger. Although it’s all very visually interesting, little of it makes much sense, and most of it has nothing to do with the play we’d so neatly set up.

We all take turns pulling and tearing at Zelda’s masterpiece. As the book gets destroyed, its blue pages spill out, transforming into a kind of Chinese New Year dragon that is to represent, of all things, a blue lobster. Then, we tell an allegorical tale about a man named Gabius Apitious who consumes himself…or the lobster consumes him. To this day, I’m unsure of the allegory’s meaning.

Fire-Food continues to wander the stage reciting poems, part
Girls Gone Wild
and part
King Lear
lost in the storm. But the story—you know, the one about Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Dorothy Parker—gets thrown to the side of the stage to make way for peanut-butter-and-jelly boobs. Mind you, we are all still on stage, saying lines and staying in character. But the show now measures five parts black-and-white ’20s film, one part ’70s living-theater chic, and a dash of LSD, just to spice it all up.