Another Memory

A long time ago, I was an actor. And once upon a time, I auditioned for two shows. One audition was for a part in a short film where I played a dimwitted mafia enforcer. The other, which injured me in ways that make me leery of ever returning to the acting trade, was one I arranged just as something else to do while in town. It was held in this little coffee shop/cocktail lounge run by two older women with beehive hairdos. The director was a large, flamboyant black man; the writer was bald and mousy. Their play, they said, was called "In Tandem With Vicki", and my part, they said, was that of her gay friend.

They asked me to camp it up, and I did. But even as I sat there I wondered how the writer, Alan Neff, had the patience to sit and write sixty-some pages of this nonsense. The script contained dialog Ed Wood, Jr. might have written if someone removed his talent for unintentional hilarity. It was attempt at a campy take on the murder of Vicki Morgan, a hustler who'd somehow gotten mixed up with the married Republican millionaire Arthur Bloomingdale. If we take Susan Sontag's definition of camp as failed seriousness, then what do we call failed camp? Even as I read it, I knew I didn't want to do it. I also knew, when I flopped on Neil's futon later that afternoon, that Neff would offer the part to me the first chance he got.

So began four miserable weeks, which ended, mercifully, with them firing me. It wasn't all bad, of course. I learned during the course of the costume fitting that an S&M lifestyle is very hard on the wallet. I learned, by watching a negative example. how important it is to treat actors nicely if you're paying them nothing and holding fourteen-hour rehearsals. Another negative example showed me how dreadfully misguided the maxim "Never give up on your dreams" is. Alan Neff was nothing if not persistent in pursuit of his, as I learned some years later in The Seattle Times:

Up until a few years ago, he directed his creative energies to free-lance movie reviewing. Then one day he checked out of the public library a biography of Vicki Morgan, a 1970s Hollywood call girl. He read the book in a single day and couldn't shake its images from his head.

So, for reasons never much clearer than "I woke up one morning and realized I didn't have a life," he sat down and wrote a play. Lo and behold, he was eventually able to persuade the Northwest Actor's Studio to produce it. He accomplished this largely by badgering the studio's director for months, until she finally relented.

"If I do this, will you leave me alone forever?" was the way the proposition was put to Neff. He accepted. The show went on and Neff still occasionally sweeps the stairs of the Actor's Studio in gratitude.

Yes, Alan Neff never said die, which was too bad really. After I was fired, my agent called me and told me that Neff and the Gang showed up during the intermission of the Northwest Actor's Studio's production of MacBeth and started doing scenes from In Tandem With Vicki on the MacBeth stage. They apparently did this without the knowledge or consent of MacBeth's director. Anger and recrimination followed. My agent told me that I got out at exactly the right time.

She was wrong. I should have gotten out before I got in. But I was my own victim here. I thought I could reach into the pile of offal that was Neff's script and extract a good performance for myself. With similar optimism, Napoleon escaped Elba.

Still, looking back, I wonder what happened to Neff. I've heard nothing from him in the last few years, and a quick google of his name turned up nothing. Maybe his job as a bill collector absorbed more and more of his time and he found his true calling. Maybe he gave up after spending tens of thousands of his own dollars on plays that only drew a handful of ticket buyers per run. He was not a better writer than Ed Wood Jr., but I hope he came, or comes, to a better end. I really do. These are the last lines of Neff's lone story in the Times

The production has a lot of "Hey guys, let's find a barn and put on a play" quality to it. There is not much polish but everybody seemed to enjoy themselves immensely. The cast and crew, who outnumber the audience about two to one, all work for nothing. Still, the production overhead is likely to come in at around $10,000. It is, Neff says, "not a very financially gratifying business."

That, not the quality of the work, is what initially interested me in this story. I wanted to know what might motivate people like Neff to spend so much time and money pursuing such high-risk, low-gain adventures.

What goes on inside their heads? I wondered.

I still don't have a clue, and after seeing the play I'm not entirely sure I want to find out. I do know this, however: We are a very unusual species."

Yeah. That's about the size of it.