In Pieces(47)

I remember feeling dark and depressed, dressed in my ragamuffin clothes as I sat on the floor of the theater arts section at the public library. Flipping through play after play, though not necessarily reading them, I was looking for scenes between two characters when I stumbled upon a long one from Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Respectful Prostitute. Without knowing what the play was about, I knew I’d found it: a scene, a character to create, and my rag doll body came to life. Immediately, I asked Paul, one of the actors I’d worked with in exercise class, to play the rich southern bigot, Fred, to my Lizzie the prostitute.

To accommodate the many actors who wanted to perform for him, Mr. Strasberg had handed down an edict declaring that no scene would run longer than fifteen minutes, at which time he would stop it. In the classes that I had attended since Lee’s arrival for his six-month L.A. stint, I’d realized it was not unusual for him to halt a scene long before the fifteen-minute cutoff, which made everyone in the room flinch with the implied blow.

When Lee was the moderator, every scene night was standing room only, and the night I was to perform it seemed especially packed, every chair taken, with the overflow sitting on the floor or leaning against the back wall. I don’t remember watching the first scene that night because mine was up second, and I was only slightly aware of Lee commenting after that scene finished, speaking sharply to one actor and dismissively to the other. All I knew was, we were up.

I was standing on the cheese end of a mousetrap, unafraid or unaware that I could be crushed. I saw it only as a way to lift off the ground, to be catapulted into space, to feel alive. The grubby, worn boards of the stage became the grubby, cheap room where Lizzie lived. The filthy twin mattress, usually stored in a side room filled with props and bits of random furniture, became Lizzie’s unmade bed. I buried my nose in the sheets, into the smell of humans, fully the madwoman down from the attic, and said my dialogue: “ ‘It smells of sin!’ What do you know about that? You know, it’s your sin, honey. Yes, of course, it’s mine too. But then, I’ve got so many on my conscience. Come on. Sit on our sin. A pretty nice sin, wasn’t it?”

As my fellow actor began to grope me, rubbing his hands intimately over my body, the madwoman part of me stayed present, and when he began to choke me—truly lost in the task—the red rage of me pushed him away, while I jumped to my feet crying ragamuffin’s tears, and the rock-solid piece of me said the required dialogue. All the pieces, the voices, the parts of me came together. Worked together. Lived for that moment… together.

Then the scene was over. Lee had not stopped us when our allotted fifteen minutes were up, like he had done with all the other scenes. Our Respectful Prostitute had taken forty-five minutes. As I had seen the other actors do after completing their work, I gathered my things and sat on the edge of the stage, not wanting to meet anyone’s eyes. My partner pulled up a chair, took out a notepad and pen, then sat poised, ready to jot down important instructions and words of wisdom from Lee, while I sat with my legs crossed and my hands in my lap. Lee asked Paul what he had been working on and received a long explanation, which I didn’t listen to because only then did I realize with a jolt that Lee would soon turn to me, asking the very same question, and I had no answer. I wasn’t working on anything. And, sure enough, after commenting briefly and rather blandly to Paul, Lee turned and looked at me. But he didn’t ask me what I’d been working on. He asked, “Why are you here?”

My heart stalled in my chest, and I braced myself to hear him say that I didn’t belong, that I shouldn’t be there.

“You work,” he continued. “A lot of people here don’t and you do. You’re doing very well. Why are you here?”

“Because I want to be good,” I said.

“You are good,” he said. “Good enough to work all the time.”

“Yes, I do work. But… not the way I want. I’m not good enough. I want to know how.”

Never taking his eyes off mine, he sat back in his chair while making little clicking sounds, as though he had a popcorn kernel stuck in the back of his throat. After a moment that felt like an hour, he leaned forward and very softly said, “I let this scene continue. I wanted to watch you. You were quite brilliant.”

My stalled heart would have exploded, but he spoke so softly I wasn’t sure that’s what he had said. He held my look, clicked the back of his throat, and repeated nonchalantly, “Quite brilliant.”

Instantly the room became vacuum-packed, airless and still. No one moved. No one raised a hand to offer comments, as I had seen happen in the past. And my eyes, which had been fastened to Lee’s, began to search the room for Madeleine.





11


Second Season


WHEN FILMING BEGAN on the Nun’s second season—leaving me with no time to attend classes—Lee’s words became fuel, a verbal elixir I would drink over and over in my memory. At the Actors Studio, I felt inside my body. Without that space, without that kind of exploration, I lost the ability to hear parts of myself, as though half of me just vacated the premises. But on the edge of my brain I could still feel that one moment of coexistence, like an echo of harmonizing voices, and one day, after we’d been in production about a week, I surprised myself.

Except for the phone call in which I had initially passed on the show, I’d never had a real conversation with Harry Ackerman, the executive producer on both Gidget and The Flying Nun. I remember seeing him on the Gidget set once or twice and in the convent for short, infrequent visits that sent tense “Big Daddy’s watching” ripples through the entire company. After a few moments of stiff chitchat, I would always find a reason to back away. But when production on the Nun’s second year started up, Mr. Ackerman invited me to lunch in the windowless, hard-to-find conference room known as the Executive Dining Room. It was an hour of forced smiling from me, of pushing the food around my plate while I counted the moments until I could leave. Then, as I was preparing to scurry back to the set, relieved to be finally free, I sat back down. Without knowing I was going to, I asked Harry if it might be possible to have one show written that season about an honest human problem, or even one scene every now and again, adding that it would give me something to look forward to. I hadn’t rolled every word around in my head four thousand times, hadn’t begged myself to speak. I just made a request, plain and simple. And when he replied, “That might be good for you, Sally; however, your audience doesn’t want to be surprised or touched or taught or have to think too much,” I silently nodded my head. Yet, as I walked back to Stage 2, I felt oddly triumphant. Without feeling blazing rage or fear or sadness, I had asked for what I wanted. Getting it seemed secondary.