A Series in Four Parts
[See Part 1 here, Part 2 here]
We left Madison August 28, 1976, nine people in a white van pulling a trailer with our props, costumes, clothing and camping gear. We would average almost 500 miles a day over four days, and camp in tents three nights along the way at such locations as Billings, MT, and Coeur d’Alene, ID. Our technical director, John Miller, did most of the driving. In the rows of seats sat Joel and six of the actors: Kelly Henderson, Max(ine) Fleckner, Melanie Sax, Frank Furillo, Gary Aylesworth, and Adrienne Rabinowitz. I resided mostly on the platform behind the seats, at the very back of the van.
I hadn’t been consigned to that space. I had asked for it.
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This was because I imagined that it would be a calmer space in which I could do the other work I had before me. While the nearly two-week trip would be a nice “vacation” from my day job as a research assistant in the first year of a three-year study of corporate crime in America (much of the time spent in the stacks of the University’s Law Library), I was facing a major qualifying examination (on the topic of organizations theory and research) for the Ph.D. degree ten days after I returned from Seattle. So I had brought with me a pile of books and articles to study during the trip. However, the utter dryness of this particular material combined with the occasional madness in the van to stunt my academic progress.
The day we drove through Montana I was studying my materials in the back of the van when I smelled marijuana smoke. That got my attention. I didn’t know who was smoking it, and I had only one concern about it. To interrupt the buzz of talk, I raised my voice and said, “DOES ANYONE KNOW WHAT THE LAW ON MARIJUANA IS IN THIS STATE?” No one did. I didn’t either. But I had learned a thing or two in my graduate study of law and criminology, and I said this: “Well,” I told my fellow travelers, “in a good number of states the penalty for mere possession of marijuana is years in the state prison. In Texas you can get a life sentence for possession. Anyone interested in risking the next decade or more living here in a cell?”1  I also knew that as a group of largely 20-somethings, dressed and shorn like a gaggle of wandering hippies in an out-of-state van, we were more likely than most vehicles on the road to draw the attention of the state police. Just because.
I was relieved when the odor disappeared a few minutes later, never to return on the trip.
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Camping on the trip was enjoyable. Even as the unofficial oddball in the group, I enjoyed the comradery as we pitched our camps, cooked, ate, and told stories to each other. While we were moving our gear out of the trailer the first evening that we camped, outside Jamestown, ND, I heard the familiar, nasal New Jersey voice petition me: “Peter! I don’t know how to set up the tent. Show me!” It was the first notice I had that I was to be Joel’s roommate for the trip.
The trip back to Madison was also memorable. Camping at Yellowstone National Park and visiting its geysers was a special treat. The last night out was something altogether different, however. We were camped near a lake, and after dinner we strolled over to lakeside with two bottles of cheer, one whiskey, one tequila. We passed the bottles around and told stories until dark. Then we repaired to our tents for the night.
I don’t remember the repairing. Or anything at all from our lakeside confab after the first 40 minutes or so. For the first and last time in my life, I got so drunk that I was out on my feet (and very sick for our last day on the road). But my castmates told me that I had been hilarious at the lake. They were quite gleeful about it. Apparently, I pretty much took over the conversation with some comic spiel from my subconscious. I wish I had heard it.
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Seattle: The Work Continues.  We arrived at our destination on the final day of August. Arrangements had been made for us to room in various apartments of young actors living in Seattle. I was less surprised this time to find that Joel and I were again to live together in a male actor’s lovely apartment in a large house. I slept on the floor in my sleeping bag in the living room. Joel slept on the dining room floor.
One morning there I awoke only to find Joel sitting on the floor next to me, quietly staring at me, about three feet between our faces. Too groggy to even think about what he was doing, I said grouchily, “Get away from me, Joel.” He did. And that was that.
That our group was scattered around the city made Joel anxious, perhaps more so given his obsessiveness. He addressed this anxiety with a long and detailed typewritten memo of instructions to us all. There were 13 numbered instructions and more than a few statements in ALL CAPS. And there was a bit of redundancy in his rulings, as in the following:
4. On any given day, no one, NO ONE, may go anywhere until all the theater work for the day has been completed. We are going to Seattle to work and to present professional theater to an audience unfamiliar with BST. It is important we present quality work.
5. No one may make advance plans to go anywhere in Seattle. NO ONE. Meetings and rehearsals come first.
Joel also put fines in place for lateness: $1 for every five minutes a cast member could not be found when the technical director arrived to pick him or her up at the house they were staying in, $1 a minute for being late to call prior to a performance. That was no chump change in those days and for us young cast members.
In our first few days in Seattle, before the Alternative Theater Festival began, we did three full run-through rehearsals of the show. We also attended a house party sponsored by the Festival for the companies of the four participating theaters. At one notable moment I found myself in conversation with one of Sam Shepard’s Los Angeles actors, a stereotypically tall, dark and handsome male no less. After saying that I was with Broom Street, he asked me whether I was an actor. I replied that while I was in the show, I wasn’t really an actor, but instead a sociology graduate student in Madison.
Well, he wasn’t having it. Before my eyes he grew to about eight feet tall, all the better to look down his nose at me with a contempt I could see boiling over in his towering nostrils. It was a short convo. (P.S.: Shepard’s play at the festival, Angel City, starring his then-wife, O-Lan Shepard, was quite good.)
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The Premier of Marjorie Morningstar.  With my fellow cast members I stood backstage awaiting the first performance of our show that September 5, which was to begin in several minutes. The theater was full, with some 500 people in the audience, many of them actors from the Seattle area. Kelly approached me to ask why I didn’t “look nervous. This is your first show and you’ve never done one before.”
Until he asked, I had not been aware that I wasn’t nervous about performing, nor that I should be. Part of the reason must have been that, with all of our summer rehearsals and run-throughs, the show–despite its length and complexity–had been drilled into my muscle memory. But that’s not what came to mind when I replied to him. Instead, I told Kelly that in those final, quiet backstage moments I was in fact anxious, because my mind had turned to the written doctoral exam I was facing soon after we returned to Madison. I figured that I was likely to fail it, given my weak preparation, and I was trying to game out how to handle that eventuality. In fact, I was relieved when we seven passed through the curtain and began our show.
Overall our performance went well. There were no important gaffes, and the audience seemed engaged by the show.
I remember only one specific moment, one that briefly startled me. After I had finished my duck monologue at Marjorie’s college graduation ceremony, I immediately moved to my position as part of a wall for the next scene, my back to the audience. A split second later I became aware of a low rumble in the theater, but I could not tell from where it came. Then it grew, eventually to a thunderous level, freezing the next scene for several moments. Only then did it dawn on me: hundreds of people in their seats were pounding on the wooden floorboards with their feet–for the duck/graduation scene.
Joel had been right.
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Broom Street Theater actors never took bows or curtain calls at the end of shows. Instead, we simply disappeared behind the stage curtain, to the audience’s applause. However, the theater reviewer for Seattle’s major newspaper, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, had no applause for the show. Reportedly, he left in the middle of the performance, and later wrote this in his review for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer: “Director Joel Gersmann needs a director, and writer Joel Gersmann needs a writer.”
Naturally, Joel was unfazed. The criticism only reinforced his views of theater as political art. And offended audience members walking out in the middle of his plays never disturbed him. The reviewer’s take seemed not to be shared with the Seattle audiences, who gave us standing ovations at the end of each of our two performances.
Immediately after the show a good number of Seattle’s young actors came backstage to discuss with us what they had just seen. One guy, about my age, approached eagerly, his smiling eyes wide with wonder, to ask me: “How do you guys do that?!? All that work for two hours straight on stage! How do you have the energy?”
I hadn’t thought about that, about our endurance, but it was true that I was neither tired nor winded after the show, nor after any of our performances that followed that fall. I answered that our long preparation for the show had worked us all into top physical shape, much as I had experienced during my last high school basketball season. This was a benefit of our rigorous theater work that I had not anticipated.
End of Part 3
- In fact I was off a bit here. In 1973, my first year in grad school, Texas had changed its law that had provided for a life sentence for possession of marijuana. At the time of our 1976 trip, Texas’ revised law provided for up to six months incarceration for possession of up to 2 ounces, but a sharp increase to two to 10 years in prison for possession of two or more ounces.[↩]
Your story is growing on me! Now I can’t wait to read Part 4! By the way, I assume you passed your exams even after your “weak” preparation which is amazing in itself. I have never known anyone else who was so engaged in extra curricular artistic pursuits while preparing for doctoral exams……..I always knew you were special……