Beautiful Chaos. Carey Perloff
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I was radically changing the aesthetic of the organization, reorganizing the school, rethinking the entire administrative structure, stretching my wings in new and surprising ways as a director, and raising a child. Maybe my naïveté was what saved me.
Chapter 5
The Issue of Children
I was raised by a working mother and a liberated father and was in high school during the height of 1970s feminism, so it had never occurred to me that of all fields least friendly to child rearing, theater had to be at the top of the list. I was running CSC when I got pregnant with Lexie, and I suppose it was the ignorance of youth that prevented my husband, Anthony, and me from making any sensible plans about how we were going to raise this child in the midst of our already crazy lives. Lexie was only ten days old when I started rehearsals for a double bill of Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party and Mountain Language, with the great man himself in attendance. This project had been in the works for some time; Pinter’s agent, Judy Daish, had been phoning anxiously all summer to ask, “Have you had that child yet?” in her baritone smoke-filled voice, while I reassured her that the impending baby would in no way compromise our upcoming production. When rehearsals commenced, Lexie was hidden in the back dressing room of CSC, sleeping peacefully in her carry cot until feeding time, at which point Jean Stapleton, who was playing Meg, would sidle up to me and whisper, “The princess needs you now,” and I would disappear for a brief spell to feed the baby. I had been told that Pinter was not fond of babies, so I made sure to keep Lexie well out of sight when he was at rehearsal. I thought I was handling the secret well, so it was astonishing when one day, while advising actor Peter Riegert about a particularly wrenching scene between the political prisoner and his mother, Pinter marched backstage, picked up the sleeping baby in her cot, deposited her (still sleeping) on the table in the midst of the rehearsal room, and said to Peter: “This is your baby. You have been needlessly prevented by the regime from ever seeing her. In fact, you will never see her. Never. Now play the scene.” A startled Riegert quickly found the despair Pinter was looking for, and he and Lexie have been good friends ever since. When the Pinter plays opened at CSC in the fall of 1989, Pinter sent his friend Lauren Bacall to give a report of the proceedings, and the only picture I have left of that evening is “You Know How to Whistle” herself cooing at baby Lexie after the show and pronouncing herself delighted by the entire evening.
CSC had a tiny staff and was two blocks away from my apartment, so I could bring my daughter to work if necessary and (to some extent) set my own rules. The managing directors during my tenure at CSC included Ellen Novack and Patricia Taylor, both of whom had children themselves and were deeply supportive of working mothers, so I never felt I had to defend my decision to have a child and remain in the theater. Being a mother at A.C.T. was altogether a different matter. This was an enormous and complicated institution in which women were, as I have said, relatively absent (with the exception of dedicated employees like Dianne Prichard and Maureen McKibben, who mothered the actors and students with unflagging devotion), and staff children were virtually unheard-of. There was no precedent, and no template for how to behave. Meanwhile, Anthony was a full-time law student at UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall, competing with mostly younger students who certainly had no children. So we just made it up as we went along.
The subsequent eighteen years witnessed an often hilarious and endlessly complicated stream of nannies that became part of the fragile system we jury-rigged to keep our chaotic working and home lives together. Someday perhaps we should write a sitcom about our child-care adventures, which included a fanatic vegan who hid our defrosting hamburger meat under the sink and was consistently late to work because she “didn’t believe in the tyranny of time,” a narcoleptic Turkish woman who spent most of her working day fast asleep on our living room couch, and a wannabe rapper who blared her latest works from her car’s CD player while the children cowered in the backseat with their hands covering their ears. We had a student of Marxism from Berkeley who read Lenin’s “What Is to Be Done?” while feeding Nick, and a Southern pastry chef who taught Lexie to make perfect pie dough; we had a compulsive shopper who spent her whole salary on new sheets and towels, and a wise older woman who read the children Victorian stories and brought a big dress-up box to work every day. Throughout it all, Anthony and I shared the joys and tribulations of our mad lives with our two intelligent and often amused children, who were articulate enough to report back their child-care misadventures on a daily basis. I’m certain that if I hadn’t had a remarkably patient and intelligent husband who happened to be a superb cook, and children in whom I delighted, I never would have survived the vicissitudes and setbacks of running a theater like A.C.T. There is nothing like a sweet face smiling up at you as you read your bad review in the morning to provide reassurance that you haven’t completely failed in the world.
But in so many ways I knew I could never compete with my male and/or childless colleagues, who could jump on a plane at a moment’s notice to see a show they’d heard about or an actor who was receiving attention halfway across the country; my rehearsals always had to finish in time to relieve the babysitter, and sleep was in short supply. It was also clear to me, from the moment I arrived in San Francisco, that the way I was written about in the press would have been different if I’d been a man. No one could wait to prove that this little girl was ill-equipped for the job. When I look at photographs of myself from that first year, I am astonished at how I dressed, in severely tailored suits that had nothing to do with my personality or my taste. I must have been desperately trying to look like I had a degree of authority that internally I felt I lacked.
So I was grateful for every encounter with, and encouragement from, the women who had come before me: producer Lucille Lortel, who at age eighty (when I met her) had more appetite for theatrical adventure than people a third her age; JoAnne Akalaitis, whose imagination captivated me as soon as I moved to New York and who took me under her wing and supported me early on; Women’s Project Theater founder Julia Miles, who taught me how to develop new plays; founder and director of La MaMa E.T.C. Ellen Stewart, who had a genius for rallying audiences to embrace unusual work; Manhattan Theatre Club’s Lynne Meadow, who urged me to become an artistic director; and Fran Smythe, who chaired the board of CSC and took a huge leap by hiring me as artistic director when I was twenty-seven and knew nothing.
Much has been written about the paucity of female voices in the contemporary theater, and about how rarely stories by and about women dominate. Yet it was only in the process of writing this book that I began to realize how long it actually took me to stop playing at being a man and to acknowledge my own personal point of view on the world and on the work. The juggling act required of female artists in the theater, particularly those in positions of authority, is acute, and our failures are often seen as failures of our entire gender. We have little power to fall back on. One of my first experiences as a young director came back to haunt me: When I returned from England to the United States in 1981, I brought back a pile of plays I wanted to direct, including Steven Berkoff’s classically inspired Greek, which I managed to persuade L.A. Theatre Works to let me stage. When Berkoff himself arrived on the scene two weeks into rehearsal, after I had cast, designed, and prepared the entire production, I was suddenly relegated to driver and junior acting coach, while the great man took over and directed his play. The producer said nothing. I remember Berkoff asking me in extremely patronizing tones whether I would like to warm up the cast before he began work. His behavior was never questioned; I was simply supposed to be a good girl, accept the authority of the great man, and support his wishes. I realized then that I could never take for granted that it would be assumed I knew what I was doing. I would have to prove that, again and again.
In the early days at A.C.T., I was often quizzed about why my choice of repertoire had a “feminist agenda,” when I knew full well that if I did a season of Mamet and Shakespeare no one would ever accuse me of having a male agenda. I watched female students in our school struggle to take center stage, and I thought long and hard about power and how uneasily it is granted to women. I also learned how women personalize failure, and how hard it is for us to be resilient in the face of a doubting culture that rarely believes we have it in us to succeed at the highest levels.
I have given a lot of thought to the live/work conflict of working mothers in the theater, as I try to support my younger female staff members in their efforts to raise children on the schedule and uncertainty of