Ten years ago, in the insane summer of 2001, I spent a season working for a small theatre company called St. Jayne’s. I still think about that summer often; there was a lot going on. First of all, my brief experience with St. Jayne’s was easily the most difficult professional experience of my adult life, to date. It was a pretty big disaster, actually. That said, I learned a lot while failing triumphantly, and came out the other side proud of the things that we did accomplish together.
But that was also the summer that my father was diagnosed and treated with cancer. And it was also the summer when I first experienced the stress and pain of a lay-off in the coldest of corporate fashions (I learned I was being “downsized” from my crappy office job when I arrived at the farewell party for a co-worker and saw that both our names were on the cake). And as I mentioned, it was August of 2001 and everything was about to change forever.
But those are different stories. This story is about St. Jayne’s. The company was founded by a girl I knew from college, who I would describe as a frenemy of mine. She was passionate and driven and was dying to produce good theatre. But she could also be vain, obstinate, and a bit of a drama queen. I was concerned when she asked me to be on her board of directors because I didn’t trust her leadership and I was worried the project would end badly. But I wanted a summer project and there were a number of other people on the board whose work I respected; I thought there was a good chance we would pull it off.
I was wrong, though. It didn’t end badly. It started badly. It got worse as it went along. And then it ended in screaming, tears, hurtful accusations and terminated friendships. What I hadn’t counted on - what I dodn’t realize at the time – was that I could also be vain, obstinate, and a bit of a drama queen. And the two of us together, my frenemy and I, twisted our vain obstinate energy into a vortex of destruction unlike anything that had been unleashed on Salt Lake City since the tornado of 1999. But somewhere in the middle of all of that, we put on a play.
I’m glad that I did it, because it was the first and last time I was able to work on a production with all of my best friends. Jules directed, I was the assistant director and I took over managing the show after Jules returned to Manhattan, and Demetria and Budgie were both acting in the show.
The play was called SubUrbia, and there are two things that I remember most about that production. Both require a little bit of explanation. The first one is the sound wall.
We were doing the play outdoors in a weird little neighborhood with a music venue called Kilby Court. It is in the center of a block in one of the more industrial areas of Salt Lake. It worked because the play takes place in the parking lot of a Kwiky Mart-type convenience store. But if a band was playing on the stage across the alley, it was too loud to hear the actors. So the board decided that we would need to get a contract from the owner of Kilby Court that stated that we had exclusive performing rights on the nights of the show and we tasked the founder of the company, my afore described frenemy, to get the contract signed.
We didn’t find out until the weekend before the show opened that the owner of Kilby Court had booked bands in his other space for every single night we were performing. I specifically remember having asked about the contract and my frenemy had responded by saying vaguely, “yeah yeah, it’s fine… it’s taken care of.” In fact, she had approached the owner with the contract and he had refused to sign it because he couldn’t afford to lose the guaranteed profit from the bands and take the risk that we would be able to deliver a similar bottom line. Which was smart. We never drew in the same sized crowds as the bands. And I understood where he was coming from. But she was afraid to tell us what happened, so she just… didn’t.
That night we were sitting on the deck trying to figure out how we could possibly “go on with the show,” as they say. And the next thing I knew – two hundred dollars, several dozen phone calls, quite a bit of concerted manual effort from the entire cast of the play, and twenty four inventive hours later – we stood in the alley of Kilby Court and looked up at our brand new, beautiful sound wall. We rented two stories of scaffolding from a construction site, assembled it ourselves, and filled it with a ton of hay that we bought off a local farmer. And it worked. We went on with the show. It was amazing.
The second thing I remember most about SubUrbia is the giant purple dildo.
The main female character in SubUrbia is a twenty-something girl named Suze who is planning to move to New York to become a professional performance artist. In her first scene on stage, Suze, who was played by another college friend named Stacey, presents the monologue that she has been developing for her New York stage debut.
The monologue is a fuming estrogen-angst filled rant that is desperate to be shocking, but comes off as a poor knock-off of Ani DiFranco lyrics from the early 90s. We wanted it to be a parody of everything people think about, when they bother to think about bad performance art. We gave Stacey a trunk to keep props in. We put her in a body suit that she could strip out of. And best of all, Stacey got The Blue Boutique to donate a big purple double-sided dildo to the company in exchange for advertising in our program. Every night, Stacey ended her monologue by swinging the dildo over her head and then letting it go, making it thwhack the brick wall behind her and fall down behind her feet with a thud. It was cheap, but we got a good laugh every night.
Thaaaaaat’s show business! [Jazz hands!]
The only problem was that people actually lived at Kilby Court. And there were a couple apartment windows that ran along the wall that we were using as our Kwiky Mart. So we were really careful to choreograph Stacey’s dildo-throw to make sure that it always hit the bricks and never got close to the windows.
On closing night, I was at my wit’s end. After a series of ugly arguments, my relationship with my frenemy had devolved to fit under the basic uncomplicated “enemy” category. We were a handful of livid phone calls away from never speaking to one another again. The audience turn-out was a little less than half of what we had hoped for. Everyone involved in the company was losing money. And all I wanted was to get through the final performance. Then all I had to do was single-handedly unload a ton of rain-sopped hay, disassemble two stories of scaffolding, return it to the construction company, and then I would be done with Saint Jayne’s and I would never have to do theatre again.
But as I was sitting in the audience, thinking through this task list, something went wrong with Stacey’s dildo-throw. She’d never had a problem with it before, but for some reason, on closing night, the throw went wild and the dildo sailed through the air and disappeared through one of the darkened apartment windows with a slap and the tinkle of shattered glass. The audience must have known that wasn’t the plan, because that was the only night we didn’t get a big laugh. There was some laughter. But it was mostly uncomfortable.
“Oh my God, ohmigod, ohmahGAWD!” I was thinking, as I snuck out of the audience through a gap in the hay. “We’ve killed someone. We’ve killed someone. At the very least, we’ve killed a cat…”
In my head I pictured a leathery old man – recently homeless, reentering society through the devalued rental property of Kilby Court – sitting in a rocking chair and reading a tattered paperback copy of TS Elliot poems. When suddenly, without warning, there was a crashing sound and… “wisht, wisht, wisht…” something long and purple spinning through the air, and then, “BAM!” right to the forehead, knocking him backward, over, and out of the rocking chair! And then, SILENCE. Death by dildo.
I found one of the managers at Kilby – a really nice guy named Mike – and I told him what had happened. He told me not to worry about it. He said he knew the guy pretty well, and he would talk to him. I snuck back into the theatre and watched the rest of the play, which unfolded without further incident. But I was distracted. We were going to be sued, I was sure of it. I was twenty-four, unemployed, and done with theatre. And, and that moment, I was quite certain that I was going to have to go into some sort of indentured servitude to pay for the ex-homeless man’s funeral and a new window for Kilby Court. At that point in my life, I would have had to go into indentured servitude just to buy the man a new cat.
But after the show, I found Mike again to see what he found out and he told me the man wasn’t home. “Whew. That’s a relief,” I said.
“Trust me, it’s fine. I’ll talk to him when he gets home.”
I expected to hear more, but I never did. I wasn’t even contacted about paying for the new window, which I thought was the least that would happen. About half of the cast showed up to help me return the scaffolding to the construction company, and a friend with a truck was kind enough to come and take all the hay out of Kilby. I was done with the show and I promised myself that I would never use my degree in theatre again, and I have mostly kept that promise.
It is ten years later, and all of this has been on my mind for good reason. I spent a weekend this fall at a writer’s retreat in southern Utah. I was one of six other writers staying on a small ranch outside the desert town of Torrey. We were all from Salt Lake City and we spent the days writing and the evenings talking, trying to find ways in which we connected and making one another laugh.
One of the writers was a musician named Jeremy Chatelain. Jeremy has toured with a bunch of east coast bands over the years, but he has also been in a lot of bands here in Utah. Another writer remembered him from a band called Iceburn Collective and the two of them started talking about these old local Utah bands that I’ve never heard of. In fact, I was basically tuning out of the conversation until he mentioned that he had been in a bunch of bands with a guy named Gentry.
I interjected then and said, “Wait, Gentry Densley?”
And Jeremy said, “No way, you know Gentry?”
And I said, “No, not at all. But I remember that his band played at a fundraiser for the theatre company I worked for a decade ago called Saint Jayne’s. I don’t suppose you were there, were you?”
He wasn’t. But then ANOTHER one of the writers, a friend of Jeremy’s named Adam said, “I remember Saint Jayne’s.”
“That’s not possible,” I said. “We were tiny. And we only lasted one summer.”
“Oh no, I remember. I was living in an apartment at Kilby Court that summer. And they were doing a play called Suburbia. And I remember that I came home from a late shift at the hospital one night to find broken glass everywhere and I giant purple dildo in my bed. And this guy, Mike, who was running things at Kilby, came running in and was like ‘oh dude, I was hoping to catch you before you got home… I wanted to try to explain…’ But I was like, ‘Dude!? How? How could you ever explain THIS?”
And I said, “Um…. Maybe I can explain it. I saw the whole thing. And I’ve spent the last ten years wanting to ask you if you were okay. I remember watching it go through the window and thinking, ‘oh Christ what have we done?’ So let me just finally officially say to you, I am very very sorry.”
We had a HUGE laugh over it. It was such a great moment. And I was relieved to find that he wasn’t angry. He was just disappointed that they didn’t let him keep the dildo.
“I was going to frame it and hang it on the wall so I could point to it when I told the story.” Then he pointed at a random spot on the wall and said, in an old man voice, “And that thar is the very same dildo that came through my window that night…”
“I wonder,” I said. “Where did it end up? Because I would have let you keep it, for sure.”
We were telling the story to the rest of the writers at dinner the next evening and Adam said, “I’ve been telling that story for so long now, as an example of the texture of Kilby Court and what it was like to live there. Who knew I would come down to Boulder Utah and meet the person at the other end of that dildo?”
