FAT MEN IN SKIRTS
I wrote a few plays right out of college. My second full-length was called Bridal Hunt. David Copelin was the director of script development at the Phoenix Theatre and he seemed to like it quite a bit—enough to option it after a reading. It was a mean-spirited, funny, vulgar play and he couldn’t raise the money. Instead he produced The Foreigner and I got to check coats on opening night!
Shortly after that I lost someone to whom I was very close, to AIDS. This was the very beginning of the epidemic, so early in fact that it wasn’t called AIDS when he was diagnosed. In any event, looking back, I realize the powerful effect this had on me. I didn’t write anything for at least two years. I went to work (waiting tables), came home, watched TV and went to bed. Then one day I was walking down the street, honest to God, and someone said to me, “Did you write a play called Bridal Hunt a few years ago?” “Why do you ask?” I responded, wanting to know if he liked it before I fessed up. He liked it. He had a theatre company and they were looking for a play for six actors, all in their twenties, on a bare stage. He commissioned me for about three hundred dollars. And let me tell you, he got exactly three hundred dollars’ worth of art. The play stunk.
They put it on at the Sanford Meisner Theatre, a tiny, tiny space on Eleventh Avenue. No one came. But the man who ran the theatre asked if I’d like to write some more. Robert Coles operated the Vortex Theater Company and he offered me a space, complete freedom, real encouragement (which was rare at the time) and no help whatsoever.
Here’s how it worked: when he couldn’t get someone to rent out the theatre he’d call me. I usually had four weeks to write a play, then four weeks to rehearse. I paid for the rehearsal space with money from my day job. I used my friends in the plays whether they were right for their parts or not.
I directed most of the time, not because I thought I was brilliant or anything, but at that economic bracket the options are slim. We rehearsed for four weeks, in the evenings. Then on Sunday, at midnight, the set designer went to the theatre (another show, some rental, performed at eight—but they had to be out by midnight). We built the set overnight, painted it in the morning, rehearsed once, Monday night, to set lights and opened on Tuesday. Usually we’d have eighteen or twenty people in the audience on opening night. We worked so hard! We were so young! I was so thin!
I worked that way for five or six years, putting on plays with no money for very small audiences comprised mostly of my friends. (We even did a performance of a play called Wanking ’Tards on the Fourth of July for an audience of one!—the stage manager’s mother. I didn’t attend.) I wrote a lot of plays and some of them were just awful. Others, however, weren’t too bad. Fat Men in Skirts was the third play I put on in that space and I have to admit, I am as proud of that production as anything I’ve ever done. The cast, particularly Chuck Coggins and Stephanie Correa, was wonderful.
There was virtually no set, but what there was, was simple and clean. The text calls for a beach. Well, we couldn’t afford sand—how sad is that? I think the budget for the set was about three hundred dollars. I wanted something natural, from the earth. And yet it had to be cold and sterile in Act III, which is set in a mental hospital. My solution was marble. Well, if we couldn’t afford sand, obviously we couldn’t afford marble. But we could afford a feather and some paint. I remember quite clearly sitting with my feather in the middle of the night, marbleizing the entire set! By hand! It took hours, I had terrible cramps in my hands and literally couldn’t stand up straight for weeks. But it’s astonishing to look back and realize that this play, which cost about four hundred dollars to produce, got no reviews, was seen by just a handful of people and dealt with such charming topics as incest, rape and cannibalism, went on to have quite a life. It was produced two years later at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre in Washington D.C. and was a big success. Since then it’s been done all over this country and in several others. The last production I worked on was at Naked Angels, directed by Joe Mantello. Marisa Tomei played Pam/Popo and was swell. She’d just won the Oscar so the audience was jammed with celebrities every night. If it sounds like I’m bragging, I don’t mean to, honestly. But as I said, plays are like children and look how far this, this runty, odd, disturbing, child went.
FREE WILL & WANTON LUST
Another play that I wrote while working for the Vortex Theater Company. Again, my friends Chuck and Stephanie were wonderful, despite the fact that he was way too old
