Conversations In A Burning Room Karen Black’s Autobiography An Excerpt From 1965&1966 Edited By Hunter Carson
CONVERSATIONS IN A BURNING ROOM
KAREN BLACK’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY
AN EXCERPT FROM 1965 & 1966
EDITED BY HUNTER CARSON
I was still working for Daynard and Van Thusen on Wall Street and called up to say I couldn't make it that day and was just lying there to catch up on my rest when the phone rang. A woman who had witnessed one of my auditions, singing with my guitar, wanted me to go up for a play called “The Playroom”. She knew I was very young, not only looked young, and the part was for a fifteen year old character. Okay, I rose from my couch and readied myself.
I went by subway to a tall building, one of the top floors; actors were given scripts to study before going across the street to a Broadway theater and getting on stage to audition. I read the scene without enthusiasm. It was bunches of teens singing and talking.
In the course of time, I walked across the street. Waiting, waiting. I was told later that hundreds of girls auditioned. So there I was in a huge mass of “being teen” girls. I’ve never seen so many blonde ponytails in my life. Waiting, waiting. I found some stairs backstage and climbed them and there before my weary eyes: a black leather couch! I lay down and almost immediately went to sleep.
The stage manager, a handsome gay fellow who seemed to grasp the amusing quality of the moment awakened me and handed me the other scene.
Okay, drowsily I sat up to read it. Oh my god! This was a role. Of course she’s saying that and doing that - she is frightened down to the depths of her being that she will loose her father, lose him, if he goes on that trip. Fear drives her; why it could drive her clear across the stage. Oh my god she would do anything, anything to make him stay.
Enormously inspired, I rose and paced.
It was my turn next. I went behind the curtains and could hear the girl auditioning onstage. Well she was very Bryn Mawr. I’ll never forget the comfortable drawling of her words. “No!” I said to myself. “All wrong!” There’s nothing comfortable here. This moment here is life and death for our character.
I go on stage and they wanted me to do the sing, talk, teen scene. I sang “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon” a cappella in my soprano range. Joseph Anthony’s voice then rose from the back of the pitch dark theatre, “Do you know anything a bit more - Rock and Roll?” I sang the new Beatles hit, “We Can Work It Out”.
Well they seemed to like that okay because they then invited me to continue and to do the scene. In the scene, my dad was way across the stage. I ran up to him as I spoke. I ran in desperation, hardly knowing I was moving. It was fear driving me to him. I begged him to stay, and every word held beneath its own sound the depth of fear urging me to speak. I finished the scene.
I wont forget what happened next, because what happened next was nothing. Silence. Then Joseph Anthony’s voice came out of the darkness, “Where have you been?” he asked.
“Why, I’ve been right here”, I answered. “Right here in New York City.”
Rehearsals were intense. I would get on the subway with the toast and hard boiled egg still in my mouth, and sometimes it was hard to swallow it. I was concerned! I wanted to do the best that I could. Seeing Peter Kastner there everyday made my insides rise to an exotic delight. It was if a light shone from his Canadian Sweater right into my eyes when I would see him every morning onstage. And Joseph Anthony was a proud, handsome, and wonderful director. He would say to the kids - Peter Kastner, Bonnie Bedelia, Christopher Norris, and me, “Nothing! is easier to play than fear. Just about anyone can produce fear in his or her belly and feel it.” For some reason I never forgot those words and they helped me to feel a comfortable latitude in pulling up my fears in shows such as Trilogy of Terror.
Mister Anthony invited me to stay over at his wonderful home out of town - a white painted house with windows galore in the living room overlooking forestry. After breakfast one morning and after what he called our “Ablutions” we all went for a walk through the trees, beautiful forlorn trees of November. Mister Anthony then said, “didn’t this come on rather suddenly?” Meaning Peter and myself.
I suddenly wasn’t alone anymore. There were calls for interviews. The New York Times came over to the shabby place where Peter and I were living and mentioned in the paper that it was called a railroad apartment on 55th Street and 10th Avenue (an awful section of town in the mid sixties) and that the rent was eighty-five dollars a month. Well what did they expect? I had lived on as little as believe it or not thirty dollars a week in my time there in New York! Was I suddenly to be a rich Broadway star??
As rehearsals progressed toward opening night, my cold progressed into flu. I went to a doctor who gave me something-cicillan. On the label it said “one, three times a day”, but I misread it to mean “three, three times a day.” This was wayyyy too much. This changed my awareness so that I was at some small distance from my body. I decided to include this predicament, to work with myself as somewhat exterior, and not to do anything else. Such as protest the circumstance.
I can still remember the curtains opening… opening… opening. Would I be alright? I thought as they edged their way open.
I received tremendous reviews. And my mom and dad, taking of course all the credit for having given me DNA talent, were three in the audience to share the happiness, as well as my erstwhile employers, Daynard and Van Thusen!! Both of them! The reviews cited small gestures I had done, which in fact I didn’t even remember making! And loved me and liked the show. I was nominated for a Drama Circle Critics Award for “The Playroom” and the show was seen by someone who wanted to see me about a Frances Ford Coppola movie, “You’re A Big Boy Now”. Coppola and I got along very well. We went out to dinner; I tried eel for the first time, and we exchanged versions of the way lights look when you’re nearsighted.
The producer [for “The Playroom”] had scheduled the play for failure. He had the opening in early December, and by mid-December the folks in New York were so busy shopping for Christmas they weren’t coming to much in the way of theatre.
So we closed early, about a month and a half in.
Meanwhile, the great Mister Anthony had me in his next Broadway play, “Happily Never After”. I didn’t understand the character and it never worked for me, but then neither did the play. It closed in a matter of days.
When a play is closing, the audience knows it. The actors know it. And there is a strange communion between them that can only occur on such a night. In “Happily Never After” there is a scene wherein some rattle bad special effect thunder and rain occur outside the window stage left. The characters decide to share a tub of chicken. Being handed the tub by one of the actors, and looking into her face I noticed that she had an uncomfortable case of giggles. Which I then caught. Trying my best to hide that fact, I handed the damn tub of chicken to the next actor on stage and we were all done for. But a decision kind of swept over us: let’s give in to this moment. And we were all in it together: Closing Night. Broadway. What can you do?
Henry Jaglom had his friend Kevin Casselman fly in and sign me at some big restaurant and so I knew for the first time that my path led to Hollywood. Henry was now in Los Angeles, who signed me, and when I finally got to L.A. with my five cats, the agent drove me around to appointments as not only did I have no drivers license, I had no I.D. card.