This essay originally appeared in the July/August 2009 edition of The Dramatist.
I
n the prehistoric middle-to-late 70s, when no theatre was interested in doing any of my musicals—not a reading, not a workshop, and certainly not a production—I decided to produce my own stuff. In my living room. With my women singers—Alison Fraser and Mary Testa—names you know now but did not know then.
We borrowed chairs from the synagogue four blocks away and served grapes. We also handed out Handi-Wipes because we would only perform on the hottest nights of the year, and in this un-air-conditioned room we couldn’t afford to hand out towels.
Which were needed.
So we handed out Handi-Wipes and grapes (approximately 50 cents a person in 1977).
I had graduated from Williams College in 1974 and though I thought of myself as a writer, I had written very few songs for a few years. In fact, I was supporting myself (badly) as a reader of new plays and musicals at the Public Theater and had recently lost my job there. One day I clomped into the Public office laden with ten miserable plays and said, “These un-produced plays are making a mockery of my life.” Someone there said, “Well then maybe you should quit,” which I did and immediately called three friends from my recent past whom I had enjoyed singing with. Alison Fraser and I met when I was a freshman at Williams and she was a sophomore at Natick High School performing in the school variety show directed (ingeniously as always) by my high school mentor, Gerald Dyer. Mary Testa I plucked, like a petunia, from the chorus of a show I was asked to see at the University of Rhode Island where I was commissioned to write a new show. The director, J Ranelli, asked “Was there anyone in this other show who you are interested in for your show?” I said, “The curly-headed girl with the big voice” (Miss Testa). And there was a third woman—tall, thin, moved beautifully, belty soprano—who was one of my favorite singers from Williams, Kay Pesek. She decided against a career in musical theatre and later moved to Chicago.
I suggested we sing some songs I was writing and see what happens. About twice a week for two months.
We’d work at our various jobs—temp typist, fitness trainer, waitress in a steak restaurant (Mary, of course), unsuccessful bartender—and then, armed with loads of chicken wings for dinner, we’d meet at my apartment where, for the first hour, the women would cook the chicken and I’d write songs that we would sing fifteen minutes later.
The first song I wrote was called “Marvin’s Giddy Seizures,” and the women, miraculously, functioned as a closely harmonizing backup trio almost immediately. Over the next few weeks, I began specific material for each woman: Alison was a wife, Mary a teacher I called Miss Goldberg, Kay a high school sweetheart. I had no idea what I was writing but somehow, fitfully, I was trying to develop a voice.
And not only a voice—if, indeed, it was a voice—but also a set of characters that I could work on for the next few years. The play was called In Trousers, the first of three short musicals about a man named Marvin and the people around him. The other two pieces were March of the Falsettos and Falsettoland (both with the enormous contribution of James Lapine) which ended up on Broadway as Falsettos.
But I’m getting ahead of myself because that evening, in pre-history—miserably hot with the grapes and Handi-Wipes—was the fourth self-presentation of In Trousers in four weeks. And one hundred people came to crowd into my living room but couldn’t. My friend Paul Samuelson came in a tuxedo, and my dear friend Rhoda came in a black gown. Twenty people ended up in my large kitchen but were unable to see a thing. Fifteen people ended up in the bedroom, also unable to see. We had to ask the unhappy doorman NOT to send anyone else up. We put a sign on my front door saying, “FILLED SORRY” (if they got by the doorman). And the girls and I sang our hearts out.
It was the last time I ever played piano for one of my performances.
It was after that performance that Ira Weitzman from Playwrights Horizons (sent there by Andre Bishop who had seen one of the earlier evenings in my apartment) asked if we would like to initiate a new series at Playwrights Horizons, doing for composers and lyricists what they had previously done for playwrights. We rehearsed at Playwrights Horizons from eleven at night to three in the morning (I was Marvin) and performed the show for two or three weeks. It was such a hit we moved to a larger theatre downstairs where Chip Zien took over the leading role.
But it all came about because I called myself a writer but wasn’t writing. And when I started writing these weird little songs for three wonderful women, we decided, impetuously, that we had a show. And since we had a show that no one wanted to produce, Mary Testa, Alison Fraser, and I produced it ourselves.
And that was, incredibly, the beginning of all of our careers.
