“Why was it sad?”
“Is there something wrong with you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why would you do that? Why are you getting up in front of people and showing off like that?”
“It was a play.”
“I know it was a play. And you were in it, up there on the stage, showing off in front of everyone. I am seriously worried about you, that you feel the need to do something like that. Showing off like that just to get attention. We haven’t been giving you enough attention and I have been feeling bad all day that you have been in so much pain and I haven’t even noticed until it comes out like this.”
Ironically, my parents love the theater. They had season tickets to Arena Stage in Washington for decades, went to New York to see the shows every year, and loved talking about the terrific plays and actors they saw. So I really did not see this reaction coming at all. They knew David Rosenthal was in plays and thought he was great, never mentioning what kind of cry for help he might be exhibiting. My sister’s friends were in school plays and my parents might have even gone to see them. But me doing it was shameful. An embarrassment. Either an ego trip or a mental breakdown of some kind. Obviously, it still rings in my head. Who the fuck would say that to their kid in that situation? I have asked my mother on many occasions if this really happened and if that was her real reaction. She stands by all of it, and still feels it to a certain degree. I laughed her off, truly not hurt by what she said and maybe, in fact, a little sad for her, that she couldn’t see the joy and awakening her son was experiencing because of remnants of the old Jewish shtetl mentality of never drawing attention to yourself. I had found my voice and my identity. My connection to the world of theater, first backstage and now as an actor and as a creator, was bonded for life.
For a Mother’s Day present that year, I got a haircut. Not only did it reduce my mother to tears of joy, it was the perfect excuse to get out of the trap of my physical appearance and open myself up to try out for the prestigious summer stock theater program at our high school, run by our esteemed Mr. Dalla Santa, head of English and Theater. I got a couple of small parts, including one where I got to yodel my own song in Leave It to Jane, a campy 1920s-style musical. I was already over six feet tall and weighed about 120 lbs., and the sight of this pencil-necked geek yodeling got laughs every show. The next fall, I got the lead role in Prom-ises, Promises, a Burt Bacharach musical in which I played a young businessman. It was a huge part, with nine or ten songs to sing, and I had to learn how to sing for real. This was before all of the wireless microphones they use now; I had to project my voice over the orchestra. I think I was pretty good in it. My parents came to see it, both of them nearly fainting from nervousness, but they ended up loving it, amazed at what I had done. WNET Public TV was doing a special series on the schools in the area, and we got to go to their TV studio and do two songs on television, which felt incredibly cool. The next summer, we had another high school do a joint production of Fiddler on the Roof with our school, directed by their theater director, Mr. Perialis. I really went for it at the audition, dancing and singing “If I Were a Rich Man” with abandon, and I beat out the star of their high school, as well as David Rosenthal, for the role of Tevye. That was a confidence builder and turning point. I had to actually act in that one, play a character that wasn’t me, wear a beard and a costume that weren’t mine. The show was really good, caught a buzz, and sold out the fifteen hundred tickets a night for its summer run of six shows. They decided to restage it in the fall, which was the beginning of my senior year, and we sold out again for the run. I was living the life of an artist—I’d built a potter’s wheel in the basement, I was making metal sculptures in my metal shop class, acting, and singing in three different choirs—but I was flunking every non-art class. The guidance counselor told me I was going to have to go to summer school to graduate and it was only November. It was obvious what the next step had to be—I dropped out of high school and never went back.
To my parents’ credit, they supported my leaving school. My sister was brilliant, in her second year of college and heading for a law degree, but they could see academics were not going to get me anywhere. They had to accept that I had some kind of acting talent, even if they didn’t understand it at all. They had no concept of what a career as an actor would even look like, and neither did I. But I needed to find out, and soon, because like Big Ben, I was met with a near-hourly reminder from my mother—“I don’t care what you do but you are out of this house when you turn eighteen.” That gave me about eight months to figure out where I would be going.
GLENN CLOSEIS MY WITNESS
I had a small window of time to try to figure out how to make money on my limited acting skills before I needed to move out and get a full-time job and a place to live. (At that point, Plan B involved finding an old school bus to park somewhere and live in, and getting a job at the car wash, which looked like fun.) It never crossed my mind to go to Hollywood or New York to be an actor. Not once. I didn’t think of those as real places where real people go to try to “make it.” The Arena Stage was, and still is, one of the premiere regional theaters in the country, but the dream of being an actor at Arena Stage was almost too big for me. Rehearsing in the daytime and performing a different play at night sounded very intimidating. Besides, sometimes they did Shakespeare plays and other classics, and there was no way I could ever be in one of those because I couldn’t read them and I didn’t understand what they were saying. Arena had an apprentice program, but even that seemed way out of my league, so I never even applied. My dream job was to get into Dinner Theater! Dinner theater is exactly what it sounds like—dining tables are set up around a center stage and the audience eats dinner during the play. Oh, and the actors are also your waiters. This was the only aspect of show business I thought I could probably fake my way through and actually make money as an actor—although at seventeen, I was much, much younger than everyone else there, so I knew my chances were pretty slim. I auditioned for a couple of shows but didn’t get anything, although I did get the experience of seeing a dinner theater production of Company where the actors performed “The Ladies Who Lunch” while serving lunch.
The only relative I had even remotely connected to show business was a cousin of my mother’s in Philadelphia named Sam Kressen. Sam was a dear and funny man, a jeweler by trade but a part-time local actor as well. His big claim to fame was that he looked very much like Ben Franklin, and in Philadelphia, that was a valuable thing. He played him in everything from local commercials and posters for the city to touring companies of 1776. So now that I was considering being a professional actor, my mom drove me up to Philly to have a serious discussion with him about the profession. We went to his apartment for tea, and he told me everything he knew about show business, which I will share with you now.
1. You need to have a picture of yourself, and it has to be printed as an 8x10-inch photo. No other size will do!
2. Your best friend is the Yellow Pages! Look up agents, casting people, and theaters in it and then send them that 8x10 photo and tell them you want to be an actor.
3. Most importantly, the life of an actor is all about The Three Ds: Disappointment, Disillusionment, and Depression. You will be rejected every day of your life for one reason or another, and you have to learn to live with The Three Ds.
That was it. Not exactly the direction or opportunity I was hoping for, but it seemed to make a lot of sense to my mother, so it was worth the trip. A few weeks later, Sam got me an audition for the bus and truck company of 1776 that he would be touring with for eight months. A real audition! My girlfriend took my picture and we had it printed in the correct, 8x10 size. I went to the audition and did my best but did not get the part. Sam felt bad, and I did too. It turned out he was spot-on correct about Numbers 1 and 3 in his guide to an actor’s life, eternal truths that still apply to this very day, even if the Yellow Pages did not turn out to be my best friend.
Mike Boyle, my high school theater director, recommended me for an apprenticeship to work on the lighting crew at the Washington Shakespeare Festival, a nonprofit organization that put on plays every summer on the National Mall in front of the Washington Monument. At my interview with the producers, I guess I told them of my experience working the lights at the B-CC theater or asked about the hours and the pay, but I honestly don’t remember much of it at all. Just that one lucky moment, crystallized forever in my mind—that tiny little moment that changed everything. I had been teaching myself to play the guitar and had a habit of chewing on a guitar pick. As I got up to leave, the producers noticed as I put the pick back in my mouth and asked if I played guitar. Even though I only knew a few chords, I said yes, trying to seem cool and figuring they would never know the difference. A week later, I got a call saying that I had gotten the job. It would only pay one hundred dollars for two months of work, but it would be great experience to learn lighting from professionals and get my foot in the door with the producers. But when I reported to work on the first day I was in for the shock of my life. The producers met me with the news that I would not be apprenticing with the lighting crew; instead, they had cast me as an actor in the play! What? What the fuck was going on? They proceeded to inform me, “We needed someone who plays the guitar to be in the play, so instead of working on the lighting crew, you will be playing a servant who plays the guitar in the big wedding scene. Although it won’t be a guitar, you will be playing the lute, a guitar-like instrument, because the guitar hadn’t been invented yet. You will also be playing a few other minor roles, as well as helping with the props and changing the scenery between scenes. And when performances begin, you will also help seat people and hand out programs.”
My jaw was on the floor. I was going to be in the play? I didn’t even know what play they were doing, since I thought I was only going to be doing the lights. When they handed me a book, I started to sweat. When I saw that it was Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, panic set in. I mean, I knew it was the Washington Shakespeare Festival, but I didn’t think I would be involved in the Shakespeare part of it. I would have to actually learn Shakespeare!? I couldn’t learn Shakespeare, because there was no way I could even read Shakespeare! To make matters worse, it turned out that this was the first day of rehearsal and we were all going to read the play out loud. I looked around and it was a room full of actors, no lighting people to be found at all. A fucking cold reading of a Shakespeare play, my worst fear coming true! I met the other apprentices, who had other small roles in the play and similar backstage responsibilities, but they obviously knew what their jobs were before they arrived. All of the professional actors and the director gathered in a circle to start the read-through while I furiously tried to find my little parts in this incomprehensible book. The actors began, and I couldn’t understand a fucking word any one was saying. Absolute gibberish. An actual nightmare come to life.
The play progressed, my first scene came up, and I found my first line—“Aye, sir!” Hey, I knew how to say that. And I did. Later in the scene, my second line—“Aye, aye sir!” A little trickier, but I nailed it. The play moved on. I felt relieved that I had made it that far, hoping my part stayed in understandable English, as opposed to whatever language everyone else was speaking. I ended up with a couple more lines of a very similar degree of difficulty, and by the end of the read-through, I felt I could handle the job. The cast were all professional New York actors who had been brought in to do the show, so that meant full days of rehearsal and a chance to watch and learn what real actors did. This was going to be better than I ever could have imagined. The only hitch was going to be this lute thing. The lute? Well, I was so bad at guitar at that point that maybe I would have better luck with the lute. When I told my parents that I was in a professional Shakespeare play and that I would be playing the lute, the look of dismay on their faces is something I still remember, because I felt the same way.
It was the time of my life and the turn in my life I was looking for. The cast was a group of incredibly talented people, starting with the young, on-the-verge-of-greatness Glenn Close playing Katherine. Glenn is a force of nature, and my god, the way she spoke the language brought it to life in a way that even Dummy Dan could understand and love. She was funny and bawdy, with an inspiring confidence and a generous heart. Richard Greene, Roy Brocksmith, and other Broadway actors were all astonishingly great in the play, but more importantly to me, so accepting and encouraging of me as a young actor. I was glad my part was so small so that (a) I wouldn’t be revealed for the uneducated idiot I was, and (b) with little responsibility, I mostly just hung out with everyone who wasn’t in the scene that was being rehearsed. It gave me a chance to get to know all of these talented people who had moved to New York to be actors. They shared their experiences, what life was like, how you got jobs, found acting schools and apartments, and made it sound possible. They knew I had dropped out of school and was not a trained actor in any way, but they made me understand that there is a place in acting even for people like me. It isn’t all Shakespeare, and no degree is required. I was making real friendships with real actors, who accepted me as an adult and an equal, even though I was just a seventeen-yearold puppy.
Especially one guy. Christopher Curry Root is a scatterbrained angel, sent from heaven to give me my life. He is an incredible actor and my lifelong friend. Christopher took me under his wing that summer, barely even acknowledging that he was twenty-six and I was only seventeen. Christopher was a bit of a bad boy with a dark sense of humor, his idol at the time being the sadistic main character from A Clockwork Orange, and his energy was infectious. I was hitchhiking or taking the bus to work most days, but when performances started, my folks let me use the car since I was getting home so late. Christopher and I would hang out after the show at the apartment he rented until very early in the morning, because we didn’t have to get up until the afternoon to do the show the next night. I started to see the glory of the actor’s life. “Hi-diddly-dee, an actor’s life for me!” Sam Kressen did not mention any of this. I started thinking seriously about moving to New York, and so did my folks. We bought the Village Voice and looked up prices for apartments and acting schools, to see if maybe I could afford to try it for a while. As the final performances approached, Christopher told me that if I ever came up to New York, I could stay with him, and he gave me his address on a piece of paper. He said it rather casually but, with the countdown clock now down to one month, that piece of paper was my lottery ticket.
It had been an incredible summer of watching the actors, making friends, and learning the lute. The only thing that hadn’t happened yet was getting my hundred dollars. The NY actors got their $253.35 paychecks every week, thank you Actor’s Equity Union, but when I asked when the apprentices got paid, I was told it would be at the end of the run. The last Thursday of the run, the NY actors got their last paycheck, but we did not get ours. I asked why not and was told that it was from a different account, and we would be paid the next day. The next day, there were no paychecks for the apprentices, and I was starting to get a little mad. The math equation of our respective salaries was ridiculous if you looked at the fact that we had put in the same hours as everyone else. One hundred dollars for the whole summer worked out to about a dollar a day. I could almost make that on my paper route. I told the stage manager that we needed to get paid on Saturday because the show closed on Sunday, and I needed the money that I had earned. To put some teeth behind it, I said if the check wasn’t there, I wasn’t going to do the show. The other apprentices were not with me at all on this. They didn’t care about the one hundred dollars; they wanted the experience and connections. But I needed the money and we had certainly earned it. When I came to work on Saturday, still no checks. I was pissed, but I didn’t have the nerve to not do the show. At the end of that night, I restated my threat to the stage manager, saying the check had to be there on the last day or I would definitely not do the show. When I got to the theater on Sunday for the final performance, no check. I was shaking; I was so mad and scared of what I was about to do. I handed out programs and seated the audience for the final performance of the play and told the stage manager I was serious. I would start the play but if the checks were not there at intermission, I would quit. I had backed myself all the way down the gangplank and had nothing to lose. When I came off stage at intermission, of course there were no checks. So I said “No more!” and I went on strike right then and there. It was my job to change the set during intermission, as well as to open the second half of the show by coming out and playing the fucking lute I had learned, so they could not proceed without me. The intermission lasted about forty-five minutes, as the accountant was found, the checks were cut, driven over to the theater, and put in my hand.
I was shaking like a leaf, and the other apprentices were understandably trying to distance themselves from me in the eyes of the producer and stage manager. But Christopher, Glenn, and the rest of the cast were right with me, thinking it was ridiculously funny and brave for this seventeen-year-old kid to bring the whole thing to a stop. That was the longest forty-five minutes of my life. The audience was yelling, “What’s going on?” and clapping to get the show started again. I went on stage to change the set for the second half and since I was the first person that the audience had seen in quite a long time, they started yelling at me, wanting to know what was going on. And I took the opportunity to tell them. Standing in the center of the stage, I delivered an impromptu monologue to explain exactly what had happened—that we had worked the entire summer for only one hundred dollars and they were holding that back, naming the producer and the accountant as the greedy, mean people who did this. I got a standing ovation from the audience. I finished changing the set and started the second half with my lute-playing scene, for which I got another standing ovation. My third standing ovation came at the curtain call. To add to the emotional craziness of the night, it was the final performance and time to say goodbye to the coolest people I had ever met and go back to my parents’ house and my little life. Driving home, distracted with so many powerful feelings, I did not notice there was a police car following me, with their lights flashing, until I parked at my parents’ house. In my second monologue of the evening, I blurted out how my entire evening had gone and apologized that I had been speeding or for whatever I had done. The officer took pity on me and let me go.
Two weeks later, and ten days before I turned eighteen, I was on a Greyhound bus to New York City, with my duffle bag, my guitar, four hundred dollars my parents gave me, and Christopher’s address in my pocket. And all because I started chewing on that guitar pick. Amazing how things turn.
LIVING A PAUL SIMON SONG
“When I left my home and my family
I was no more than a boy
In the company of strangers
In the quiet of the railway station
Running scared
Laying low, seeking out the poorer quarters
Where the ragged people go
Looking for the places only they would know”
—PAUL SIMON “THE BOXER”
I made the decision to move to New York quickly because I wanted to get out of Maryland before all my friends left for college, and to be able to tell them that I was doing something cool too. My parents insisted that if I went, I had to sign up for acting classes, to at least give the appearance that I was going for educational reasons. But beyond that, they had no idea where I was going to live, who I was going to see, or what I was going to do. They gave me four hundred dollars to get started, and I took the money from my savings account and got traveler’s checks for safety. I stuffed my clothes and sleeping bag into the duffle bag I used at Wigwasati, grabbed my guitar and the piece of paper with Christopher’s address on it, 21 West 86th Street, and walked out of my family home for good. My dad took me to the Greyhound bus station in downtown Washington and that was it—I was on my own, and would be for the rest of my life. Kind of like sending me out onto the mean streets of Philadelphia by myself as a four-year-old, only this time with a different message—don’t come back. I was scared to death and already feeling homesick but, really, I had no other choice.
I am not sure why I didn’t call Christopher to tell him I was coming before I left. Well, actually, I do. I was afraid he would tell me not to come. As it stood, legally speaking, the final offer on the table was “Come on by if you’re in the neighborhood,” and there was no reason to fuck with that. All I had to do was get myself to his neighborhood and he would be legally and morally bound to let me stay with him. The bus let me out at the Port Authority on West 41st Street and 8th Avenue, a very sleazy part of town in 1975. With “my suitcase and guitar in hand,” I still remember the feeling of hitting a wall of humanity, and just being swept up in it like a school of fish. There were buses that went to the Upper West Side, but they were so crowded and I had so much stuff that I decided just to walk the two and a half miles. Eighth Avenue was crazy, lugging that duffle bag and guitar, being jostled by the crowd, surrounded by hookers, porno theaters, three-card monte games, and food carts. But at 59th Street, it turned into Central Park West, which was a whole other world I was seeing for the first time. I made my way up to 86th, turned left, and there was Christopher’s building, with an awning that read The Brewster Hotel. I went through the revolving door and up to the clerk behind the desk, asking if Christopher lived there. He told me he did, gave me his room number, and up the elevator I went. I don’t think I had peed since I left my parents’ house that morning and my bladder was close to bursting, so barging in on Christopher was not the only reason for my anxiousness when I knocked on the door.
Bruce McGill is a daunting motherfucker. He is from Texas and is built like a bull. He is an amazing character actor you have seen in movies and TV for decades, from Animal House to My Cousin Vinny to Ali, playing bikers, cops, judges—any character whose intention is to intimidate, because he is a formidable guy. He opened the door to Christopher’s apartment with a look that said, “I am in the middle of a lot of things and who the fuck are you?” I wasn’t sure if I had the right apartment because Christopher never mentioned anything about having roommates.
“Is Christopher here?”
“No.”
