Free atta girl: Tales from a Life in the Trenches of Show Business by Peggy Pope Page B

Euripides’ Medea for her, came to Broadway. I sat in the last row of the balcony and was riveted for two hours, along with the rest of the audience. Euripides was the last of the great tragedians and the impetus for modern theater. You might say he moved drama out of the “war and incest” arena and into boy-meets-girl territory. After Jason marries the sorceress, Medea, she helps him capture the Golden Fleece so he can regain his kingdom. Two children later, he falls for a younger woman and tells Medea to get out of town. So Medea sends the new mistress a gown that bursts into flames when she puts it on and burns her alive. After that, she kills Jason’s and her children. It’s a regular Daily News, “see pages 4 and 5 melodrama. Rave.
    And I sat there rooting for her. Medea! Medea! Go, Medea! I totally got how she could murder four people in two hours. I was right back there with the Greeks in the amphitheater. I had never seen anything like it before, and haven’t since. This was the real goods. I felt my psyche shifting inside me. I must have been shaking all the way home because a couple on the 104 bus asked me if I was all right. When I told them I’d just seen Medea, they understood immediately. The wife said, “Oh, of course. You’ll be all right in a couple of days.”
    I was thrilled to be joining this astonishing profession. I stood on the beach that summer, an apprentice at Ogunquit, roaring lines from Medea, timing them to drive back the ebbing waves, dreaming of my own power, waiting for me to catch up.
     

Audition 
    In the fifties and sixties, when an actor went to audition for a Broadway show, a play or a musical, here’s how it went.
    You took the 104 bus or the Seventh Avenue subway or walked over from a cold-water flat in Hell’s Kitchen to the theater district. You entered through the stage door into one of the solid, well-designed, acoustically perfect—sans amplification—intimate, delicious theaters that lined the side streets east and west of Broadway in midtown.
    The stage door was usually down a dark alley alongside the theater. It led directly to the dimly lit backstage area, where an ancient doorman in a rumpled uniform and a slouch hat sat in a minuscule office, with mailboxes and a Seth Thomas clock on the wall above his head. He ruled from a desk just big enough to accommodate his solitaire setup. He said, “Yes?” without taking the cigar out of his mouth.
    You told him who you were and what time you were expected, and he pointed you to a waiting room with a George Booth lightbulb stuck in a wall socket. You could wait there if you wanted to be with other actors who were trying out for your part, or you could wait in the hall, which was cramped, airless, and lacking windows. Or you could sit on the metal stairs leading up to the dressing rooms or go down into a mold-filled basement where the stagehands hung out when the show was on.
    Everybody was nervous. It was a big deal. You had dressed up for the audition. The men wore their best suits, and the women wore high heels they had gotten for free from the union at the A. S. Beck shoe store on Forty-Seventh Street. The shoes were guaranteed to ruin your feet for the rest of your life because of their pointy toes and thin stilts, but they made they your legs look swell and gave you confidence. You wanted to make a good impression with every step. This was Broadway, the Great White Way, and there was a broken heart for every lightbulb on it. And, oh yes, your competition was the cream of the crop.
    As it got closer to your turn, as you moved nearer to the wings, to the darkened area just off the stage, you could hear and see the audition of the actor ahead of you. This could be unnerving or reassuring depending on how it was going. Did she get cut off early? Did the director engage the actor in pleasantries? Did the actor have a unique take on the script that had never occurred to you and had made everybody laugh hard and long,