A Straight Line
by Lisa

A friend of my parents called me. Her daughter, a high school senior, was thinking of going into theater. Did I have any advice? Not really, I said. If she's meant to be in the theater she can be an econ major and she'll still end up in the theater. If not, she can go to the Yale Drama School and by age thirty two she'll be doing something else.

As far as I can tell you don't choose the theater, the theater chooses you. It's our version of the clerical vocation. I did not do high school plays. I did not do community theater. I did not declare my drama major until the end of my junior year in college. I didn't even see a stage play until I was 15 years old and I recall thinking it was 'weird' and being more enthused by the strolling bazouki player at the Greektown restaurant where we went after the show. Until about 7 years ago I was still planning on another career if I could just figure out what it was I really wanted to be. But finally I gave in and admitted it. I love the theater. It's not a choice. It was something I was born with. And now I can look back and see the tendencies all along: the made up performances for family, friends and at my synagogue; my decision at age 12 to make myself the kind of girl about whom others would say, she's the funniest girl I ever met. And I remember the year after college when I was living at home and working in a luggage store to save money so I could move to New York and I got cast in a production of Cabaret at the local community college. Suddenly I felt like the world had returned to color after a summer of black and white. Because I was in a play. It was in college that I discovered my true home. I was dazzled by life in the theater department. I had spent a long childhood consciously counting the hours to adulthood. I just knew when I went to college things would be different and so they were. In the Fine Arts Department I met artists for the first time. People devoted to unconventionality and invention. We went to our classes in the day, rehearsed all evening, then stayed up all night prowling around the Fine Arts Building. We tried on all the clothes in the costume shop. We wrote our overdue papers in the Green Room. We lay on the floor of the glass walled lobby and talked and laughed for hours. The department was made up of gay men, the women who pined after them and me. To be honest, I pined after some of those clever, clever boys too. There were no other lesbians in the theater department. There were no other lesbians anywhere in theater as far as I could tell. In my Senior Spring the mainstage show was William Inge's Picnic. During the preceding three and a half years I had honed my talents playing an array of bit parts as old women, neighbor ladies and the occasional animal. I had been told by the head of the theater department that he couldn't use me in bigger roles because, in his indelible words, you just don't convey any sexuality on stage. I was told I was a character actress which I later decided was really a code word for lesbian. I was told there would probably be no work for me in the theater until I was 40 at which time I might be suitable for mother roles. I was told in order to be employable I needed to either lose 30 pounds or gain 100. Needless to day 'Picnic' looked like my big chance. The lead role was Rosemary, an old maid. Finally a lead for a lesbian! But the part went to a skinny, straight sophomore and I played Mrs. Potts, the elderly neighbor. I had no actual scenes, just crosses where I would utter quick but pivotal phrases like, I baked a Lady Baltimore cake! At the end of the play when all the women sit in the yard, devastated because the young man who had wandered into town and given them reason to live had wandered off again I had my big speech: He walked through the door and suddenly everything was different. He clomped through the tiny rooms like he was still in the great outdoors, he talked in a booming voice that shook the ceiling. Everything he did reminded me there was a man and the house, and it seemed good.... And that reminded me ... I'm a woman, and that seemed good, too.

It occurred to me that spring that this speech summed up everything I might ever be given to do in the theater. It had been made clear to me that I would never be adequate to play a wife or a girlfriend. I could play neighbor ladies, and eventually mothers. My job would be to reflect upon the actions and importance of the male characters. I would never play a character who grapples with work or love or friendship or politics or religion or sex or power. Theater seemed so compelling to me, so powerful and that spring it was clear to me that that power to affect, to transform was in someone else's hands and the best I could ever hope for was to catch a ride on someone else's view of the world.

I moved to New York had moderate success in productions such as 'Trees,' a musical about a bunch of trees who wanted to become Christmas trees and conveyed this yearning through songs like Diddidly Doop De Doo Kind of Christmas and Ach du Kleiner Christmas and the Light Opera of Manhattan's heartwarming seasonal favorite, Babes In Toyland in which I played a doll, and a lollypop. Then in 1985 I saw the Split Britches Company perform their play 'Split Britches' and everything changed. I couldn't imagine how such a thing had been created. It seemed like it must have sprung fully formed from their heads it was so beautiful and complete and so utterly unlike anything I had ever seen before. It was strange yet totally familiar. Funny and heartbreaking and so sexy. It was non linear that blew my Midwestern MIND. And they made it themselves. To me this was a revelation. It turned out in order to perform you did not have to psych out the mind of a casting director so he would think you were the suited to play Tree Number Four. It turned out you could make your own show.

Through Split Britches I found my way to the WOW Cafe. My work at WOW challenged every rule I had learned about theater including the part about learning your lines before you went on stage. The work there was a beautiful mess -- largely created by women who had never set foot in a theater class so they had no concept of how things were supposed to be done. It was free from political or aesthetic agendas and fueled by the wild excitement of an audience who had never seen themselves reflected. Shows in which you could fall in love with the characters and the actors and not have to think, 'what if she was a lesbian?' They were all lesbians. At WOW even the women who weren't lesbians were lesbians. Shows were put up in a months or sometimes a few days with sets and costumes made literally out of trash from the streets. They were full of magic. I remember late one night sitting in the first WOW space, a tiny storefront on East 11th Street, in the hush of a New York blizzard and watching out the window as a woman danced for us in the snow under a streetlight. Never rehearsed. Never done before. Never repeated.

I learned to be a lesbian at WOW. Through our plays and variety nights and rent parties and fashion shows and retreats and staff meetings full of lesbian 'process' and lots of lesbian drama, we made a place in the world where it was taken for granted that girls like other girls and we could drop the explanations and justifications and become fully human.

I justified leaving behind my ambitions for a conventional acting career by telling myself that by doing my own work I could move back into the mainstream on my own terms but I was just rationalizing. I never thought that would really happen. Friends of mine took seminars which told you exactly how to make a career in the theater. You read Backstage every week, went to all the auditions you could and sent out regular mailings of postcards with a montage of photos in which you alternately looked excited, studious, working class and sexy. I did buy Backstage most weeks but I never went on auditions. All I did was go to my various temp jobs and hang out at WOW.

When I did my first solo shows there, a friend of mine, an older woman who was a theater reviewer gave me names of a handful of women producers to invite. They produced on Broadway and Off Broadway and some of them were lesbians. They're not interested in this work, I told her. People from uptown, they don't understand what we're doing down here and their not interested. She said, 'You're scared.' I told her she didn't know what she was talking about but some years later I realized she was right. I was afraid of rejection because I had been rejected. I came from a world that implied and sometimes told me directly that I was not feminine, not sexual, not attractive, not funny and not interesting since male experience is universal and female experience is not only trivial but generally whiney and that goes double for lesbians.

I began to perform all throughout the East Village in the many, many performance spaces that existed in the mid 80's. A small group of us from WOW seemed to share an artistic affinity and were interested in making a show that could tour and so began The Five Lesbian Brothers. We began to acknowledge our ambition something we had not thought about before. We told ourselves we were just having fun. Just doing it for ourselves. We said broader success was not available to lesbians. In some ways that was true. There was and still is a prevailing assumption that lesbian work will be didactic, boring, self righteous. The Five Lesbian Brothers have often quipped that we're going to call our next play, 'Big Heavy Handed Message from Five Angry Lesbians who are too Ugly to Get Men An Evening of Song.' But certain doors were opening to us.

We were in the right place at the right time and my solo work and the work of the Brothers began to reach a professional level at the very moment when some mainstream theaters were opening their doors to lesbian work. We learned then that part of the responsibility for bringing lesbian work to a larger audience lay with us. We would have to learn to open ourselves to these opportunities and set aside the fear that if we dared to reach for more we would be once again dismissed as being incapable of conveying anything of worth or interest to those that count.

My solo work and the work of the Brothers received professional recognition beyond what had been available to lesbians who came even a few years before us. Still, I could write a long and bitter book full of offers we would have had if we were not lesbians. But mostly I feel grateful. The sit coms and movie deals we never got definitely would have made us a lot richer, but an easier life isn't necessarily more interesting. Because no one else cared about what some crazy dykes on East 4th Street were doing every night we made work that was unselfconscious and vibrant. We got to make theater that felt like it mattered.

I love working in the theater. I love it. I love it. I love it. Sometimes when I'm on stage I feel seized by the joy of it. Sometimes, when I'm working on a piece and things are going horribly I still feel grateful that I get to be miserable in a rehearsal room rather than at a temp job. It took me a long time to admit to myself that I cared about the theater. After my years perusing the NYU Continuing Education Catalogue trying to find my true career it turns out I'd already found it. I am what I really want to be a lesbian writer and performer. For such a long time I felt I was wandering aimlessly through my life until I finally realized I'd been moving with great deliberation in a straight line toward a goal I hadn't known existed until I got there. What luck.