Impossible Vacation by Spalding Gray Page B

was going to make very sure that we couldn’t get it from someone else.
    Now I’m not saying that Mom did this consciously, but somedark unconscious shadow was operating through her, a shadow that she never came to recognize because of her constant search for the divine transcendent life. That shadow was a part of her, but she could not see it, because in Christian Science she was taught only to look for the light side, only look for the good.
    Those were dark times when I blamed Mom for my not being able to get closer to Meg or succeed in the theater. Then, just as I’d get swamped in all of that dark psychologizing, I’d try to pull out of it by getting a larger overview. I’d try to understand my failure in theater by taking a look at the plays they were casting. None of them really had to do with me. They were all so ethnic—you know, things like
The Indian Wants the Bronx
. Directors were always looking for courageous tough ethnic types, young antiheroes, not neurotic New England WASPs. They were all plays about tough ethnic guys bucking the system, not about people who disappeared when they came into a room of strangers.
    The big break came along out of nowhere. I read in
Back Stage
that Robert Lowell’s play
Endecott and the Red Cross
was being restaged at St. Clement’s Church. I had no idea what
Endecott and the Red Cross
was about. I assumed it was not about the guy who founded the American Red Cross but probably had to do with some dark Puritan heritage, of which Robert Lowell was still one of the great autobiographic voices. I loved Robert Lowell at a distance. I didn’t want to get too close because he represented that New England overbreeding which led to hypersensitivity and periodic madness, as well as wicked bouts with alcohol. He was a noble, beautiful man to look at, but deep in his writing I could feel him like an overbred Irish setter; nervous, quivering and shaking, constantly on the edge.
    Not only had Robert Lowell written the play, but he had chosen a man named John Hancock to direct it, and I thought: This is perfect. This play was made for me.
    And I was right. I went up for the audition and was immediately cast in the role of the King of the May. The play was based on a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne called “The Maypole of Merry Mount,” which took place at the Merry Mount colony in Massachusetts and was basically about the punishment of the colonists for takingpleasure in the celebration of the pagan May Day festival. The whole colony was punished by a horrible oppressor named Endecott, who carried a flag with a red cross on it. In our first rehearsal, we all sat and listened to Robert Lowell read the play all the way through. He read in one long monotonous drone. Every character seemed to be speaking in the same depressive New England tones. He mumbled it through in a resigned way, with very little passion. I felt right at home. The play was all about my people, my repressive Puritan people.
    The Queen of the May was played by a beautiful blond actress, and I played the King, all dressed up in a fine white peasant shirt, long flowing auburn wig, rough brown leather pants, and high-laced suede boots. We looked great together, the Queen and I. She was dressed in pure white, with flowers in her hair. We got to dance around the maypole with some Puerto Rican actors who were playing American Indians and some other odd assorted colonial types. Then, right in the middle of our sensuous revels, we get busted by Endecott and his big red cross. The Queen and I get tied up and punished along with everyone else. And that was about it. It was like a “let’s pretend” backyard children’s game, only it was played in an Off-Broadway theater which doubled as a church on Sundays.
    But the experience of acting in that play did not, as I had hoped, lift me into some transcendent state. I hardly had any lines at all, and I felt like a prop. I wanted more out of theater, or I was going to give up