Moose Murdered: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Broadway Bomb (6 page)

“And let’s not forget,” I said, “that the play has been capitalized for months. Months! Come on, how many starving playwrights get this kind of deal thrown in their laps?”

“In case you haven’t noticed, you’re still starving,” said Dennis, who must have been getting awfully tired of wearing that hooded black robe and lugging a big old scythe around our tiny hot apartment.

This is as good a time as any to point out that Broadway was still considered to be the brass ring for many aspiring American playwrights back in the late 70s and early 80s. The British invasion headed by the likes of Cameron Macintosh and Andrew Lloyd Webber was only just beginning, the theater district had not yet been Disney-fied, and it would be years before out-of-control production costs and consequent out-of-control ticket prices forced producers to sink their money solely into bankable revivals of classic plays and musical adaptations of hit movies. Back then, there was still a slight chance that a new American play could open on Broadway and that people might actually be able to afford to see it.

But even then, the journey from the typewriter to the Great White Way did not, as a rule, happen overnight. More often than not, you would have to go through many drafts of your script before ever seeing any sort of fully realized stage production. There would be retreats to writers’ colonies, showcases sometimes sponsored by Actors’ Equity and sometimes not, staged readings held in somebody’s basement, or wine and cheese backers’ auditions held in somebody’s Upper-East Side apartment—through all of which you would continue to rethink, reshape, and rewrite—and then rewrite some more. And even if you were lucky enough to find a producer willing to take a risk on your play, you could expect to go through many more drafts at some out-of-town regional theater before even
thinking
about taking your show to Broadway.

I’d gone through versions of this process with my two previous plays. Some critics had actually found nice things to say about these first efforts, suggesting, a few of them, that I was a “playwright of promise.” The shelf life for this “promising” phase in the life of a playwright is rather nebulous, but you stand a much better chance of breaking through to the next level by arming yourself with feedback from smaller public forums before doing battle in the Broadway coliseum.

Frank Rich put this all in perspective in an article for the
Times
about four months after
Moose Murders
closed. “There were only three new American plays produced expressly for Broadway this season, without prior stagings at institutional or regional theaters,” he wrote. “One,
Brighton Beach Memoirs
, was a fait accompli, given that its author is our best known playwright; the other two were
Moose Murders
, and another, equally junky one-night flop,
Total Abandon
.” (More about
Total abandon
later, by the way.)

Force Ten Productions had conveniently eliminated all such “institutional” steps for
Moose Murders
, sparing me the grueling development process in its entirety. Sure, there had been some quibbling at first about whether or not we’d take the show
straight
to Broadway—the original contract had, in fact, been for an Off-Broadway production. But for any number of financial reasons (none of which I ever bothered to ask about), it wasn’t long before a new contract had been made up and Force Ten had posted the bond for a first class Broadway production.

Like a kid waiting for Christmas morning, I was too impatient to go over the first and only draft of
Moose Murders
for any glaring errors in character development or any gaping holes in its plot. Rather than using this down time constructively, I spent hours daydreaming about quitting my job as a reservationist for Air France, moving out of my cramped apartment, and finally paying back all the money I owed to various members of my family. I may have managed to grab hold of the brass ring on the merry-go-round, but it looked like my free ride had been postponed indefinitely.

And then, in the dog days of summer, what to my wondering eyes should appear but Stuart Howard and Amy Schecter of the Pulvino & Howard casting office. Just hours after having received the script to
Moose Murders
, Stuart had been on the phone with Ricka, exchanging favorite lines from the play. He could barely contain himself, and his colleague Amy was equally enthusiastic. I couldn’t imagine a more dramatic contrast to the cool reserve persistently maintained by the team of Johnson, Liff, and Zerman. Stuart and Amy not only got the play, they got me—and neither one of them was the least bit averse to sitting right down with me at the dweeb table. My first meeting with them was the most fun I’d had since I’d gotten on board this carousel called
Moose Murders
, and I could tell immediately that these were the guys who were finally going to crank up its engine.

In late September I sat in on an Equity Principal Interview for
Moose Murders
. Essentially cattle calls mandated by the union, these events took place over a designated period of time in grungy, harshly lit rooms adjacent to the lounge in the Actors’ Equity building on West 46th Street. For any actor who’d been around the block more than once, an EPI held about as much appeal as an army physical.

It was common knowledge (at least in the days when the Moose was loose) that most shows heading for Broadway or Off Broadway had been precast long before these interviews were even announced. If by some fluke a role or two remained open, you still shouldn’t get your hopes up because chances were great you’d be chatting with somebody on the bottom of the production’s food chain whose opinion—good or bad—wouldn’t count for much. So the best you might expect was to be put on a list as a possible understudy—and even that was a long shot.

Moose Murders
, however, had not been precast (although God knows we’d tried), and despite the fact that we were still looking for “name” performers, most of the actors who bothered to show up for our EPIs had at least a fighting chance to be considered for just about any role in the play. Pulvino & Howard’s Amy Schecter had drawn the short straw and was conducting the interviews the day I attended. She told me that she and Stuart had been deluged by submissions from agents, and had already filled every time slot for the regular audition period beginning October 7. Since submissions were still coming in, it was likely we’d be extending auditions throughout the month, in which case we’d also draw from a holding file of promising interview candidates.

If you had to subject yourself to an EPI, you couldn’t have found a better person than Amy to see you through the ordeal. She was warm and down-to-earth with every single person who straggled in during the time I was there, putting everybody (including me) at ease immediately. This was especially helpful for this kind of nonaudition process, where there were no sides of the play’s dialogue for actors to read from. Instead, they had to rely on making an impression with either the “right look” (whatever that might be) or with some kind of memorable small talk. That’s about as daunting a situation as you’ll find in the business.

Without having access to the script, the only guideline to what we were looking for was the cast breakdown that had appeared in the trade papers the week before:

The male lead of Nelson was listed as “cast” because Jeffrey Jones (currently in the Off-Broadway ensemble of Caryl Churchill’s wonderful play
Cloud Nine
) had tentatively committed to playing the part, and the role of Hedda’s twelve-year-old daughter, Gay, called for little girls who could tap-dance, so we’d all decided we’d hold agent-exclusive auditions for these little darlings (and their stage mothers) at a later date. Lauraine, of course, had long since been claimed by Lillie.

I laughed out loud when I saw that Stuart had included Rula Lenska as a prototype for Nurse Dagmar. Rula had appeared in the British TV series
Rock Follies
in the 70s, but here in America she was known primarily for a series of Alberto VO5 shampoo commercials which always began with a close-up of her announcing in a deep, husky voice “I’m Rula Lenska.” All anybody really knew about her was that her name was “Rula Lenska” and that she apparently needed to keep her hair looking nice. When I’d thrown her name out as a possible Dagmar, Stuart had been the only person in the room to crack up (aside from me, of course). John and Ricka hadn’t taken this suggestion seriously, especially since Equity was currently foaming at the mouth over an influx of British imports, but it was nice to see that Stuart was giving me an honorific wink and nudge.

It was interesting to see how broadly some actors interpreted descriptive phrases from the breakdown the likes of “overly enthusiastic” and “quite a bit grotesque,” and I noticed that none of the suggested age ranges had made much of an impression. Most of the folks who came in were pleasant and perfunctory, acting as if they were here to pick up their dry cleaning. I realized soon enough that I wasn’t going to get anything more out of this experience than they were, and, doing my best to keep a low profile (I was
not
a union cardholder), made my way back through the lounge to the elevators. Just in time, too, since I could tell the Equity officials were about ready to point and scream at me like the pod people in
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
.

The fog of ambivalence still hanging over me from the EPIs finally lifted a week later when I arrived at the Michael Bennett Studio on Broadway. The first thing I saw was a glass showcase in the lobby displaying the legend
, “Moose Murders
, Studio One.”

“Holy shit,” I thought. “It’s real.”

As soon as I entered the cavernous Studio One, Stuart came bounding over to me like an overgrown puppy, and vigorously shook my hand. He introduced me to Mary McTigue, a lean and angular young woman in a tweed suit who had been hired to read with the auditioners.

“I just
adore
your play!” said Mary with a thick nasal twang that reminded me of Gloria Upson, Patrick’s gentrified fiancé from
Auntie Mame
.

Stuart then directed me to a seat next to John and Ricka at a long table near the front of the room. There was a place setting for each of us consisting of a freshly bound
Moose Murders
script, a note pad, a coffee mug and water glass, a pack of breath mints, and a copy of this morning’s “program”—vital statistics concerning each of the actors we would soon be seeing. A huge stack of actors’ resumes and head shots had been neatly positioned on the left side of the table.

“I love your caterer,” I whispered to John.

“The mints are à la carte,” he said.

Before long Amy entered from the hallway outside the studio to announce the arrival of our first appointment, the actor Richard B. Shull who would be reading for the role of Howie. Richard had a lived-in face that I recognized from dozens of films and TV commercials, and had completely memorized his audition piece—a nice stroke of professionalism that was seldom displayed by those to follow.