RESIDENT (Serving Midtown)
Vol. 5 No. 28 August 1-7, ’97

Renting and Raving
Cuisinart Presents Five tales of Life in Hell’s Kitchen
by Rick McKay

Stephen Sondheim said it best: “It’s a city of strangers.” No place else in New York City crystallizes that sentiment more than the neighborhood into which Irish immigrants poured after the potato famine of 1845. So many crowded into each room of the tenement buildings lining the avenues west of Broadway between 37th and 57th streets that in the summer, when the heat became insufferable, they would say it was hotter than… “Hell’s Kitchen” – and the name stuck.
A century-and-a-half later, a young writer named David Caudle left the cultural famine of Los Angeles and the security of a position at Nickelodeon to make his name as a writer in New York City. The first apartment he found was a walk-up on Ninth Avenue in the 40s. When he asked the real estate agent if it was loud at night, the agent snorted: “How do I know? Do I live here?” The floors were painted dark brown (the better to camouflage the roaches) and were still wet when he looked at the empty studio. As the annual Ninth Avenue Food Fair began the next day, Caudle was re-painting the bare apartment. As he went in and out of the building that day Caudle couldn’t help but feel that he was now one of the millions of New Yorkers torn between fighting for space and trying somehow to connect with another human being. He soon began to realize that he was living in a building full of strangers, stacked one cubicle on top another. It didn’t take the writer long to begin Hell’s Cuisinart, the new play that just opened at the Samuel Beckett Theatre (410 W. 42nd St.), in where else—Hell’s Kitchen.
Hell’s Cuisinart is five vignettes taking place simultaneously on a set that flawlessly reproduces the identical studio apartments in the legendary neighborhood. The characters are all forced by some economic or emotional factor to live in an incredibly small space in America’s largest city. The play opens with a fresh-off-the-farm young couple replicating Caudle’s experience with a real estate agent in a tiny studio. Before the play ends we have visited a closeted gay man who is afraid to bring his drag queen lover home for Thanksgiving to his small-minded “Pennsyltucky” town; a New-Jersey nine-to-fiver who borrows her brother’s place for an anonymous carnal rendezvous; a young woman who is forced by hard times to share her single room with a young actor- each with assigned sleeping shifts to avoid actually “touching” each other; and the climax finds a non-communicative husband whose lonely wife dreams of being “madcap” and resorts to desperate measures before the evening ends.
The characters are brought to life by a talented cast, as you slowly realize that they have each chosen this tiny living space to force themselves into a confrontational encounter. They are people trapped in their skins who long for contact with someone, or perhaps anyone. They range from lovers who hardly know each other to a man who is followed home from Burger King by a Belgian who cannot speak a word of English.
“Helena Handbasket,” is the story of the lonely wife who goes from temp job to temp job, and the actress who plays the role, Leslie Nipkow, has no problem understanding Helena. Nipkow has lived in Hell’s Kitchen for 10 years and understands the bleakness of temping, too. “I have been doing it for 12 years and have been fired from so many jobs. I see the people who came here with a dream and end up just going to work and then hiding in their tiny apartments at night.” This combination of a young, gamine Shirley MacLaine, Geraldine Page and Sandy Dennis grew up on a farm in Maryland and came to New York to be an actress. She has been fortunate enough to snare a fair share of acting roles—albeit not always under the conditions she would prefer. “I have worked in some of the holes of New York,” she says.
The director, Andrew Volkoff, has not had a day off since July 4. He has rehearsed seven days a week to get Hell’s Cuisinart on its feet – while holding down a full-time job. “It can be exhausting—it is like directing five one-act plays a night—but it’s worth it just to see the reaction of the audience last night. They laughed all the way through!” Volkoff has worked at Lincoln Center and Manhattan Theatre Club with the likes of Athol Fugard, Julie Andrews and Val Kilmer, but loves the flexibility of Caudle’s writing. “He is surprising. No one likes to see work that is predictable and David never is,” says Volkoff. “This is a play about people needing to belong in a city that tells you ‘take it or leave it.’”
Between acts, jazz chanteuse Cynthia Crane croons Gershwin’s “Changing My Tune,” optimistic that the job, relationship or bigger apartment is just around the corner.
And maybe they are. Nipkow recently moved to Manhattan Plaza, the high-rise apartment complex that was created for members of the performing arts and is Mecca to a New York actor. It is conveniently located just across the street from the Beckett Theatre. There maybe a temp job or two left for Nipkow, but not many. Volkoff is already hard at work on his next production, Mr. Clean, a one-man show about nude housekeeping, also to be produced in Hell’s Kitchen. The playwright is at work on his next piece, too, but is still being kept busy with Cuisinart. Filmmaker Anezka Sebek, who adapted Caudle’s earlier piece, Landfill, is already beginning plans to film this one. Watch for them both to make the festival circuit in the next year.
Meanwhile, people have been sniffing around Cuisinart as a potential television pilot. Caudle doesn’t have time to think about that right now, though, as his life is in a bit of disarray. This week, while his play was opening off Broadway, his apartment was broken into and robbed. “It’s alright, I just figure it was my turn,” he says. At least the burglars seemed to have some sense of compassion. They stole his television and VCR, but left his computer. They must have seen his work and wanted to let him keep writing. And besides, who needs a television in Hell’s Kitchen?