Another Waltz with Prior

It seems I will spend more time in NC than NY this year.  In mid-December I’ll be leaving to play Prior in Angels in America at PlayMakers Rep in Chapel Hill.   I couldn’t be more thrilled to return to this play (and to this role).  It also gives me a chance to write about how circular and interconnected living and working in the theater can be.  When you waltz, you dance in 3/4 time while moving mostly in circles.  And unlike most partner dances, the man leads by stepping backwards.

(The original poster and playbill artwork for Angels by Milton Glaser)

An epic work by the playwright Tony Kushner, Angels in America is in fact two plays, or a play in two parts: Millennium Approaches and Perestroika.  The plays can stand alone and are sometimes performed independently of each other, but are meant to be seen together.  They are performed by the same cast in repertory (meaning that the actors alternate which play they perform) and on a two show day, they might do both: Millennium as the matinee and Perestroika in the evening.  Set in New York City in the 1980s during the very beginning of the AIDS crisis, Angels in America blurs the line of fantasy and realism, and in doing so delves into such divisive subjects as politics, sex, and religion.  The plays follow a diverse cast of characters that include a former drag queen and nurse named Belize, a fictional representation of the lawyer Roy Cohn, a young Mormon couple living in Brooklyn, and a man diagnosed with AIDS named Prior Walter who is abandoned by his boyfriend but receives visitations from a terrifying and beautiful angel.

I first read Angels in America as a twenty year old college student.  Kim Rubinstein, my acting teacher at Northwestern, had been the associate director of the national tour.  We spent an entire semester working on scenes from Millennium and Perestroika, and as our final exam of sorts my class performed the entirety of the two plays. Erik Hellman, Jonathan Saylors, and I all worked on Prior, each taking different scenes.  Flash forward five years.  As a twenty-five year old graduate student at NYU I played Prior in Millennium Approaches, a production which deeply affected the training I received there.  Now another five years has passed and I am finally the right age to play Prior professionally.  I’ll be doing both parts in repertory this winter at PlayMakers in NC.  Even at a cursory glance, this play has obviously followed me throughout my life as an artist.  But it even goes a bit further.

(Ellen McLaughlin and Stephen Spinella in the original Broadway production)

While doing Millennium at NYU, we met with Oskar Eustis.  Oskar commissioned the play while running a theater called the Eureka in San Francisco, and directed the initial workshop production.  He now runs the Public Theater, and teaches a class at Grad Acting about collaboration and devised work. Oskar gave me my first job out of grad school, directing me in his production of Hamlet as part of Shakespeare in the Park.  Between years of graduate school, I spent a summer with the Chautauqua Theatre Company in upstate New York.  I did a play called The Just with Ellen McLaughlin, who played the Angel in the original Broadway production. She performed a play at PlayMakers last season and recommended me. If that isn’t enough, Kate Goehring played my mother this fall in The Glass Menagerie.  How is she connected you ask?  Well, she played Harper in the first national tour, directed by my acting teacher at Northwestern, Kim Rubinstein.

Before the Angel crashes through the ceiling of Prior’s apartment at the end of Millennium Approaches, he is visited by several ghosts of his ancestors, prior Priors as it were.  Attempting to calm him, they conjure a vision of Louis, the boyfriend who has abandoned Prior, unable to cope with the complexity of his sickness.  Prior and Louis share a quiet waltz, moving in circles across the stage, with Prior retracing his steps backwards toward his bed.  As I prepare for another waltz with Prior, I am reminded again just how circular everything can be.

How I Got Beat Up by a Cat

(A number of years ago now, my father asked for us not to send him gifts or cards on his birthday.  Instead, he wanted us to write short stories about memories from our childhood.  I was busy writing/producing We Outran the Sun when he had his most recent birthday, so this story arrived a bit late.  It recounts an altercation I had with a childhood pet, a cat named Ashes.  Hope you enjoy.)

I don’t get into fights.  I’m just not that guy, never have been.  The closest I’ve come to being in a fist fight include: 1) a falling out with a friend named Nathan in 4th grade, which ended with me pushing him into a urinal and 2) being punched in the stomach (also in grade school) after I fouled a guy named Evan while playing basketball during recess.  Fights usually end quickly if one of the combatants is covered in urine, or can’t breathe because his diaphragm is temporarily paralyzed. So it should come as no surprise that the only confrontation to give me a bloody nose was with a cat.  That’s right, you read that correctly: a cat.

(Eva and Leo as kittens for Halloween, note the name tag on Leo: Ashes)

My sister Stephanie and her husband Phil recently brought home two kittens, who were promptly named Candy and Pumpkin by my young niece and nephew.  The day Eva and Leo first met their beloved pets, Steph and I talked on Skype.  She had brought her laptop out to the barn in their backyard, where the kittens will be spending most of their time.  Eva and Leo were much more preoccupied than usual, and justifiably so, walking in and out of the frame occasionally, holding or pursuing a cat.  The excitement (and joy) in the air was palpable – if not for the cats, certainly for the kids.  At one point during our conversation, Steph turned to Leo and told him not to pick up the cat by its head.  Which reminded me of my own childhood experiences with cats.  When I was very little, we had a kitten named Taffy (note the similarity in name to Candy).  I made the mistake of picking up Taffy by the tail.  Taffy scratched the daylights out of my arm, and I was not allowed to play with him for an unspecified amount of time.  Now Eva and Leo have been kitty crazy for quite awhile, and both of them dressed as kittens for Halloween this fall, in adorable costumes made by their grandmother.  Each of these candy crazed kitties had a name tag on their costume. Eva went by the moniker of Snowflake, while Leo assumed the nom de chat of Ashes.  Ashes happens to be the name of the second feline to reside at 10893 Lowell Road (Taffy having a rather short life span), and the adversary who would give me a bloody nose.

Ashes eventually mellowed as he grew older, but as a kitten he was rambunctious and rather high maintenance.  Decidedly an outdoor cat, his natural habitat included the few acres around our house, as well as the small box in our garage where he would sleep at night.  But a significant compromise came about when it was decided that he could spend time in the basement of our house.  Not permanently, to be sure, but more on a visitation basis.  The basement had not been remodeled, and therefore Ashes and his fur and claws were less of a threat to the furniture, carpet, and whatever else my mother thought would be damaged. As kids, we spent a lot of time in the basement; both the television and all of our Legos were in that room.  A large, open space with red carpet and faux wood paneling, it housed my father’s record collection.  We would play those records and dance around the basement, bouncing around to the tunes of The Everly Brothers and The Four Seasons.  I’m not exactly sure what Ashes thought we were doing when we were dancing, but it did not, shall we say, have a calming effect. His eyes would dart around the room, following us.  Then suddenly he would latch on to one of us with his claws and bite our knee.  Like a puritanical parent from the 1950s who caught their kids listening to Elvis, Ashes vehemently showed his disapproval.

(I’m holding Ashes on the left, with my sister Anni on the far right, circa 1986)

We eventually learned to put him in Stephanie’s room if we wanted to listen to those records, but not before the bloody altercation to which I’ve been alluding. Dancing around the basement on a summer afternoon, probably listening to “Poor Jenny” by the Everly Brothers, I suddenly caught a glimpse of Ashes with the crazy look in his eyes that he would get before darting up to bear hug our legs.  In an instant he was on the move, and I quickly turned to run away.  I didn’t get very far.  I ran into the wall.  The wall had a ledge, where the faux wood paneling ended and the windows began.  I don’t remember how old I was when this happened, but I was at the age where my face (specifically, my nose) was exactly the same height as that ledge.  Before I was able to process what had happened, blood was streaming down my face.  Ashes had retreated somewhere to calm his nerves, I’m sure pleased that the immoral songs of The Everly Brothers had been turned off, and I had my first and as yet only bloody nose.

I suppose what I’m saying is, I got beat up by a cat.

Playing with Darkness

Last Friday, I received a fairly unexpected phone call.  I had just finished recording this textbook on social work, and was getting ready to go downtown to see my friend Lena in a performance at DR2, which would be followed by drinks with another friend to celebrate her birthday.  I was hurriedly trying to eat dinner and get dressed (simultaneously) when my phone rang.  The number had a 917 prefix, which signifies a New York cell phone, but I didn’t know who it was.  I thought about letting it go to voicemail, but instead picked up.  Then I heard, “Hey this is Daniel Fish.”  Daniel Fish is a smart and innovative theater director, an artist known for rethinking classic work and also for shaping edgy contemporary plays.  Successful as he may be, he remains a decidedly “downtown” director (which, if you ever happen to read this Daniel, I mean as a compliment).  I had no idea how he got my phone number, or why he would be calling me.  I set down my fork, and probably also a shoe, and said hello.  He was directing a reading of a new play by Thomas Bradshaw at the New York Theater Workshop, and at the last minute an actor had a conflict.  Jimmy Davis, who played Juliet in the all-male production of Romeo and Juliet I did a few years ago in DC, had given him my number.  “Would you be interested?” he asked, and “Can you do a German accent?”

(Outside the New York Theater Workshop on E. 4th Street in Manhattan)

When you do a reading of a new play, you usually just have one short rehearsal.  You familiarize yourself with the language, the director makes suggestions, and then that evening (or the next day) you sit in front of a script on a music stand and read the play.  No movement or blocking, just the interaction of the actors and the audience with the text.  Hearing a play out loud, as a writer, is a completely different experience than hearing it only in your head, and an essential step in the writing process.  After rehearsing the play Sunday night, I went to Park Slope, Brooklyn for a dinner party.  Ciera Wells (who you may perhaps remember from the song cycle) was having people over for dinner and wine at her place.  I got to talking about the play, called The Ashes, which centers around an African American artist whose work addresses the complexity of race.  During the course of the play he has a show of his artwork in Berlin.  The role I played was that of a German neo-Nazi skinhead, and needless to say, things don’t turn out well.  The play provides a complex and provocative look at race and identity.  While explaining the play, I got this question: “Why would anyone agree to play roles of incredibly hateful (or racist, or immoral, or pathological) characters?”  And more specifically, “How does playing a role like that affect you?”  The easy answer would be to say that I usually play “nice” characters – the sensitive young man – and that the variety is exciting.  But it’s a little more complicated than that.

(Thomas Bradshaw, the provocative playwright of The Ashes)

What people find offensive is often surprising to me.  Parents who complain about teenage sex in Romeo and Juliet don’t even blink at the murder and hatred in plays like Macbeth or Richard III.  Theatergoers will turn a blind eye to any number of immoralities but write letters of complaint to the theater when a character “takes the Lord’s name in vain.”  But the truth of the matter is that morality usually makes for boring plays.  People are complex, and the essence of drama is conflict.  The play needs an antagonist (or sometimes a protagonist, like in Macbeth) whose actions drive the motion of the play and allow the characters to confront those complexities.  Without Iago, there is no Othello.  Without the neo-Nazi characters in The Ashes, the play wouldn’t arrive at its polemical conclusion. The theater doesn’t try to show the world as it should be, but rather as it is: complicated and beautiful, but also painful and violent.  That is not to say that playing a neo-Nazi is an easy thing to do.  I can’t explain how strange it is to hear certain epithets come out of your mouth, or how disquietingly exhilarating it can be to feel your body filled with rage and hate, however imaginary those intentions may be.  You do feel the need to check in with the other actors, to acknowledge that the tension created is illusory.  But it is only in playing those characters truthfully and without judgement that the audience will be forced to address their own relationship to the issues at hand.  If a performer judges or comments on the character he plays, then he diffuses the culpability of the audience.  They will feel good about themselves because they are “better” than that character.  But if Iago, for instance, believes what he does is justified, or if a neo-Nazi believes his actions are moral, it forces the audience to look more deeply at themselves and their own prejudices.

Which, I suppose, is why we agree to play with darkness.  Yes, it can be disturbing, for both artist and audience.  But that’s the point: it’s supposed to be.