My Off Broadway Acting Debut A Telepathic Success

I made my Off Broadway acting debut Saturday night.

In a Playwrights Horizons production of “The Thin Place,” I uttered the last word of the one-act play. Without any rehearsal or advance preparation. I hit my cue. To the utter amazement of Gilda and the rest of the audience. 

It wasn’t the first time I strutted my thespian talents. When I was 13 I played Rusty Charlie in a summer camp production of “Guys and Dolls.” I knew my lines back then as well, though, to be honest, the director asked me to silently mouth the last word of the “Fugue for Tinhorns” opening song because I could not master the desired harmony.

There was no music involved Saturday night. I simply had to project one word from my seat at the extreme right of the first row of the audience.

Wait. First, a little background on “The Thin Place.” Written by Lucas Hnath who also authored “A Doll’s House, Part 2,” “Hillary and Clinton,” and the “The Christians,” “The Thin Place” deals with the possibility of an alternative universe and paranormal communication, sometimes between the living, sometimes between the living and the dead.

A young woman, Hilda, recounts how she and her grandmother would endeavor to communicate telepathically. Sitting in an armchair on a stage devoid of anything else but a narrow table lodged between a second identical armchair, Hilda said her grandmother had subsequently died. Looking directly at me she said I somehow reminded her of her grandmother. That I looked like her.  I stroked my beard in amazement, but she just continued reminiscing about her young life with her granny and her later adult life which had become entwined with Linda, a medium who acknowledged that conjuring up the dead was a trick she performed as a less expensive but more result-oriented therapy than professional medical help to relieve the anguish her customers had from some unresolved conflict with the departed.

At the end of “The Thin Place,” sitting in the chair from which she had never moved over the play’s 90 minute span, Hilda again faced me. She wanted to demonstrate telepathy, the way she did it with her grandmother. She took a pad and marker pen out of the table drawer, wrote down a word, held it to her chest and implored me to concentrate on this unknown word that she would be trying to transmit to me, her imaginary grandmother.

I thought “meatloaf” would be an appropriate homey memory but when she looked at me and asked what I had heard in my head, just behind my forehead, I replied, too softly at first for her, let alone for the audience, to hear. Louder, I said, “Umbrella.” Turning the pad toward the audience she revealed what she had written—Umbrella. The audience gasped. The stage went dark. The audience clapped.

Immediately my 15 minutes of Off Broadway stardom began. Audience members approached me to ask, Did I really receive a telepathic message? Had I been primed by the theater staff prior to the performance to say umbrella? Was I an actor planted in the audience?

No, on all counts. Just before I was ready to say “meatloaf,” I heard a faint but distinct metallic voice say, “Umbrella.” I quickly processed my role, though to be sure I at first whispered “umbrella,” hoping Hilda could read my lips. With her encouragement I repeated aloud the last word of the play.

Seated next to me, Gilda was the most confounded. She had not heard the electronic transmission. I checked around my seat. No receiver or speaker anywhere. My seat was no different than anyone else’s.

My 15 minutes of fame was nearly up, we were already standing outside the theater when I recalled retailers have sometimes used narrowcasting technology to direct messages to workers or shoppers in specific locations so as not to alert or bother customers or staff throughout a store. Messages such as a special sale for those currently in the housewares department. Or staff should clean up a spill in aisle eight. 

The theater must have targeted a narrowcast to my seat alone. I couldn’t prove it but it is the only rational explanation. I was, after all, not Hilda’s grandmother. And though “meatloaf” would have been a much better word, I had no license to alter the playwright’s dialogue. So with a smile as my umbrella, I uttered the last word of the play. 

My Wife Wants to Sleep with a TV Star

My wife wants to sleep with a TV star. 

Me.

Last week Gilda saw an article about an open casting call for extras for two television shows to be filmed in Westchester in the fall. After not acting like a stage mother with our daughter when Ellie was a teenager, despite Ellie clearly having more talent and stage presence than I, Gilda encouraged me to strut my stuff at the “auditions” that would be held August 26 at Manhattanville College in Purchase.

Now, I am very comfortable delivering speeches even to an audience of a thousand or more. But the last time I performed on stage was 1962, when I was 13 and cast as Rusty Charlie in a summer camp production of Guys and Dolls. I was one of a trio singing the opening "Fugue for Tinhorns." I didn’t have a single piece of spoken dialogue. But this open casting call was for extras, and extras rarely have speaking parts, so the idea of being on TV intrigued me.

The casting call was scheduled for 1 to 4 pm. As I had to be in Manhattan to pick up Gilda at work at 4, I arrived at the college around 12:15 to be part of the first wave of wannabes. The guard at the entrance gave me a sardonic smile when I asked where the auditions were being held. It was a smile you see in all those old Dick Powell-Ruby Keeler 1930s movies about stage door hopefuls trying to bluster their way past the guard onto a Broadway stage.

If my time at the auditions was typical, hundreds, make that thousands, of would-be stars showed up, most of them not yet possessed of a college degree. Which was okay, since the casting agents described not two but three shows they were seeking to populate. 

For CBS’s Members Only, they needed extras to play the staff and members of a private country club. HBO had them looking for background actors to be “working and middle class types of all ethnicities” in Show Me a Hero, a six-hour mini-series about the court-ordered construction of low income housing in Yonkers in the late 1980s. The cast includes Oscar Isaac, Winona Ryder, Alfred Molina and Catherine Keener. The third project is an Amazon pilot, Mozart in the Jungle, based on a memoir of the same name by Blair Tindall.

In groups of around 200, we were ushered into and seated in a large hall where we were told about the three shows, asked to fill out a one-page questionnaire, and had two digital pictures taken. They did not interview anyone. 

The form included some basic questions such as height and weight. Asked for my age within a five year range, I did what many actors do. I lied. I opted to shave three years off my 65. 

They wanted to know what type of car we drove and if we had any skills, such as playing golf and tennis. I wrote I was a slightly above average tennis player (which only my winter tennis buddies may dispute). They also wanted to know about our wardrobe at home, especially if we had any clothing typical of the 1980s. As most of the candidates were barely in their twenties it was doubtful any of them had such outfits, but I still have some suits from that era hanging in my closet. 

Most everyone in my group of 200 came dressed casually. It was, after all, in the mid 80s Tuesday. But one twenty-something girl stood out. Above her high heels, she wore a short, tight fitting, plunging neckline black dress enhanced by a severe push-up bra that revealed, depending on your point of view, either healthy genes or great plastic surgery. Either way, two middle-aged women sitting behind me couldn’t stop talking about her as she posed for her pictures.

“Oh, she’s bending over and they’re popping out,” said one, to which the other replied, “She’s actually pushing them out.”

To hear veteran extras talk about the work, it’s a day-long drag waiting around hours for a few minutes of being background scenery. We were told it’s a full day’s work, usually about 11 hours. And you won’t know if you’re needed until the day before shooting.

I left the “audition” at 1:35, time enough to easily get back to my temporary day job chauffering Gilda to and from work. 

Regrets, I've Had a Few

The linked article from Saturday’s NY Times Arts section recounts a music critic’s choice to donate the cello he has owned for more than half his life but has not played in years. It was a moving summation of transition and regrets that for some reason evoked within me pangs of melancholy, nostalgia  and regret (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/05/arts/music/a-critic-donates-his-cello-his-musical-past-to-wqxr.html?ref=arts&_r=0). 

I regret never having learned to play an instrument (and, as a parent, never having insisted my children take lessons). For a short time in my childhood we had an upright piano in our living room. It was for my sister, Lee. The piano teacher came to our home just often enough for our parents to realize it was a waste of time and money. The ability to bang out “Chopsticks” was not a sound return on investment.

My brother, sister and I never took up another instrument, nor, to my knowledge, did any of our friends. Until, that is, my best friend, Lenny Dorfman, worked one summer as a counselor in a day camp after either his freshman or sophomore year at SUNY Stony Brook. To garner larger tips, Lenny had been counseled that he needed a shtick, something to make his campers distinguish him in the eyes of their parents. So he self-taught himself to play the guitar and, this being the summer of 1967 or 1968, the harmonica, which he propped up in front of his cheeks à la Bob Dylan. 

It was a transformational experience. Lenny had entered Stony Brook to study physics. He graduated a music major. He learned to play piano. He grew an Afro. He performed under the name Len Gary, Gary being his middle name.  He wrote his own songs, though he could barely carry a tune. 

One thing Lenny didn’t want to carry was an Army-issued rifle in Vietnam, so after graduation in 1970 he opted to go to Canada to avoid the draft. He taught music in Windsor, outside Detroit, returning to New York only after a draft evasion amnesty had been extended. Last time I checked he was teaching music on Long Island.

Unlike Lenny, or my children, I regret never having the college dormitory experience. Brooklyn College was a commuter school. Most evenings I ate dinner with my parents. My year in graduate school in Syracuse I spent in a rented apartment, not a dorm. I guess I had enough communal living from 15 years of sleepaway summer camp. 

I regret not living in an apartment in Manhattan.

I regret being too timid to cast myself forward for parts in camp and school musicals. I knew the scores of most Broadway shows, but couldn’t overcome my fear of failing to remember dialogue and embarrassing myself. I was on stage just twice, when I was 13. For a camp talent show I sang “On the Street Where You Live” from My Fair Lady. Later that summer I was Rusty Charlie in the opening number of Guys and Dolls. I was one of three gamblers in “Fugue for Tinhorns” handicapping horses. My horse showed a lot of class; his great grandfather was Equipoise. Only trouble was, I could never learn to harmonize with the other singers. My Broadway dreams finished out of the money. (By a cruel coincidence, The Times also carried an article Saturday on a one-time benefit concert performance of Guys and Dolls performed last Thursday at Carnegie Hall. The article began with a tribute to "Fugue for Tinhorns.")

No doubt there are other regrets I could share, but that’s enough for this post. Besides, for every regret there’s a counterpoint of triumph. Attending Brooklyn College meant I met and married Gilda. No regrets there.