CAST
Cheka......................Raul Aranas
Itai.........................William Rhys
Cuckoo...........Wayne S. Turney
Bjuti...............Mary Lee-Aranas

Stage Design..................Bill Stabile
Costume Design......Estelle Painter
Lighting Design...Beverly Emmons
Properties...................James A. Guy
Sound Design............................Vox
Hair........................... Tony Marotta
Violin..........................Sue Kowalski
Sculptor..........................Beth Wolf

TIME
The year after the drinking water disaster

SETTING
Between Ararat and Xanadu

I remember one night in the Club, Will gave me Mueller's script in German, and asked my opinion. I took it home and it took me more than a couple of days to plow through it. The language was incredible. It was rather like reading a translation of James Joyce without the classical allusions to bring some sense of familiarity to the enterprise. Wonderful made-up words encasing a grim odyssey of four survivors of a nuclear disaster (the piece was first performed in Germany shortly after the Chernobyl accident) floating down the Rhine on a raft fleeing or in search of... something. I concluded it was either the most brilliant piece of new writing I had encountered in a decade or the worst waste of paper on the planet. I told Will so, and he decided it was worth the risk. I think my exact words were, "A faint heart never filled a flush." This was one gamble that really didn't pay off.

It was an expensive enterprise. There were four spectacular sets including one post-modern rendering of a Renaissance wing and drop moving set with "wave" machines upstage and a huge four foot high platform representing the raft spanning the Bolton stage and propelled back and forth by a small army of stage hands. Another set was an enormous pile of shoes out of which my character, Cuckoo emerged. Another was a forest of gigantic mutant broccoli stalks. The house itself was hung with an enormous yellow scrim that floated about four or five feet over the heads of the audience like a cloud of pollution. Under pressure from the board, Will imported the director and three of the four actors from New York.

But. Because Roger Robinson the actor from New York had transportation difficulties getting to the first read through, I read Cuckoo on that occasion. It's a devilsihly difficult role. At one point Cuckoo has a double monologue as his mind slips back and forth from the present to the past from one line to another. When it's clearly done, it's a dazzling, funny and truly terrifying speech. To make a long story short, I looked in from time to time after that on rehearsals and was a little alarmed that actor and actress playing Cheka (Raul Aranas) and Bjuti (Mary Lee-Aranas) were difficult to understand. Raul was Hispanic with a fairly thick accent and Mary was Asian with a tiny little voice. And Roger clearly didn't have a clue how to handle the sudden shifts in Cuckoo's psyche. The Tuesday dress rehearsal was, as usual a mess, with Roger in particular foundering in the sea of his words, bellowing, as Eliot would say, sound without meaning.. But, the translation itself was spectacular and the acting was not my problem. Until...

I arrived in the lobby of the Bolton one day at about 12:30 on the Wednesday of tech week for Deathraft. I had a 2:00 call for a rehearsal of Much Ado in which I was cast as Verges, so I was going to go to my office and get some dramaturgy done. To my surprise, Will was in the lobby in costume--an unheard of breach of theatrical protocol--waiting for me. He rushed over and asked me if I would go on on book that night as Cuckoo. I, of course, said I would, and he told me Estelle was waiting in the dressing room with some costumes to try on me, and he gave me a script and we rushed backstage. I didn't have time to ask him what had happened to Roger; I had visions of a mangled Roger bleeding in a ditch. But as we rushed to the waiting Estelle, I saw Roger standing next to a dumpster with his topcoat and a pile of luggage. I found out later they had bought him out. I didn't ask for details--whether he wanted out, or whether he was "let go." But it became clear that I wasn't going on just for one night. And we were opening on Friday!

We ran the blocking and did the performance; Thursday night was the perilous one because I had time to get familiar with the script. I find I'm best at either total preparation or a cold read. Half preparation is worse than none at all. But I forced myself to keep the script in my field of vision, and Friday, I opened still on book, though I frequently was able to put in in my back pocket. And by the following Tuesday, I was off book. But the troubles of the run didn't stop there. About a week or two into the run, Mary's voice gave out. She wasn't hoarse, she was sans sound. So Jan Bruml was called in, not to play the role, but to be Mary's voice. Since Will had to carry Mary and sometimes Mary and me(!) on his back around the stage, the physically larger Jan Bruml couldn't be substituted, but vocally, she was wonderful, so we set up a station on one of the otherwise useless faux balconies that Philip Johnson hung on the walls of the Bolton, and Jan spoke the lines, and Mary very adeptly lip synched her disembodied voice. It was actually quite fascinating and "worked."

This was a daring choice and was great fun to do, though our audiences baled out in record numbers. We rarely lost less than 50% of the house at intermission. Had we been able to do justice to the staging in the Brooks, that's where it would have found its audience, but on the Bolton stage, with a mass audience, enormous expenses--stagehands outnumbering the cast, a truly world class design, and a frankly rather preachy agenda, the play in Cleveland proved to be a bomb.