Afterword: Baby With the Bathwater

I wrote the afterword to Laughing Wild nearly nine months ago. I have nothing new to add to it, or take away from it, but wanted to talk a bit about the two plays in this volume.

I wrote the first act of Baby with the Bathwater as a self-contained one-act sometime in late 1981. Then in late 1982 Robert Brustein, whom I knew from my days as a student at Yale Student of Drama (where he had been dean), told me he wanted to do the one-act Baby at his American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts on a double bill with a Beckett one-act. I had been toying with the notion of expanding Baby, wondering what would happen if I followed subsequent years in Baby’s life, so I asked Brustein if he’d be interested in doing a full-length Baby with the Bathwater, were I to come up with one. He said yes.

He then went on to schedule the full-length version before I had written it, which flattered me. However, when I heard the due dates, I became momentarily alarmed—I had to write Act Two in six weeks or something in order to be ready for the scheduled first rehearsal. That wasn’t much time, and what if I got stuck in the writing?

But then I shifted back to being flattered by his faith in me and what I’d come up with, and I also knew that in many instances I could (and did) write very, very fast. So I decided just to accept the shortness of time, and write quickly.

I had a really good time writing Act Two and think it’s clearly better than Act One (which makes the play, I’m afraid, a bit lopsided in performance).

Act One was written in a bit of a throwback to the absurdist style of my first plays (Nature and Purpose of the Universe, Titanic, ‘dentity Crisis)—a style not unlike that of Ionesco, or Edward Albee’s The American Dream. Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You and Beyond Therapy, the two plays that preceded this one, had their own comic exaggerations (especially the end of Sister), but they both had a kind of reality going—Sister, for instance, walks to her lectern, she doesn’t pop out of a big box the way Nanny does; Bruce in Beyond Therapy may cry unexpectedly but he doesn’t, say, show psychological upset by crouching next to the refrigerator or lying in a pile of laundry the way John and Daisy do in Bathwater.

Act Two skips through time as we follow the child Daisy’s growth without ever seeing him. I enjoyed bringing back the absurdist details of Act One in semi-realistic form in Act Two: having the child Daisy write an essay, for instance, in which the infant’s fear of the German shepherd, and of buses, and of being called a baked potato, all come back to haunt him. I also got an enormous kick out of writing the Woman Principal in that essay scene, and kept laughing out loud as I wrote her.

Then I liked switching tone in Daisy’s monologue, where we realize that (a) he’s male, not female; and (b) for all the absurdist trappings, he’s in a lot of pain. Taking Daisy’s pain (and for that matter, his parents’ pain) seriously at the same time that I expect the audience to find humor in it has become for me the definition of my style, or at least what I intend it to be: absurdist comedy married to real feelings.

The ending of the play was, for me, my first genuinely “hopeful” ending. I had been criticized for not ending my plays well, and most of the previous plays had what I call “dot dot dot” (. . .) endings, in which the audience sees the characters once more doing the same damn thing they’ve been doing all their lives, and now sees they’re just going to keep on doing it forever, as the lights dim (. . .).

It’s the opposite of plays in which characters change; the whole point of these endings tends to be that people don’t change. I felt there was no intrinsic reason why endings had to have big character changes or big revelations that huff and puff, trying to explain everything. The challenge, though, with the (. . .) ending is to restate the problem in a way that is dramatically satisfying and amusing to an audience (such as, I think, the sex-change couple mock-explaining the play’s meaning in ‘dentity Crisis and then conjugating the word “identity”: I dentity, you dentity, he, she, or it. . . etc.).

When I approached the ending of Bathwater, I surprised myself by not wanting to show Daisy repeating the exact patterns his parents had, as I might have in an earlier play; it felt falsely cynical. And although the statistics of abused children who grow up to be abusing parents is sadly high, I realized that in this instance Daisy’s intelligence and introspection counted for me in a positive way.

I used to believe that intelligence was of little help in escaping the psychological patterns that have been inbred in one. I based this depressing belief on how overwhelming my own personal depressions were in my early twenties, and on how my mother and some other family members—smart people too—nonetheless seemed to make the same sorts of mistakes over and over in their lives, causing themselves the same kind of pain; there wasn’t even variety in their pain. And other people I met seemed similarly stuck in repetition. So life seemed hopeless to me, and without progress.

As I left my early twenties behind, my life kept getting better, partially because I made some smart choices. I lost that sense of feeling like a child at the mercy of his parents; and though I’m not totally free of the subtle and buried kinds of psychological traps that all of us have, I found I was choosing to avoid being around or working with difficult or chaotic people. I think I’m oversensitive to tempestuous people—those for whom throwing a temper tantrum is just a way of releasing steam, but who terrify me—but by my consciously choosing to avoid those people, I did myself a great favor, I gave myself the right to protect myself. And as I felt more protected, I felt less a victim, and then happier. (Plus, there are so many talented people out there who aren’t tempestuous that, indeed, why not choose someone easy and supportive over someone unpredictable and enraging?)

Anyway, I’ve been rather personal in analyzing why I felt more optimistic at this point in my life, but in terms of the play it was simpler. I just “knew” that Daisy would be less unpredictable to his child than his parents were to him because, through introspection and analysis, he had been so sensitized to what it had done to him; and he was smart enough to have sought help to get “better.” It meant his mistakes would not be as blatant, and that actually is progress, isn’t it? I had never, to my knowledge, written an ending that was “hopeful” before. And it wasn’t false to me; it was what I meant, and felt. So I was excited by this ending.

Andre Bishop at Playwrights Horizons offered to do the play at his theatre in New York for November of 1983. Jerry Zaks, who had directed Sister Mary and the off-Broadway Beyond Therapy was set to direct.

I love working with Jerry, who’s extremely kind and smart, and who also loves actors, which makes them happy, which makes me happy. Jerry has gone on to become justly famous as a director, winning Obies (for my play Marriage of Bette and Boo) and a Tony (for his revival of John Guare’s House of Blue Leaves), and now he’s a musical director as well, having done the highly successful Anything Goes at Lincoln Center.

In early previews, though, something seemed wrong; the play just wasn’t funny. Or one night it would be kind of funny, then the next night not at all. Some of it seemed to be the talented actress playing Helen; she was doing something other actors have also done, and which drives me crazy: she was deciding that if her character was angry on pages three, four, and eleven, she had to make sure each of these instances was “different,” when they were written, more or less, to be done full throttle and to the maximum—part of what was scary, and funny, about Helen. But the actress, tied to rather old-fashioned beliefs of character “building,” was wedded to using her intellect to “modulate” the character’s emotions. And underneath this desire for modulation was fear: she was worried about what would happen to audience sympathy for her if she didn’t do this. As you can probably tell from reading my plays, I have people fly off the handle and into rages frequently, and, frankly, in most cases, “full-out” is the best way to do these mood shifts. Anyone who’s lived near someone who flies into rages knows that most of the time they fly into the 99% category, they don’t run around “gradating” them.

So Jerry would direct her to be full-out, and Andre Bishop would explain how “in Chris’s plays, the characters who are really awful are the ones the audience likes best.” And she’d be better for one performance, then slip back to doing it the way her instinct told her to. But because she was a good actress, the effect she was having was subtle; maybe the play was at fault, I thought.

I then had a good actress friend come to the play. She looked pained after the performance. She was too sensitive to just blurt out that it wasn’t working, but I admitted to her that something seemed wrong and I didn’t know what. I asked her if she knew, and without hesitation she said, yes, you must fire the actress playing Helen. I was shocked at her bluntness and her certainty, but she also stilled the doubt in my mind that the fault was in the play. Without any cues from me, this friend “got” that the actress didn’t trust the play and was worried she’d seem unsympathetic. This worry about sympathy, which was not explicit but just a “tone in the air,” did not belong in the world of this play; according to my friend, if I didn’t fire her, it would be the play that would look bad, not the actress, because she was nonetheless very talented.

We did fire her the next day—or rather, Jerry did, looking stricken and pained, but in definite agreement. (Our unnamed friend was the epitome of caring and honesty, and not someone to lightly suggest firing anyone, so we took her comments very seriously.)

We postponed the opening and asked Christine Estabrook to play Helen. (We had almost cast her to begin with.) Christine was heroic and did the first two nights holding the book, but so skillfully that one immediately forgot that she was reading. She’s a fabulous actress, extremely funny, extremely touching, and we were lucky to have her.

The rest of the cast was a little disoriented by our firing of the original Helen, but they all chose to let go of any doubts they had and just trust me and Jerry and get on with it. The other actors, all of whom were terrific, were W. H. Macy, Dana Ivey, Keith Reddin, and Leslie Geraci.

The play was done upstairs at Playwrights’ studio theatre, which has seventy seats. Younger audiences found the play a laugh riot. As the play went on, though, the seventy seats were often filled by the Playwrights Horizons subscription audience. Subscriber audiences tend to be older, and they have agreed to come to all the plays, on a certain date, having no idea what they are to see. And they didn’t like it much.

Or rather, something happened to them in Act One. They became afraid I was going to make jokes about physical abuse of infants, while, as you know from reading it, I’m just making merry about psychological abuse, which is what I know about. So some nights, the subscriber audience would not laugh once. In the entire first act. Not once. This drove the poor actors crazy. (And I didn’t love it either.)

In Act Two, though, this same audience would start to laugh. And I realized it was maybe because in the first scene of Act Two, I finally had some voices of reason on the stage: Kate and Angela clearly loved their children, and were alarmed by Helen’s behavior. And this gave the conservative audience a reference point; they suddenly breathed easier, and felt I wasn’t actually in favor of child abuse.

In terms of my work, I also remembered that some of my early plays (especially The Nature and Purpose of the Universe) really upset some audiences because the characters’ suffering was presented comically (and in great, hideous exaggeration), without there ever being a spokesperson in the play for normal decency or compassion. When I’d meet audience members who only knew my early plays, they would often express surprise that I didn’t look and sound like the Wild Man of Borneo.

Looking back, I’m extremely fond of my early works that are so anarchic and horrifying; they do make me laugh, as was true for some of the audiences too. But starting with Diane’s serious speech in Sister Mary where she straightforwardly expresses her upset with Sister and the Church, I started to drop the manic-ness from time to time and to talk seriously. And I realized that the subscriber audience at Bathwater missed this greatly in Act One; they felt they were trapped in a seventy-seat subway car with a lunatic.

However, luckily, we extended the run of Bathwater a bit, and as the subscriber audience thinned out and a more general audience came to see this specific play, the play fell into better balance, and we got laughs throughout again.

The reviews had been mixed—good, bad, and medium—but because The New York Times had been even a bit better than good, some commercial producers negotiated to move the play off-Broadway. However, the night of our last scheduled performance I learned from Andre that the deal looked 99% likely to fall through (for no particular reason, just cold feet that maybe it wasn’t commercial enough, I guess). I decided to tell the actors this before the last performance so they’d know it was possible this would be their final performance. They were disappointed but took it in good stride.

For the next two years, I worked on a steamer that crossed the Atlantic from Hoboken to Burma. No, I’m kidding. I don’t remember what I did. Then, in 1985, Jerry Zaks directed what I think is my best play, The Marriage of Bette and Boo, at the Public Theatre. (It’s also published by Grove, hint, hint.) It won many Obies, and went well with the audiences, even the subscriber ones, and was, all told, pretty successful.

Sometime in late 1985, I wrote the Woman’s monologue part of Laughing Wild. I wrote it the same way I wrote Sister Mary, with no particular production in mind, with no theatre, just because I had an impulse to write. I wish I always could write from that impulse.

New York City has gotten harder and harder to live in (I’ve been here since 1975), and part of the speech was triggered by that. Another part was triggered by choosing to let go of the “reasonableness” of my mind; I let the Woman unleash her most random complaints, and I didn’t censor them or try to balance them with being fair. (Her comments on Mother Theresa are a good example; I would hardly say any of the things she says about Mother Theresa, though critics were lazily to list Mother Theresa as one of my “targets” in the play. A less lazy audience member, not trying to come up with a snappy, journalistic list of targets, told me how much she identified with the Woman’s thoughts, more or less, up until the crazy comment about Mother Theresa being “just like Sally Jessy Raphael, only different,” at which point she realized how deeply crazy the Woman was. The Woman’s targets and mine should not be assumed to be the same.)

Early on I had a reading of the Woman’s monologue, and I asked the actress-writer E. Katherine Kerr to read the part. I had been a fan of hers from having seen her at auditions (especially a hilarious interpretation of Sister Mary Ignatius), and from seeing her in Tommy Tune’s production of Caryl Churchill’s Cloud 9. Indeed, I saw her three times (and the play five times), so knocked out was I by her performance, and the play itself.

I had no idea what Katherine’s presence would do to the part, but I knew she had razor-sharp comic timing and, judging from the end of Cloud 9 in particular, an ability to be deeply (and suddenly) moving.

At this initial reading, Katherine blew the invited audience away, and I filed away in my head that I wanted to make this Woman’s monologue somehow be part of a full evening.

But the project stayed on a back burner. In late 19861 was scheduled to read from my works at the 92nd Street Y (on a bill with Wallace Shawn), and I decided to write something new in order to make use of the audience who’d be there, to test their responses. Katherine had been encouraging me to write something that I myself could act in to go with the monologue, so that’s what I did. And once I had the notion that the Man was the person on the other end of the “tuna fish” story, I knew I had a good hook.

At the Y, the Man’s monologue was scary to do_; it felt very personal and naked. The Woman’s voice was that of a character who thought and spoke very differently from myself (however much I might occasionally mirror her crazy upset). The Man’s voice and concerns were much closer to my personal ones. The audience response, though, felt very electric, and I overcame my hesitations and decided that this Man’s speech, reworked, should remain the companion piece to the Woman’s.

The evening needed a third piece, and I kept waiting for the perfect one to spring forth from my brain. I thought of having a third character show up—maybe the street musician, or the ‘cello player, or any of the other people mentioned in the Woman’s speech; maybe I could make the evening be a series of character sketches, all somewhat related. But I kept feeling that having the Man and the Woman interact would be the most satisfying and logical premise for the third piece. But how to have them interact, in a real or even semi-real situation, stumped me. Their history of attack and illogic in the supermarket seemed to offer little opening for conversation that I could figure out.

Then I thought of having them dream about one another, and of the (I hoped) theatrical effect of having their dreams (and obsessions) intersect with one another.

I also felt that the third piece—and the evening as a whole—should be written intuitively and be less reasoned out. And I guess I think I failed in this—my intuitive glands are just too blocked still. The third piece is rather willfully intuitive.

Having been, I hope, disarmingly honest about this, still I think plays are rarely perfect, and there are chunks of the third piece that do work. The opening re-enactment of the supermarket event, done in various versions, worked very well indeed. Their spoken dreams are okay, and do serve the function of explaining how their dreams are overlapping with one another. The Infant of Prague sequence is (or was) much fun for the audience (and for me to perform), but its sketch energy probably pulls us away from a clear connection to the genuine psyches of the Woman and the Man.

Then, at the Harmonic Convergence, I feel the dream is on to something thematically compelling and resonant. And some audience members told me they felt very complete with the play and its ending. And some audience members (and most critics in their reviews) found the ending unbelievably hopeful (and sappy), and just totally unengaging.

I don’t know what I think. Or rather, I think several things, some of them contradictory.

Preview audiences seemed to love the entire evening, and to be really really engaged. The invited audience the night before the critics and the night after the critics was ecstatic. (Invited houses are, of course, geared to like it, yet I don’t have enough friends to explain when an audience response is ecstatic.) The night the critics attended was weird and unpleasant. Being in a play where both characters talk to the audience, and having to talk to this particular group of people, especially in a small theatre, where their presence predominates—well, it was difficult. The energy of the critics is very different from a normal house. They’ve come to judge: that’s what their job is, and how most of them view it. It’s hard not to become self-conscious in that atmosphere. Remember when you were a child, and a teacher or a parent put you under scrutiny and said grimly: Okay, now let’s see what you can do. You invariably freeze. You wouldn’t freeze in front of a nurturing parent or teacher, but in front of a judgmental one, it’s pretty hard not to. That’s what theatre performers are up against during critics’ nights: a strange, judgmental, cerebral atmosphere that is nothing like performing for a regular audience. Oh well, I’m off on critics again. Give it a rest, Chris.

Then after the reviews and previews, we were back off on the subscription houses again. And they liked this better than Baby with the Bathwater—they actually agreed with the Woman’s sense of rage and upset, and they grew to like the Man. (The actor in me, I sometimes feared, made him more ingratiating than he maybe should have been, in order to make some of his opinions on sexuality more palatable to the fairly conventional audience.)

But I found the run very stressful.

I usually enjoy performing—and I had greatly enjoyed being in The Marriage of Bette and Boo—but performing in Laughing Wild ended up being harder, and more complicated, for me.

The Man’s monologue is very personal, and I’m a mixture of introvert and extrovert. Some days I’d be at the theatre and not want to get up in front of the audience and express myself so nakedly. But then for that thirty minute monologue, I would have to pretend to be outgoing. Of course, that’s what acting is, pretending; but these monologues felt as if they should be genuinely felt, not just performed; and when I would feel reclusive and not communicative, it felt very uncomfortable to do this play. (I also probably internalized a lot of the critics’ judgments, which also made me want to withdraw and not be outgoing.)

And then here I was again with the subscriber audiences. As I said, they liked it (and sometimes told us so), but they were hard to play to_; the previews had gotten us used to being rewarded by big laughs, and now, though we still got laughs, it felt as if we were pulling the audience along with us. (I remember after one matinee, Katherine and I were having lunch, bemoaning how quiet and nonresponsive the house had been, when four women in their late sixties came over and told us how much they had just loved the play and how it made them think and so on. This was a big boost, so we got better at deciding that a quieter house didn’t necessarily mean they were disinterested. Indeed, Katherine pointed out that the loudly laughing audiences were probably made up of people who already saw the world in the terms the play did, and that maybe the quieter houses “needed” to be exposed to the play’s viewpoint more than our demonstrative houses did. Sometimes that gave me a sense of purpose: there were audiences that needed to be exposed to this play. Other times my sense of purpose would drop down to zero, and I would await going to hell in a handbasket with everyone else in New York City.)

Our last week (which no one knew was our last week due to confusing publicity from Playwrights), the subscribers were over, and we had only audiences who came to see the specific show. And all eight performances were glorious, as the invited previews had been; but these audiences weren’t invited, they were just whoever came and paid that night. It made me feel the play and the performance were a success. I wish we had run longer so I could have had more of that, to convince me the play was successful with audiences, or at least to test whether those performances were just flukes. But having the last eight in a row be so well received was at least a nice note on which to finish up.

I got to do the Man’s monologue on its own this past summer at the Theatre Communications Group conference in Northampton, Massachusetts. TCG is the organization of all the regional theatres, and so the audience at this conference was of theatre professionals from all over the country. I loved performing it there, knowing I wasn’t going to be reviewed; audience response would be my one and only critique. And I was thrilled with the TCG audience’s response. Audiences want to be entertained, and they also want to be engaged in issues that are important to them. This one-time performance helped me feel better about the writing in Laughing Wild. The electricity between the piece, me, and the audience seemed so evident to me that I simply don’t understand the blankness with which it was received critically in New York.

I sound like a stuck record about critics, so what topic can I end on that doesn’t concern them?

I keep meaning to talk about the “New Age” stuff in Laughing Wild. The Man clearly dabbles in it, without its really working for him, and that’s true of me as well as him. Probably one of the sincerest lines in the monologue, for me, is, “I’m starved for some meaning. . . I’m tired of being an existentialist.” Maybe it’s my Catholic religious upbringing, which instilled in me as a child the belief in a Father God with intricate, involved plans for your life; with its guardian angels (like ethereal teddy bears) floating around, trying to guide you in the right direction; with its myriad of saints with special skills (like St. Anthony for finding lost things, and, most appropriate for the 20th century, St. Jude for magical help in hopeless causes).

The New Age is kind of like secular humanism married to a sense of magic: crystals and the earth and our own bodies have healing properties that we have forgotten about; there are spirit guides floating around, with advice and solace and direction; if there isn’t a great big Father up there to guide and judge (and condemn) us, there’s a belief in a God within that we are all a part of. The world and its chaos seem so far outside our control, it’s very attractive to believe or at least entertain belief in these sorts of things in order to more easily walk around, putting one foot after another. And because I do believe in intuition—which is a nonlinear kind of knowing—there is a part of me perfectly willing to think there’s a whole litany of different kinds of knowledge that humankind could have access to.

So some days I’m a sort of semi-believer.

And then other days, alas, I switch back to finding life an enormous, meaningless effort. And on those days I try not to talk on the telephone, and I sit in a chair and meditate on Peggy Lee singing “Is That All There Is?” And I wait for feelings of optimism to return.