
A COMPANY OF THREE
A
novel by Varley O'Connor
A Non-review by
J. Stefan-cole
You
know all those hot looking New York City waiters and waitresses
you shamelessly flirt with? How many of them do you suppose
are aspiring actors? Varley O'Connor's novel, A COMPANY
of THREE; Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2003, reveals
the world of struggling actors from the inside out, from
having been an actor herself.
Robert Holt, Patrick O'Doherty and Irene Jane Walpers team
up after meeting in the coveted scene-study class of the
notorious Andre Sadovsky. They share everything from finances
to sex, shoulders to cry on and finally the same roof. This
is New York City of the seventies, gritty but also cheaper
and friendlier, according to the author, to dreams. A time
before Rudy Giuliani turned Times Square into a Disney theme
park and Donald Trump and his ilk turned the city's real
property into an Olympus only god-like wealth could afford.
There was a living art scene with galleries popping up,
and the beginnings of Off Off Broadway, all wide open to
innovative ideas, good, terrible and in between. Money wasn't
yet the bottom line and actors did not need a Hollywood
dollar sign stamped on their foreheads to find work. There
was plenty of competition, but also lots of opportunity;
all it took was hanging on hard on to hope, adjusting the
dream where needed, and a little luck.
The novel gets off go a bit of a slow start establishing
the characters. I felt at times I was hearing about them
more than discovering them. I would have liked to have seen
more of Robert waiting tables, or Irene with one of her
sugar daddies, and maybe followed Patrick after bartending
as he walked the mean, three AM city streets. Robert is
the narrator; sturdy, normal and, unlike Patrick and Irene,
nearly always lands on his feet. He is good looking with
a lonely streak, an apparent talent for acting (though this
comes into question later) and a nice amount of luck. Patrick
is an oddity, bird-like face and tall--six foot five--a
former dancer, a potential star in that medium until he
mysteriously smashed a knee cap (dancing mishap or pre-arranged
car crash?). Acting is a fall back position for Patrick
who has initially made it into Andre's class by virtue of
his undeniable presence. Patrick is also gay and, compared
to Robert, utterly luckless. His personal life is an enigma
intensified by a penchant for fictionalizing. Enter Irene
Jane, a firecracker of a girl in cowboy boots, straight
out of Coffeyville, Kansas, she's intense, talented and
gorgeous--a character that in real life would quickly get
on my nerves because she's so on all the time, but I qualify--my
nerves, she makes an entertaining character to read.
Robert falls hard for Irene but wavers between bewitched
fascination and infuriated exasperation. They are a curious
threesome. Robert: "Patrick and I were veterans. Acting
had drawn us together. Irene, the last potent elixir, entangled
us hopelessly." Affinities, a common goal, a common
enemy, can make for unlikely alliances. The trio becomes
a kind of ad hoc family, sticking together long after differences
and life itself would have pulled most friendships apart.
This is an endearing quality in the book, these comrades-at-arms
who at times become dangerously entwined. Robert tries to
keep things sane, but he gets breaks the other two don't.
He lands a few high profile TV commercials playing smiley-faced
dads, which segues into a soap opera part to the tune of
$20,000 a month. Soap opera, of course, is not his ideal,
only a high-priced compromise. He moves ahead, but wonders
if the work is even acting. O'Connor does a funny send up
of him coming to grips with the emptiness of daytime melodrama
where an emotional decision can take ten episodes to come
about, with no themes and thrown together characters created
by limp writing. The hope is that soaps will lead back to
the stage, to a bigger and brighter future. This is the
hope of every great compromise, that it will not corrupt
the gift and swallow the person.
Success does not go to Robert's head. We don't get to see
him interact much, though, in his new role. His lonliness
again? He has cruised out of the hand-to-mouth waiting tables
by night, auditioning by day world that Irene and Patrick
still inhabit. He stays in the apartment they share on grungy
Fourteenth Street, and offers to support Irene financially
as he tries to find opportunities for a flagging Patrick.
He still has it bad for Irene in spite of her having taken
up, disastrously, with Andre; ever the more practical, except
where she is concerned. Eventually there is squabbling:
Robert to Irene who has just insulted him:"'You're
such an actress, arrogant and temperamental and so fucking
emotionally draining I've just about had it.' At that, she
swept out the door--only Patrick made her come back and
apologize, ruining the exit." A company of three.
Patrick and Irene are stand bys to Robert's success. A
classic flash point: one succeeds, how do the others react?
How does the successful one treat the other's stagnation?
Robert wants to remain sympathetic, though he develops a
whininess at times, as if he's carrying the weight of the
world. He feels protective after Irene confides that a sleazy
producer tried to get her to couch audition: "I couldn't
scold her, I couldn't judge her. Here was this great looking
woman who should have been having a wonderful life, with
this spectacular talent that no one cared anything about,
and now she felt ashamed, as if it were her fault some pervert
would grovel for a hand job." Yikes. Waitress!
The second half of the book really picks up. Robert brings
Patrick and Irene out to Missouri to star in regional theater
with him directing. The writing seems surer here, more pinned
to the ground. Arriving at Irene's house in Coffeyville,
Robert takes in the great plains: "The house was bigger
and blander than what I'd envisioned: ranch style, wood
and brick, late fifties. One lonely tree in the whole big
front yard. Silence, a distant buzzing of insects. No sunsets,
no clouds in the sky, just the unabating heat and a foretaste
of darkness, like the light was getting tired." The
scenes in Irene's Kansas rodeo town sing. We meet her hard-nosed
father whose routine consists of work, TV and suspecting
his daughter. Of her apparent unhappiness he says only,
"'That girl has never been contented and she never
will be.'" Her mother died when Irene was entering
her teens and she makes up for the loss by sleeping with
older cowboy types with names like Hook, a habit she continues
in New York. That led me to wonder if there isn't a disturbing
leitmotif here of art as therapy, or at least acting as
such.
Both Patrick and Irene deteriorate as disappointment becomes
the norm. Patrick takes a dark turn in his nocturnal wanderings
and Irene gets sucked in, possibly as compensation for her
own failings she wants to succeed in saving him. Quitting
a dream is probably the only real failure, but time is never
on the side of an actor. Or as Irene says: "'How long
can you keep doing something that nobody wants? I get so
tired of essentially saying Please, like me.'" Yeah,
and after waiting tables has lost its charm and no other
skills have been developed, where does an actor go? They
are not the only ones, what about the really fine musicians
you sometimes hear playing while waiting for the subway
car to roll in or books that die on hard drives? Questions
bubbles up; friendship and ambition and compromised dreams.
Varley O'Connor takes a hard look at a tough business, one
that, if anything, has gotten even tougher since Irene,
Patrick and Robert longed to take Broadway by storm.
©November 2003 J. Stefan-Cole
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