Dystalgia
Part Two
I entered Yale, and I went on acting. In the early 1960s, the undergraduate Yale Dramatic Association and the School of Drama shared the University Theater, although pressure was building in the drama school to kick out the undergrads so that it could mount more plays each season. But that didn’t happen until after I graduated (with a BA in English, since majoring in drama was not an option at the time). Lee Starnes was the Dramat’s director, and he mounted ambitious and sometimes controversial productions. The Cold War was at its height, and Lee, who had no use for American jingoism, put on Bertold Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle, despite the fact that Brecht was an East German Communist. He cast me as Simon Shashava, a soldier in the Caucasian Grand Duke’s army, who becomes engaged to Grusha Vashnadze, the Duke’s wife’s maid. The play, in two parts, consists of a series of short scenes, like parts of a newsreel, and Lee embraced Brecht’s “epic theater” concept wholeheartedly, even filming a key scene between Simon and Grusha, and projecting it on a screen at the back of the bare stage. The second part of Chalk Circle involves the wily judge Azdak, who presides over a case involving a baby boy whom Grusha has rescued during the chaos of a coup d’état. The Duke’s widow, Natella Abashvili, who had abandoned her baby, shows up to claim him back. Azdak suggests cutting Michael in half and awarding each half to the two claimants (a reference to King Solomon’s ploy in the Old Testament). Natella seems indifferent, but Grusha passionately pleads for the child’s life, and Azdak awards Michael to her. The production was panned by the conservative New Haven Register’s critic, who castigated Yale for putting on a play by a Commie. But a stringer for The New York Times gave it a good review, and we played to packed houses for the duration of the run.
I did other roles while I was at Yale, among them Christy Mahon, the callow anti-hero of John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, and by the time I graduated, I was committed to becoming a professional actor. I even had my Equity card, thanks to a stint as an apprentice at the Williamstown Summer Theater. But before I left Yale, I acquired a sort of groupie.
Dick Lampert (a pseudonym, for reasons that will become clear) was a witty, sharp-tongued loner who looked a bit like Franz Kafka, and he expressed a measure of enthusiasm for my work. Rarely for a Yale student, he had a car, and one evening he drove me to Greenwich Village, stopping at its foremost gay bar, the Stonewall Inn. This was long before the Stonewall Riots, whose fiftieth anniversary is being celebrated by the LGBT community this year, and homosexuals generally kept a low profile, even in New York City. But they had havens where they could strut their stuff, and the Stonewall was wild. Many of the male and female customers were in drag, and I had no idea which was which or who was what.
I’d already been to a gay bar in Dallas, Texas, of all places, while I was in a ridiculous revival of the Sammy Davis, Junior musical Mister Wonderful (the lead was played by a white guy – don’t ask – so a lot of the dialogue made no sense) and I knew what to expect. I got hit on a couple of times, and rebuffed the advances politely. Unfortunately, Dick assumed my refusals meant that I was saving myself for him. He got smashed on martinis, but I only had a couple of beers, and I insisted on driving his car back to Yale. On the way, I told him I was straight. He nodded, and said he wasn’t completely surprised. But he seemed hurt, as if I had betrayed him somehow, and I never saw him again.
I only found out what had happened to Dick when I read the Yale Alumni Magazine’s notes for the Class of 1964, many years later. According to his family, he’d been suffering from depression throughout his time at Yale, and had been seeing a psychiatrist, who prescribed Miltown, a form of tranquillizer that was popular at the time. But the pills didn’t make him more tranquil. One day in the summer of ’67, while his parents were away, he went into the garage, rolled down its door, and sealed the gap at its bottom with duct tape. Then he got into his car, opened all its windows and turned on the engine. It’s possible that he had already taken a massive overdose of Miltown, but I don’t know that for sure. His parents returned and found him slumped behind the wheel. They called an ambulance, but it was too late.
If nostalgia is the bittersweet feeling you get when reminiscing fondly about past events in your life, dystalgia is its opposite: the sense that nothing you have done is of any value, and your life has been wasted. Dick’s suicide was a tragedy, in the authentic Greek sense of the term, because it involved cruel irony. Only four years later, the Stonewall Riots gave rise to the Gay Pride Movement, and homosexuals stopped feeling guilty about their sexual orientation. I expect that if Dick had survived, he would have been one of the leaders of that movement, because of his sharp intelligence, his powerful emotions, and his biting sense of humor. He would have found a loving companion, and perhaps the pair would have married, as soon as same-sex marriage was legalized in Connecticut. By no means do I wish to trivialize his death, but he was a victim of bad timing. Like Richard Cory – except that Dick Lampert was a real person.