Day 111…
I got into the AEA union in 1985. Actor’s Equity Association is the union that covers actors in the theatre as well as stage managers.
You can’t be in the union unless you have a union job and you can’t have a union job unless you are in the union. That’s the endless conundrum facing all of us when we are starting out.
The way that I got in was that I had been working for a stage manager and a director as a non-union production assistant for a couple of years. On the kind of shows we did, though, the assistant stage manager position was not covered by AEA. Finally, they did one in a theatre that was big enough to require that I join the union and I got my card.
The show was called Just So! (complete with exclamation point). It was a musical version of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories by Mark St. Germain, David Zippel and Doug Katsaros. The great British empresario, Cameron Mackintosh did a different version a few years later that had nothing to do with this one. Most google searches will lead you to that one, not ours.
This one started in a small regional theatre in Allentown, Pennsylvania. I didn’t work on it there. The stage managers connected with the theatre did it, but we all took a road trip out to see it.
Bebe Neuwirth was in it in Allentown, but she didn’t come into New York with it. She played the Leopard. (as in How the Leopard got its Spots). André DeShields played a character that we used to refer to as The Evil Queen, but looking it up, I see that officially he was called Eldest Magician. André won the Tony award last year for the musical Hadestown.
We opened at the Jack Lawrence Theatre on December 3, 1985 which was a Tuesday. We then closed Saturday night after six somewhat dismal performances. We were not a hit. BUT, I had my union card.
It was announced yesterday, by the Broadway League, that the shut-down of Broadway theatres is going to continue until January 2. The Broadway League is an alliance of producers and theatre owners. To be clear, Broadway shows are not going to start up again on January 2. The previous date that had been announced was Labor Day - September 7. Nobody thought that we were going to start up again in September, they just didn’t want everybody piling onto the system to get refunds and exchanges at the same time.
That’s it.
January 2, as a date, is for exactly the same reason. If you have theatre tickets for a Broadway show between now and January 2, you can now get them refunded. That’s all that that particular date means. Once the majority of those ticket orders have been dealt with, the League will extend the date forward another couple of months.
So, when is Broadway coming back? The answer to that, no matter who you ask, are always going to be the three scariest words in the entire English language:
I don’t know.
Nobody knows. Period. There are some guesses, but they are all based on what is happening right now and not on what will actually happen when we get there.
A lot of friends in the business leapt onto Facebook yesterday to complain that they hadn’t been notified of this decision by the union as if the union was some sort of all-knowing parent. Nobody in the union knows anything more than any of the rest of us do. Honestly, none of our actual parents know anything more that we do. Nobody does.
We have to stop thinking about the people we choose to lead us as being these omnipotent beings who know everything. They aren’t and they don’t. They are just people that we have chosen to be our voices. They don’t know either.
They are making this up as they go along. You can watch somebody like Governor Cuomo take in the information at hand and make the best decision that he can. Making elderly people who had been hospitalized with the virus return to their nursing homes was a massive mistake. He learned that the hard way. Many people died. He could have shut us down earlier than he did, that was a mistake, too. In both of those cases, he was taking the information that he had at the time and weighing against politics, economics and everything else and, as a result, made some wrong decisions.
Once he learned more, his decision making improved and now we are seeing the fruits of that. Our cases are well and truly down. Compared to the rest of the country at the moment, we are golden. Before he learned those lessons, though, he just didn’t know what to do. It’s easy to sit at home and second guess all of our leaders, but in Cuomo’s actions you can see an evolution happening as time progresses. He knows much more about how to deal with a pandemic now than when we started.
Now, there may very well be information that comes out in the future about things that happened that he could have stopped. Looking at what the man has done to safeguard the people of New York, however, at this point in time, I am happy that he is the one leading us through this.
He also says “I don’t know” when he doesn’t know. I find that immensely comforting.
I don’t know can’t be an excuse if you don’t try and learn what the answer is. It also can’t be a lie.
The President continually says “I didn’t know” when something that he does backfires. He shared a video on twitter that had a guy yelling “white power!” at a group of protestors and is now claiming that he didn’t know that it was part of the video.
The President “didn’t know” the significance of Juneteenth or the city of Tulsa when he chose to stage his first rally back there.
He “didn’t know” that the virus was coming out of China because the Chinese didn’t tell him.
It has been reported that the Russians have been paying Taliban fighters to specifically target American troops. The Russians are literally paying out a bounty on American soldier’s lives. The President says that he “didn’t know” that was happening.
Today there is a report that the intelligence was included in his daily briefings last year in 2019. His defense is that he doesn’t read the daily briefings, so he didn’t know. The White House Press Secretary says the same thing. The President didn’t know. Even if we accept the absurd and horrifying notion that the President didn’t know about any of this, it is absolutely apparent that everybody around him did.
When the Vice President and Speaker of the House start wearing masks and cancelling events in viral hotspots, whatever they are saying to us, we know that they KNOW.
We have all learned a lot over these last few months. Even with that, there is still a huge amount of information that we simply don’t have yet. Every day scientists are learning more about this virus and how it spreads. Some of the new information seems to contradict itself.
Will we get a second wave?
Will Broadway reopen in the spring?
I don’t know.
One of the other characters in Just So! was a Giraffe. The Giraffe was played by my ex-husband. Yes, in the very short time that gay marriage has been legal, I have somehow managed to already have done it twice.
You think gay marriage is hard, try gay divorce. Anyway, that’s (possibly) for another time.
In the show, the Giraffe knows everything. He is a complete control freak. In his big eleven o’clock number, my ex sang a song that should be called “I don’t know” but I think was called something else. I’ve been looking for it, but I can’t find it to check, but my memory of it is that the lyrics were just “I don’t know” sung over and over again.
My ex… well, whatever I might say about him, he could wail.
This song was a total anthem of joy where the Giraffe discovered the freedom in being able to say the words, “I don’t know”.
None of us knows what the future is going to be so all that we can do is prepare for the worst and hope for the best. What actually happens is going to likely to fall between the two.
When “I don’t know” covers a lie it is extremely dangerous. When it’s spoken as the truth it is freeing because it gives us a way forward. It points us on the path of discovery that we need to move ahead on. The unknown is (usually) much scarier than the known.
When we know the date that performances will start up again on Broadway, we will know. Until then we don’t. That’s all. That’s OK.
I’ve got a Zoom meeting with a bunch of Broadway stars in half an hour. They aren’t going to know either, but we are going to make something else in the meantime.
We will get through this.
THAT, is something that I actually know.
We will get through this.
someone please once told me
God is in the unknown
I found this to be comforting
I like not having an answer to everything
Rilke says
“love the questions”
love everything
we aren’t ready for the answers yet
there is alot I do no
and alot I don’t
no
I do know
I can trust and listen and honor the voices inside me
the quiet truth
the one that makes me feel joyful
your posts do that
every day
this I know
is true
💕