Take Your Shirt off and Cry: A Memoir of Near-Fame Experiences

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It is the fall of 1983. I am a freshman drama school student at NYU, sitting rapt with attention as David Mamet, the guest lecturer in our seminar class, Intro to New York Theatre, expounds on why George Bernard Shaw had his head up his ass. I am a precocious seventeen-year-old clad in black leggings, glittery leg warmers, and white pumps. My gray sweatshirt has been expertly cut into a Flashdance neckline, and my eyes, rimmed and smeared with black kohl eyeliner, are wide open.

"Shaw told us that the theater is a teaching tool: people come see a play, learn what they're doing wrong in their lives, and then, go change," Mamet announces, deadpan, shrugging slightly. I dig his shorn hair, close-cropped patriarchal beard, and mustache. His round eyeglasses reflect the stage lights, an effect that makes him look like a Talmudic raccoon.

"That," Mamet continues, "strikes me as rather jejune, eh? It is reductive and it is pretentious. The real purpose of theater is to show the folks a good time-wow 'em-then, send them the fuck home."

Everyone around me is scribbling piously, but all I can do is smile. This guy is hilarious.

"Feelings don't matter, and neither do words," Mamet declares, stalking about the stage during the question-and-answer portion. He is admonishing a mousy freshman from the Strasberg Studio who has tripped onto a tricky philosophical land mine.

"The words are gibberish," he continues. "They mean nothing, feelings mean nothing. The only thing that matters are actions. It's only about what you do."

"But-how-how can you say that?" Mousy Method Chick sputters. "I mean, you're a playwright, of course feelings mat-"

"Excuse me-please, tell us, madam: how do you know what the character is feeling?"

"Because you-well ... when you read-"

"HOW DO YOU KNOW WHAT THE CHARACTER IS FEELING? HOW?" he roars. "HOW DO YOU MAKE YOURSELF FEEL?"

"Well," Mousy Method Chick's face assumes the glow of raw hamburger meat, "you can d-d-do a 'sense memory,' like-"

"OHHHH!" Mamet puts his hands up, as if he's being robbed. "OK, thank you. [Long pause]. Folks, this woman-what she is referring to is JERKING OFF IN PUBLIC. She is talking about Strasberg. What Strasberg taught was to JERK OFF IN PUBLIC AND CALL IT ACTING. OK. Thank you."

Mousy Method Chick crumples into her seat in a daze as people continue to scribble:

Feelings don't matter.

Do not jerk off in public.

Strasberg = Douche.

"It's not your job to masturbate onstage," Mamet barks at us, his face impassive. "It's not your job to be interesting. Your job is to put your attention on the other actor in the scene, say your lines, and then," he adds merrily, "you go home."

Home. My mind wanders briefly back to Connecticut. I see myself standing beside my father on the platform at the Westport train station, just a few weeks ago. I am leaving, heading off for school registration and my new life. My mother, whose enjoyment of cheesy melodrama is limited to fictional settings, has opted to stay home, sending me off with a quick peck and a terse "See you" at the front door. My father holds my bag as I peer down the track, watching the ten thirty-seven pull into the station. I glance at him; he is shaking his head. "Don't worry, Nance," he says, smiling sheepishly. "It'll be OK." We hug, and I know that his assurance is more for himself than it is for me. "You can always come home to your daddy, you know." His Brooklyn accent seems especially thick when he says the word "daddy." Dee-ahh-dee. Three drawn-out syllables, as though the longer the word is, the more attached we'll be. The lush late-summer leaves wave a listless good-bye as I pull away and turn toward the open train doors.

"And don't fah-get what I told you: only take cabs! Don't ev-uh go into that shithole subway!"

Before the end of the lecture, someone asks Mamet who his favorite actresses are.

"Women who act are not actresses. They're ACTORS. Why do they need to fucking qualify what their genitalia are?" The audience titters; Mamet continues to thunder. "Folks, seriously, I need to disabuse you of the notion that 'actress' is anything other than a euphemism for 'floozy.' Do women doctors call themselves 'doctresses'? [Pause.] Do women fucking writers call themselves 'writressess'? [Pause.] NO! So why the fuck shouldn't a woman who acts call herself an actor?"

The lecture is over. Everyone laughs as we file out, and I am a new person: I will never allow anyone to call me an actress again.

* * *

At the time, David Mamet was the preeminent badass of the American theater. The following spring, he would receive the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Glengarry Glen Ross. Everyone at school (and elsewhere) was nuts about him. While I thought his whole vibe was killer, I was annoyed by how the older kids tried to approximate the Mamet ethos, traipsing about with Stepfordish reverence, constantly assuming a pseudo-intellectual, combative mien. They ate fruit-juice-sweetened granola, smoked high-grade pot, and traded in their contact lenses for Mamet-inspired coke-bottle glasses. They spoke robotically, like Mamet characters, repeating questions and statements with a bizarre quasi stutter:

"That's right. That's [pause.] Yes. That's exactly so," they'd drone at the Cozy Soup and Burger Diner near school, while ordering coffee. "Yes-I want it regular. Milk and sugar. Excellent. [Pause.] Yes ..."

It was nauseating watching the Mamet-ites run around glassy-eyed, reeking of patchouli, saying things like "Swell" when you asked how rehearsal was, or the party or the laundry room. It was Harold Pinter meets Charles Manson. I assured myself I would never be one of Mamet's minions.

Apart from Mamet's heady introduction, the first few weeks at school were mind-blowing on other levels too. Suddenly, men were checking me out in a big way. Walking through Washington Square Park, I'd notice guys staring at me, or I'd pick up my mail and find notes in my box from this guy or that, asking if I wanted to have coffee or check out some music at the Village Gate. I was so unused to this kind of attention that initially I thought it was a mean joke someone was playing on me. All through high school, I was a tomboy; only two guys ever asked me out. But somehow, the moment I arrived at school, I became fuckable.

My sudden popularity, however, did nothing to assuage a lifetime of self-doubt. In fact, my newfound desirability had the paradoxical effect of making me more needy and desperate. I slept with almost anyone who asked. There were a few whom I merely made out with, just for kicks, but I was rapidly getting a reputation as an easy lay. On the sluttiness spectrum, I suppose I wasn't that unusual; this was, after all, drama school, where people would routinely screw their scene partners mid-rehearsal, then decide they were bisexual by dinner. Walking through the Drama Department halls, you would find yourself in a maze of bodies: people making out, giving massages, bodies draped across each other, legs and arms intertwined all over the lumpy, moth-eaten couch next to the bulletin board. There was once an entire Hamlet cast who gave one another crabs.

I can recall countless evenings spent listening to the ubiquitous strains of Tina Turner's "What's Love Got to Do with It," rolling around on some random artsy dude's BO-infested East Village mattress, wondering, what, in fact, did love have to do with it? I'd habitually show up to study down the hall of my dorm with guys from my History of Dramatic Literature class wearing nothing but a tank top and bikini undies, and when they'd look at me, astonished by my shamelessness, I'd act like they were crazy. I was a whirling dervish: voraciously horny, out of control, and, at the same time, deeply conflicted about the sexual attention I seemed to court so breezily.

I found refuge from all this male attention in a blossoming friendship with my dorm roommate, Therese, a shy girl also in the Drama Department, with a quirky, sharp wit. Therese and I immediately bonded over our mutual love of movies, Woody Allen's in particular. We liked to trade off Woody's and Diane Keaton's lines:

She'd say, "He's a genius, Helen's a genius, Dennis is a genius. You know a lot of geniuses."

And I'd say, "You should meet some stupid people-you could learn something."

We'd collapse with laughter.

Then I'd say, "You don't need a male. Two mothers are just fine."

And she'd answer, flawlessly, "Really? Because I feel very few people survive one mother."

Therese and I also shared the fact that we had Jewish fathers and for kicks, we'd run around Tompkins Square Park singing "Half-Breed" while annoyed homeless people tried to sleep. One day, we performed the entire song for a junkie who was lying on a bench.

"What d'you think?" Therese asked him after we had finished. He reflected for a moment and then offered, "Cher sucks."

From then on, whenever we'd ask for each other's opinion, no matter the subject, the answer was always "Cher sucks."

My father liked Therese. He met her when, after taking a deposition, he showed up on a whim to take me out to lunch and invited her along.

"Now, Therese is a brawd who eats," he enthused the next day over the phone. "Which is good: people who eat are trustworthy."

Therese and I had a blast; there was such ease to our connection, and a humorous rapport that continued to deepen and grow. As we got closer, our natural tendency toward joking about everything fell away, and through tearful, late-night analytical conversations, we were mutually able to arrive at epiphanies about ourselves, most of which had to do with having distant mothers from whom we craved warmth and tenderness.

We hugged, habitually brushed hair out of each other's faces, curled up together on one of our beds to listen to Joni Mitchell's Blue, or Kate Bush's The Kick Inside, or the sound track to Pippin, crying, laughing, singing along softly.

I'd never had anyone be that affectionate with me without sex involved. Here, for the first time, was a person whom I trusted completely, who loved me just for me, not to use me or fuck me or get anything other than just my loving back. I felt safe with Therese; with her, I could let it all hang out.

"Why do you think that guy asked me out? You think maybe it's some fucked-up joke?" I'd ask virtually twice a week, standing in front of our chipped closet-door mirror, tying and retying the floppy rag bow in my hair, turning this way and that to get every possible view of the ass I thought was so fat.

"Because you're beautiful," she'd say patiently, lovingly, tilting her head to the side as she watched me from her desk.

I had become obsessed with my looks. I couldn't pass anything remotely reflective without double-taking, but as much as I wanted to be adored, I wanted also to be left alone; I wanted to be checked out, but in fact, I couldn't bear to be seen. Therese took all of my insolent contradictions in stride; she was calm and loving, and I couldn't remember anyone ever before being as tolerant of my foibles.

In the spring, Therese decided to see if she could get into the summer program David Mamet was holding in Vermont. She was miserable studying at her assigned studio, Stella Adler, and the thought of spending the summer with her mother in their cheerless colonial home freaked her out, so she pleaded with me to help her with the audition. Except that there wasn't an audition. Instead, Mamet asked that all applicants participate in a weeklong treasure hunt to uncover the answers to ten or so riddles. The answers were to be presented-typed up-to Mamet during an interview, at the end of which the applicant would recite a memorized poem by Rudyard Kipling.

"You do realize that this is by far the most fucked-up thing you've ever auditioned for, right?" I asked Therese one day while we sat flipping through humongous reference books at the New York Public Library.

She did, of course, but she was truly desperate. Therese hadn't had any luck scoring roles in the school's classy Mainstage productions and had been relegated to trying out for the various "experimental" student productions-usually plotless ruminations on emotional breakdowns and scatological insights-that left their audiences catatonic. She auditioned and auditioned, but no matter how revolting the premise, she never even got a callback.

As the year progressed, she grew increasingly depressed by the rejections, downing cheap bottles of Bordeaux, then lying in bed reading Remembrance of Things Past in the original French.

So when it came time for the Mamet "audition," Therese raced all over Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn and Queens trying to unearth answers to the brainteasers, discovering that most of them had to do with obscure World War II weaponry, con-artist ploys, and arcane poker slang. At the end of the week, with barely half of the correct answers, Therese wept uncontrollably as we ran through her Kipling poem.

"What do you think?" she whimpered. "Do I even have a chance ?"

"I think," I said, taking her hand, "that Cher sucks."

I sat next to her on the bed and wiped her tears with the back of my sleeve.

The whole thing infuriated me. What kind of arrogant prick was this guy, sending these hapless kids all over hell and gone looking for cryptic crap? It was just a load of I-say-jump-now-you-say-how-high. What did any of this have to do with acting, which was what he claimed he'd be teaching them? Looking at Therese's puffy, red-blotched face as she sat blubbering on her squeaky dorm bed, clutching her hard-won typed-up answers, I thought back to that Mamet lecture.

"The only thing that matters are actions. It's only about what you do," he had said. "The words are gibberish; exercise your will ..."

And then, the whole Mamet gambit dawned on me: Whatever the premise, whatever the score, it didn't matter. His thing was about showing up and committing wholeheartedly. It was, essentially, a game of five-card stud for stage.

"Therese, don't worry," I assured her. "None of this matters. All that matters is that you go in there and present this shit with pride."

"But," she wailed, "I'm missing a bunch of the answers!"

"Listen to me," I said, kneeling in front of her. "Just go in there, look him in the eye, and give him the answers you have-no apologies for the ones you don't-and do that poem like you mean it. Period. And tell him you want to study with him."

Therese was not only accepted; she became one of Mamet's most treasured students that summer. She sent me exhilarated letters detailing how he appreciated her "offbeat style, rapier wit and deadpan delivery." He'd rave about what a great writer she was and he made her a founding member of the new theater company he started with all the kids who'd been studying with him the past few summers in Vermont.

When Therese came back to school in the fall, she was a new person. She had new standards for herself and would no longer audition for anything-Mainstage or not-without seeing a script first. Her posture, which had been schlumpy at best, was now erect, even graceful. People spoke about her when she walked into rooms: "Oh! There's that funny chick!" Therese was hot shit.

That semester was insanely busy for both of us. Therese was immersed with the new theater company; I was cast, much to my surprise and delight, in a few Mainstage shows. My favorite was my very first: Adrienne Kennedy's bold, surrealistic dream-play, Funnyhouse of a Negro, in which I played a blowsy, middle-aged landlady who spews hideously racist monologues directly at the audience as though performing stand-up. Costumed in a blonde wig, white kabuki-style makeup, and a fat suit designed by the Tony Award-winning Willa Kim (which took sixteen hours of fittings), I literally disappeared inside my role. Whenever I would meet people thereafter during my years at NYU, they would be astonished by this credit: "That was YOU in there??" It was a great source of pride.

My parents came to see me in Funnyhouse, and I found my father wandering around backstage after the curtain calls, dumbfounded.

"What the hell was that?" he wanted to know. "I think you were good, but I didn't undah-stand one goddamn word, so who knows?"

My mother and I tried to explain that the text was meant to be nonlinear; that it was lyrically brilliant, absurdist in the manner of Beckett ... but my father wasn't buying it.

"Such a bore," he'd repeat, rolling his eyes. "You can't tell me people actually like this kinda crap. Why don't they do some Neil Simon, for Christ's sake? Now there's a genius ..."

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Take Your Shirt Off and Cry by Nancy Balbirer Copyright © 2009 by Nancy Balbirer. Excerpted by permission.
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