Scott Feiner
Gersmann, here in 2004, ran the theater company for more than three decades.
I first encountered Joel Gersmann in the early 1990s at the thing I dreaded most: an audition.
My sister, who had already performed in Cookies for My President, convinced me to try out for My Fair Arab. I was in my 20s, not too long out of college, where I had pursued writing and activism and neglected the theatrical pursuits that had gotten me through high school. I was aware of the crazy stuff going on in the old garage on Willy Street but hadn’t considered I could be a part of it.
Which is how I found myself fumbling for a cigarette in the dark driveway of Broom Street Theater, trying to steady my nerves.
From either side of me came the Good Samaritans: Marcy Weiland, a Broom Street veteran of many Joel shows, who was pre-cast as the lead in the musical. And Andrew Rohn, the show’s music director/composer and (spoiler alert!) my now husband of 25 years.
“Don’t be frightened of Joel,” they said of Broom Street’s famously difficult director. “His bark is worse than his bite.” Just do what he asks, they advised, and you will be fine.
So, I stepped into the tiny black box theater to be greeted, gruffly of course, by a grizzled man several inches shorter than me, wearing a beret, scarf and sweater I would come to know by heart. One by one, he called us up and had us read from a children’s book. “Louder!” he would bark. “Now roll around, and read it again.” “Fall down!” “Again!” “Read it like you’re scared.” “Now scream.” In this way, he would put us through our paces. Although Andrew and the piano were right there, my singing audition was to sing one note, as loud as I could. That I could do. He asked us nothing about our experience, except this probing query: “Are you with the university?” It was clear the answer needed to be “nothing to do with the university.” Joel hated what was happening in university drama departments. I answered correctly, and was cast.
My Fair Arab was, as you might guess, a loose parody of My Fair Lady. A Palestinian waif (Marcy) was taken under the wing of some Israeli schemers who pass her off as Jewish. The show could never be produced today. It stereotyped Jews, Arabs and Muslims (“dirty, filthy Arabs” was one lyric). A Nazi sang a number. An Ethiopian Jewish character sang a Nina Simone-style song, “Don’t Mess with the Big, Black Jew.” As a centerpiece we performed a musical-within-the-musical titled … “Koran: The Musical.”
To my surprise, I was given the opening number, playing a psychiatrist studying “Jerusalem Syndrome,” a real-life phenomenon where people arrive in Israel believing they are characters from the Bible. A promising start, but my character disappeared after that scene, only to appear once more in the second act. I didn’t mind being in the ensemble, though. There was plenty to do and sing. And my young body didn’t mind (mostly) scenes where I played inanimate objects — another signature Joel move. One acting task was to remain completely still under a sheet while playing one half of a couch — in an interminably long scene. Have I mentioned that Joel never shortened or edited anything? Once he wrote it, it was set in stone.
We sang a song titled “Intifada” and in the finale, the Palestinian-posing-as-Jew killed every one of us.
So, yeah, that was Joel. Working with him was challenging, but I loved all the people in the cast and band. We were young, and felt like we were living on the edge. I was in Joel’s favor, which meant he basically left me to my own devices on stage. When we weren’t rehearsing he would call me up and talk endlessly on the phone. He asked me to play Janis Joplin in his next play, Peace of My Heart. I got to sing and dance, present a puppet show, shake my long hair around, simulate cunnilingus (sorry, Mom), and die of a heroin overdose on stage. It was my dream role.
After that, I was kicked out of Joel’s orbit after participating in a workshop put on by the Landmark Forum, an outgrowth of the cult-like est, founded by Werner Erhard. That’s another story, but in Joel’s eyes, it was unforgivable. He resented that many of his actors (especially, he felt, the ones participating in the workshops) were pushing back against his authoritarian methods. In 1995, he wrote a play about Erhard and threw a tantrum after the performance when someone in the audience piped up about attending an introductory workshop.
It wasn’t until my friend Nancy Streckert later wrote and directed a Broom Street play that I caught a glimpse of something I thought was just fictional: Joel’s blacklist. “These people are not allowed to work in my theater” was the heading. There it was, in black and white, along with several dozen others: Catherine Capellaro, Andrew Rohn.
I still believe that Joel’s bark was worse than his bite. When he liked something you did, he would get excited, and shout “Keep it!” That was as far as he’d go in delivering praise, but I cherished those rare moments. I wish he were alive to know that I credit him with instilling something important in me. His unconventionality, his belief that theater should challenge, confront and engage. His ability to put together something wholly original with zero budget with a bunch of inexperienced kids.
If it weren’t for Joel, Andrew and I wouldn’t have met. No marriage in the apple orchard, no twin babies, now grown up to go off to study art in college. No VO5. And no Temp Slave or Walmartopia. We might not have had the nerve to think we could write our own musical. But we did, several times, and like many other Broom Street alums, we got our start being told to be “louder and faster” in a tiny black box where the magic happened.
And Joel wasn’t all wrong. A lot of theater, and especially musical theater, is pretty dumb. By declaring that theater was dead, Joel inspired us to find something in ourselves to prove him wrong.
For more on Broom Street Theater, click here.
