Latest / EST's "Truth Be Told" / "Playacting" by David Zellnik

Transcript

"Playacting" by David Zellnik · EST's "Truth Be Told"

• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: Hello and welcome to season two of Truth Be Told, Love and Theater.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: Fourteen new stories, each performed at Ensemble Studio Theater, as part of Truth Be Told, a night of amazing, weird, embarrassing, profound, and completely true stories created by Susan Kim and David Zelnick.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: Season two draws from two sold-out nights: The Moment I Knew and The Theater.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: Every Monday, tune in for stories of love and realization, and every Thursday for stories of the joys and madness behind the curtain.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: And now, without further ado, from writer David Zelnick, a story about three kids in a suburb making theater for their parents, and a suburban mom making up songs to beat back the demons.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_01: At age 14, my sister was repulsive.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_01: My brother, age 11, a prince, and me, age nine, an evil queen.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: These were the roles we wrote for ourselves in a play we titled Repulsive.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: It was a sort of fractured fairy tale version of Rapunzel.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_01: Think once upon a mattress, but with no songs or jokes.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_01: And for the record, I was not the evil queen because I was the bitchiest sibling.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: I think we can all agree that was Joe, who in another favorite game loved to play Joan Crawford, that game being him and me restaging Mommy Dearest.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_01: No, I played the Evil Queen because I was the only one who fit into the costume.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_01: A 1920s cocktail dress that once belonged to our grandma, who'd been something of a flapper.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: The dress was black, lacy arms, and heavy with beating.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: It was phenomenal.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_01: Joe did get to wear the tights as prince, which he loved.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_01: And as repulsive, my sister was covered in a piano shawl.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_01: What was the exact plot of repulsive?
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_01: I don't remember.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_01: Why did my high school age sister agree to such a role?
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: Also unclear.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: What I remember was my excitement before it started.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_01: Waiting in the wings, aka the dining room.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_01: I remember the window, the curtains drawn to make the practicals, aka two standing lamps, shine brighter.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: I also remember my joy that my older brother and sister wanted to include me, that Miriam, who'd made me laugh, performing late-night skits in front of Joe's in my bunk beds, that she was gonna act with me, and that Joe let me play the monarch, when really I was the clown of the family and not the evil queen, and my audience was always my mom.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_01: I once heard our next-door neighbors call my family eccentric.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: Which is a word I had to look up.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_01: Others said that we were very cultured.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: Others said that we were New York-y, which I think was code for Jewish.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: But we thought of ourselves as a theatrical family.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_01: In that way, families sometimes brand themselves.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_01: A sort of you can't take it with you family.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: A reference I didn't know then, but my mother did, a showbiz family that somehow got stuck in the sticks, performing for an audience of ourselves.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: For the record, no one in my family had ever been in show business.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: My mom got trapped in Cherry Hill, or Cheery Hell as she called it, in the normal way.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_01: She was an only child born in the Bronx during the Depression.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_01: She studied English at Cornell in the 50s.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_01: She wrote ad copy after college.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_01: Supposedly, everyone around her told her she was destined to write novels or plays, an expectation I believe she had for herself.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: But after marriage and kids, she moved to the suburbs and real life took over.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_01: It's a very Betty for Dan story, but my mom didn't write a book that launched second wave feminism.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: What my mom did was write songs.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_01: And her songs were genre pieces with lyrics that were doggerole, ironic.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: For instance, when she cleaned, she'd sometimes sing a waltz that I think was meant to sound Victorian.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: She'd sing it as she did dishes or in between crying jags.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: It went.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: This is real and hard for me.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_01: Except you can't lie down.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_01: This sounds crazier than it was.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, it was bonkers.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: But we all felt in on the joke, though none of us were exactly sure what the joke was.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_01: Another one of her songs was a country western tune summoned from somewhere in her subconscious, composed after my perennially unemployed dad spent$400 fixing our car, which was named, because we named all our cars, Sapphire.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: This was her Loretta Lynn number.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_01: I wish I was a car and not a woman, because then my man would take good care of me.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_01: She sang this anytime the topic of the car came up, accent in all.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_01: She said it was consciously mistressed because that made it more authentic.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_01: And yes, a lot of people make up little tunes when they work, but there was an energy behind my mom's that was unmissable even to a nine-year-old, that these were songs you sing to stop yourself from going insane.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_01: Or maybe these were songs to underline the insanity you want others to see.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_01: Back on the set of Repulsive, I'm on stage and acting my heart out.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_01: I'm afraid I do remember the plot, which you might have guessed.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_01: The handsome prince climbs the tower, woos repulsive while the queen tries to ruin her daughter's chances.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_01: But when the prince finally falls in love and her shawl is pulled off, the prince streaks.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_01: She's hideous.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_01: So then he leaves with, wait for it, me! I can't remember my parents' face after.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_01: Did they laugh?
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_01: Did they clap?
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_01: They must have clapped.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: Did they clock how much I loved wearing a dress?
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_01: Were they mortified by Miriam's role?
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_01: I called her recently to get her take.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_01: Hey Mim, do you remember that play we did, Repulsive?
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: Of course.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: Do you remember mom and dad's response?
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it was awful, right?
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_01: It was kids doing a play, I'm sure they loved it.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_01: But do you think they were like a little upset maybe by some of our choices?
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: You mean like the fact that I played a character called Repulsive who spent most of the play under a shroud?
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: That was a shawl, and you were the oldest.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: You could have said no.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_01: I was feeling fragile because I had just gotten over chicken pox, and you guys didn't help.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_01: I was nine, and I'm sorry if it added to your pain.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_01: I probably liked being under it.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_01: Back then I mostly just wanted to disappear.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_01: Then I read some of the story to Joe, and he texted back first of all, you wore a 1960s cocktail dress, not one of grandma's flapper dresses.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_01: And Miriam wore a silver lace holiday tablecloth, not the Viennese piano shawl.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_01: Like I say, Joe can be the bitchy sibling.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_01: Or precise.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_01: I asked him though, did you recall anything Mom and Dad said?
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_01: He said, I don't remember childhood as strongly as you do.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: And are you sure it was a 60s cocktail dress?
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_01: I swear I remember beating.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: Here, I'll send you a picture.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_01: And suddenly there are the three of us on my phone, in a set made by Joe, Miriam with the silver tablecloth, Joe and Tights, me in a 1960s cocktail dress.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: Presumably it was my dad behind the camera.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_01: Repulsive would be the last show the Zelnick siblings did as a troupe.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: Soon Miriam was off in our teenage life, skipping classes, going to parties, smoking cigarettes, doing pot, dropping acid, stumbling home bleeding after walking into a car.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: Joe and I followed a different path.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: And whether or not it was inspired by my mom's songs, Joe started noodling around the piano, writing melodies, and then demanding I write lyrics, which I did.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_01: And unlike my mother's tunes, ours were chipper, cheery, relentlessly.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_01: They were also maybe ripoffs of Jerry Herman or Kandor and Ebb songs, songs that might have been cut from a second-rate Liza musical, like, Now's Today, Fun's Today, Life's Today to Enjoy.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_01: There's so much more.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_01: We wrote for a variety of reasons, but not for nothing.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_01: When I sang my songs, my mom never cried.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_01: She would sit in the kitchen, one room over, applauding between songs.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_01: She would say, David, you have a voice, a real voice, which she knew she didn't.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_01: And she'd say, You're gonna go to New York and really do it, and I'm so excited.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_01: I do worry it sounds like I'm making fun of all this.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_01: This songwriting, this theater making, Joe and my juvenilia.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_01: I'm also worried it sounds too Chekovian, this longing for a theatrical life far away from any sort of real art.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_01: Because in some ways I think we were actually close, even my mom.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_01: Art as this insistent force against sadness, art as a force against clinical depression.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: Although art is a fancy word to describe repulsive.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_01: Once Joe and my songs and then musicals took over the house, I don't remember any new ones coming from my mom.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_01: But I will be honest, her songs were never her great performance.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_01: Her real creative work was playing the happy suburban mom, heading the PTA, collecting recipes for junior high cookbooks, pretending to believe in God at synagogue.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_01: She even called it role-playing whenever we called her out on her insincerity.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_01: And this explanation satisfied us, or at least me, because every theatrical family knows the show must go on.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_01: None of us do remember her or my dad's reaction to repulsive, but now I'm more interested in the fact that I have the same question for this piece as I did after that one 45 years later.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_01: Did you like it, Mom?
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: Did you laugh?
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_01: Are you happy?
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: David Zelnick is the author of a lot of plays and musicals, including one called Loveville that will open in New York in March 2027 with the Tossos Theater Company.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: He has not stopped play acting.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: Truth Be Told was created by Susan Kim and David Zelnick, and each episode was produced and scored by Eric Svaikar.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: If you enjoyed this, please tell your friends and keep listening.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: More stories of the moment I knew will be released every Monday and about theater every Thursday.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: And do hit like and subscribe, it really helps.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: Till next time, remember, the truth wants to be known.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yours too.