At Play: Teaching Teenagers Theater

INTRODUCTION: MY STORY

I think of myself lying wide awake in my pink-and-white bedroom in a restored Victorian house in Buffalo, New York. We lived near the zoo, and I grew up imitating elephant calls and the screeches of peacocks. I also hear strains of a song called Try to Remember wafting up the stairway like the smell of crisp toast. My father is at the piano, crooning this melancholy song from The Fantasticks (a story of lovers separated by a wall, based on the legend of Pyramus and Thisbe). My brother is in his messy rat’s nest of a room listening to Bali Hai from South Pacific. His record player is turned up high and he is braying along like a proud donkey. My mother sits at the kitchen table, a cigarette in one hand, a drink in the other, reciting The calla lilies are in bloom agayne in a semi-British, tight-jawed accent. She dreams of being Katharine Hepburn.

My childhood home was a theater. We were all dramatic. We made grand entrances and exits. Quotes from Shakespeare at the dinner table were as normal as Pass the potatoes. I remember drowsing off to the mumbles of my parents helping each other learn lines. When I was four or five, I sat tucked into a rear seat of Buffalo’s Studio Arena Theater, where I got to watch my parents star in a play called Picnic. My mother looked so tall and elegant in her gray shirt-dress and spike heels. She also wore a black beret. I was overjoyed. My mother, a beatnik! But at some crux of the play, she became fiercely angry. And as I sat in my seat, she tore the shirt off a man named Hal. He was handsome, with big arms and blond chest hair. I didn’t understand why my mother did that. Scream and tear a man’s shirt off? I burst into tears as she squinted her eyes and puffed at her cigarette. This was nothing like the mother I knew. I had to be carried into the green room behind the stage area because I was sobbing so loudly.

After the show, my mother sat me on her lap and laughingly explained that she was just acting. There was no just as far as I was concerned. I could smell the heavy powder on her face; her eyebrows appeared to have been replaced by painted lines. I wouldn’t touch her hands. Those long red fingernails had torn off Hal’s shirt! I didn’t understand this concept of acting. It was happening, but not really happening? Her fury was part of the play? I calmed down but remained on guard; there was no telling what this woman who had been my mother would do. She washed her painted eyebrows off and began to look more familiar. On the way home, my father tried to reassure me that acting was very common and that lots of people put on plays and went home and watched Jack Paar like everyone else. (Jack Paar was the first Jay Leno.) In another scene of this Picnic, my father backed off from marrying my mother and left her alone. I found his refusal confusing since I was sure I’d seen the movies of their wedding several times. I watched them very carefully in the days to come. When I saw that they sat together at the dinner table and cuddled side by side in our large Buick convertible, I still didn’t understand the concept of acting. They told me again and again, acting was pretending. It wasn’t the real thing. I never believed them fully. Theater was that convincing.

Soon I was initiated into the family madness. My brother Lincoln directed me in his two-person adaptation of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella. I was cast as Cinderella; he played all the other parts. His version lasted less than ten minutes, but I got to sing the lines In my own little corner in my own little chair / I can be whatever I want to be. I think that’s all he let me sing at the time, but I relished my moment. I savored the triumph over my nasty stepsisters (whom he played) when he placed the golden sneakers on my feet and when I won the heart of the prince (my brother again). I truly fell for him when he danced me in a slow waltz and sang, Ten minutes ago I saw you / I looked up when you came through the door / My head started reeling / You gave me the feeling the room had no ceiling or floor. My parents, as well as Ducky and Howard Newman, the couple who lived downstairs, applauded and whistled and cheered. My mother had a piercing whistle (she’d been a tomboy) and my father shouted Bravo! Bravo! like an operagoer. They hugged us as if we’d won first prize in some spectacular contest.

I mark that as the first time I realized that singing and talking and moving my arms up and down put me on the plus side of the human scoreboard. I didn’t think I was acting. I truly believed I’d been a poor adopted orphan. (I’d always wanted to be adopted, it seemed dramatic.) I knew I’d been transformed into a princess. I knew I loved Cinderella when I danced in my brother’s arms. And I know it now. Theater has never been a made-up world for me. It’s always been a place where in a moment you can be transformed into another reality. The word pretend reminds me of telling white lies—it’s neither here nor there. No spine.

I had my secret ambitions and dreams. I memorized most of the words to the Rodgers and Hammerstein and Rodgers and Hart musicals. I lay on my bed and sang along and became Anna in The King and I, Sarah in Guys and Dolls, and Marian in The Music Man. I’d never seen those musicals—or any musical, for that matter—and had little notion of their stories. I made up plots by looking at the photos on the album cover. I was probably completely off base, but I often moved myself to fake tears. By the time I was nine or ten and saw my first real musical on Broadway, I’d already written (in my own mind) most of the great musical masterpieces of all time. My whole grammar school was in awe. Despite those fantasies, the first time I saw a real Broadway musical, I screamed my lungs out at the end in wild happiness. I’d never felt such joy. The voices were angelic; the lights came from heaven; the sets moved. Great dancers tapped and kicked and they did so at exactly the same time. I was overcome.

Julie Andrews in The Boyfriend was a revelation. Musicals were better and bigger than life. I didn’t remember the names of the characters, their stories or problems, but I saw a whole world come to life onstage. A singing, dancing, speaking, feeling extravaganza of life. Life just became—well—so alive. So much brighter and stronger than my bedroom in Buffalo. I didn’t understand why people couldn’t live in musicals all the time. Speaking loudly, bursting into song, running offstage, running onstage, changing costumes, jumping over sets, tap dancing, spinning. Yes! Why wasn’t there more tap dancing in the streets of Buffalo, New York? I knew then that the volume, speed, and intensity of daily life weren’t going to be enough for me. I was going to turn up the sound and shine a brighter light on the earth and persuade everyone to sing along. I’d stage my musicals on Main Street. I’d star in them too. My dreams went on a rampage, my narcissism went a bit out of control. Did I want to sing, act, dance, write? (Did I even know what directing was?) I never differentiated. I just wanted to make theater. In second grade I directed my first show. It was about the great pumpkin on Halloween. I forced all my friends to follow me into the basement, where I had costumes and a script ready. My plans were sabotaged when one girl refused to put a hollowed-out, stinky, seed-filled pumpkin over her head.

As I grew into my high school years, those dreams, though still persistent, became very complicated. The world in which I was growing up had changed. Some of my new perspectives evolved from my simply becoming more mature. Then came the problems of family and adolescence. My family and friends suffered through different kinds of social and personal upheaval. I was highly aware, like other young people, that the sixties were supposed to be a radical decade. There was a new edge and fire in our country. The lead characters that inspired me didn’t tap dance or wear hoop skirts; the story lines were rarely about finding one’s sweetheart in the midst of adversity. My attention was turned from the victories of the past to the multiple injustices of the present. Sweet choruses and waltzing couples didn’t fit into the world of civil rights conflicts and assassinations. How could the stage compete with the lives and deaths of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Kennedys? I still vividly remember the horse with no rider and boots hung upside down from the stirrups trotting slowly down Pennsylvania Avenue. This was the theater of President Kennedy’s funeral. The stage couldn’t compare to the civil rights marches taking place in Mississippi and the bombing of a church with four little girls inside. The images were unforgettable. Now, unfortunately, we see violent deaths and memorials every day, and to some they are an odd kind of entertainment.

I was especially influenced by Bob Dylan. No one had written lyrics like his before—both poetic and political. In my young mind, musical theater became irrelevant in comparison to Dylan’s songs. (I still believe Bob Dylan is one of our great poets.) The Beatles created theater for the ears with their unusual harmonies and sorcerers’ voices. Every broadcast of their concerts, as well as reports of their antics and love affairs, became my theater. In clubs multicolored lights and flashing strobes became the theatrical lighting. And no playwright or actor had the energy of a psychedelic rock band, the guitar riffs of George Harrison, or the pounding drums of Cream. Well, not to me anyway. The theater had fallen in my estimation. It was a place where my parents went to watch people in heavy makeup talking to one another in phony voices about silly little problems. I was hardly interested. Instead, I got myself a guitar and plunked away until my fingers bled.

I tried to imitate Richie Havens’s merciless rhythmic strumming. I wrote many, many sad and angry songs. Some of them were good; some were just awful. I listened to Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez and I feverishly copied down chords and lyrics. Folk and rock music was theater for me.

NOW, YOU MAY be thinking, Please don’t tell me about the sixties. I’m tired of the sixties. Hippies were potheads and radicals were boring. I understand. There were aspects to the sixties that seem silly or bizarre now. But it was also a time when you could take huge risks and lay out your own path. The reason I mention this decade is that it was when I was a teenager. At that time, there were no shows or plays designed to include my generation in theater. There was no recognition of my inner turmoil or the urgency I felt. There were no theater songs that reflected the turbulent atmosphere in our country.

During my high school years I turned my back on most theater, but I did encounter one show that stirred my imagination and gave me a hint of what could satisfy my evolving tastes. The musical/play was from England and was called Oh What a Lovely War. The tone was satirical and dangerous. The subject was ostensibly World War I, but the images and words evoked all war. And, in a very entertaining way, the actors let us know the absolute horror and absurdity of war. There was no real plot to the piece, but it moved and grew in intensity like a song. The music itself was in the old style of the British music hall, but the players distorted it (as the Beatles did on their Sgt. Pepper album) and made fun of the tunes. In a flash, however, the sounds could become very scary or sad, and I liked this combination of humor and danger. The soldiers acted like buffoons on the stage. They marched drunkenly in a circle and fell over one another, becoming caricatures of military men. Simultaneously, terrible scenes from World War I were projected on a large screen in the back. I was laughing and feeling a sense of horror at the same time. I learned about the creators’ disgust for war but there was no preachiness, for much of the emotional information was displayed through the body and