Chapter 7
Violations
When I walked into the rehearsal room the next morning, it felt like smacking into a solid brick wall of silence. Only a few days into the process, I’d gotten used to that din of noise, the roomful of big voices with even bigger personalities.
Everyone who’d already arrived sat at the table, staring at their phones. Or staring at nothing. Michael was reading an actual physical copy of The New York Times. It hid his face, but I didn’t miss how his fingers clenched the edges of the paper.
I dropped into my regular seat, where a small cardboard cup was waiting. I started to get up until I noticed a Post-it stuck to the cup.
Thanks for the pro-tip (Yelp). In return, a little pick-me-up if you need it. —R
I jolted up in my chair so quickly that I knocked over the cup. Somehow Michael, from behind his paper, noticed, shot his arm out toward me, and caught it before hot liquid spilled across the table.
“Thank you,” I said. “That was impressive.”
He crumpled up the newspaper, wadded it into a tight ball. “I figured you normally have someone to catch anything you knock over.”
“Look,” I said, trying to keep my tone sweet despite that Did sweet sentences ever start with “look”? “It’s so controlled on the sets I’m usually on. Even if I want to take care of something myself, which of course I do, it’s someone else’s job. A person will literally yell Violation! at me.”
The room was so quiet that everyone turned to look, including the foursome that had just walked into the room: the producer Patrick, the playwright Stephanie, Neil, and of course Rebecca.
“Fine,” Michael said. “Sorry. You’re welcome.”
Kathleen caught my eye and mouthed oh my god!
which made it difficult to keep my face neutral.
Between what-the-hell was with this herbal tea and Michael’s whole thing and the looming threat of whatever was about to blow up this production, I barely could keep track of what even qualified as neutral.
The article had gone up as scheduled, six our time. I’d been freshly post-yoga, post-gratitude, and knew that opening the New York Times app would likely undo any good I’d just done for myself. Ignoring it, though, hadn’t been an option.
It was damning. Nearly a dozen women from throughout Geoffrey Gordan’s career had come forward.
He’d made promises, given out opportunities, professed he knew how stacked the deck could be against women in the arts.
And while, to a fault, no one claimed that violence was involved, there was a violence in extracting what he wanted and they didn’t, even when the looming threat was professional stakes, a you’ll never work in this town again, not a knife, a gun, a fist.
I’d been lucky. Sure, there’d been leering producers, a director who did his best to bypass my team to get me up in his hotel room, a costar who was handsy during a kissing scene in a PG-rated film.
In a perfect world those incidents would hardly mark me as lucky, but Hollywood was far from perfect.
It was na?ve, but I’d wanted to believe theatre would be different.
Instead I thought about my fawning email to Geoffrey Gordan, my insistence that I would have done anything to work with him, and felt how barely spared I’d been.
If not for the women brave enough to speak out against someone with so much more power—
I didn’t even want to think about it. In fact, I’d felt so literally sick to my stomach that I had almost missed them, the paragraphs near the end of the story.
Gordan was scheduled to begin rehearsals for the world premiere of Stephanie Hoff’s play Hometown at Los Angeles’s Jaffe Theatre this week, featuring a company that includes Vindicators cast member Tess Gardner.
The Downtown Theatre Association (parent organization of the Jaffe) confirmed that the Tony-nominated director of last season’s Arcadia revival, Rebecca Frisch, will now helm the Jaffe production.
Initially, producers were eyeing a Broadway opening next season; those plans seem less firm now.
“While we’re thrilled to see what Rebecca brings to Hometown,” producer Patrick Russell Miles said, “it’s way too early to predict when we’ll want to take the show to New York. So much is still up in the air.”
“I’m sure you’ve all read the news.” Patrick Russell Miles stood before the table with a practiced quality of leadership, his own mini TED Talk.
“I’d keep in mind that there’s nothing official yet.
Allegations are allegations, and it doesn’t do anyone any favors to pretend they’re actual charges.
Obviously, a Broadway production is top of mind for all of us—”
I wondered if that were true. It went without saying that performing on Broadway would be another dream come true for me—at one point it had been my biggest dream in the world—but we’d barely started rehearsing this production.
While it would be a lie to say that shifting my image wasn’t a huge reason I’d been willing to anger my entire team to take this role, already it wasn’t what I thought of when I was in the middle of the work itself.
In the best moments, the work was the work.
“—but no one needs to put that cart before the horse. And we’re seeing great buzz about the show and ticket sales, thanks to Princess Platinum here.”
I tried to smile faintly in no one’s direction, but Patrick was doing his best to make hard eye contact with me, so I gave in. It’s what I did. I looked grateful and absolutely unconcerned about anyone else, including myself. A villain and a good girl all rolled into one.
“Anyway, I know you’ve all been working very hard this week, and I thank you for that. I’ll get out of the way and turn things over to Rebecca.”
Patrick headed out of the room, waving as he went.
I couldn’t imagine people were about to get fired en masse, but that hardly made me feel better.
If it happened, it would just happen later, calls to people’s reps tonight, people with less power like Kathleen or Ashlee suddenly out of work, a different cast who’d already been lined up, in by tomorrow, maybe next week at latest. And me, the company member who deserved the role least, who was only hired to lure people to the theatre, or because an old man thought he’d get to fuck me—I’d still be here.
“So it’s been a morning, huh,” Rebecca said once Patrick had closed the door behind him. “I don’t know about all of you, but I certainly haven’t been in this situation before.”
Something like a murmur circled the room, a group response of recognition. I liked how Rebecca did it, took charge of the room but still made herself one of us.
“We met only a few times over the years, but I think it’s safe to say that Geoffrey Gordan and I have our fair share of differences,” Rebecca continued.
“That said, he did a hell of a job putting this company together. I think that we’ve already started to find something pretty great, and I hope that all of you agree.
I personally can’t wait to see where we end up. ”
The entire room seemed to exhale as one.
Rebecca gestured to the table. “So let’s get this pushed back, make some space. We’re ready to get into it, yeah?”
I hopped up and placed my hands on the table.
“Violation,” Michael said, and I immediately put my hands up.
“Sorry,” I said. “Rebecca said—”
“No, sorry, it’s been a bad morning and that was an even worse joke,” Michael said. “Go for it, Tess. Move the table.”
I took a sip of herbal tea and did just that.
To say that rehearsing a play at the Jaffe was different than rehearsing a play at Applewoods Summer Theatre was like saying shooting Vindicators was different than shooting a video of Rosie on my iPhone.
We had table reads, but hardly with the luxury of time that Hometown’s schedule gave us.
Our director, Matt—yes, the same director for the entire summer’s run of shows—gave us an impossibly short amount of time to get through the script once, and then we were on our feet working through it.
Everyone at Applewoods had been young. Everyone in the cast, that is.
The design team, the administration, even Matt—they were as old as my parents, and I had old parents!
The cast, though, were mostly fresh out of college, like me, or a year or two removed, like Rebecca.
There were hookups and instant relationships and all the guys with girlfriends back home who were having emotional affairs with single Applewoods girls.
Me, secretly drunk in love. It seemed impossible we’d be able to accomplish anything that had to do with something other than our messy love lives, but then we’d sit down with the next script, and none of that mattered. The play really was the thing.
Going from the table to the moment we pushed it out of the way and began staging was always one of my favorite parts of the entire process.
I liked how safe the table read felt—back then, at least!
But once we were on our feet, interacting with each other in our whole bodies, not just our voices, the magic really swept in.
And despite everything—everything—I hoped that would happen today.
Yes, on one hand my participation in this play was a shallow bid to change how the world thought of me.
The indie film I’d poured so much of my heart into hadn’t shaken things up as much as I’d hoped.
Vindicators 4 seemed like more of a done deal the more my team talked about it.
Hometown needed to move the needle, because my team hardly seemed eager to brainstorm other ideas despite how often I’d directly asked.