On Making Off: Misadventures Off-Off Broadway (29 page)

Zelda’s growing erratic behavior cues Dickey to usher the rest of the audience offstage and into their seats. Dickey gets a look of disgust in his eyes every time he gazes Zelda’s way. He truly dislikes this person, and she truly doesn’t care. And nobody is acting.

We wanted the play to begin in as “artificial” a place as possible. To us, that meant creating as real an environment as possible, a hyper-pretend world. The goal was to try too hard so it would look fake. But it didn’t read fake to our audience. To them, the whole experience was quite unique, magical, and real.

We set up this construct for one very specific reason: to destroy it. The whole show would fall apart, decay if you will, to our end point—as “real” a place as possible, which actually turns out to feel very artificial. We are going to show the destruction of our characters’ lives in the play, as we’d done before, but then we are going to destroy the construct of the play, then the actual script, and then the entire company of players.

By the end of the evening, all the magic of being in the south of France with famous authors will dissipate. The storytellers, known as The Beggars Group, will be gone. Every layer of performance will be peeled away, and we’ll all be left with only ourselves. Performers and audience members will become a bunch of bodies in a room. It is a theatrical suicide mission.

Once all the audience members settle in their seats, we hear a crash of thunder, the lights go down, and the curtain falls on a dark stage. Much like the first version of
The Expatriates
, the opening 15 minutes is a well-made play. Topical dialogue between interesting characters establishes time, place, and situations. The situation this time isn’t Zelda’s ballet-dancing, nor is it the book she wrote. This time, the play is about Zelda’s going crazy.

One stormy evening, Ernest, Dorothy, and Scott discuss her dissolving state while sitting in a cottage somewhere in the south of France. Zelda, after almost causing Scott to crash the car on the way back from the café, runs off into the storm and is nowhere to be found.

Our inferences are not subtle. Everyone knows people who run out into a storm are crazy. King Lear is the most obvious example. But our audience, too, had fled into the rain just before the show began. Harrison, who had deftly written and constructed the scene, would have kept going and seen the play through if Lolly hadn’t demanded that he stop.

“
I don’t want this to be just another fucking play!” she had screamed in the middle of rehearsal. “It needs to dissolve. Deteriorate. Decompose. It’s all fake if it doesn’t decompose.”

We were all used to disagreeing in rehearsals, and nobody was a stranger to Lolly’s conceptual outbursts, but something about her tone was very different. She was mean, loud, and a bit grotesque—which was oddly familiar to us. We’d written this person before.

“
But we can do that with the script!” Harrison said. “I can make that happen with the script.”

“
No, you can’t!” Lolly countered. “Because there is a script! We’re not going to have a script by the end of this play. The play itself will have dissolved into nothing. Into shards of pulp.”

“
I’m not interested in that,” Harrison said.

“
Well, I’m not interested in doing your fake-piece-of-crap script.”

“
What are you talking about?” I interjected. “It’s a good script!”

“
It’s crap!” Lolly said. “You got the balls to destroy your own words, Harry?”

By this time, Harrison realized he had two choices: He could punch her in the face or take a walk around the block. We weren’t watching Lolly and Harrison. This was Zelda and Scott, and Harrison hadn’t signed up for a method-acting developmental session.

Thankfully, he chose to walk around the block.

That was only the beginning of the fights. While the play rotted away, so did our rehearsals. What we were putting on stage began happening in real life, which was what we wanted to do, and it was oddly brilliant. But the fact that Lolly and Zelda were becoming the same person, and that person was going crazy, meant we all had to deal with her. And crazy people are neither fun nor easy to deal with.

Back in our play, Zelda enters the stage in typical Zelda fashion, soaking wet from the storm and excited by something she’d just experienced.

“
Scott, the most amazing thing has happened. I met a man at the café. An amazing man. A prophet, Scott. A prophet. Oh, God, baby, I am so happy. I don’t even know where to begin.”

Her insanity starts in a place of excited beauty. Then, lightning and thunder. Zelda, in her excitement, faints, and the power goes out. Another thunderclap, and the door opens to reveal a stranger from beyond, George Antheil. Still the ringleader of the production, my character now has a more subtle control over the events. He no longer abruptly stops the action but guides it from one place to another.

After a moment, Zelda awakens, delighted to see George. She explains that the beauty of his music had caused her to overexcite, and she implores George to play this magical music for the others. I call forth my musicians, who enter carrying electric guitars—the first crack in our set-up world.

The band, A Brief View of the Hudson, blends country, folk, and rock. They set down their amplifiers center stage and sit on them. Nobody can pretend we are in the 1920s any more. And with the first riff of the guitar, the chaos begins and doesn’t stop until the end of the play. The deconstruction is unstoppable.

Lolly’s behavior in the rehearsal room had continued to grow stranger and more unbearable. But unlike the first production of
The Expatriates
, she wasn’t the director, so she got a lot more pushback. We had cast out any notion of a director, and people didn’t have to do what she told them. Building a consensus was not easy, especially for Lolly’s strong will, and the more resistance she felt, the more frustrated she became; and the more she behaved badly, the more she created resistance.

Eventually, Kevin, Jenny, Harrison, and I put on our kid gloves when dealing with Lolly. We pressed forward with the work, but the entire cast made it very clear to me they would not be working with The Beggars Group again—not so long as Lolly was involved. I’d seen it coming, and I was fully complicit. Once again, the company was falling apart, and once again it was because Lolly was too aggressive and I was too passive.

The nightmare in the play’s second half is loud. With the electric guitars at full volume, Dorothy Parker’s howling horrors are creepier and more threatening than ever. Hemingway’s solitary speeches are more heartbreakingly devoid of hope. And F. Scott and Zelda’s fights are, quite simply, real.

Since we were writing this during rehearsals when everyone was feeling awful about the show, the hatred and despair permeate every word. It is a horror-show collection of scenes, each shorter and louder than the one before. We are, in a way, seeing the world of our characters through the eyes of Zelda, and the crazier she gets, the more bizarre and fragmented the scenes become. The narrative fractures at an increasing pace. The play falls apart. Finally, we throw a kicking, screaming Zelda into the asylum.

“
I’m going to take a year off from The Beggars Group,” I told Lolly one day during the run. “I need to do my own thing for a while. I need a break from this intense collaboration. I’m gonna write a one-man show.”

“
OK,” Lolly responded.

“
You can keep the company going if you want.”

“
I’m not going to do that,” she said simply.

This marked the end of our collaboration. It was clean and devoid of feelings. We had an unspoken agreement to leave feelings out of the business of making theater.

The remaining conversation contained few words but tremendous amounts of emotion. In three short years, we’d been generating theater nonstop. Together, we’d burned megawatts of our youthful energy to illuminate the world through art. And we sat in silence, looking back as if we both knew we were making off with something special. Nothing tangible, of course, but we were making off with something. A memory, an awareness, maybe it was just a strong sense of accomplishment. It was something for sure. We recognized ceremony and went through the motions of mourning. I would truly mourn the loss of our collaboration years later but, at the time, I needed to separate myself from the intensity we’d created.

We carry Zelda across the stage and throw her into a chair. Hit her. Drug her. Torture her with words. This was how crazy people were treated in the 1920s. And this is how we all feel now about Lolly. It also happens to be the unpleasant business of decay, the foul-smelling, putrid texture of life disappearing. Now, there are no more scenes. We see only pieces of scenes, which appear in a haphazard fashion.

Then, we start forgetting lines, not having lines, not knowing what character we’re playing. The music is the only constant. Everything else on stage is an utter mess. Finally, we are all sitting in a row of chairs facing the audience. The company of players emerges. It’s us, The Beggars Group. Wigs have fallen off, costumes aren’t on right, the work lights illuminate. We are exposed and breathing heavy in the unforgiving fluorescents. We look at the people. They look at us. Everyone is uncomfortable. But the show doesn’t end until the company dissolves.

Kevin exits first, and Jenny quickly follows. They stand and walk up the aisle to the back of the house. I shake my head and exit next, leaving Lolly and Harrison alone on stage for what feels like hours. They can’t stand each other in real life, and it’s difficult to watch them sit so close. They smell and are ugly to look at.

Finally, Harrison tells her to “fuck off,” and she laughs. He leaves the stage.

Lolly, now alone, looks up to that spot where the word
HOME
had been projected on the curtain an hour earlier. It’s not there now. We are expatriated. We can no longer go home. There is no home to go to. We now have to keep moving beyond our borders, forever exploring foreign territory. The company we once knew finally rots away, giving its energy to other purposes.

Crouching in the aisle at the back of the house, I watch Lolly try desperately to just “be” with the audience—a task at which she fails miserably. There is too much “real” happening in her. She was filling the room with an intense energy…an inescapable energy that demands attention, reaction.

Like the beggar I saw on the street years ago, she casts out a cloud of dust that covers everyone in the room. I watch the audience shift uncomfortably in their seats, praying for the moment to be over so they can start clapping, standing, something. They are experiencing something intense. It is the strongest reaction we’ve ever garnered from an audience. It is the beggar effect.

Finally, the lights go down, and the audience applauds. We take our final bows and leave the theater. We know The Beggars Group had a good run, but it’s time to take a break to recharge, refocus, and, most importantly, re-imagine the next parts of our lives.

Standing there on East Fourth Street in my black peacoat, taking the last drags off my cigarette, I noticed a man sitting down in the gutter between two cars. By his appearance, I assumed he was either homeless or extremely poor. I stamped out my cigarette and walked toward him, pulling five dollars from my wallet. It was a spontaneous and sudden decision, but one filled with the utmost conviction.

“
Randy, are you coming in?” asked Harrison, who was already halfway in the bar.

“
Yeah,” I stopped and looked toward the bar. “Just a second, I want to…”

“
What?” said Harrison, in his most sarcastic tone. “Throw that five dollars in the trash?”

Struck by the insensitivity of his comment, I didn’t let it deter me. I turned back around, determined to give this beggar five bucks. The first five had bought me three years of happiness. I was eager to buy another. But, as I turned and bent down to hand the beggar my bill, I realized it was not a person. It was a small stack of garbage bags that only appeared to be a man slumped over in defeat.

I chuckled at myself and headed to the bar. My five dollars was going to buy me a beer, my imagination would provide the happiness. Because by now I knew, if you can imagine it, you can live it. You can make off with any kind of life you want.

THE END