Broadway Bullet Interview
Jody, Alex, and actress Elizabeth Sugarman talk with Broadway Bullet about To Be Loved. Also available as a streaming flash video file. You can even listen by phone at 1-213-514-5315!
NYTheatreCast Interview
Matt Schicker speaks with Jody and Alex about the trials and joys of heading an independent theatre company. Hear what they have to say. Also available as a streaming flash video file.
Erica Kutcher
Two summers ago, a very close friend of mine from high school, Erica Kutcher, died in an avalanche during a mountaineering expedition in Pakistan. Originally it was misreported that she had died at a base camp on K2; I had this in mind when I arrived back from Long Island after the funeral and wrote this preamble to a larger piece of writing – an essay?, a short story? – which I never finished:
Erica Kutcher died on the second-tallest mountain in the world.
She was only twenty-seven years old, as wild and blonde and puckery-faced as I remembered her from high school – this was the first thought that struck me as I navigated through the many news items on the internet and in the local papers regarding her disappearance. I hadn’t seen or spoken to Erica in almost five years, but the two pictures in circulation that her family had released – Erica scaling a mountain, Erica in close-up against a background of blurry green wilderness – matched my memories exactly. Sun-browned, smiling, superheroically strong.
Her body had a child’s proportions (something she used to joke about, particularly her chest), but every muscle was disciplined, elastic. This unbelievable physical possibility made her very popular with boys, her tomboyish athleticism notwithstanding. Girls liked her too – in more ways, I think, than most were willing to admit. She was the perfect combination of a blonde, small-featured beauty and a full-blown varsity jock. More than female, more than either sex, everyone could adore her.
I find it strange now that immediately following her burial I was so obsessed with describing her physically. But if I pause to think about it (and between these two sentences, I have), it makes sense. As a gay teenager, I became obsessed early on with the body and how we dress and disguise it. And Erica may have exemplified the All-American extremes of either gender, but in her ability to make them so effortlessly coexist, she was clearly bucking the trend.
Some people looked at her – at her fondness for running and jumping and getting dirty and making noise – and called her a “lesbo” or a “dyke.” But I don’t think they were responding to any sort of butchness on her part; Erica may have been a tomboy, but she was a tomboy in the sweetest, most non-threatening, Little House on the Prairie sort of way, and she’d also had plenty of boyfriends over the years who could attest in no uncertain terms to her sexual preference. Rather, I think it was the force of her physicality – its lack of self-consciousness – that drove some people to dislike or even fear her. And her lack of self-consciousness was by no means limited to the way she used and dressed her body – in sneakers, t-shirts, shorts, and comfy clothes in a year when every girl in our high school seemed to own the same pair of hip-hugging black pants. Her intelligence, her laughter, her smile, her impulsive fits of joy: All of these betokened an utter lack of self-consciousness, an unabashed drive towards life, that even most adults would find odd.
But for most of us Erica’s vitality was irresistible. I’m embarrassed to admit that I originally approached her in the hopes of asking her out (at that time I was still on the lookout for a girlfriend to help save face). As preschoolers we had been friends and had regular “play dates,” but it wasn’t until gym class my junior year that I found in her a willing partner for table tennis. I was every bit the gay boy shamed by all things athletic. Even table tennis was too much for me, but Erica gladly welcomed me to her table.
After the failed romantic overtures, a friendship quickly developed. It consisted of “normal” friendship activities like talking across our tennis table, saying “hi” in the halls, and getting together after school for long conversations and listening to music in her room. But it was no ordinary friendship, at least not for me. I’m not sure when or how it first happened, but Erica and I developed a ritual. During our shared recess period, we would venture out to the property in back of Great Neck South High School – an enormous soccer field framed on all sides by twisting paths of woods – and run and shout and wave our arms as if we were flying, dancing.
I remember one afternoon in particular. It was snowing; puddles in the woods had frozen over and a dense white fog smudged away the field. The two of us were lone figures – bundled in our dark winter coats with our bright pink faces peeking out of our scarves – and here we were in a sea of white, and everything seemed like magic. We ran and screamed and waved our arms; we took hesitant steps into the thickest portions of the fog and glanced smilingly at each other to note each new discovery – each twig that broke beneath our sneakers, each glimpse of something we recognized from the real world – a field line visible beneath the snow on the grass, a bit of metal fencing that bordered the property – which gave this magic place some semblance of reality.
We even climbed a fence to a previously unexplored recess of our terrain: A small body of water, frozen over, at the center of which sat a large metal tank. I have no idea of its purpose or even if it was part of the school, but the fact of having to climb a fence made us feel like trespassers. And as trespassers, we were giggly with excitement. A large white teddy bear – the sort you might win at a carnival shooting game – was surreally half frozen into the water. For the next fifteen minutes, our project was to loosen it from the ice. Our intention was to bring it back with us – a remarkable discovery, you’ll never believe what we found!, a small piece of evidence that this wondrous world existed. Alas, the bear was rather less wondrous once we had dislodged it. The submerged half was dripping with ice-cold water, badly bruised and stained with mud. We left it there, crossed back over the fence, and made a break for the boy’s bathroom nearest the rear entrance, where we arrived just in time to thaw our near-frostbitten hands under hot water.
I realized at her funeral that I had not known Erica that well. Her two closest friends, whom I had never known, spoke at the service of her amazing spirit as well as her doubts – something she had never shown me. Or perhaps I had never seen them because I didn’t want to see them. I had so many doubts. At that point in my life, I was truly and desperately undecided about whether it even made sense to go on living, and while I took comfort in the doubts of my few other friends – relished them even, for they meant I was not alone – Erica refused to indulge my morbid uncertainty. If she saw me scowling in the hallway, she jumped on me – literally – with an enormous smile and gave me a scolding: Smile! Be happy! If we were driving somewhere in my car and I tried to light a cigarette, she grabbed my pack and threw it out the window. One night I remember I had just gotten off work. I can’t remember why, but I was glum. I got into my car to drive Erica and another friend to wherever it was we were going to hang out that night, and Erica defiantly stepped out of the car, threw herself onto my windshield, and refused to get off unless I “made her.” (One of several attempts involved my turning on the windshield wipers. I still remember the bizarre look on my mother’s face when, later that night, I explained how one of them had broken off in the process.)
These stunts of hers could be maddening, especially when it meant having to stop the car, get out, and walk back however many feet to the spot where my cigarettes had landed on the street. At the time of her funeral when I found myself sharing these stories with the people closest to me who hadn’t known her – my partner, friends at work – I received plenty of staggering looks, as though the logical response would have been to throw this crazy girl out of my car. But the reason I never did was simply because by the end of whatever stunt she pulled, I was always laughing. Laughing at her looniness, laughing at myself, laughing at life and suddenly suffused with its ridiculous, beautiful, and utterly impulsive joy. At the funeral I told several people that Erica had saved my life. I doubt she ever knew she was doing this, but the simple fact of her presence and my broken windshield wiper was enough to keep me, at least for that night, from giving into the far less ecstatic reality of a life with few friends, a life filled with impulses I had been conditioned to see as ugly – a life I was very unsure I wanted to live.
It is no coincidence, then, that Erica will forever be that figure of central importance and self-actualization in my life that is common to all gay teenagers who eventually come out: She was the first person I told. We were just beginning to emerge from a very harsh winter (the same winter that had found us exploring the foggy white soccer field several weeks before), and I told her with all the weight of the world on my shoulders as we sat atop a pile of rubble in a construction site at a park. When the words finally came out, she laughed sweetly. Of course she had known the whole time, and of course it didn’t matter. Her reaction seems obvious in retrospect, but at the time I could have wept for joy. And as the memory floods back to me now, I remember, in fact, I did.
I have been a writer for a little over ten years; I made the decision that this was what I wanted to do at roughly the same time I knew Erica, roughly the same time I came out, roughly the same time I began to embrace who I was and vowed to make all my uncertainty of the past 17 years count towards something larger. Saying Erica Kutcher saved my life is in no way an exaggeration; it feels as true and urgent to me as a similar statement must feel to a victim of some terrible accident – a car wreck, a flood – who experienced a panicked awareness of their own dwindling life at the very moment when someone suddenly dragged them to safety. To shout that person’s name from the rooftops – to publicly and repeatedly acknowledge their act – is to reaffirm the importance of all life – the life of everyone you have known or ever hoped to reach. It is to spread hope for a fundamental need that all of us share – to be saved, to be healed – and to declare the answer to this need is not exclusive to religion or something intangible up there, but can be found in other people, friends and strangers, the people down here who surround us.
I have yet to write a play about Erica, although someday I would like to, and there are elements of her and our experiences together that I see in some of my other work. I do write a great deal about darkness – about that panicked realization of the tenuousness of life and the social forces that threaten to squelch it. But this impulse to be saved – this desire to be healed – is something all my characters share. That their impulse is also mine, and that Erica proved to me such an impulse could be answered in human form, is precisely why I continue writing plays, and why I have written this dedication to her memory.
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