REACHING OUT WITH THEATER
IN THE MONSTER METROPOLIS
Originally printed in Theater Week
Written by Laurent Rejto 

    It was late December and we were bundling ourselves to go out. Going to the theater was such a rare occasion for us that underneath our bundles, we were dressed up. It wasn't a Broad-way show or even off-Broadway. Nevertheless, it was an excuse to dress up. When we reached 29th Street, we saw no sign of any theater. All we could see was the haunting red brick facade of Bellevue Hospital. While the rest of the city glistened with snowflakes and Christmas lights, Bellevue scowled. We checked the ad-dress once, twice, three times. This had to be the place.
    We walked through the courtyard, past homeless men who were spend-ing just a few more minutes outside before entering  the Bellevue Men's Shelter. We went in and met a six foot tall, muscular security guard who was gave us an odd look. "Yo, you need any help?"
"Is the theater here, or the theater group?" Meira asked quizzically.
Another guard turned towards us.
"Y'all with the theater?"
We nodded.
"Down the hall and up to the second door,'
We turned toward the elevator, where a hundred homeless men were gathered waiting to go up to their -respective floors. We looked back toward the exit before starting down the long, gloomy hall crowded with men. Most of them were standing quietly while others were stumbling around drunkenly; still others shouted at the guards or at the voices in their heads.
We stood among them and waited to pass through the metal detector and into the shelter area. Security guards with rubber gloves ushered the men through the machine. Those who set it off were searched. About three dozen knives and a revolver had already been confiscated. Finally, we were waved past the line and directed toward a small, overheated theater.
  Two ushers in guard uniforms were handing out programs at the door. Tonight's performance would be 'Ten-nessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie. On the stage, the actors were putting the final touches on their makeshift stage with its curtain scenery, Maxwell House coffee can spotlights, and cardboard props. This was definitely not Broadway!
   A young female social worker ar-rived to relieve' the guards as usher. To the arriving men, she handed out can-dy canes in addition to the programs. I looked back to see the audience that was gathering. My brow furrowed and my eyes widened. Over a dozen malodorous, unkempt, homeless men were sitting behind us. What the hell were we doing here? I did a double take. Some of the men were sleeping, some watched the stage preparations; others laughed and talked.
    Timothy, our, friend and the founder/ producer of this theater group, came up from backstage in a huff. He frowned and scratched his thin white hair, and shot out at the actors:
    "You're doing it the wrong way!"
    The actors yelled back. They squabbled over everything. These ac-tors were so eccentric that I was beginning to understand what we were do-ing in the old psychiatric ward at Bellevue.
    When in need of extra help, Timothy would enlist a man or two from the au-dience, who were only too willing to help. Finally, when the stage was almost set, Timothy acknowledged our presence. And with a smile and a loud chuckle, he said: "Oh, you dressed up. It really wasn't necessary."
    A large black man with half his teeth missing limped in our direction, then tilted his head down towards Timothy. "You the producer?" he asked in a slow, low tone. For the next ten minutes, he would try to persuade Timothy to produce his seven man band: "We play jazz, Latin, rock, you name it."
    Another man approached and started talking to Timothy about Don Ameche, Fred and Ginger, Alice Faye: the good old movies. Suddenly, the lights went out. Not because the show was about to begin but because the fuse had blown. It would blow out four more times during the first five minutes of the show. The actors would continue undaunted while Timothy spent the rest of the evening holding an extension for the stage lights into a socket in the hallway. All this, so the show could go on.
    By the end of the show, the men were cheering wildly. The actors took two curtain calls. When the house lights went up, I saw one wipe a tear from the corner of his eye before strut-ting nonchalantly out of the theater. Most of the other men surrounded the actors with accolades and asked for autographs. The big black band leader was now calling Timothy "sir". It wasn't Broadway. It was better. It was free and fantastic. We joined the men and the actors in the cafeteria for milk and cookies. And we talked about theater, jazz, movies, and anything else that came to mind.
 
    Invariably, this is how an evening with the Single Room Occupancy Hotel Touring Company of Players (yes, that is their full name) unwinds. The company, which was founded in 1979 by Timothy Gordon, 65, is a volunteer, non-profit (and that means NON in capital letters) group of amateur, professional, and retired actors.
    In the 1940s, Timothy Gordon set-tled in New York with the hopes of. becoming an actor.
    "When I first came to New York, I could make it;" he remembers. "Within an hour of getting off the bus, I was making pies at Bickford's. In those days, you could afford a room. You could dish wash. You could busboy. Geraldine Page used to wind thread for something like seventeen dollars a week. When I first met her, she was working as an usherette in the legi-timate theater. She got a dollar a night, but she was seeing all the fabulous new shows and she was only paying three dollars a week for a room. So she had four dollars left over for food and transportation. Also:' he adds with a chuckle, "a lot of us would go into the local candy stores 'with big coats and walk out with five pound boxes of chocolates. A lot of the places in New York supported their actors that way."
    In 1947, Gordon joined The Touring Players, a group founded by Peg Murray, who appears in the soap opera All My Children. When the tour ran out of money, the players started to perform in every possible hall in order to col-lect enough money to return to New York. They found that they were most appreciated in black colleges and places where theater was a scarcity. In Frankfurt, Kentucky, Doctor Clement Atwood, the dean of the local black college, was so appreciative that he organized and raised enough money to send the Touring Players on a tour of Southern black colleges.
    "They read Shaw and Wilde and all the playwrights," Atwood told the Players about his students. "But they have never seen it before. They don't want to humiliate themselves by sit-ting up in the balcony when the plays are in town, so they don't go. What you people are doing is wonderful."
    In the 1970s, Gordon went on to play the ghost of Jeremiah Collins in the
popular soap, Dark Shadows.  He also acted in several stage productions and had a part in the film The World of Henry Orient.
    In 1977, however, as a result of an arthritic condition caused by an aortic abdominal aneurysm, he retired: "I was 55 and almost bedridden," he ex-plains. "while I was recovering, the landlady sold the building. The new owners wanted me out within the month. Around the' same time' I saw a documentary on television' about the plight of the welfare hotels in the city and it was the most depressing thing I ever sat through. It showed that the people being kicked out into the street were hopeless. It showed the places where they were being placed and the little possessions they held together, but there was nothing being done for them. I mean, you could give them shoes and food and you could look after their welfare and see that doc-tors looked after them and buried them, but that's all. The only difference between me and these little old men and women was that I knew more people and I knew how to fight, and boy did I ever fight! It took me two years, but I kept my little apartment."
    That same year, Gordon got back to acting but in a different Vein. He went to summer stock and spread an idea of his around: "I remembered the documentary and I thought, actors are magic people. They literally are magic. With a backdrop and a costume they could take you away into a land of fantasy and imagination. The first play I ever saw was Thornton Wilder's Our Town.. They didn't even use a backdrop. I was so excited after the show that I walked twenty miles in the wrong direction. It changed my life, and ever since then I've had the firm belief that if you can change a moment in a person's life, you've done something miraculous."

    The newly formed Single Room Occupancy Hotel Touring Com-pany of Players found a place to rehearse, a corner of a room at the Bowery Residents Commit-tee, a place where alcoholics could come in for coffee and maybe some at-tention. Ben Walker, then director of the B.R.C, approved the idea and thought the cultural and artistic contact would do the men good.
The next step was to find some places to play. "When I started;' Gordon says, "I was foolish. I would go straight to the hotel managers. One man tore up my leaflets and said, 'Get the hell out of here, these people don't deserve anything like this, they're scum!"

    Eventually, Gordon found help through social workers. The Division of Volunteers at Human Rights Ad-ministration and Special Housing Service Department at Crisis In-tervention Center, HRA, have been especially helpful.
From the onset, the program has helped itself The question of money and reward has never entered the pic-ture. "If money were a factor in any of what we do, the program would fall apart instantly;" claims Gordon. "It's not about money. It's about theater and caring. All we ever needed was people and transportation to and from the hotels and shelters. There are plenty of people who can't bear to go bowling or to bridge for another night. They can't stand it anymore and they love the theater and good work so, they join up with us!"
    Holbrook Harmon, 70 years old and known as Holy, has been with the SRO Players from the beginning in 1979. He is their set designer extraordinaire. "We use curtains for the background and hang them from pipes, which we somehow hang from the air!' he comments. "Most of the furniture is made out of cardboard. Timmy's light box is made out of dim-mers and extensions cords. Most of what we use was either donated or, more likely, found in some garbage!"
     Holbrook works on the props from his four hundred square foot railroad apartment in the East Village. "It's real theater; but it's not the theater of Broadway. Some people come and they don't know that they're allowed to laugh or cry Slowly and cautiously, they let got When we were doing The Bride of the Undead, there were lovely lines coming from the audience warning the actors that Dracula was around. "Stay away from that man or he'll bite you!" they would shout out. They really get into it!'
    Gordon remembers that in their first show, The Old Lady Shows Her Medal, by James M. Barrie, they hat a cardboard stove on stage When one of the actors approached it, a yell came from the audience: "Watch it honey, you'll burn yourself!'
    Since that first one act play, the SRO Players have gone on to perform such shows as The Happy Journey to trenton and Camden by Thornton Wilder, Mr. Pim Passes By and The Ugly Duckling by A. A Milne, The Marriage Proposal by Anton Chekhov, Hay Fever and Still Life by Noel coward, Arsenic and Old Lace by Joseph Kesselring and The Bride of the Undead and An Order of Merit by Timothy Gordon himself.
    The stages which have been set up in hallways, conference rooms, and giant armory floors have traveled around the city from hotel to shelter The Jane West Hotel, the Stratford Arms Hotel, the Woodstock, Spencer Arms, Traveller's, and Kenton Hotel are but a few of the SRO hotels they've played. Among the shelters, there's the Men's Shelter on 3rd Street, the Lexington Avenue Armory Shelter the Fort Washington Armory Shelter the Park Avenue Women's Shelter, the Catherine Street Family Shelter, and Bellevue.
    Each performance has been a success. "We don't just go in and take them out of their misery for an hour, an hour and a half," Gordon explains. "We give them something they haven't had for a long time-- respect. It's always required of these folks to nod and smile and nod and smile and say thank you, thank you, thank you... What we invite is reaction. That's invaluable to them!"
    Norman Trotsten, director of the Men's Shelter on 3rd Street, has welcomed the SRO Players with open arms.
    "When you get somebody like Tim coming in here with his group, it shows the residents that you care for them, that you're trying to take them out of their bleak existence. Most of the men are depressed and down and out. When you get a live show coming in, it just elevates them to great heights. If you look at the resident during the show and see the smiles on their faces and the glow in their eyes, you really the good being done by the SRO Players. They actually reach out and touch the audience. One of the nice parts about the show is that at the completion, the players don't leave but talk to the audience They relate to them and answer their questions. That's something that's really marvelous If you see a Broadway play, you don't get this interaction It's because you're apart from the players. Here, it's an interaction that's really magnificent."

    Freddie Mae Williams, an elder-ly resident of the Park Avenue Women's Armory Shelter, has a story which is not uncommon. She speaks with a soft and kind Southern accent. "One night, I was walking home and I fell out with a seizure. TWO wonderful peoples, they took me to this shelter and put me here When I woke up the next morning' I didn't know where I was. And ever since, I been here."
    "More often than not:' Gordon says, "These little old ladies would go out on a spring morning sometime in late April and it would be warm. By after-noon, it had gotten chilly. By the time they got back to their rooms to put on a shawl or a sweater, their room was locked and they had no room anymore and they were stuck on the street"
    Richard Spore, a young off-Broadway and television actor who has appeared with the SRO Players several times, wonders whether one day he too will be in the shoes of the shelter resident "I lost my home on West 8Oth  . I had a small room there that was converted into condos. The landlords brought goons in. When the garbage and the broken front door stated happening, I knew there was no hope. You know, I'm not a rich ac-tor. And it's sad and frightening and it's only by the grace of God that I found another place and didn't become one of the dispossessed of this monster metropolis."
    The "monster metropolis" has spared  no one but the rich. Thousands have suddenly found themselves luckless and homeless. Since 1985, the shelter population at Bellevue alone has grown from fifty men, age forty-five and over, to more than 1,000 at present. This is indicative of the ci-ty's overall pattern. Most residents are not mentally unstable: Some have drifted into the shelters from institu-tions, but the majority were once employed and living normal lives in the middle and lower classes. They en-joyed movies, books, plays, and all the daily pleasures which are taken for granted by most people.

    Angus Kirkland, who was co-director at the Bellevue Men's Shelter in 1986, has seen both sides of the fence He fell into the hole of homelessness' but fought his way out. "These people are disenfranchised:' he told u& "They don't have any money. They can't af-ford to go to movies. They can't afford plays. But most of them read the papers and they know that there are good plays on Broadway and good movies. They can't afford to see them. They have a live performance come to where they're living really makes them feel like they're a part of what's going on in the world, even though they do live in the shelter."
    "Some of the actors," Gordon told us, "come to auditions prepared to star on Broadway the next day, and then we take them up to Fort Washington Avenue and 168th Street. They go in-side, see this one block long and wide some of the toughest men in the city. They're appalled at first but then they realize the value of what they're doing.  Of course, at the end, when people come crowding up and asking for autographs, well, they feel like the biggest stars that ever existed. It's a 'magical experience for us as well as the residents." Each tour ends, believe it or not, in the Broadway theater district. Just a block from The Phantom of the Opera.
    Ever since Gordon can remember, it's been the home of "spear holders and supporting actors": ex-showfolk. "At one time, they could afford to live in the Times Square Motor Hotel or the Woodstock. And both were once excellent hotels;" Gordon  "But, as time went by, these show folk didn't become big names, stars. They made their living in the theater. When they retired, they retired on a substantial retirement pay of twenty five dollars a week. Overnight, their rooms were far more expensive than what they were getting for their pension. These people were very proud. They'd worked all their lives for what they had and the next thing you know, they just didn't have enough. They had to go on welfare; some wound up on the street and some in the shelters."
    The few residents remaining in the Time Square Motor Hotel (which the city now hopes to turn into a shelter) are filled with memories and stories from the heydays in burlesque, vaudeville, and the theater. When the SRO Players are scheduled, they rejoice.
    After a performance one December night as Christmas approached, the hotel residents and the actors gathered for some Christmas cookies, milk, and coffee.
    Matilda helped herself to some cookies. She put some in her pocket for safe keeping. Laticia went around and collected autographs: "I got 'em ... all the autographs and I enjoyed the show. It was very good!"
    Milton, an ex-vaudevillian, laughs and hugs the players in a fit of joy. Gordon knows Milton by now. He's been to all their shows. "We wanted to use him once in one of our plays," Gordon explains, "but we couldn't reach him. And the reason we couldn't was that Milton dreams about the past..."
    Murray, who is dressed in a tweed suit and necktie, discreetly tells us that he's snuck into four Broadway shows that week. He raises his voice and adds, "This is the best play I saw out of all of them. But then again, I'm a great fan of theirs. They call me a 'groupie'."
    Juliana finished her milk and walk-ed up to Gordon before retiring to her room: "I'd like to see you on Broadway, but we wouldn't get to see you then. We wouldn't get to enjoy it, would we?"
    Timothy held his chin and chest high. He stood proud as a peacock and frowned at Juliana with a questioning look. "But we are on Broadway:' he assured.

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