Moose Murdered: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Broadway Bomb (20 page)

The Author and his Revivalist. with John W. Borek

Arthur and the Rochester “Moosies,” August, 2008.

“Here’s what John has decided to do,” began Ricka. “He’s going to wait until after tomorrow’s rehearsal. If there’s no improvement, he’ll ask her point blank if she has any interest in continuing this project. If she says ‘no,’ he’ll let her go. If she says ‘yes,’ he’ll plow through until Saturday’s first preview.”

“And what if the play is still a train wreck after Saturday?” I said.

“He’ll ask her again.”

“Brilliant.”

“Yeah, but you see,
this
time, if she says ‘yes,’ he’ll fire her anyway.”

“Anything you need me to do?”

“No. We’ve already put feelers out to Anne Francine, Peg Murray, and Joan Copeland. Best thing to do is just sit tight.”

“Okay, swell. You’ll let me know if you think of something.”

“Are you coming to the runthrough this afternoon?”

“Wouldn’t miss it,” I said. “My love to John.”

I contemplated the ramifications of firing Eve Arden. Not only would it mean at least a loss of $200,000 (she would still be paid through her six month contract), but bringing in a replacement at this late date would be
death
for the play and its box office.

And not a cozy, farcical death.

I thought a lot about Eve, trying to put myself in her turban, so to speak. Was it all just too exhausting? Was it no longer physically possible to maintain the Eve Arden persona—
and
be competent—sixteen hours a day?

I managed to get Mary Ann to turn off the TV long enough so I could listen to a cassette recording of the most recent radio ad. I noted the improvement immediately. Here was the Eve Arden we’d heard all too infrequently. Varied pitch. Boundless energy. Obvious commitment. Maybe radio was the answer. Maybe we could just broadcast the play, and bring back talk radio. A pleasant image of a perfectly groomed 50s family, all gathered around the old faithful Victrola in the parlor, briefly passed through my mind: “Return with us now to the thrilling days of yesteryear! Eve Arden rides again!”

In much better spirits (who knows which level of denial I’d reached by this time?), I left Mary Ann to her soaps, and treated myself to a cab to the Minskoff. My old college chum Barbara Kerr was in town from Ohio, and we’d made plans to have her join us for the runthrough of Act Two. Unbeknownst to me, John had asked June to play everything “straight” in order to recapture the “essence” of Snooks, whatever either one of them imagined
that
to be—my own vision was long gone. The result was an almost clinically depressed Snooks, so overwhelmingly subdued she dragged everybody else down with her. I think Barbara was happy just to have been allowed into an otherwise “closed” set, but the whole thing was a real snooze. This, I must say, might have been an improvement over the usual uncontrolled mania.

“Solid performance!” said Lillie to June, afterwards.

“But I didn’t
do
anything,” said June.

“Yes, it was lovely,” cooed Lillie.

Barbara, Dennis, and I left the studio and walked over to the O’Neill, where workers were beginning to reassemble the set on stage. We entered through the stage door and made our way to the front of the house. The basic framework was up, without any of the accoutrements—so far, only the birch bark wainscoting that lined the proscenium arch and the polished wooden floor for the “entertainment” platform had been constructed. Full-size plastic elms and pines were spread out on tarps thrown over the theater seats—all of them soon to become an Adirondack forest.

Our moods soaring, the three of us scampered up to the balcony, where we could safely admire all these strange, wonderful men who’d been employed to erect the Wild Moose Lodge on this very site.

“Oh, look who’s here!” said Barbara, as Eve and Brooks suddenly appeared and began to walk across the stage below. We waved, and eventually joined them in Eve’s dressing room.

Unlike the house itself, these rooms backstage were pretty bleak.

“Perhaps some posters will brighten this up.” Said Eve, examining her ample dressing room and its adjoining parlor.

“How about a Chinese silk screen?” suggested Dennis.

“Yes!” agreed Eve. “Could you run out and get me one?”

We investigated the other dressing rooms, and Dennis found one especially to his liking. It had a shower.

“This is like choosing a dorm room,” he said.

It really was. We wondered what it would be like to call this home for an extended period of time.

We came back out front to find Ricka, in a rage. The rest of the marquee, which was to have gone up no later than this morning, had still not arrived. The elevator in the warehouse where it had been built had a broken cable which had gone unrepaired for weeks. The stairway there was circular and the windows were too small for the marquee—the logo moosehead with a full set of antlers—to fit through. Promises were made to have all these problems solved and to have our moose beacon delivered all in one piece tomorrow morning.

We said our goodbyes to Barbara. It had been enormously gratifying to share all of this—even the occupational hazards—with a friend from the outside. We were also happy that Barbara could have this experience now—since she’d be unable to attend the opening. She had other plans. She was getting married.

“Well,” she said. “Since Jane has her book and you’ve got your play, I figured it was the only thing that hadn’t been
done!
”

The next morning—our first day in the theater—was full of magic for the first hour or so. It didn’t really matter what the play was, or what kind of trouble we were having with it, today we were all rosy-cheeked school kids checking one another’s accommodations. Dennis’s dressing room—the one with its own shower—was on the top floor. His neighbors would be Suzanne and Andy. They’d already begun to call this floor the “understudy suite.” Down a flight were rooms claimed by Lisa, Jack (who had his own shower, too), and Scott. Lisa had a window overlooking 49th street, and had brought a tacky yellow throw rug with her which she immediately threw down on the floor. She demanded that we each come to admire it, which we did, joyfully.

And-Lillie-Robertson was in the star wing with Eve. She had, I must say, begun acting the role of prima donna. She prissed, she pouted, she ordered people about.

Ah, well. A minor irritant, all things tallied.

There was a mailbox slot for each of us downstairs, and several of the cast members already found invitations from press agents to “get in touch” when they had a chance. No agent appeared interested in me, but I was just as excited to find a note from my old high school drama teacher—who’d enclosed a clipping from a play I’d done fifteen years earlier.

Wow. Fifteen years seemed like a lifetime ago . . . then.

The runthrough the day before had been good enough at least to postpone further discussions about firing Eve. I assumed that John had given her his soft-core ultimatum and that she had indeed confirmed her “interest” in staying with the project. But obviously the talk hadn’t had much effect. She was still paraphrasing. Lines like “Is talking permitted?” became “Is speaking all right?” and “Have we lost all electricity?” became “Are we all out of electricity?” No big deal. When the rewording made no sense, though, it really burned my ass, because Hedda was supposed to be . . . unnnnnnnnnhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh . . .
incisive
.

The much bigger problem was when she had clumps of words to tackle at once (I’d carefully removed anything resembling a monologue, but she still had to deliver one or two complex sentences strung together on occasion). Most of these attempts were in shambles. During a line readthrough in the basement before rehearsal, she freely confessed “I didn’t have time to go over these, you know.” Then, after a beat, she commanded “Arthur, leave the room!”

I did, shortly thereafter, not to behave, but because I was feeling in the way—as out of place as Brooks, in fact, who could be found wandering aimlessly throughout the hallways and alcoves all day long.

The set—all dressed, now—was awe inspiring. My circuits began to overload; I was teetering toward at least a minor breakdown (whether I was aware of it or not.) The tension was suffocating.

Dennis and I sat down together in the orchestra seats for the “get acquainted with the set” rehearsal, and it wasn’t long before something set me off—it could have been oxygen at that point, who knows—and we had a verbal battle that almost incapacitated me. Dennis abruptly left his seat and disappeared into the back of the theater. I sat alone, fuming and miserable, for as long as I could—five minutes, tops, no longer.

I sought Dennis out, saw that he was still in no mood for my company, and promptly broke into tears. Before I had a chance to fill the rafters with my heaving sobs, he quietly took my arm and escorted me up to the balcony. Only when he was sure that we were quite alone did he then administer some desperately needed TLC.

“You know I’ll always be here for you,” he whispered.

That
I managed to hear. Worked like a charm.

Once I’d calmed down and was no longer either weeping or trembling, he left me alone to go over opening night party reservations. This was a good job for me. Not exactly mundane or mindless, mind you, but not breathtakingly exciting, either. I really was in no condition to take any more stimulation—I’d probably have been best off licking stamps or counting backwards from a zillion, or so.

Like Don Quixote facing the Knight of the Mirrors, I was coming precariously close to seeing things as they really were—in spite of all the glittering tinsel that was hanging everywhere I looked. I knew I had to get a grip. As I sat watching a dreamlike combination of splendor and messiness, I’d cower when approached by Ricka’s husband, Albert, or Brooks, or John Sullivan, or anyone else. I didn’t want to talk to anybody. I’m sure my eyes were glazed. There may, in fact, be such a thing as
too much
.

Picture call happened sometime while I was in this daze. Bouncy Betty Lee whipped through this process, taking barely an hour. The best shot, I saw later, was of Eve standing alone on the balcony, leaning over the centrally located and most monumental moose head. The costumes were all workable, but the one that had impressed me the most on paper—Dagmar’s evening gown—turned out to be a huge disappointment. The heart-shaped cutout on the back wasn’t nearly prominent enough—you couldn’t really tell it was a heart—and the body stocking underneath that John the Designer had chosen to equip her with made the whole ensemble look baggy and ill-fitting. A far departure from the intoxicating, chic, and shapely outfit we’d all been anticipating.