Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me_ (And Other Concerns) - Mindy Kaling [31]
In 2002, the Fringe Festival named us Best Play of all five hundred shows. The New Yorker wrote of the show: “Goofy, funny, and improbably believable … Kaling and Withers have created one of the most appealing male-bonding stories since Damon and Pythias. Or Oscar and Felix.” That quote was easy to access because I have it tattooed on my clavicle.
This is when our lives started to change.
Producers got in touch with us to transfer the show to Off-Broadway. We got a director, we got a budget, and we could finally return our costumes to Brenda’s brothers. The show went up at P.S. 122, a beautiful theater in the East Village that at one point had been a public school. There’s a special level of cool for buildings in Manhattan that have at one point been something else. Someone might say to you, knowingly, “Oh, did you know this theater used to be a zipper factory?” or “You obviously know this discotheque used to be church, right?” or “We are eating in a restaurant that at one point was a typhoid containment center.” That’s what I love about New York. If Rikers Island ever goes under, I know André Balazs will have that place turned into a destination hotel for urban metrosexuals within a month, tops. People will sit in their cell/hotel rooms and say, “You know a convicted sex offender used to live in this cell, right?” The solitary confinement unit will be the honeymoon suite.
The show was short enough that we could do two shows a night. That in itself was challenging, because in the play, the twenty-one-year-old Ben tries to impress Matt by chugging an entire twelve-ounce bottle of apple juice in one gulp. So I actually gulped two bottles a night, though the apple juice was diluted. As I’ve written about in great detail in this book, I’m no dainty girl, but I’m a not a camel, either, and doing that twice in one evening was pretty nauseating.
Word of mouth from the Fringe helped sales. Nicole Kidman and Steve Martin coincidentally came to see the show on the same night, and before long the show was selling out so much that we had to add a third performance a night. This meant three bottles of diluted apple juice. By the third curtain call of the night I had to consciously tell myself not to barf when we took our bows. I have never been so excited to hold back vomit.
BLOODSHED
On the night that Bruce Weber of the New York Times was reviewing the show, I accidentally punched Brenda in the face and broke her nose.
How does one accidentally fracture the face of one’s best friend? Well, in my defense, there is a fight sequence in the play. It happens toward the very end. Matt has been so antagonized by Ben’s immaturity that he tells him he has no talent. Ben, in the heat of the moment, punches Matt. It was a choreographed punch that we had worked on for weeks. But, I don’t know, maybe I was drunk on apple juice, because my fist connected with her nose. It made a funny little cracking noise, which, I should probably note that Brenda did not immediately recognize as funny. That’s because Brenda was too busy bleeding. Her shirt was instantly soaked with blood. Noses, for the record, bleed like crazy. It looked like I had stabbed her in the face. The audience collectively gasped; there was a long beat of confused silence during which Bren looked at the blood on her hand and then up at me. Then the house manager turned on the lights, and Brenda ran offstage.
Brenda held paper towels to her bleeding face, and I stood by her dumbly, completely in shock at what I had done. Our director David Warren appeared backstage moments later. He walked over to us briskly, with the imperturbable cool of a soldier who dismantles explosives for a living: “You have to finish. The show must go on. Go.” There was no pussyfooting