PLUME: In transitioning out of the college atmosphere, what was the biggest step? Because essentially, I’m assuming, you’ve had this tight-knit group for, what, eight years at that point?

SPINER: Yeah, or so.

PLUME: A repertoire group, I guess it had become by that point…

SPINER: Practically.

PLUME: What was it like taking that leap out of that.

SPINER: Scary. I mean, it was taking a leap out - because I was still living in my hometown, and I went to New York. That was one of the scariest propositions ever. I didn’t know anything about New York or what it was like to live in a big city like that.

PLUME: What was the biggest culture shock?

SPINER: Snow. Really, cold and snow - I didn’t think I was going to make it through the first six months that I was there. I thought I was going to die.

PLUME: You must have looked back at the irony of standing in front of that air conditioner…

SPINER: Yeah, it’s true. I went to New York January 1st, I think, 1971 or ‘72.

PLUME: It was one of the big blizzard years, wasn’t it?

SPINER: It was unbelievable. I went to Times Square, and it was New Year’s Eve. I went to Times Square and came down with the Hong Kong flu the next day.

PLUME: Welcome to New York.

SPINER: Yeah - and literally as sick as a dog for a month. Every time I went outside, it was like ice - freezing, horrible. I thought, “I just cannot live here. How do people do this?” I remember one time I was walking down the street, and all the street lights were out. The street lamps had been blown out or something - because that was a tougher time in New York, the ’70s. I was walking down this dark street in the snow and one of the lenses of my glasses popped out of the frame - I guess from just expanding or something, it just like popped out. So I couldn’t really see …

SPINER: It really was, and I’m like feeling on the snow with my bare hand to try feel for the lens, and just as my hand touched it, the other one popped out. I thought I wanted to just lay down in the snow and perish at that point - let them find me with my little frames with no glass in them.

PLUME: You’ve got to think that the universe is telling you something. I guess it’s kind of a damper on getting work right away, when you get sick once you get there…

SPINER: Well, I mean really, I knew nothing about it. Nothing. That was the one area in which we didn’t have any training - like what to expect… even just the groundwork of beginning a career. I didn’t have pictures and resumes… I didn’t know anything about that stuff.

PLUME: So once you actually regained your health, how do you even get started on something like that? Do you have anyone you can ask, or is it just, “I guess I should get this.”

SPINER: I asked people, and I found out you buy the trade papers and go to cattle calls and that kind of stuff. I guess the first job I got in New York - well, I drove a cab in New York, first. Both my friend Tommy Schlamme and I, who I roomed with, we both drove cabs. Fortunately I only had to do it for about six months, because I got a job. The first job I got was a production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which is an amazing building. At that time, there was a theater company there called the Chelsea Theater Company, which was a really great company at the time - they did some really cool stuff. I went to a cattle call for a musical called Polly, which was the sequel to The Beggar’s Opera, that was hardly ever done. I think I waited about six hours to audition, there were so many people there. I finally came on, I did a song - I did the “Indian Love Call” - and at the end of it, the director said to me, “Were you kidding, or were you serious?” And I had to really think about it for a minute. I said, “I think I was kidding.” And he went, “Okay.” When I got home, they had offered me the job, which was a character who had no name.

PLUME: How do you put that on a resume?

SPINER: This no-named character? Well, as it turned out, the play was about Macheath and his group, the guys from the Beggar’s Opera, who land in the West Indies, where they meet the Indians who are kind of the noble savages - and I was one of Macheath’s pirates. There was a big battle, and I remember I was the first pirate killed, and as I fell offstage they tore my clothes off and painted me red and I came in the other side as one of the Indians.

PLUME: So you were versatile.

SPINER: I was - even then. I do know that the first day, they had a bunch of weapons out and I pulled out this knife that was like one of those things you see on a cartoon - those squiggly knives, you know? So I said, “Can I call my character Dagger, the Sailor?” and they said, “That’d be fine.” So that was what went on my resume.

PLUME: You can’t beat that. I’m assuming that was off-Broadway.

SPINER: Yep.

PLUME: There are some people, I guess, that spend their entire careers doing off-Broadway shows…

SPINER: Which, by the way, is the best theater in New York, you know.

PLUME: Because it’s the most experimental and risk-taking?

SPINER: Well, exactly. It’s the stuff that you want to go see. Often you find yourself in a Broadway show, and you get to the theater and there’s this line of buses and a sea of blue hair when you walk out.

PLUME: Welcome to the Ladies’ Guild of Tulsa.

SPINER: Exactly … and that’s not the kind of an audience that would come to an off-Broadway show. I felt, really, the more interesting work was generally off-Broadway.

PLUME: Do you think it’s also because, I guess on off-Broadway you get a lot more originals, as opposed to Broadway - especially now that revivals are pretty much what Broadway is built on.

SPINER: Yeah, that’s true.

PLUME: I guess you’re always standing in the shadow of who the other 15 people were that originated and played a given role.

SPINER: Yeah, exactly. Although that’s true also of Shakespeare and Chekhov and that kind of stuff.

PLUME: When you’re an actor starting out in New York and off-Broadway, is the Grail Broadway? What was your Grail at that time - Broadway, Hollywood, or movies?

SPINER: At that time, for me - the Grail for me, in the beginning - was the New York Shakespeare Festival. It was Joe Papp and the Shakespeare Festival, and that was where anyone who wanted to be a serious actor wanted to work.

PLUME: How exclusive was that?

SPINER: It was hard… it was tough. I ultimately worked there a couple of times, but it was not easy getting a job there.

PLUME: What was the process for trying to crack that?

SPINER: Well, it was always just a matter of luck that you would wind up in something. I did a reading of a play - it was a play from Toronto called Leave It to Beaver Is Dead, that was written and directed by Des McAnuff. Des was a young, hot director at the time, and he’d had a success with this piece in Toronto. So he did a reading of it that I participated in at the public theater, and Joe Papp decided “Okay, let’s do this.” So I got to be in a show at the public theater. That was my introduction to them.

PLUME: Was the process any different, as far as the actual putting on of the show, than what you’d experienced up to that point?

SPINER: No, no, that’s the amazing thing - and even today, every show I do, the process is no different than what it was with Cecil Pickett at Bellaire High School.

PLUME: So, in that aspect, he prepared you quite well for the actual production process?

SPINER: I think the biggest difference is that when I do a Broadway show now, my mom doesn’t make my clothes. She doesn’t make the costume - but sometimes I wish she had.

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