Judy Militare: CTC's Behind-The-Scenes Presence
The name Judy Militare has resonated to East End theater audiences since June of 1989, when she made her behind-scenes debut as stage manager for Tri-Light Productions' "The Women" at Guild Hall.
An invisible presence we knew was back there running almost every show to hit the boards, she did not, however, have a face for most of us.
At the urging of the director Sandy Rosen, Ms. Militare decided to "step out of the darkness into the light" before her 50th birthday and the millennium coincide in the year 2000. She would play the Sergeant in CTC Theater Live's current production of Irwin Shaw's moving antiwar drama, "Bury the Dead."
Opening Night Delayed
"The part requires yelling, and that's what I do backstage; I yell good," she said. "So I opened my mouth and put my foot in it and said yes. I got my script, learned my lines and movement, and braced myself for opening night."
"But the universe had other plans. 'You'll have to delay your opening night for two weeks, you're going to the hospital,' it told me."
Ms. Militare had been having chest pains for about a year, and during the rehearsal process, she said, she became unable "to stand or think."
A sonogram "introduced me to my gallstone," a formidable object eventually removed by surgery that left her stapled together and too weak to perform.
"I couldn't even make it through a metal detector," she laughed.
The Patient Recovers
Her daughter Andrea Gross, last seen as the hilarious maid Doreen in CTC Theater Live's "Waiting in the Wings," filled in splendidly for her mother.
A recent visit to Ms. Gross's Montauk apartment, where her mother, attended also by her younger daughter, Marcy, is recuperating, found the patient a little feverish but determined to give a good interview in that gallant style that says the show must go on.
"I'll be back as the Sergeant for the show's final weekend," she promised. "I don't know if we love me as an actor yet, but we're definitely going to find out. I think it may be a hoot. It'll be my first time on stage in quite a while."
Eight-Year-Old Ballerina
Ms. Militare began her theatrical career as a dancer in the Metropolitan Opera Ballet Company when she was only 8. Her father was Assemblyman for the 17th A.D. in Queens, later a New York State Supreme Court Justice, and her mother a politician's wife "who gave dinner parties, the whole nine yards."
Although it was alien to their regimented lives and her strict Roman Catholic upbringing, her parents gave her a chance to pursue her little girl's dream of becoming a ballerina.
One sweltering afternoon they took her to the old Met, before it moved to Lincoln Center, to audition along with 200 sweaty, screaming city kids. Among the 20 chosen, she began classes the following week, and stayed with the company for seven years.
"We traveled a lot, but my favorite part was not so much the dancing or the character parts in various operas as learning the workings of the theater."
Behind Scenes
"There was a wonderful old cage elevator up to the dance studios that took you through the prop department - it made me gasp. I spent all my free time with the seamstresses who were working on these incredibly heavy, beaded, gold-encrusted velveteen creations for 'Aida,' 'Cavalliera Rusticana,' 'Carmen,' et cetera. The dancing was just fun at that point."
Dancing led into acting, however, and Ms. Militare moved on to study at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, attending the Professional Children's School for her academic education.
Blame 'The Theater'
About this time she became "a little obstreperous," according to her parents, stripping her elbow-length hair white just before a visit to the family's summer house on Shelter Island. Her father blamed this rather typical teen-age gesture on The Theater.
"My mom took me to the hairdresser to get some kind of kind of ladylike color on my head because we had to go this testimonial dinner," Ms. Militare said. Shortly thereafter, she was packed off to the Chapel Hill School for Girls in Waltham, Mass., as a boarding student.
"My father hoped this would make me into a serious person, but it didn't work. To this day I drive him crazy. When he visited me at Southampton Hospital, I think it was partly to make sure I wasn't running up and down the corridors doing scenes from 'All That Jazz.' "
Once sprung from boarding school she considered joining the Peace Corps or the Army. When her parents suggested the U.S.O. instead, she ran away and married Ken Gross, a Juilliard graduate playing in the pit of "Follies" at the time. Andrea was born, and four years later, Marcy.
Then came divorce and a brief second marriage to a musician 20 years her senior, who gave her a summer house in Montauk as a wedding present before they split up.
"I was impressed. I said 'Oh, okay, I'll keep this, thank you. Now, I'm afraid you'll have to leave.' "
"We have a good relationship as long as we're not in the same room," she explained.
Ms. Militare, something of a jack-of-all-trades, raised her girls in New York, working in a law office, for The New York Times, and eventually founding her own audio-visual company that supplied fund-raising films to various charities.
Out Of The City
When Andrea was mugged in the subway on her way home from the High School of Music and Art 10 years ago, she determined to get her daughters out of the city. She sold her company, winterized her Montauk house, and moved in.
"After the first winter the girls looked at me and said, Mom, you're baking cookies and hanging curtains and you're really scaring us. Where is the pod that is our real mother? Please get a job. We can't stand coming home from school and having you smiling."
Ms. Militare got a job in a video store - "I've always flown by the seat of my pants, sometimes with a certain amount of prowess."
Ensconced
When the Community Theater Company's production of "Pajama Game" opened at Guild Hall in the spring of 1988, she took Andrea to see it.
"We were sitting house left. I thought it was a cute little theater. Then the show began; it had that fantastic dance number with Velaine Pfund and the late Michael Paoni. During intermission I looked at Andrea and said, 'Honey, you and I are going to be ensconced in this house.' "
"And guess what? We have been, for quite a long time now."
Theater Geek
Ms. Militare got keyed into backstage doings as an adult during a performance of "Sweeney Todd" at the Uris Theater.
"There I was weeping over Angela and Len, and suddenly I spotted these technicians up on a catwalk. Then the entire set moved hydraulically in a circle. It was mesmerizing. How did it work? I had no formal education on this."
She began to read voraciously about the technical side of the theater, and when Michael Disher put on "The Women" the following year, got her first gig as stage manager.
Barbara Bolton and Serena Seacat, who were in the cast, snagged her for "The Children's Hour," the CTC's next production. She's been ensconced ever since.
At The Controls
Stage-managing can best be compared to NASA's Mission Control, said Ms. Militare. "I'm usually backstage at a podium lit by a blue light, shrouded in black, with a script, a headset, several cups of coffee and, recently, a stool to sit on."
"My central headset is tuned in to all the technicians' headsets throughout the theater, and the show doesn't begin until I open my mouth. I make sure the hundreds of little components of the script, and the set, lighting, and sound designs, happen fully and naturally."
"I see to it that the phone rings when it's supposed to, the lights go up when they're supposed to, et cetera. I'm actually calling the show, moment by moment, making the play come to life."
Having "been embraced by the theater and the community" to the extent that she has - she now works for her friend and fellow actor Alan Court's decorative-tile and bathroom fixture company - Ms. Militare plans to spend the rest of her life on the East End.
"It's an easier, kinder, more favorable community than the city, and that's important for me and my daughters: my settling-down place, their stepping-off point. I'm ready to crone now, to become an old witch; they're ready for the world."
It's difficult to picture this vital woman in her 40s as a crone, however. Her stage-manager's mantra, repeated before every show, is: "If things are ready on the dark side of the moon, I would like to play the pipe drums."
A quote from "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," it means, she said, "I am doing my work in the dark. I would like to proceed, put it out into the universe now."
Hardly a retirement mantra.