Mansfield, Ohio
1961
I am an accident of the theater.
The first Broadway show I saw was Bye Bye Birdie. The lyricist of that show, Lee Adams, happens to have come from my hometown, Mansfield, Ohio. I was eleven and it was my first visit to New York City. We traveled on an overnight train and stayed at the Hotel Astor in Times Square, in a room that overlooked the smoking Camel sign. Pretty heady stuff. The day after we arrived, we went to a matinee of the show. Mind you, we didn’t know Lee Adams or his family, but as far as we were concerned, after Johnny Appleseed (who had lived briefly in our town), he was the most famous person to have emerged from Mansfield.
After the show, I stood amid a large crowd at the stage door to get a souvenir program signed for my cousin Janis. I’d promised. There was a great rush toward Dick Van Dyke when he emerged from the theater. In what I would characterize now as a bit of New York City moxie, I wormed my way through the assembled throng and got to the long railing that separated fans from stars. Worried that I would miss my chance, as Mr. Van Dyke finally moved along and came closer to our section, I stepped on the bottom of the railing and shoved the souvenir program in his direction. Contact was made, but not quite how I had intended. I struck him in the nose, causing a minor paper cut on that famous proboscis. He stared at me for a moment, grabbed the program from my hands, hastily signed it, then shoved it back and quickly moved away as he dabbed his nose. The people around me were not happy, but my cousin Janis was ecstatic when I brought that autograph back to Mansfield.
As much as I enjoyed the show, I didn’t return home with any dreams of a life in the theater. (That trip did, however, make me fall in love with New York City, and luckily enough, a couple of years thereafter, my father took a job in New York and we moved to nearby Connecticut.)
My only foray onstage in Mansfield was playing Jack, of beanstalk fame, with the children’s summer theater group in the local park. Mind you, I had no memory of this until I had written Into the Woods and someone from Mansfield sent me this clipping:
In high school I also performed in Neil Simon’s Come Blow Your Horn and Meredith Willson’s The Music Man. My talents as an actor were limited, though I enjoyed the camaraderie that came with putting on a show. That pretty much was the sum total of my experiences in the theater until I was twenty-eight years old.
I majored in history at college. My junior year I became friends with a fellow student, Phillip Blumberg, who was passionate about the theater. He was from the Bronx and he knew a great deal about the downtown avant-garde scene in New York. The first “experimental” show he took me to was titled Commune, by The Performance Group. As I recall, the show had something to do with communal life and the Charles Manson murders. It was performed in a loft and we had to take our shoes off before entering. The seating was on the floor and the actors interacted with the audience—a new experience for me. What I remember most about the evening was that at the end of the play, the actors took all the shoes that we the audience had taken off at the entryway and dumped them in the middle of the performance space, making us sift through this smelly pile of shoes so we could go home.
In my senior year, I took a photography course and fell in love with the camera. As it was the Vietnam era and I was in no mood to be drafted, I decided to go to graduate school to study photography and design. After that, I moved to New York City with the intention of being a fine-art photographer, my idols being Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, and Lee Friedlander. To support myself, I worked as a waiter, a page at NBC, and an assistant at the Architectural League of New York, while landing the occasional photojournalist or graphic design gig.
Copyright © 2021 by James Lapine
