My Most Significant Theatrical Experiences

MY MOST SIGNIFICANT THEATRICAL EXPERIENCES
(Or What Passes for Shameless Name-Dropping)

I never gave it much thought, but I do have a significant theatrical heritage I’ve never acknowledged—until now as I pursue my MFA: by default playwriting became my correlative areas of study. Now I’m hooked. Perhaps some of my crazy stories will find their way into a theater piece, that is, if I ever learn to tell a story. I’m a poet and though good at creating anecdotes & images, I find it difficult to find the storyline, or through line. Why I am interested in taking this class is to learn how to craft my literary flotsam onto a solid skeletal structure of playwriting.

When I was seven years old, my mother took me to see the Children’s Matinee “Hansel and Gretel” at the Gate Playhouse Theater, a W.W.II Quonset hut in downtown Sausalito. She was in the cast and though I was a bit scared sitting by myself in the audience, I was so proud that it was my mother up there on stage I wanted to shout it out. I loved watching the transformation from mother to actress. I could see both simultaneously, and at times I forgot she was my mother. I was transported into the fairy tale. I loved the costuming, and the set which she’d also designed. And the story, how the clever Hansel substituted a chicken bone for a finger to trick the witch into thinking they weren’t fat enough to eat.

After the performance, it was a Gate Playhouse tradition to invite the birthday kids of the month up on stage along with the cast for a photo shoot and birthday cake. I must’ve been a little slow at climbing up onto the stage after the performance—the risers were huge—she came out from behind the wings to lift me up onto the stage. But as I was hoisted into place, absolute bedlam broke out as all the other kids stampeded off the stage screaming, because my mom was still in costume—as the witch. Take five. Their fear of being eaten meant that I had the birthday cake all to myself.

I often accompanied my mother to rehearsals. During performances, my babysitters at Tiki Junction were actors including Tommy Smothers who was pretty funny even to a seven-year-old. That same year, by default I was cast in a local historical play “San Geronimo!” written by New York playwright Stu (Stuart) Rasmussen. I was the female lead, Julia Dollar, a rancher’s daughter of Anglo settlers in the San Geronimo Valley in West Marin. The leading man, my beau, Richmond Young, was cast because of his height but he was unpopular—kids made cruel fun of him (God rest his soul—they could sense his queerness even then).

I don’t know why Stu’s son Mark wasn’t cast. He was a natural lead, maybe he thought it was sissy. But Richmond was OK, I liked him well enough. He was always kind to me even if he was from Woodacre, the rich end of the Valley and Protestant-DAR to boot. When I say rich, everything was relative. We were from Lagunitas, the Catholic end of the Valley. In the larger scale of things we were all living in the poverty belt. Of course, a popular girl from Woodacre was originally cast as the leading lady but when she was about to deliver her lines to Richmond, she made a fatal mistake, shrinking away from him, making a waspish comment about cooties. Stu, exasperated with her silliness, yanked her off the stage and grabbed another child for the role.

My mom was an actress, she shoved me forward, I was a pro, I went right up to Richmond and batted my eyes cow-like, drawling Southern style, “The Jerseys. Ah just love the Jerseys, their big soft brown eyes...” I got the part. (The popular girls spit like cats and never forgave me for the next six years—it was a small school.) My mom ran me through my lines ad nauseam, I hardly remember the play, just the line about the Jerseys...but it must’ve left a bitter taste in my mouth because I never expressed any interest in being in the theater afterwards. My mom’s going crazy probably had something to do with it—fear of my mother’s footsteps, but I was also extremely shy and had trouble memorizing things. Turned out, I had dyslexia, probably the real reason why I chose to become an artist in college.

One summer when I was around 10 or 11, my mom was costuming for a live televised theater variety show in Sacramento circa 1960. We drove up in a big white convertible to a real motel with a kidney-sized swimming pool with pink flamingos and it was magical. All white and turquoise and pink, the water winking like diamonds in sunlight. I thought it was part and parcel of the world of theater. I loved rehearsals—the theater, a cool round darkness, respite from the searing midday heat. The empty hushed whispering of plush seats, belayed voices emanating from the stage. The set, a revolving black stage. The big red eye of the cameras on cranes hidden behind purple netting draped from the ceiling like Spanish moss meant you had to be absolutely silent. A ballet in progress: Swan Lake. I don’t remember the play. Maybe “Pipedream.” I remember asking what it meant, not realizing we were living a pipedream

I loved the emcee, my mother’s friend who gave me a trinket, a crystal star necklace with secret rainbows trapped inside. Caged stardust. I wore it around my neck even in the pool. The emcee/actor would sit me on his knee and say, “I got a daughter your age” and introduced me to his two boys who were up visiting. But I was far too shy to play with Beau and Jeff. After that summer, I watched every episode of “Sea Hunt” at my friend’s house (we didn’t have a TV) just so I could see him. I loved watching that slow ballet of divers underwater on the black and white TV. And the man who swung me up to the rafters until I screamed. That summer I learned to fly. I was the ballerina in the wings. I was devastated when the crystal star slipped down a crack in the back seat of my neighbor’s Chrysler, she wouldn’t help me get it. Said it wasn’t there. She loved her bourbon first thing in the morning, too drunk to see, more like it. She had a TV too but she never let me watch “Sea Hunt.” Maybe she was jealous of Lloyd Bridges’ small gift.

My next theater experiences were when I got my AA in Art at College of Marin. I needed units outside my field so I took a costuming class. My mom (whom designer Ruben Panis married for his Green Card), had me costuming at an early age (one hot summer in the Hollywood hills I was stuck sewing sequins, pearls and rhinestones on Miss Korea’s costume (while the kids in the pool next door never invited me over for a swim. Poor Panis later drowned in his own blood, stabbed by a jealous gay lover).

Many of my classmates were in the Theater Department: Stu Rasmussen’s son, Mark (Marin’s quintessential hot tub guy in “The Serial”), hoofer/singer Joel Blum (Tony nominee in The Music Man), and musician Mark Adler (his moniker is on movie scores). Besides, there was someone I was sweet on in the Theater Department. I’d follow him across campus because he was a real-life scene stealer. Dadaesque Living Theater in motion. One time this merry prankster streaked across campus in green gym shorts and a lady’s swim cap with chin strap dangling; the next time, he pretended he was blind, asking for help from strangers, then groping them, or picking their pockets.

We designed costumes for “The Importance of Being Ernest,” “Lower Depths” and several Shakespeare plays directed by James Dunn. A seminal line in “Ernest” was “A handbag?” I don’t know why it stuck...perhaps the absurdity of finding an orphan in a purse. We play-read Ionesco’s “Rhinoceros” I was confused but intrigued by the play, as with “The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man in the Moon Marigolds.” I didn’t know what to make of them, but they mesmerized me as did Beckett’s “Play” of three talking heads in garbage cans. I think the music of language was beginning to settle in my ears.

My singlemost seminal theater experience was watching Robin play Malvolio in “Twelfth Night.” Robin outrageously built upon cliché and nuance upon nuance from performance to performance—I knew I was in the presence of absolute genius. It wasn’t what he said, the lines stayed the same, but what he did with the part. He stole the show (and my heart). Ya had to be there to see it. Besides, as he reputedly said, “if you remember the ’60s (OK, so make it the ’70s), you weren’t really there.” But we were there all right— stardust was in our eyes. Our brightest young stars, Mark and Joel and Robin, they all took Julliard by storm. But only Robin William’s small starfish hands were immortalized in cement at Grauman’s Chinese Theater on the Avenue of the Stars.

While I was at Sonoma State University finishing up my BA in Art, I created a theater project at my old grade school for the bicentennial festivities. We resurrected and updated Stu Rasmussen’s “San Geronimo!” with the kids at Lagunitas School. This time I was co-producer, set designer, choreographer/dancer and Jill of all trades. I made a herd of enormous paper-mache head/body masks of Jersey cows which later hung surrealistically on fence posts in my granny’s lower garden to our neighbors’ dismay. One of my classmates at SSU, Fred Curchak, directed Aristophanes “The Birds” and a friend made huge bird masks for the play. I loved the intersection of art and theater. But I stayed on the periphery and became a performance poet instead.

How many kids could claim a theatrical legacy that included a mad-hatterly mother who was an extra in ”It’s a Mad Mad Mad World,” who really went crazy while making costumes for Sinatra in Las Vegas? Or that my cousin’s Nicasio cottage was in a bad remake of “The Village of the Damned”? Why I came so late back to the theater and to playwriting has to do with overcoming the transgressions of childhood by means of story. I’ve lived in the periphery of a life resembling a character out of Faulkner or Williams. I consider playwriting to be a legacy of my second childhood as I’m now officially an orphan. Now I can say what I want. Embellish even!

In retrospect, I think I didn’t want to compete with my mother. Now that she’s dead, the stories resurface. It was fitting that at her memorial service where she dedicated her eyes to Stevie Wonder, there was a huge forest fire raging so most the guests couldn’t come. So we watched a movie shoot in progress—a big truck with cameramen perched on the hood filming cowboys inside the cab, the big rig circling Nicasio square like a wagon train. We were the Indians sitting it out on the front steps of St. Mary’s, ashes drifting down, waiting for the guests to arrive. I had to laugh at the absurdity of it all. She would’ve appreciated it, her wake upstaged by Hollywood. “Take five,” she would’ve said. And so we did. The guests eventually arrived and we sent her of—Hollywood style.

9/10/2002
CW 810, Plays/viewing
Brian Thorstenson
Assignment 1