Great stuff: 1940 Broadway socialism. This being the crowd that it is many besides me recognize the lines from the Kaufman and Hart comedy
In act one the daughter of a dull, rich family brings home a Greenwich Village artist named Pierce Falkland. His specialty is huge murals of heroic workers and farmers. In the second act Falkland paints his greatest work on the living room wall and turns their world upside down.
A young John Garfield played it originally on Broadway. Clark Gable, of course, did the movie with a lot less socialism and a lot more kissing.
On the night of a full blue moon almost forty years ago young Ransom as Falkland blew the minds of the second string critics sent to view a revival of that rickety comedy. “Pure Animal Power!” one of them wrote.
Tonight, for a few moments, the white hair and the years are wiped off his face and he is the young stage radical. Ransom and I have planned and discussed tonight’s show for months. But this is unrehearsed and spontaneous. With such an actor at such an hour it’s impossible to predict what will happen.
The crowd, the people looking down from apartment windows applaud. A few howl. At times I wish the Food and Drug Administration would speed up the approval of drug therapy for Luna-Related-Obsessive-Disorder, not for the actors but for the fans.
A camera tracks us as Ransom and I go through the lobby and down the center aisle of the Cherry Lane. The curtain is up revealing an unadorned stage. The house lights remain on for this performance.
The audience turns to watch us. Our players stop in the standing room at the back of the house.
After this we’ll play larger venues—big old theaters, concert halls, open meadows in parks. The Cherry Lane is a choice both sentimental and artistic; an evocation of Ransom’s past, a chance to capture a performance in an intimate setting.
Ransom turns his back to the audience and stands motionless facing the rear wall. The cultists all lean forward in their seats. Behind them our players are a shifting background of black clothes and moving faces.
I sit on a stool stage center. When the music stops, I lean forward and slip into a favorite dual roll as man of learning and priestess of the moon.
“As I speak the clocks have moved past midnight.”
Someone down front gives a little yip and someone in back answers. I ignore this.
“In the wild, the hunt for food is all consuming,” I tell them. “Some of us have bits of that obsession, especially on a night like this. In the hunt the ability to choose your physical form is a huge advantage and some of us retain traces of that.
“We are a society addicted to turning problems into excuses and letting cable TV news define our character.
“They whisper that we are a menace. But in my entire career I’ve have seen just five full lupus transformations and all of them were in hospitals, jails or both.”
As I speak, the audience murmurs. I feel my mass shift, my face crinkle. Without a mirror or monitor I know that my face is half man of learning/half woman of magic.
Ransom turns slowly, faces the audience, steps forward. “My father,” he says softly, “would have looked the way I usually do if he’d lived as long as I have and gave up crew cuts.” This part he has rehearsed.
“Thaddeus Taylor Ransom preached hellfire in the fields. He’d done a bit of college, University of Nebraska, before he went off to war. Got wounded and frostbitten in the Battle of the Bulge. Won a Silver Star, two purple hearts, maybe lost a few things.
“But my father believed that God in that very time gave him what Dad called his visions and the voice to tell us about them.”
Ransom’s delivery is slow and steady, growing hypnotic just like his father’s must have been. “He could describe the sun at midnight and the red eye of Satan. His family was Presbyterian but that church wouldn’t hold him when he returned. Instead he discovered The Children of the Fire, an apocalyptic sect. In your moment of spiritual need the Children were there with the comfort of a guaranteed fiery death.
“My father became a preacher. He was a charismatic, a hands-on healer.” When Thad reaches this point his face has become stark with burning eyes as its main feature. “He preached on Sundays. And sometimes in church it could seem like he was burning the world down.
“Often, though, he saved the most intense moments for his family. That was my mother and two sisters and me.”
Here Ransom’s voice rises. “And at certain times, nights like this one, he would gather us in the living room and run something like this, ‘The Lord’s Great Eyes, God the Father’s great eyes are upon us. His fiery gaze is upon us. It burns into your chest, into your heart, into your soul!’
“One of those nights, he woke me up, just me. I must have been ten, maybe eleven, dragged me out in my pajamas to a pasture where there was a pond and baptized me under the moonlight. I’d been baptized years before in daylight and in church.
“But this time he had a pair of torches he’d made with rolled paper and tar. He submerged me in the water, pulled me out by the scruff of the neck and held the torches so close they singed my hair.”
“THE UNION OF WATER AND FIRE IN ONE BODY,” Ransom yells, his eyes are huge as plates. “MY SON WILL NEVER REST EASY IN YOUR SERVICE, GOD OF FIRE.”
And at that moment Ransom is as big and as terrible as that father was to that little kid. I can hear the audience gasp, see their fear.
Then the voice softens; the eyes get a little sad, a bit pensive, become no larger than anyone’s. “He collapsed in the pulpit one ordinary Sunday morning six or seven years later and died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. Over time a bullet fragment had worked its way into his heart.
“Six months later my mother married a member of the congregation, a man who owned a Buick dealership. My sisters were regular kids. Maybe I was the old man’s only legacy.
“When I was eighteen I left town for state college. I ended up in the Drama Department. They say acting and preaching are related skills. At the end of sophomore year, needing more space between my family and me, I left home and ended up in New York.”
He sits on a stool. The audience nods: Ransom’s upbringing was extreme but lots of them came here from situations into which they didn’t fit. And more than a few get a bit turned inside out by the light of the moon.
I look up and smile. “My launching on the lunar path was a bit less dramatic.
“It was on a fine, warm night when I was maybe four. My Irish grandmother was taking clothes down from the line on the roof of the apartment building in Boston where she lived.
“Grandmother hadn’t really decided who or what I was—never did I think. They’d named me Joseph but were already calling me Josie. It’s a slippery name that over the years has come to be as much a girl’s as a boy’s.
“She pointed up at the moon and recited that ancient appeal to the goddess of the night sky. It was invented for protection against the creatures that mean us harm and walk in the silver light:
“I see the moon and the moon sees me
God bless the moon and God bless me”
“Was it also a prayer for those beings who are its worst captives, the women and the men ensnared in the lunar cycle? Could my grandmother sense that in me?
“It was part of the folklore of every nationality long before it became Lunar Related Obsessive Disorder and got discussed on TV and the internet.
“But if it’s a disease where is the virus? If it’s a mental disorder where are the conclusive studies? And if the moon’s role is a delusion, why are there nights like these?”
I hear my voice at a distance. My face moves on its own. The lunar priest and the woman of science flicker there and a camera catches them.
As I finish Ransom is prowling the stage. “I came to this city the usual way,” he says, “knowing noand nothing and almost immediately fell in with the perfect wrong crowd. A girl I met took me to an acting class at the New School.”
We are into an old routine, one I can almost watch myself do. “I saw him the first time sitting in that acting studio all legs and hostility,” I say. “Afterwards we talked and walked. It was late in the lunar cycle on a summer night with nothing in the sky but the Dog Star. Even without the moon he was intense. His eyes never blinked. He ended up crashing in the same pad I was staying at.”
“I’d never met anyone like Josie,” says Ransom. “But I figured this must be how people were in the big city.
