On Stage and Off

Man is a make-believe animal . . . never so truly himself as when . . . acting a part.

william hazlitt

Broadway. Our name in lights. It all seemed possible in the last row of Forest Hills High auditorium, waiting to audition for Play Pro, the drama club. I knew my soliloquy as Linda, the wife in Death of a Salesman, cold, having said it perfectly in the shower, three times that morning:

I’m gonna show you and everybody else that Willy Loman did not die in vain. He had a good dream. . . .

It didn’t help. I fled to the bathroom before my name was called, right after my best friend was too good at performing Juliet to her Romeo.

Maybe if the school librarian had given me Juliet, or Emily, the girl in Our Town, I would have climbed the three steps to the stage. But at sixteen, with big dreams and a new boyfriend named Stu, I couldn’t imagine myself as a widow, my mother’s age, and full of fierce grief. All I imagined were my arms hanging down like a gorilla’s.

In Mr. Plotkin’s English class, I wrote a short story about an evil ferret, and everyone liked it, so Mimi, “failed actress,” switched to “writer.” And that stuck—until a friend, fifty-two years later, asked me to join OnStage, a group of fifteen closet actors, all over fifty-five, that met weekly with a local director, to learn theater techniques. “We also gather stories from the community and perform them locally as scenes and monologues, each year a different theme,” she said. “It’s called documentary theater. Last year it was ‘First Jobs’; this year, it’s ‘Thriving, Not Just Surviving.’

I’d recently retired from teaching, finished a book tour, and was looking for something new. Yes, I’d started a novel called “Solo” about a married couple, not us; but ever since Stu’s cardiologist said he needed a defibrillator, I’d been cleaning closets rather than write past page forty.

“Sure!” I told my friend, out of the blue. “If it’s fun, I’m in!” I liked the idea of weekly theater games and doing scripts that were like stories you hear over lunch or on a bus. If not now, when? I thought, and forgot about gorilla arms. The pressures of youth were off.

In the Community Room, we play “Name a Scene”—the beach, a garage, the top of Mt. Everest—and I converse with the clamshell, or mechanic, or Sherpa beside me. I never know which until my partner moves or says something that I have to answer. Whatever comes out, it sticks—with no revisions. Such a nice break from writing!

I also work on Yes, and which is better than No, but. To refute someone, according to our director Adam, will stop the improvisation cold. So if A says to B, “It looks like a hot day,” and B answers, “It won’t last!” there’s silence. End of conversation. But if B says, “Yes, and I’m going to sit on this bench all morning!” all sorts of possibilities arise: “Yes, and will you sit here tomorrow too?” or “Yes, and I am going to sit here beside you.” Maybe said sweetly, maybe with menace. Either way a story begins.

The week after learning Yes, and one woman from our group came in with an epiphany. “All my life I’ve been a No, but person. This week I’ve been totally Yes, and. What a difference it’s made! I got everything I wanted.” My own epiphany came from another theater technique, gote, which got rid of Stu’s pile of books on the floor. gote stands for Goals, Obstacles, Tactics, and Expectations, and on stage you must use them all. Say I’m a shoplifter and want a candy bar (Goal), but the store clerk keeps eyeing me (Obstacle). I start choking so he’ll get me some water (Tactic) and think I’m safe if I can pass the cop who’s buying coffee (Expectation).

Here’s how gote worked...