Standing in the wings and hoping someone on stage will get injured was never part of my big Broadway dreams. I had been working professionally long enough to know that many actors considered swings to be the second-class citizens of Broadway, the spares whose talent wasn’t distinctive enough to merit their being seen on stage every night. I knew those generalizations to be false, and though they stung, I had reasons beyond my pride for wanting my own track in Chicago. As a kid, I had always wanted to know the exhaustion and exhilaration of performing eight shows a week, every week, especially in a show like Chicago, in which every company member had a moment (or two or three) to step forward, play a character, and truly be seen. I wanted to play one character, perfect that role, and, for the first time since moving to New York, call something my own.
Instead, I had been hired as a swing, and I would spend my days anxious and jittery, wondering whether or not the stage manager was going to call and tell me I was on that night. Would I be doing a low-key track with no dance features or would I be doing the leaps and turns in the track ordinarily played by a former American Ballet Theater dancer? Or, more likely, would I be standing in the wings, watching other people ooze and slither through the show, waiting to hit the deck to do what I had been training over two decades for.
In my rehearsals for Chicago, it was just me, an accompanist behind the piano, and David, the other male swing, who taught me the seven ensemble roles without once referring to his notes. David was forty-eight—exactly twice my age—had a sleek, shaved head, bulky arms, a soft-spoken shyness, and a girlfriend he’d been living with for three years. He gave me photocopies of charts he’d made outlining where each character went and when. I took those charts and recopied each and every one of them by hand; I color coded each character’s track, drew new diagrams demarcating traffic patterns, typed up quick reference cheat sheets, and made flash cards to quiz myself on what count of the overture each character entered the stage, which chair they sat in at the end of Act I. I felt as though my brain was firing for the first time in years. I’d continue figuring out the puzzle of Chicago after rehearsals every night while sitting alone in the balcony of the Ambassador Theater, taking notes, watching the show, and dissecting all the pieces that merged to form that sleek, glittering whole. I kept telling myself that if I were the best swing Chicago had ever seen, I’d be bumped up to my own track. With my own track, I was sure to feel fully part of the show instead of like the underage kid at the party: invited, but not wholly welcome to partake in the fun.
The morning after I made my debut in the show, I went right back into rehearsals to learn the other six ensemble tracks. David told me the director and associate choreographer had liked what I’d done on stage and that many people in the chorus had said they’d hardly noticed someone brand new was in the show at all. I felt I was doing my job well: filling the gaps, keeping the show running as if no one was missing. I developed some confidence in my ability to be a swing, and as I learned and performed more roles, my confidence turned to self-satisfaction, then to arrogance. I found that if I imitated the movement quality and even the line readings of the performers I was standing in for, everyone from the stage manager to the leading ladies were happy. When, in an emergency, I was thrown into a split-track, I really felt like I was hot shit. I actually enjoyed the challenge of a split track, engaging my brain and feeding my ego by performing two roles at once, which of course meant more stage time and more features. On the nights I was on stage, I felt I was really getting to participate in the fun, even if no one seemed to notice I was at the party.
By September, I had learned all seven tracks and had come to love the feeling that I was needed. I was a savior of the show. When one guy turned green and had a panic attack in the middle of Act I, I was able to throw on my costume and get on stage before the next musical number. When one guy was stuck on the train for an hour on the way to work, I was able to do the opening number then step out of his role when he arrived so he wouldn’t miss a day of pay. The stage manager asked where I had trained and what other Broadway shows I had done, and was surprised to hear that Chicago was my debut. I was so calm, he said; I was just what the show needed; I was consistent and professional and easy to work with, and all around, everyone thought I was pretty great. But during the day, my blood seemed to be perpetually rushing with the knowledge that I could possibly be performing at night. Though I was excited to perform, I was also intensely, disproportionately nervous. I did my best to mask my nerves beneath a pall of calm that, according to the stage manager, was beginning to come across on stage as boredom. I wasn’t bored. Far from it. From the moment I woke up in the morning until I went to bed at night, my head was ringing with the awareness that I was finally—finally—in a Broadway show.
The end of September rolled around and I woke feeling I had lost hold of something essential that I couldn’t name. Something that had previously tethered me to the ground seemed to have slipped from my grasp and I was disoriented, living in a higher, more rarefied altitude where I couldn’t shake a feeling of dizziness and an inability to fill my lungs completely. I began thinking that if I could just get home to Maryland for the upcoming Jewish holidays, eat some of my mom’s brisket, chat with my dad during a late night dog walk, and get lost in the fugue of show tunes that is the shorthand with which my brother and sister and I communicate, I might be able to extinguish the blistering sensation in my stomach telling me that something was terribly, terribly wrong.
So, on the third Friday in September, I boarded an Amtrak train at Penn Station and sped away from New York, heading toward D.C. and a pre-Yom Kippur feast with my family. My sister picked me up from Union Station around 4 pm and we yakked about her new apartment in Fairfax, about how much I loved doing Chicago, about her Masters in Folklore and her recent divorce, about my boyfriend on tour, and about how our mother was slowly driving us insane. By 4:45, we were deadlocked in rush hour traffic. Unsure of how much longer it would take to get to our parents’ house, I decided I had better make the phone call I’d been dreading all day. By putting off the call to the Chicago stage manager to say I was sick and wouldn’t be able to make it to the show that night, I had hoped to make my lie plausible—a stomach flu that began at 10am could conceivably have cleared up by the 7:30 call time. But I had also put off the call because I was a terrible liar, and I’d hoped that being with my family would fortify my courage and my believability. Instead, the anticipation had gripped my stomach like a vice and I felt as though my innards were being increasingly squeezed and flattened with each minute that ticked by.
After I had finally dialed the stage manager’s number and rattled out an overly detailed story about waking up in the middle of the night vomiting, he interrupted me by saying, “Brian, I was just about to call you. We already have three guys out and we need you on tonight in a split track.”
“Oh,” I said, scooting down in my seat as though he might be able to see me through the car window. “I really don’t think I can come in.”
“Why?” the stage manager said, his voice tightening. “What’s going on?”
If I had been a little more seasoned, I would have known that it’s against union rules for management to make you come in to work if you say you’re unable to. If I had come up with a story and stuck with it, they would have had no choice but to figure out how to do the show without me, and that would have been that. But I was green, completely and utterly green. And in the world I had always lived in, there wasn’t anything I couldn’t get away with, especially when I put my good-boy-home-with-the-family routine to work.
“I’m home in Maryland with my family,” I said smiling, sure that my stage manager would be won over by my charm, even from two hundred and thirty miles away. “It’s Yom Kippur.”
There was a long pause. “Brian, this is not good,” the stage manager said. “This is really not good.”
I got off the phone and turned to my sister, who was looking from the road to me and back to the road again, her face pinched with worry. Before I could tell her what had happened, my phone rang. It was the company manager, the person who signed my checks and to whom the stage manager reported.
“We’ve been really pleased with your work thus far, Brian,” she said in her crisp voice. “And everyone thinks you’re a nice guy. But if you’re not at the theater for tonight’s performance, we’ll have no choice but to permanently release you from your contract.”
I hung up the phone, burst into tears, and called my parents. Ten minutes later, my sister had somehow maneuvered through the unmoving traffic, exited the Beltway, and dropped me at a Metro station. There, I would board a train to Reagan National Airport then hopefully catch the shuttle flight to New York that my dad had booked once he’d gotten me to stop sobbing long enough to tell him what had happened. If everything ran on schedule, I would land just after 7 pm and have plenty of time to get from LaGuardia to the Ambassador before the half-hour call. I would sign in, get into costume, and do the show. It would be as if I hadn’t been in D.C. at all.
The plane took off right at 6 pm as scheduled. I tried to read a book, but instead compulsively composed apology letters to the stage manager and general manager in my head. It seemed I hadn’t gotten past the sentence, “I can’t find the words to say how sorry I am” before we were beginning our descent into New York. It looked like I would really make it to work on time until we had to circle the airspace over LaGuardia for thirty minutes before landing. By the time I had run off the plane, gotten through the airport, and waited in line for a taxi, the time on the cab’s dashboard clock read 7:39.
“49th Street and Broadway,” I said to the driver, trying to keep my voice steady. “And step on it.” I looked around, hoping no one had heard me actually say “step on it.”
I closed my eyes and, with a clammy sense of futility, tried visualizing the roadways clearing of traffic, the cab lifting up over the highway, soaring over the East River, across the island of Manhattan, and setting me down in front of my stage door. But getting in the way of the visualization was the voice of my company manager, repeatedly saying, You’re a nice guy, Brian. You’re a nice guy, Brian.
I thought back to a summer I’d spent in the Berkshires when I was twenty-one, dancing at Jacob’s Pillow. A man named Chet Walker ran the three-week program, and I worshipped him. Chet had been a protégé of my childhood hero, Bob Fosse, and, at fifty-something years old, could still turn more pirouettes and balance on one leg longer than any of his young students. When Chet danced, he still exuded the effortless style and clarity of intention that only a performer of true genius is born with. During the last week of that summer program, Chet Walker pulled me aside after an evening rehearsal. I was sure he was going to tell me I had real talent and that he wanted to hire me for his professional dance company. Instead, he brushed the fringe of blond hair from his eyes and said, “You know what you are, Brian? You’re nothing but nice. No one will ever want to hire nice.”
What Chet was telling me was that my performance lacked a point of view. I was serviceable. I was technically proficient. I was interchangeable with hundreds of other dancers. I was nice. At the time, I was devastated by Chet’s view of me, but had then written him off as an out of touch nobody by the time I left Jacob’s Pillow. But as the taxi sped across the 59th Street Bridge, I thought about how, in each and every different track I performed in Chicago, I had made the conscious decision to take on the energy and style of the performer I was standing in for. If the dancer attacked the movement with sharp precision, so did I. If the guy I was on for had a minimalist elegance and moved with a laid-back languor, so did I. On the nights I was performing, I would come down the stairs, dressed in my costume, ready to go on, and at least one cast member would inevitably ask, “Who are you tonight?” The answer was that I had no idea who I was in Chicago. I had no concept of what I would dance like if I were to just to dance like myself. By failing to bring my own perspective to performing—the one thing that had defined me for nearly two decades—I had lost myself both onstage and off. I’d become, in every way, nothing but nice.
For the first time since sitting on the Beltway nearly three hours before, I stopped crying. Despair and guilt were traded for a boiling anger directed at myself. I had the sense that it was too late to undo what I’d done. I couldn’t imagine how I’d begin to find myself again.
At 7:53, the cab pulled up in front of the Ambassador. I threw money at the driver and managed to refrain from yelling, “Keep the change.” I ran through the heavy metal gate, down the concrete alley, through the stage door, up the backstage stairs, and practically spat into the stage manager’s office, “I’m here. Who am I on for?”
I got into my costume, the curtain went up at 8:05 as usual, and I made my entrance on the fourth count of eight of the overture. I had a definite point of view on stage that night, and my point of view was fury.
After the show, I changed into my street clothes and poked my head into the stage manager’s office to apologize once again for lying and for causing such unnecessary chaos.
“I’m not mad,” the stage manager said, his eyes downcast at some paperwork. “Just disappointed.”
I assumed he knew disappointment to be the worst thing of which a nice Jewish boy could be the recipient.
I stomped out the stage door, embarrassed by my months of arrogance and infuriated that I’d fooled myself into thinking I had been doing anything remarkable. Chet Walker may have been right: maybe I’d never had a point of view in the first place. Trying to find my own opinions and personality on stage now would be like taking my first dance class when I was six years old, learning how to do a times step and a plié all over again.
I wondered if it was too late; I wondered if I had built up so many layers of what I thought everyone wanted me to be that the point of view of the person who was truly me had long ago crumbled and decomposed without my noticing. I had no way of knowing if, in the end, I’d be able to find that person. And if I did, I couldn’t be sure whether or not I’d understand what he thought and felt and needed.
When I pushed through the metal gate onto 49th Street, I found my mother, my father, my brother, and my sister standing in front of the theater. They were holding platters of potatoes, a bowl of salad, a few cakes, and a homemade brisket. Around the same time I had boarded the plane at Reagan National, my family had piled into their car in Maryland. With my brother behind the wheel, my father reading the Yom Kippur service aloud, my mother telling my brother to drive faster, and my sister delivering an impromptu sermon on the themes of repentance and forgiveness, they had driven to New York so we could all spend the holiday together. I collapsed into them, laughing and remembering, for the first time in a long time, what it felt like to be no one but myself.