On Making Off: Misadventures Off-Off Broadway (9 page)

“
I’m afraid the show is cast already,” I said. “Too bad you didn’t graduate a month ago.”

“
No shit. Seriously, what do you need? I don’t care what you have me do. I’ll do anything. I just wanna work.”

So, I relieved the petrified friend of a friend behind the light board, and Lolly got to work.

“
Randy, close down the box, get the fuck up here, and let’s do a show!” Lolly shouted down over the noise of the KGB patrons.

The moment had arrived. I closed the strongbox, put it under my arm, took a breath, and sprinted up the stairs two at a time.

When I walked into the Red Room Theater, it evoked a whole different energy from when I first crawled into its darkness last fall. Yet somehow, it wasn’t unfamiliar. I had visualized this moment so many times in the past eight months that seeing it for real felt oddly repetitive.

It turns out it’s not hard to make a 30-seat theater look full. And with a cast of 10, family and friends fill the place quickly. Only a few seats remained. Lolly had placed a stool for me next to the booth, and I greeted people as I walked up the aisle. Then, I took my seat.

Looking out over the audience, I became instantly addicted to the feeling of putting on a show in the East Village. I loved seeing my co-workers from Blah-Blah Big Bank settling into their seats, drinks in hand, taking in the bohemian experience. I listened for a minute to strangers talking about what they knew about the show or whom they knew in it. And then the house lights dimmed, the conversations quieted, the programs settled, and my little story about success began.

PEACH PASTRIES

After the short-but-sweet success of
Testing Average
, The Beggars, as we now called ourselves, began meeting on a regular basis. Realizing I could no longer do all the work myself, six of us—Lolly, Bobby, Andrea, Deborah, Kathy, and I—banded together to create a company of producers. One of our favorite places to assemble was the Hungarian Pastry Shop. Nestled on the Upper West Side, it’s a cozy café filled with excellent coffee, yummy pastries, and Ivy League students discussing Nietzsche.

Lolly and I, the first to arrive at 10 a.m. on this particular Saturday morning, secured a table in the back, ordered coffee, tea, and a dozen peach jelly–filled pastries.

“
So, I think we have an idea for a great show,” Lolly started with excitement.

“
Let’s hear it,” I replied.

But Lolly wouldn’t divulge anything until the others arrived. Lolly is at her best when she’s coy. She squints her eyes and gets a smirk on her lips that signals fun. Bobby stumbled in past the front counter.

“
I need some coffee!” he said too loudly to the woman behind the counter. She politely took his order and told him to have a seat. Seeing our waves from the back, he stumbled his way to our table.

“
Why are we meeting so fucking early?” He hadn’t come home the night before, so he was obviously sleep-deprived.

“
It’s 10,” Lolly said. “It’s not early. You just went to bed too late.”

“
Ha! What makes you think I went to bed?” Bobby said with a laugh. “Where are The Girls?”

We’d taken to calling Andrea, Deborah, and Kathy “The Girls,” as Lolly aligned herself more closely to us boys.

“
They’ll be here soon,” I replied. “They’re all coming from Queens.”

“
Fucking Queens,” Rob exclaimed.

“
Fucking Queens,” Lolly repeated. “Who the fuck lives in Queens anyway?”

“
I don’t know, a couple million people, maybe?” I said.

We definitely had a bias against the boroughs. As if cued, The Girls paraded into the café, settled into their seats, and our powwow began.

The Girls and Lolly immediately launched into their idea for a play based on the life of Zelda Fitzgerald, wife of writer F. Scott Fitzgerald and, as The Girls quickly pointed out, a writer in her own right. She had written a posthumously published book, they reported, called
Save Me the Waltz
. After they confirmed Zelda’s own artistry, they turned to the details of her glamorous yet tortured life.

Every bit a southern belle, Zelda agreed to marry Scott only after he published his first novel,
This Side of Paradise
, and then, only if it was a success. Once his promising career was established, they wed and immediately took New York by storm. Riding on the tops of cabs, jumping into fountains, dancing and drinking the nights away, they quickly became the king and queen of the roaring ’20s.

Bobby and I asked questions, and books piled up on the table. Lolly and The Girls spared no detail of their extensive research. The Fitzgeralds spent far too much money keeping up their expensive lifestyle and needed a cheaper alternative to New York. Still recovering from World War I, Paris—an inexpensive cosmopolitan city filled with expatriate artists living cheaply and living large—was far more accommodating to the Fitzgeralds’ level of consumption.

Everyone who was anyone lived in Paris in those days. The Fitzgeralds passed their time with the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Sara and Gerald Murphy. We could see why Lolly and The Girls were so excited about this fascinating collection of artistic giants.

Their play would capture the energy of the period while looking at the under-examined talent of Zelda. As they saw it, history had relegated her artistic contributions to a mere footnote. I wasn’t convinced we should construct an entire play focusing on a woman few people had heard of, but the idea of making a play about the 1920s felt like a good direction.

The year 1999 may as well have been 1928. The ’90s were already being heralded as the second Gilded Age. The freewheeling, easy-living attitude was a carbon copy of the late ’20s, when money and jobs were also plentiful. It felt timely. By exploring the past, we could illuminate the present. We could even be prophetic! After all, the Roaring ’20s were followed by the Great Depression. And while nobody was talking about a Depression in 1999, I was convinced the thought was lurking somewhere deep inside our society’s collective subconscious.

“
So, was Zelda crazy?” asked Bobby, looking up from a book he was scanning.

“
What do you mean by crazy?” Andrea asked.

“
Well, it says here, she died in a fire at an insane asylum where she was a patient,” he said, pointing at the page he was reading. This immediately peaked my interest.

“
You mean to say, not only was she crazy, like wild-party crazy, but she was also insane-crazy?” I asked with excitement.

“
No, she wasn’t insane,” said Deborah sternly. “She had some mental problems, but she wasn’t insane.”

I was struck by how defensive The Girls got about Zelda. Even Lolly objected to my accusation. I wasn’t sure if it was because I called Zelda insane or the obvious delight I took in the idea, but either way, they were not going to tolerate my insulting her.

“
Come on,” I said. “Nothing makes for better drama than someone going insane.”

“
Well, we don’t want to make a play about Zelda going insane,” said Andrea, attempting to put the conversation back on track.

“
But why not?” I continued. “I mean, if she went insane, we should capitalize on that! Even if she didn’t go insane, I think we should make her go insane.”

Bobby nodded in agreement. Of all people, he understood the whole “insane person as entertainment” thing. He made a point of being insane for that very reason.

“
We can’t just make stuff up,” Deborah said. “We have to be true to the research.”

That moved us past deliberating on the degree of Zelda’s mental illness into a very profound discussion on the type of play this would be. The Girls had clearly done much research. They wanted to explore every nook and cranny of this woman’s life. I had no problem with that, but I insisted we avoid creating a “bio-play.” Historical facts could serve as a launching pad, but I wanted allegory, symbolism, and universal themes. I wanted to present these people’s lives in a fantastical world filled with high drama and stunning visuals.

In order to achieve this, we were going to have to make things up. Historical reality would read too flat. The Girls didn’t agree. They believed Zelda’s reality was fantastical enough. And I suppose, for them, it was.

I couldn’t know it then, but Zelda’s reality would eventually make a mess out of mine. That argument clearly wasn’t going to get solved over peach pastries, so I suggested we table that conversation and look at possible titles for the piece.

“
I don’t think we can title the project yet,” Kathy said.

My head fell into my hands. “Fucking artists,” I thought to myself. This was the price I had to pay for creating a group—discussion and compromise. And I wouldn’t always mind it, but sometimes I’d have to resort to manipulation.

“
Yeah,” agreed Andrea. “The title will come later. We need to develop the idea further.”

I paused and bit my cheek.

“
Why don’t we discuss possible titles for the piece? Maybe we’ll develop the idea further,” I said very diplomatically.

“
I don’t know,” said Kathy, shaking her head. Lolly, Bobby, and Deborah quietly picked at the remaining sweets on the table.

“
Well, I do,” I said, punctuating my declaration with a sip of coffee, pinky down. “Let’s brainstorm and see what we come up with. We don’t have to choose anything now. Think of it as an exercise.”

I knew we’d be walking away from this meeting with a title. Would it be the final title, I couldn’t know, but we’d be digesting our pastries calling this project something.

A project doesn’t exist until it has a title. I know it may sound ridiculous because clearly, it does exist without a title. Like a shoe. Even if there were no word for shoe, a shoe still exists. But I can’t live in a world where you need to tie “that thing on your feet.” When someone asks me what project The Beggars Group is working on, I need to be able to say “SHOE.”

“
So how about
Save the Last Waltz
?” I started

“
No,” Andrea said. “That’s the title of her book, and we’re not doing her book. How about just
Zelda
?”

The brainstorming began. Everyone had ideas, and the dialogue moved from a jovial competition of cleverness to full-blown discussions about characters. We started to build the core of the play. Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Sara and Gerald Murphy would all grace the stage in our pageantry of people past. They all had at least one thing in common: They were all American expatriates living in Paris in the 1920s. They were expatriates. The play was about the expatriates. The play would be called
The Expatriates
.

Once we hit that word, the conversation exploded. “Expatriates” is loaded with a million thematic applications, and it officially became the title of the project.

“
What are you working on?” people would ask.

“
The Expatriates,” I’d say, and launch into the tagline, followed by the detailed description.

As the afternoon sun grew heavy, we established a timeline for this opus. We would submit the project to FringeNYC, the largest downtown theater festival in the city, for the summer of 2000. After this workshop production, we would rework the play and present a full run in the fall, two months later. We were excited by the challenge of this extreme ambition. A little over a year to write the piece seemed a comfortable amount of time to really dig into these people’s lives.

As if that wasn’t enough, a few side projects were put on the table as well. The Beggars Group was a new muscle we’d all just discovered, and we were eager to flex it. The more we produced, the better we’d become at it, and the more people would know about us. So while our main artistic creation was a year away, we had a litany of projects to help raise our profile and sharpen our skills.

We would produce Charles Busch’s
Theodora, She Bitch of Byzantium
, an evening of music by Stephanie, and an experimental poetry piece curated by Andrea. There seemed to be no end to the theatrical evenings we could generate. And generating art was like rocket fuel for our ambitions, propelling us to do more. We filtered out of the café seven hours after we had arrived, jacked up on caffeine, with clear goals and ambitious hearts.

AUNT PHYLLIS

One of our biggest challenges was how to fund all this ambition. My handy credit card, which I wasn’t afraid to use, didn’t provide a realistic, long-term strategy. We started a solicitation campaign and scheduled a few fund-raising parties. And while those 20-dollar donations added up quickly, we needed larger infusions of cash. So, everyone else got to work on grant research, and I got to work on courting a benefactor.

I met my Great-Aunt Phyllis at a private club on the Upper East Side. She had flown in from San Francisco for a few days, and we were going to have lunch at the club and then head to the theater. Aunt Phyllis, who is my father’s aunt, was the only living relation on his side of the family. Her life was steeped in mystery. While her vibrancy belied her 80 years on this earth, her sophistication and manners were undoubtedly from an earlier era. Eager to hear her thoughts on the literary giants we were studying, I arrived wearing suit and tie as requested.