City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s Read Online Free Page A

of time on the job for my own writing). My nights I gave to playwriting. I’d go out for dinner and then come back to the office and write plays until ten or eleven before heading home. I had written a play at the University of Michigan that had won a prize and was eventually staged in New York, where it received mixed reviews and closed after a month. It was about angry black servants in a white household and was out of step with the conciliatory civil rights era. The content may have been ahead of the times, but the style was passé, since it was inspired by Ionesco’s theater of the absurd and the baroque, menacing mockery of Genet’s The Blacks .
    Now that I had an agent and The Blue Boy in Black had had aproduction, I felt I must go on writing plays. I knew almost no one in the theater aside from the actors who’d starred in my play, Cicely Tyson and Billy Dee Williams. And I scarcely knew them; not till years after the fact did I read Cicely had married Miles Davis. She was totally mysterious as a person—I didn’t even know where she’d been born or if she had a boyfriend.
    I read the “News of the Rialto,” about showbiz, every day faithfully in the New York Post . I immersed myself in the gossip-column tittle-tattle of who might be replacing whom in a certain production and whether the new Murray Schisgal comedy might or might not be in trouble on the road.
    In those days, before Xerox copiers, faxes, and computers, the chief problem facing a poor playwright was making copies of his work. I swore that if ever I became rich I’d endow a free script-copying foundation for the indigent young. Sometimes I would compose plays directly onto mimeographing stencils. I’d make my agent, Sylvia Herscher at William Morris, read my scripts off the stencils. If she didn’t like them, I wouldn’t waste the money having copies run off.
    She never liked my plays after that first one, which she’d ushered onto off-Broadway. She disliked Mrs. Morrigan , my play about a divorced woman slowly going crazy who turns into what used to be called a nymphomaniac. Much of the play was devoted to my protagonist’s anguished exchanges with the grotesque imaginary figures who haunted and hectored her. Nor did Sylvia like my ritualistic play about a violent, incestuous family who sacrifice one of their own members to appease a dark god or exorcise the curse of some ancient tribal crime (I can’t really remember the plot). I rewrote that play several times, but Sylvia remained unconvinced. Nor did she like my comedy of manners Madame Steiner , nor my gender-switching one-act Trios , which I would eventually present in a staged reading to a few friends, who were polite. I had a weeklong affair on Fire Island with Mart Crowley, who’d just written thehilarious Boys in the Band . I made him read Trios ; when he finished it, he looked up and asked, “Is this supposed to be funny?”
    It never occurred to me to seek out a new agent, even though Sylvia was actually more famous for the musicals she worked on for fifty years as producer, publisher, and agent. Nor did I think I should give my plays to one of the casual little cabarets springing up off-off-Broadway, despite the fact that my lover, Stan, sometimes performed at the Caffè Cino. The owner, Joe Cino, would stand at the back of the theater manning the rumbling, hissing espresso machine while a drag queen emoted about the horrors of aging in Lanford Wilson’s Madness of Lady Bright . The stage was just eight feet by eight feet and there were fewer than twenty tables, most of them empty. A hat was passed by the actors at the end of each performance. I remember seeing Warhol actress Mary Woronov cracking a whip onstage and growling sadistic curses. I remember an incestuous brother and sister calling mournfully for each other in Home Free! —another Wilson one-act. Leonard Melfi, a scruffy heterosexual who sweated and shook and laughed painfully while making constant frightening