Moose Murdered: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Broadway Bomb (28 page)
Read Moose Murdered: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Broadway Bomb Online
Authors: Arthur Bicknell
For years I was one of those “gallant” folks opting to use the word
legendary
whenever talking about that particular life-defining production. I wrote other plays, enjoyed a few productions of one or two of them here and there—none ever again on the scale of on or Off Broadway. Eventually I left Air France to start a career as a literary agent, and, a few exciting and harrowing years after that, found myself unable to cope with the stress and expense of living in New York City one second longer, and ultimately escaped to—of all places—Springfield, Massachusetts. I went there to live with Dennis (with whom I reunited after an estrangement of over a decade) and a litter of golden retriever puppies. That fantasy I talked about in the prologue about writing a great redemptive play never happened, but I did land a decent job as receptionist and—just a few patiently humble months later—communications director for the city’s regional theater, StageWest. A year or so after the theater went under (as so many do, sadly), I found shelter in Springfield’s
other
bastion of culture, Merriam-Webster, the reference publisher, and stayed there as the company’s publicist for eleven years—longer than I’d worked at any day job in my life.
Perhaps not the most exciting existence, working with the lexicographers and “harmless drudges” (as Noah Webster himself once put it), but happy enough—certainly safe and remote enough to allow me the luxury of almost completely forgetting about that bitch from the preview audience so many years ago who’d screamed “Officer! Arrest this play!” about something that had taken me at
least
an entire month to write.
The first shoe had fallen so miserably, why on earth should I continue to wait for the other one? Time to bury the Moose, and to inter the good and bad with its bones.
And then, wouldn’t you know it, those damned
Moose Murders
journals that I’d suspiciously left behind in the early 90s somewhere inside my Upper West Side sublet were anonymously delivered to my friend Sally’s work address in Manhattan. Only a few weeks after that, Sally actually remembered she
had
them, and hurriedly sent them off to me in Massachusetts.
Around that time Dennis was diagnosed with a brutally aggressive brand of prostate cancer, and I began a race to finish this book before he left us. Unhappily, we lost both the race and Dennis in February of 2008. But the home hospice nurse had taught me that the sense of hearing is one of the last things to go, so those final days were made almost bearable by bedside readings of our old misadventures, his and mine.
Dennis’s horrible and slow death put a stop to my writing for a very long time. It seemed that I was not meant to gain even a sense of closure on this Moose issue.
And then—just like that unexpected run-in with your intended soul mate that they always say will really and truly happen one day if you just stop looking for it—almost
exactly
like that but maybe a little more
unexpectedly
—I got a phone call from self-described “part-time conceptual artist,” John W. Borek.
“Arthur,” said Borek, “I’ve ruined your play.”
He had me at
ruined
.
| Who Is John Borek? |
Racing through the past quarter-century of my life post Moose Murders in a few paragraphs creeps me out a little, especially when I see that I’ve chosen to devote only a few scant sentences to Dennis’s bout with cancer. I’m not trying to be cavalier about that awful period of my personal history, or in any way attempting to marginalize the experience. It was an excruciatingly sad, joyless time. His death process from start to finish was just about as long as the play’s entire life span from paper to production, and was— despite not being reviewed by the press—significantly more painful to endure. I began writing this memoir before he got really sick, and fully anticipated his still being around when I finished. It’s now been three years since his death, and the damn book still isn’t done. I guess what I’m feeling now as I struggle to conclude this story is a big fat case of survivor’s guilt, on more than one level.
F. Scott Fitzgerald said
there are no second acts in American lives
. If I buy that, and I’m not sure I
don’t
, it just presents another impediment to finishing this off. See, this story is about
Moose Murders
, which is infamous, and not about Arthur Bicknell, who is not. Certainly within the traditional restraints of a memoir, having at any time during one’s life created something considered to be “the golden standard of awfulness against which all theatre is judged” is an extremely difficult act to follow with any kind of epilogue. Anything you talk about—even nonmetaphorical death—is bound to be at least a little anticlimactic.
More inanely put, in order to even
pretend
to destroy this monstrous master flop of mine once and for all, I needed a better stake to drive straight into its dead little heart.
A nice healthy slew of amateur productions throughout the years might very well have given me the button I was seeking, but the truth is, there haven’t been very many of these at all.
Bad play, you know
.
I was guest-of-honor at one extravaganza, though, performed in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where blind Howie was played by a local Mennonite and where the whole production was treated like an old-fashioned melodrama, and where the audience was encouraged to boo for the villains and cheer for the heroes. I was very interested to see which characters the director had chosen to be the heroes—probably because I’d never been able to figure that one out for myself.
Attention was almost exclusively reserved for the big bull moose head mounted on the back wall of the set for another production, this time in Skowhegan, Maine. The hairy trophy was reportedly a recent kill made especially for the show by one of the theater’s most devoted patrons. The dead moose got its own bio in the program, and I discovered its body as an entree choice at the adjacent restaurant—along with a nice chocolate mousse for dessert. (I tried neither, as I recall.)
The other thing I remember about this production was that little Gay was played by a thirty-year-old woman who might also have played Josie in
A Moon for the Misbegotten
. She never unbuckled her tap shoes, and trod mighty heavily on those boards for the entire show—whether she happened to find herself on or off the stage. Visually, this show was about fresh moose meat. Otherwise, it was all about Gay’s shoes.
By far the most Poetically Just revival happened in 2007, when a repertory company in the Philippines opened their fortieth year of continuous productions with “Moose Murders by
Frank Rich
.” Although I didn’t make the trip to see this particular rendition, I Googled like mad, and, sure enough, Frank’s name was listed as author on all the company’s press material. “This mystery farce by Frank Rich,” read one release, “has been dubbed by its director an outrageous comedy that was written ahead of its time.” More than a year later they corrected their error and wrote a sort of retraction (“it was a guy named Arthur Bicknell”), but had they chosen not to bother, I’m going to come clean right now and admit that their horrible little secret would have been safe with me forever.
Sometime in the spring of 2008 my old friend Karen Winer got in touch with me at Merriam-Webster. She told me I had to register with that new social networking phenomenon called Facebook in order to be able to see some fabulous photographs of a staged reading of
Moose Murders
her equally old and dear friend John was organizing in Rochester. I fought off signing up as long as I could (probably a matter of hours), logged on, saw the photos, and soon became hopelessly dependent on Facebook and all the connections—real and otherwise—it suddenly afforded me access to.
But that’s another story of obsession; back to Borek.
An erstwhile book store owner and current aide to a Rochester city councilman, John W. Borek had just begun to find his niche as a gadabout conceptual artist when our paths crossed. For some time he’d been fascinated with the concept of failure as an art form, and had been searching for just the right discipline in which to express his unorthodox philosophy on the subject. It was his goal to find an example of some such art form—painting, film, music, whatever—universally considered to be the “worst” of its kind, and then to showcase it and its perceived awfulness as a legitimate piece of art.
Pick a category and try this game at home.
It’s not so easy, is it? Coming up with
the
worst. Unless, of course, you pick the category of
stage
, in which case the answer is almost always going to be…
Aha!
Yes, once again my poor, tattered, berated little farce was going to be used as a bad example.
“I owe my career to Arthur Bicknell, the most generous playwright of the twenty-first century,” claims Borek in the
manifesto
of what he calls his Post-Cap Movement.
“When art becomes business,” he explains,
its value is only a matter of success or failure. The creative process exists to please a hierarchy of interests rather than to take on important and controversial matters directly. And, perhaps most importantly, the artist repeats past successes rather than exploring new ideas because the lure of commercial success is so strong.
I founded the Post-Cap Movement in October, 2008 with Post-Cap muse Karen Winer in the midst of presenting a revival of Arthur Bicknell’s play
Moose Murders
. The production revisited the worst-reviewed play in Broadway history, a play that effectively put Mr. Bicknell on hiatus as an artist for a quarter century. Two years prior to the Broadway production of
Moose Murders
, Mr. Bicknell had presented a play,
My Great Dead Sister
, that was regarded as one of the best off-Broadway plays of 1981. His abrupt fall from grace and descent into no-artist’s land because of one failed play inspired Post-Cap’s examination of failure in the arts. Karen and I concluded that the demands of the marketplace and the expectations of returns on investment in the art world create a bottleneck for what is produced, and, consequently, what is accepted by audiences and critics.
This phenomenon of failure is replicated in all the arts. It is most notable in the theater because theater artists create in real time and in so doing, are the most vulnerable. Critical response to their artistry is immediate. Of all artists, theater people are most prone to panic when exposed to the toxin of failure. A bad review immediately affects the ability of the entire group to earn a living. Unlike film, there is no time to find new work before the old work is exposed; and unlike the world of art galleries, there is no gallery owner doing spin for a bad review. The theater artist lives and dies by the critic, and the money follows the critical response. Art is pressed into the service of pleasing critics, then backers, then the audience and, only lastly and forlornly, the artist.
We wondered what would happen if the capital threshold for creating art were lowered? What if, as in the case of the
Moose Murders
revival, we made a philosophy out of a do-it-yourself financing with absolutely no expectation of profit or advancing reputations? What if, amidst the debris of corporate financed art, the goal was to keep it simple and simply have fun? What if creating art in the twenty-first century happened on a playground rather than a minefield? What would the modern artist look like then?
Hard stuff to resist for
this
aging Adult Child of an Alcoholic, let me just say.
Hell, I was so starved for this kind of unconditional affection (even if it was just for my play), is it any wonder that I immediately agreed to give J. W. Borek not only the exclusive rights to carry out any or all of his nefarious Post Cap intentions on this play of mine, but also the right to add a full score by a (strangely brilliant) duo of local musicians—a score which, I am quick to add—at any given moment—may or may not be performed in tandem with the play or its plot?
I think not, Madame or Sir.
He was, as he insisted on calling himself as often and earnestly as possible, John W. Borek,
your producer
, and I saw no reason to doubt him whatsoever—especially when I learned that his tenacity and talent at self-promotion had attracted the attention of
Times
journalist Campbell Robertson, who now, I was told, was interested in writing a story about John and his “moosies.” I was very nervous about taking an interview with this acclaimed Broadway reporter myself, not because I didn’t like or crave the attention, certainly, but because I was terrified I was going to say something injuriously dorky and have it printed for everybody in all my past and present lives to see.
No matter what angle I tried to take as I practiced mentally for this interview, I couldn’t shake the real fear that this was just another opportunity for somebody to poke fun at my literary deformity. Did I really want to exhibit myself
intentionally
in such a shameless manner?
