14 Stories

OUT OF WORK

An ad in the Equity newsletter says a South Dakota college has an opening for an acting coach and stage director of several workshops and Theater Arts Department plays at associate professor’s pay. The position is for three years starting this September. “We are seeking a working actor, not the typical theater teacher who is teeming with worthwhile erudition but deficient in performing experience.”

I send my résumé and also write: “I expect because of your Equity ad you’ll get 700 to l000 applications, many from people with a lot more stage and movie experience than I and also more experience in Theater Arts departments (mine’s been limited to being a substitute teacher for the N. Y.C. Bd. of Education and taking over junior high school play productions when the regular Language Arts teacher who also dabbled in Drama was sick). But I’m applying anyway, as I need the job, feel I qualify (if you’re serious about wanting a ‘working’ actor), and want a change of scenery. In fact, I’ll probably need to have a change of scenery, since once I saw your ad I did my criminal best to stop circulation of the newsletter to every New York actor and actress I could think of who might better qualify. That ought to be some indication of my industrious nature and ability to act.”

The chairperson of the Theater Arts Department writes back saying: “Initially I was put off by your efforts to stop distribution of our ad. But after receiving close to 800 applications so far, coupled with the enormous sadness of learning in one ‘felt’ swoop that so many gifted theater performers are out of work, I am much beholden to you to say the least, and to say the most, shamelessly overjoyed. It has taken me weeks to go through all the applications, and finally reaching yours brought a much-needed levity to the task. Perhaps because of your sense of humor and certainly because of your past active experience in the field, two accomplishments that are in short supply in our department, I would like to pursue your application further, despite your lacking the M.F.A., which we hoped for in all our candidates and which the printer left out of the ad.”

A few weeks later she writes: “The three year position you applied for has been cut to two years because of a reduction in our department’s funds. In this college, which is run (I might say was saved) by an ex-textile salesman who rose to the top of his field (no mean accomplishment either), the Arts take third best to Business Administration and Custodial Science, the latter having the most extensive catalogue in its category in the Midwest, and is consequently the school’s main source of state and corporate aid. If you’re still interested in the position, it might be helpful to know that you’re now one of 32 candidates out of the original 1048 still competing for the job. Some of the more attractive candidates have since eliminated themselves for stage or screen work or positions at other colleges and universities; about a thousand applicants were rejected outright or after deep consideration for a variety of reasons; another hundred applicants applied after the stated deadline; and two of the original 34 final candidates have since died. If you become one of the five finalists, would you be willing to come here to be interviewed?”

I write back saying I’d be happy to.

A month later she writes: “I am equally happy to report to you that you are one of the five finalists. Unfortunately, because of continuing payroll cuts, the position had to be reduced to a single year, though with a possible option for a second. One correction I must make is that of the two candidates who I said had died, one wrote me saying she was ‘only kidding,’ though with no enucleation why. And the second said that the person who claimed to be the executor of his estate was in fact his archenemy and longstanding theatrical rival in that part of the country (and coincidentally a final candidate for the position himself) getting even on a number of old scores (some of them musical, I’m sure). I quickly eliminated all three from the competition, which might seem ‘unequityable’ to you, but with so many highly qualified candidates to choose from, I was snatching (you might say) at eliminative straws. Another thing, Mort: because the position is now only for a year and with no possibility of tenure even if you were asked to stay on for a second year, its title of ‘Theater Arts teacher’ will henceforth be known as ‘actor-in-residence,’ with the salary commensurately reduced to that of an assistant professor’s rather than the assoc. professor’s pay as advertised. And with vacant houses going for a premium in this booming college town, there’ll now be no assurance of an on- or off campus abode, which might change the title to ‘actor-out-of residence’ if the person who gets the job can’t find a home. (When the original ‘in-residence’ pun was told to me, it seemed much funnier than the above. I’ve always been remiss with key lines and cues, which is perhaps why I gave up acting to only teach and administrate.) If you’re still interested, after all I’ve just said, please list two possible times you might be able to come here for a minimum stay of two nights and days between August 19th and 24th. I’m sorry to rush you like this, but the position does begin with the new fall quarter on September 3rd.”

I write back giving the dates I can be in northeast South Dakota. Several weeks after I was supposed to have been interviewed, the chairperson phones and says “Do you think you can fly out tomorrow or the next day for the interview? The job is still for one year though begins with the winter quarter now and with no possible option for a second year.”

“I can come tomorrow. Do you make the flight arrangements from where you are or should I do all that here and be reimbursed when I arrive?”

“The school policy is for the interviewee to make his own traveling arrangements and be reimbursed in full if he gets the job. If he doesn’t get it, the college reimburses half of all his expenses, though with both it takes a minimum of one to two months to receive.”

“I’m not a gambling man, Sarah, especially with money I’ll have to borrow to pay for the trip, so what are my chances of getting the job?”

“I’m sure I’m not supposed to reveal this, Mort, but the four other finalists bowed out because they didn’t want to uproot their families for only one year when there was no chance the contract would be renewed. So I’d say your coming here is more to interview us and see how you like our department and countryside rather than our interviewing you.”

“In that case, I’m on my way.”

She tells me of the one plane I can catch in Minneapolis to get to the North Dakota airport, the closest to the college. “There’s no train service to here and the one bus from Fargo leaves an hour before the plane lands, so someone will meet you at the airport and drive you down.”

It takes all day to get there. Long stopover in Minneapolis, longer Fargo wait for the car. I’m put up in a student dorm, “Which would normally cost you a dollar a night,” Sarah says, “but I think my department can absorb. You’ll have to shell out for all the other expenses while you’re here, so for reimbursement purposes keep your receipts and an exact written record of what they’re for.”

That night I’m to meet several Theater Arts Department people and their mates at the one restaurant in town that Sarah says serves halfway decent food. Before we go we have cocktails at her house and she gets high and her husband Ike gets a little drunk and begs off from “Old Ptomaino’s to take care of my hounds who have colds and who I don’t want getting lonely without me and during dinner and dopey talk just toppling over and die.”

Driving to the restaurant at 30 mph over the national speed limit and about 70 mph more than her tipsiness could seem to control, Sarah says” Ike didn’t come mostly because he went out for the job too. They wouldn’t consider him because he had little theatrical experience except for his Ph.D. orals and the defense of his dissertation on Beckett’s effect on the East Berlin years of Brecht, or was it the other way around, with Brecht on Beckett’s German poems? But there’s some execrable state law where it has to be a professional like you and preferably someone outside the school or we don’t get those particular funds. Kind of makes me bitter, for we need the money and it’d be fun working with that shiftless slob for once, but no hard feelings, you hear?” and she turns to me for an answer and we narrowly miss a cow as we plow through the first row of a front-lawn cornfield.

The dinner talk is mostly about rifles, shotguns, the upcoming hunting season when most of the men expect to fly north and bag a couple of moose, turkey shoots, do I shoot? “No? Then trap and fish? Then what do you expect to do around here weekends if you get the job?” And movies. Quality of acting in x-rated classics, which are all they get in the area. The greasy food we’re about to eat. “But great Bloody Marys,” someone says, “with two shots each in them of real commie vodka, and a celery twig instead of lemon slice, so you can get some roughage too.” Crime in New York. Death of the Broadway theater, rebirth of the regional. Where I’m originally from tor there’s an accent that’s not Manhattan, which a few of them say comes from London and almost everyone detects as not from New York. “North Carolina.” I lie. “So you’re down home like all of us, even if you been living in that cesspool for fifteen years.” Joan of Arc, Timon of Athens, and Cyrano de Bergerac, the three major Theater Arts Department productions this year that I’d be expected to help direct. “What are your ideas on Cyrano for instance? Would you portray him as a sympathetic impotent or a detestable sex-starved rogue or both? Do you think Rostand was influenced by Collodi’s Pinocchio, which if you didn’t know was written just fourteen years before Cyrano?” “Seventeen years,” someone says. “Fourteen.” “Seventeen.” “Let’s settle it,” Sarah says, “and call it an even dozen.” “Even two dozen,” the person who said “seventeen” says.

Gradually a couple of the teachers or their husbands or wives get drunk and have to wait in their cars for their spouses to finish dinner and in one case both get drunk together and leave while their desserts are being set aflame. “Put ours in two doggy bags,” the wife says before they go. Finally it’s just Sarah drinking more but getting soberer it seems, and the scenic and costumes design professor and his girlfriend, a Theater Arts Department senior who will be starring, he says, “in one of your three major plays this year including Cyrano or Timon in drag — that is, if you don’t positively mind.”

“Does that mean you know something I don’t, and maybe you do too,” I say to Sarah, “which is that I have the job?”

“Gordon was saying if, if, if. No final decision can be made till the vice president and English Department chairman and I get together the day after you leave.”

“Last winter,” the professor says, “for this flambé reminds me so much of it — remember, Sarah, the fireplaces we kept glowing for seventeen days straight? — we had a blizzard so tough, Mort, that it obliterated three people in this town alone. One of them this cuteas-can-be young history and marital team from the East who’d never seen such a snow and thought they had to experience it in the raw with a walk around their little street I don’t mean they went outside in the raw, for theoretically their habiliments on any other day or night, shall I say, would have availed.”

That night I can’t sleep much because of the drinks or spicy food and the beer parties going on in the surrounding rooms and floors. Next day I conduct a directing class and acting seminar, both with the Theater Arts Department staff watching and commenting—“I disagree with Mort’s interpretation of that walk-on.” “I agree.” “I don’t.” “You don’t disagree with Mr. Silk’s interpretation of the walk-on or you agree with Chuck and Faith?” “Excuse me, Professor Bien, but when I said I agree I didn’t mean I agree with Chuck but with Mr. Silk”—and after lunch I’m interviewed by the English Department chairman who tells me he’s been to New York City twice, both times to read papers at an MLA convention and also to see some shows. I ask what the letters MLA stand for and he says “I’ll skip that remark as either being indirectly pointed or too tempting for me to respond to in the cynical rather snotty way I dislike in everyone, including myself.”

“Wait, I don’t want to be misconstrued, especially by you. I suppose the last letter stands for Association, or possibly Academy, but I was sincere when I said I didn’t know.”

“I’ll accept that, sir.”

I’m next interviewed by the college’s vice president who holds open a thick folder with my name on it, and which has letters of recommendation and my correspondence with Sarah sticking out of it, and she says “You haven’t applied for too many college jobs, have you? Though I suspect all serious people in the arts, because of what should we call it? The emotional pressures of their work and the different sort of acquaintanceships they make over the years — have to be somewhat bizarre by nature and innovative in the social ways to just get on with it, as our students say, now isn’t that so?”

“I never thought there was anything that unusual about our behavior or that our pressures or the people we meet differed from any other line of work, except for a little something here or there which every profession has peculiar to its own, but you’re probably right.”

Later Sarah says the Theater Arts and English department faculties would love for me to give an informal reading of my favorite monologues from plays. “We have an excellent library for a college this size, and it is kind of expected of you I’m afraid.”

The reading went so well, she tells me over dinner at the same restaurant of last night, “that the two departments would like to jointly sponsor a reading in the main auditorium tomorrow afternoon for the entire school and nearby communities to enjoy.” A modest admission price is charged at the door and enough money is made, she later says, “to sponsor several free poetry and play readings by lesser-known performers during the year, and even pay them a fee. We’re all very grateful to you, and it certainly didn’t diminish your chances in securing the job.”

“Does that mean I have it?”

“Do you live alone?”

“I have my own apartment.”

“Then I suggest you start thinking about getting a sublessee.”

Sarah can’t find anyone to drive me to the airport. Ike was supposed to but he disappeared into the woods behind their house with his hounds and quiver and bow and enough food for three days, and she, because of ecological reasons that she suddenly decided on after a bad dream last night, no longer drives a car. I phone the young woman who asked for my autograph after the reading last night and who said if there was anything she can do for me short of driving me to New York, please let her know.

“If you only called five minutes earlier,” she says. “But now I’m in bed with a sick friend.”

I take the bus to Fargo, which stops at about a hundred towns along the way, one for a half-hour food and rest break. In Minneapolis I miss the last plane to New York and can’t make any connections till early morning, so I sleep the night in the airport lounge.

A month later I still haven’t heard from Sarah. I write asking what the decision is and two weeks later she writes back “I wanted to delay answering you till another candidate confirmed his appointment to the position of actor-in-residence. After you left we interviewed one other actor and actress and felt that Hans Radish’s ‘performance’ in the classroom was the most promising of the three, and since his acting experience is as impressive as yours, that he should get the job. Please send your receipts and a written record of what each receipt is for so I can start reimbursement proceedings to get your money to you soon as we can.”

I send the receipts and written record along with a note saying “Because you misled me in stating I was to be the one interviewee for the job and that this interview was really just for me to see if I liked the job and all of you, which is the sole reason I thought I could afford to fly out there, I want to be reimbursed in full.”

Following week I get a check from the college bursar for half the expenses I paid out. I write Sarah and the English Department chairman that I’m not going to cash this check till I get another check for the rest on my expenses or at least the equivalent of that money as a reading fee, and I get no response. I write the college vice president and tell her why I think I should get the rest of my expenses or a reading fee and she writes back “An impartial board has carefully considered your complaint and though sympathetic to your financial and professional situation, has decided that the college reimbursed to you all that you deserved.” I then write the senior South Dakota senator and the college president and include copies of my letters to Sarah and the chairman and college vice president and her reply. The senator says “South Dakota has always been known as a fair-minded state and personally, your grievance seems just. But rather than ask for a reading fee, which might also be just if it weren’t a little after the fact, I should write the president of the college asking for the rest of your expenses.” I send the college president a copy of the senator’s letter and he still doesn’t reply. By this time it’s December and I’ve run out of people to borrow money from and I still haven’t found a job. I cash the college’s check with a friend. He calls a week later and says “‘I have to ask you for the money back plus the bank’s three-dollar service charge, as that check bounced because the college went bankrupt.”