This was in my first post-college career, when I was working happily as a sportswriter on a newspaper in the Deep South. I always wanted to work in newspapers, and one of my favorite plays is The Front Page.
I got to see a production of it (with Terry O’Quinn in the lead) at Center Stage in Baltimore, back in the days when a college student could pay $3 and sit on the steps of the auditorium (I guess they didn’t have fire codes in those days!) Others in the cast included James Rebhorn, Patricia Kalember, and the playwright John Pielmeier as escaped convict Earl Williams. Another Center Stage production that blew me away was their Cyrano de Bergerac, with F. Murray Abraham (well before Amadeus) playing the title role, brilliantly. And with a student rush ticket, I could see touring shows at the Morris Mechanic Theatre, where I answered an ad when the company was looking for a taxi horn for the pre-Broadway run of A Day in Hollywood/A Night in the Ukraine. They comped me to the show, and after, I went backstage and haggled with Alexander Cohen as he tested the horn, and finally decided to buy it (and give me more tickets to the show). I believe it was the understudy horn, though I like to think Priscilla Lopez used it in her Tony-winning performance.
Another show I saw was Neil Simon’s I Ought To Be in Pictures, with Bill Macy and Alexandra Kenin. “Hmm…I thought. If I ever got a chance to play THAT part,” (meaning Libby the teenage girl from Brooklyn), “I would do it.”
And interned at a now-dead Baltimore paper that once employed H.L. Mencken, graduated from college, and worked for two professional sports teams, and got a job on a daily paper writing sports in Columbia, South Carolina. Where, a couple of years into that career, I spotted an ad for tryouts for I Ought to Be in Pictures at Town Theatre.
“I’m here for the part,” I announced. The director gave me a “we’ll see about that” look and explained to me what a “side” was. I have since learned that there are some people who are just right for the part, even if they have no craft. I guess the director knew it, too. Town Theatre (which is still going strong) is a beautiful old venue, with its own scene shop, huge dressing rooms and a green room, and a loyal subscriber base that turned out for each season of warhorse musicals, revivals of Broadway comedies and the occasional drama, and a kitchen-sink musical revue called “Showstoppers!”
By the end of the run, I was in love with pretty much everything about the theater. Stagestruck, I went out for everything else that season and lightning did not strike twice. I did get into the chorus of Brigadoon and Annie, failed in my attempt to convince the director that I could play Anybody’s in West Side Story (“but you’re so TALL, dear”) she told me. As if we didn’t have a bunch of bubbas with ‘80s hair playing the Jets and the Sharks.
It was a tough balancing act to be both sportswriter and community theater actor. I felt a pull to do both, and couldn’t possibly figure out how to choose between them.
I went up to visit my family in Baltimore, and hopped the train for New York City for a matinee. I decided to see Agnes of God. (written by escaped convict John Pielmeier). As I was swept away in the story and the acting, I felt something else…a certainty, an idea in so many words: You have to come live here and be in the theater. I almost turned around to see if someone had spoken to me, it was that clear.
It didn’t happen right away, I had to grapple more with the idea of giving up a promising career doing something I loved, for a potential career with no guarantees. But I ended up selling the car, and putting my stuff in my parents’ basement, and moving to New York City as a first-year student at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. That’s a short, painful story, but afterward, I was in New York City, and I really didn’t want to leave.
I caught on as a general dogsbody at Mirror Rep Company (where I got to tell the Agnes of God story to Geraldine Page), and wrote my first full-length play, To the Top. I watched and learned as much as I could from very good teachers, both in workshops and classrooms, and in rehearsal rooms and theater offices. I got to tell the Agnes of God story to Amanda Plummer, though I couldn’t really tell if she took it in.
Fast forward to this century where I still have a dayjob I enjoy, and the rest of my time is spent in, around, and creating theater.
To quote Frank O’Hara:
Now here I am
the center of all beauty
writing these poems,
Imagine!
