Front of House: Observations from a Decade on the Aisle (10 page)

Delacorte Theater

Almost every night at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, a gentle breeze blew across the lake as Andre Braugher, playing King Henry V, ripped into the “Once more unto the breach” speech. Tennis balls were scattered across the floor, and at intermission we stood in front of the stage to keep patrons from stealing them.

Before I started working on Broadway, and after my stint at the New Victory Theater, I spent one summer and fall working for the Public Theater — also with an ‘er’ — and their New York Shakespeare Festival. For the summer I was up in Central Park, working at the Delacorte for Shakespeare in the Park. In autumn I subbed here and there at the Public’s main space on Lafayette Street in the Village. Interestingly enough, it was right around the block from Cooper Square and my old stomping grounds at Children’s Express. CE was an international news service run by youth, and I’d worked with them until I’d aged out at nineteen.

If you’re from New York City, you already know what Shakespeare in the Park is. You will have to bear with me for a moment while I explain it to our out of town friends. Every summer the Public Theater, known for premiering groundbreaking musicals such as
Hair
and
A Chorus Line,
stages two productions. Usually they’re both Shakespeare plays; occasionally there’s a deviation from that trend and they throw another classic or a musical into the mix. The shows go up at the Delacorte Theater, an open-air venue in the middle of Central Park.

The Delacorte is directly behind a lake and directly below Belvedere Castle, so it’s a very picturesque spot. There’s nothing like sitting there on a summer night, when it’s warm enough to be cozy and cool enough to be comfortable, listening to someone gift you with a Shakespearean soliloquy. If you’ve never done it, trust me on this: it’s sublime.

Tickets to Shakespeare in the Park are free. At a time when tickets to Broadway shows are prohibitively expensive for a lot of New Yorkers, that’s a big deal. This might have changed, since it’s been a while since I worked there, but in the late 1990s the tickets were first come, first served. You could not make reservations over the phone or online. If you wanted a ticket, you had to queue up early in the day, either at the Delacorte box office in Central Park or at the Public Theater on Lafayette Street. The lines were incredibly long; people camped out for the day on the sidewalk with blankets and lawn chairs. Some brought wine and food and made a picnic out of their wait.

The summer I worked at the Delacorte, our shows were
Henry V
and
Timon of Athens.
Henry
ran from, I believe, June to July; there was a short break, and then
Timon
took over for the rest of the summer. Even though I’d taken a Shakespeare class in my senior year of high school, I’d never read those plays, so I was very interested in them.

The ushering staff was young, energetic and friendly. We flitted around the open-air Delacorte Theater in banana-yellow shirts. Most of us were not fond of the garish color, but it served its purpose: the ushers were immediately identifiable and easy to locate. We weren’t going to be mistaken for patrons, that was certain.

It was a stormy summer in New York that year. One of the production managers wore a safari hat and trench coat when it rained; she always looked like an old-time explorer from a silent film. Even if there was a storm in the forecast, the general philosophy was to try to go forward with the evening’s performance anyway. Light drizzle wasn’t enough to stop the show; the actors doggedly kept going. It was up to the audience to figure out how to stay dry. If and when the rain worsened, though, the performers were signaled to stop and left the stage. The patrons bolted for the covered sections of the theater and huddled together; the ushers usually joined them.

Generally, the production team tried to wait it out. If the storm did pass through the crew wiped down the stage, the actors returned, and the action picked up where it had left off. The show wasn’t completely canceled unless it appeared that the rainstorm was going to be heavy, was going to last for a while, had thunder and lightning, or was otherwise going to create a dangerous working environment for the actors. Several performances of
Henry V,
including the opening night, ended up getting cancelled due to inclement weather. August wasn’t quite as wet as June and July, so
Timon
had better luck.

Only half of the ushers got to stay for the entire show; the rest of us left after intermission. It was based on seniority, so I was part of the half-show crew. I didn’t mind too much; it allowed me to get home before midnight. The Public took safety very seriously, and they always arranged for us to walk in groups or have security escorts out of the park. My bus stop was right on Central Park West, and someone usually stayed with me until the bus pulled up and I had safely boarded. Still, I felt better walking through Central Park when it was a little earlier in the evening.

I got to know my colleagues on these walks; on these waits. We would slump on the wooden benches outside the park and chat. One of my co-workers was reading
Great Expectations;
as he traveled through the book I checked in with him from time to time to see what he thought. He told me about the angry notes to Pip he was writing in the margins; I confessed that I’d felt similarly and had really hated Pip after a while. On other nights the conversations veered toward sex, music, or the world around us.

I worked to be a good usher, but unfortunately, most of my colleagues only remembered how drunk I got at the opening night party for
Henry V.
It was totally out of character for me, because I had pretty much grown out of drinking altogether by the time I was seventeen years old. Even before then, I hadn’t particularly been out of control. I’d gone to a lot of rock clubs as a high school student, and I’d had no trouble getting served at the bar — odd, since I didn’t look anywhere near twenty-one and I never had a fake ID — but I’d usually ordered one mixed drink, sipped it all night, and left it at that. Most of the time I just got soda, anyway; it was cheaper and tasted better. I certainly didn’t engage in the drinking and partying that everyone expected of university students. I didn’t live in a dorm, I didn’t attend a party school, and frankly I had neither the time nor the inclination for that. Getting trashed wasn’t my style. I didn’t judge those who chose to partake; I just didn’t find being inebriated to be very much fun.

It happened this time, though. I was used to drinking vodka and whiskey in mixed drinks. They served Bailey’s at the party, and it was completely unfamiliar to me. I was drawn in by the sweetness and I didn’t realize how strong it was. Considering that a single beer was enough to intoxicate me, drinking multiple glasses of Bailey’s turned out to be a very bad idea, and before I knew it, I was asking people about their shoelaces. I didn’t puke, I didn’t dance on a table and I didn’t sleep with anyone, but if you talked to me, you immediately knew I wasn’t sober.

Thankfully, I wasn’t the only employee who had gotten wasted. The house manager finally herded us all together, put us in cabs with escorts, and sent us home. The next morning I called them to apologize, and when I showed up for work that night, they greeted me by pretending to stumble around.

I wasn’t at my best for the
Timon of Athens
opening night, either. During one of the first previews, I became feverish and sick midway through Act I. The house manager sent me backstage, where I rested in a hammock that had been put up near the lunch tables. When it became obvious that I was way too ill to work, he sent me home for the night. By the time I reached my apartment, red spots covered both of my arms. By the time I got to the doctor’s office the next morning, I was running a 103-degree fever. I’d come down with chicken pox, the childhood disease I’d never actually had as a child. I’d had scarlet fever and Rocky Mountain spotted fever, but the more common illness had eluded me for some reason. I never said I was normal.

Getting chicken pox when you’re a teenager isn’t particularly fun. Trust me there. The illness made me too exhausted to even rise from my couch, and the anti-viral pills I’d been prescribed didn’t seem to do much to help. My mother had to bring food to my apartment and check on me every day. By the time the
Timon
opening party rolled around I was no longer contagious, but I was also still too drained to function with any level of competence.

It didn’t mean I needed to miss the party, though. A black dress with long sleeves and a pair of magenta tights covered the lingering pox scars, and if my face was unnaturally ashen, it matched the Goth look I was sporting. I spent the entire night at the Belvedere Castle bash sitting on a wall, moving as little as possible. That, combined with my subdued nature, convinced a few people that I was partying again, but the marks that still dotted my pale face said otherwise.

Shakespeare in the Park attracted a lot of celebrities, but that didn’t faze me at all. Since I was very much out of the loop with television and film, I didn’t know who half the people were to begin with. That was, until the evening that Tom Hulce showed up. Hulce was a gifted actor, and he’d played my favorite composer, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, in one of my favorite films,
Amadeus.
We had another rain delay that night, and I looked over at him, made eye contact, and shrugged apologetically. He grinned back at me as he ducked into the covered tunnel to keep dry, and smiled again as he returned to his seat after the rain let up. For the rest of my shift I was dancing on air, and to this day I’m still kind of chuffed that the man who played Mozart smiled at me.

Oddly enough, someone on the production staff thought I was star-struck when I truly wasn’t. As I climbed through the stands one day, I walked past the Public’s director, George C. Wolfe, and several members of the production team. We had a full-page photo of Wolfe in our usher guidebook, and we’d all been told that we needed to learn to recognize him and say hi if we saw him. Since I was a stickler for following directions, I cheerfully said hello as I passed by.

A week or so later, I needed to go to the New Victory to pick up a check. Instead of just handing over my money, Kelly called me into her office.

“Did you run into George C. Wolfe, by any chance?” Kelly asked. For some reason, everyone always seemed to say his full name all the time.

“Yes,” I said, with a shrug.

“What did you say to him?”

“I just said hello and walked away.”

”It was the
way
you said hello.” Kelly went on to inform me that someone on the production team had taken exception to my encounter with the Public bigwig. Curiously, instead of bringing it to my attention, they’d reported it to Kelly.

I blinked as I replayed the scene in my head. How had I said hello, precisely? Had my voice been too high pitched? Too low? Had the word been uttered too quickly or slowly? Had there been there something in my tone of voice that had seemed suspect? I’d only said
one bloody word.

“They told us to say hello if we saw him! Was I supposed to do something else? Was I supposed to just ignore him as I walked by?” I was completely confused.

“They were asking me if you got star-struck.” I was now even more bewildered. I was many things, but a star-struck fan of George C. Wolfe wasn’t one of them. I really hadn’t been familiar with him before I’d started working for the Public. As such, I didn’t have a recording of my “hello,” but I didn’t think I’d uttered it with any level of admiration, much less disturbing fannish zeal.

“What? I don’t know anything about him. I just said hello because we were told to do that! His photo was in the handbook!” None of it made sense to me at all.

“Okay,” Kelly sighed. “I’ll talk to them.” She knew all about the photo of George C. Wolfe in the ushers’ handbook; it had been her idea when she worked with the Public Theater.

To this day, I really don’t know why my greeting caused such offense. Nobody ever brought it up again. Luckily, I was able to steer clear of the Public Powers That Be for the rest of the summer, so I didn’t have to worry about perfecting my delivery of the word “hello.”

Since I didn’t know which production person had made such a ridiculous complaint, they all became suspect. I made sure that I only interacted with the actors and crew members who worked in the front of house from that point on. They were uniformly friendly and cordial, and they didn’t see ulterior motives in the word “hello.” The delightful Henry Stram, who played Montjoy, greeted me every night as he made his entrance for Act II. I always waved back, and by the end of the summer I had a total crush on him. When the production staff passed by, however I tried to walk the other way or divert my attention so I wouldn’t even make eye contact with them.

Of the two shows I worked that summer, I found
Timon
to be the more interesting production. The original play apparently had some gaps; these were filled in and fleshed out. Henry Stram was in the cast again, playing against the incredibly gifted Michael Cumpsty. Every night I watched Timon lose his fortune and crumble onstage; every night I held my breath during the breakdown scene. To use a cliché, it was theatrical magic.

The backstage crew might have disagreed with me due to the hundreds of pounds they dragged around every night. The Victorian tables and chairs that were carried onstage were lightweight enough, but the major set element was a behemoth metal trailer. It had several rooms and was positioned in different ways depending on the scene; the actors worked both within and in front of it. The stagehands had to manually push it to each setting. At a few points in the show there were actors standing inside the trailer when the scene changed, which added even more weight to the stagehands’ load. And it didn’t just move once or twice; the damn thing spun all night. I didn’t envy the crew at all. It was a complete turnaround from the easy time they’d had during
Henry V,
where the set pieces and props had basically consisted of a bunch of tennis balls, a steamer trunk, a cart and a chair or two.