Julius Caesar

Something about Shakespeare
Just makes people
Want to kill themselves

Beau was no different

He was directing Julius Caesar
And he was miserable
And the company
Wasn't too happy with him either

This was at the end of our fifth season
Spring, 1968
After he'd thrown his wife out of the company
One of our best actresses

He thought she was cheating on him
With one of the actors in the company
Which is understandable
She'd done it before
But the guy he was thinking of this time was--

Well, he was no prize

And that guy got to stay in the company
Probably because he had dirt on Beau

The only way anybody stayed in that company
Was by having something on somebody

As soon as you looked around
And realized you didn't know who was sleeping with who
Or who was drinking too much
Or who got a little too rough
With one of the actresses at a cast party

You knew you were on your way out

And back then, Beau was the guy
You had to have dirt on

And it wasn't easy

It wasn't easy finding out stuff about him

He was a real mystery

And that made me nervous

Because I had left school in Connecticut
To join the company
And my parents
Were not pleased with me

I wanted a little job security

So when Beau tossed the wife
I used that as an opportunity
To bring up some...concerns I had
With the way things were run

Luckily for me
I wasn't the only one sick
Of Beau's tyranny

And more than a few of the actors
Missed his wife

We would have called her
A 'cool chick' back then

So we went to Beau
And told him
We wanted some sort of stability
In our jobs

And that we wanted him
To ask his wife
To come back to the theater

He screamed at us
Threw things
Behaved like one of those monkeys
Who throws their shit
At people
When it's feeding time

Then he stormed out of the theater
And we finished rehearsal without him

That was the day we decided to create
The Board

Now, before you go thinking we're jerks
Remember that eventually
He would have needed a board anyway

You can't have any kind of growing
Decent-sized theater
Without a board

So the next day
We waited until he blocked the assassination of Casear
Or, as I like to think of it
A little government scuffle
And then we approached him

Well, to be honest
I did most of the work

The men all shrank to the back

They claimed Beau would listen to me
Because he and I had a 'special relationship'
What they meant was that they assumed I was blowing him
On a regular basis
When that wasn't the case at all

I'm not stupid
I don't piss where I swim

I told Beau that there was going to be a board
Whether he liked it or not
And if he tried to fight it
Everybody in the company would walk

Part of me was afraid
He might actually tell us to do it

But he had a show to open
In a fairly short amount of time
And he wouldn't be able to recast the whole thing
And mount it
Without us

I told him that, in time
He would see
That this was a good thing

He told me
To go fuck myself

He said--'I never would have expected this from you'

And that was...hard

But we had our Board

And he let his wife come back
The following season
Although at that point
They were getting a divorce

And do you know what the first thing that Board decided to do was
That Board full of men?

First off, they decided that I didn't have enough experience
To serve on the Board

Then, they decided the theater didn't have enough money
To keep all their actors
On the payroll

So they let go of three people
All women
And I was one of them

They sent me right back to Connecticut
And Beau couldn't stop them
Even if he had wanted to

And stupid me
I spent so much time throwing my boss under the bus
That I forgot to get dirt
On the people I needed to get dirt on

I moved back home
I finished school
I married a politician

I became a real live Senator's wife

And if you think we all sound crazy
All the former members
Of the acting company

Go spend some time in D.C.
They'll show you what crazy is

I still feel a little bit bad
About betraying Beau
All these years later

I look much older than this
In real life

But this is theater, isn't it?

And we were all allowed to come
In our best costumes
Anger and shame and sadness
They all sort of
Fall by the wayside
As the years go on

But the looks on the faces
Of the people you've hurt
The people you've really hurt

Those stay right where they are