He knew Phoebe already from performances they’d done together at the Judson Poets’ Theater. Nicholas Park-the same steps up which I had often walked to get to City College in the single year I’d attended. Walter was a student at the (old) High School of Music and Art, then at the top of the steps up through St. Young Walter Harris agreed to do the twin roles of Ratlet and Androcles. An older, wonderful, rather dyky woman with a somewhat mannish voice, Phoebe Wray, got the somewhat sexually ambiguous part of Poloscki. Although she understood, still Judy was disappointed.) We decided to assign multiple parts, and Danny dealt them out to each. Judy would have been fine, but Danny’s Allegra, Randa Haynes, was very good. (Later I explained to Judy, that because Danny had put together the cast and because of all the work he was doing-none of us was getting paid for his or her considerable labor-I felt I had to let him choose the actors that he wanted. By the beginning of the following week, he had found five other actors. In his apartment, just off 2nd Avenue, I read Danny a few pages of my story, and he decided immediately what I’d hoped he would: I was an adequate enough actor to do the main character. Would he be interested in directing a play for WBAI? (Each night backstage he’d done our make-up for Perseus.) A chain of phone calls got a number from his parents in the Bronx, and I learned that, now using the name Daniel Landau, Danny was living in the East Village himself and was, indeed, acting and directing. A year older than the rest of us in the play, Danny had seemed to know a good deal about theater back then. “How much help do you need putting together a cast.?”Īn energetic twenty-five-year-old back then, soon I had gotten in touch with an old high school friend, Daniel Weiseman-who had played Voice Three in Marilyn’s play Perseus: An Exercise for Three Voices, when we’d performed it six years before at the 10th Street Coffee Gallery. (He was to die, twenty-five years later, in Canada, of emphysema complicated by lung cancer.) Initially at that first lunch I projected the play’s running time at an hour. But when, at home, I plunged into it, I was totally befuddled by its rhetorical pace and density.Įveryone soon called Baird “Bai” (pronounced “Bay”), the same way they soon called me “Chip.” A neat and compact man, with strawberry blond hair, Bai had once been a ballet dancer, but now smoked almost non-stop. The book was by someone I’d never heard of before, Michel Foucault, though I’d seen the volume on the psychology shelf at the Eighth Street Bookshop, then on the corner of MacDougal Street and Eighth Street. I said that sounded good to me-and shortly she gave me her copy of Madness, Sanity, and Civilization (later republished by Vintage Books as simply Madness and Civilization), a Signet-Mentor paperback with an orange cover, showing a badly reproduced woodcut of a medieval “Ship of Fools” in black.
Searles’s phone call had been the result.ĭuring a vegetarian lunch among the three of us that afternoon, Judy (who had been a child actress on Broadway) said she’d love to play Allegra in the story. When Baird had mentioned to her he’d been impressed with the story, she’d mentioned that we’d been friends. The next Thursday, I went up to the private house on East 38th Street, four blocks down from Grand Central Terminal, where, in 1967, WBAI-FM had its offices and studios on the top two floors-and discovered, sitting at a desk in Searles’s office, my old friend Judy Ratner, whom I hadn’t seen in some four or five years. “Well, actually,” Searles said, in his oboe-esque voice, “that sounds wonderful! Why don’t you come in, and we’ll talk about it?” I responded immediately: “Why not simply do ‘The Star-Pit’ itself?” “I was wondering whether you might like to write something on that order as, say, a radio play.” “I really enjoyed that story of yours in Worlds of Tomorrow this last winter-‘The Star-Pit.’” Mr. In the year of his death, it had been my father’s favorite radio station. His name was unfamiliar, but I knew of WBAI and had listened to it on and off. In early spring of ’67, when I was living intermittently with Marilyn on East 10th Street, I received a phone call from someone who said he was Baird Searles-Drama and Literature Director for WBAI-FM.