Litter (Part 2) by David Schmader
In my family, we didn't have prayers. My parents were both raised Catholic and emerged from the experience with near-opposite responses. My dad was schooled by nuns, and carries on a sort of light, nonchurchgoing compliance, built on a vague, unwavering faith in a heavenly father who knows and sees and cares what we do, and nightly prayers before bed. My mom attended public school and weekly mass and came out a pure atheist, and her renunciation was far more emphatic than my dad's belief.
His prayers were a private affair—I knew nothing of them until my mom mentioned them in passing last year—and they seem like the spiritual parallel of his habit of unplugging appliances before vacation: a comforting final step, and better safe than sorry. My mom's atheism was less demure, expressed primarily through the ladylike snorts she'd emit at the newspaper or TV whenever Texas's ruling class of Christians did something too stupid to ignore.
I felt her pain, but remain unable to share her resolve. It doesn't matter if it's existence or nonexistence—anyone who claims to know anything definitive about God is some kind of butthole, and atheism has grown to strike me as simply the least repellant form of fundamentalism. Atheists don't like it when you say this, but for me, the mere fact of our capacity to invent and revere such intricate concepts of God is enough to make me at least agnostic—and yes, casting the ability to invent God as proof of God is deeply iffy, but that's God for you.
Anyway, between dad's compliance and mom's denial, my parents forged a middle path for my spiritual education, illuminated by nothing more or less than the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, a philosophy of self-obsession that instills a basic understanding of the validity of others, and a reasonable starting point for every human.
By leaving God out of the equation, my parents undoubtedly believed they were doing me a favor. My mother in particular noticed my potential for gay at an early age—I was sensitive and expressive and worshipful of “The Wizard of Oz”—and her shielding me from the mindfucks of the Bible was a heroically maternal act.
Still, our family resided in America, and while my parents restricted his presence in our home, God was bound to cross my path out and about. This was El Paso, in the early '80s, and God's name was forever popping up in song lyrics and pledges of allegiance and the weird upper reaches of our TV dial. God was a prominent component in the lives of friends and relatives, some of whom were regular churchgoers and spoke of God as a kindly if demanding grandfather. This didn't confuse me. God was like Aerosmith—just because I wasn't into them didn't mean they didn't exist.
But over time, the idea that God was for other people coalesced into something more sinister, a worldview placing God on one side and me on the other, our only connection a mutual antagonism. This mythic bit of drama-queenery was characteristic of my station in life, which hinged on the elemental agony of consciousness: Not only was I a gay kid in Texas, I knew I was a gay kid in Texas, with the realization of the fact quickly followed by the grim understanding of what the fact meant, saddling me with some heavy existential issues before middle school.
The facts as I understood them:
1. My natural—some would say God-given—feelings made me as what was called a
homosexual;
2. Being a homosexual—as I'd glommed from various cues from the world around
me—was reprehensible, worthy of at least pity and at most violent disdain;
3. My best bet was to be the least reprehensible homosexual I could be.
The key to my success was to avoid detection—if no one knew, no one could act upon the knowledge—and I devoted myself to constructing an elaborate internal filtration system, designed to snuff out incriminating behavior en route from urge to expression. If this sounds like a one-way ticket to a completely artificial personality, eureka. Mine was a self-correcting system that advanced in intricacy daily; new rules took root as soon as they were conceived. When speaking, keep the voice low in pitch and volume; when gesturing, keep hands beneath the collarbone. Enthusiasm for anything was a girlish red flag, better replaced with a masculine reserve that brought with it a necessary dumbification, which sucked, but using multisyllabic words seemed like wearing a Carmen Miranda fruit hat, and for the protections of homogeneity I downgraded my report card from flaming As to butcher Bs.
No one escapes the challenges of childhood, and overcoming our formative horrors is a key step on the road to becoming responsible, sane, attractive adults. What distinguishes the gay childhood mindfuck is its depth of origin. What we're dealing with are deep, elemental urges—gut feelings—which make themselves known as all gut feelings do, through slow explosions of absolute fact. I love my grandma. Pizza is delicious. I would like to kiss Darren from “Bewitched” on the lips. There's little choice involved in such gut feelings, and no arguing: These are the facts of your life, and piecing such facts into a harmonious whole is the great work of childhood, and maybe every stage of life.
But harmony's hard to come by when one of your deepest natural urges is branded an aberration. That one of my gut feelings was corrupt made all my gut feelings suspect, a crude bit of math that left me fundamentally rudderless. Lacking a trustworthy internal barometer, I gauged my behavior by the responses of others, making the creepy transformation made by so many kids for so many reasons, from a normal natural kid to a little politician, whose behavior is determined not by honest expression but the pursuit of a desired effect. The result was an amalgamation of pre-approved gestures that represented my personality, and the desired effect was an ineffable feeling of safety, of doing things right, that arose when I struck the perfect balance of self-expression and self-critique, showing as much of myself as possible without revealing anything to make someone drag me to death behind a truck.
This feeling of safety was sporadic through my preteen years, but soon after adolescence I stumbled upon a veritable safe haven, where I found an acceptance and camaraderie I'd given up on, a hiding place where so many queers had hidden before me: high school drama club.
Perhaps you're thinking: Isn't a gay kid hiding in drama club kind of like a Jew hiding in a Klezmer band? Yes, but “hiding” isn't the right word. What drama club provided was context, a social setting where those of us required by circumstance to develop plastic personalities could exist without shame, in a world where the ability to replicate and modulate behavior wasn't evidence of incriminating emotional damage but a talent to be developed, shared, applauded and rewarded.
At my school, there were three levels of “drama club,” demanding varying degrees of commitment. First was the all-school production, an annual event designed to parade as many kids as possible across the stage, typically through a classic three-girls-to-every-boy musical like “Bye Bye Birdie.” Then there was the official Drama Club, built for kids with a special interest in dramatics, who auditioned, were cast in and performed two or three full-length plays a year—typically, four-girls-to-every-boy dramadies like “Steel Magnolias.” Finally there was Speech & Drama, a full-immersion, highly competitive lifestyle choice involving daily training, weekend tournaments and summer camp, and it was here I pitched my figurative tent in high school.
My particular strain of speech and drama fell under the banner of “Interp,” short for interpretation. There was Dramatic Interpretation and Humorous Interpretation, both of which involved 10-minute cuttings from theatrical texts—in Dramatic, popular faves were Edward Albee and Marsha Norman; in Humorous, Neil Simon and Christopher Durang. This 10-minute cutting would then be performed by a high-school student, alone, with his or her feet planted to the floor, no movement allowed below the waist. Different characters were delineated through vocal inflections, facial expressions, and waist-up hand gestures, and dialogue was achieved through dueling focal points. For example: You don't understand. No, you don't understand!
Through these means could a gangly postadolescent transform him- or herself into an impressive 10-minute blast of “'Night, Mother” or “The Odd Couple” or, in my case, “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”
MAGGIE: Brick, how long does it have to go on? Haven't I served my term, can't I apply for a—pardon.
BRICK: Just do it, Maggie.
MAGGIE: Do—what?
BRICK: Take a lover.
BIG MAMA: Brick! What's this door doin', locked, faw?
MAGGIE: Big Mama, Brick is dressin'…
Subtlety was in short supply in the world of interp. Old people talked like this, ladies talked like this, and accents were delivered via sledgehammer. On weekends, those of us enthralled by interp gathered from near and far for Official Tournaments, where we'd compete to see whose one-person rendition of a 10-minute cutting of a great American play was The Best. Top placers qualified for state then national competition, with the whole cycle, including interp-intensive summer camps, filling the majority of the year.
This was my life throughout high school, and looking back fills me with a feeling that wavers between paralyzing embarrassment and pity. The very pursuit of excellence in interp was a double-edged sword: Like yodeling or speaking Klingon, the better you were at it, the stupider you looked. The official competitions were from outer space, blending the creepiness of child beauty pageants with the pretension of performance art into the kinkiest scene I've ever been a part of. Adding pathos to the equation: The unusual but real brilliance achieved by the best of the interp freaks, whose talents, however perverse, were undeniable. Case in point: Ashley Thomas's “Death of a Salesman,” performed at National finals in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, 1987. I don't care how ridiculous it sounds—that girl was Willy Loman.
But like all good safe havens, mine came with an eviction date: graduation, after which those of us who'd spent the past four years honing our abilities to impersonate three-quarters of the cast of “Angels in America” had to make some tough decisions.
Those set on higher education had essentially three options. Option one involved funneling the theatrical dream into a reasonable real-life vocation—say, majoring in communications at a state university. Option two involved sustaining the theatrical dream while buttressing it with a sensible safety net—say, majoring in drama with a minor in some resume-friendly discipline like sociology. The ultimate option: Fucking go for it. Insist, at the age of 18, that your value as an artist cannot be denied and must be nurtured in an elite conservatory setting—a professional actors training program, of which there are roughly a half dozen in the U.S., from New York City's Juilliard School to Pittsburgh's Carnegie-Mellon University to Seattle's Cornish College of the Arts.
The very question of how to proceed struck me like a dare. Was I a dabbler, or was I was for real? Thanks to my plastic gifts, I had few good ideas about who I was or what qualified as “real,” so I left it up to God. I wish I were speaking figuratively. Despite my parents' banishment of Him from our home, God managed to get his hooks in me. Some might suggest I invented a God who created my suffering just so I wouldn't have to go through it alone; others might point to my aforementioned mistrust of gut feelings, which even secular humanists might consider internal signposts of God, and if gut feelings were the enemy then God was the enemy—all of which made the issue of praying, of wanting something so badly you felt compelled to register your desire with the universe, deeply convoluted.
What I wanted was to continue with the life I'd been living for the past four years, the dream life fostered by Interp, where the ability to replicate behavior was an art and a calling, not a phase to outgrow. I wanted to continue believing the story that said all this intricate fakery was adding up to something real. I wanted to gain entry to the professional actors training program at the North Carolina School of the Arts, one of Juilliard's country cousins. As with all professional actor training programs, competition for admittance to NCSA was intense—a fact publicized heavily by the schools, for reasons that would reveal themselves later.
For now all I knew is I'd be one of 1,200 auditioners competing for 34 slots in NCSA's freshman class of 1987, and if I were a praying man, I would have begged God for help, but how do you pray to your enemy? Reverse psychology, asking for the opposite, to foil His foiling of me? “Dear God, please don't let me get into the North Carolina School of the Arts…”
A more reality-based applicant might have wrestled the situation down from the cosmos, prepped a Plan B, or applied to more than one school. Not me—the response to my one and only drama school audition was a referendum on my existence, with the universe deciding how or even if I'd be allowed to proceed. This was another product of the voodoo thinking of my youth: an inability to plan for or even really conceive of a future. According to my calculations, planning for the future was a one-way ticket to misery. Planning for the future was not just counting your chickens before they hatched, it was selling tickets to a ticker-tape parade celebrating the hatching of your forthcoming chickens, and I foiled the insta-jinx of optimism by never expecting anything.
But to get into drama school, I had to do more than expect, or hope—I had to Want It, and make the depth of my desire clear at my audition, which consisted of contrasting monologues and a song performed for a panel of North Carolina School of the Arts representatives.
My drama school prayers were answered in the affirmative, via an acceptance letter that literally made me jump up and down in the street. And while what resulted from my answered prayers wasn't officially a tragedy, I imagine “Answered Prayers and Other Eternal Mindfucks” wouldn't look as good on press materials.
Anyway, the universe had spoken, and I was to spend the next four years steeping myself in the ancient art of the theater—eight hours a day, five days a week, for four years if I was lucky. Along with competitive admission, the pro-actor programs prided themselves on rigorous cuts; by junior year, our freshman class of 36 would be whittled down to 16, with those deemed too thick or slow in their apprehension of the ancient arts banished. The effect was jarring: As one hand stroked us for our extraordinary gifts, the other hovered above with the threat of the cut, creating an environment filled with people with inflated egos who were insecure wrecks, and the closest thing to a cult I've ever experienced.
Freshman year was devoted, in its entirety, to the development of our theatrical instruments, and days were a tangle of movement classes, posture classes, dance classes, breathing classes, voice classes and special workshops in Alexander technique. Our theatrical gifts were strictly to be developed, not deployed, and freshmen were forbidden from speaking a single line of written text. Text would be addressed as sophomores, after a year of intense development had rendered our acting instruments as tender as veal; for now, we would deal only with theater's raw materials, breath and movement. I spent the majority of the year in a leotard.
Fresh out of high school, with little real-life experience to calibrate my expectations, I might be excused for accepting a life devoted to diaphragm exercises and contact improv as a reasonable pursuit. But the majority of my classmates were in their 20s and early 30s, and came to NCSA after attending other colleges and pursuing professional acting and their tuition was not fronted by parents and God knows how they squared themselves with our year spent stretching and grunting nonsense syllables.
The whole world of the professional actors training program was shrouded in a mysticism that all but squelched rational thought. Nothing about the place was rational—a fact the school addressed in annual lectures, where invited arts professionals would tell students in no uncertain terms that what we were doing was stupid. “Only three out of every fifty of you will ever make a penny acting,” the haggard casting director would wheeze, ostensibly to stoke our competitiveness, and spark the actor equivalent of the “eye of the tiger.” But looking back I wonder if these warnings weren't antilitigation maneuvers, designed to protect professional actor training programs from lawsuits when their trained actors found their alleged professions didn't necessarily exist.
The ridiculous risk only added to the magic, which was in the air we breathed. What we were learning was as old as time and as fresh as our next out breath. We were channelers of ancient spirits and creators of new realities, and without a doubt, our work was sacred. Keeping this dream afloat required not just magic, but magic layered upon magic, with each of the competing magics boasting their proponents on faculty.
On one side was Cigdem, an impossibly glamorous Turkish woman whose intelligence, intensity and ageless hotness suggested a brunette Helen Mirren. We'd all heard tales of Cigdem's stature as “the Meryl Streep of Turkey.” This was before she came to Winston-Salem—a town named after two cigarettes—to teach acting for money. This was also pre-Internet, so we couldn't just Google her and learn she'd actually been the voice of, say, Turkey's favorite cartoon burro, so we took her reputation as fact, which was easy, as Cigdem was one of the most charismatic people I've ever been exposed to. For Cigdem, acting was a mystical privilege, drawing down the wisdom of history through a human vessel, and her classes involved moving through space, endless moving through space, feeling for the theatrical impulse, an invisible wire of transmission that would power us beyond mimicry into creation, or something.
At the other end of the spectrum was Marty, a walrus of a man from New York state and a veritable hippie Stanislavski. Marty indoctrinated us in a gritty Method acting that rejected Cigdem's magical imaginative empathy for a straight-up bait and switch. For example: Let's say we have an actor aiming to replicate an emotional experience—say, a parent responding to the loss of a child. In Cigdem's world, this actor would seek to forge a mystical connection to the parent in all of us, drawing on the mythic experience of loss, while in Marty's camp, the actor would start by identifying his or her closest comparable real-life experience—the loss of a dog, or a grandma—then recalling this memory onstage, presenting the emotions brought up by this real-life event as the emotions felt by the character.
These were the dueling creation myths of the NCSA drama program. Confronted with conflicting theories, some students balked; they'd come here for answers, not riddles. But to me the conflicting theories seemed like the point—learning to survey the available options and decide what's best for a given situation, or maybe I was just whipped by the drama-school mysticism, which answered questions with questions and presented oxymorons as the deepest truths.
The deepest riddle of all was what all this effort and development and study was adding up to—the dream of the well trained actor, ready and able to meet all your professional acting needs, just give me a moment to find the portal to the collective unconscious or drudge up a memory of my dead dog. Professional actor training programs measure their success by the success of alumni; at NCSA, the alumnus names worth dropping belong to Tom Hulce, Oscar-nominated actor for “Amadeus”, and Mary-Louise Parker, Emmy-winning star of the TV series “Weeds,” whose names and photos adorn all NCSA recruitment materials. Left unmentioned is the fact that neither Tom Hulce nor Mary-Louise Parker is an NCSA graduate; both were cut after their sophomore years, and their post-rejection success is their own. “They didn't need training,” went the common explanation, but there was no avoiding the unspoken moral: acting schools don't necessarily create actors—they create acting students.
The limitations of the conservatory setting were made particularly clear for us during our junior year, when my surviving classmates and I were deemed sufficiently developed to work with visiting artists. This year, it was a real-live New York City director, in his mid-30s, who led us through a two-day monologue workshop devoted to acting on camera. On day one, we were given our monologue texts, one for the male students, one for the female students. The men's text was a young veteran's first-person account of war; the women's text was a young woman's first-person account of rape. Given 24 hours to prepare, we attacked the pieces with all the dramatic tools we had, and on day number two, we came together to perform our monologues for the camera. One after another we sat there and tore our guts out, the men reliving the moment in the trench when a burst of bullets tore through our buddy's chest, the women staggering through their accounts of a brutal sexual assault—“and then, they held me down, and, you know, raped me!”—it was like the Emoting Olympics, each of us trying to Go There more truthfully than the others; by the end, we were exhausted.
That's when the director wheeled out a TV/VCR combo, suggesting that perhaps we'd now watch our freshly recorded performances. The truth was crueler: In the VCR was a tape containing the original sources of both the men's and women's monologues, which weren't theatrical texts but actual testimony. There on screen we saw the real-life rape victim, the real-life vet, recounting their horrible stories, and neither of them were doing anything close to “Going There.” “And then they held me down and, you know, raped me.” The flatness of their affect was shocking, and humiliating, and incriminating, exposing our tortured emotional machinations as 16 kinds of sham. Granted, this was acting for the camera, not the stage, and a certain diminishment of output was to be expected. Still, the moral of the exercise rang out loud and clear: In certain situations, everything you've been taught will be useless.
