Trapped in a Closet: Living within the Fringe

Contributed by Guest Blogger of the Week, Clay McLeod Chapman

There’s a 3 ½ floor in the Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center. It’s buried at the back of the building, large enough to hold only one room. It was a janitor’s closet back when the CSV used to be Public School 160—but during the sweltering summer of 1997, in the thick of the 1^st Annual New York International Fringe Festival, I called that crawlspace home. 

Literally.

As in—I lived in a janitor’s closet all through the Fringe. 

Most theatre artists living in New York have their own personal war story over the Fringe at this point. Whether it’s performing in a cramped black boxer or slogging through an air-conditionless afternoon as an audience member, we’ve all earned our Off-Off-Broadway red badge of courage from the Fringe. But in true you-just-had-to-be-there fashion, there really was something exceptional about that inaugural year of the fest. Pre-Urinetown, the Fringe attached as many off’s to its Broadway with reckless abandon by rooting itself within every closet, every attic, every below-the-code and foreclosed storefront in the Lower East Side. 

 

That included the Clemente. 

Built by the Board of Education of the City of New York in 1898, this neo-Gothic school building has since had its classrooms converted into four theaters, two gallery spaces and over fifty different artist studios. The Fringe took it further that first year, transforming the entire building into a bunker of batshit-independent, no-fi, devil-may-care theater. No classroom went unoccupied without some one-man show exorcising itself before the blackboard. Even the library was renovated into a fifty-seater. Some overworked techie threw up a few bed-sheets over the bookshelves and clamped down a couple clip-lights onto the sprinkler system—and voilà: 

A new venue was born, aptly christened—The Library. 

Through some fortuitous venue-programing on the Fringe’s part, this was the theater me and my friends were assigned to herald the NYC-debut of our own production—The Pumpkin Pie Show.  

I was eighteen. I was a wet-behind-the-ears freshman. On a whim, I applied to the Fringe, never believing I’d ever get in—but lord almighty, suddenly I was responsible for thirteen performances on the boards in the Big Apple. 

And I lived in Virginia.

With no money.

Total budget for metropolis-lodging for the month of August: $180.00.

Here we were—three kids, right off the bus from the Ol’ Dominion. My friends and I had taken the Greyhound, packing our props in the bus’s underbelly. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed really doesn’t cut it. Chalk us up to dim-witted and dumb-assed, because we’d just arrived in New York without a place to stay, under the assumption that it would be a cinch to simply check in to the nearest performing arts hostel with only the change rattling about our pockets.

No such luck. Everything was booked. Everything. And the places that weren’t weren’t exactly spots we’d feel safe falling asleep in without someone standing watch.

 It’s pretty amazing how swift this city can crush a kid coming from Virginia. We hadn’t been here for more than a couple hours, hefting our set—and already, we felt like we’d lost.

And we still had a show to put on.

And fill butts in seats.

And eat.

Closing night felt a long, long ways away.

Ed Vega, head of the CSV back then, just-so-happened to be within earshot of our sob story.

You guys are really stupid, he said, shaking his head. 

Yes, we agreed.

Wanna live here?

Okay.

I got a broom closet upstairs that’s empty right now, he said. Paint the walls before you leave and it’s all yours.

A closet might’ve been a bit of an understatement, but it was ours. All ours.

There was a shower within the room, no curtain attached. We’d give each other the courtesy of turning a blind eye to whomever was bathing, for modesty’s sake.

There was a toilet in the corner with no enclosure—so whenever one of us needed to use the facilities, the rest would evacuate the premises.

There was no air-conditioning.

Hell—there was no air.

We found a cot, which the three of us would alternate sleeping on throughout the month. Sometimes, I’d sneak into the Library and sleep onstage.

We didn’t have keys. Each night, we had to make sure we were in the building by the time the venue director locked the front doors. Sure enough, there were a few nights when one particular member of our trio would inevitably stumble back from the bar a little too late for curfew, finding himself locked out—sleeping on the fire escape until the venue director returned the following morning to let him back in.

I was convinced the school was haunted with the ghosts of dead school children.

Or Lower East Side bohemians.

Or a little bit of both.

But the fact of the matter was—this sleepless, sore-muscled existence was one of the purest inductions into downtown theater that I was ever going to get. We came to NYC with nothing but our show strapped to our backs—and yet, through it all, somehow, it miraculously made its way onto the stage. Sure, only five people saw it—but that’s (almost) besides the point.

We made it.

We got here.

And we put on a show.

An awful show, of course—but trial by fire, right? We burned through thirteen performances, making fools out ourselves in front of our poor, poor paying audience. But as far as inauspicious beginnings go, ours was a glorious failure. One that’s hard to not feel a little sentimental about.

There’s a space within this city. Nothing but a room. It’s probably no longer a theater anymore, having been renovated into a yoga studio or something else by now—that will forever possess the first Pumpkin Pie Show.

I snuck back into the CSV once, a few years back—just to peak my head inside the janitor’s closet on the 3 ½ floor.

The door was locked. Whatever was in there now, the maudlin-in-me imagined three squatting teens, curled up in their sleeping bags like newborn pups in a shoebox. Sometimes the closest thing to ghosts that haunt a theater are the shows performed within them. If that’s actually the case, then the Clemente is haunted by a bunch of ripe smelling Virginians waiting for their 30-minute turnaround between shows to set up and perform. 

Horny Goat Weed

Contributed by Guest Blogger of the Week, Clay McLeod Chapman

So the horny goat weed was probably a bad idea. 

Lord only knows how many times I’d passed up the opportunity to purchase the herbal supplement from the corner deli. I’d never paid them much mind before, their tin-foil packets dangling off the rack just next to the cash register, right alongside the “rough riders” and French ticklers and other male potency placebos for sale. But for some unknown, utterly asinine reason—on this particular night, during this particular production of my own personal long-running performance piece The Pumpkin Pie Show—with hardly one hour left on the clock before show-time, this impulse-buy for “restoring a man’s inner fire” seemed like a viable option on helping me get in the mood for tonight’s show. 
 
Horny goat weed is, after all, a performance enhancer.
 
That’s exactly what it said on the front of the packet: Performance enhancer.
 
We hold these pre-show rituals to be sacred.
 
All performers do.
 
For me, the time before the curtain rises has always been holy—completely sacrosanct. My personal pre-show ritual borders on those disorders most definitely obsessive-compulsive, beginning hours before even reaching the theater:
 
The pre-show nap. The pre-show shower. The pre-show subway ride. The pre-show line-through. The pre-show coffee. The pre-show settling into the space sixty minutes before actors are actually called. The pre-show walking around the stage… 
 
Any minor divergence from my rigidly systematic warm-up risks ruining that evening’s show. Every last facet must be followed to the ‘T,’ no matter how innocuous—or else gamble the chance of wrecking an entire performance. 
 
But on this night, waiting in line at the deli, I made the cavalier call of integrating a new, last-minute component into my pre-show procedural:
 
I would pop some horny goat weed.
 
Bad call on my part.
 
For years, I had laced my extra-large cup of coffee with a packet of Emergen-C Energy Booster mix for that extra kick. Just a little more oomph for tonight’s show, I had rationalized to myself. I’d stir the powder straight in and watch it fizz up into a clumpy froth of vitamin C and half-and-half, creating some caffeinated cocktail that I speculated would rocket my energy right on into the stratosphere—thereby taking The Pumpkin Pie Show to higher, Laurence Olivier-like levels of performance.
 
It didn’t.
 
The drink was, in fact, disgusting. It tasted awful. God awful. Turns out that lemon/lime-flavored vitamin C powder and milky coffee do not mix—literally. Rather, this flotsam of citrus-foam formed along the surface of my coffee—that I would still dutifully drink, no matter how disgusting it truly was. For over five years, five years, I believed in my pre-show ritual so badly, that I was willing to wreck my liver with this battery acid brew. I only stopped after the first signs of jaundice kicked in.
 
I realize I’m talking about juicing up with over-the-counter dietary supplements here. This all must make me sound like some kind of pre-K steroid-abuser. An Off-Off-Broadway Barry Bonds. But we subject ourselves to these awful, rituals de los habituals because we believe they make our performances better.
 
By their very nature, practitioners of all-things theatrical tend to be a superstitious lot. We won’t mutter Macbeth onstage, we leave the ghost-light burning to ward off evil spirits. If you told an actor that their performance would improve ten-fold by licking the ass-crack of their stage manager ten minutes before she called "places" every night, I’m of the mind that they would seriously consider it. We performers will commit any number of delusory follies, no matter how irrational they seem to the outside eye, if we believe they perfect the performance itself. Because—what if? What if tonight you didn’t lick your stage manager’s dimpled seat cushions? Are you willing to take that risk? Once these systems have integrated themselves into our hallowed pre-show ritual, there is just no deviating from them.
 
They have become law. Holy writ.
 
Increased libido. Improved erectile function. Hours of long-lasting energy.
 
Horn-dog snake oil.
 
It was the boost to the libido that sold me. This all-natural “Phyto-Aphrodesiac” (what does that even mean?), with its recipe based around an undisclosed ancient Chinese medicinal text, was just the thing downtown theater artists have been searching high-and-low for for centuries. Its key ingredient is the leafy epimedium plant, commonly found in the mountainous Asiatic wild—not the Lower East Side. With its potent cocktail of flavonoids, polysaccharides, sterols and magnalforine alkaloids, I had visions of the coming hour-and-a-half onstage as something quasi-shamanistic. The Pumpkin Pie Show has always been a bit of a ceremonial experience in my mind, anyhow—imagine ghost stories told around the campfire by Sid Vicious. This seemed to fall right in line with our mission statement. This would be as close to a peyote ritual as I was ever going to get with an audience, guiding ticket-buyers through a metaphysical experience unlike any other evening at the theatre they—or myself—had ever encountered before. This would be the performance of a lifetime.
 
Obie-awards, here I come…
 
Not Richard Burton’s preferred pre-show warm-up, I’m sure. Nor Peter O’Toole for that matter. Or Richard Harris. But in my off-off-off-off-off-off Broadway black box world, within the realm of my thirty seat eco-system, you take what you can get.
 
And so I got some horny goat weed.
 
Down the hatch.
 
Nothing happened for the first fifteen minutes of the show. What a waste, I remember thinking. I’ve totally been shammed.
 
But then the fever kicked in. The heat seeped into my chest, flushing up my neck. I started sweating. Not simply sweating in the pits, mind you. Pores had opened that I highly doubt had ever opened before, flooding the base of my neck, my scalp, everywhere. Suddenly I looked sunburned. No amount of water could quench the brushfire that had spread out through my limbs. I couldn’t breathe.
 
I felt as if I was in the midst of my first and only hot flash.
 
I’m going to die, I thought to myself onstage. I won’t be stepping off this stage tonight…
 
I could sense the audience in the front row were no longer paying attention to my performance, no matter how enhanced—but to my pants.
 
A 30-seat black box theater has its drawbacks—one of which, I have since learned, is the unavoidable distraction of a perpetual erection onstage while performing a ten-to-fifteen minute character monologue.
 
And yet the show goes on…
 
For up to four hours.

Guest Blogger of the Week: Clay McLeod Chapman

We are excited to announce that this week's guest blogger is Clay McLeod Chapman.

Clay McLeod Chapman is the creator of the rigorous storytelling session The Pumpkin Pie Show. He is the author of Rest Area, a collection of short stories, and Miss corpus, a novel. Currently, he is writing a trilogy of children's novels titled The Tribe—book one, Homeroom Headhunters, is slated to hit the shelves in 2013. He teaches writing at The Actors Studio MFA Program at Pace University. Visit him at: www.pumpkinpieshow.com