7 Years of Missing Wendy

"I like him.  He knows when to laugh."

These were the first words Wendy Wasserstein ever spoke to me.  Or rather, about me, I should say.  We had just finished the first day of a week-long workshop of her play Old Money at Lincoln Center in May of 2000, in preparation for the upcoming production that would go into rehearsals in October of the same year.  The ever-kind Mark Brokaw had asked me to assist him on the production, and invited me to sit in on the workshop, and at the end of the first day, after the actors left and I lingered, hoping I'd be allowed to stay and hear how Wendy and Mark talked about what they'd learn from having heard the play, Wendy gestured to me and said those words.  "I like him," she giggled, in that endearing way that made you feel included.  "He knows when to laugh."

The First Laugh

Knowing when to laugh was a matter of great import to Wendy.  When I worked for her over the course of the next few years, the first first laugh was something she'd talk about.  For her, the first laugh was to a comedy what the first song was to a musical - if it didn't come early enough and wasn't pitch-perfect, you'd lose the chance to introduce your audience to the piece.

After Old Money opened, Wendy asked me to type for her.  I was her amanuensis, I guess, although I only learned that word recently, in the context of Milton, who was blind when he "wrote" Paradise Lost.  The poem was transcribed by his daughters, to whom he recited it in its entirety.  I imagine them furiously scribbling down his lines of perfect iambic pentameter, secretly bemoaning their cruel lot in life to each other later.  "If only we weren't the daughters of a brilliant blind poet," Anne Milton, the elder, would complain to Mary, the younger.  "We could go out on Saturday nights like the rest of the Puritan girls.  But instead we're stuck home scribbling away.  And don't even get me started on my ink-stained fingers.  Who's ever going to want to slip a ring on one of these?"

The one on the left looks especially bored to me - she's totally thinking "Dad's blind, so he can't see me rolling my eyes at him." Milton also had a third daughter, standing in the back, but she's rarely mentioned so she must've been boring.

A Life In The Theater

I'm not sure exactly what I'd be doing today if I hadn't met Wendy.  Unlike many of my peers, I live on the money I make directing and writing.  In my twenties, when the income I made from directing was the meagerest of trickles, working for Wendy was the only way I could afford to pay my rent and buy my groceries and go out dancing.  In addition, my first professional directing job was at Theater J in Washington, D.C. - two one-acts Wendy had written and given to the little theater to produce if and only if I got to direct them.  The first was called Welcome To My Rash, a piece that's almost unbearably painful for me to look at now, about a sick, middle-aged writer struggling with her illness and loneliness.  The second was a one-act version of Third, which would grow up and become Wendy's last full-length play.

I am not resilient the way many of my friends are, and I think working a day-job would've broken me.  But I didn't need a day-job, because I had Wendy.  When I would kvetch to her about how unfair it was that young directors with trust funds could stay in New York and assist for free while I had to go gallivanting around the country directing at colleges, she would tell me that she was my trust fund, and I would remember how lucky I was to be able to support myself in a job that paid well, didn't require early mornings, and allowed me to learn about my field.

Writing

Up until and including the time that I worked for Wendy, I never wanted to write.  I know this, because I didn't write anything, and I'm someone who believes that people do what they want to do.  I haven't actually parsed through the cause-and-effect of losing Wendy and starting to write.  Was it something that would've happened if she hadn't passed away, because my proximity to her inspired it, like the Fantastic Four, who developed their superpowers after being exposed to cosmic rays (not to be confused, of course, with the gamma rays that turned Bruce Banner into the Incredible Hulk)?

One of the first things I ever wrote was a play about a young director and the established writer he works for, titled WORK.  I've been hacking away at it for years (click here to go to my website and download the sample).  I have no idea if the play will ever have any life, but I know that writing it helped me tremendously as I struggled with Wendy's loss the ache of missing her.  So maybe losing Wendy was the cause, and writing the effect.  I am positive that I'd never have had the fortitude to write my young adult novel, ONE MAN GUY, if it hadn't been for the years I spent at Wendy's side.

Or sometimes I think, Wendy died so young, and with so many things she still wanted to write, that I started writing to try to fill the void her absence created.  Chekhov, after all, wrote hundreds of short stories and 5 brilliant plays before he died at the age of 44.  Sometimes, when I want to depress myself, I think about all the work he would've made if he had lived to be 50, or 60 or 70.  It's enough reason for everyone to pick up a pen and start writing their version of funny, sad, heart-breaking characters on a Russian estate.

Closer Than Ever

Writing makes me feel close to Wendy.  Unlike directing, with which I've had mentors galore, Wendy is the only one of two writers I've ever really been close to in that way, and so the act of it reminds me of her.  Writing my play about her, this blog, my young adult novel - every time I sit down at the keyboard, I hear her voice, and most of the time, it's making me laugh.  The rest of the time, it's giving me advice, which is inevitably practical.  When she came to see my production of The Seagull, she told me how much the character of Trigorin spoke to her, in his obsession with his writing, and how he (and Chekhov) were clearly so interested in the craft of the art.  Wendy took great pride in that, in her own work.  And I know that some people feel her plays are a little old-fashioned, and not edgy enough, or too nice, and until I get to direct one again and prove those people wrong, I hope we can all agree that they are, at least, written by someone who brings great craft to her field.



Pastrami and Cheesecake








October 18th was Wendy's birthday.  We had plans to lunch together on the day that neither one of us knew would be her last birthday, in 2005.  We were supposed to meet at the little writing studio she kept on 60th St (in the same building where Rafael was living when I met him, and if you think that wasn't Wendy nudging me along from beyond, you gravely underestimate her).  Wendy wasn't feeling well enough, however, to leave her apartment, so I went to the Carnegie Deli and picked up pastrami sandwiches and cheesecake, one of our perennial favorites.

She was in bed, where I served her the delicious fare.  She picked at her sandwich and didn't even touch the cheesecake.  If I weren't in such deep denial about her medical state, this would've been a clear sign that something was wrong.  I ate my portion with gusto, blabbering on about boys and work.

I try to do something that would honor Wendy ever January 30th.  Before her niece Samantha moved out West, we'd sometimes meet for a cocktail at Cafe des Artistes, which like Wendy, is no longer with us.  The first anniversary of Wendy's death, I went to see Sarah Ruhl's stunningly beautiful play The Clean House at Lincoln Center, in the same theater where Old Money had happened years before.  I wept through most of The Clean House and left the theater knowing that I would direct the play one day (which I got to do at Syracuse Stage two years ago, one of my finest productions).

But the one thing I always do January 30th is go to the Carnegie and order a pastrami sandwich and a slice of cheesecake.  I am passed the age where I can finish both those magnificent servings by myself, but I still do it, knowing I'll have leftovers for another meal.  And so I invite you to partake of this tradition, wherever you are today.  Order some pastrami or a slice of cheesecake, and spend a moment thinking about Wendy, and how lucky those of us who knew her were to have known her, and how lucky all of us are to have her work.  





 

Feeding A Colony Of Artists

Breakfast, Anyone?

A bunch of us working.  I like the celestial light.

This Thursday, Friday and Saturday this merry gang of Original Sinners:

Franca Sofia Barchiesi               
Paul Bernardo
Lauren Coppola
+Estefania Fadul
+Lindsey Gates
Chris Grabowski
Brough Hansen
Maggie Lacey
Liz McLaughlin
Phil Mills
Rahaleh Nassri
+Eric Sutton
+Alex Trow
+Steven Wooley

will be going up to the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center

 http://www.theoneill.org/

on an artists' retreat so we can work on the first four books of PARADISE LOST

I am not including "play board games" on the schedule, although that's what I'm planning we do every night after dinner until midnight or so.

OUT OF HELL

I think we're going to call these books, the first of three installments, OUT OF HELL, as it chronicles Satan's journey out of Hell and to Paradise.  It turns out that planning the retreat is a whole lotta fun as well - making up the schedule, creating the room assignments, figuring out transportation.

And of course, putting together the menus.

Although the idea of rehearsing for twenty hours in a three-day period and making six meals for a group of 14 is appealing, I decided to call in some help on this one.  Enter Chris Grabowski, director and cook extraordinaire, who was also my directing mentor at Vassar College, when I was a wee little thing.

LUNCH, THE MIDDLE CHILD

The first menu decision Chris and I made was to let lunch be a delicious but simple array of cold cuts from which the company could assemble sandwiches.  In this country, lunch is the neglected middle child of meals, and for reasons of simplicity, I wasn't going to change that (even though I'm a middle child, and there's a great reading of Paradise Lost in which Satan is the middle child, sandwiched between Jesus and Man.  And when I say "a great reading," I clearly mean one I made up myself last week).  To dazzle lunch up a bit, because even a middle child deserves some bling, I'm going to make the mayo from scratch, a not very hard thing to do if you've got a food processor, and it's hella delicious.  I use this recipe from the NY Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/recipes/12459/Mayonnaise.html

BREAKFAST IS SEXY

I asked Chris to take over the dinners, because they're harder, and also because I love making breakfast.  Breakfast is a sexy meal, and during my single days, I'd love to see what I could whip up in whatever foreign kitchen I found myself (if this hasn't been made into a reality show, it obvi should be).

My proving-to-be-invaluable assistants, Steven Wooley and Estafania Fadul, and I spent a few hours this weekend figuring out the logistics, and they've created menu books and ingredient spread sheets and lots of other things to make our lives easier.

For one breakfast, I figured I'd put my money where my mouth is (god knows I've put everything else there) and make the tofu scramble that I posted about earlier, served over quinoa.

http://michaelbarakiva.blogspot.com/2012/12/vegetarians-are-annoying-but-you-dont.html

BETWEEN QUICHE, CASSEROLE AND HEAVEN. . . 

For my second breakfast, I'm going to make a strata, an Italian breakfast casserole dish that lives somewhere in the exquisite space between quiche, casserole and heaven.  I made this dish for the getting-to-know-you brunch I hosted for my FARRAGUT NORTH cast a few weeks before we started rehearsal.  Clearly it did the trick - link to our NY Times review here.  A strata is a great way to feed lots of people well.  I'm tripling the recipe, and making one of the portions without chorizo (an ingredient I add as homage to the Mexicans I'm marrying into) so that the vegetarians can dive in.

From what I understand, what amateur food bloggers like myself are supposed to do is take a recipe I like, make marginal changes to it, and then publish it as my own.  But there are some things that are sacrosanct even to a double genocide descendant such as myself, and one of them is the cookbook that basically helped me (re-)discover my love for cooking.  It is The New Best Recipe, the cookbook from the editors of Cook's Illustrated.

THE BEST COOKBOOK IN THE WHOLE ENTIRE WIDE WORLD 
 


Although the a few of the recipes are occasionally more complicated than they ought to be (the chicken parm takes like two hours to make), everything is so well researched, so clear, and so specific that it takes all the annoying guess work out of cooking and pretty much guarantees a successful product (if theater had an equivalent handbook, I guarantee you I would've committed it to memory by now).  I especially recommend it for beginning cooks, because I find its meticulousness as I wander into unknown territory especially comforting.  When I made this strata the first time for my FARRAGUT NORTH cast (another great review here from some local NJ rag) I had never eaten, let alone made a strata.  But I followed the good book, and it did not lead me astray.

Here's the recipe.  Stay tuned for updates from our retreat, pictures of the food we make, and Chris's dinner recipes!

STRATA RECIPE

Breakfast Strata with Spinach and Gruyere

SERVES 6

To weight down the assembled strata, use two 1 pound

boxes of brown or powdered sugar, laid side by side over

the plastic-covered surface. To double this recipe or the

variation that follows, use a 13 by 9 inch baking dish

greased with 1.5 tablespoons butter and increase the baking

times as suggested in each recipe.

Breakfast Strata

8-10 (1/2-inch-thick) slices supermarket French or

This is not a strata I made, but rather, the image of one I found online.

Italian bread

5 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened

4 medium shallots, minced

1 (l0-ounce) package frozen chopped spinach,

thawed and squeezed dry

Salt and ground black pepper

½ cup medium-dry white wine, such as

Sauvignon Blanc

6 ounces Gruyere cheese, grated

6 large eggs

1 ¾ cups half-and-half

1. Adjust an oven rack to the middle position

and heat the oven to 225 degrees. Arrange the

bread in a single layer on a large baking sheet

and bake until dry and crisp, about 40 minutes,

turning the slices over halfway through the drying time. (Alternatively, leave the slices out over night to dry.) When the bread has cooled, butter the slices on one side with 2 tablespoons of the butter; set aside.

2. Heat 2 tablespoons of the butter in a medium

nonstick skillet over medium heat. Saute the shallots  
until fragrant and translucent, about 3 minutes;

add the spinach and salt and pepper to taste

and cook, stirring occasionally, until combined,

about 2 minutes. Transfer to a medium bowl; set

aside. Add the wine to the skillet, increase the heat

to medium-high, and simmer until reduced to 1/4

cup, 2 to 3 minutes; set aside.

3. Butter an 8-inch square baking dish with

the remaining 1 tablespoon butter; arrange half of

the bread slices buttered-side up in a single layer

in the dish. Sprinkle half of the spinach mixture,

then ½ cup grated cheese evenly over the bread

slices. Arrange the remaining bread slices in a single

layer over the cheese; sprinkle the remaining

spinach mixture and another 1/2 cup cheese evenly

over the bread. Whisk the eggs in a medium bowl

until combined; whisk in the reduced wine, the

half-and-half, 1 teaspoon salt, and pepper to taste.

Pour the egg mixture evenly over the bread layers;

cover the surface flush with plastic wrap' weight

down (see note), and refrigerate at least 1 hour or

up to overnight.

4. Remove the dish from the refrigerator

and let stand at room temperature 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, adjust an oven rack to the middle

position and heat the oven to 325 degrees'

Uncover the strata and sprinkle the remaining

1/2 cup cheese evenly over the surface. Bake until

both the edges and the center are puffed and the

edges have pulled away slightly from the sides of

the dish, 50 to 55 minutes (or about 60 minutes

for a doubled recipe). Cool on a wire rack for

5 minutes; serve.