In the beginning, there was desire – my desire to write a play. So I wrote one, and I called it RECONSTRUCTION. Then I was gripped by the desire to get my play produced – and I accomplished that, too. Finally, a third desire consumed me, a desire that was a thousand times greater than the first two combined. It was the desire to survive what I’d set in motion. If you’re a theatre producer, or a parent with a newborn child, or a poor schmo trying to build a house, you know what I’m talking about. Some say that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. Do you believe that? Well, I found out.

 

RECONSTRUCTION is a one-act play that tells the story of an extremely important night in the life of Ally and Ford, a married couple in their late 30’s/early 40’s.  Ally has recently completed treatment for breast cancer, treatment that has included the removal and reconstruction of her left breast.  This ordeal has temporarily ended their once-rich sexual relationship, and they have set this particular night aside in an attempt to resurrect it.  RECONSTRUCTION dramatizes the events that occur, and don’t occur, on this night.

 

Why did I write the play?  Many reasons.  My wife Jane was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2001 – she’s fine now – and I had something I needed to say about that experience.  (While RECONSTRUCTION isn’t exactly our story, it’s close.)  Also I wanted to prove to myself, my family, and my friends that I could write a worthwhile play, as well as establish that there was more to me than the functionary who subwayed to work every day at the Manhattan Theatre Club. 

 

I finished writing the play on February 14, 2004 – Valentine’s Day – and submitted it to the New York International Fringe Festival.  To my delight, it was chosen for inclusion in their 2004 Festival, which was scheduled for mid-August.  Most of the plays and musicals selected to be in the Festival range from the experimental to the just plain silly.  I think my play stood out because it was serious.  What made it Fringe-y was its extremely frank sexual content.

 

The Fringe provides a venue, a schedule of deadlines and performances, some technical help, and some publicity for all the pieces in their Festival.  They do not give out money, cast shows, or hire personnel (such as directors or stage managers).  That’s up to each individual production.  Personally, I have no problems with the Fringe or the people who run it.  I found them to be organized and fair.  Whatever troubles RECONSTRUCTION had during its Fringe run begins and ends with me.  Most shows in the Fringe are produced by groups.  I had no group – there was only me.  I was the Producer and the Writer, a recipe for trouble.  I knew this but thought I could handle the job(s).  How difficult could it be?  I found out.

 

The first and most important task I faced was hiring a director.  I wanted a female director because I felt that balancing the sexes was necessary – male actor, male writer, female actor, and female director.  I also wanted a director with some life experience.  My search led me to a woman – I’ll call her Georgia – who had directed several one-acts for a respected Off-Broadway theatre company and who came recommended by a number of people I trust.  Perhaps the most attractive quality she possessed is that she WANTED to direct RECONSTRUCTION.

 

Georgia had a scheduling problem, though.  She was slated to be in upstate New York running a theater retreat during July.   However, she said that she only needed a couple of weeks to rehearse the show, and the 2 weeks between her return from upstate on July 31 and the first performance of RECONSTRUCTION on August 13 would be sufficient to get the show up – provided we got a great cast.

 

We began casting before she left and came up with a list of names.  I only knew a few of them, but I ran them by the casting department at MTC, and they helped me narrow the list down to some good prospects.  Then Georgia began to make calls.  We were well aware that it was going to be hard to find actors in June/July who would be free in August – the good ones either have jobs or are going on vacation – but we didn’t know just how hard it would be.

 

We didn’t find anyone in June, and with the arrival of July, Georgia left New York for her upstate job.  At the same time, I went to Vermont with my family for the month.  That’s when trouble began to brew.  Communication between Georgia and me immediately assumed a glacial pace.  There was one telephone at the place she was working, and more often than not, when I tried to reach her, she was working out of the office.  I left messages, but it always seemed that she returned them when I was out with my family.  Thus, we were both unable to concentrate fully on casting RECONSTRUCTION.

 

Eventually, we cast a very fine actress for the role of ALLY, an actress Georgia had worked with before.  For the moment, it seemed we were in good shape.  Only one more actor to go.

 

As a producer, I managed to keep RECONSTRUCTION afloat with the helpful array of information, resources, and deadlines provided by the Fringe.  I was supposed to be doing rewrites, as well, but this was difficult to do because my time was generally eaten up by producing duties, familial obligations, and weekly trips to and from Manhattan for my job.  (Eventually, I would spend seven days in July driving back and forth between work and vacation – including losing 2 days when a wheel practically fell off my car on I-91 just south of Hartford).

 

Finding an actor to play FORD was proving to be very difficult.  Either the ones we wanted were unavailable or had conflicts.  And the time lag between conversations involving Georgia, potential actors, and me grew maddening.  Days seemed to go by without any advancement of the situation.  Suddenly, I was running out of time to do some of my producing tasks, such as printing out postcards.  But how could I print out postcards when I didn’t have a full cast?  (Finally, very late in the game, I printed out several hundred postcards bearing no actor credits – almost all of which are currently residing in my basement.)

 

Many times I told myself to end my vacation and return to New York to work solely on RECONSTRUCTION.  But I couldn’t do that.  My job took me away from my family enough as it was; I couldn’t spoil their vacation.  Although that is what happened, because as I grew more frantic about the show and spent more and more time in my room furiously rewriting, making phone calls, and rowing the Internet, our quality of vacation life precipitously declined.

 

Georgia and I went back to one actor who had told us he had conflicts, and we found that he was now able to do the show.  Done!  Then another conflict came up.  One actor said he could make four of the five shows, and I agreed to that condition, opting to worry about Show #5 later.  Done!  Then the actor read the script and decided he didn’t want to do it.  Suddenly, it was the end of July, it was time for rehearsals to begin, and we were only half cast.  I jokingly said that I might have to do the show if we didn’t find someone.

 

Georgia said she had run out of people to call; so I asked my associates at MTC to help round up prospects.  They responded heroically, not just giving me names but also making calls on my behalf.  However, they ran into the same problems Georgia and I had encountered.

 

It was now the first week of August, vacation was over, I was back in New York, and we were not in rehearsal.  Not only that, I had missed a number of opportunities to publicize the show.  But not all the news was bad.  Somehow I had managed to finish my rewrites – a major accomplishment.  Just as important, I had hired a stage manager, a young woman named Karina Ramsey, who’d been recommended by someone I’d once worked with at MTC.  She proved to be a jewel, though she had an unfortunate habit of nagging me about remembering to eat.  In the face of impending doom, food was beginning to seem increasingly irrelevant.

 

Monday, August 2.  Georgia was very worried.  Even if we found an actor that very day, we would have at best 10 days of rehearsal, as our first performance was scheduled for Friday, August 13 – yes, Friday the 13th – and she was concerned that she wouldn’t have time to do the kind of job on RECONSTRUCTION that the show deserved.  A decision was going to have to be made, and I would have to make it, if the show was going to be canceled.

 

Tuesday, August 3.  A blurb about RECONSTRUCTION appeared on a prominent Internet website.  At any other time, this would have been cause for celebration.  Instead, the pressure doubled.  But no actor surfaced.

 

Wednesday, August 4.  No actor.  The pressure doubled again.

 

Thursday, August 5.  No actor.  I told Georgia that my deadline was 5:00 Friday.  If no actor turned up by then, I would either cancel the show or (I said, half-jokingly) I would do it.  The pressure was off the chart.

 

Friday, August 6.  We found an actor, a good one, thanks to my associates at MTC.  We were one week away from opening, which meant we only had a week in which to get the show up, but with two good actors, a good director, a good stage manager, and a pretty good script, we had a fighting chance.  We needed to start rehearsals immediately, though.  Unfortunately, our actress was out of town for the weekend, naturally, and we couldn’t reach her.

 

Saturday, August 7.  Georgia withdrew, citing the reasons she’d mentioned the previous week.  I don’t know for sure but I think she was expecting me to miss my Friday 5:00 deadline and then cancel the show.  That way, she wouldn’t be the one who pulled the plug.  It wasn’t her job to do that, of course; as writer and producer it was my job.  But I refused to do so – and she went along with my determination/folly.  I believe she truly wanted to direct RECONSTRUCTION and remained on the foundering ship because of that desire.   Desire!  In the end, however, she left, the pressure on me equaled that found at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, and Karina gained fresh cause to criticize my eating habits.

 

To be honest, although this was a staggering blow, I was ready for it.  Having sensed Georgia’s wavering commitment for several days – I’m not THAT stupid – I’d contacted my good friend Tom Coash and sounded him out about replacing Georgia.  Just say when and I’m there, he replied.  I called, said “now,” and he immediately made the trip to New York from New Haven.

 

Tom is a superb director, and I knew he’d do a splendid job.  I probably would have asked him to direct RECONSTRUCTION in the first place had I not felt that it was important for my director to be a woman.  But I was past that point now.  It was publish or perish.  The great thing about Tom is that for him perishing is not an option.

 

But a pair of problems appeared in the wake of Georgia’s departure and Tom’s arrival, like two heads sprouting from the neck of the Hydra when one head was severed.  I had to tell my actor and actress about the change.  Georgia, to her credit, volunteered to persuade the actress, her friend, to remain with the show.  (Georgia knew and liked Tom, having worked with him previously.  What she felt about his replacing her I cannot say.)

 

While we – Tom, Karina, and I – waited to hear from Georgia, I called our actor.  He was already very nervous about appearing in a play for which he would have only one week of rehearsal and during which he would be nude much of the time.  Would you be surprised to learn that he withdrew when he heard that Georgia had quit?  He did – and I don’t blame him for doing so one jot.  In his shoes, I might have done the same thing.

 

Then Georgia called back.  The actress was withdrawing, too.

 

Every undertaking is governed by a series of moment-to-moment course-corrections, blind leaps of faith, and stubborn bouts of pushing.  But each one eventually arrives at a make or break point, and for RECONSTRUCTION, this was it.  So, within 24 hours we had gone from a fully cast play, with director, to no cast at all and a director who’d only recently arrived from Connecticut – and six days until opening night.  Almost every instinct told me to cancel the show, that I was heading for certain humiliation, that there was no way to achieve any of the goals I had set for myself when I submitted RECONSTRUCTION to the Fringe.  It was the smart thing to do.  The wise thing.

 

Ah, but no is so final, isn’t it?  It’s such small word, and yet it carries infinity inside it.  Sometimes you need no because it kills false hope and clears ground for new growth.  But the rest of the time it murders true hope and prevents the unpredictable world from throwing you an apple ripe with possibility just when you’re starving with despair.

 

Well, the sad truth is, whether it’s smart or wise or not, I always side with possibility.  Who’s to say that humiliation is inevitable, I asked myself.  Who’s to say that I can’t achieve most of my goals?  And to turn my back on the work and the hardship that had gone into getting RECONSTRUCTION this far, not just mine but that of my family and friends, too – well – that I could not do.  In the long run, it was pure and simple bullheadedness impelled me to continue.

 

First, we called another friend, Alice King, and asked her to take the role of ALLY.  Alice had read RECONSTRUCTION weeks ago and fallen in love with it.  I could have asked her originally to be in the Fringe production, but I believed that it was important for Georgia to have a say about whom we cast.  Now I prayed that Alice would say yes.  Against all reason and common sense, she did.  But she was out of town and wouldn’t be able to rehearse until Monday.  Gulp.  Okay, on we go.

 

We still needed an actor.  There was only one fellow we hadn’t seriously considered:  me.  I had been mouthing off about doing the role of FORD for weeks, but now the time had come to put up or shut up.  If RECONSTRUCTION were going to happen, I would have to act in it.  I hadn’t acted in 25 years.  That didn’t bother me.  As a musician, I’d been appearing onstage for years and felt comfortable in front of people.  I wasn’t worried about being nude either.  As a musician, I always felt naked onstage.  What I worried about was memorizing my lines.  Even though I’d written them, the idea of committing them to memory and then speaking them onstage IN 6 DAYS TIME was terrifying.  Pressure?  No time to fret about it anymore.  Food?  After the 13th, and lay off Karina.

 

Thus we passed out of real time into a dream world where reality shrank to one fact:  RECONSTRUCTION, with me in it, would go before an audience at 7:00 on Friday the 13th, six days away.  I suddenly understood what the hero of Poe’s “Descent into the Maelstrom” felt as he spiraled down to watery destruction.

 

We started rehearsing on Monday, and it quickly became apparent that my fears about learning lines had not been groundless.  They wouldn’t stick in my mind.  My only hope for getting though an entire show would be for Alice and me to learn the sense of the play and almost ad lib as we went.  Alice, a trained actress, was able to do this well.  I did my best, but I had other problems, too.  Much of the time I couldn’t understand why I was saying my lines.  Somehow, the reasons I’d had for writing them didn’t make sense anymore.  Tom helped by suggesting dozens of judicious cuts – we eventually cut about 20% of the play, and they were such smart cuts that I’ve retained them.  And my stumbling over lines was matched by my stumbling about the stage.  Never having been a graceful person to begin with, my awkwardness was compounded by a lack of stage training, insecurity about what I was supposed to be doing and saying, and sheer fear.

 

The days moved by with an eerie slowness.  Each one felt like a week.  Not only did we rehearse whenever possible, we had to tend to RECONSTRUCTION’s physical production.  This meant locating set pieces and transporting them to the theater in which the play was due to be produced.  (My play was assigned to a small black-box theater called the Schaeberle Studio Theater.  It was a very intimate space, holding approximately 70 people, and it was perfect for RECONSTRUCTION.  I have nothing but good things to say about the Schaeberle and the Fringe staff assigned to it.)  We also had to arrange for a light design, a sound design, and . . . well, about 337 other things, many of which actually got done.  Most importantly, we hired someone to design the make-up for ALLY’s scarred breast.  It had to be livid but not horror-movie gruesome, it had to be simple enough for Karina and Alice to apply, and it had to be both durable and non-smearing.  I think we did pretty well there.

 

By Thursday, it was evident that we were in trouble in virtually every area it was possible to be in trouble in.  As far as learning lines went, I wasn’t even close.  This caused all other acting values to be suppressed:  naturalness, humor, passion, etc.  (For instance, I found it virtually impossible to embrace or kiss Alice with ardor because I was too busy trying to remember what I was supposed to say or do next.)  In my eyes, I looked ragged, amateurish, embarrassing.

 

That was also the day that we had our technical rehearsal, during which we were unable to run the play at all because we were assigned such a brief allotment of tech time that we could only concentrate on a couple of light and sound cues.  Tom and Karina were going to have to wing it technically the next night, as were Alice and I onstage.

 

That was also the night that I sat on my sofa, staring into space and watching my life flash in front of my eyes.  I feared that I was about to make such a laughing stock of myself in front of my peers that I would never be taken seriously in the Biz again.  The only speck of hope was that few of my peers would turn up because I had done so little publicity.  Still, enough would.  At one point I turned to Tom (who was staying at our apartment) and said, “Tom, this isn’t just going to be bad.  This is going to be a disaster of Biblical proportions.”  Tom, Jane, and I laughed.  It was the way you laugh in a graveyard.

 

Friday the 13th.  Tom immediately declared that we would do that night’s performance with our scripts in hand, treating it like a dress rehearsal.  He would announce why we were doing the play that way before the show began.  To Alice and me it was like a ray of light into a mine-shaft that had been sealed by a cave-in.  We felt so good that we ran through the play in rehearsal WITHOUT holding our scripts.  After a nervous conversation, we all decided to try to perform the play that night without scripts but with Tom sitting in the front row holding a script and prompting us when we got lost or forgot our lines.  It was a mad, reckless decision that made all of us feel righteous about our courage and numb with horror at our idiocy.

 

I don’t remember much else that happened that day.  I do recall that it was rainy – yep, it was a dark and stormy night on Friday the 13th – and I clearly remember getting drenched on the way to the Schaeberle.  The four of us dressed our set, and then Alice and I got into costume and went backstage to await our cues.  Tom announced why he was “holding book” and the play began.

 

Alice was supposed to start things off with some silent stage business, while I waited in the wings for her to exit so that I could make my entrance.  What do you reckon was going through my mind as I stood behind a heavy black curtain holding the large box I was supposed to carry onstage?  Was I thinking, “After all that’s happened, RECONSTRUCTION is about to turn into a real play at last”?  Or, “Does all the pain and suffering, from food deprivation to the wheel falling off our car, come down to this, my entrance?  Is that all that there is?  Is that enough?”  Or did I wax philosophical, “That which didn’t kill me has made me strong”?

 

No.  What I thought was, “Please, let me get through the flap in the curtain without dropping my box.  Please, please, please let me do that.  Just that.”    You see, I’d never seen the massive black curtain or the tiny slit of a flap I was going to have to slip through in order to make my entrance because we hadn’t had a full tech.  It hung in front of me, a barrier as haughty and unbreachable as the one God erected to keep Adam and Eve from sneaking back into the Garden of Eden.  It mocked me, too, in a voice vaguely reminiscent of James Earl Jones’s.  “See what comes of getting in over your head, you clumsy oaf?  Nobody wants to see your middle-aged buttocks.  When I get through with you, you’ll be lying on your back and that box will be jammed down onto your empty head.”  And then Alice exited.  And I moved dumbly forward.  And there was the flap – the cackling flap, unforgiving flap.  And then – then I was through it.  Cleanly.  And the play happened.

 

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if I could report that our performance that night went incredibly well, that we were a smashing success and theater history was made.  Or that everything went incredibly wrong and we were part of a disaster of Biblical proportions.  Well, neither happened.  What did?  We got through it.  We were as shaky-legged as foals and we had to ask for lines a couple of times, but we got through it.  The audience laughed a little, clapped in a friendly way, and paid attention.  Alice and I got through it, Tom and Karina got through it, and the audience got through it.  We all got through it.

 

I used to think that those four words – we got through it – were the four saddest words in the theatrical lexicon because they seem to suggest how far short of glory a particular production has fallen.  Now I know that they are the four greatest words.  Getting through is glorious.  Getting through means that Life has asked you to dance, and you’ve accepted.  You have cast your ambitions, preconceptions, fears, and safety net away, and now you know what you’re capable of.  That’s a thing worth knowing.  I now know what I’m capable of.  At the very least, at the moment of ultimate truth, I can get through a curtain flap without dropping my prop.

 

That night, after the show, we all went to a bar, where I ate like a starving man.  Someone said he’d seen a man in the audience taking notes, and we groaned in misery.  To have a reviewer come to the show on this particular night seemed a cruel trick of Fate, but par for the course in this epic history.  However, after a round of scotch-tinged discussion, we decided he was a representative of Pace University who was taking notes about the Schaeberle.

 

Each of the four performances after Friday the 13th was better than the one before, and by the last two I felt that RECONSTRUCTION, the play I had originally envisioned, was finally onstage.  Audiences laughed where they were supposed to and listened when I hoped they would.  I do wish I could have watched it from the audience’s perspective, but I learned things about it from an actor’s perspective that are just as valid.

 

Did anything about RECONSTRUCTION turn out the way I had hoped it would?  No.  Turned out better.  True, not many people saw it.  And it didn’t win any awards.  No one whisked me away to Hollywood to be an actor, writer, or model.  To my friends I became a theater functionary whom they’d seen naked.

 

But I got two great reviews.  Remember the guy in the audience taking notes on our opening night?  He was reviewing the production.  But he heard Tom’s pre-show speech and gave us the benefit of the doubt.  I’ll live on that review for a long time.  And a good friend of mine, a Tony Award-winning producer, attended the show and said afterward, “Well, Lee, you’ve got a great body.”  I’m living on that review, too, baby.

 

I also learned that I have better friends than I deserve to have.

 

Most important, though, I got through it.

 

And I’m certain that RECONSTRUCTION will have a future life. Why? I’ve got another desire.