Once upon a time, Monday nights were dark nights. Every theater was closed, everyone stayed home: actors, audience, and critics. But Kenneth Prager found that no nights were completely dark anymore, certainly not Off-Broadway.
He put in a full day at the Times on Monday, writing the final drafts of two reviews that would not run until later in the week. One described CSC’s uneven revival of The Rivals, the other a vanity musical about New Yorkers and their dogs. “Imagine Rent with dog biscuits, or Hair with mange, and you get some idea of Dog Run.” He tried to be kind to the actors.
It was going to be a slow week. He wanted to review the new Richard Foreman and explore his thoughts about that strange avant-garde dreamer whose performance pieces hadn’t changed in thirty years. Repetition became a kind of integrity. But Ted Bickle, the first reviewer, had put dibs in on the Foreman. Bickle was being very piggy with assignments since his return from the hospital.
The copyeditor routed The Rivals back into Kenneth’s computer decorated like a Christmas cookie with red corrections and green queries, including one asking him to explain, “for our few readers who might not know,” what century Sheridan had lived in. Kenneth could have worked at home, but he needed his office in the Times Building. He felt solid here, grounded, safe in his fourth-floor cubbyhole. Other Timesmen and Timeswomen softly milled outside his open door. Kenneth was not the boogeyman here, not the Buzzard of Off-Broadway, but a good journalist, a disciplined writer who never missed a deadline. He liked most of the people he worked with, and they seemed to like him—except maybe Bickle.
He went home by cab. He used to take the subway but couldn’t anymore. Too many theater people traveled underground.
He ate dinner with his family that night, munching the macaroni and cheese—Rosalind’s favorite—that Gretchen had picked up at Gourmet Garage on her way home from the office. He listened to Gretchen ask Rosalind about a boy she was sweet on, Tony, who’d been in Show Boat with her. He was startled to learn that Rosalind could be sweet on anyone. Wasn’t she too young?
“Does this mean I’ll have to start meeting boys at the door with a shotgun?” he teased.
“Oh, Daddy,” said Rosalind, baring her braces at him in a grimace of humiliating pity.
Around the time when most family men were thinking about going to bed and enjoying nice long chats with their wives—he wanted to ask Gretchen about this Tony—Kenneth had to go out again. He was expected at Cafe Fez tonight for something called “Leopold and Lois.” It wasn’t a play, it was—God knows what it would be. The music reviewer had seen it and said it wasn’t music. So they were sending Kenneth.
“Good luck, dear,” said Gretchen when he kissed the top of her head—she did not get up from the sofa. “Who knows?” she timidly hoped. “Maybe it’ll be fun?”
He could only make a pained face and produce a pained noise. “I’ll try not to wake you when I come in,” he told her. “Good night.”
Cafe Fez was just over in the East Village. Kenneth decided to walk. The night was lovely, the air mild and fragrant. A man could be safely anonymous in the bosky shadows of the tree-lined streets.
Fez was in the basement of a large, trendy restaurant near the Public Theater. Reviewers were supposed to be incognito, but the management knew him. “The Times, right? We got a table for you.” The room was set up like a nightclub, but the crowd was hardly café society. They were all in their twenties, with an extreme sampling of shaved heads and stapled faces. Kenneth had left his necktie at home but feared he still stuck out like a Secret Service agent.
They led him to a table where a man was already seated, a plump young man in a seersucker suit. “Kenneth Prager! What a surprise! Never thought I’d see you here!”
He held out his hand and Kenneth shook it: a damp, pudgy hand. “Hello, Cameron.”
Cameron Ditchley wrote for the Post. He wasn’t their theater reviewer or music critic, just a renaissance hack whose beat was “Downtown.” A florid dandy of another era, he was not yet thirty but looked straight out of Sweet Smell of Success. He wore a display handkerchief in the pocket of his jacket. He spoke in an exuberant whine full of random italics.
“I hear this is fabulous. But you must have heard too, or the Paper of Record wouldn’t be sending a man of your credentials.”
They made shop talk for ten excruciating minutes. Ditchley loved anything he hadn’t seen, and hated only shows that had closed. Whenever Kenneth feared he’d become a sell-out, a hack, a whore, he often told himself, Well, at least I’m not Cameron Ditchley.
Finally, the show began.
An old man and old woman stumbled up onstage, or rather, two boys in their twenties, one of them in drag. Leopold and Lois were a lounge act: Leopold played the piano, Lois sang. Leopold wore the bad, sooty makeup of a child playing Grampa in a school play. Lois was more convincing in her blue-rinse wig and teal blue evening gown. Kenneth was not averse to drag; he could appreciate camp. He loved the late Charles Ludlam.
Lois kicked off the act by singing “All of Me”—in the coarse croak of a sick crow. No, it wasn’t music. Kenneth scribbled the song title on his notepad. He noticed Ditchley noticing; Ditchley took out his own pen and wrote something on a cocktail napkin. Sitting with other reviewers often made Kenneth feel like they were all taking a test and he should keep his answers covered.
“Good evening,” Lois croaked. “Welcome to the musical stylings of Leopold and Lois. Lucky you.” Leopold tinkled the intro for a song. But instead of singing, Lois growled, “That reminds me—” and fell into a boozy ramble about her life in music, starting with her childhood. She had a wonderful drunken mother and an even drunker father, who raped her when she was twelve. “Oh, but I got my revenge on him,” she said sweetly. “Next time he visited me in bed, I was holding a straight razor under the covers. Ha! Improved his vocal range by a whole octave. Mom, of course, never forgave me. So I left home and went into show business.”
It was supposed to be funny, or funny for being so unfunny. The kids around him roared. At the next table, a young woman with brown lipstick and a face full of rings—she was armored like a stag beetle—applauded by pounding the table with her fist.
The show continued in this vein, with more monologues than songs, Lois tossing back drinks and laughing as she told stories about her first husband the junkie, her second husband the cross-dresser, and how Leopold was beat up in grade school, then in high school, then in college, then was thrown off a roof by his boyfriend, “a very nice schizophrenic named—Mike.”
“So here we are,” she concluded and reached across the piano to clutch Leopold’s hand. “Together forever. The way it was meant to be. Isn’t life a kick?”
It was a parody, of course, a riff on all the smiling-through-the-tears schtick of a million lounge acts. But the ugliness and pain outweighed the comedy. There was no sympathy here, no pity, only contempt for an old woman’s delusions. And there was no love of showbiz either. Kenneth worked hard to find some affection for junk, the poetry of trash. There was nothing but anger.
Lois began to sing “Hey, Jude”—“For the kids,” she explained—turning the elegiac Beatles song into a bitter, angry rant.
“Isn’t this fabulous?” cooed Ditchley.
Once Kenneth caught the note of anger, he could notice nothing else. And the audience ate it up, enjoying the cruelty as if it were bold truth-telling. You’d think the show were an attack on Ronald Reagan or the Vietnam War, not the mocking of two old entertainers.
What were the performers and audience so angry about? Their parents’ lives? Getting old? The vicious world of celebrity and entertainment? Whatever the cause, Kenneth felt he’d fallen into something fierce and ugly. It made him angry.
When the show ended, Kenneth hurried outside. He needed the meaningless noise of the city at night. But it was late, the city was quiet. He walked home on West Ninth Street, a silent corridor of tall apartment buildings that suggested a high empty room like a deserted theater. Kenneth hated the empty quiet. He walked more quickly. He could hear nothing here except his own sorry footsteps.