What was YOUR first Frank experience?

We had a fundraiser last week, and when news of this upcoming blog leaked around the crowd, the idea for detailing various "points of entry" on a Frank blog got people ALL excited. The crowd who had been gabbing all had met Frank at different stages. "FARMYARD!" "TOP GIRLS!" "QUARTET!" Sounds like a good jumping off point for me. It's always curious to hear when people met Frank, and how that introduction influenced their perception. Some of the pieces have been brutal, I'm sure, scaring people off for good (like the first date couple who came to FARMYARD). And some of the "easier" pieces like THE CHEKHOV PROJECT have also created dubious first impressions. I directed the first show, so I go way back. Bernadette and I decided to do a gritty project to offset the skills required by her growing success as a commercial voice talent; FARMYARD was the ticket, a heartbreakingly nasty little piece about how inhumane we humans are to each other, with more silence than dialogue. We had no idea about how to produce a piece of theatre, and we were much less interested in starting a theatre company. Somehow we wrangled all the pieces of the production, and we staged the play in a fourth floor studio of the Rossmor building in St. Paul, long a home to many artists but recently converted to condos. The brutality of the play
gave some folks pause, but the performance was excellent, and led to another production and yet another. Seventeen years later, the similarly harsh scenes in Suzan-Lori Parks' FUCKING A just seem to reiterate the idea present in our original production, that is, sometimes this world isn't a very nice place for some people.

Where did you come into the party?