On Making Off: Misadventures Off-Off Broadway by Randy Anderson

Author:Randy Anderson [Anderson, Randy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781461041689
Amazon: 1461041686
Publisher: CreateSpace
Published: 2011-04-19T07:00:00+00:00

Two weeks before opening and four weeks into rehearsals, the actress playing Fire-Food called me from a payphone near some basketball courts in Chelsea.

“Randy, I really need your help,” she pleaded. “I’m at a pay phone by the basketball courts on 22nd Street. What are you doing right now?”

She was clearly upset, but why was she at a basketball court?

“What’s going on?”

“I just really need your help. Can you meet up with me? I don’t know what I’m doing.”

I wanted to say, “You’re playing Fire-Food, how hard can that be? Just burn and eat baby, burn and eat!” But I knew better than to tease a desperate woman. Instead, I agreed to meet her at court number three, wherever that was.

When I arrived, she was sitting on a park bench, slumped over, mumbling incoherently. If I didn’t recognize her, I’d have sworn she was a crazy homeless woman.

“Well, it looks like you’ve got this part nailed,” I said, sitting next to her.

“Randy, thank God you’re here. Help me! I’m so confused. I don’t know where I fit into this play! I keep asking Lolly, and she keeps talking about nourishment and how I fuel life.”

“And fire…” I interrupt. “The fire is death. How you take life away.”

“Yes! And while that makes perfect sense when we talk about it, I don’t know how that’s supposed to justify my presence on stage.”

She stood up, looked around, paranoid, and whispered, as if the pigeons contained recording devices, “I mean, what am I doing in this play?”

Her eyes were crazy. She had a hopeless look I read as the first move toward walking away from the project. A jolt of dread shot through me.

By this time, I no longer had faith that Lolly could bring reason to this Fire-Food business. Fire-Food was dragging the play into a performance-art realm not unlike watching naked lesbians smear peanut butter on one breast, jelly on the other, and...

But I couldn’t tell this to Fire-Food. A civil war was breaking out inside The Beggars Group, with Fire-Food as the wild card that kept everyone off balance. The perfect distraction, Fire-Food was like an alien spaceship landing in the field at the battle of Gettysburg. The North and the South still wanted to kill each other, but what the hell was that round metal object floating off the ground over there?

If Fire-Food left, the play might take a turn for the better, but then Lolly and The Girls would be forced to reconcile their differences, a process I was certain would end badly. I had to preserve this delicate balance for the sake of the play. So, I rolled up my sleeves and dug in.

We worked for two hours: reciting poems, running around the court, screaming at the top of our lungs, doing cartwheels. We did sense-memory exercises, improv games, and after we had tried everything we could think of, we sat on the bench to catch our breath.

“Randy, I feel so much better. Right now, anyway.”

“Yeah, that was fun.

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