A Personal History of the American Theatre

excerpts from A Personal History of the American Theatre Spalding Gray INTRODUCTION TO A PERSONAL HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN THEATRE A Personal History of the American Theatre is my fourth autobiographic monologue. It was first conceived and performed at the Performing Garage in the Fall of 1980. It is based on memories, stories, and associations around and about forty-nine plays which I acted in between 1960 and 1970. The names of all these plays were printed on 5 x 8 cards and the cards were placed in a box with a clear plastic front. During the course of the monologue, I turn each card by hand to reveal a new play title to the audience and then proceed to tell stories that came out of my experiences with each play. THREEPENNY OPERA Done at the Barnstormer Summer Theatre in Tamworth, New Hampshire. Directed by Francis Cleveland, the son of Grover Cleveland and the head of the Republican Party in New Hampshire. This summer theatre was kind of like his little hobby. It's a very conservative town, Tamworth, New Hampshire , at least it was then, when I was an apprentice. In fact, there was a town ordinance that all the fronts of the houses had to be painted white if they faced the road. So Francis was very nervous about doing Threepenny Opera there. 36 He was working with actors that mainly worked in New York in soap operas during the winter, and then came up and acted their hearts out in the summer . I mean real good method actors. I remember one guy during Idiot's Delight; he ran around the barn four times before he made his entrance just so he could come in out of breath. He was an extremely devoted actor in that way. Anyway, Francis was nervous that this was a Communist-inspired play that would offend, not only the town, but the minister of the church next door. But the actors talked him into doing it. The problem was that the lead actress , who was supposed to play Jenny, couldn't sing. So what he did was to distribute all of Jenny's songs randomly among the cast. So that production was quite a mixed bag. I was an apprentice, but not a very good one. I was allergic to hammers. So I would mainly stand around and talk, drink a lot of coffee, talk some more, and stay up all night to put up the new set. I'd get so tired that I would hear the buzzsaw call my name. And when you ran a piece of wood through it, it was screaming all sorts of stuff. I can remember one time when I had been up all weekend on coffee, and it was just about dawn, and I opened the side door of the back stage where our set was-there was a big side door where you bring in the scenery-and whoosh! There was this beautiful dairy farm. It had always been there, but I was seeing it for the first time in all it's splendor , with the sun just coming up and the farmer starting up the milk machines, and I could hear the cows, and the lights were on in the barn. Try as I might, I couldn't see that farm as anything but an extension of the set we'd been building all weekend. And ever since, I've never been able to see a dairy farm as anything but a theatre set. THE CURIOUS SAVAGE The Curious Savage was the first play that I was in. It was done at my boarding school. I think that certain people decide to become professional actors , just like certain people decide to become doctors and dentists. Somewhere along the line, they say "I guess I'll go into acting." And they study it and become an actor. It's an act of will. But with other people, it's an ontological condition. There is no way out. They are born into it. They find that they are "acting out" all the time, and they don't know what to do about it. They have these...