Come to the Edge_ A Memoir - Christina Haag [35]
For me, these meetings were a relief from the rigidity of Juilliard. Legend has it that Robin Williams, an alumnus, called it boot camp, and on many days that’s what it felt like. For John, they were a way to hold on to his love of the theater. Robin Saex knew that he missed acting. Although he had majored in history at Brown, he’d appeared in plays there with authors as varied as Shakespeare, Pinero, Rabe, and O’Casey. She sensed that we would work well together and often spoke of finding the right vehicle. The play she found was Winners. It was a perfect fit.
Brian Friel is one of Ireland’s most prominent playwrights. He was born in Omagh, county Tyrone, in 1929 but grew up in Derry. His more notable plays include Philadelphia, Here I Come!; Translations; and Dancing at Lughnasa, which would receive the Tony for Best Play in 1992. In 1980, along with actor Stephen Rea, he had co-founded Field Day, a theater company and literary movement that sought to redefine Irish cultural identity. He also happened to be one of my favorite playwrights. At twenty, while traveling through Dublin, I had attended the opening night of Faith Healer at the Abbey Theatre, and when, by chance, I was introduced to him, without thinking I bowed slightly. It was as if I’d met a rock star.
Winners had premiered at the Gate Theatre in Dublin in 1967 before coming to Broadway. It’s really one part of a two-part play, Lovers: Winners and Losers. Losers is about a middle-aged couple married for many years, but Winners is about young love. It’s often performed on its own, as we did in our production.
Maggie Enright and Joseph Brennan are seventeen and seventeen and a half, respectively, and Catholic. It’s a warm day in June, a Saturday, and they are studying for final exams on Ardnageeha, the hill above their town. Mag is “intelligent but scattered” and Joe dreams of becoming a math teacher. They’re to be married in three weeks because Mag is pregnant. As they look out over Ballymore, they fight, they sleep, they laugh, and they tease; they profess their love and talk about the future.
When we reached the subway stop at Sheridan Square, John suggested that we enjoy the day. He would walk me to Fourteenth Street, and I could get the subway there. Usually we parted here. He’d get on his bike, and I would head to Brooklyn, where I’d moved the month before, or to my boyfriend’s on the Upper West Side. But today we got ice cream. He ordered a pistachio double scoop, and I got coffee swirl. As the woman at the register handed him his change, she seemed suddenly flummoxed.
“What’s your name?” she said.
“John.”
“John what?”
“Haag. John Haag.”
“Spell it,” she insisted, her eyes narrowing.
“H-a-a-g.”
“You positive? You related to the General?”
He told her he was a Democrat, and we made for the door.
“Wait!” she cried out, trying to enlist me. “Do you know who he looks like? I mean, who does he look like if you didn’t know him?”
“Richard Gere,” I deadpanned. “Definitely Richard Gere.”
“Oh no, he looks like John-John!”
Outside in the sun, we laughed. “You need a persona,” I said, as he moved to unlock the heavy chains that bound his bike to a nearby street sign. He handed me his cone and nodded. When he turned his back I thought, He has to do this all the time. I must have known it in the years before, but the worlds of high school and college had been cocoons of a sort and it was only there, by the newsstand at Sheridan Square, that I grasped that life, in the smallest of ways, even getting ice cream, was very different for him.
“You may be right about that,” he said, taking his cone back, the bike balanced with one hand. “But Richard Gere … I’m way better-looking.” He winked, then bit into his pistachio.
“How’s yours?” he asked as we walked.
“Yum,” I said. “Perfection.”
“Mine tastes a little funny. Smell it.”
We stopped,