THE WORST NIGHT OF JUVEE

Horrors of Live Theater

When I was struggling my way through San Francisco State University by selling joints and writing pornography for 976-phone lines, I happened to take a playwriting class.  I figured I should put my recent past to bed and exploit it for art’s sake.  I was 19, and had been in juvenile hall when I was 17, so I wrote my first play to exploit this fact, and hence, “JUVEE.” 

The playwriting teacher kvelled over it, so my friend and fellow student Daniel Watts took it upon himself to produce it, and asked me where I’d like it to be performed.  There was no question for me that I wanted it at Climate Theater.  Owned and lived in by night club impresario (and future Burning Man founder) Joegh Bullock, Climate was about as avant-garde as you could get in San Francisco without performing at the old punk club, Club Foot.  I selected Dude Theater’s Chris Brophy as a director, the added bonus of which was we got to rehearse in the crazy raw warehouse he was living in, in the Mission District. 

“Juvee” wasn’t directly autobiographical - more of a suped-up version of the rather cushy, Marin County juvenile hall experience I actually had.  I really wrote the play to give myself something to act in, and made my character (and the character’s mother) engage in dialogue significantly dumber and louder than the real cold war between my mother and I (which was far subtler and deadlier.) 

Brophy and I found an amazing cast for the angry teen rocker girl (me), the wily, sophisticated teen crack dealer, the defiant young gay kid, their hapless parents and the juvenile hall staff.   Since we were so Off-Off Broadway as to not even be in the same home planet, we ripped off a bunch of popular music — Van Halen, Public Enemy, etc. - as a soundtrack, and we were off to the races with a one-month run in the drywall dressing rooms and indoor-outdoor carpeting of Climate Theater. 

One night my parents came to watch the show in the audience with my Aunt Margot, who was visiting from out of town, and whom I had come to dread because she acted so strangely when she was drunk, which was, as far as I could tell, all the time. 

Somewhere around the first 15 minutes of the play, after my character had a huge blowout with her mother, I could hear someone clapping at strange times — in the middle of dialogue.  Without looking, from backstage, I knew it was Margot, and got shivers of unease. 

As I was backstage preparing for another scene, Margot staggered in through the stage curtain and cornered me.  

“How COULD YOU,” she barked.   I begged her to keep quiet, because she could be heard onstage and there was a scene going on.  

“How could you do this to your mother?” She demanded, with crazy eyes, not understanding that the play was, in fact, fiction — a fact that even my mother understood. 

Fortunately my cue onstage came and I was able to slither away.  

It was the middle of the fucking play.  Did she think I was going to walk onstage in the middle and make a public apology, tear my skin off and beg for my mother’s forgiveness? I wasn’t sure what was going on in her vodka-drenched mind. 

The way that Brophy set the stage up, there were two backstages — one leading into the kitchen of the theater, and one at the front door/box office.  Since our last altercation, I had another scene go by (thankfully) without incident — I was reciting lines thinking God no God no God no the whole time, thinking Margot might walk onstage and cause some disturbance.  I got through the scene, then I walked to the backstage by the front door ….and BAM there was MARGOT, waiting for me in ambush in the dark.  It was like Jaws. 

“How do you think your mother feels about this,”  Margot hissed with disembodied eyes.  

Something took over in me because I had to go back onstage within 40 seconds.  

“Margot,” I said, grabbing her firmly by the elbow, “I very much would like to talk to you about this, but let’s go outside,” I said, ushering her through the front door. 

As she started to squawk in protest to my play, I nudged her over the threshold, closed and locked the front door. 

This was my Marine training: The show must go on.  

I made it onstage, did my scene, and went to the kitchen backstage, and after about forty seconds, I could hear her hammering on the glass door in front.   BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM all through the next scene.  She’d let up for ten seconds, then again, BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM. 

There are things I have never been drunk enough to do, and disrupt  theatrical proceedings is one of them.  The stage is a magic wall you do not pass through on your way to bitching out the teen playwright. 

It was thoroughly taboo to me, and I cut Margot off.  The Chinese garage doors shut, and she was dead to me. 

Margot wanted to talk to me on the phone recently.  I knew she had been sober for years, and that she was dying of cancer, but I still didn’t want to deal with her.  I wavered on calling her back, and let it fall backward into the opaque ADHD-foam that envelops all memory in my life, and then she died.   All trespasses are forgiven, Margot.  

Just keep it off the stage next time, or I’m getting the fire extinguisher. 

If not, hire me as an editor: cintraw@gmail.com

Artwork: Original flyer for “Juvee,” photographer unknown.