CONSCIENCE
In the season of 1969-1970, I worked for a theater in Rochester, Michigan, located on the campus of Oakland University, and I thought it was a wonderful job. The theater paid a little better than Actors Equity union minimum, and it laid on a free trailer. I’d never lived in a trailer before. Compared to the cramped little New York apartment I shared with my wife, an actress just beginning to make her name in tv soap operas, who had to get up earlier than I did to begin putting on her makeup, it was expansive and comfortable. I had a tiny bathroom all to myself, a little kitchen where I could cook, or at least heat up, the kind of food I liked and my wife didn’t, a bedroom almost entirely filled by a big bed I didn’t have to share with anyone unless I wanted to, and even a minuscule living room with a couple of chairs and a couch. The theater said I could have a tv, but I’d have to pay for the hook-up. I passed.
I had turned down a chance to appear on Broadway in a small role, for the opportunity to play very large roles at the theater in Michigan. The Meadowbrook Theater didn’t pay Broadway wages, but I got to be a big frog in a small pond, which suited me fine at the time.
The company had been founded by John Fernald, an Englishman who was hoping to emulate Sir Tyrone Guthrie, another English director whose Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis was already established as the best of America’s regional theaters. Like the Guthrie, Meadowbrook produced ambitious, serious stuff, even when it did comedies. That year we did plays by the likes of Albee, Ibsen, Miller, Williams and Chekhov, and a stage adaptation of Franz Kafka’s “The Castle.” I had leads in most of them. John Fernald had chosen an excellent company, some of them English actors he’d worked with before, the rest accomplished Americans with a lot more experience than I had. He directed a couple of the plays himself, and the rest were put on by rising directorial stars of the American stage. I felt privileged, even honored, to be a company member, even though my wife thought I was crazy to leave her and New York to work for chump change in the howling midwestern wilderness. She bought me a heavy sheepskin coat as a going-away present. And my New York agent dropped me flat.
But I didn’t care. I had a full season of meaty roles, an adequate salary (most of which I saved, since I had no expenses to speak of), and a certain local fame, once the favorable reviews began to come in. Of course Rochester was hardly a howling wilderness, even though life in my trailer became less cozy once winter set in and I realized that mice had eaten all the insulation between the thin aluminum skin and the cheap fiber-board walls. But Rochester, on the outskirts of Pontiac and forty-five minutes from Detroit, was one of the bustling satellites of Planet Car. The Meadowbrook Theater’s audiences were drawn from wealthy automobile industry people living in Grosse Pointe and other fashionable suburbs of Detroit, and we were reviewed by the Detroit Free Press. Oakland University itself, situated on the large and lovely estate of Matilda Dodge Wilson, the combined auto-and-sporting-goods heiress, and ordered by the terms of an enormous bequest in her will to become “the Harvard of the Midwest,” was by the late 60s a yeasty, foaming campus, full of countercultural hooraw: lots of grass and hash and LSD (practically free, in those happy hippie days), and of course strenuous and flamboyant protests against the Viet Nam War.
I’d done my time as an Army draftee, although not in Viet Nam, and I hated the Army, Richard Nixon, and the benighted policies of the rulers of my country. I’d participated in big demonstrations against the war in New York and Washington. In addition, one of my younger brothers, who’d been a notorious organizer of draft resistance at Harvard, was staring that year both at his graduation and at a bad lottery number which meant instant conscription into an Army that knew all about him: he’d spent a couple of nights in jail and he was on J. Edgar Hoover’s “enemies list”. Of course Harvard was full of anti-draft outfits providing advice about conscientious-objector status, the jail option, or ways to leave the country. But my brother was too well-known for his local groups. So I invited him out to Rochester for a few days and steered him to Oakland University’s efficient student-faculty draft-counseling organization. All I’ll say here is that he never got drafted, never went to jail, and stayed in the USA. I was very happy that I’d been able to help him.
But I was very busy with rehearsals and performances, and although I owed the Oakland anti-war group a big favor for helping my brother, I had little time to spare for helping them in any real way. Towards the end of the season I was cast as Doctor John Buchanan in Tennessee Williams’ “Summer and Smoke,” opposite an actress of some renown who was brought out to the Meadowbrook to play Williams’ sad and needy lady Alma Winemiller. It was the most popular production Meadowbrook put on that year – tough stuff, but I guess it spoke to the lonely wives of the auto magnates, and it wasn’t nearly as weird as the Kafka “Castle.”
A few days into the run we’d finished the first act and were well into the second, when the theater’s fire alarm began to whoop and the stage lights blacked out. The emergency lights over the exits came on, and by their glare I saw six people running down the aisle of the theater heading for the stage.
Two young women and four young men in full Blows-Against-The-Empire drag, which involved, for both sexes, Army-surplus fatigues and boots, cheered up slightly by colorful headbands to bind their long hair, jumped onto the stage. They had their own battery-operated bullhorn and an array of powerful flashlights. I’d been in the middle of the scene in which Miss Alma visits the drunk Dr. Johnny in a forlorn hope to seduce him. She was in early 20th century Southern frill, and I had a short haircut, parted in the middle and slicked back. I was wearing a white shirt with a celluloid collar, a tie and white linen trousers. Neither of us were exactly rigged out for a demonstration.
I recognized one of the women and two of the men as students at the drama school John Fernald had founded at Oakland. The acting students were occasionally given small roles in the professional company’s plays, but they didn’t like being treated like apprentices, even though they were. Official Actors’ Equity apprentices, that is, and according to the Union’s rules at the time, if they worked backstage and also managed to get cast in three or more speaking roles in the course of a season, they could get their Equity cards. I’d gone through the same grunt-work apprenticeship a few years before, at summer theaters, while I was still in college. It was routine: the way young actors became professionals.
But the times they were a-changing, and the kids hated the Meadowbrook’s choice of plays (well, the Kafka production got their attention a little, mainly because the cast was enormous and many of them were in it), and they’d already put on a play of their own, a wild stoned-out acid-head-warrior rock musical version of “Alice in Wonderland.” They couldn’t use the main stage, so they put their play on in one of Matilda Dodge Wilson’s old barns. I went to see it on one of my nights off, and I thought it was cool, probably because I was wrecked on hashish. Don’t remember much about the show, except that Alice, not exactly a child, spent a lot of the play nearly naked, and one of the big production numbers involved what was in the Caterpillar’s hookah. “Breathe, Alice, breathe!” the chorus sang.
So there I was onstage, and the radical kids had just taken it away from me, because I was The Enemy, a pampered, paid actor pimping my talent to the Pigs whose money came from the Military-Industrial Complex. Well, yeah, the Big Three automakers did build tanks and other military vehicles. Miss Alma, sensible professional that she was, had cleared off the moment the kids began ranting into their bullhorn at the baffled Pigs, whom they addressed as such, frequently and loudly. Of course only about a quarter of the audience was actually made up of car people, and on that evening there was a sizeable contingent of students from Wayne State University, who broke into cheers and immediately joined the Oakland radicals onstage.
My cue to exit had come, of course. The amplified Band of Brothers and Sisters continued to howl about the war and the audience hit the aisles for the exits (grateful, I suppose, that it was only a war-protest, not a fire). But I just stood there. I noticed the Stage Manager in the wings. He was a cheerful part-time weed dealer who sold me cleaned leaves and buds for about ten bucks a weighed ounce (it was a long time ago, boys and girls), but he was looking a good deal less than mellow, frantically waving at me to get the hell off the stage.
Still I lingered, standing in the dark wondering whether or not to join the demonstration and lose my big-frog-in-small-pond job instantly (I still had one more hefty role to play that season), or follow Miss Alma’s example and quietly close ranks with my fellow professional actors. The kids had settled down, and one of them was reading, as calmly as anything can be read through a bullhorn with failing batteries, a well-prepared statement condemning the war-profiteers. But the house was almost empty, and it occurred to me that I was the only person in the theater still wavering between conscience and convenience.
My dilemma was solved when the stage lights came back on and a small group of Rochester cops in riot gear slammed down the aisles toward the stage. They had their own bullhorn, and they had their guns out. The demonstrators immediately went non-violent, lying down and going limp. I thought I heard one of the student actors chanting, “Alice, breathe!” One young cop, pumped up with righteous fury, noticed me still standing. “Get down on the floor, mother-fucker!”
“Oh, no, I’m sorry, Officer,” I said. “I’m not…I mean, I’m just an actor.” He noticed my costume and makeup. “I’m in the play,” I bleated.
He snorted, but he let me walk into the wings. It took awhile for the cops, aided by Oakland’s goofy Kampus Kops, to clear the stage of the demonstrators. Many members of the audience had already gone home, but John Fernald himself went out to the parking lot to beg the ones who were still there to come back in and watch the rest of the play.
So the show went on, as it usually does. I finished the season, and returned to New York. My marriage had not survived: the sheepskin coat turned out to be a permanent going-away present, although the end of the alliance was not my wife’s fault. I spent the summer of 1970 living in a small commune in Boston with the brother I’d rescued from the draft, and although I went on acting for many more years (and did another season at the Meadowbrook), I never really got anywhere. There was something about copping out on the protest movement that night which kept diminishing the value of my acting ambition. Or it may be that I copped out on the hard career of an actor as well. Perhaps once you’re so thoroughly paralyzed between equally compelling imperatives, utterly unable to choose between them until circumstances, or fate, determine the outcome, you never really regain control of your life.