Take Your Shirt Off and Cry: A Memoir of Near-Fame Experiences (2 page)

“The only thing that matters are actions. It’s only about what you do,” he had said. “The words are gibberish; exercise your
will . . .”

And then, the whole Mamet gambit dawned on me: Whatever the premise, whatever the score, it didn’t matter. His thing was about
showing up and committing wholeheartedly. It was, essentially, a game of five-card stud for stage.

“Therese, don’t worry,” I assured her. “None of this matters. All that matters is that you go in there and present this shit
with pride.”

“But,” she wailed, “I’m missing a bunch of the answers!”

“Listen to me,” I said, kneeling in front of her. “Just go in there, look him in the eye, and give him the answers you have—no
apologies for the ones you don’t—and do that poem like you mean it. Period. And tell him you
want
to study with him.”

Therese was not only accepted; she became one of Mamet’s most trea sured students that summer. She sent me exhilarated letters
detailing how he appreciated her “offbeat style, rapier wit, and deadpan delivery.” He’d rave about what a great writer she
was and he made her a founding member of the new theater company he started with all the kids who’d been studying with him
the past few summers in Vermont.

When Therese came back to school in the fall, she was a new person. She had new standards for herself and would no longer
audition for anything—Mainstage or not—without seeing a script first. Her posture, which had been schlumpy at best, was now
erect, even graceful. People spoke about her when she walked into rooms: “Oh! There’s that
funny
chick!” Therese was hot shit.

That semester was insanely busy for both of us. Therese was immersed with the new theater company; I was cast, much to my
surprise and delight, in a few Mainstage shows. My favorite was my very first: Adrienne Kennedy’s bold, surrealistic dream-play,
Funnyhouse of a Negro
, in which I played a blowsy, middle-aged landlady who spews hideously racist monologues directly at the audience as though
performing stand-up. Costumed in a blonde wig, white kabuki-style makeup, and a fat suit designed by the Tony Award–winning
Willa Kim (which took sixteen hours of fittings), I literally disappeared inside my role. Whenever I would meet people thereafter
during my years at NYU, they would be astonished by this credit: “That was YOU in there??” It was a great source of pride.

My parents came to see me in
Funny house
, and I found my father wandering around backstage after the curtain calls, dumbfounded.

“What the hell
was that
?” he wanted to know. “I
think
you were good, but I didn’t
undah-stand
one goddamn word, so who knows?”

My mother and I tried to explain that the text was meant to be nonlinear; that it was lyrically brilliant, absurdist in the
manner of Beckett . . . but my father wasn’t buying it.

“Such a bore,” he’d repeat, rolling his eyes. “You can’t tell me people actually
like
this kinda crap. Why don’t they do some Neil Simon, for Christ’s sake? Now
there’s
a genius . . .”

Despite my achievement with
Funny house
, I began to get discouraged. I would get cast in parts and feel stressed out and insecure about my ability. I was constantly
anxious and overwhelmed.

Watching Therese be so confident and inspired, I felt excited for her, but also a bit jealous. The change in her was so striking,
I started romanticizing the Mamet experience. Maybe it was cultish, but it seemed to work for Therese. I wanted a piece of
that too.

When Mamet announced the inception of a new year-round acting studio at NYU, to be held at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre at
Lincoln Center for only fifteen new students, I put my name first on the list to try out. Students would be instructed by
Mamet’s protégés; Mamet would teach master classes a few times a month (“subject to availability”). I asked Therese, who would
be moving on to the advanced “company classes,” to coach me. Unlike the high-wire hat trick Therese had had to endure to get
into his summer program, my interview was a run-of-the-mill audition, wherein I would perform a monologue for a Mamet protégé
and the voice teacher. At the time, I was on a bender of feminist-inspired rancor against all the same old boring victimy-chick
monologues, like those in
Getting Out
and
Crimes
of the Heart
, plays I referred to as “Menstrual Shows.” I insisted on only doing guy’s monologues in class and for auditions. For the
Mamet-studio audition, I chose Jerry’s speech from Edward Albee’s
Zoo Story
, known as “The Story of Jerry and the Dog.”

“Just do what they tell you,” Therese said as she threw out various outlandish ways for me to approach the text. “Don’t worry
about it
making sense
. Just, whatever objective they tell you to try, do the monologue that exact way, with total confidence and commitment.”

The advice was strangely familiar.

“When they ask you what you’ll do if you don’t get in, tell ’em you’ll quit school and go off to ‘work on your voice.’ They’ll
love that. And just remember,” she smiled, throwing the Albee script at me, “Cher sucks . . .”

I had a great audition, and the following day I literally jumped up and down when I saw my name on the list posted on the
Drama Department bulletin board. Therese and I decided to celebrate by going out to dinner at a French bistro called La Metairie,
a teeny little jewel of a joint on the corner of West Tenth and West Fourth. The place had a rustic vibe, smacking of Provence,
complete with beamed wooden ceilings artfully festooned with copper pots and farming tools. There were even doves—real doves
cooing in cages—perched above the diners, tucked between baskets of hay and dried hydrangea. It was adorable; even the butter
was adorable, fashioned in the shape of a duck.

“I love you,” Therese said, after the waitress left our table.

“I love you too,” I said, holding aloft the kir royale I’d felt so terribly sophisticated ordering. “To us!”

“No,” she said, taking my hand. “I mean . . . I
love you . . .
”

“Oh” was all I could manage. Therese sat across from me, the candlelight dancing fretfully across her flushed cheeks.

She continued to hold my hand and stare at me, batting her eyes in that languid way cats do when they worship you.

I was both startled by her confession and somehow anticipating it. We always said “I love you” before getting off the phone,
before going to bed at night, at the end of cards and letters. And I
did
love Therese, but—did I love her
like that
? I never felt like fooling around with her, though I did find myself at times rolling over the same familiar fantasy in my
mind: “God—she’s brilliant. I wish Therese was a boy.”

“So . . . are you a lesbian?” I asked, wishing we could go back to the halcyon days. It was clear we were entering a new era,
fraught with doom.

“No,” she shook her head, bemused. “I’m just in love with
you
.”

I nodded, trying to grasp the distinction. The butter duck was melting. Most of the bottom of it had liquefied, so that it
appeared to be just the head and part of a wing, swimming in its own excrement.

“And,” Therese continued, “I want to kiss you.”

“OK,” I said. “Here?”

“No, no, that would be . . . weird, I think—don’t you?”

“Yeah,” I said, subdued, examining the butter dish.

After dinner, we took a cab to Queens, where Therese’s parents owned a vacant apartment in Forest Hills. There, we lay on
the beige wall-to-wall carpeting of an unfurnished postwar condo, and to the yelping strains of Spandau Ballet’s
True
, we made out for several hours. I wanted to be turned on, but I wasn’t. For the next few months, I would make out with Therese
one day and for the next two weeks pretend it had never happened. I thought I could make the fact that I wasn’t gay go away
if I just didn’t think about it. It was a very Scarlett O’Hara “I’ll think about it in the mornin’ ” type of denial. I just
didn’t want Therese to be mad at me—couldn’t bear it, in fact—but that’s, of course, exactly what happened.

“I always knew you were a cock-tease, but it looks like you’re a twat-tease as well!” she railed one morning after I’d brought
home a guy I’d picked up at a Freeing the Voice seminar the night before.

I was whirling back and forth emotionally, either berating myself for my perceived sluttiness or feeling defiant in my unbridled
pleasure-seeking. I needed her to love me; I needed things to be the same. Together, we had become successful. We had given
each other the space and the love to be better; what would happen if it all came crashing down?

***

For our first class, David Mamet delivered a lecture the premise of which was that Bill Cosby was a whore. This was certainly
a cutting-edge way of viewing him, given the popularity at the time of
The Cosby Show
, and we all sat in our seats, completely riveted, furiously writing notes into our notebooks. Cosby was a whore, television
was evil and for whores, Hollywood was a hotbed of whoredom, and we were to avoid all of these things like the plague, unless,
of course, we too were whores and not the artists we’d said we were. Why it never occurred to any of us to question the fact
that Mamet himself was actively working in Hollywood, toiling away on movie scripts and, furthermore, television, is beyond
me. Maybe we intuitively understood that he wanted us to be “pure” in some parental way, a sort of don’t-do-what-I-do-do-what-I-say.
It reminded me of my father, sitting in his underwear at the dinner table chain-smoking Marlboros and berating me for smoking.

“It’s vile,” he’d sneer, blowing smoke in my face. “I just don’t understand it.
How can you smoke?
You’re gonna ruin your singing voice after I paid for all those goddamn lessons!”

If these subtle ironies eluded us, perhaps it was just our sheer excitement. Mamet was forever blowing our minds with his
contrarian edicts, like the time he told us that for an actor there was “no such thing as character.” Character, he declared,
was the job of the playwright. No matter how vigorously we argued our position that actors had a huge part in the creation
of their roles, Mamet stood impervious, arms folded, having none of it. It was infuriating. But it was also a total turn-on.

Often, Mamet would begin his sessions with us by reading aloud an incendiary essay he’d written the previous night, embracing
themes near and dear to his heart. Banalities on Broadway was one; critics, whom he referred to as “the Syphilis and Gonorrhea
of the Theatre,” were another. Mamet rained down his most vigorous contempt, however, on Hollywood film producers, who he
insisted were nothing more than a bunch of self-loathing Jews obsessed with making bad films about nice Nazis. His style was
rather breathtaking: each essay was a rhetorical rant, artfully interspersed with potty-mouthed hyperbole, after which he’d
take questions (if you dared), and he always presented each of us with our own essay copy to take home as a parting gift.
Turtle Wax, Mamet style.

As fun and entertaining as Mamet could be, he was a dogmatic hard-ass about rules and respect for theater as an art, and woe
to the person who challenged him. We were instructed from the outset that if we did not show up to class fifteen minutes early,
we would be considered late and not permitted inside. No exceptions. No excuses.

“There are no accidents. People do what they want,” he told us after throwing out a guy who came in at five of with a whole
story about being trapped in the subway for an hour. Mamet’s intolerance for lateness was extreme, as was his reaction if
someone was doing an exercise or a scene and he couldn’t hear them.

“GET THE FUCK OFF THE STAGE. NOW,” he’d bellow from the back of the darkened Beaumont. “And,” he’d continue, his short, burly
body bouncing around like a schoolyard bully in need of his daily Ritalin, “don’t fucking come back until we can hear you.
How dare you
? You’re WHISPERING. On the stage. It’s fucking passive-aggressive!”

As the disgraced culprit would slink off the stage and back to their seat, Mamet would press on.

“You know, folks, only people who are full of shit
whisper
. It’s a fact. They
whisper
because they are fucking
liars.
Once again: your job is to tell the truth. People think that to be a good actor you must be a good liar. No. A good actor
is good at
telling the truth.
If you are not full of shit, if you are not
lying
, you speak
so people can hear you.
It’s that simple.”

I thought he was so terribly hip, mixing cocky, intellectual expressions like “This is exactly so” and “edification” with
Yid-dishisms and raunchy jokes.

The tension in the air during his classes was palpable, and everyone always seemed meek and nervous about volunteering for
exercises, but somehow, the more bellicose Mamet got, the calmer I felt. His two-fisted style may have freaked out my classmates,
but I felt right at home: he reminded me of my father, aphorisms and all. It was like déjà Jew.

“You get nowhere being afraid of me. Nowhere,” Mamet declared one afternoon, looking around the room with dismay. “Who wants
to try the prologue from
Henry V
?”

My hand shot straight up.

“Me. I do!”

“OK. Good,” he said, handing me the book. “I want you to do it like you’re ‘imploring a loved one to give you another chance.’
”

“O for a muse of fire that would ascend the brightest” was all I got out before Mamet blurted to the class, “OK, this is very
good.
She’s
not afraid. This is good.”

“So,
nu
?” Mamet asked, turning his attention back to me. “Have any ‘actions’?” “Action” was his term for what was commonly referred
to in acting parlance as an “objective”—or the thing that you, as the character, want and thus are trying to achieve in the
scene. Mamet had asked that we keep a running list of actions to have at our disposal, so that we could use them in our work
and also discuss them in class.