Three days before the opening of Booth, director David Cromer is watching the cast rehearse a scene the playwright, Austin Pendleton, rewrote and distributed two nights before. He watches silently, cheek resting in the palm of his hand, knees bouncing up and down. Occasionally he gets up and moves to a different place in the makeshift, 50-seat theater.
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Cromer immerses himself so completely in his work that his life and the plays often become indistinguishable. When he directed On the Bum in 1995 he was obsessed with the main character. “I was busting everyone’s chops about the color of her hair and the color of her dress,” he says. “It had to be this green dress, and she had to have this bright red hair. It wasn’t until my mom came to see the play that I realized I was basing that entirely on a photograph of my mother from the 1930s.” Last year when he played the terminally ill Edmund Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey Into Night he became convinced that he had AIDS or lung cancer, though he refused to see a doctor. “Why should I go to the doctor?” he said. “So he can tell me I’m dying?”
Cromer left Big Game. He took acting jobs, worked as a data editor, and taught part-time at Columbia. And he directed a couple of plays, but they weren’t hits. In 1998 he was using scenes from Tony Kushner’s Angels in America in one of his classes, and he realized he wanted to put it on. He spent a year and a half drumming up money and assembling a group of actors. “Ninety percent of my job is casting the right people,” he says. “Then I just facilitate what they do.”
