Theater Kid
by Kitty Kelley
Being poor, adopted, gay, and Jewish fueled Jeffrey Seller to become a multimillionaire and then spiraled him into psychotherapy four days a week for 12 years. “I always felt like an outsider,” he writes in his Broadway memoir, Theater Kid. But he admits that being a Jew probably saved his life and paved the way to his immense success.
Growing up in “Cardboard Village,” a housing project east of Detroit, young Jeff auditioned for the annual Purim play at Temple Israel, which tells the Old Testament story of Esther, the clever Jewish queen who saves her people from the villain Haman. Too young then and not yet “out,” the 9-year-old does not audition for the role of Esther. Instead, he’s cast as a sailor in the chorus, and from that experience, he falls in love with theater.
The day after the performance, Seller writes a play for himself and his two fourth-grade pals called “Adventureland.” He shows it to his English teacher and begs her to let him stage it. She agrees, recognizing what she calls “a theater kid,” and Seller becomes a playwright, director, actor, and producer, which charts the rest of his days. He acts and directs plays throughout grade school, high school, and college at the University of Michigan, which he attends on student aid. He spends his summers as a theater counselor at Camp Tamarack.
While grateful for his first theater experience with the Purim play, Seller remains resentful of the synagogue in Detroit that humiliated him as a have-not. “This wealthy temple that caters to its many affluent members has underscored my shame at being poor and my feeling that I am less than the other kids and families who attend,” he writes, adding, “We were so broke we went on welfare.”
Today, at 60, Seller is worth millions, having produced hugely successful plays such as “Avenue Q” and “In the Heights,” and winning four best-musical Tony awards. He’s also the only person in Broadway history to have produced two Pulitzer Prize-winning musicals, “Rent” and “Hamilton.” He’s amassed producer credits for hits like “The Cher Show,” “Sweeney Todd,” and “West Side Story,” as well as for clunkers like “The Last Ship” with Sting. “Money, sex, and ambition is my life,” Seller tells the New York Times.
While no longer poor and living in the projects, the Broadway producer remains adopted, gay, and Jewish, which, he shares, leads him into intense psychotherapy, and finally to writing this book. “I wrote it for everybody who has ever felt left out.”
He divides his memoir into three acts, similar to a theater script. Act I features young Jeff, who’s advised by a friend’s mother to introduce himself as Jeffrey because “it sounds better.” Before he’s in first grade, Seller learns he’s adopted, which he feels isn’t as bad as being poor and living in a “neighborhood where the parents have less: less money, less education, less stability and the kids are deemed less: less smart, less cooperative, less likely to succeed…I want to escape the poverty that entraps me and my dark dour family.” He calls his father “a loser.”
Act II has Seller graduating from college in 1986, heading for New York City, and coming out to his parents, who shrug. “It’s like being right- or left-handed,” says his father. But it’s a devastating time for gays, with the onslaught of the AIDS crisis. “It inhibited me physically,” Seller writes. “I was so afraid of death…of getting sick.”
Thomas Mallon also addresses that paralyzing fear in his new book, The Very Heart of It: New York Diaries, 1983-1994. In rereading his extracts of those years, Mallon writes in his preface that “the relentless spread of AIDS constantly thwarted the happy entries,” adding that the deaths of friends and lovers plunged him into a whirlwind of grief and fear. Pages later, he observes, “To think there was a time when Anita Bryant was all we had to worry about.”
Act III for Seller whirls him into the stratosphere of financial success, proving his assumption “that I can bend the world to my will if I try hard enough.” Still, he remains so terrified of AIDS that he signs up with the Gay Community Center for a seminar called “Making Safe Sex Fun!” His conclusion? “Bottom line: the connection between sex and death doesn’t go away.” Yet pages later, he writes in wildly X-rated detail about a sexual encounter with two strangers in a steam bath on his 30th birthday.
Seller sprinkles every page of this book with name-drops: “When our next-door neighbor Kurt Vonnegut stopped by one afternoon for an informal lunch…” To see the first run-through of “Hamilton,” “I called Mike Nichols, acquaintance, supporter, friend.” So many names, but no index. No footnotes or chapter notes, either, despite pages and pages of quotes and verbatim recollections of long conversations from his youth, all of which the author attributes to “my phenomenal memory.” Spotlighting his professional achievements, he makes only slight mention of his personal life, including his former lover, Josh Lehrer, with whom he lived for 26 years, and the two children they adopted and raised together.
There are, instead, clever one-liners written by a Broadway obsessive. “Going to see the Shuberts [theater owners Bernie Jacobs and Gerry Schoenfeld] is like going to see the Wizard…They remind me of the Muppet Show hecklers, Statler and Waldorf, except they are not even a little bit funny.” The Shuberts’ competitor, Jimmy Nederlander, gets described as “a crap shooter from Guys and Dolls.”
Seller writes that, ultimately, Theater Kid is a book for gays who love musicals:
“Musicals make me feel good in a way that no other experience can, except sex. There, I said it. Musicals and sex. I can’t live without sex; I can’t live without musicals.”
And that’s a wrap.
Crossposted with Washington Independent Review of Books