Impossible Vacation (12 page)

The Queen of the May was played by a beautiful blond actress, and I played the King, all dressed up in a fine white peasant shirt, long flowing auburn wig, rough brown leather pants, and high-laced suede boots. We looked great together, the Queen and I. She was dressed in pure white, with flowers in her hair. We got to dance around the maypole with some Puerto Rican actors who were playing American Indians and some other odd assorted colonial types. Then, right in the middle of our sensuous revels, we get busted by Endecott and his big red cross. The Queen and I get tied up and punished along with everyone else. And that was about it. It was like a “let’s pretend” backyard children’s game, only it was played in an Off-Broadway theater which doubled as a church on Sundays.

But the experience of acting in that play did not, as I had hoped, lift me into some transcendent state. I hardly had any lines at all, and I felt like a prop. I wanted more out of theater, or I was going to give up on it and try to do something else, maybe become a poet even, if one could will such a thing.

But as they say in show business, things lead to things, and indeed they did. At the opening-night cast party of
Endecott
, I met a weird and interesting theater director named Rex Duffy who took a liking to me. Rex was extremely dramatic-looking. He was very pale and angular, with a little goatee. He was about my age, but twice as intense and very passionate. He seemed to possess the male equivalent of Meg’s passion, and because of this I was immediately drawn to him. He was dressed completely in black—black pants, black shirt, black leather boots—and he smoked a filtered cigarette in a cigarette holder. He drank, I noticed, only straight Polish vodka. Most of all I was drawn to Rex’s mesmerizing stories about Bali and some crazy, unorthodox
French actor named Antonin Artaud, who had gone there to study Balinese trance dance long before my uncle Jib went there to buy my monkey mask.

The cast party was held around the maypole on the set of
Endecott
and suddenly I was back on that distant Rhode Island beach where Brewster the monkey boy had danced in front of Mom with the Balinese mask on. Robert Lowell had replaced Mom and was standing there like a great wise New England patrician in his tweed jacket and horn-rimmed glasses, palliating his shaky madness with tumblers of straight scotch. And Rex, in black, had replaced my uncle Jib, in white, telling wild island stories to an awestruck boy. I stood there between them having a déjà vu. I stood there, this innocent Boy-King of the May, dreaming once again of Bali, that faraway other side of my cold dark New England heritage.
I’d found my way to a lost trade route into a lost time
.

It was on that glorious night that Rex invited me to his experimental theater company, which he called the Rex Duffy Laboratory Theatre. I was ecstatic about what Rex told me at that party. His idea was that theater was action to heal the split between language and the body. He called the body “the flesh,” which at the time sounded even more exotic to me. I couldn’t get that word “flesh” out of my mind, as well as the word “heal.” And I thought that we were in the perfect place to talk of healing the flesh, here around the maypole at Merry Mount, where we had been punished for trying to celebrate the senses.

Rex and I hit it off. I would almost say we bonded, which was rare for me because I had so few male friends. I was never attracted to real male men. But Rex had a nice blend of male and female in him and I was attracted to that quality. At the end of our conversation he invited me to come visit his theater.

I showed up at Rex’s Laboratory Theatre early Monday morning. It was really just a hole in the wall in a basement room on West Nineteenth Street, no more than twenty-five by thirty feet, with one bare light bulb hanging from a very low ceiling.

After a short coffee break and introductions to three very striking women and two less-than-striking men, the laboratory got down to work. Rex wanted to show me a run-through of an original theater piece they’d been rehearsing. It was called
The Tower
and it was based
on the Tower of Babel story: how all humankind—who, at the time, spoke one language—tried to build a big tower tall enough to reach heaven and how God knocked the tower down and confounded their language and left them all alienated and speaking in many tongues.

They planned to tour wherever and whenever they thought they could. Rex assured me that they were in no hurry and did not work under any kind of deadline. They were, he said, an organic theater group.

As soon as Rex went to the little dimmer on the wall and turned the light down, the group abandoned their coffee cups and scattered. Now the room was dark and silent except for the distant grind of trash trucks. For a long time I sat in the dark thinking nothing was going on and maybe that was the whole point, that I was supposed to get in touch with that nothing.

As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I began to see various leotard-clad bodies stirring in and around the four corners of the room, accompanied by low moans that grew into one shared tone as the group slowly came together under the single light bulb in the center. The bodies began building a body pile in which they seemed to be crawling up each other to turn out the light. Soon the pile (which now resembled a sort of spastic rendition of the Flying Wallendas) stood still for a moment, then collapsed. As soon as this happened, the uniform voice drone went into wild dispersions and everyone crawled off growling, barking, and grunting into the various corners of the room, until once again there was only the sound of distant trash trucks grinding.

Rex turned the light bulb up to full and everyone slowly got up and came over to sit in a circle. Someone made space for me. I was more than a little nervous, because I was sure they would ask me what I thought, and I really didn’t know what to say. I had a sense that it was art, but that it would be more fun to be in it than outside of it, which seemed to me to contradict at least one of the definitions of art.

But Rex simply asked me if I wanted to join. Without hesitation, I said yes. What they were doing was original and like nothing I’d ever seen before. I wanted to learn how to perform with equal commitment.

That night it worried me that I was not able to come up with the words to describe what I’d been through to Meg. But she let me
off the hook by saying that it was most likely a nonnarrative, visceral experience, not easily lending itself to linear translation. Thank God for Meg.

A
FTER MANY WEEKS
, somehow, and I don’t know how, Rex and his company got invited to bring the production of
The Tower
to play in grade schools outside St. Louis. We were so happy that someone wanted us somewhere that no one questioned it. Rex divided the company between two rental cars and we were off with our show to St. Louis.

The first school we played at was a rambling single-story clapboard building in the middle of a cornfield about forty-five minutes outside of St. Louis. It looked, on that gray March day, like a combination of an Edward Hopper painting and a set for a new Alfred Hitchcock movie. There was a dirt playground with a baseball diamond and a couple of old tires hanging by a rope from the limb of a giant spreading oak tree. As soon as we stepped out of our cars we saw the school kids flying to the windows of the classrooms, pressing their faces and wildly waving, their teachers pulling them back to their seats, shooting us disdainful glances.

We were all taken in to be shown the sacred performance space. It was the school cafeteria, with the tables and chairs pushed aside. The floor was cold, hard concrete, but the ceiling was quite high, so at least we had a grander heaven to reach up to.

We changed into our leotards in the girls’ and boys’ toilets and came out to do our warm-ups. It was freezing, and that concrete floor felt hard and ungiving after working all those months on wood. Rex refused to give in to any of these problems and proceeded to carry on as if we were in our laboratory in New York City.

After our warm-up we were all led to a small empty office to wait. We could hear the excited commotion and yelling as the children were ushered into the cafeteria single-file by their teachers. When it was filled to overflowing with screaming kids, Rex guided us through
the drafty corridor. I don’t know about the rest of the group, but I definitely felt like a Christian being escorted into a Roman arena.

We arrived outside the cafeteria, got down on all fours, and began to crawl, making contact with our personal sounds as we crept. In the distance we could hear the teachers trying to discipline the children by blowing what sounded like police whistles to bring them to order.

We crawled into the cafeteria to almost total silence and awe, broken by a few hysterical whispers. There we all were, crawling in our ripped and tattered leotards, feeling the cold from the concrete floor leaking through to our warm flesh. Three men and three women making strange sounds, groveling on all fours in front of a mob of grade-school children somewhere on the outskirts of St. Louis. Don’t think about it, I thought. Just don’t think about it.

We crawled to the center of the room to build our tower. At first the kids seemed mesmerized. There was a very intense hush as we moved toward the center. And then it happened. It happened as soon as we began to touch each other to find our balance. As soon as the first one of us touched another, the entire room went wild. Anarchy spread like a brush fire. The children became hysterical. They went out of control and started jumping up and down and spinning like tops. They were screaming and spinning and running toward us and running around us. Police whistles began to blow again. Teachers ran to try to drive the children back, but they slipped through the teachers’ arms and legs and ran spinning and shouting toward us. A very large, matronly woman was rushing toward Rex, waving her arms and blowing her police whistle, giving him orders: “Stop this show! Stop this show immediately!”

Rex touched us all like some gentle football coach and said, “Okay, people, clear the space. Clear the space,” and we all jumped up and ran for the exit.

Rex was called down to the principal’s office while we, completely humiliated, changed back into our street clothes in the girls’ and boys’ rooms. Then we went back to the empty office to wait. Twenty minutes later Rex came in to join us, his sense of humor still intact. He was smiling when he told us that we were to return to St. Louis to meet Mr. Tweedy, our sponsor.

In St. Louis Mr. Tweedy told Rex that the Missouri Arts Council,
which had originally put up the money for our tour, was pulling out. As far as they were concerned the tour was over and they were not about to honor the rest of our contract. Tweedy said it was because we were exposing inappropriate naked flesh to minors and attempting to build obscene body piles in front of schoolchildren. The “inappropriate flesh” had consisted of the patches of skin that had shown through the small rips in our leotards. Mr. Tweedy had most likely lost his job, he told us, and we were banned from Missouri forever. It was, he said, a scandal.

We were totally humiliated. We were stunned. We were cast out of the Garden of Eden. We had lost all innocence about our art. The Tower of Babel had turned into the story of the Expulsion. We had come face-to-face with America and they had found us lacking.

I lost my faith in Rex and the Laboratory. I also lost my faith in America and the chance of ever bringing it art. I was depressed. I even thought that I never wanted to go to Bali.

Meg laughed when I told her the story over beers, and that helped. That made me feel good; once again, telling a story saved me. But where was I to go from there? I knew I no longer had a group I could thrash with.

The Rex Duffy Laboratory Theatre was never the same. Before we went to St. Louis, we never even noticed the holes in our leotards. Now we made jokes about them. Before we went to St. Louis we thought our body configurations as we built our Tower of Babel were sacred and beautiful; now it felt like a group grope. We had not converted Middle America. They had instead oppressed and broken us. We were down and out—at least I was. I now saw myself as a fool for spending so many days rolling on the floor in a dark room when I could have been doing Chekhov.