WD

Seeing me now, you might not suspect. But I was once a sexual fantasy.

Actually, I played someone who was a sexual fantasy.

“Sleeping Beauty” was a one-act comedy I had appeared in at the Manhattan Punchline, an Off-Off-Broadway comedy theater on 42^nd Street in New York. I had worked at the theater in the late-night cabaret series they called “Fools Night,” which was a stand-up show after the main stage production. That’s where I got to know the artistic director, Steve Kaplan, and how eventually I got cast in “Sleeping Beauty.” It was written by a young playwright named Laurence Klavan, who has since made quite a name for himself winning Edgar Awards for mystery novels that usually have a Hollywood movie backdrop.

Laurence’s play was about a young woman, named “Louise Needleman,” played by a lovely actress named Amy Beth Williams. “Louise” is twenty-eight years old and lives with her sweet but dull boyfriend, “Malcolm.”

Although she has a stable home life with Malcolm, she finds herself dreaming about finding a man more exciting. In a monologue to the audience, Louise wonders if she might have been happier with the handsome boy in high school she never had the courage to approach named “Ricky.”

To her, Ricky represents romantic opportunity missed. At another point, she fantasizes about a sexy guy she saw on the bus, which would later turn out to be me, a character named “Tony Pectorallo.” In a New York Times review of the play, my character was described as a “brawny Brando-type,” which was enough to get me a call from one single casting director, whose face immediately fell when he saw what I actually looked like. My mother always told me what a handsome young man I was. And growing up, I believed her. It did wonders for my self-esteem. But, once I got into show business, I learned that I was what they call “offbeat handsome,” which means “not really that handsome,” or “ethnic handsome,” which is code for: “big nose.”

In the climactic scene of the play, “Louise’s” fantasies show up in her apartment, which leads to a lot of near misses and farcical door slamming as my character competes for her affections with the romantic fantasy and the dull boyfriend. All three of us finally come together, breathless from the chase, whereupon my character, “Tony,” standing in the middle, puts his arms around Malcolm and Ricky’s shoulders to demand that Louise finally decide.

Turns out, “Tony Pectorallo” as you might expect, isn’t very smart or attentive and gets Louise’s name wrong, calling her “Lucy.”

“What’s it gonna be, Lucy?” I say in my best mooky New York Italian dialect, “A stable home life?” referring to her boyfriend, Malcolm, “Romance and adventure?” indicating romantic fantasy, Ricky, “Or…” finally indicating myself, “an express bus to climax junction?”

I agree. And so would the crickets.

The more we rehearsed, the more we realized “express bus to climax junction” was just not cutting it. There’s a lot of pressure on that punch line. It comes at the end of a big action sequence. It’s supposed to wrap everything up. No one could articulate it at the time, but with all the comedy writing experience I have accumulated since, I can tell you that it had too many syllables, and you also had to remember that she saw him on a bus, which made it too “thinky.” We were making the audience do too much math to put it together. And that’s death for a joke.

To me, writing a joke is akin to trying to hit a ninety-five-mile-an-hour fastball. You’ve got to time it just right. You’ve got to “square it up.” Miss it by a fraction of an inch, and you foul it back to the screen.

At the end of one rehearsal, all the actors sat around a small table with our director, Steve, and our playwright, Laurence, pitching on improving “express bus to climax junction.” We couldn’t come up with anything better. It was one of those brainstorming sessions I am now all too familiar with when you’re at that part of the day when nothing is going to score. There is always something wrong with whatever is being pitched.

But then an idea occurred to me.

I almost pitched it. But something told me in that atmosphere, no matter how good I thought it was, it was going to be thought about, mulled, dissected, and ultimately thrown on the reject pile along with all of the other pitches. The timing wasn’t right. Too much judgment in the air. So, I held my tongue, which is not easy when you think you’ve got the answer.

This turned out to be a good instinct. I’ve applied it a number of times since in the course of my writing career, along with a couple of other principles I have learned the hard way.

For instance, in a comedy writer’s room, never stand to pitch no matter how excited you get. Because when you jump up to pitch a joke that falls flat, that’s a long slow embarrassing descent of shame back into your chair. You can almost hear the hissing of the air leaking out of your dumb idea balloon.

I have also learned that the key to most jokes is the element of surprise, and there was no way I was going to catch anyone off guard at the end of this rehearsal day.

So, I put it in my pocket.

With nothing else striking the right chord, Steve dismissed us. We’d take it up again at tomorrow’s rehearsal.

The next day, after we had rehearsed some of the earlier scenes, it was time to tackle the big climactic farce scene. We were about to start, when director Steve said, “Oh wait, we need to come up with a new line.”

I said, “I have an idea.”

“What is it?”

I still didn’t want to tell anyone yet. I wanted to surprise them. If it didn’t work, it didn’t work, but I wanted to try it in the context of the scene not in the context of people standing around judging it.

“Let’s just run the scene, and I’ll try it.”

He said, “Okay.”

Earlier in the play, Louise in another monologue had mentioned a PBS special she had seen about whales, the world’s most powerful mammal. She learned that the average whale’s penis is about twelve feet long and remarks, “That’s the entire length of our new living room.” It usually got a good laugh, especially in New York where most people live in small, cramped apartments.

We ran through the farce scene and got to the point where my character gathers the other two under his arms. I go through the set-up, “So what’s it going to be Lucy? Stable home life?” indicating her boyfriend. “Romance and adventure?” indicating the romantic fantasy. “Or…” indicating myself… and I took a little extra time just to raise the level of anticipation…

“Or whale dick.”

I still have the image in my head of Steve Kaplan bent over laughing. The other two actors, which included my good friend, Brad Bellamy, who played Malcolm the nerdy boyfriend, and Peter Webster (a genuinely handsome guy), who played Ricky, both fell away from my arms, knees buckling, laughing. Amy and the stage manager too. The only person not laughing was the playwright, Laurence Klavan, who just sat there, eyes wide, understandably horrified that this nightclub comedian moonlighting as an actor had just sullied his play with a dick joke.

A dick joke we all knew was there to stay.

Looking back, I realize I had put myself in the best position to make it work. I had mystery on my side. No one knew what I was going to say. If I had pitched “whale dick” the night before, it would never have stood a chance. We would have examined it, turned it over, slapped it around, and beached it. But because I had the good sense to hold back and let it play in its natural habitat, it scored. I had “squared up” the ninety-five-mile-an-hour fastball.

I have never been prouder of a dick joke. And I could argue to Laurence that he himself had set it up. He had already injected a penis into the body of the narrative. I was merely paying it off, giving it a happy ending, so to speak.

Two syllables. Hard comedy K sound. No one saw it coming. It met all of the qualifications for an effective punch line.

Whale Dick could not be denied.

Eventually, Whale Dick made its debut in early 1985 during the Manhattan Punchline’s One Act Festival at a packed Judith Anderson theater, a ninety-nine-seater on Theater Row on 42^nd Street between 9^th and 10^th Avenues.

“What’s it gonna be Lucy? Stable home life? Romance and adventure? Or… whale dick?”

Boom! From our vantage point on the stage, we could see the laugh roll from the front row in a wave to the back row, hit the wall, and bounce back again. And we surfed on that laugh for a good twenty, thirty seconds. And it was that way every night, the biggest laugh in the show. In fact, Brad and Peter started inventing little physical pieces of business waiting for the laugh to die down, me in the middle with one arm over each of their shoulders with them looking at each other, looking at my crotch then back at each other again. The Judith Anderson was a great venue for comedy, not too big not at all ornate, high proscenium stage, relatively low ceiling. I would guess that the distinguished Australian actress Dame Judith Anderson, after whom the theater was named, and who made her reputation playing Lady Macbeth opposite Olivier and winning a Tony Award for playing Medea might have been just as scandalized as Laurence Klavan to know that a dick joke was killing ‘em nightly in her theater. Although, according to Wikipedia at about this same time, she was appearing in the movie “Star Trek: The Search for Spock” as the Vulcan high priestess T’lar. So, who knows?

It got to the point where the cast and anyone else associated with the show started referring to me personally as “Whale Dick,” or “WD.” That became my name in that circle of people.

“Hey, WD!” “WD? You wanna go out for drinks?”

And no matter how well the play was doing on any particular night, even if the crowd was not as big or responsive, we knew we always could count on Whale Dick. Even on an off night, we knew Whale Dick would get ‘em.

Until one fateful evening in Malvern, Pennsylvania.

Malvern is a suburb of Philadelphia on what is known as The Mainline, an archipelago of prosperous communities that pushes west into Pennsylvania. “Sleeping Beauty” had been selected by a regional theater in Malvern called The People’s Light and Theater Company to be the curtain raiser for their headline production, a play entitled “The Love Suicide at Schofield Barracks.” As the title might suggest, “The Love Suicide at Schofield Barracks,” was not a comedy. It was a drama about an Army general and his wife, stationed in Hawaii, who commit suicide over their anguish about the Vietnam War. That logline might not be doing it justice, but that’s what I remember.

What I remember most was that it was a terrible play. The setting was a hearing room where a military inquest was taking place and the whole action – and I’m being generous when I use the word “action” – was a series of monologues by about a half dozen witnesses or so, who get up one by one and tell two military officers about their version of events. Holy Jesus was that boring. One by one, these “witnesses” would stand up and deliver a two to three, maybe four, sometimes seemed like twenty-page monologue. The playwright didn’t even bother to write in any arguments or interjections by other characters. At no time did anyone else ever say, “That’s not what happened!” Or “Objection!” Or “Why are you talking for so long?” Everyone just sat politely and listened to one character after another stand-up and tell their story, then sit back down again. There was no “play” in it. No conflict. Just long speeches. It wasn’t set up as a real trial. So, there wasn’t even a verdict to anticipate.

About three-quarters of the way through the inquest, another character would stumble in late, ostensibly drunk; and on more than one occasion this would produce an audible, weary “Uggh” from the audience, which I’m sure had been calculating how many more monologues they had to sit through before they could go back to their comfortable homes on The Mainline. And now this fucking guy was ruining the math. By the end, I was convinced that it wasn’t the Vietnam War that led the General and his wife to commit suicide. I would have killed myself, too, stuck on an island with this group of boring motherfuckers.

I had to sit through this thing every night for about six weeks, because in addition to recreating the “iconic” role of Tony Pectorallo in the curtain raiser, I doubled as a junior officer, who had about a dozen lines in “Love Suicide.” I had the damnedest time remembering those dozen lines because they were all interlocutory, like “What happened then?” “Who?” “Where were you?” “What time?” “Why?” Sometimes I would lose track of whether I was supposed to say “Who?” “Why” “When?” or “What the fuck?”

Fortunately, I sat at a table with my back to the audience, – I never had to get up; that would have made the play far too exciting – so I could write my lines down in a notebook and just read them. There were long stretches, long, long stretches where my character didn’t say anything. To keep my mind occupied, I played a game with myself. As a character slogged through a monologue, I would latch onto a phrase, say, “The General went to the door.” (That’s not a line from the real play. I’m just making it up for purposes of illustration). That phrase would become the first line of a limerick I would try to compose as the character droned on.

The General went to the door,

I had to finish the limerick before the character finished his or her speech.

With orders to find something more.

That added suspense to the game, the suspense that was clearly absent from this play.

He was given the task

Of a question to ask.

To the audience, it just looked like I was concentrating very hard on the testimony and taking copious notes.

Why is this play such a bore?

This mental exercise allowed me to get through this earnest and overwrought piece of pretentious palaver without blowing my own brains out.

By the way, I don’t blame the actors for this. They were all doing admirable work digesting and spitting out this relentless Coney Island Hot Dog Eating Contest of words. The most electrifying moment occurred the night, halfway through one of the later monologues when I heard a male voice from the audience proclaim, “Bullshit.”

Sounded like an older man. He didn’t shout it out, but it had an edge, more a statement of fact than an angry refutation. It had the tenor of a simple declaration made by someone’s grandfather at Thanksgiving dinner pushing himself away from the table when he can no longer stomach the political views of his liberal son-in-law, whom he never approved of in the first place.

I assumed this gentleman was offended by the none-too-subtle anti-war sentiments being expressed in “The Love Suicide at Schofield Barracks.” My back was to him, but everyone on stage could hear him slowly clomp, clomp, clomp down the metal stairs and pad his way out of the theater, the door swinging open and thumping closed. I so much wanted to turn and catch a glimpse of the guy, if for no other reason than to maybe wink at him as a “thank you” for breaking up my night. And I resolved that if something like that were ever to happen again, I would turn and in character announce, “One more outburst like that, and I will clear this courtroom!” in the hopes of injecting one whaledickian laugh into this solemn wake of a play.

Alas, the opportunity never arose. Turns out, Grandpa was the lone truth-teller in Malvern.

The People’s Light and Theater was much bigger than the Judith Anderson, seating probably close to two hundred, if not more. And it was a thrust stage, which means the audience was not only in front of you but also a little bit off to the sides. The ceiling was high, more like a Broadway theater, although with more of a warehouse feel. Overall, it was less intimate and therefore not as conducive to comedy; and as Tony Pectorallo, I did find myself subtly swiveling my head from one side of the room to the other on the big line in an effort to afford everyone the full Whale Dickensian experience.

Nonetheless, “Sleeping Beauty” was big and broad and loud and despite the fact we were playing to an older, generally more staid, suburban crowd, we got our laughs, not as ricocheting-off-the-walls satisfying as at the Judith Anderson, but still solid.

Laurence had written quite a few very good punch lines, but Whale Dick continued to be the Great White. We came to rely on it just as we did in Manhattan. Whale Dick was invincible. But sometimes in the run of a play – as also happens in stand-up – the chemistry you worked so hard to get right just doesn’t have the desired effect. We were maybe three-quarters into the six-week run when Tony Pectorallo put his arms around “Malcolm” and a new “Ricky,” played by Murphy Guyer, and said, “What’s it gonna be, Lucy? Stable home life? Romance and adventure?

Or… whale dick?”

Nothing.

Not a chuckle. Not a chortle. Not a giggle.

Nothing.

Even the crickets were dumbfounded.

I stood there in the numb silence with my arms extended around Brad and Murphy like the crucified Christ, as they still did the physical business they had choreographed to cover the usual laugh. I hung on that cross for what seemed like hours. Romans were throwing dice for my cloak as I waited for someone to please say the next fucking line and roll the stone over the mouth of the cave that holds my sepulcher.

There ain’t nothing like a dick joke, folks. There also ain’t nothing like a dick joke that is met with complete silence. All of a sudden, you are a mature adult who just bragged about his weenis in front of another group of mature adults, who just stared back at you unimpressed and probably a little disappointed at the gratuitous vulgarity. I half-expected the critic from the other show to call “Bullshit” once again and slowly clomp out of the theater in disgust. I could also imagine Laurence, sitting at his desk back in New York, all of a sudden perking up, not sure why he was feeling a sense of vindication. When I was eighteen years old, I struck out with a man in scoring position to end the game that eliminated my team from a local tournament. The whole thing felt a little like that. Swing and a miss.

Backstage between shows, the casts from both plays analyzed the death of Whale Dick like it was the Kennedy assassination or a school shooting, or for that matter -- a love suicide. It was all so shocking, and everyone was just trying to make sense of it all. Every actor had a theory. I had put too much emphasis on the “whuh” and not enough on the “duh.” Too much on the “iii” and not enough on the “Kuh.” I had swiveled my head too quickly from one side of the room to the other, thus slurring the words.

As I got into my military officer’s costume for the second play, I found myself taking offense at the implication that all of a sudden, I didn’t know how to deliver a dick joke that I had not only been scoring with show after to show after show but lest we forget, had originally conceived. Finally, when someone opined that I had not said it loud enough, I piped up with not a little irritation, “Hey! They heard it! They didn’t like it! That’s it.” The edge in my voice ended the round table discussion.

The next night, inexplicably, Whale Dick came back. It got respectable laughs for the rest of the run but was no longer the safety net we had once taken for granted. From that point on, we, as a cast, were a little more alert, our performances a little tighter, a little more focused throughout, knowing we could no longer fall back on ol’ WD.

About twenty years later, I was in a Samuel French bookstore in Los Angeles, where they carry published plays. I don’t remember what I was looking for, but it suddenly occurred to me to check the section that begins with “S.” And there it was, a thin volume of two short plays by Laurence Klavan, “Sleeping Beauty,” and a companion piece called “Smoke.” At the front of each booklet, Samuel French prints the details of the very first production of the play, including the cast list. I saw my name along with Brad’s and Amy Beth’s and Peter’s. Directed by Steve Kaplan. The Judith Anderson Theater. The dates. I flipped through the pages until I found what I came to see. I had never seen “Whale Dick” in print before and wouldn’t have been surprised if Laurence’s original punch line had been retained.

But there it was. To this day, the only two words I have ever had officially published.

I stared at the page.

Hello, old friend.