Her place was just up Bedford Avenue, which was perfect, because that meant I could walk to rehearsal. We’d all moved to Williamsburg after graduation because it was affordable, if one can imagine such a thing. We sat around her kitchen table (in my memory Leslye was chain smoking, but perhaps she wasn’t) and we read. Thus began my first “gig” after college. It would also turn into a play that would change my life and forever affect the way I would watch a movie— or a film, I should say— the distinction was made clear, and with expletives, by page five. Cinephilia felt lifted directly from the torn bedsheets of our own idle apartments, and it spoke straight about the mess that gets left in the heart when someone you love isn’t able to love you back— it did all this in movie-language, as if she’d somehow weaponized Easy Riders, Raging Bull but in an empty Brooklyn room save for a broken bed, a DVD player, a neurotic roommate, and the ever-present threat of California. It was brilliant.
In those precious weeks we talked about heartache, obsession, drugs, Soderberg,
moving to California (which most of us would eventually do), toxic love, the Studio System, Lloyd Dobbler, and sex. Frank made me stay after rehearsal so we could watch Deer Hunter in order to better understand one of our more comedic moments. I’ll never forget Lauren saying to us— we were rehearsing in an actual bedroom on this particular day— “…years from now when they are studying this play at Tisch…” and it hit me that I was part of something truly special. We played the one-act at a Bushwick Salon for a handful of people curious enough to take the L past Bedford. Soon after our workshop Leslye moved to California.
A few years later the play came back to me via email (PDF’s were the new RAGE for scripts back then) and she told me she’d finished the second act. I read it immediately, it felt complete, and I told her so. The IAMA Theatre Company produced the full World Premiere production in Los Angeles that year— with Graham Sibley, Wes Whitehead, Amy Rosoff, and Louise Munson. I didn’t get to travel to see the play but as luck would have it I got involved in a theatre company in New York— the now defunct Posse-ble sic Theatre Company— who decided to produce the New York premiere of Cinephilia that same year. I got to revisit Cinephilia at Theatre Row and this time with a proper rehearsal period and run, with the realized second act intact, and with Brandon Scott, Katie Cappiello, Nila K Leigh and the visionary Michael Silverstone at the helm. Mike spun the stage to make the audience face each other, I got to work a remote control car and spill popcorn all over the stage, and Brandon threw real darts at the wall near my face as I delivered one of my monologues each night— a piece of choreography the unions would probably have shut us down over. That was ten years ago this summer.
This Saturday I get to revisit the play again, despite being a little long in the tooth for the role. I’ll be sharing the stage this time with Amy Rosoff, Melissa Osborne, Graham Sibley, and Eli Gonda at the wheel. It will only be for one night, not counting a week of rehearsals. In the weird way God has of handing out puzzling pieces of bliss, Cinephilia has been there throughout. One of the few constants. I’m not sure if Cinephilia has hit the curriculum at NYU just yet, as per Lauren Mark’s prediction, but I suspect it won’t be long. And in another fifteen years I'll direct it, if I'm lucky. I now have my first glimpse of what it means when the old timers look back and say, yeah, I was there for that, what a time, what a gang, what a gas! This is what we’ll be talking about. It’s happening now.
Thank you, Leslye.