Next script on my script shelf:
Sexaholics and Other Plays – Acting Edition
A very funny and also frightening play – about two people who are sex addicts. When we first meet them, they are having a mad sexual encounter, and are the kinds of people who are instantly emotionally intimate. We think it’s great … but slowly, as we watch the first scene unfold, we realize how messed up it all is. They are both married to other people … and they are risking everything to have these one-night stands. It’s a compulsion – they can’t stop themselves. She (Julie) starts to really feel bad about it during the first scene … and she starts to talk about wanting to go to “a meeting” where other people who can’t stop themselves from giving in to the sex drive meet and talk and 12-step to Health. He (Tony) is totally offended by the suggestion that he might need help. I’m making this sound rather dreary and actually, it’s a very funny play.
They both get into recovery – and the next time we meet them is a couple years later – when they have gotten the sex drive under control, they are “happily” married to their respective spouses, and all is well. But of course all is NOT well. The play is a kind of lampoon on the self-help culture in general.
Here’s a very funny excerpt from the first scene. The two of them have just met. They just had mind-blowing sex. They come out of the bedroom and say, “So what’s your name again?” They start to talk. It’s obvious that these people are emotional vacuums. They have completely glommed onto one another because that’s what addicts do. In this section of the first scene, they start to confess some of their past sins to each other. As you’ll see, it is a mix of amusing and disturbing. Schisgal’s a master at that.
From Sexaholics and Other Plays – Acting Edition
TONY. I once had sex with two nurses. In the operating room of a city hospital.
JULIET. I once had sex with two bus drivers. On a bus traveling over eighty miles an hour.
TONY. I once had sex with a stewardess on a DC-10 going to Frankfurt, Germany.
JULIET. I once had sex with a scuba-diver, under water in Montego Bay, Jamaica.
TONY. How old was the oldest man you ever slept with?
JULIET. Arnie Schneider. Sixty-eight. You?
TONY. Emily Rhinebeck. Sixty-one. The youngest was sixteen.
JULIET. Fourteen for me.
TONY. Did you ever sleep with a black man?
JULIET. Of course. Did you ever sleep with a yellow woman?
TONY. In San Francisco. Did you ever sleep with a midget?
JULIET. I almost married a midget.
TONY. YOu’re kidding.
JULIET. No. I was only eighteen when he proposed. I didn’t wanna tie myself down.
TONY. I don’t blame you.
JULIET. How much did the heaviest person you ever slept with weigh?
TONY. Two hundred and thirty-seven pounds.
JULIET. [skeptically] Tony …
TONY. I’m telling you the truth! I met her in Miami, when I was nineteen.
JULIET. How did you know she weighed exactly two hundred and thirty-seven pounds?
TONY. Because I saw her weigh herself. In a drugstore. She said she wouldn’t go to bed with me if she weighed over two hundred and forty pounds.
JULIET. Why not?
TONY. Because she was on a diet, that’s why not! She said the only way she could keep her weight down was by not having sex every time she weighed over two hundred and forty pounds. Lucky for me she was three pounds under the limit.
JULIET. [hands him second martini] Listen to this. I once had an affair with a married man who decided he was getting too fat. He thought if he lost weight his sex life would improve. So he started a diet under a doctor’s supervision. He ate nothing but steaks, skirt steaks, sirloin steaks, any kind of steak. And he went from two hundred and sixteen pounds to one hundred and fifty pounds in less than six months.
TONY. Did his sex life improve?
JULIET. Now that’s the strangest thing. The more weight he lost and the more steaks he ate, the less interested he was in sex. He went from having sex three times a week, to one time a week, to one time a month until eventually he became completely impotent.
TONY. Did he go off his diet?
JULIET. No, he moved to California.
PRATFALLS FOR CRICKETS
(or THE WORST SHOW I’VE EVER BEEN IN)
by brendan o’malley
i usually am quite circumspect when it comes to dishing on theatrical disasters, and also i’ve been quite lucky in that regard, only having been in a small number of productions that i’ve not been immensely proud of.
but, and murray schisgal is to blame, i am breaking my silence. i was in the first ever production of a play called “angel wings” that murray schisgal wrote in the mid ’90’s. i was a part of a theater group that tried to shepherd new works to the stage. murray was affiliated with this group somehow.
i never met him and hope that he is happy, but my life was miserable for several months because of this play.
a short description of the play. a wealthy amoral businessman who has alienated his entire family dies at the end of the first act. during the second act, he returns as a humpbacked stranger and has to get his wife to love him in order to save his soul.
that is a very succinct version of the play, which involves two children, one of whom i played, a young french student who has been left quite a good bit of money in the guy’s will, an angel who tries to help the dude, a murderous limo driver, a hamlet’s mother type marriage to the guy’s brother, ok, i’m confused even trying to remember so you must be completely lost.
any way you slice it, this play is a farce. there is a rap sequence, my character is a strident environmentalist who comes onstage basically wearing a boy scouts uniform and carrying an insect net, and there is an extended sequence in the second act where EVERYONE starts speaking in french accents for NO REASON AT ALL.
now, when i say farce, i don’t mean that it read funny. but if it had any chance of landing laughs it had to be RIDICULOUS. camp, even.
but murray was convinced that this was a romantic comedy, even though there were, count ’em, NO love scenes in the play. he handpicked his director who reminded me of m. emmett walsh. quite a good actor, but a bit under the thumb of the weight of having to direct for a famous writer. someone needed to sit murray down and say, if this is played like a romantic comedy, i’m going to kill myself. oh, i guess that is just what i needed to say to him.
here are some snippets. as is usually the case when actors are in a show they have a hard time believing in, they misbehave. there were a lot of backstage hijinks. the dressing rooms were down a spiral staircase from the stage and so an echo chamber of sorts was formed. this meant that you really couldn’t talk at all without the audience hearing you. and since there wasn’t a helluva lot of LAUGHING coming from the audience, EXTRA care was required.
which made for perhaps the loudest backstage in the history of backstages. the main actor, a pompous blowhard member of the actor’s studio who seemed convinced that this show would finally put him on a par with gene hackman, grew increasingly annoyed. understandably so since he was on stage practically the entire show wearing a hump and talking with an exaggerated lisp. actually, he was quite good but still an asshole.
well, the combination of sweating bullets in a hump to silent faces and constant chatter from the dungeon of actors sent him over the edge. while i was onstage i heard him exit and begin yelling at people on his way down the spiral staircase. clumping down in his big boots that were absolutely necessary for his humpback and yelling at people that they were completely unprofessional.
and i’m not kidding when i say yelling. full throat. people were quiet from then on, mostly sneering in his direction.
at one point, my character falls in love with the young french student. to impress her, i guess, i begin speaking in a french accent while dramatically putting on my bug-catching gloves. my ardor makes me clumsy and i trip over the back of the couch, somersault over it with my insect net in hand and land with my head in the corner of the couch in her boobs.
now, i’ve done pratfalls before. i must break out of modesty here for a moment to assure you that i am considered to be an extremely funny actor. i NAILED this pratfall. it didn’t look forced, it happened in context, it wasn’t exaggerated, etc.
and hence, the title of this post. night after night i would embark on this ridiculous journey over the couch knowing full well that no matter what i did, it would still be met with utter rejection, even contempt. pratfalls for crickets.
i literally retired after that show until i booked my next part. and i never participated in that theater group again. sorry, murray, but you are responsible for my worst theatrical experience ever.
Oh man. I remember that show!!!
I had no idea about the “dungeon” of misbehaving actors – I can so see it!!!
I am shaking with laughter about the “sweating bullets in a hump” line – oh man!!!