A TALE OF THE LIGHTBRINGER

My associates consider self-effacement a signal quality of my being. The second signal quality is patience--the dumb patience of shorelines rebuilding after hurricanes, of trees fighting back after devastating fires. I'm faced with major dramas three, four times a week that cannot unfold without my compliance and intervention, for which compliance and intervention I receive a grudging a pittance and a line of print featuring my misspelled name; almost never thanks. Yet I endure. I flourish.
Let me explain. My job is the bringing of light-- not to myself, but to the theater of other people's passions. I handle the most powerful sources of illumination useable indoors; these I point everlastingly away from myself. I don't act out my own dramas; I'm not sure what they would be if I did. I prefer to disappear into the heights where it is dark and warm and all things lie open to scrutiny beneath.
I must have wanted this from the first, when I was sperm or something, it seemed so perfect when it began, settling around me like the shell of an oyster. I am by profession a theater lighting technician, yes, but to do this for money is incidental to some resonance-- personal and eternal, therefore almost inexplicable-- set off each time I climb the narrow stairway to the technical booth.
During the last eight years I've been involved with every theater company in town, little and legit, hippie and hillbilly, solvent and fly-by-night, because of being the only one who could run a tech system--sound, lights, sound and lights both when the computer boards came in and it was a matter of programming and sitting back--with any touch of human decency.
By "human decency" I imply that people can still stand talking with me by the end of a run. If you're a theater person you know what I mean. Theater techies are the farts of the arts. There are historical reasons for this. You face unique problems and genuine dangers. You wrestle broiling lights thirty feet above the floor. You mess with wiring designed fifty years before for, maybe, an auditor's lamp. You have too-artsy-to-think-of-the-details directors handing you tasks like Storm at Sea or the Burning of Troy expecting you to accomplish it without the whirring of machinery or the least compromise of the onstage action. You're expected to achieve a simulacrum of reality while working with gel and foil and balsa and wads of tape, to make a universe out of tissue. Sublime technical complexities without apparent solutions are the rule each day. Demands become the more hysterical as opening night draws on apace and the company expects the technical crew to pull it out of gulfs created by bad acting and idiotic direction.
I mean, I have done miracles, but to expect that sort of thing on a regular basis is to tempt fate.
We do not take this pressure in the manner of saints. We retaliate by cultivating chronic irritability. We leave everything to the last moment so we can stay up all night before opening, arriving for call with the haggard caffeine-and-nicotine aura that breathes theatre to so many in the business. We grouse. We bitch. We make ourselves martyrs to art in a way the combed and well-rested actors cannot hope to match. While they must manage "perky" and "up" when they hit their marks, we can hang-dog along in whatever profundity of depression we care to, the deeper the better and farther out of the reach of any conceivable correction. No one in his right mind would criticize us when we're in that state, at once having given far beyond what was required and being strung out far beyond any hope of reason.
In a medium that is light and voice, the power of the lightbringers is such that we can get away with everything.
While students, we would drag in Tuesdays after missing Monday's class and say to our professors, "Sunday was tech, man, I just couldn't make it" and expect slack to be cut. If slack was not cut, we had one more thing to feel victimized about. I have manifested my share of this behavior, but always surfaced after a few dramatic hours, always managed to make the next adjustment, work the next wonder. Always managing to be, in short, professional. That is why I am never out of work, even at those times when I sort of wanted to be. I'm the best around. I could make it in New York, but there I'd only be good among the best. Here I'm a Himalaya.
I got my training over at the State University, coming down out of the hills in my rust-red '67 (one year younger than me) pickup with visions of the life of the theater blazing in my head. Now the fact is I had never seen live theater except for the high school shows that only girls and sissies were ever in, and that they made us come to in sullen herds from chalky classrooms, standing over us with map pointers in case we acted up or snored too loud. Mom and daddy did come down for the first couple of shows at the college theater. I invited them, so I must have wanted them, though the experience was never what I would call encouraging. It was daddy who observed that I was as likely to be Miss America as a professional actor. I played hurt for a while, but he really only confirmed what I'd already surmised. As an actor I stunk on ice.
But by then I'd gotten a load of credits in the drama department-- a few of them outright A's, which they gave pretty liberally to keep majors who otherwise would have flown after the calamity of their first production-- and made some friends, so instead of taking something sensible I switched over to tech and found home.
Unlike acting, technical theater is precise. If you do it right, you do it right. The lights come on; the music plays. If not, you know where to start to make it work. Either you fucked up or the machinery did. No soul-searching. No polysyllabic critques. Acting for me was like being broken and not knowing what to do to fix yourself. I was a flat blank onstage, except that I understood nothing would ever be good enough, and no matter how you did it something would be Wrong. Each of those hundred pairs of eyes glittering the dark was a critic. Each expect something which may not be in me. Believe me, once I disappeared from stage and got hold of those levers and knobs I never let go.
Yet if I thought my artistic education was over when I gave up being an artist I was mistaken. Up in the booth you learn a lot. You watch every move the actors make. You see which ones are computers and which ones reinvent themselves each night. You see who clings to the bee line of the director's blocking and who follow Inspiration. I learned more up in the booth than ever in class, and if someone gets the bright idea to let me direct, it'll be damn fine. Don't mention I said this. I mean, who wants the grief? Anyone who thinks it's easier to give orders than to take them has no experience in life.
University life was pretty exciting, considering what I was used to before. The women at State made the girls up in the hills look like biddy hens. They didn't let you get away with the stupid things the girls back home did. They were harder to get and more challenging once gotten. There are people (mostly the women themselves) this can't be said to, but that doesn't change the fact.
University theater, though, was really unlike my prior experience. It's schizo anywhere, but especially so in these mountain towns where you're not only divided between Education and Art but also between Art and Baptist. . . and not only that but between Regular Baptist and roaring red-neck ignert-as-dirt-&-don't-go-to-church-but-by-gawd-know-what's-right Baptist. Throw in the regular mixture of dope heads, nervous hospital outpatients, artistes, hissing fairies and hand-wringing fussbudgets and you have yourself a circus. I loved it for a while. Glamour and mortification in one package. Me and Paul-- Paul was the University tech director-- would leave the booth every night shaking our heads.
Avrom Wassermann was director of the University Theater, and had been since it began years before as an outgrowth of the English department. The central issue of Avrom Wassermann's life was that he thought he was Chekhov. Wassermann wanted to be a Chekhov character, actually, all moody and nuanced, the sort of person who can sing at table and expect not to be asked why. He was like a member of the family in The Cherry Orchard, wandering about having lost everything but gaining from the experience a license to bore everyone to tears with prolonged passages of sensitivity. He told many a class that he was the only person on campus who really understood existentialism, because he alone lived it. That may have been accurate, but since I didn't understand it I couldn't judge. He certainly looked like he based his life on something French. I think what he meant by "existentialism" is what I would call making excuses for myself.
Wassermann was a compact little guy, and though he didn't exactly walk on his tip-toes he gave the impression of doing so, leaning a tad back from every human encounter as though we were all bad smells. There were Wassermann jokes around for a while, but they would have been better had he been closer to us. The best humor comes from intimacy; his aloofness inspired respect in some, mistrust in some, a liberating indifference in still others, like me. It's not that I didn't like him. I sort of did. But he was like a public figure, aloof, untouchable, outside of issues of liking and hating. He was like the duke in Romeo and Juliet who just comes on to stop the action and remind people what would be going on were it a perfect world.
His more-ironic-than-thou attitude put at least three twists to anything he said, and it was difficult to know what he really meant at any particular time. Just something like "do you really like that effect?" could be derision, irony, idle chit-chat, or a real question. You never knew. Luckily he didn't speak much to us lackeys up in the booth, but communicated through Paul, who seemed to have a sense for the direction of the director's indirection.
Paul was good. He got his work done, fussed as little as possible, tolerated much, was pretty creative when left alone, which wasn't often. He was my bass-line mentor, by which you are to understand I meant to start where Paul left off. Paul was good. I meant to be damn good. Looking back I see that Paul meant to be damn good too. Maybe we stopped in the same place after all. Maybe Paul was better than I thought when I was a headlong kid. Maybe I never got as good as I wanted to be. Anyway, Paul gave me the vision of job satisfaction, which meant you could be happy with what you did even if nobody else was.
Wassermann, on the other hand, was never wholly pleased with anything. His own work didn't satisfy him; he derived unwavering pleasure out of enumerating the ways in which things went wrong, fancying his acumen as a clear-eyed critic of the passing scene more than he treasured his talent as a director, or even his character as a man.
He could, and did, tell you the exact number of years, months, days it was until retirement.
Wassermann was one of those people who once had the perfect job but left it for reasons known only to himself and God. He had been a rare book curator in a library up in Cambridge, the sort of fussbudget non-human-contact job God had intended him for. Somewhere in his background, though, there had been a bare stage and bright lights, and when he blundered down to teach English at the university the allure reawakened, and soon he was able to convince the Powers that what they needed on campus was a theater. It's true that they needed a theater, but someone like Wassermann's founding it was one of life's little jokes. He didn't even like theater that much. He liked dressing up and going to the theater, and then talking about it afterwards over brandy, but doing it was another matter. It's messy, and at its best inclines toward organic chaos-- the messy, the organic, and the chaotic being the three things old Avrom could not abide.
Unlike those characters in Chekhov on whom he otherwise modeled himself, Wassermann had a knack for making a place for himself. He was not a very good teacher and not a Ph.D, so his best bet for tenure was to create a venue in which his was the only standard of comparison. It worked beautifully. He raised most of the money for the theater building himself. I wasn't around when it happened, but my guess is that his ironic-smile-giving, delicate-handshaking, tip-toe walking was just the thing that spelled culture to the mountain folk. Listen, every endeavor in art needs at least two people: one who looks the part of the artist who raises the money, who punches up the public profile, and one who can actually do the thing, who can look pretty much the way he pleases. If the first is good enough, it takes a long time for people to notice that the second has not yet appeared.
This town brims with little old ladies too cultured for the musical-and-mystery community theater on Walnut Street, too upscale for the rough theaters experimenting in bars and warehouses downtown. Typically these citizens have piles of money. Avrom got the money from them, built himself a theater, got himself a reputation, and hunkered down for the long glide into retirement.
Wassermann was born to be retired. Even in his youth, I bet, he saw himself in mellow advancement, rocking on the terraces of Mediterranean villas with his saved-up money, sipping exquisitely, looking exquisite, thinking ironic exquisite thoughts, smelling the jasmine or whatever the hell it is they have over there, never needing to move or to be again.
I would have added "eyeing the local beauties" to the scenario above except that old Avrom never gave any indication of sexual preference. If he'd manifested a libidinous impulse of any description, no one known to us had witnessed it. I don't think he was a neuter, exactly, but just so embarrassed by things bodily, things that might involve spit or smell or not being able to have your muffins by the study window first thing in the morning, that he would rather do without for a lifetime than take the risk. Certain kinds of dirt fascinated while repelling him. His lunch time discussion of serial killers was vivid and informative. Other kinds of dirt, particularly the sexual, he never mentioned at all. His productions were famous for their lack of the passionate clinch. When lovers on stage exhibited anything more than an academic simulacrum of heightened interest in one another, Avrom swooped down like a flustered hen from his perch in the house, squawking about the difference between acting and indulgence. "It's too real" he'd shriek, leading three generations of acting students to believe reality was the one quality in art most vehemently to be avoided.
This all served not only Avrom's squeamishness, but the community's desire for sanitary pastimes on University Heights.
I entered the scene way past the mid point in Wassermann's glide toward retirement, after the energy necessary to prove himself had dissipated and before he had quite become an immovable institution. He was riding high. He had done some good work, and his eye for beautiful placement--the eye of an interior decorator--had given him a reputation for directing.
Even then, though, he spent most of his time out of the theater. We'd sit in the lobby watching him prance to committee meetings on those polished toes, volunteering for tasks other faculty fled from, consolidating his power on all fronts save the artistic, where the solitariness of his stature made effort unnecessary. When a vice-chancellor vacancy appeared, there would be Avrom, interviewing and politicking, so whatever else the new man was he would be the theater's friend. Wassermann was several kinds of genius, none of them related to drama but all useful in the airless world of academic politics.
It wouldn't be fair to say that AW wasn't any good as a director; he was quite good when he had a certain sort of play or when he paid really good actors to come in from outside, who didn't need the direction he wasn't likely to give. "I don't direct actors," he said in rehearsal when someone requested direction or questioned motivation. The uninitiated would wonder what, then, he did, but I had been there long enough to understand. He savored totalities. He midwived impressions. He made scenes on his little arena stage the way a girl makes scenes in her doll house, insulated, deaf to the cries of the outer world, self-absorbed, often exquisite, once in a while possessed of great (if apparently accidental) evocative power.
He designed the theater so it was as much like a living room as it could be. Now that the image has come into my head, I see that was what it all was-- Avrom's living room into which he invited the right sort of people to act out fragments of their lives in a manner that, without being an actual challenge or mess or inconvenience, imported a savor of the turbulence of Outside. Avrom was God's own voyeur, and so good at it you'd have to work for him a decade or so to notice what was going on.
Though Avrom didn't direct actors he did discourage them. This was called in the department "giving a sense of the mean." The "mean" was very big at the Theater back then, a magical point between the demonstrably incompetent and the embarrassingly vivid. There was never intentionally at the University theater one of those over-the-top performances that sometimes give life to productions otherwise forgettable. Everything was damped down, repeatedly sepia-washed, rubbed hard to take off the edges. Once in a while someone really good came through, a boy or girl with theater in their veins, fiery and hopeful. They would invariably leave after their sophomore year. But while they were there the Director would deliver himself of that one famous and unwavering bit of Wassermann advice. In the heat of action that was crossing over into passion he'd stop the scene and say, "No! No! It's too real. You act as though you really love her." Got so students would call to each other on campus, "It's too real" and then burst out laughing. It would have been funnier had it been a misunderstanding, but it really was the way Wassermann wanted it: nothing startling, no emotion other than the silvery arch of intelligent irony, no real sweat, no real tears, the calm orderliness of a photo in a fashion magazine.
When brow-beaten into doing Shakespeare, Wassermann would make his actors talk so fast the verse was unintelligible, play the background music so loud the sense of the action was lost. He would tell the cast so little that they could not but get the emotions wrong, and then go about crowing for the next year how it was impossible to do Shakespeare on a university level, with his own flop as evidence. It was elegant, really: do what you want by doing what you don't want badly.
His dress-rehearsal pep talk was usually that everyone should shower and use mouthwash. Not that this is not useful, but that it does seem to miss the heart of the matter.
Avrom proved so useful to the university doing committee work that he was permitted to hire other faculty to run the drama department. After the first few session this process came to be known cruelly as "Hire the Handicapped Month," for-- like a Republican candidate choosing a Vice-President-- Wassermann made it a principle to select the feeble so as to show his own talents in higher contrast. OK, this is a cruel way of putting it. Wassermann would say he was "striving for complementarity."
It worked beautifully for a while. He got an acting teacher who couldn't act and couldn't teach, whose directing talents were so spare that his looked lavish by comparison, whose lack of an advanced degree kept her dependent perpetually on his good grace. An alumna of the university, Yvain was the prize of the drama department because once she had appeared in an off-off Broadway bomb, and framed photos of the dress rehearsal in a slant, brownish, flattering light hung not only in her office but also in the women's john. The picture was meant to intimate an historical professionalism never revealed directly to the present. Yvain's coquettish smile said, "I have made it. I'll never have to prove anything again." What the photograph told me was the whoever was doing their lights knew their business.
With Yvain, Avrom got a two-for-one, as her loud husband Hendl came along, shouting down opposition and ambivalence alike at those forums designed to critique plays in the making, insisting on his wife's genius at a volume few had the energy to contest.
In Yvain's acting classes you learned how to imagine yourself jello and a fetus in the womb, how to "prepare" for your "moment", how to come to rehearsal on time. Everyone anticipated the occasion when, having successfully impersonated jello, you would be brought up short with the phrase, "but what flavor of jello?" That was meant to be a real eye-opener.
Paul was apparently a mistake; he was good. He was also thoroughly non-confrontational, and after a while Wassermann stopped perceiving in him a threat. A while after that, Paul was so absolutely necessary to the functioning of the theater, that his future, such as it was, was made.
Following Yvain there commenced a procession of lecturers and assistant professors, all hired publicly for some arcane expertise and privately for their absence of fire. One quickly forgot them. They passed through swiftly, denied tenure or reappointment with Avrom's head shaking sadly in the background, as though he regretted it oh so much. One sued, but Avrom had made sure her incompetence was demonstrable.
Then in a single year, my junior one, Wassermann made two mistakes. The first was Carol. Carol wasn't much better than the others artistically, but she was honest and hard working, incompetent by the standards of visionaries, maybe, but good enough for us, and she did adore Avrom, so after only a few months he began talking about laying the reins of the department into her trustworthy hands so he could more thoroughly "pursue his artistic calling." Right, Paul said. In her second year Carol found herself Chairman, an unenviable labor which she shouldered manfully-- am I allowed to say that?-- womanfully, like someone trying to be a good sport while left with the dishes after a huge family dinner. Wassermann was thus free to chair more university committees and be more visible in the dinner meeting set downtown, which was the major source of his revenues, ticket sales being generally disappointing.
Carol was a big girl, you know, and didn't find it easy to date in a superficial town like this. It wasn't easy to know whether her perpetual state of near-hysteria was the result of trying to keep the theater together or plain loneliness. I could have helped her, I guess, but first I was a student and then an employee, and neither level seemed right for an approach I didn't especially want to make anyway. I didn't want to date her, but I would have once or twice, to take the tension out of our working conditions. But the right moment never came.


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