Friends: A Love Story (10 page)

Because of the work we'd done at Shakespeare & Company,
Ahren and I were more emotionally available than most of our classmates. They wanted to know where we had learned what we knew about emotions, and we told them. They began to understand the importance of voice class and breath work (you access your emotions through your breath). But once people began to pay attention to me, it opened up a can of worms. And I didn't have the skills and wasn't mature enough to deal effectively and sensitively with people who were impressed with my ability. I didn't know how to navigate my growing success as an actor.

That summer I worked at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut, where Yale's Dean Richards was the artistic director. The theater center was bustling with new playwrights, new plays and actors. My insecurities surfaced. Walking into the lunchroom on the first day felt as nerve-wracking as being back in kindergarten. “Who's going to sit with me? Am I going to have to sit by myself?” And after I performed for the first time up there and people praised my work, I didn't know how to emotionally deal with the attention—especially from the women. I was spinning out of control. I tried to apply my acting techniques to aid me in decision-making. Because some decision-making processes used in acting—such as flipping a coin—are very arbitrary, it was a deadly combination. But I wouldn't learn that until much later in life.

 

By the second semester of our first year, all of the newness of drama school had rubbed off, and Ahren and I were thrown into the casting pool with the other students. Yale is a production-based drama school. At any given moment, its forty-five students are writing, directing and acting in about forty plays. NYU is more of a studio-based school—they may do two shows a semester. Now that we were also acting, things became more intense. Our second year at Yale was about Shakespeare and we broke down the Shakespearean plays to the word, the
sentence, the punctuation and meter. We literally had to beat out the rhythm of the whole play. The rhythm tells you what's happening emotionally. Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum. In Shakespeare the rhythm is the play's heartbeat—it even tells you how to breathe. I found all the detail overwhelming, so I stayed with my head in my notebook. I knew I had to stick with it to get it. Now, putting things in order, I loved it. It spoke to my upbringing. Once we started doing the scene work, it all came together for me—the emotional and the technical. I started flying!

In the meantime, one of the young women in our class had become our class star. From first semester, Earle kept repeating, “This kid's brilliant.” She did have extraordinary talent. The rest of us knew she would be very successful. But the second semester of our second year, our acting teacher pushed her and made her bring her scenes back. There was no reason. He was just pushing her buttons—he set her up. She wasn't used to getting corrected, so it took her out of her element. The teacher sensed her fear, proceeded to pick her apart and exposed that her work ethic was weak. It showed me that the warning that my voice teacher had given me was correct—three years
is
a long time to be going to school to get an agent.

That same semester over at Yale Rep, which was once of the most distinguished regional theaters in the country, August Wilson was producing a new play called
Fences.
Lloyd, who was going to direct the play, asked Earle if he could cast a student. Earle suggested me. I didn't know I was being considered for a part, but in the meantime I read the play and thought it was fantastic. One day Ahren told me, “Something big has happened. Go look at the casting board!”

“I'm in a hurry, Ahren. Just tell me. What is it?”

“Go look at the casting board.”

When I saw my name I almost fell down. This was not an ordinary student production—it was an August Wilson play!
Ma
Rainey's Black Bottom
had just played on Broadway and been nominated for all sorts of Tony Awards. I was in shock! But I knew this was a direct relation to the hard work I was doing in my classes with Earle.

Now I was in an August Wilson play but I didn't know upstage from downstage. Lloyd didn't give me a lot of direction; he assumed everyone was well qualified to perform their role. He treated me like Cory, my seventeen-year-old character. I was so mad at him! I wanted to be treated like James Earl Jones and Mary Alice and Charlie Brown and Frankie Faison, Ray Aranha and the other adults—I wanted to be in the group. On breaks they'd be talkin' and laughin', and I'd be off to the side by myself. Every now and then I'd try to chip in. Lloyd would look at me as if saying, “Did somebody ask you something, boy?” I hated feeling like a little boy—seen and not heard. What I didn't know at the time was that he was teaching me.

We spent an entire week sitting around the table reading the play over and over, stopping and starting, asking about this moment and that moment. Inside I was thinking, “What are we doing? Can't we just get on our feet?” I didn't realize we were charting the emotional course of the play. By the time we got up on our feet to begin blocking, I realized I didn't know anything about my character because I had been wasting time. Now I had to do the emotional and physical work at the same time, which is very difficult. Lloyd had been waiting for me to ask some questions so he could actually direct me. Now we had finally gotten to the part of the play where we were blocking my entrance, and August's stage directions read, simply: Cory enters.

But how? I wondered. What was he doing? What did he have on? What does he say? How does he enter? And when is somebody going to tell me what to do? Because I was too insecure—yet acting like a know-it-all—to ask any questions, Lloyd pulled me aside after I had upstaged James Earl.

“Courtney,” he told me gently, “if James was any other star,
he would tell you himself, but I'm going to tell you. The way you're positioning yourself when you're talking to James, you're upstaging him,” he explained.

“Oh, that's what upstaging is!” He was teaching me stagecraft.

At one point it dawned on me that, like Cory, I had played football when I was younger. I had been a quarterback; quarterbacks have cadences. I should apply what I knew. So I stood off to the side before my next entrance and said quietly, “Blue fifteen. Blue fifteen,” then entered the scene.

“What did you say?” Lloyd asked me.

“Nothing.”

“No, Courtney. What did you say? Just say it louder, Court.”

“Say it louder?”

I took off from there. Now when I entered I had a whole thing.

“Blue fifteen. Blue forty-two.” I ran onstage, dropped my book bag and stuff, and dropped back like I was throwing the ball. “The quarterback fades back….” I threw the ball to myself way up in the air like it was a long bomb then caught it. “Touchdown! WE BAD! YEAH, WE BAD!” Then I did an end-zone dance.

I had finally started to click onstage, but personally I was completely discombobulated. In addition to learning the play, I still had classroom work, a work-study job, a girlfriend, a dog/child and classmates who wanted to know everything that was going on and not only envied the opportunities I was experiencing, but my relationship with Ahren. I was overwhelmed. I couldn't talk to anyone about what I was going through; it didn't feel safe. I couldn't talk to Ahren because I felt guilty that the woman who I loved and who had gotten me started in this part of my life wasn't a part of what I was doing. I couldn't talk to my parents because they didn't know anything about this world. And I couldn't talk to anyone in the play because they were treating me like a child. (I didn't realize they were intentionally treating me
like my seventeen-year-old character.) I had no place to put my fears and insecurities, which were considerable and overwhelming. I hid behind a facade of competence, which worked well—onstage.

By third year I'd come into my own. My outlook shifted inside and I began to think more about my own interests. My classmates resented me. I didn't know how to deal with it. There were times when I wasn't very sensitive to them, other times I tried to ignore them and times when I tried to divert the attention by diminishing myself. None of the approaches worked. In my defense, I was dealing with an incredible amount of success in a very short span of time. None of my classmates had to deal with the pressures I was under. On the outside I looked and behaved—acted!—like I was incredibly happy. But on the inside there were times when I was a wreck.

Now that, as a class, we had turned the corner and were on the “back nine,” educationally, we were no longer little young bucks. As a class we'd been through a lot. There were several cliques, several camps. We weren't close. Now we had to come together to develop our scenes for the Leagues. While that was going on, I learned that
Fences
would be performed in Chicago at the Goodman Theater and Lloyd wanted me to reprise my role as Cory. Talk about an uproar among my classmates! But it was no big deal to me. I was a student; I knew I couldn't be in it. No outside professional work—that was the rule. As far as I was concerned, that was all there was to it.

What I didn't know was that Lloyd had a very specific vision for the school. For years he had been developing playwrights at Yale, the O'Neill Theater Center and elsewhere, and perfecting a process by which their work would travel to Broadway by way of the regional-theater circuit—Yale Rep being foremost among them. At each stop on the regional circuit, the play would be deepened and perfected, and the regional theaters would be credited and compensated as producers once the
play reached Broadway. Although playwrights from Athol Fugard to Lee Blessing would eventually journey this road Lloyd was paving, Lloyd began the process with August Wilson, who was black. Unlike most other playwrights of his caliber, August had a large enough body of work that the process Lloyd had envisioned could be repeated and perfected. In fact, August would eventually make that journey ten times with ten different plays to great acclaim (
Fences
was second). But it was Lloyd's vision that August stepped into. So Lloyd—the play's director and Yale drama school dean—made an exception: I would be able to perform in Chicago! Now my opportunity became not just a big thing at school but a big and openly divisive thing for Lloyd's entire tenure. White students already resented the fact that because of Lloyd, black students were getting many opportunities at the Yale Rep, O'Neill Theater Center and in all of these new August Wilson plays—opportunities that hadn't been open to them in the past. They were also envious because Lloyd was a master teacher but only performed administrative duties on campus, so none of them could be taught acting by him; yet a few black students were getting to perform in plays under his direction. And now the final salt in the wound was that this black student would be allowed to tour as a professional in a play in violation of school policy. The script had been flipped. People were hot—students and alumni alike! Ahren and I were caught in the middle.

 

The
Fences
cast rehearsed in New Haven for about a month then traveled to Chicago, where I performed in the play for about a month. It was emotionally draining and difficult for me; I was working harder than I had ever worked in my life. At the same time I was having the time of my life. Chicago's a great town, and by that time the cast and I had grown close and were like family. I was also learning life lessons from the play. When my character, Cory, was seventeen and
about to graduate from high school, he got in a big fight with his father, Troy, played by James Earl, who kicked him out of the house. Cory then joined the marines, where he worked his way up to the rank of captain. He didn't return home until seven years later, when he received news that his father had died. Cory returned home to tell his mother, Rose, played by Mary Alice, that he wasn't going to attend his father's funeral.

“Son, you've got to go to his funeral,” she told him.

“I'm not going,” Cory told her and ran down a list of his father's shortcomings and how they had hurt him.

“Your father wasn't always right,” Mary Alice told Cory before acknowledging how hurtful some of Troy's actions had been. “But that's all you got to make a life with. You gotta find the good in him and take it then move on and make a life with it.”

In the next scene Cory's little sister, Raynell, who was seven years old and barely knew Cory, comes onstage. She asks, “You know that song Papa used to sing?”

Cory starts singing,
Had an old dog, his name was Blue / Ol' Blue was mighty true / You know Blue was a good ol' dog…
Then she joined in and they sang a stanza together.

“You know the song, too—he taught it to you, too?” Cory said. And though Raynell and Cory barely knew each other, that song became their connection. Through it, their father's spirit lived on. And through singing the song with Raynell, Cory realized how much he missed his father and that he had to go to the funeral.

Behind the scenes there was an ongoing disagreement about how to finish the play. The producer thought the play should end with Cory singing the song; August thought that the play should end, as written, with Gabe, Troy's mentally ill brother, blowing his horn and opening up the gates of heaven so Troy can enter. They wouldn't resolve the issue for a year or so. Yet the idea of looking for the good in someone and building
upon it and letting the bad go, resonated with me and would remain with me for the rest of my life.