My (Very Brief) Life in the Theater, Part 2: Making a Play

A Series in Four Parts

[See Part 1 here]

In addition to our cast-in-waiting for a play to do, we had one of American experimental theater’s magicians.  Of course I had no sense of this as we gathered for those first meetings.  Truth be told, I knew very little about theater at all, let alone this new experimental form that had bloomed around the country as part of the cultural and political revolutions of the 1960s that had shaken many of our institutions, from art to politics to religion.  But given that we needed a finished play in a little over two months, I thought that we were dithering in those first meetings.

Curiously, though, I observed that Joel never seemed to be dithering.  Even without a play yet before us, his direction dominated those early meetings.  Unlike later in our work, his voice was usually calm.  But his eyes jumped rapidly back and forth as he shared his unfolding thoughts and sought our replies.  It was if he was furiously scanning his mind in search of his own creativity, but without anxiety or any sense that he was lost.  Occasionally he let loose with one of his cackling laughs.  As he would throughout the summer and fall, he dominated all of our gatherings with his charisma, certainty of purpose, and his yelling at and arguing with us.  To me, whatever else it was, it was sensational to watch–if not always easy to bear.

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By day three, Joel had an idea for a play.  We would do a show based on Little Orphan Annie, which had come of age as a popular American comic strip.  At least it was something with which I had some familiarity.  But then he said that I would play the role of Daddy Warbucks, Annie’s wealthy father-figure and protector.  What?  That would be beyond gonzo.  It would be much more like pathetic.  But perhaps that was the point.

Thankfully, with very little rehearsal of that possibility, it soon died in Joel’s imagination.  By week three he had an idea that stuck.  We would instead do a satire–really more a full-throated takedown–of the story of Marjorie Morningstar, the starry-eyed New York City ingénue who aspires to be an actress.  The story was first told in Herman Wouk’s 1955 best-selling novel by the same name.   The movie version, starring Gene Kelly and Natalie Wood, appeared in 1958.

Born to the Morgenstern family, Marjorie wishes to become an acting star, and in the effort changes her last name to Morningstar, a literal translation of her German family name.  The story features the tension between her family’s traditional Jewish values emphasizing women’s roles in the home, family and religious traditions, and Marjorie’s desire to become an independently successful and famous actress.

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For Joel, this was familiar cultural material.  Born to a Jewish family in Brooklyn in 1942, he was raised in Passaic, New Jersey.  According to his sister, in Daniel Levin’s 2012 documentary film of his life and work, Filthy Theater, his family was a conventional 1950s middle class family, his father an accountant and his mother an aspiring musical artist who eventually set her goals aside and went to work for her husband in his accounting business.

Joel, however, was not a conventional boy.  His sister reports that he took no interest in the sports that his father had wanted him to try, and instead he was very much an isolate in his own family and did not like spending time with them.  “He didn’t feel that they were on the same level as he was on,” she said.  “(I think that) he just didn’t want to be around them because he didn’t think they were worth talking to.”

In the documentary Joel described the cultural life among his family and relatives as “pretty sterile” when he was growing up.  The arts were “something that you didn’t dare take seriously.  It was too dangerous to do that sort of thing.  It was a life that was so insecure.”  Instead, as in many American middle-class families in the 1950s, the emphasis was on achieving financial security and success.  This, he said, produced painful side effects in his family.  “The pressure to step up the ladder and make more money was too hard for my father.  He couldn’t deal with it.  He took it out on his children.  He’d be violent.  He would start screaming and yelling.”  Joel said that he had learned from his father’s example:  “I think I picked up on this way of behaving, which is, you can only get your way if you’re pushy or aggressive.”

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From an early age Joel’s interests were distinctive:  reading, playing piano, and, beginning in junior high school, theater and opera.  He began attending many shows in New York City.  In perhaps an early sign of his developing artistic tastes, he was disappointed in the first Broadway show he saw, Sunrise at Campobello, starring Ralph Bellamy as Franklin D. Roosevelt and introducing a young James Earl Jones.  The play won the 1958 Tony Awards for Best Show, Best Director, and Best Actor.  But Joel did find the theater’s ambience and audience to be thrilling. ¹

He went on to earn his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in theater studies in Eastern universities, after which he served two years in the U.S. Army, reaching the rank of sergeant, and then worked a while as a newspaper reporter, before moving to Madison to pursue his doctorate in Asian theater.  But after completing all of his doctoral requirements except the dissertation, he left graduate school, having decided that doing theater was more interesting and important than studying it.  He took over Broom Street Theater at age 28.

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After our acting company’s focus shifted to creating a satire of Marjorie Morningstar, our daily rehearsals settled into a pattern for the summer.  Joel would distribute a few new pages of typed script that he had written the day before, and we would rehearse the new scenes, occasionally after having revisited previous scenes that he wished to edit or sharpen.  While I had read Wouk’s novel to gain a sense of the story and its major plotlines, that was not much help in the face of our playwright’s daily script pages.

The biting satire in the scenes was evident–these were not Herman Wouk’s lines–and the acting was often hyperbolic, sometimes to the point of slapstick.  Individually and together, the scenes skewered conventional middle-class aspirations as well as the pursuit of art as a means to celebrity stardom.  Neither were religious traditions exempt from this examination, as in an extended scene of Marjorie’s brother’s  bar mitzvah.  While our version remained a story of Marjorie’s ambition and her (ultimately failed) love of the rakish Noel Airman (Saul Ehrmann), it also contained a measure of gratuitous violence, especially in a scene in which her Uncle Samson-Aaron–in Wouk’s book her protector against the seductions of Airman–sexually assaults Marjorie.

As with all of his plays, he intended ours to discomfort the audience both physically and mentally:  to confound their expectations, to challenge the taken-for-granted, and to highlight hypocrisy in everyday social life and norms with cutting satire.  “We ask ourselves, what are the audience’s expectations,” he said in a 1976 newspaper interview.²  “Then we figure out how NOT to give them what they want.  There is no middle ground.  We take an extreme point of view and our shows provoke strong reactions.”

Joel regarded all of his plays as political works, even those that had no apparent political content, such as Marjorie Morningstar.  That is how he saw all of theater.  Neil Simon comedies were political, for example, because they implicitly normalized harsh political and economic realities by narcotizing people against them with hilarity.  He saw experimental theater as the means for attacking conventional theater’s–and his audiences’–complicity in accepting corrupt social institutions.³

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One day, during a break in rehearsal, I absent-mindedly started fooling around with my Donald Duck voice.  Joel caught it and immediately said, “We’ve got to use that!”  A few days later he showed up with new script pages that contained a scene in which I played the master of ceremony of Marjorie’s graduation from Hunter College, recognizing her achievements and those of her classmates as I handed them their diplomas one-by-one.  My extended monologue in the scene was to be spoken entirely in my duck voice.  Perhaps as a reward, Joel let me write the lines for this scene.  And so to Marjorie I quacked:  “Marjorie Morningstar, for four years you have been the exemplary Hunter student:  A drab participant in a pointless academic charade, inane work in the dramatic arts, supple achievement in an assortment of drawing rooms, and various other impertinences.”

Joel thought the scene was hilarious, his cackle never more energetic.  I thought it would bomb in front of audiences.

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The rehearsals of two other scenes stand out in my memory.   In one, I was playing the role of Mr. Teichman, a drama teacher in a course that Marjorie was taking in college.  Joel wanted me to enter the classroom in a flamboyant way, and directed me to trot across the stage, then jump, followed by a few more steps to my position in front of the class.  The move sounded simple enough until I tried it.  And tried it again.  And again.  Each time, and ever more loudly, he said, “NO!  That’s not IT!  TRY AGAIN.”  Continuously adjusting the dynamics of my jump for each trial, I failed at them all.  Finally, frustrated and embarrassed at failing in front of my castmates at what sounded like such an easy move, for the only time in the company I yelled at Joel.  “ALRIGHT, JOEL!  YOU COME UP HERE AND SHOW ME HOW TO DO IT!”

I was pretty athletic, and I had observed that Joel was not.  As I yelled at him I was thinking:  “Let him come up here and share a bit of humiliation with me.  Put his body in the air.  Then maybe he will shut up or improve his direction of the move.”  Of course he refused the “invitation,” and simply told me to try yet again.  Perhaps my audition came back to mind, but what I then did was turn the jump into a ballet leap.  And finally, in his characteristic fashion when he saw what he wanted, he yelled, “THAT’S IT!”   And we all moved on.

The other scene displayed Marjorie losing her virginity to Noel.  The scene was nasty and brutal in blasting sexual conventions.  It was grotesque.  Joel had privately developed the scene outside of rehearsal with our actors playing the two leads, Marjorie and Noel, and he simply had them show us the scene at the next rehearsal.  The five others of us were mortified, even horrified, at the scene.  Virtually in unison, we all told Joel firmly that we could not include that scene in the play.  The two actors playing the scene agreed with the rest of us.  “Over the top” does not accurately capture the problem the actors saw in the scene.  It was disgusting.

The loud argument went on for a while.  No one altered her or his view.  The scene stayed in.

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By the end of the summer we had finished the play.  And just in time.  The final scenes were rushed in, and the last pieces of Marjorie’s journey were compacted compared to the earlier, more fully drawn ones.  But we had a complete show.

In all the show comprised some 70 scenes with a running time of two hours.  In the Broom Street Theater fashion, all seven actors would be in every scene (there were few costume changes), either as a human, a horse or dinner entrée, a piece of furniture, a door or a wall.  We were the set design for many scenes, and the blocking for the show was complicated.

There would be no intermission.

My roles in the show had some range to them.  I played Marjorie’s immigrant father (and so had the first scene in the show:  swimming up to Liberty Island before collapsing at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, exclaiming “Amer-ee-kah!!!); Dan Kadane and Irving Kalfus (two of Marjorie’s early boyfriends); Uncle Sampson-Aaron (yes, with the assault scene); Mr. Teichman, the drama teacher; Peter Ferris, a Broadway producer; the aforementioned graduation ceremony MC; the Master Builder (in the Ibsen play of the same name); a Hunter College German teacher; three different men reading in faux Hebrew from the Torah at Marjorie’s brother’s bar mitzvah; Prince Charming, the horse; Guy Flamm, a Broadway producer; Milton Schwartz, one of Marjorie’s suitors.

I also played several walls, a carved entrance door to a Chinese restaurant, and its restaurant table at which Noel and Marjorie enjoyed a lobster dinner.

The final week of August we did five full run-throughs of the play, two with dress rehearsals.  In his instructions to us for that week, Joel wrote:  “ANY ATTEMPT TO CANCEL A REHEARSAL FOR ANY REASON WILL RESULT IN THE CANCELLATION OF OUR TRIP TO SEATTLE.  NO EXCUSES.”

He was in mid-season form.  So were we.

End of Part 2

1. Howard Waxman, “Gersmann Of Broom Street Part I”, The Isthmus, October 8–14, 1976, pp. 3, 5.  Madison, Wisconsin.[↩]
2. Howard Waxman, “Gersmann of Broom Street–Part II: Thoughts From the Director,” Isthmus, Oct. 15-21, 1976, p. 8. Madison, Wisconsin.[↩]
3. See Waxman, “Gersmann of Broom Street, Part I, 1976.[↩]