Moose Murdered: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Broadway Bomb (7 page)

Next in was Lois Smith, the terrific actress who’d played any number of very serious roles in movies, including the concert pianist sister of Jack Nicholson in
Five Easy Pieces
. She looked disgruntled, as if she’d just caught whiff of some foul smell. Stuart introduced her to the “panel,” and when she got to me she looked me straight in the eye and said acrimoniously: “This is a
very
silly play.” She then gave us a Nurse Dagmar that could have come straight out of Brecht’s
The Caucasian Chalk Circle
.

Michelle Shay, on the other hand, who’d just gotten raves as Titania in the Shakespeare in the Park production of A
Midsummer Night’s Dream
, gave us a sultry and seductive Dagmar, whereas Judy Graubert from PBS’s
The Electric Company
offered a wide-eyed and totally manic Dagmar that was actually just what I’d envisioned for the role of Lauraine.

I didn’t know what to expect from Mink Stole, one of John Waters’s discoveries and the star of his early classic underground films
Pink Flamingos
and
Female Trouble
, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d shown just the right sensibilities to knock Snooks out of the park. Unfortunately, Mink acted like she’d wandered into this building entirely by accident, and seemed bewildered when asked to read out loud from the script. Dana Ivey, at that time playing Monica in the Circle in the Square production of
Present Laughter
, fared much better with her sharp and tough Brooklynese version of Snooks.

The first one in after our lunch break was my older brother Bruce, an accomplished architect who’d worked out of Colorado and New Mexico for several years before falling onto some hard times. He was in his early fifties, and had recently pulled up stakes and moved east to make a fresh start of things here in New York. So far, not too many architectural opportunities had cropped up, but, on the brighter side, there had been lots of time to put his community theater skills to the test. With his Santa Claus-length snowy white beard and twinkling blue eyes, Bruce was causing a modest sensation in the Off-Off-Broadway community—some of the companies for which he’d worked had even been willing to spring for cab fare.

I don’t think Bruce ever really expected to be cast in
Moose Murders
—he just needed to see for himself what the current fuss over his little brother was all about. He was convinced I’d fashioned the character of Joe Buffalo Dance after a man named Freddie Brack, the real-life caretaker of a lodge at Big Moose Lake in the Adirondacks next door to the camp our father had purchased in the thirties. Having known Freddie for years, it made perfect sense to Bruce that he should at least be considered to portray the man on stage, and that he might even bring the show a little authenticity.

“God, I was scared,” he admitted to me on the phone that evening. “It was all so impressive. Are you sure I didn’t embarrass you?”

“Of course not,” I said, without flinching.

I didn’t dare tell him that the formality of the audition process also impressed the hell out of me, and that I was struggling to maintain my own brittle sense of entitlement. This wantonly paranoid side of me suspected that Bruce’s underlying motivation for showing up this afternoon might have been to somehow find a way to defraud me, and I was relieved to hear that the facade of the Michael Bennett Studio had managed to protect me so well. We hadn’t grown up together (Bruce had moved out West to start his own career and family shortly after I was born), so this burgeoning sibling rivalry—whether real or imagined—was something strange and new that I wasn’t at all sure how to handle with all the other strange and new things going on all around me.

Apparently I wasn’t alone in my confusion. After my brother finished his very earnest, and, yes,
authentic
audition, a conversation gap threatened to suck all life from the room. “So,” I said, to fill it, “I think my Aunt Betty is next. She’s got her eye on the role of Hedda.”

For the next hour or so, we watched our reader Mary McTigue play Hedda to a parade of Stinkys of all shapes and sizes, many of whom sought to disarm us with their improvisational comedy. Mary seemed unfazed when one actor suddenly fell to the floor and desperately entangled both his arms around her leg, but she did start to become unglued when her many polite attempts to dislodge him failed miserably and she was forced to drag him along with her on her escape route across the room. She came dangerously close to losing it when another Stinky snuck up behind her and planted a loud, sloppy raspberry on her neck. She finally had to request a five-minute break after one exceptionally bizarre young man spent his entire reading fixating on her bosom while methodically playing with himself (something, by the way, that’s really difficult to do while also holding your book).

Mary wasn’t the only one worn out by the end of the afternoon. Our circuits were overloaded and we were all bleary-eyed from watching what essentially amounted to an eight-hour, nonstop variety show. It was only the first day, and already we’d seen everything except the guy spinning plates on sticks while accompanied by Khachaturian’s “Sabre Dance.”

And then in walked June Gable with a full set of china.

She was wearing a fake leopard skin halter top, shocking pink skintight chinos and tacky gold “come-fuck-me” pumps. She’d teased her hair until it had unconditionally surrendered, and had thickened her lashes with enough mascara to offend Tammy Faye Baker. With just a little more taste and reserve, she might have been ready to reprise her role as bathhouse performer Googie Gomez in Terrence McNally’s
The Ritz
.

She launched right into a swing version of “Jeepers Creepers,” simultaneously pulling out every stop and slaughtering every note along the way. Halfway through the number, she ran over to the handbag that she’d left by the door and whipped out a pair of novelty glasses with droopy eye balls on springs. She put them on and flounced over to the table, letting her droopy eyes dangle in John’s face and across his chest. “I just can’t take my eyes off you,” she said, then went back “upstage” to belt out her finale.

Way back when, Johnson and Liff had cautioned us about June Gable’s penchant for scene stealing during Hal Prince’s 1974 Broadway revival of
Candide
. She’d won a Tony nomination for her role as the Old Lady in that production, but had apparently pissed off a lot of her fellow actors with her total disregard for ensemble team work. When or if push came to shove, Geoff and Vinnie thought John might have considerable trouble reining her in.

But it was just this sort of excessive enthusiasm that defined the character of Snooks. June’s lounge act was maybe a little too bad-Vegas as opposed to bad-Adirondacks in this first audition, but that was just a matter of fine tuning as far as we were concerned. She’d made us scream with laughter at the end of the day when our brains were fried and all we’d really wanted to do was to crawl home and fall into our beds. If she’d so easily managed to revive us, think of what she could do for all those bridge and tunnel crowd matinees. So what if she was guilty of a little upstaging every now and then?

If scenery be the food of laughter, chew on, June, chew on.

A large part of the second day of auditions was devoted to blatant cronyism. John had long since played the vanity card by anointing himself director and by casting his wife in the show, and I thought it was high time for me to start reaching into the cookie jar myself. It had always been my intention to finesse John into hiring Dennis as Nelson’s understudy (the role itself was going either to Jeffrey Jones or some other “name” actor), but I couldn’t really broach the subject as long as Dennis continued to act as my agent. The trick was to tie up all the loose ends of my contract with Force Ten in time for Dennis to “cut me loose” and ease into his new role as understudy. Once the show was on its feet and running, I figured it shouldn’t be too hard to find myself another agent to take up the slack.

Yeah, I know. The operative word there was “running.”

Once you’d eliminated all the lead roles earmarked for known actors and the one role precast, the pickings were pretty damn slim. You had eighteen-year-old Stinky, twelve-year-old Gay, the middle-aged caretaker that my brother had tried out for, and one other character with no lines who wasn’t even mentioned in the cast breakdown, and yet was destined to be singled out by just about every theater critic as a prime example of the limitless depths into which
Moose Murders
plunged: Hedda’s husband Sidney Holloway, a wheelchair-bound quadriplegic wrapped in bandages from head to toe.

Between us, John and I had a considerable number of college chums who were pursuing careers as professional actors, but most of these folks fell outside the age range of the available roles. A few of them, though, were physically and vocally flexible enough to understudy multiple roles (gaining a Broadway credit and an Equity scale paycheck in the process), so it wasn’t long before a sort of collegiate “Sharks” and “Jets” gang warfare started to materialize.

John’s Carnegie Mellon team consisted of Brad O’Hare, a young leading man I suspected was being groomed for the role of Nelson should Jeffrey Jones bail out, Anderson (“Andy”) Matthews, a funny and very personable guy who reminded me of a young Buddy Hackett, and Suzanne Henry, a talented singer who had costarred with Craig Lucas in the Stephen Sondheim revue
Marry Me a Little
when it debuted at the Production Company in 1981.

My own alma mater, Ithaca College, was represented by my roomie Dennis and two other close partners in crime: Marc Castle, the man to whom I’d dedicated
Moose Murders
and whose flawless portrayal of a nerdy fifteen-year-old in both incarnations of
My Great Dead Sister
had earned rave reviews (despite the fact he’d been pushing thirty at the time), and Jane Dentinger, the Dorothy Parker to my George S. Kaufman (in our own minds, anyway), and the lady who—possessing the barbed wit and quick delivery of Fran Lebowitz and the singing voice of Lucy Ricardo—had been the inspiration for the character of Snooks Keene.

When Jane stopped by the casting office to pick up her audition sides, the young man at the desk had urgently warned “you’d better do something to make yourself look older!” Under different circumstances, this might have been music to her ears. As it was, she told me later she had to stifle the urge to grab the kid by the collar and scream “Fuck you! I’m the prototype!”

Remembering that she had once lunched with Ann Miller, Marc suggested that Jane try to borrow one of the veteran hoofer’s indestructible wigs for the upcoming audition—or, better yet, just snatch the current one off the old gal’s head as she walked by. “She has so many,” he said. “She’ll never miss it.” As viable an option as this was, Jane decided instead to shell out fifty bucks for a session with her mentor Larry Moss, an acclaimed acting coach then teaching in New York.

As soon as Jane walked into the studio that second afternoon, she and I took care of a little preplanned business. Oblivious to everybody else in the room, we exchanged a little banter from
Murder on Cue
—Jane’s debut mystery novel that had been sold to Doubleday earlier that year and was due to be published shortly after the opening of
Moose Murders
. We both felt at that time that we’d
earned
the right to be so publicly precious, I suppose. The scene we enacted was a reunion between actress/amateur sleuth Jocelyn O’Rourke and playwright Austin Frost (I’d managed to talk her out of calling this guy “Arthur Bracknell”), on the occasion of Austin’s illustrious return to Broadway. Whether life was imitating art or the other way around, Jane decided right then and there that in her next book, she would definitely have Jocelyn win a Tony Award.

She tore the room apart. I’d acted with her in a number of college and summer theater productions, and had seen her perform two of the three characters in the long-running Off-Broadway hit
Vanities
, but had never seen her pull off such a tour de force. My jaw would have dropped if I hadn’t been laughing so hard. She made such an impression on Stuart that he demanded his own copy of her picture and resume for future reference, and was still singing her praises at the end of the afternoon.

“She must have experience with stand up comedy,” he said. I told him I didn’t think she had, and he looked at me if I’d just failed in my life’s mission. “Well, tell her to get herself a writer and start! She’s one of the Funny Ladies!”

Jane’s own take on her performance that afternoon was a little less hyperbolic. “I thought you’d find me amusing,” she said, “but I didn’t think I’d have to hold for laughs.” She appreciated Stuart’s comments, but wasn’t sure she was quite ready to set her sights on nightly gigs at Caroline’s.

Despite this triumph, Jane knew the lay of the land and had no illusions about actually being cast as Snooks. We were both convinced, however, that she’d just indisputably nailed the right to understudy the role. Her competitor from the Carnegie team, Sue Henry, was having some serious dental problems that had forced her to beg off from the auditions.