How I Survived My Twenties
Founding Ensemble member Joy Gregory reflects for a beatFrom The Hephaestus Issue of ArtAntica  “You should fall into this work as though you are falling in love.” Jerzy Grotowski, Towards a Poor Theatre “Dude, it’s not Pittsborough.” David Catlin, after I insisted that Edinburgh be pronounced ‘Edinborough’ rather than ‘Edinburg.’ We were the hot shit show at N.U. Even the program was cool – it opened from the middle, not the right edge, like a storm cellar or barn doors or a new life. The opening cut right across a xeroxed photo of the six of us – Andy White, Larry DiStasi, Sara Lehman, me, Alan Goldwasser and David Catlin – standing in our dare-to-call-me-a-dork overalls and carefully deadpan expressions (because deadpan equals authentic, you know). It all started with a book of photographs by Richard Avedon of a 70’s New York adaptation of Alice In Wonderland by the Manhattan Project, directed by Andre Gregory. The skinny 70’s actors, seemingly whittled by passion and discipline, were authenticity itself, jamming food into their faces, falling off of a heap of wooden chairs, screaming, weeping, creating forests with umbrellas. The guy holding the book was David Schwimmer, and months later under David’s direction we were performing our own adaptation of Alice In Wonderland in the Great Room at Jones Residential College which was basically just a room, if not great. But what we were doing was great, at least the student audiences seemed to think so, our acting teacher David Downs thought so, and after months of sweaty rehearsals, we definitely thought so. Mainly what I wanted to do, though, was make sure Adam Buhler thought so. Adam Buhler was the guy who stomped on my heart and left me gasping for air and dressing in black for at least a year after casually ditching me one afternoon before an Alice rehearsal. I later learned I was thrown over for Amy Osborne, a freshman who was way more committed to the Gothic look than I would ever be with her black Lulu bob and intricate, webby ensembles. Since Amy lived in Jones Residential College and was a theater major, chances seemed good that she’d drag Adam, who hated theater and thought I was doing a children’s show, to see Alice. And then something would happen. I didn’t know what, exactly, but somehow, by seeing my exposed, beating heart in this most excellent, hot shit show, He Would Know. We started Alice behind a paper curtain, clinging to each other’s shoulders and breathing together before bursting through the paper as a writhing, hissing Jabberwocky monster thingie. I managed to pretty much forget about Adam at that point, except for one moment when I went out into the audience to look for the Cheshire Cat and came upon the two of them, Adam and Amy, with their matching A names and their matching black hair dye, staring up at me. I ducked quickly back into the play and didn’t surface again until the last moment, when Alice returns to the riverbank where she fell asleep and I paused one heartbeat, two heartbeats, three, then gasped awake. Then the lights went out and people clapped and we took a bow. When I was five years old I presented my mother with a hand-picked bouquet of flowers and she looked at it and asked why the stems were so short. It’s never quite what you’re hoping for when you expose your beating heart, is it? When I found Adam after the show he said, “That…wasn’t at all what I thought it was going to be.” Then he followed Amy off to her room. A few months later we transferred Alice to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival where we were to perform on Mondays and Tuesdays at 11 am. In a meeting room in a church. Far from the center of town. Undaunted, we gamely plunged from our heap of wooden chairs, stuffed food in our faces, screamed, cried and made forest umbrellas. Audiences, however, proved to be underwhelmed. As probably most would be at 11 am. This meant that every afternoon was spent performing in the crowded streets to try to hustle up tomorrow morning’s audience – standing in statue positions, shouting scenes above the din, anything to get people to stop long enough to thrust a flyer into their hands. Still, our audiences remained small and very, very quiet. Were we hot shit? No, we were not. But on Tuesday morning at 8 am, ironing my Alice dress for the morning show (and smelling cooked egg that I hadn’t quite washed out from yesterday’s Humpty Dumpty scene), I think I experienced something I didn’t know at the time was happiness. I had my gang. They were passionate and whittled and would never dump me for someone with a cooler haircut. They knew my beating heart when they saw it and they would always catch me at the bottom of any rabbit hole. They were, for the most part, people I’d been looking for my entire life. At the end of the Edinburgh festival, everyone paired off in twos and threes and disappeared into Europe and the U.K. As it happened, I ended up in a rented car with another N.U. student from a comedy improv show, Stephen Colbert, who kept me laughing with endless Jackie Stewart commentary on our trip and impromptu performances of Shakespeare or Harry Lennix as Pontius Pilate in a recent school production of Jesus Christ, Superstar. One night while I was driving Stephen said somewhat ominously, “Pull over.” Fearing a flat tire or dead animal or worse, I pulled to a crunching stop. “Get out of the car.” I did. “Lay down.” I lay next to Stephen on the ticking hood of the car and looked up – and stretched out above us was the most defined, magnificent view of the milky way I’d ever seen before or since. It was like seeing every vertebra in a spine of stars. I felt a million light years from heartbreak with literally the universe spread out before me, opening from the middle like a storm cellar or barn doors or a new life. One hearbeat, two heartbeats, three… |
|
