BY DUSICA SUE MALESEVIC | New Mexico, the late ’70s: Cheryl King is having problems with her live-in boyfriend — he wants her out of the apartment.
King knows she needs a job, but waiting tables is unappealing. She passes a topless club with a sign reading “Dancers Wanted.” Okay, she thinks, that might work.
She walks in and wants to immediately walk out, but a man who works there gets her a loaner nightie. “I put it on and I’m dancing barefoot on this dirty parquet floor,” she recalled.
While the first time was not necessarily stellar, King does become a topless dancer, makes enough money to get away from her boyfriend and something else happens — something big that puts King on a trajectory that lands her squarely in the New York City theater world.
“It turned out that I was kind of good at it,” King told Chelsea Now by phone. “And I liked being funny. It turned out I was funny. The tits thing didn’t bother me, really.”
King’s discovery that she liked being funny propelled her to the nicest strip club in town, then to audition for a visiting theater company and snag a part. The show included a mime, and King was smitten. “I fell in love with mime,” she said. “I had never even seen mime [before].”
When the show closed, she decided to leave Albuquerque and move to Atlanta. There, it just so happened that mime, “for the only time in the history of man was actually popular.”
“The Shields and Yarnell Show” was playing on CBS and King starting studying the art, leading to paid work as a mime and an eventual tour of the country. The practice has served her to this day at her theater in Chelsea, Stage Left Studio. (Chelsea Now’s sister publication, Gay City News, is a corporate sponsor of Stage Left.)
Stage Left, on the sixth floor of 214 W. 30th St. (btw. Seventh & Eighth Aves.), is a fairly small theater, she explained, “so you can’t have giant sets…so I use mime a lot and I teach mime. It’s a great skill. It’s magic, you know, because it is both there and not there.”
After working as a mime, King transitioned to stand-up comedy. She already had mime bits that were humorous and auditioned at a comedy club at Atlanta.
“I learned my craft as a stand-up working on the road,” she said.
For 13 years, she made a living as a comic, moving from the opening act to the headliner. But by 1989, tired of the lonely lifestyle, she moved to New York City with the idea that she wanted to do something different. She knew she wanted to write a solo show and the city seemed an ideal place to work the comedy circuit, take classes and develop a sense of theater.
An outgrowth of this was her show “not a nice girl.” She then realized that being a stand-up is different than being an actor.
“As a stand-up, you kind of develop your persona and that’s what you sell, but as an actor, you actually need to be able to inhabit the character — and that’s a different set of skills,” she explained. “So I realized I needed to become an actor if I wanted to do the show that I wrote any justice.”
She began studying acting with actor, director, teacher and performance coach Carol Fox Prescott.
“So then I discovered theater, and went, oh, this is where I’ve been headed my whole life,” she said.
She started working as Prescott’s assistant. One of her duties was to find people to rent her teacher’s Manhattan space. Prescott taught classes there, but needed to subsidize it when she wasn’t using it.
While searching for black box theaters where she could perform her solo show — and finding spaces that were bad, expensive, poorly maintained or all of the above, King began to consider having a space of her own. “I thought I could better than that,” she recalled. “I definitely could do better than that.”
After Prescott lost her space, King figured she if she got her own space, she would have one client, at least. In 2005, she opened her theater on W. 37th St. (btw. Ninth & Tenth Aves.).
“And then I realized, oh God, I’m going to have to be a theater manager,” she said with a laugh.
Stage Left made it’s home there for five years until the building was sold. She found Stage Left’s current location in Chelsea and built it out, investing a tremendous amount of money and effort, she said.
Unfortunately, the theater’s run is coming to an end. King said that she is moving out at the end of July because rent has become too expensive.
Artists are fleeing the city as prices and rents rise and they comprise a large part of my business, said King. As for audiences, many work two jobs to pay bills and thus have less disposable income for tickets. “So income is going down and expenses are going up,” she lamented.
King has also grown weary of being a theater manager whose time is spent on marketing, communicating, scheduling, drawing up contracts and cleaning the theater. She said she can’t afford to hire someone to do it. Instead, she will be dividing her time between focusing on her own art and helping others shape their work.
But there are still many great performances to see before the theater closes in mid-July. Beginning next week, the seventh edition of her Left Out Festival will be presented. It grew out of King’s desire to advocate for queer culture.
In 2008, she said, transgender and queer culture was struggling even more so than today and she wanted to help the Bailey House, an organization that for over 30 years has offered housing and support services for those living with HIV/AIDS.
“Then I folded it all into one thing: I’m doing something I want to do, I’ve got a beneficiary who deserves the thing [and] it’s a public forum to talk about these issues,” she said.
The festival took off and was a huge success, said King.
The Left Out Festival includes selected shorts, solo shows and full-length plays. It will run from April 15–May 5.
As part of Left Out, King will be performing in playwright Topher Cusumano’s “Getting Away With Mother.” It concerns Avery (Thomas Dane), a writer with one book under his belt (“Ass Backwards”). In the middle of the night, his estranged mother, Matilda, played by King, shows up at his door. He wants her to go away, but she does not relent. A deed will be revealed that changes their relationship as Avery struggles with his sophomore book effort. Already having spent his book advance money, Avery’s agent comes a-knocking as well — wanting a manuscript that isn’t even close to complete.
It’s very funny, said King, who is excited to be a part of the play (which has one performance, April 24 at 7:30 p.m.).
The best thing about running a theater, she said, has been the development of a network of artists that have created a sense of community and camaraderie. She has made too many deep friendships to count — and that, she emphasized, is the biggest and most beautiful thing that she has gotten from this experience.
As for the one-time mime and stand-up, King is off on a new adventure. She will travel the country, and possibly abroad, working, acting, directing and creating art. Already the writer of the “Page to Stage” blog, she is considering a new one: “Cheryl King Art Tinker,” because that is what she does, she said. She tinkers with people’s art.
For more information on the Left Out Festival and other upcoming productions, visit stageleftstudio.net.
