When the usher let us in, I saw that the space was fairly typical of off-off Broadway Theatre—that is, tiny. Inside the dark, hot, dusty room were four rows of two columns of five folding chairs arranged on a platform with four small tiers. The smell of sawdust was in the air. Natasha’s eyes widened. The last thing we had gone to see together was “Cats.”
Unlike a Broadway show, here there was no predicting what it would be like. It could be an amazing play. It could be a piece of crap. It could be an amazing piece of crap. Among us 25 audience members, there was sort of a shared anxiousness of not knowing. Going to a seedy little theatre like this one was akin to what I imagined it would have been like to visit a speakeasy in the 1920s. The cast and audience were conspiring to create a little secret society with rules of our own.
Every so often, I had ventured into one of these off-off Broadway productions at the prodding of some friend or co-worker, only to watch two or three actors in turtlenecks mime and pontificate their way through two-hour sensory deprivation experiments. Audience members would sit patiently in these folding metal torture chairs, flex their feet to avoid calf cramps, stifle their yawns, applaud politely at the end, stay long enough to show the actor or playwright that they did their duty by attending, and then retreat before having to lie convincingly about how good the show was. I hoped this wasn’t one of those.
Snazzy music from a synthesizer blasted over the speakers. The lights came up on some sort of South American native pulling tourists through the jungle on an enormous cart. It wasn’t one of these jungles painted on a backdrop begging the audience to be taken seriously. There were solid vines, albeit made of plastic, that the actors had to constantly push their way through. They were singing a song about being in paradise. And so “Club Ted” began.
During this first musical number, as the tourists were arriving, Natasha began to giggle. That was a good sign. “What is it?” I whispered.
“I really like the fat guy in the Hawaiian shirt!” she said. “He’s so cute!”
I could immediately spot the fat guy to whom she was referring. I had him clocked at about 300 pounds. But I saw the appeal. He had these shining, expressive eyes, soft cheeks, and an expansive, innocent smile, like some enormous baby bundle of joy. Where did he find this guy? I wondered. Did he put in a casting call for “Adorable Fat Guy?”
Dirk was playing the sleazy owner of a resort situated in an unstable South or Latin American dictatorship. Near the beginning he is complaining to the local general, a tall dark man with slick black hair, that his death squad is performing its executions too close to the tennis courts and that members have been complaining about the noise. It was an excellent premise, Dirk was good in his role, and I had no idea where he got his Latin American general.
The second musical number was something called, “Casual Sex,” in which Dirk was fondling, straddling, leapfrogging with, and everything short of dry humping two of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen in real life, dressed in bikinis. One of them was this curvy, breezy blonde with a sensually fleshy butt, dripping with brattiness and superior attitude. The other was a veritable Penthouse Pet of the Month—a dark-haired petite but busty Jewish or Italian girl with a sort of aggressive, in-your-face sexuality. That lucky sonofabitch. I wondered if he was fucking either one of them or both. God, I hated my stupid little desk job.
“That’s a pretty cheap laugh, if you ask me,” Natasha whispered. Though I disagreed, I nodded just to shut her up.
–excerpt from “Larger than Life, from Tales of the Troupe.
Doug, who taped this and Jay, who wrote it, were ashamed at the bad singing (so says Jay) and shoddy camera work. This footage was actually to provide close-ups for another piece of footage that showed the stage from a distance. Anyway, this was the song that inspired me to write for the theater and consort with actresses.
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