The Sheila Variations

On staged readings

Max Sparber has a great post with advice for playwrights when having staged readings of their work.

Last year, I had two readings of the script I've written, one relatively informal, and one formal, and his words really ring true. I have been involved in more staged readings than I can count as an actress, and I have also participated in the Playwright/Directing Unit at the Actors Studio (a tedious task at times, but unbelievably useful for the playwright) and all of this prepared me, to some degree, to how it would feel being on the other side of the process. My concerns were different. As an actress in a staged reading, my only responsibility is to the playwright, to speak the words clearly (staged readings are usually about having the script be heard, it's a work in progress), and to commit to what is going on in the script to the best of my ability while holding script in hand. I am off the hook in a staged reading, as an actress. That's part of why they can be so fun. But when it was MY work being read, I paced in the back of the small performance space like a tiger, listening carefully to audience reaction, trying to FEEL what was happening between the molecules in the room: did that joke land? If it didn't get a laugh, why? There are many reasons why, and you have to take them all into account. Maybe the actor, who is reading, after all, bumbled the line a bit. Or maybe the line isn't funny. All bets are off at that point. You have to consider everything. You have to be at the very same moment: detached and attached.

It was exhilarating, and nervewracking, and I was so happy when it was over. It was illuminating, too: we had a QA afterwards, pretty informal, but what ended up happening was so helpful for me in moving forwards with my writing. I got the same comment from multiple people about the female character. There were questions. People were intrigued, don't get me wrong, but there was a sense that there might be a lack of clarity there somewhere. I also have a dreaded fear of being too obvious, which can keep me from saying what I mean, and this is something I need to work on. I have been reading Streetcar Named Desire and Long Day's Journey Into Night over and over these days, basically to remind myself how it is done, and although there are still mysteries in the characters, and I could talk about Blanche and Mitch and Stanley and Mary Tyrone all day long, there is never any doubt that the playwright knows what story he is telling. Tennessee Williams is not afraid to be clear. The last scene of Streetcar is a masterpiece. If you had held out any hope at all that Blanche could be saved, Williams disabuses you of those fantasies in a scene that is, what, 2 pages long? That's economy, that's clarity. It helps me to read those scenes again, those climactic scenes that work, to remind myself to not be afraid to put it all out there, to say, in no uncertain terms, what I mean. So when I got numerous comments about the female character, all along the same lines, I do remember thinking, "Okay, gotta look at that section ... something's not working there." An example of being both detached and attached. I am still amazed at myself that I was able to be in that space, because all I felt, inside, was ATTACHED.

As Max writes:

Ignore individual answers, as there are audience members out there who manage to get bewildered by The Family Circus, but pay attention to the answers as an aggregate. If there are areas of the play that confuses a number of people, it's probably actually confusing.

Yup. You have to know what to take in and what not to take in, but at the moment of the staged reading, it is best to keep your mouth shut and listen to everything. Do not defend. Do not defend. State what you were going for, and then shut up and hear people respond whether they got it or not.

One great thing that came out of it was that I had written into the script the Pauses I wanted the actors to take. I guess I think I'm Harold Pinter or something. David (the actor) asked me if I wanted them to follow the Pauses to the letter, and I said, "For this purpose, yes. Let's see how it plays. And don't add more pauses. Just do the ones I wrote." WELL. Within about 15 minutes of the reading, I thought, "I can lose about 50% of these pauses." I had over-paused, basically. It was immediately apparent that I could lose most of them. Too many. It made the script sag. Pinter can do it, but that's because he's a genius. I went nutso with the pauses, and now need to pull back, and let the dialogue just play. That was a great thing that came out of the reading, something that nobody even commented on, but it was just a Note to Self. ENOUGH with the pregnant pauses! That's what a reading is for. You have to put it out there, without second-guessing, and be willing to take a good hard look at what doesn't work. In front of people. Not for the faint-hearted.

Over the weeks following the second reading, I had email conversations and actual conversations with people who had been there, who fleshed out for me some of their thoughts about the script, and again, that was so helpful, because first of all it helped me see that in some cases I was actually onto something, and then, in other cases, it helped me see where I was 100% NOT clear about what I was trying to say. And, in some cases, it helped me actually see that I didn't know what the hell I WAS trying to say, and I needed to get clear MYSELF.

If you find yourself talking too much, if you find yourself going on and on about what is "going on" in a certain scene, that that is a pretty sure sign that you have no idea what actually is going on. You should be able to boil it down and sum it up in a sentence. You can boil down Act III, scene 1 in Hamlet into a sentence and that scene is one of the greatest achievements in Western literature. The theme, the objective, is clear, in almost every line. It's not muddy or complex. You don't need to talk and talk about it. "Do I want to live or do I want to die?" Hamlet wonders. That's it. I'm talking as an actress and a member of the show-trash community here, NOT academia, an important distinction. People can write theme papers on it to their heart's delight, but in terms of drama, the action of the scene is as simple as can be. So any time I found myself babbling on and on about this or that moment, I knew that I didn't know what the hell was going on.

Most of my friends are actors, so they speak in actor-terms, and I found their comments to be the most intuitive, the most clicked-in. They weren't jargony or academic (as mentioned by Sparber), but emotionally based. If something doesn't make sense emotionally, then an actor will be the one to tell you why. Because that is their business. They truck in emotions. This is not about being obvious or literal. Usually it is the more academic types who want something more literal. After all, there are moments in Women Under the Influence where Gena Rowlands doesn't behave in a way that makes sense, perhaps, dramaturgically, it might look weird on the page, but on a deeper level, a soul-level, it makes more sense than any performance before or since. That is part of what I was going for with some of my transitions, and so I really needed to listen, and listen closely, to those who said they didn't get it, or those who said they got it completely. Again, you have to be able to listen. And then decide what to do.

Max writes:

Once you have had a few responses that are really useful, though, you'll start to recognize them. They tend to produce a sort of "Aha!" moment. They make instant, intuitive sense, and may actually cause you to see your own writing in an utterly new way. They tend to take the form of a very specific comment about the script you wrote, such as, "It seems like the main character of your play is actually ..." or "For me, the moment of the greatest dramatic interest was ..." You hear these comments, and think, My God, that at actually is the main character, and that actually is the dramatic climax of the play!

I had mentioned in the QA that the scene I had been most concerned about, the one I had worked on the most, was the climax to the first "act" (although it's really more of a big SCENE, made up of little fragmentary other scenes), which I called "the Baby on Board Scene". I was tormented by that scene. I had a clear idea in my head of how it had to PLAY, but then that means that it must, it must, exist like that on the page. I worked it to death. But it wasn't until I heard the two wonderful actors read it that I could really get a sense if I had succeeded or not. One of the people there said to me afterwards, "It was in the Baby on Board scene that I suddenly started not liking her. I started feeling worried for HIM, and like he should cut his losses and get out. I was with her up until that point, and then I turned on her."

I thought to myself: "YES!"

And this was a woman making that comment, which had been another concern of mine. One of my explicit (unstated) goals in that scene was to have women, who might have been "rooting" for the female character, abandon her to her own demons, and switch sides. I hadn't said that out loud in the QA session, I hadn't told anyone, but when I got that comment, about one of the most re-written and edited scenes in the piece thus far, I knew I had done what I had wanted to do, and knew I didn't need to edit at least THAT scene anymore.

I haven't touched it since.

I won't be shy and tell you that the scene played like a bat out of hell. It killed. It was the most successful scene of the entire second reading, the one that that generated the most organic response. I don't know what it was like for the actors, but it felt, to me, watching, that all they had to do was say the lines, and the thing landed. Standing in the back, I was gauging the energy of the room the entire time like a crazy barometer. I had been so worried about the scene that there was a hunkering-down feeling in me, like: "Okay. Don't just listen to the words. Be totally present, 100% right now, so you can see how this damn thing plays." I had a specific idea in my mind of the arc of the scene, which comes out of the scene before. The scene before ends on a hopeful note, a moment of conciliation, where the female concedes ground, and the two have a loving moment. The next scene (the scene in question) opens mid-argument. The argument goes, without let-up, until the very end of the scene, when he (I hoped) demolishes her with a monologue about what is wrong with her. My hope for it was: the audience would already be invested in the couple, rooting for them, and the scene before leaves them hopeful, hopeful that this nice man will make it work with this weird prickly OCD woman. I wanted to start mid-argument to dash the audience's hopes INSTANTLY. The two argue for a bit, and then it becomes clear what they are arguing about. The Baby on Board signs. (It all makes sense in the context of my female character, who lives life like it is an ideological war on all fronts). I wanted that to be funny, hilariously funny. I wanted to set it up that the audience thinks they are arguing, at first, about something that might be reasonable for a young new couple to be arguing about: she flirted with someone else, or he didn't call when he said he would ... but then, when it becomes apparent, that they are in a rageful argument about the Baby on Board signs - I wanted that to be funny. Get a huge laugh, basically. (This was my main #1 fear: that it wouldn't get a laugh.) I wanted the argument to rollick along, and I wanted the audience to find it all funny - almost like they are relieved. "Oh, they're just arguing about that ... that's kind of silly ... I can relax ..." But then, at a specific point, I wanted the audience to go: "Uh-oh." By that point, there are only 2 pages left in the scene. I didn't want to dwell on it, or hammer it home 10 times. I wanted there to be a feeling of dread, and of incomprehension, that she would be so unreasonable, that she would be willing to throw away this romance because of a disagreement about the Baby on Board sign, of all things ... and then, boom, it's over. He's had it. He's done. She has revealed herself to be an unworthy mate over the course of the scene, and he's out of there.

So. That's a lot to get into one scene, and that's some pretty subtle maneuvering that has to take place. I only write about this at length because it is a moment I am quite proud of, and it is important, in times of difficult work and struggle, to remember the moments that worked. It helps me (to quote Lorna in Golden Boy), "stiffen the space between my shoulder blades". You need that when you are trying to work. As you can see, I had a specific experience I wanted to create, and if it was great on the page but didn't play that way for the audience, I'd have to re-work. And literally, every transition I just mentioned above is what I could feel happening in that audience. They rode the wave. The actors were more like conductors. They played the shit out of the scene. They played it real, they played it heartbreaking, and the result, out in the dark seats, was tense silence at first, dismayed, then HOWLS of laughter that continued on for a couple of pages, just waves and waves of guffaws, every time my female character said the words "Baby on Board sign", the laughter would get more intense. And then, at the moment I had planned (and this is credit to the actors, too, who just went there, talented geniuses that they are), I could feel the energy shift. People stopped laughing. People pulled back. They realized that a disaster was unfolding. It was funny and then .... it was not.

We weren't out of the woods yet. We still had the whole second act to go through, but that "Baby on Board" scene had been my main concern. If you don't get THAT, then you don't get any of it. The rest will NOT follow. Because then it will seem like he has over-reacted and fled into the night over a stupid trivial argument. But that was not the story I was telling. You need to finish that scene thinking, "Well, that sucks, but I think he did need to escape that. He clearly couldn't have dealt with that." If you end that scene thinking, "Boy, did he over-react", then I have failed.

There is nothing like the thrill, quiet and sure, when you know ... you KNOW ... you have succeeded.

The comments I got at the QA confirmed my feelings about that scene, and also deepened my understanding of what I hadn't done in some of the other scenes. There were issues I needed to take seriously. "Why does he call her and ask her out to dinner?" That was a big one. I am still not sure I have handled that one appropriately, and I am still working on it. What does he want from her? If my answer requires me to talk for 15 minutes, then it's not a good answer. Objectives need to be short and to the point.

To quote my acting mentor Sam Schacht:

Every scene is either Fight or Fuck. If you're ever stuck and you don't know how to play something, then just make a choice, either way, and see how it goes. Fight or Fuck. See if it gets you anywhere.

It might be possible to count just how many times I think of his words in my life when I'm trying to create something, but I doubt it. It comes up for me constantly. There are, naturally, subtleties ... but when you're stuck? Trying something subtle is never the way to go. William James wrote:

To change your life: start immediately; do it flamboyantly; no exceptions.

The same is true with acting, with writing. If I'm stuck, the last thing I need to do is try to make a subtle measured change. Fight or Fuck, man. Fight or Fuck. Choose.

Try something unexpected, something sudden, as sometimes happens in real life. People are surprising. See how your characters would react to a surprise. Don't assume you know. Those people on the page might surprise you if you just let them.

I am talking to myself right now. It helps. Don't assume you know, Sheila. Let them surprise you. See what happens.

Oh. And don't be afraid to say what you mean. Ever.

Balm in Gilead

Someone keeps searching for the term "balms and gilead" in my Search box. I don't know what they are finding, but it seems they are coming up empty, since the searching for that term continues - and I figure I should correct this person, so hopefully he/she can find what he/she is looking for. Now it could be that this person is searching for a Bible verse, ie: "Is there no balm in Gilead? is there no physician there?" but I imagine that this person is looking for Lanford Wilson's play Balm in Gilead (not "balms and gilead"), and here is a post I wrote about that groundbreaking play, more influential than I think it is given credit for, for helping to create that overlapping montage effect of dialogue so prevalent now.

Strangely enough, I just had a conversation a couple weeks ago about Balm in Gilead with friend Alex (who has directed the play), and Jeff Perry, who appeared in the Steppenwolf production of said groundbreaking play in 1980, directed by John Malkovich (which was eventually moved to New York). Perry played Franny. We were talking about how to create a sense of conversation, realistically and convincingly onstage. Especially when there are many cast members, and there has to be the illusion of a crowd scene, where we dip in and out of many different conversations (one of the biggest challenges of Balm in Gilead, not just for the audience, but for the actors. How to pick up your cues, how to listen while you are pretending to silently talk to someone else - how the entire cast in such a play has to become one big organic entity. Not easy.)

So I hope that helps you, in whatever you are searching for.

Scott Caan's Two Wrongs: a "delightful production"

A really nice review of Scott Caan's Two Wrongs :

And this one is a lollapalooza, a hearty laugh-out-loud, feel-good comedy that will engage you throughout, just as it does the audience full of attractive 20 and 30-somethings that packs the house each weekend.

Well. Since I was in the audience twice over the past week, I consider that a compliment. Cause yeah, it's all about me.

Congrats, Two Wrongs team!

Los Angelenos, still time to see it! Call (323) 960-1057 for tix!

Two Wrongs, a new play by Scott Caan

Is there such a thing as too much self-knowledge? Is the pursuit of love helped by therapy, or hurt by it? There is a crazy and chaotic element to falling in love that perhaps does not fit into the "rules" of what mental health means in our self-help-focused society, but is that necessarily a trap? Scott Caan's new play, Two Wrongs, which opened last weekend at the Mineral Theatre Company's Lounge Theatre, produced by Mike O'Malley and directed by Missy Yager, examines the confluence of love and therapy, neurosis and happiness, and the play is a ride and a half. Well-written, observant, hilarious, and touching, Two Wrongs has, at its heart, a deep yearning for connection, for love, for finding that one, your mate.

Larry Clarke plays the therapist, and Bre Blair and Val Lauren play two of his clients. One day, due to an apparent scheduling mix-up, Blair and Lauren run into each other in the therapist's waiting room. She freaks out that someone else is there. Normally the room is empty because it is HER time. She doesn't want to be seen. Therapy should be confidential and anonymous. Security has been breached. All is lost! Lauren (a really funny and relaxed actor) tries to talk to her, tries to joke with her about the mix-up, but she is having NONE of it. Blair is hysterical, as she staunchly turns her back on the man sitting less than a foot away, insisting that this is HER time, not HIS time, and to please go away and come back when she is no longer there.

The dialogue zips and sparks. It's really fun stuff, especially because both of these people are DEEP into therapy, and so they try to be aware, sensitive, and yet they cannot hide their own neuroses. These never tip off into parody, or mockery, meaning: neither of them seem stereotypically "cray cray". They are people who are trying to work on themselves. They have problems. They are trying to do better for themselves.

Despite this inauspicious meeting, the man goes into his therapy session and he can't stop talking about that girl he met in the waiting room. There was something about her he liked. She was "pretty and smart", and that was what he liked about her. The therapist keeps trying to talk about deeper underlying issues, but the man is determined. He wants a date with that girl, and he wants the therapist to help him set it up.

The therapist reluctantly embarks on a journey of deception, using his therapy sessions with the two people to basically say, "He really likes you - do you like him? Check yes or no."

Bre Blair has to create a character here who is deeply unhappy, and yet really prefers being alone. There is always something wrong with every guy she dates, and she can't deal with it anymore. She has a hilarious monologue about one date she went on with a man she (and her therapist) now refer to as "the burping guy". He burped at the table, apparently, and then blew the burped-out air off to the side with his mouth, and it was such a gross moment that she can't get it out of her head. He may be her Prince Charming but the burp is something from which she will not recover. Scott Caan shows one of his many gifts as a writer here. This is an acute observation of a certain kind of perfectionist woman, and yet he never makes the mistake of labeling her as "high-maintenance", or judging her. Because this is a play about therapy, it's all about what is REALLY going on with these people. Maybe it is that she fears intimacy, and so therefore she focuses on the tiny foibles and flaws of her dates, so that she won't have to commit, and therefore risk getting hurt. It is totally clear that that is what is going on with her, and yet there she is, lying in the therapist's couch, ranting about the way this guy burped and how disgusting it was. The script is fantastic in that way: it operates on multiple levels simultaneously.

The man and the woman do begin to date. It's not like a normal date, where perhaps you want to put on your best face, and present a totally awesome persona to your prospective mate. Here, because they both know the other is in therapy, they can get to the truth much quicker. I loved that aspect of the script. Therapy is an easy target for mockery, but sometimes that mockery is TOO easy. Sure, therapy can be over-used or abused, but at the same time, there is nothing worse than a person who THINKS they are awesome, and yet project nothing but weirdness and hostility and unexamined issues. Two Wrongs doesn't point the finger at therapy as the problem. It actually is seen as a healthy pursuit, and helps these two lost somewhat damaged souls to connect. "So what's wrong with you?" she asks him, with the understanding that something must be, since he is in therapy. She gets it. Something is "wrong" with her as well.

Bre Blair has to start the show as a chatty neurotic, constantly second-guessing herself with her therapist, and struggling to find her own truth. Through the course of this show (which is not long), she has to blossom completely, bursting forth into full flower - the true goal of therapy, if you think about it - and Blair is superb in showing that transformation. She is funny, sweet, sometimes difficult, and it's exhilarating to watch her find her own power. She creates a character that is believable, relateable, and also flawed and perhaps dangerous. There's a twist in the script that requires us to believe that she could behave in an unpredictable and impulsive manner. Blair nails that dynamic. I buy it completely. Yup, I could totally see her blossoming a bit, and then realizing, "Holy shit, this is scary and new", and suddenly clamping back down into her old ways. Blair doesn't miss a beat throughout. She's wonderful.

Val Lauren, as the man, is terrific. I loved his energy on stage. He seemed like a practical character, a guy who had some issues and so was going to therapy to try to figure it out, but he wasn't passive in that process. He challenges the therapist from time to time - ("No, no, no, don't do that, don't get all professional on me, just talk to me ...") and he also challenges her. He is interested in her. He is interested in her in a way he has never been interested in a woman before. What is that about? It's all new territory for him, and Lauren manages to suggest this in subtle and really eloquent ways. He has a short monologue where he talks about her, and what she is to him - and he has one line where he says, "To me, you're perfect in every way." A simple line, right? But handled wrong, it could be deadly. Too sentimental, perhaps, or cliched. However: Love itself is a cliche. We're all different, but there are certain rituals everyone goes through in the terrifying process of falling in love, and in that moment, where he tells her she is perfect in every way, Lauren plays it as though he is discovering it for the first time. He clicks into the underbelly of the thing, the truth, the realization aspect of falling in love. It's not easy for some of us. Some of us have problems even just being with other human beings. Lauren, at the beginning of the play, wearing a T-shirt, jeans, slouched in his chair, twitchy, pesters her in the waiting room to look at him, joking with her about her paranoia. He reminded me (just go with it, please) of Rocky Balboa, in the early scenes of Rocky, where we see a man who, just by his physical gifts and presence, should (should) be completely at home in the world, and yet - there's something about Rocky that is just yearning for connection. He is isolated. And yet, tragically for him, he is a true extrovert. That extroverted side of him has been squashed down, put into sinister use by the loan shark and others ... but if you watch how he chats up Adrian in the fish store early on ... he keeps it light and jokey and friendly and non-threatening, and all I can sense in those early scenes is the loneliness of this man, his desire for friendship, to be listened to, to be taken into consideration. Val Lauren has all of that going on for him in the early scenes of Two Wrongs, and so when he confesses, "To me, you are perfect in every way," it comes out in a simple and true way that works. It just WORKS. I found myself invested in these two people, hoping they could work it out.

Larry Clarke, as the poor therapist caught in the middle, is hilarious. But look out for that sucker-punch, because it's coming. He has this way of listening, sitting back and staring at his clients, which make you wonder what the hell that guy is really thinking. He has no business meddling with the love lives of two of his clients, but that makes him funny and human as well. There are a lot of things to talk about in therapy: childhood, dreams, job issues, family problems ... but this therapist? All he talks about with his clients (at least all that we see in the play) is love and relationships. I don't think that's an accident. Scott Caan knows exactly what he is doing here.

There's loneliness keening on the edges of the play, and while so much of it is funny, I found myself really moved time and time again - not so much by the events in the play, but by the search itself. Everyone is searching. Everyone wants to find "that one". An intermediary is sometimes necessary. Sign up with an online dating service. Ask your friends to introduce you to new interesting people. Have a friend set you up on a blind date. In Two Wrongs, the matchmaker is a therapist. His actions border on the unethical, but the best part of the play is that the therapist is given his reasons as well. He has motivations. An objective. A life outside the world of the play. So many playwrights forget this. Or, if they don't forget it, they do not have the skill to make it live and breathe on stage. The characters remain wooden, or schticky. It is hard to imagine any of them, oh, going to a movie, or just having breakfast, doing things normal people do. The world of the play feels artificial. But Scott Caan gives everyone room here. Room to be human, flawed, genuine, cunning, baffled, lonely. And although the entire play takes place in the therapists' office (except for one brief scene on a bench placed downstage), I could feel the world, their lives, their concerns and interests, pressing in onto that isolated office. These were not people acting in isolation. They were struggling. The office is supposedly a safe place where you can come, drop the cares of the day, drop the persona, and say whatever you want to say.

This is a good thing.

Sometimes.

Here, however, everything goes haywire.

Director Missy Yager has done a superb job in creating the world in which these three characters must operate: The script is handled with sensitivity, finding the humor as well as the pathos. The set, with its Oriental rug, wall of books, and leather therapists' couch is simple and yet immediately tells us where we are. Clarity is key in a play like this one. I loved the music chosen to play between each scene (beautiful and appropriate - not too on-the-nose, emotional), I loved how each song served to guide me deeper and deeper into the play, without telling me specifically how I should be feeling about it.

It's been a couple of days now, and I am still thinking about all three of those characters, and that is a great tribute to Scott Caan's script, and the entire team.

It's a short run, and it's selling out quickly, so if you live in Los Angeles, call to buy your tickets now: (323) 960-1057.

Two Wrongs plays at the Lounge Theatre, at 6201 Santa Monica Blvd in Los Angeles.

Sick, by Erik Patterson: The Los Angeles Theatre Center

What a joy it was to attend the world premiere of Sick, award-winning playwright Erik Patterson's latest, playing at The Los Angeles Theatre Centre through May 16. It is funny, personal, brutal at times, and deeply profound. From the first scene, where we witness a married couple, Pamela and David (played by Vonessa Martin and Ramon de Ocampo) discuss her health issues, we know we are in the hands of an ensemble we can trust. The tone of the piece, set immediately by Patterson and the director, Diane Rodriguez, is confident, absurd, and unafraid of sentiment when the time comes. Not sentimentality, which is deadly, but true and honest sentiment. Sick is a terrific piece of work.

Pamela, in a panic, opens the play by breathlessly describing to her husband that "something is wrong" with her. The humor here is that her "symptoms" immediately take on a sketchy quality, as in: she does not appear to be a reliable narrator of her own body. She informs her husband, "My poop is weird." He tries to be patient and interested, but you can tell that this is a conversation they have had countless times over the years. She is convinced that the restaurant where she works is "giving her cancer". She needs to get a new job. Her "poop is weird". In her neurotic mind, everything is connected. As indeed it is. It's a small cast, and Sick lets us get to know them in pieces, the actors rotating through scenes with one another, and through this we get to know their relationships. Pamela and David have a young son Michael, played with beautiful sweetness and clarity and intelligence by 11 year old Quinton Lopez. Johnny Giacalone, in a fantastic performance, plays Gary, Pamela's out-of-control brother, who has been thrown out of the house by his newly-sober wife Carla (the night I saw the show, Carla was played by the understudy, Regan Metoyér - she was wonderful). Carla is now attending AA meetings, and has become a Christian, and cannot deal with her husband Gary, who is still drinking, smoking pot, and thinks if he promises to her that he will cut out "vodka and jello shots", that that will be enough. Carla is new to AA, and she finds help and inspiration from an old-timer, Jeannie, played by Anita Dashiell, in a really subtle and effective performance. She has all the steps down, she has been clean for 12 years, but she is not without her flaws (she is obviously addicted to coffee, and watch how she INHALES the half of that Krispy Kreme donut, terrifiied that the Overeaters Anonymous people will judge her), and shows that health (mental or otherwise) is a process. You are never DONE. Drunk Gary has moved in with his sister Pamela. Meanwhile, Pamela continues to think she is dying. She is perpetually sick. Something is wrong. In desperation, she goes to see her son's pediatrician, played by Brendan O'Malley, in a wonderfully sociopathic performance, and even though he insists that he is a PEDIATRICIAN, he does listen to her problems. She just knows that something is WRONG.

Well, yes. Something IS wrong. But not with Pamela. She's got it all wrong. In more ways than one.

Patterson has created a really personal piece of work here. There isn't one didactic moment. It's not politicized, even in this climate where healthcare reform is on everyone's lips. This is te story of one wacky family (but no wacky than any other family), and how they deal with sickness, imagined and real. Nobody is exempt. Perhaps hypochondriacs know this on a deeper level than other people, which causes them to obsess, and fixate, and spin their wheels. Everyone has an "end". It's out there, waiting for each of us. Hopefully, we can spend our time on this planet not worrying about it too much, and trying to have a good and meaningful life while we are here. But sickness can throw that balance out of wack. Everyone reacts differently to sickness, the specter of it, and Patterson examines all of the diverse ways that people respond. Some deny it entirely, some accept it, some become totally selfish, others can't help but empathize. I loved how much variety he was able to find in his script - the humor leavened by the seriousness, with the entire cast on the stage the whole time, with those not in whatever scene was happening, sitting in the background, reading magazines, and I really got that feeling of being in a hospital waiting room. The masses of people. Sitting, waiting, watching the clock ... maybe one person is waiting for a benign routine test, maybe one person is waiting to hear whether they have two months to live or not. Regardless, everyone sits together at the hospital, and there's a FEELING in those places ... unmistakable to anyone who has spent any time at all in a hospital. Sick nails it.

The acting is fantastic. I hesitate to say too much about each character, since each specific journey unfolds in a way that is individual and full of surprises (I did not know how it would go, the ending was not "telegraphed" to me in any way, which was very effective), but each actor was marvelous. Sick is about one specific family. And yes, the family has a lot of problems, and are in the midst of fighting with one another (Pamela and David fighting over her hypochondria and how to raise their son Michael, Gary and Carla about to split up over his drinking and her rigid sobriety) - but one of the things Sick so understands, and I found it deeply moving, was how families can come together. How they operate, when under duress. How things become clear, horribly so, when something bad happens. The people in the World Trade Center on 9/11 were like everyone else: maybe someone had left home having a fight with his wife, maybe someone else hadn't said "I'm sorry" to their kid for whatever reason, things left unsaid, unresolved - but what were the calls about coming from those towers on that day? "I love you." "I love you." "Just calling to say I love you." "I love you." I felt that the cast of Sick, every one of them, helped create a family. Sometimes, in plays, where "families" are supposed to be represented, you just never buy it. "No way are those two siblings." "Those two are cousins? Not a chance." Everyone seems like separate individuals. This happens in films, too. But here, I really felt this FAMILY operating as a FAMILY. This is a great compliment to Patterson's writing, and also to every actor on that stage.

Information and tickets for Sick here.

Two Wrongs, by Scott Caan - world premiere

A play with some good friends and family involved: The world premiere of Two Wrongs opens tonight here in Los Angeles at the Mineral Theatre Company. Information here (tickets, directions).

Directed by Missy Yager, recently seen off-Broadway in The Starry Messenger. and long-time O'Malley friend (additionally, she was the one who read the female part in an early draft of my script last year when we had a reading of it out here, which was a true highwater mark for me - she's a wonderful actress, I was so honored!), and produced by cousin Mike O'Malley, it also stars Larry Clarke, another honorary O'Malley, a fantastic actor from TV, movies (recently seen in The Informant) as well as theatre.

Written by Scott Caan, Two Wrongs opens tonight and runs through Sunday, May 9. It's a short run, so theatre-lovers in Los Angeles, and I know you're out there - make sure to check it out!

Very much looking forward to seeing it tomorrow night.

Ticket information here.

"family drama with a side of hypochondria and alcoholism": Sick, by Erik Patterson

Great review of Sick, the new play by Erik Patterson, which opened at the Los Angeles Theatre Center last weekend. It also got Critics' Pick from Back Stage West. My brother Brendan O'Malley is in the cast, and I am really looking forward to seeing it tonight.

Los Angelenos: Ticket information here.

Today in history: April 17, 1897

American playwright Thornton Wilder was born.

A snarky funny anecdote about Wilder from Tennessee Williams's Memoirs:

Streetcar opened in New Haven in early November of 1947, and nobody seemed to know what the notices were or to be greatly concerned. After the New Haven opening night we were invited to the quarters of Mr. Thornton Wilder, who was in residence there. It was like having a papal audience. We all sat about this academic gentleman while he put the play down as if delivering a papal bull. He said that it was based upon a fatally mistaken premise. No female who had ever been a lady (he was referring to Stella) could possibly marry a vulgarian such as Stanley.

We sat there and listened to him politely. I thought, privately, This character has never had a good lay.

This one below is one of my favorite anecdotes of all time. It comes from the book The Actor's Chekhov, a compilation of interviews with actors who worked with famous director Nikos Psacharopoulos, artistic director of the Williamsburg Theatre Festival:

Interview with PETER HUNT:

When you hit your head on a wall, back up and go another direction. Don't be afraid to say you're wrong.

My favorite example of that is the Our Town story. Nikos [Psacharapolus] was directing, and Thornton Wilder himself was playing the Stage Manager. For some reason he and I struck up a friendship, and one day we were standing and talking, and Nikos burst out of the rehearsal room and came up to Thornton and said, "The scene isn't working." And Thornton Wilder said, "What? The scene isn't working?" Nikos said, "Yeah, George and Emily, they're on the ladder, doing the homework scene." And Thornton said, "What's wrong with it?" And Nikos said, "It doesn't work." And Thornton said, "What are you talking about, it's a Pulitzer-Prize winning play, it works!" And Nikos said, "It's not working. They're up there, I'm playing all the values, they're in love, he's in love with her, they want to get married – but it's not working." Thornton's jaw drops to the floor and he says, "My lord, what are you doing? It's very simple! He's stupid and she's smart, and if he doesn't get the algebra questions for tomorrow's homework, he's going to flunk. THAT'S IT." And Nikos said, "But Thornton, it's a love scene!" And Thornton said, "That's for the audience to decide." And Nikos said, "Got it!" And he rips open the door to the rehearsal room and yells, "Everything we worked on is off! You're dumb, you're smart! Play it!"

If you have ever seen Our Town (and if you're an American, and you haven't, WTF?), and if that scene between George and Emily DOESN'T work in the production that you see, you can bet it is because they are trying to play "the love", rather than the objective, which is "can you help me with my homework?" It's a brilliant anecdote on so many levels. Love Nikos, a fiery temperamental opinionated man, realizing how wrong he was, and flinging open the door to the rehearsal room shouting, "EVERYTHING WE WORKED ON IS OFF."

My tribute piece to Paul Newman includes an analysis of one of his moments as The Stage Manager in Our Town, and how he said a certain line in a way I had never heard it before. A way that made beautiful horrible sense, and made me see that moment in a new light. A true tribute to the power of that American classic.

And finally. This:

What is that, you may ask? A page from Thornton Wilder's copy of Finnegans Wake, a book that obsessed Wilder for decades.

Thornton Wilder said:

"I am not interested in ... such subjects as the adulteries of dentists. I am interested in those things that repeat and repeat and repeat in the lives of the millions."

Happy birthday, sir.

One of the reasons I love John Lahr

... son of Bert Lahr, as well as long-time theatre critic for The New Yorker (his profiles have been compiled into a wonderful book: Show and Tell: New Yorker Profiles) is because of paragraphs like this one, in his recent review of what sounds like a misguided Glass Menagerie at the Long Wharf:

Direct address suggests that the audience is being let in on a secret. In Edelstein’s production, we are, instead, let in on a documentary. In the opening four minutes of the play, a long time in the theatre, Tom (Patch Darragh) enters, puts on a record, loosens his tie, and readies himself to write—a preparation that includes swigging from a bottle of Bourbon (though drinking as an aid to writing was a habit that Williams didn’t acquire until nearly a decade later)—and, after much flimflammery, starts to type. When Tom finally gets around to speaking the play’s first words, he talks to himself, as if sounding out lines hot off his typewriter. We don’t enter into memory; we’re outside it, watching it take place. This is a huge shift in narrative tone, dramatically speaking—like switching from first to third person. To members of the audience who don’t know the masterpiece, it may come as a surprise to learn that none of what they’re seeing was written by Williams. To those who are familiar with the play, it’s an outrageous piece of intellectual impertinence from a director who is trying to claim co-authorship of a play that he imperfectly understands. At a stroke, Williams’s purpose and his meaning are skewed and screwed.

I have always felt that a theatre critic's job is not just to say, "This was good", or "This was bad", but to understand the context and try to make it relevant and clear to the reader (and potential audience member). Not only does he describe accurately this imposed "device" in the new production but he is able to analyze why, exactly, it doesn't work. He does this because he knows Williams's work so well, and knows what has been lost in the transfer.

I love John Lahr's work.

Plot

"Aristotle says that plot is the most important factor of a play but I'd rather have a bad plot with interesting characters than a good one with a bunch of stooges."

-- Tennessee Williams, college paper

"Why I do theatre"

An extraordinary clip posted by Alex, of part of a lecture on theatre given by Patsy Rodenburg. Not to be missed. See the whole thing.

Today in history: March 24, 1955

Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opened on Broadway. It was directed by Elia Kazan and starred Ben Gazzara and Barbara bel Geddes. Williams was tormented by the writing of this play. He found it "messy", and wrote in his journal that "the intrusion of the homosexual theme may be fucking it up again". But he kept at it. He always kept at it.

On April 3, 1954, Williams wrote to his agent Audrey Wood:

Here's a sort of rough draft of the play that threw me into such a terrible state of depression last summer in Europe, I couldn't seem to get a grip on it. I haven't done much with it since then, but I would like to have this draft typed up, so that I will at least be able to read it with less confusion. Although it is very wordy it is still too short and would need a curtain-raiser to make a full evening. But I do think it has a terrible sort of truthfulness about it, and the tightest structure of anything I have done. And a terrifyingly strong final curtain.

In June of that year, he wrote to Cheryl Crawford (director, producer):

I let Audrey read "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" while she was here and to my surprise she seemed to take a great liking to it, said the material excited her more than anything I've done since "Streetcar". But she doesn't find it complete in its present form and wants me to add another act to it. So far I don't agree with her. I think it tells a full story, though it is under conventional length, and that as soon, or if I get back my creative breath, i can fill out these two acts (or 3 long scenes as they actually are) to a full evening without extending the story as I see it.

Williams's back-and-forth with his agent are always really good reading, dealing as they do with the creative process. Here is part of a letter Williams wrote to Wood in September, 1954:

I agree in principle with what you say in your letter ... but I feel there are circumstances to consider carefully in this instance. For one thing, I gathered that your enthusiasm for the "Cat" play is more or less contingent on my adding another act to it. To me the story is complete in its present form, it says all that I had to say about these characters and their situation, it was conceived as a short full-length play: there are three acts in it. First, Brick and his wife. Second, Brick and Big Daddy. Third, The family conference. They are short acts but complete, and I thought at least structurally the play was just right, I liked there being no time lapse between the acts, one flowing directly into the others, and it all taking place in the exact time that it occupies in the theatre. I would hate to lose that tightness, that simplicity, by somehow forcing it into a more extended form simply to satisfy a convention of theatre, would much rather risk the prejudice that might be incurred by bringing down a curtain at 10:30 or 10:45 and possibly raising it a little later to compensate. Or even using a good one-act play as a curtain-raiser.

This was a disagreement that would go on and on (even carrying over into Kazan's feelings about the play, which culminated in there being TWO versions published - Williams's preferred version, and then Kazan's staged version. It's fascinating to read those two back to back).

Williams only wanted Kazan to direct, naturally. Kazan was "his" director. Williams sent the play to Kazan, and then began a back and forth between them. They were very close intimate friends and colleagues - they were able to speak truthfully to one another (sometimes forcefully), expressing emotions of dismay or conviction - without sugar-coating things. This is the collaborative process. I would so love to have Kazan's side of these letters published - or to have a volume of the Williams-Kazan correspondence - showing BOTH sides, because while Williams gave birth to these plays (and Kazan has said that all of Williams's plays came to him complete - there were no major revisions that needed to be done - Cat is the exception) - Kazan was the "midwife". It was his input and sensibility that helped ground Williams's lyrical and sometimes sentimental art. Kazan has obviously written to Williams giving him some strongly-worded reactions to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. It had to do with its structure - the highpoint of the play comes in the second act. It should come in the third, according to Kazan (and to Wood). Williams disagreed. In October, 1954, Williams responds:

There is certainly no use in my trying to disguise or dissimulate the fact that I passionately long for you to do this play. But I can understand why you are afraid of its failure although I am not. I don't mean I think it couldn't fail. I think it not only could fail but has a fifty-fifty chance of failure, and know how much I have to lose from such a failure, but still I do passionately long for its production and for you to stage it because I think it does that thing which is the pure aim of art, which is to catch and illuminate truly and passionately the true, true quality of human existence. It so happens that the second act has the highest degree of dramatic tension. That has happened before in very fine plays and they have survived it. It has to be compensated, not by a trick or distortion but by charging the final scene with something plus, underlining and dramatizing as powerfully as possible the sheer truth of the material, it's very lack of shrewd showmanship, because I think critics and theatre lovers will respect it all the more for not making some facile, easy, obvious concession to the things which a lot of people have complained about in us, both, a too professional, showy, sock-finish to theatre. Am I rationalizing again? Maybe, but on the other hand, I may be simply trying to articulate to you my side of the case ... Even if "Cat" is not a good play, it's a goddam fiercely true play, and what other play this season is going to be that? I resumed work this morning, at 8 a.m. after not much sleep, on Act Three, determined to get what you want without losing what I want. (Assuming they are essentially the same thing, just conceived of in different fashions) I dare to believe that I can work this out, but it would help me immeasurably if you and some producer would give me a vote of confidence by committing yourselves to a date of production with the work still on the bench. I don't think that I would fail you. Of course I will be disappointed if you refuse, perhaps even angry at you - I was angry with you last night, too angry to sleep! - but I will not hate you for it, and we would still do something together again. I know that you are my friend.

Kazan wrote about this Third-Act disagreement (among other things) in his autobiography. So let's get his side of things:

I believed Big Daddy could not be left out of the third act. I felt that his final disposition in the story had to be conveyed to an audience. I also thought that the third act was by far the weakest of the three - one and two were brilliant and as good as anything Tennessee ever wrote. I suggested that Big Daddy be brought back into Act Three, a suggestion that had nothing to do with making the play more commercial. Tennessee said he'd think about my suggestion, and a few days later he brought me a short scene where Big Daddy did appear and told a dirty joke. It wasn't this author's best work, but perhaps it was better than nothing.

This is a big disagreement. What Kazan describes (the Big Daddy short scene) happened once rehearsals got underway, but the issue was there from the start.

Kazan agreed to direct. A date was set. Work continued on the script. Williams wrote to Kazan on Nov. 3, 1954:

I am glad that in "Cat" we are getting off the chest some of the terrible things that we have to say about human fate. I want to keep the core of the play very hard, because I detest plays that are built around something mushy such as I feel under the surface of many sentimental successes in the theatre. I want the core of the play to be as hard and fierce as Big Daddy. I think he strikes the keynote of the play. A terrible black anger and ferocity, a rock-bottom honest. Only against this background can his moments of tenderness, of longing, move us deeply. This is a play about good bastards and good bitches. I mean it exposes the startling co-existence of good and evil, the shocking duality of the single heart. I am as happy as you are that our discussions have led to a way of high-lighting the good in Maggie, the indestructible spirit of Big Daddy, so that the final effect of the play is not negative, this is a forward step, a step toward a larger truth which will add immeasurably to the play's power of communication or scope of communication.

Work on the script continued. Kazan sent a 5 page letter to Williams (why can't I read that letter??), telling Williams his problems with the script - it mainly had to do with the conception of the character Brick.

Which reminds me of a funny story. Allow me a digression:

Tommy Lee Jones came and spoke at my school. He hung out with us students, and answered questions. He could be frightening at times, and wasn't afraid to let people know that some of the questions were a little bit stupid. One of my classmates, a playwright - really nice guy - asked (and it was the WAY he asked it that was so funny - I could see Tommy Lee Jones break down his veneer a bit, he enjoyed the manner of the question, it seemed to come from an intelligent place): So my classmate asked, "I know that you played Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Having suffered through many a terrible Brick in almost every acting class I have ever taken, I just had to ask you: what's up with Brick? What's the roadblock?" Tommy Lee Jones' whole body language changed. He responded to the question physically, perking up, sort of changing his position. He loved it. Anyway, his feeling was that Brick came from Williams's long fascination with Nietzsche - that Williams was working out something in that character that had to do with Nietzsche's views - and that was Jones's approach to it. This is interesting because I haven't heard many people make that connection, but that was Jones's "way in" (which just goes to show you what a brainiac that guy is. I will be playing Brick. I will learn my lines, I will walk with a limp, I will be a convincing drunk and closeted gay man .... and I will also immerse myself in the works of Nietzsche, looking for clues). Because Brick IS a problem, a conundrum. Not a problem to be solved, mind you, but one of those characters who stay in the mind long long after you leave them. Jones also felt that Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was certainly Williams's most well-made play, and, ultimately, Williams's "only truly great play". A very interesting perspective. No wonder everyone who worked on the original production felt like they were wrestling with a giant anaconda. Williams was working on something different than he had ever worked on before: the themes in Cat are not the themes of Streetcar or Menagerie - and that play really does stand out (in my opinion) in his body of work as quite singular.

The "homosexual" level of the story was difficult to handle (although crucial), and Williams stuck to his guns about all of it, with an increasing sense that he was not being understood at all. He was more than willing to collaborate, to take in suggestions - but when the suggestions seemed to threaten the core of the play, he pushed back.

Williams wrote in his journal, about Kazan's Brick comments:

I do get his point but I am afraid he doesn't quite get mine. Things are not always explained. Situations are not always resolved. Characters don't always 'progress'. But I shall, of course, try to arrive at another compromise with him.

In one of his notes on the play, Williams wrote:

The poetic mystery of BRICK is the poem of the play, not its story but the poem of the story, and must not be dispelled by any dishonestly oracular conclusions about him: I don't know him any better than I know my closest relative or dearest friend which isn't well at all: the only people we think we know well are those who mean little to us.

In another letter to Kazan, Williams talks specifically about the character of Brick, one of the many bones of contention (and seriously: every actor attempting to get by the "roadblock" of this character should not only heed Tommy Lee Jones's advice, but also read this letter:

Why does a man drink: in quotes "drink". There are two reasons, separte or together. 1. He's scared shitless of something. 2. He can't face the truth about something. - Then of course there's the natural degenerates that just fall into any weak, indulgent habit that comes along but we are not dealing with that sad but unimportant category in Brick. - Here's the conclusion I've come to. Brick did love Skipper, "the one great good thing in his life which was true". He identified Skipper with sports, the romantic world of adolescence which he couldn't go past. Further: to reverse my original (somewhat tentative) premise, I now believe that, in the deeper sense, not th eliteral sense, Brick is homosexual with a heterosexual adjustment: a thing I've suspected of several others, such as Brando, for instance. (He hasn't cracked up but I think he bears watching. He strikes me as being a compulsive eccentric.) I think these people are often undersexed, prefer pet raccoons or sports or something to sex with either gender. They have deep attachments, idealistic, romantic: sublimated loves! They are terrible Puritans. (Marlon dislikes me. Why? I'm "corrupt") These people may have a glandular set-up which will keep them "banked", at low-pressure, enough to get by without the eventual crack-up. Take Brando again: he's smoldering with something and I don't think it's Josanne! Sorry to make him my guinea pig in this analysis (Please give this letter back to me!) but he's the nearest thing to Brick that we both know. Their innocense, their blindness, makes them very, very touching, very beautiful and sad. Often they make fine artists, having to sublimate so much of their love, and believe me, homosexual love is something that also requires more than a physical expression. But if a mask is ripped off, suddenly, roughly, that's quite enough to blast the whole Mechanism, the whole adjustment, knock the world out from under their feet, and leave them no alternative but - owning up to the truth or retreat into something like liquor ....

Wow. I mean, just: WOW.

Williams is making the case that Brick does, in a way, "progress" (one of Kazan's criticisms) - that he eventually faces the truth about who he is. Williams goes on in the same letter:

He's faced the truth, I think, under Big Daddy's pressure, and maybe the block is broken. I just said maybe. I don't really think so. I think that Brick is doomed by the falsities and cruel prejudices of the world he comes out of, belongs to, the world of Big Daddy and Big Mama. Sucking a dick or two or fucking a reasonable facsimile of Skipper some day won't solve it for him, if he ever does such "dirty things"! He's the living sacrifice, the victim of the play, and I don't want to part with that "Tragic elegance" about him. You know, paralysis in a character can be just as significant and just as dramatic as progress, and is also less shop-worn. How about Chekhov?

It was time to find the cast. Again, there were disagreements between Kazan and Williams. Kazan writes in his autobiography (and this, to me, is a brilliant analysis of a certain TYPE of woman that perhaps I recognize because, duh, he's talking about me):

[Barbara Bel Geddes] was not the kind of actress [Williams] liked; she was the kind of actress I liked. I'd known her when she was a plump young girl, and I had a theory - which you are free to ignore - that when a girl is fat in her early and middle teens and slims down later, she is left with an uncertainty about her appeal to boys, and what often results is a strong sexual appetite, intensified by the continuing anxiety of believing herself undesirable. Laugh at that if you will, but it is my impression and it did apply to Miss Bel Geddes. I knew how much a working sexual relationship meant to this young woman and that in every basic way she resembled Maggie the Cat. I trusted my knowledge of her own nature and life and therefore cast her.

I believe it is a mistake to ONLY cast a sexpot in that part. It is a misunderstanding of what Williams is going for. Elizabeth Taylor was fine in the part, but put her side by side with Barbara Bel Geddes, and you not only get a different interpretation of the role, due to the different sensibilities of the two actresses, but you get an entirely new interpretation of the play. Maggie the Cat is not some nympho. I've seen her play that way and I find it misogynistic (on the part of the director, and also the actress, frankly) and incorrect. Misogynistic because it compartmentalizes women into two different groups: the sexy and the unsexy. And the "unsexy" can't possibly have sexual feelings, right? At least it's not anything that an audience (male audience, it is assumed) would want to SEE. Everyone on the planet has sexual feelings. I find it far more interesting to see Maggie cast as a normal woman, who expected a normal (ie: sexual) relationship with her husband, and is driven to the brink by his refusal to participate. How much more agonizing would that situation be for a woman who already has some anxiety about her attractiveness to men (as pointed out by Kazan)? Anyway, you could take many different tactics with this - and it's not that a beautiful woman can't also have insecurities and anxieties - but often the actress playing the role doesn't include those elements at all (which are in the script). All she does is beg her husband to fuck her, writhing around in a negligee. Well, that's one (unimaginative) way to go with it. Kazan sensed something in Barbara Bel Geddes that he thought would be powerful and potent in the part.

Young actor Ben Gazzara was cast as Brick. He was well-known at the Actors Studio, but this would be the role that would make him a star. He writes in his autobiography:

When I was cast to play Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof it was a dream come true. Every actor wished to be in a Tennessee Williams play directed by Elia Kazan. Kazan had not been abandoned. He lost friends but he worked in film and in the theater whenever he wanted to. And despite the controversy surrounding him, most actors would have killed to work with him, too. He was the "actor's director" and he had chosen me to work with. I couldn't believe my good fortune.. I'd seen how Williams's plays gave actors the material they could delve deeply into - the glorious Laurette Taylor in The Glass Menagerie and the electrifying Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire. How would I pull it off?

Gazzara describes the first rehearsal:

When I arrived at the New Amsterdam Roof, near Times Square, where we were to rehearse, everybody was already seated around a huge wooden table. Elia Kazan, Tennessee Williams, Barbara Bel Geddes, Burl Ives, Mildred Dunnock, Pat Hingle, and Madeleine Sherwood. Seated nearby facing them were Audrey Wood and the producer Roger Stevens of the Playwrights' Company.

Nobody got up or even said hello. They looked at me in silence. I was embarrassed because I'd arrived late ...

But once the reading began, all else was forgotten. To hear Tennessee's vivid dialogue being spoken by these fine actors was a revelation. The play became much more than I imagined when I'd read it on my own.

Gazzara talks about the part of Brick:

He's married to a beautiful woman, and I had to make it clear to viewers that rejecting Maggie doesn't come from his dislike or disgust, but instead from the death of Skipper, the friend he'd loved with a love he never admitted, even to himself. The loss of Skipper leads Brick to more and more booze and even greater disgust with people's mendacity, especially his own... I worked on reaching into myself to find the broken part of Brick.

What a beautiful way to put it.

Gazzara describes some tense moments at reherasals, when it became clear that Williams was not happy with the casting of Barbara Bel Geddes.

She was much too wholesome for [Williams's] taste. He was looking for something more neurotic, but I'm sure that Kazan had cast Barbara precisely for that wholesome quality. Theatergoers loved Barbara and therefore she would be able to make audiences embrace this complicated and not always likable character. Gadg [Kazan] was absolutely right about that.

But Tennessee felt there were problems during the scene where Barbara is on her knees embracing my legs and making a plea for me to take her to bed. Tennessee said something like, "Gadge, she's fuckin' with my cadence." He may have thought he was whispering but Tennessee had a deep, mellifluous voice which at that moment was too loud. And he'd been drinking. Well, I looked over and Barbara was gone. She'd run off the stage in tears, so I went after her to console her. When I came back, Gadge looked at me for a long time and said, "You're a nice guy." I didn't understand. Wasn't it normal to help a lady in distress?

Kazan finally spoke to Williams and told him to lay off Bel Geddes, which he did. Eventually, Williams went up to Bel Geddes and told her she had much improved and he was happy with what she was doing.

The opening approached. After a run-through in early March, Tennessee Williams sent his notes to Kazan, some of which I will excerpt here - just a fascinating glimpse of the artistic process:

The bare stage background in New York may have been partly responsible but it seemed to me that the last act of the play, the first part of Act III, suffers from an undue portentousness as if we were trying to cover up some lack of significant content by giving it a "tricky" or inflated style of performance.

In manuscript, in style of writing, this is almost the most realistic scene that I have ever written. I gave enormous care to restricting all the speeches to just precisely what I thought the person would say in precisely such a situation, I tried to give it the quality of an exact transcription of such a scene except for the removal of any worthless irrelevancies. I assumed, and still believe, that the emotional essence of the situation was strong enough to hold interest, and that the exact quality of experience, if captured truly, would give it theatrical distinction...

There is a "poetry of the macabre" which I was creating in all the silly, trivial speeches that precede and surround the announcement to Big Mama, the fuss over what he ate at dinner, the observations about Keeley cure, anti-buse, vitamin B12, the southern gush and playfulness, these all contribute to a shocking comment upon the false, heartless, grotesquely undignified way that such events are treated in our society with its resolute concentration on the trivia of life. Practically all these values disappeared, for me at least, in a distractingly formalistic treatment of the situation...

I'm not happy over the interpretation of Doc Baugh whom I had conceived as a sort of gently ironical figure who had seen so much life and death and participated actively in so much of it that he had a sort of sad, sometimes slightly saturnine, detachment from the scene, a calm and kindly detachment, but he plays like a member of the family, in the same over-charged manner, like a fellow conspirator, especially at the moment when he starts abruptly forward as if about to deliver a speech and says the Keely cure bit at stage-center with such startling emphases. It is off-beat off-key little details like this which give the beginning of Act Three its curiously unreal look-for-the-rabbit-out-of-the-silk-hat air ...

I love the noise of the storm fading into the lovely negro lullabye: that's a true and beautiful bit of non-realistic staging which comes at the right moment and isn't the least bit exaggerated, in fact I would like to hear the singing better ...

After all of this, he closes the letter with:

I am being utterly sincere when I say that, on the whole, you have done one of your greatest jobs. I just want all of it to measure up to the truest and best of it, and to make it plain to everybody that this play is maybe not a great play, maybe not even a very good play, but a terribly, terribly, terribly true play about truth, human truth.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opened on this day, in 1955, in New York. It got incredible reviews. Brooks Atkinson, one of Williams's staunchest critic supporters, wrote: "[The play seemed] not to have been written. It is the quintessence of life." The performances were praised to the rooftops, Ben Gazzara became THE new guy in town, and Cat ended up running for almost 700 performances. It was a smash hit, playing to standing-room only houses. The play went on to win the Pulitzer Prize and the Drama Critics' Award.

When Williams heard that he had won both of the plum prizes for a playwright, he sent a telegram to the cast of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, on May 2, 1955:

DEAR PLAYERS: I WANT YOU TO KNOW THAT I KNOW THAT YOU ALL GAVE ME THE PRIZES. ALL MY LOVE=
TENNESSEE

"a fatally mistaken premise"

Now I like Thornton Wilder a lot (not only because of Our Town and all the others, but because of this and also this anecdote - which should be memorized by every actor/director planning on doing Our Town, because THAT is the key to the scene), but I love this put-down here from Tennessee Williams in his Memoirs. Wilder's opinion sounds similar to Louis B. Mayer's opinion about Streetcar, as related by Elia Kazan in his autobiography:

Louis B. Mayer sought me out to congratulate me and assure me that we'd all make a fortune ... He urged me to make the author do one critically important bit of rewriting to make sure that once that "awful woman" who'd come to break up that "fine young couple's happy home" was packed off to an institution, the audience would believe that the young couple would live happily ever after. It never occurred to him that Tennessee's primary sympathy was with Blanche.

You know, the dark mystery and power of sex is threatening, even to very intelligent people. Maybe even more so to intelligent people. Willful blindness to it, and also refusal to side with the "sensitives", as Williams called them. Because if you let yourself identify with Blanche ... when before you would have judged her ... it seriously could change your entire outlook on life forEVER, and who wants that? It's confronting, a character like that. However, that is neither here nor there, although quite interesting. What I want to share is the excerpt from Williams's memoir, which pretty much nails my own response to Wilder's comment:

Streetcar opened in New Haven in early November of 1947, and nobody seemed to know what the notices were or to be greatly concerned. After the New Haven opening night we were invited to the quarters of Mr. Thornton Wilder, who was in residence there. It was like having a papal audience. We all sat about this academic gentleman while he put the play down as if delivering a papal bull. He said that it was based upon a fatally mistaken premise. No female who had ever been a lady (he was referring to Stella) could possibly marry a vulgarian such as Stanley.

We sat there and listened to him politely. I thought, privately, This character has never had a good lay.

Interpreting Lady M: Sarah Siddons/Ellen Terry

Ellen Terry, 16 years old

I am finally reading Michael Holroyd's A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving, and Their Remarkable Families, a book I have been excited to read since its publication. I have read Ellen Terry's memoir (my review here), and a juicier theatrical book I would be hard pressed to think of. Now that I am reading the joint biography of Terry and her business/acting partner Henry Irving - I am realizing how much she left out (understandable), and the effect of her memoir is sometimes of shifting veils, and you get the sense that what she ISN'T revealing may be more interesting than what she IS. Ellen Terry herself wrote:

I never felt so strongly as now that language was given to me to conceal rather than to reveal - I have no words at all to say what is in my heart.

When Terry's memoir came out, Virginia Woolf, a big fan, wrote in her diary about it:

... a bundle of loose leaves upon each of which she has dashed off a sketch ... Some very important features are left out. There was a self she did not know.

But the strength of her memoir, why it is so fantastic, is her memories of rehearsal processes, for all of her plays, and how she created this or that role, and why Irving's Hamlet was so good, what it was he DID as an actor that was so amazing. She has a great eye. But the more shocking elements of her life (her failed marriage as a teenager to the painter GF Watts, who made her famous, her living in sin with Edward Godwin which put her beyond the pale of respectable society - but frankly she had had enough of marriage with that Watts fellow, the two children she had with Godwin - one of whom grew up to be the famous Gordon Craig - and etc.) are left out of her memoir, or she hints at them, but does not reveal. That is her prerogative, but it sure is interesting to get a fuller picture of this famous woman, not only as an artist but as a human being. Michael Holroyd wrote a giant (three-volume, I believe) biography of George Bernard Shaw, which took up most of his life. Shaw was friends with Terry and they had a voluminous fascinating correspondence. A Strange Eventful History is that interesting and rare thing: a group biography.

Henry Irving, as Shylock

Henry Irving, dedicated somewhat gloomy actor (or "actor-manager" as was the term back then, because that was really the way to make your mark - you had to have your own theatre), is someone I knew nothing about, besides what Terry said about him, and besides what all of the people (people like Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Shaw, many others) who saw him act thought of his performances. There is a tragedy to his personality. He had nothing but theatre. It probably saved his life, but there is a lot of wreckage there because of it: a failed marriage, a contentious relationship with his two sons (who despised him and yet who also needed him desperately), and who knows what was going on in his relationship with Terry.

Holroyd makes the leap that they were lovers, and while there was certainly speculation at the time that that was true (they traveled together, he would visit her house and "sleep over", all those things) - the evidence is pretty slim. The fact that Ellen Terry, in letters and her memoir, rhapsodizes over his beauty does not necessarily mean that she was in love with him. There is such a thing as artistic appreciation. I could write a paragraph about my dear friend David, and how much I love him, his face, his eyes, the way he smiles, that may make you think I am in love with him, but we are dear friends, and to me his personality is one of the best I know, and I have no problem appreciating him aesthetically. The fact that people were suspicious that Terry and Irving were having an affair is not necessarily proof. Gossip happens. You can't give too much credence to it. I am not saying I DON'T believe they had an affair (although it wouldn't really be an affair - she, by that point, was a widow, and he was separated from his wife) - but I don't think Holroyd proves his case as much as HE seems to think he does.

Additionally, please, biographers: an actor is separate from his work, that is part of the appeal of acting. The fact that Irving wanted to play "Mephistopheles" in Goethe's Faust may have had NOTHING to do with any biographical element of his life - purging a demon, or trying to deal with the loss of his sons, whatever. Irving knew good theatre, and knew a good part for him when he saw one. Much of acting is about ESCAPING, and I see this kind of thing in theatrical biographies time and time again, and I just don't think it's appropriate to speculate like that. It makes you look like the outsider that you are. ACTORS understand how it works. You should take them at their word. If you look at the scope of someone's work, and see certain themes, well, that certainly is interesting ... but it doesn't necessarily follow that the themes are in place because the actor's mother didn't love him enough. This sort of analysis seems to diminish the actor's talent. I can certainly look at some of Montgomery Clift's roles, for example, and see there the SPLIT that I believe was in Clift's personality - the abyss between one side of himself and the other. He was gay at a time when you really couldn't be gay. He didn't want to be gay. He was truly tortured by it (unlike Tennessee Williams or Truman Capote, his contemporaries, who lived "out" lives and yes, paid prices for it, but they lived "out" anyway). Clift couldn't. His sex life was tormented and anonymous and he hated himself afterwards. All of these things are certainly present in his work, because he's an actor - he uses EVERYTHING - you can see that split in A Place in the Sun, in The Misfits, in The Heiress, From Here to Eternity. But to say that this was all just a biographical PURGING, as opposed to an organic outgrowth of his natural tendencies and talent ... is a misunderstanding of how acting itself works. Much of it is on an unconscious level. You don't say, "I'd like to work out my feelings about my mother in this particular role." That may be a byproduct, you may be surprised at the things you discover in the process, but it just doesn't work like that.

Holroyd makes that mistake quite a bit, it's one of my pet peeves, but his research more than makes up for it. He gets, as much as possible, first-person accounts of the performances, people who were THERE, so that THEY can tell us how Irving affected them, or Terry. One of the things I really liked to learn was Terry's growth as an actress. She was a star, remember. She was seen as emblematic of their particular age. This was a good and bad thing. It could limit her. She realized her own limits when she played Lady Macbeth, a totally different part for her. Terry was known for her grace and charm, which apparently came naturally to her, flowing out of her in undulating waves that captivated her audiences.

Bram Stoker (friend and assistant to Henry Irving at the time) said that Terry "moved through the world of the theatre, like embodied sunshine." She was not a great tragedienne, like Mrs. Sarah Siddons, star of Drury Lane Theatre in the 18th century, whose Lady Macbeth was apparently off-the-charts, and still being talked about in Terry's time, even though no one alive at that time could have seen it. It was one of THOSE performances, and Siddons haunted Terry. Here is Sarah Siddons as Lady Macbeth:

Interesting to compare and contrast that with Terry as Lady Macbeth:

If I could play interpreter for a second, although one is a painting and one is a posed still photograph, what I see as the differences here are: Siddons's Lady Macbeth is an iconic vision of tragedy and doom. It is horrifying, in its own way. Terry's Lady Macbeth adds a level of femininity and grace to it, which is horrifying in ITS own way, considering Lady Macbeth's actions. It's perverse.

There are contemporary reports from Siddons's production of Macbeth that audience members literally fainted at Sarah Siddons' show of intensity. There is a great anecdote, one I treasure, of how Sarah Siddons, to get into the mood for the sleepwalking scene (because, remember, Lady Macbeth is barely onstage in that whole play - you have a LOT of downtime with Lady M!) she would go out into the alley behind the theatre, in costume, and chop wood. It got her into the proper frenzy so that she could go on and say "out damn'd spot" and have it be believable. Isn't that marvelous? You do what you have to do.

But Terry was not known for her tragic roles. She was known for her warmth and loving quality, something far more appropriate to comedies. I loved this comment from Terry. It came from her after her triumphant performance as Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing (which pre-dates her Lady M):

It is only in comedy that people seem to know what I am driving at!

God, I love that. She really did understand her own gifts. She was not universally beloved - Henry James had a problem with her acting (but then, that may have been envy speaking, since he was dying to write plays himself, and felt left out of that world). But still, his cranky comments on her still give a really nice glimpse of what exactly it was that she was about. He wrote:

[Terry] is greatly the fashion at present, and she belongs to a period which takes a strong interest in aesthetic furniture, archaeological attire, and blue china.

Ouch. Henry James' assessment, which is a criticism, is actually the very thing that Oscar Wilde found so enchanting (remember the comment that made him notorious at Oxford, before he was famous for his writing: "I am finding it harder and harder to live up to my blue china.") I am sure Henry James was digging at both Terry and Wilde in his comment.

Elizabeth Robins, an American actress at the time, said that Ellen Terry had "the proportions of a goddess and the airy lightness of a child."

Now perhaps you can see why Terry playing Lady Macbeth might have been a challenge for her. Lady M having the "airy lightness of a child"? Really? Terry herself saying that it is "only in comedy" that people seemed to know what she was "driving at"? How will that type of talent handle the demands of Lady Macbeth's voracious ambition and eventual madness?

Holroyd's book (and why it is so good) does not short-change the artistic journey of these people, which, for me, is the real interest in it. Lady Macbeth was going to be a new thing for Terry. Holroyd doesn't pontificate on his own about why - he goes into Terry's process, how she worked on it, etc., and it is really interesting stuff. Her Lady Macbeth ended up being one of her greatest triumphs. Not beloved by all - because Terry seemed to take a different "spin" on it than what was expected. I love all of this information because it seems to show the flexibility of Shakespeare's work, first of all, purists be damned, and also it shows Ellen Terry's self-knowledge. Her understanding of her own strengths as an actress. She could not out-Siddons Siddons, and she knew it. So what would be her "way in"? Fascinating questions.

Terry, in her memoir, writes of Irving as Macbeth:

When I think of his "Macbeth", I remember him most distinctly in the last act after the battle when he looked like a great famished wolf, weak with the weakness of a giant exhausted, spent as one whose exertions have been ten times as great as those of commoner men of rougher fiber and coarser strength.

"Of all men else I have avoided thee."

Once more he suggested, as only he could suggest, the power of Fate. Destiny seemed to hang over him, and he knew that there was no hope, no mercy.

As they began rehearsals for Macbeth, Henry Irving wrote Terry an extraordinary note, which really illuminates their special artistic relationship and symbiosis:

To-night, if possible, the last act. I want to get these great multitudinous scenes over and then we can attack our scenes ... Your sensitiveness is so acute that you must suffer sometimes. You are not like anybody else - see things with such lightning quickness and unerring instinct that dull fools like myself grow irritable and impatient sometimes. I feel confused when I'm thinking of one thing, and disturbed by another. That's all. But I do feel very sorry afterwards when I don't seem to heed what I so much value ... I think things are going well, considering the time we've been at it, but I see so much that is wanting that it seems almost impossible to get through properly. 'To-night commence, Mattias. If you sleep, you are lost!'

After the play opened, Terry wrote in her diary:

It ('Macbeth') is a most tremendous success, and the last three days' advance booking has been greater than ever was known, even at the Lyceum. Yes, it is a success, and I am a success, which amazes me, for never did I think I should be let down so easily. Some people hate me in it; some, Henry among them, think it my best part, and the critics differ, and discuss it hotlly, which in itself is my best success of all! Those who don't like me in it are those who don't want, and don't like to read it fresh from Shakespeare, and who hold by the 'fiend' reading of the character ... One of the best things ever written on the subject, I think, is the essay of J. Comyns Carr. That is as hotly discussed as the new 'Lady Mac' - all the best people agreeing with it. Oh, dear! It is an exciting time!

A "new 'Lady Mac', huh? Intriguing. It takes courage to "re-interpret" such a well-known character. It doesn't always succeed. There have been a couple of instances recently where a performance has made an indelible impression, something that helps people to re-think, in general, the WAY a certain part should be played. There was the Doll's House a couple years back, with Janet McTeer's Nora, a performance people are still talking about. I don't want to say it was a re-thinking, which implies that other interpretations are wrong. It went at it from a different angle, let's say - it went deeper as well. Scholars can opine and theorize but very often it is the ACTOR (or the director) who can break new ground with such well-known plays.

All of this talk about Macbeth reminds me of the second season of Slings & Arrows, the Canadian TV show I have raved about before. Each season shows the New Burbage Theatre Festival rehearsing a different Shakespeare play, and season 2 is Macbeth. They have hired an actor who has played the part three times before, a big stage star, who is cocky and assured that he knows more about Macbeth than anyone, and he becomes, very quickly, un-direct-able. He will not stray from his own interpretation, which worked so well for him in the past. The director wants him to go another way, and the clashes they have in rehearsal are fascinating - a great lesson in script analysis, first of all - and secondly, a great lesson in the importance of interpretation. The thing about Shakespeare's work that is so exceptional, I would say, is how adaptable it is. How flexible it is. Change the focus of your lens, and hierarchies of new meaning come into focus. Change the focus again, and you still get clarity, brilliant clarity, but you have new hierarchies. It is not "relative", it won't take ANYTHING (as I've said before, productions that try to turn Taming of the Shew into a feminist manifesto and Merchant of Venice into a play about ANTI-Semitism always have a rough time - you have to muck with the text too much. You have to basically de-nature Shylock. You can't get away from the Shylock-ness of Shylock. Good luck trying - many a brilliant theatre director has tried - but I haven't seen it done successfully yet.) So it isn't that there are no limits to the interpretations, it is that it shifts, subtly, depending on the lens through which you look. Do you want your "version" of the play to be about forgivness and mercy? Or do you want it to be about the ravages of war? The dissolution of personality that comes along with power? It's all there. Focus in on any one of those things and the play will play along, so to speak.

In the 2nd season of Slings & Arrows, Geoffrey (the director) wants to focus on the fallibility of Macbeth, the humanity of him. They key to much of this is in the scenes with his wife, Macbeth's private relationship, where we can see what is going on behind closed doors. The text supports that interpretation. The scenes between them pulse with sexual feeling and anxiety. Talk of nipples and sucking and sex and all of that. It is not an out-of-left-field interpretation. So Geoffrey wants his Macbeth to be a man, driven to heights of murder and carnage, through an anxiety about his sexual potency with his wife. Again, this is supportable in the text. Much of their scenes together is Lady Macbeth pushing him to go further, go further. It is SHE who is the engine. She builds him up, with one hand (so to speak), telling him how much he deserves because he is great and powerful, etc. etc. - and emasculates him with the other, basically saying to him, "Are you a man or what??" A potent combination, lethal in this case. Geoffrey's actor playing Macbeth has always been in productions where Macbeth basically is a psychopath, a criminal personality, whose bloodlust and ambition knows no bounds. There IS no moral compass. This is also supportable in the text (I think Macbeth, along with Crime and Punishment is one of the great descriptions in the canon of what it actually feels like to have no moral compass. You get INSIDE it, rather than stay outside of it - which then implicates you, the reader/audience member. Raskolnikov is not without sympathetic qualities. Neither is Macbeth. Admitting that is one of the truly unbalancing things about that play). You could make a great case for either interpretation, but the actor's job is to fulfill the director's interpretation - so there is a huge ongoing clash between actor and director in Season2 of Slings & Arrows. The actor (Henry Breedlove) insists that Macbeth is a criminal psychopath, with no morality whatsoever, (and the actor manages to suggest that there is some fear there, some resistance based on a reluctance to reveal certai sides of himself) - so to "slow things down", so to speak, in the first scene between them, as Geoffrey wants, and to have Lady Macbeth undress her husband and wash the blood of battle off of his body - was unthinkable to Mr. Breedlove. He basically refuses to do it. It's too human. HIS Macbeth would never allow it.

Interestingly enough, that is just how the scene was played in Patrick Stewart's Macbeth that I saw at BAM a couple years back.

Lady M did not undress her husband, but she did fawn all over him, kissing him, caressing him, putting her hand between his legs - not only to relax him, but to also dominate him. It was made even more disturbing because of the age difference between the two actors (Stewart is, in all honesty, too old for Macbeth) - but they made it work: it looked a bit like an older guy with his libido not what it used to be, trying to keep up with his hot young wife. And it made a lot of sense. That one of the reasons he follows through on her commands, is not just for his own lust for power, but his own anxiety about losing her and not seeming like a man to her. He is very very worried about that.

Lady Macbeth says it right out, in her soliloquy after reading his letter to her:

Yet do I fear thy nature,
It is too full o' th' milk of human kindness
To catch the nearest way.

She understands her power over him, calling out to him in her mind:

Hie thee hither,
That I may pour my spirits in thine ear,
And chastise with the valor of my tongue
All that impedes thee from the golden round,
Which fate and metaphysical aid doth seem
To have thee crown'd withal.

She sees his weakness. To her, "milk of human kindness" is weak. She's a tough customer. After making their plans to kill Duncan (she pushing him on), comes the psychologically devastating Act I, scene vii, where you can see what she "does" to this guy, her husband. Not that he is a victim, he falls prey to his ambition as well - but it goes back to the PAIR theory of criminal psychology. Would Macbeth have done this on his own? I think if Shakespeare had wanted to make that point, he would have made Lady Macbeth more of a worried nonentity, like the other wives of his other tragic heroes. The wives who cajole, plead, try to hold their husband back, keep him safe. Shakespeare is up to something different here. Also, knowing his obsession with twins (it shows up in almost every play), I have to believe it is deliberate: the "twinning" of Macbeth and Lady M. The sense that only together would they be able to accomplish murder. Alone, they are helpless, together they are deadly. Anyway, back to Act I, sc. vii, which is upsetting reading - on multiple levels. (I touched on this in my review of Don't Deliver Us From Evil, referencing the Macbeths in the opening.) Directly before this, Macbeth has his waffling "if it were done, when tis done, then twere well it were done quickly" soliloquy, where you can feel him basically getting up the guts. A remnant of conscience. Lady M. bursts in on his reverie, interrupting him. The end of the soliloquy ends with a dash, which tells you the kind of symbiosis and interconnection Shakespeare wanted to create here. Lady M won't even let her husband finish his damn soliloquy properly.

Lady M. He has almost supp'd. Why have you
left the chamber?

Macbeth: Hath he ask'd for me?

Lady M: Know you not he has?

Macbeth: We will proceed no further in this business:
He hath honor'd me of late, and I have bought
Golden opinions from all sorts of people,
Which would be worn now in their newest gloss,
Not cast aside so soon.

[Uh-oh. Lady M is not gonna like this.]

Lady M: Was the hope drunk
Wherein you dress'd yourself Hath it slept since?
And wakes it now to look so green and pale
At what it did so freely? From this time
Such I account thy love. Art thou afeard
To be the same in thine own act and valor
As thou art in desire? Wouldst thou have that
Which thou esteem'st the ornament of life
And live a coward in thine own esteem.
Letting "I dare not" wait upon "I would,"
Like the poor cat i' th' adage?

[Ouch. She certainly knows how to push his buttons. "You coward." Potent stuff, which is certainly supported by Macbeth's next line:]

Macbeth: Prithee peace!
I dare do all that may become a man
Who dares do more is none.

[His humanity is hanging by a thread here. He could definitely hold onto it if she would just stop badgering him! Prithee, peace! This is blood to a vampire. Now comes one of Lady Macbeth's most revealing and awful speeches - look at its power. It still amazes me.]

Lady M: What beast was't then
That made you break this enterprise to me?
When you durst do it, then you were a man;
And to be more than what you were, you would
Be so much more the man. Nor time, nor place,
Did then adhere, and yet you would make both:
They have made themselves, and that their fitness now
Does unmake you. I have given suck, and know
How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me;
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this.

[Holy shit. There are many levels here. She is making the analogy of nursing a baby to nursing her husband - which is disturbing, on a sexual level. She is revealing that she once had a child, she gave birth, she has "given suck", but the babe obviously is no longer with them. Equating her husband with the now-dead baby is manipulation of the highest order. It also goes along with her famous cry early in the play: "Unsex me here." She begs the "spirits that tend on mortal thoughts" to "unsex me here, And fill me from the crown to the toe topful of direst cruelty." Now, now, this is interesting. Lady Macbeth needs spiritual HELP to be "unsexed", ie: lose her humanity - even she can't do it alone, and she also knows that she must be "unsexed" in order to then be filled with "direst cruelty". All of this, though, is a private moment with herself. Her husband is not let in on that struggle. To him, she shows a passionate commitment, unwavering, inhuman to the extreme. Heady stuff.]

Macbeth: If we should fail?

Lady M: We fail?
But screw your courage to the sticking place,
And we'll not fail.

After her big pumping-up speech about how the murder of Duncan is going to go ("don't worry, dear, I've thought of everything, leave it all to me"), Macbeth explains, in a line that makes me wince for him:

Macbeth: Bring forth men-children only!
For thy undaunted mettle should compose
Nothing but males.

I don't know if Lady Macbeth can no longer have children, or what the deal is, but that's an intense line, especially following her loving and then awful image of nursing a baby and then plucking her "nipple from his boneless gums" ... This is an intense relationship here, suffocting, a bell jar of mirroring images and symbols. They are intertwining, they are becoming one. It is awful - no wonder why people have such a bad response to this play. Psychodrama, man.

I guess if Macbeth were "just" a psychopath, a kind of Scottish Ted Bundy or Scottish Idi Amin (the "last King of Scotland" indeed), it might be easier to deal with him, explain him away. This is the struggle that goes down in Slings & Arrows, a struggle that encapsulates the centuries of struggle that usually go into doing this particular play "effectively". It's tough. It's one of Shakespeare's bloodiest. There is no moral. Or, what's the moral: Don't let a psychopath ruin your country? It is nihilistic in a way that the other tragedies are not, with their piercing moments of mercy, revelation, and awareness of all that is lost (Lear's "never, never, never, never", and Hamlet's "the rest is silence" being primary examples of their tragic understanding of how THEY AND THEY ALONE are responsible.) But with Macbeth, he chops his way to the top, he is haunted by the leering Ghost of Banquo, he loses his marbles, and finally loses his own head, and nobody feels bad about it, because he's already murdered anyone who would give a shite, and they have a new King now, "long live the King of Scotland".

It is effed up, and I love it dearly.

Ellen Terry was fearful about approaching Lady Macbeth, in the same way that actors today are probably fearful about approaching Stanley Kowalski, due to the inevitable comparison. As I mentioned, Sarah Siddons made such a deep impact with her Lady Macbeth, and the "press" about it (William Hazlitt, I adore him, called her "tragedy personified") was so extensive that Terry knew she had to find her own way, her own interpretation. Even though that performance was a century in the past, the cultural impact of it was remembered. It became "the way" to play Lady Macbeth. So where did Ellen Terry start? She went back and researched Sarah Siddons, to try to see where that actress was coming from. Not to imitate, but to get an inkling of the approach. Smart, smart. Ellen Terry was a childlike soul (the word comes up again and again), and stagehands tell of seeing her, a woman in her 40s, climb up a rope backstage into the wings, and then slide down, laughing hysterically. This was who she was. How could she translate THAT (that which came naturally to her) into Lady M? She couldn't do it any other way.

Holyroyd describes her approach in his book:

'Lady Macbeth interests me beyond expression,' Ellen told Stephen Coleridge, '-- how much I fear will she will be beyond my expression!' Of what use would her celebrated charm, her gift for pathos, her natural vivacity, be in depicting the 'fiendlike queen'?...

But what persuaded Irving to put on Macbeth, and gave Ellen guidance as to how she might find a new interpretation of her character, was an article, published on 12 August 1843, in the Westminster Review, which revealed Mrs. Siddons's private thoughts about the play.

That essay, by Sarah Siddons, entitled "Remarks on the Character of Lady Macbeth", is a fascinating detailed analysis of the play and Lady M's part in it. I have a copy of it in the indispensable book Actors on Acting: The Theories, Techniques, and Practices of the World's Great Actors, Told in Thir Own Words (I am forever grateful, sometimes, that I have invested so much time and energy in creating an actual LIBRARY of books in my collection.) Sarah Siddons analyzes not just the character, but the structure of the play itself, and Ellen Terry found in it many revelations.

Siddons starts with:

In this astonishing creature one sees a woman in whose bosom the passion of ambition has almost obliterated all the characteristics of human nature; in whose composition are associated all the subjugating powers of intellect and all the charms and graces of personal beauty. You will probably not agree with me as to the character of that beauty; yet, perhaps, this difference of opinion will be entirely attributable to the difficulty of your imagination disengaging itself from that idea of the person of her representative which you have been so long accustomed to contemplate.

I can almost feel Ellen Terry's jolt of "a-ha, now THIS is something I understand" in reading that. Ellen Terry was rather vain. Or, let's say it another way: as an actress, she understood that one of the weapons in her arsenal was her beauty. It was an undeniable fact, and it served her well, and she was grateful for it. She knew it was important. To accept that Lady Macbeth was "beautiful", and not just a scheming murderer - that both could be true - must have given Terry a sense of the possibilities, and given her confidence, that yes, I can do this. I can use what I already HAVE.

Siddons goes on:

According to my notion, it is of that character which I believe is generally allowed to be most captivating to the other sex, - fair, feminine, nay, perhaps, even fragile -

Fair as the forms that, wove in Fancy's loom,
Float in light visions round the poet's head.

Such a combination only, respectable in energy and strength of mind, and captivating in feminine loveliness, could have composed a charm of such potency as to fascinate the mind of a hero so dauntless, a character so amiable, so honorable as Macbeth, to seduce him to brave all the dangers of the present and all the terrors of a future world ...

THIS is why I don't even need to have seen Siddons's Lady M to know that she was probably a hell of an actress. That is specific, and not only specific but PLAY-able. You cannot play an abstract, or an ideal. What is the character DO-ing?

Here is Siddons on the terrifying sleepwalking scene:

Behold her now, with wasted form, with wan and haggard countenance, her starry eyes glazed with the ever-burning fever of remorse, and on their lids the shadows of death. Her ever-restless spirit wanders in troubled dreams about her dismal apartment; and whether waking or asleep, the smell of innocent blood incessantly haunts her imagination...

During this appalling scene, which, to my sense, is the most so of them all, the wretched creature, in imagination, acts over again the accumulated horrors of her whole conduct. These dreadful images, accompanied with the agitations they have induced, have obviously accelerated her untimely end; for in a few moments the tidings of her death are brought to her unhappy husband. It is conjectured that she died by her own hand. Too certain it is, that she dies, and makes no sign. I have now to account you for the weakness which I have, a few lines back, ascribed to Macbeth; and I am not quite without hope that the following observations will bear me out in this opinion. Please to observe, that he (I think pusillanimously, when I compare his conduct to her forebearance) has been continually pouring out his miseries to his wife. His heart has therefore been eased, from time to time, by unloading its weight of woe; while she, on the contrary, has perseveringly endured in silence the uttermost anguish of a wounded spirit.

Wow. Yes. Yes. The text supports this. "Unsex me here" is a private moment, her husband never ever gets wind of that struggle.

Siddons goes on:

Her feminine nature, her delicate structure, it is too evident, are soon overwhelmed by the enormous pressure of her crimes. yet it will be granted, that she gives proofs of a naturally higher toned mind than that of Macbeth. The different physical powers of the two sexes are finely delineated, in the different effects which their mutual crimes produce. Her frailer frame, and keener feelings, have now sunk under the struggle - his robust and less sensitive constitution has not only resisted it, but bears him on to deeper wickedness, and to experience the fatal fecundity of crime.

That twin thing again. The two parts made whole, in a terrifying way. A mirror image. One could not exist without the other.

Ellen Terry read Sarah Siddons's word and got fired up. She found her own backbone. She knew what to DO now. Here is Holroyd's description of that process:

What surprised Ellen as she read this essay was the revelation that Sarah Siddons had apparently seen Lady Macbeth as a 'fair, feminine, nay, perhaps, even fraile' woman ... This was very different from the virago she had portrayed onstage where Lady Macbeth's motivations appeared to spring from a hive of evil seething within her that destroyed her initially virtuous husband. In the theatre, Mrs. Siddons's Macbeth had been the tragedy of power used as a substitute for love - she overwhelmed Macbeth's intermittent sense of the emptiness behind his ambitions. But on the page Mrs. Siddons had written of Macbeth as a tragedy that evolved from a flaw in human nature.

Why, then, Ellen asked herself, did Mrs Siddons 'write down one set of ideas upon the subject and carry out a totally different plan'? The answer must have been that she was a prisoner of her own solemn talent, an actress who, in Leigh Hunt's words, could 'overpower, astonish, afflict, but ... [whose] majestic presence and commanding features seemed to disregard love, as a trifle to which they cannot descend'. Ellen Terry possessed little of the stately genius of Sarah Siddons that had made her Joshua Reynolds's 'the Tragic Muse', but she had in a unique degree that 'trifle' of love and the potent web of charm that Sarah Siddons identified as being Lady Macbeth's essential qualities. Who would not murder for her husband? Ellen could understand such a question and perhaps achieve something that had eluded the legendary Sarah Siddons. Her Lady Macbeth 'pricks the sides' of her husband so that he will better attain his wonderful aspiration. She feels a joy in his presence and subdues everything to his dreams. Irving's acting version, which replaced the original twenty-nine scenes with nineteen, omitted Lady Macduff, leaving Lady Macbeth a more isolated figure like Macbeth himself. The two of them stand alone - and eventually stand apart from each other. Irving's Macbeth was 'a poet with his brain and a villain with his heart' who clothes his crimes in romantic glamour. His wife is deluded by this glamour until she sits 'wondering and frightened' as Ellen recorded, realising that Macbeth has 'no need of his wife now'.

Again, wow. That is a deeply thoughtful analysis. To ask "why" they do what they do is not excuse-making. It is essential for theatrical truth. This is not akin to "I ate Twinkies as a kid, and that's why I shot up my school". This is looking at something that has daunted scholars for centuries (why? why do they do what they do?) and making a stab at understanding. These are not superhuman beings sprung from the evil warlord Xenu's secret galaxy. They are human beings. Human beings do terrible things. Human beings sometimes do terrible things and have no remorse. Remorse in Macbeth is even more terrifying because it seems to work on a completely subliminal level. Lady Macbeth experiences remorse only when she is sleepwalking, and sees blood on her hands. And Macbeth sees the ghost of Banquo at the dinner, and flips out, not knowing what is real and what is imagined. He is too far beyond the pale now to ask questions. There is indeed a point of no return.

Now Holroyd gets into the nuts and bolts of Ellen's process (and this is why the book is so good - it doesn't skimp on the MAGIC of the actor's process. That's what I want to know, and he does not disappoint). How does Ellen then take the revelation from Sarah Siddons's words and make it her own?

Never before had Ellen prepared for a role so comprehensively... Ellen filled two of the copies [of the play] with her copious notes, trawling through the text for illustrations of Lady Macbeth's feminine nature and its effect on her husband. 'I must try to do this: 2 years ago I could not even have tried,' she scribbled next to one of her speeches. In a letter to the playwright Alfred Calmour she wrote: 'I have been absorbed by Lady Mac... she is most feminine ... I mean to try at a true likeness, as it is within my means.' On the flyleaves of one copy of the play, she described Lady Macbeth as being 'full of womanliness' and 'capable of affection, adding: 'she loves her husband... and is half the time afraid whilst urging Macbeth not to be afraid as she loves a man. Women love men.'

There's that possibly emasculating idea that is certainly in the play and Lady M's speeches, how she preys on Macbeth's nervousness that he is not enough of a man. Not just to be a king, but enough of a man for HER. Classic. Good stuff Ellen.

[Irving] had cut the text by approximately 20 per cent. 'The murder of Baquo, I have cut out as the scene is superfluous,' he informed the designer Keeley Halswelle. But one important cut from the 1875 production he restored: the speech of the wounded sergeant in Act I, scene ii, which tells of Macbeth's extraordinary valour in vattle - a valour which forms a juxtaposition to his moral cowardice. As Elen observed in one of her annotations to the play, he was 'a man of great physical courage frightened at a mouse.' What this helped to define was the nature of Lady Macbeth's love for him not simply an admiration for his exploits in the field, but a sense of what he lacked and she could make good.

Fascinating. Ellen Terry here was not a young actress. She was in her 40s. She had been acting since she was 5, 6 years old. She knew who she was, she knew HOW to work, and here she was, faced with a challenge. Instead of trying to be what she was not (a scheming malicious evil woman), she instead saw Lady Macbeth as an aspect of her personality, the one she could understand: the loving wife of a husband who was not quite good enough for her, and if she just pushes him, he will be as glorious as he deserves to be, and she will reflect in that glow. Ellen Terry knew, in her bones, how to play that.

I love the following anecdote about Henry Irving trying to tell the composer of the score what he wanted. Thank you to whomever took note of that moment, because it is a perfect example of what collaboration means, and also how artists, when they are in a groove with one another, tend to understand the unspoken. Good artists, anyway. Kazan talks about how he never had to "tell" Brando anything. He'd start to say something, Brando would nod curtly, having filled in the rest, and would sometimes walk away, to let it percolate, to then just DO it. Irving telling the composer what he wanted, and the composer "getting" it is a beautiful example of this.

Macbeth opened at the end of 1888. The sonorous and supernatural music had been composed by Arthur Sullivan, who took his cue from Irving's various hummings and gestures. 'A drum, a drum, Macbeth will come,' Irving had suggested, adding that a trumpet too might be useful - anything of a stirring sort. Sullivan got the orchestra to play him what he had written. 'Will that do?' he asked. Irving insisted that it was 'very fine' - but absolutely useless. Sullivan then asked for further hints, and Irving began swaying his body sideways, beating the air and making inchoate vowel sounds. 'I think I understand,' Sullivan said and turned back to his score. Presently the orchestra struck up some passages again and Irving cried out: 'Splendid! Splendid! That's all I could have wished for.' Sullivan completed his score in three days, working through the last night.

Tears!!

Henry Irving and his Lyceum Theatre was known for its overwhelming scenery, its realism (when they did Faust, for example, Ellen and Henry had traveled to Germany to research the area and get ideas for the scenery - same thing here, Ellen and Henry had gone to Scotland to get ideas) went all out here for Macbeth.

The sumptuous scenery, lit by flashes of moonlight that appeared to penetrate the thickest of castle walls, represented the awful depths in which Macbeth was shrouded: wide, desolate Scottish heaths, gloomy court interiors, a mysterious withches' cavern lit by uncanny radiance, and then the vast battlefield over which, to roars off thunder, Irving manoeuvered his army of actors.

He was fond of magnifying the sense of apprehension by 'leaving the stage in utter darkness,' the American actor Arnold Daly observed. Sometimes he would light a set with 'a solitary lamp or dull fire which may be in a room; while he has directed from the prompt place or the flies, a closely focussed calcium ... so that you can only see a lot of spectral figures without expression moving about the scene - and one ghostly face shining out of the darkness.'

Dear Arnold Daly, thank you for writing down your impressions. I truly feel like I can SEE it now.

Macbeth was his most somber production - the sets so extensively gloomy that hen an outdoor scene was played in bright daylight there was a shout of relief from the audience.

Where is my time machine. I resent its absence.

Holroyd describes the sense of anticipation growing in the audience to see this particular production. Ellen Terry was a star, let's not forget. So was Henry Irving. They had toured America. They had brought their productions around England, Ireland. Macbeth was THE ticket of the season.

Speculation and excitement had been rising in the weeks before the opening night and queues outside the theatre began forming at seven o'clock in the morning.

I think of myself, sleeping in the dirt, LITERALLY, in Central Park, to get a ticket to The Segull, directed by Mike Nichols, starring Meryl Streep and Kevin Klin (and Philip Seymour Hoffman, Natalie Portman, Christopher Walken, Marcia Gay Harden, you get the picture?) Tickets were free. You had to get in line. No other way. I had no strings to pull. So I got in line, slept in Central Park for the night, curled up in the dirt (staring around me at the tent-city that had cropped up with other ticket-buyers, people with Hibachis and camp chairs ... amazing). I HAD to see the show. Londoners in 1888 felt the same way about the Lyceum's Macbeth.

The reviews were actually mixed, but it had an impact on audiences that seemed to just grow over time (in a similar way to Sarah Siddons's Lady Macbeth). It's also similar to the fact that the original review of Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway did not call out Marlon Brando for special recognition. He was listed in with the rest of the cast as all being very good, and Jessica Tandy was really the one who was written about most extensively. Over time, the impact of that performance just grew, exponentially, but it was not immediately apparent - not even to Brando - what had happened and what it "meant" to the culture at large.

Holroyd writes:

Irving's ironic, semi-humourous speeches were peculiarly strong and, in recollection, Ellen Terry's interpretation of her role more memorable than it promised to be - the audience, as if hypnotised by her disordered figure, the haggard face, the straggling hair, had collectively seemed to hold its breath during the sleepwalking scene. It was not tragic acting but a masterpiece of pathos. 'There is more of pity than of terror in her end,' Ellen wrote. '... She dies of remorse.'

Perhaps this is debatable, but that's the best thing about it. It's HERS. However, there were those who did not like the new interpretation. Where was the evil? Where was the schemer they had all come to expect?

It occurs to me that all of this is reminiscent of my feeling when I saw Natasha Richardson (may she rest in peace) play Sally Bowles at the Roundabout production of Cabaret. I described that in full here, in my memorial piece for Richardson. Are certain roles NOT up for interpretation? Or is it just that the person who originally played it made such an impression that we cannot even imagine it done another way? Richardson literally wiped out the indelible impression made by Liza Minelli in Fosse's film. This isn't to say it was better. It was not. It was completely new, and fresh. She re-interpreted it. That took balls. That's the kind of thing I am talking about here. Richardson did not convince everyone, but she sure convinced me. She EARNED that. Best live performance I have ever seen.

Holroyd talks about some of the skepticism at the time about the new spin on Macbeth:

But was Macbeth really 'an Empire builder led astray by listening to bad advice from a parcel of witches who had lured him from his regimental duty'? Henry Labouchere could not resist poking fun at Ellen's soft-natured damsel who 'roars as gently as any sucking dove'. Nevertheless, he acknowledged that 'such a magnificent show as the new Macbeth has never been seen before.'

Ellen wrote a letter to her daughter about some of the controversy surrounding her "interpretation" and concluded:

Meanwhile, I shall not budge an inch in the reading of it, for that I know is right. Oh, it's fun, but it's precious hard work for I by no means make her a 'gentle lovable woman' as some of 'em say ... She was nothing of the sort, although she was not a fiend, and did love her husband.

I believe her.

Holroyd writes:

This love [that Lady M had for her husband] was the ingredient Irving had been seeking to give his production its originality. 'The great fact about Miss Terry's Lady Macbeth is its sex,' wrote a critic in the Star. 'It is redolent, pungent with the odeur de femme. Look how she rushes into her husband's arms, clinging, kissing, coaxing, and even her taunts, when his resolution begins to wane, are sugared with a loving smile.'

It's even more sinister, if you think about it in that way. Kind of brilliant, actually, and daring. At the time, no other actress could have pulled it off but Ellen Terry. She inspired the next generation of actresses to be bold and yet thoughtful in their approaches to these classic roles. A couple of people who saw the performance when they were young credit it, and it alone, with making them want to go into the theatre. One young woman decided, almost on the spot, that she wanted to be an actress after watching Terry's Lady M, and did go on to some success with it in America. It had that kind of power.

Since this was, after all, 1888, we have no record of the performance, no film, no recording. We have the responses of audience members who wrote things down. We do have a lot of information, we just can't see it, or feel it, for ourselves.

John Singer Sargent wanted to paint her as Lady Macbeth, in the costume she wore. Terry was very very into her costumes. She knew what she wanted, and felt, often, that without a good costume, that flattered her, or if the colors were wrong, she couldn't play the part. The dress she wore for Lady Macbeth was designed by Alice Comyns- Carr, a bold almost pagan design, beautifully executed. Sargent wanted to paint her in that dress. Ellen Terry hesitated. This was before she knew that the play was a smash hit (it ran for 150 performances to sold-out houses the entire time). Sargent had seen her (maybe on opening night or a preview) and immediately knew he had to paint her in that dress. She was cautious, however, about having some glorious painting done of her in a role that might end up being a FLOP for her. However, once she realized it was a success, she said to Sargent, Go for it, and yes, you can paint me in my Lady M. dress.

The dress is described thus, by Alice Comyns Carr in her memoir:

[Mrs. Nettleship] bought the fine yarn for me in Bohemia - a twist of soft green silk and blue tinsel ... When the straight thirteenth-century dress with sweeping-sleeves was finished it hung beautifully, but we did not think that it was brilliant enough, so it was sewn all over with the real green beetle-wings, and a narrowborder in Celtic designs, worked out in rubies and diamonds, hemmed all the edges. To this was added a cloak of shot velvet in heather tones, upon which great griffons were embroidered with flame-colored tinsel ... [and] two long plaits twisted with gold hung to her knees.

To get her portrait painted by Sargent, Ellen would get dressed in this get-up at her house and travel by carriage, in that get-up, to Sargent's house. Oscar Wilde, who adored her as an actress, wrote two sonnets for her, saw her go by once in her Lady M dress on her way to Sargent's and wrote:

The street that on a wet and dreary morning has vouchsafed the vision of Lady Macbeth in full regalia magnificently seated in a four-wheeler can never again be as other streets: it must always be full of wonderful possibilities.

Sargent went back and forth about how he wanted to portray her, and finally decided to isolate her - have her body cut out the background entirely.

His portrait is the 19th century equivalent of being photographed by Herb Ritts or Annie Liebowitz. This is a star-making portrait, and caused a huge controversy by Victorian art critics who found it distasteful. The Saturday Review called it 'the best hated picture of the year'.

To my eye, looking at it over the span of a century-plus - I think it captures some of what Ellen Terry was going for in her interpretation of that part, and how vibrantly she succeeded. Yes, the pose is exquisite, and the colors just play up the disturbing quality of it all ... but for me, it's the look that Sargent was able to capture in her eyes.

Puts an ice-cube right down my spine, I can tell you that.

Shakespeare makes people crazy, example 1

This exchange just gets more and more delightful as it goes on. Max Beerbohm (look him up if you don't know who he is) writes a letter to the editor in regards to a recent edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets. A Shakespeare expert, Mr. Thomas Tyler replies, sending his own letter to the editor, in regards to Beerbohm's letter, and Max Beerbohm replies again. It is masterful. So so witty. It's the last sentence of Beerbohm's last letter that is the "button" of the comedy. The "ching" to the other two letters "ba-dum". The details. The fervent urgency in Tyler's letter. Yet also the overwhelming formality and respect they give to one another (rather than today's perhaps more honest yet incivil and humorless name-calling that passes for "debate" on political sites. Its worst sin, in my mind, is that it represents terrible writing, not to mention cloudy blinkered thinking. If the thought is limited, so too is the language - and vice versa). The letters below show what it means to be passionate about one's scholarly topic, in a fearless nerdy way. It is also indicative of the near-psychosis this Shakespeare chap can engender. Conscience does make cowards of us all? I would say that Shakespeare does make manic nerds of us all. The exchange also goes to show you that Google and Wikipedia may be awesome and they are, but people who have needed to find shit out through history will do so, come hell or high water.

Enjoy. This is rollicking awesome stuff. To say more would be to give away the joke of it.

[Max Beerbohm to the Editor of the Pall Mall Gazette]:

5 May 1898

48 Upper Berkeley Street

Shakespeare's Sonnets

Dear Sir,

Your reviewer complains that in Mr. George Wyndham's edition of the sonnets there is no note upon that much-debated line:

Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth.

Various editors have sought to elucidate this line in various ways, but so far as I know, none has hit upon the following explanation, which seems to me to be the only one that is quite plausible. In all ancient books of heraldry one finds that the chief escutcheons bear on either side certain wing-like appendages, which are technically called "flourishes". Each of these appendages signified "a noble Place or Poste under the Crowne". The tenure of a Royal seal or charter, for example, or admission to the Privy Council, entitled a nobleman to add one of these flourishes to his arms. But if for any misdemeanour he forfeited his privilege the heralds caused a line to be drawn through his flourish, which was thenceforth described by them as a "flourish transfix". Thus in Hort's Compleat Booke of Antient Heraldrie and the Devices, published in 1653, one finds that the arms of the Earl of Forde had as many as nine flourishes, two of which were crossed--one "transfix in the yeare 1540 for Rebellion". All flourishes were abolished by Charles II, soon after the Restoration, when it was found that many noblemen had contrived to embellish their arms with flourishes to which they had no right.

I am your obedient servant,
Max Beerbohm

[Thomas Tyler to the Editor of the Pall Mall Gazette]

May 1898
5 Thornhill Square, N

Shakespeare's Sonnets

Sir, A letter signed "Max Beerbohm" in the Pall Mall Gazette for May 7 has come under my notice. The letter mentions a line in Shakespeare's sixtieth sonnet which certainly presents some difficulty:

Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth

According to Mr Beerbohm the line contains a metaphor borrowed from heraldic usage. "Flourishes" were appendages to coats-of-arms indicating honours attained. Misconduct might be punished by a line "transfixing" the flourish. An alleged case in point is that of "the Earl of Forde", for information concerning which we are referred to "Hort's Compleat Booke of Antient Heraldrie and the Devices, published in 1653". Mr Beerbohm's suggestion would have been not without value if verification had been possible. Unfortunately this is not the case. No such work as that mentioned is to be found in the British Museum catalogue, or in that of the Bodleian or of the Huth Library, or in Moule's Bibliotheca Heraldica, or in other well-known lists. Dr Furnivall, who has taken a good deal of trouble in the matter, wrote to a friend of his, a distinguished member of the Heralds' College; but this gentleman knew nothing of "the Earl of Forde", and did not believe in "transfixed flourishes". I do not like to come to the conclusion that Mr Beerbohm's letter was a practical joke; but if so, it can scarcely be regarded as other than very objectionable. Appearing in a journal so well known and so influential as the Pall Mall Gazette, it may, as Dr. Furnivall points out, crop up again fifty years hence; and even now it may lead astray German or American students, who are unable to consult the great libraries of this country.

I am, Sir, your obedient servant
Thomas Tyler

[Max Beerbohm to the Editor of the Pall Mall Gazette]

30 May 1898
48 Upper Berkeley Street

Shakespeare's Sonnets

Dear Sir, I am sorry that serious men have been taking me seriously as a commentator on Shakespeare, and I hasten to admit that my theory of the heraldic metaphor was but an essay in fantastic erudition, or, as Mr Tyler rather crudely conjectures, "a practical joke". To Dr Furnivall I have already confessed, receiving a genial absolution. To the others I apologise also. But have I really wasted anyone's time? The true scholar loves research for its own sake. The exhilaration is in the chase itself rather than in the "kill". That is a metaphor drawn from fox-hunting. It can be verified in the Badminton Library.

I am your obedient servant
Max Beerbohm

-from Letters of Max Beerbohm, 1892-1956 / edited by Rupert Hart-Davis

"Forget about the boy"

From Thoroughly Modern Millie, performed on the 2002 Tony Awards. Exhilarating. Last Sunday, Mitchell, Rachel and I went to Side Trak, a gay bar in Chicago - and every Sunday afternoon they have a "musical comedy video" extravaganza. Hard to explain how much work goes into these compilations, that play on every screen in the joint - and the videos are different every week. Bea Arthur and Angela Lansbury performing "Bosom Buddies" (a favorite at Side Trak), various clips from Rocky Horror -but seriously, whoever puts together these videos is AMAZING. They find everything, they keep everything - and people flock to Side Trak, to have a cocktail, and sing along to EVERYTHING.

So look. Forget about the boy. That's an order!

Today in history: December 3, 1947

A Streetcar Named Desire opened in New York at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre.

Scene 5, Streetcar Named Desire

BLANCHE: Young man! Young, young, young man! Has anyone ever told you that you look like a young Prince out of the Arabian Nights?

Tennessee Williams lived in New Orleans while finishing Streetcar which, at that time, was called The Poker Night. Here is Kenneth Holditch, who gives literary tours in New Orleans:

[Williams] said from that apartment he could hear that rattletrap streetcar named Desire running along Royal and one named Cemeteries running along Canal. And it seemed to him the ideal metaphor for the human condition.

Tennessee Williams on Irene Selznick, who was chosen to produce Streetcar:

She is supposed to have 16 million dollars and good taste. I am dubious.

Irene Selznick, Tennessee Williams, Elia Kazan, consulting backstage at Streetcar

Elia Kazan on scripts:

"One must do one's best and at a certain point say, 'I've done all I can. I'm not going to make this better.'

I've noticed that the best pieces of writing for the theatre I've known are complete at birth. The first draft had it -- or didn't. In both Streetcar Named Desire and Death of a Salesman, I asked the author for no rewriting, and rehearsals didn't reveal the need for any. Those plays were born sound. The work, the struggle, the self-flaggelation -- had all taken place within the author before he touched the typewriter. usually when there is a lot of tampering and fussing over a manuscript, there's something basically wrong to begin with."

Tennessee Williams, letter to Jay Laughlin, April 9, 1947:

I have done a lot of work, finished two long plays. One of them, laid in New Orleans, A STREETCAR CALLED DESIRE, turned out quite well. It is a strong play, closer to "Battle of Angels" than any of my other work, but is not what critics call "pleasant". In fact it is pretty unpleasant.

Some background. In 1947 (when Streetcar was still in the planning stages), Williams saw Arthur Miller's All My Sons on Broadway and was blown away. Kazan had directed. Williams immediately reached out to Kazan, striking up a correspondence (obviously having Kazan in mind to direct his new "unpleasant" play STREETCAR CALLED DESIRE). Kazan had reservations at first. Williams' stuff perhaps seemed too fragile, ephemeral, effeminate, I'm sure. He wasn't sure how he would handle it as a play. Kazan responded to Miller's social and political commentary (as a red-dyed Lefty from way back), and Williams' work is strictly apolitical. Kazan said, "Miller seemed more my kind." Kazan recognized Williams' talent but just wasn't sure if it was his cup of tea as a director. How little we know ourselves at times! Anyway, Williams' agent Audrey Wood opened up negotiations with Kazan, also looping in Irene Selznick. At some point, early on, the negotiations broke down and Kazan withdrew his interest, causing everyone to go into a tailspin. Eventually, they came to an agreement, and Kazan signed back on - but before that, Williams wrote Kazan (or "Gadge" as he was known to his friends, short for "Gadget") a letter. I love these early letters because their relationship has not solidified yet. Theirs ended up being a spectacular collaboration, one of the most important in American theatrical history, but they didn't know that in 1947.

Tennessee Williams to Elia Kazan, April 19, 1947.

I am bitterly disappointed that you and Mrs. Selznick did not come to an agreement. I am wondering what was the primary trouble - the script itself or your unwillingness to tie up with another producer. Frankly I did not know that you were now in the producing field. Working outside of New York has many advantages but a disadvantage is that you lack information about such things. I have known you only in the capacity of actor and director.

I am sure that you must also have had reservations about the script. I will try to clarify my intentions in this play. I think its best quality is its authenticity or its fidelity to life. There are no "good" or "bad" people. Some are a little better or a little worse but all are activated more by misunderstanding than malice. A blindness to what is going on in each other's hearts. Stanley sees Blanche not as a desperate, driven creature backed into a last corner to make a last desperate stand - but as a calculating bitch with "round heels". Mitch accepts first her own false projection of herself as a refined young virgin, saving herself for the one eventual mate - then jumps way over to Stanley's conception of her. Nobody sees anybody truly, but all through the flaws of their own ego. That is the way we all see each other in life. Vanity, fear, desire, competition - all such distortions within our own egos - condition our vision of those in relation to us. Add to those distortions in our own egos, the corresponding distortions in the egos of the others - and you see how cloudy the glass must become through which we look at each other. That's how it is in all living relationships except when there is that rare case of two people who love intensely enough to burn through all those layers of opacity and see each others naked hearts. Such a case seems purely theoretical to me.

However in creative fiction and drama, if the aim is fidelity, people are shown as we never see them in life but as they are. Quite impartially, without any ego-flaws in the eye of the beholder. We see from outside what could not be seen within, an the truth of the tragic dilemma becomes apparent. It was not that one person was bad or good, one right or wrong, but that all judged falsely concerning each other, what seemed black to one and white to the other is actually grey - a perception that could occur only through the detached eye of art. (As if a ghost sat over the affairs of men and made a true record of them) Naturally a play of this kind does not exactly present a theme or score a point, unless it be the point or theme of human misunderstanding. When you begin to arrange the action of a play to score a certain point the fidelity to life may suffer. I don't say it always does. Things may be selected to score a point clearly without any contrivance toward that end, but I am afraid it happens rarely.

Finding a director aside from yourself who can bring this play to life exactly as if it were happening in life is going to be a problem. But that is the kind of direction it has to have. (I don't necessarily mean "realism": sometimes a living quality is caught better by expressionism than what is supposed to be realistic treatment.)

I remember you asked me what should an audience feel for Blanche. Certainly pity. It is a tragedy with the classic aim of producing a katharsis of pity and terror, and in order to do that Blanche must finally have the understanding and compassion of the audience. This without creating a black-dyed villain in Stanley. It is a thing (misunderstanding) not a person (Stanley) that destroys her in the end. In the end you should feel - "If only they all had known about each other!" - But there was always the paper lantern or the naked bulb!

(Incidentally, at the close of the play, I think Stanley should remove the paper lantern from the bulb - after Blanche is carried out and as he goes to resume the game.)

I have written all this out in case you were primarily troubled over my intention in the play. Please don't regard this as "pressure". A wire from Irene and a letter from Audrey indicate that both of them feel you have definitely withdrawn yourself from association with us and that we must find someone else. I don't want to accept this necessity without exploring the nature and degree of the difference between us.

Scene 3, Streetcar Named Desire:

STANLEY: Stella! My baby doll's left me! [He breaks into sobs. Then he goes to the phone and dials, still shuddering with sobs] Eunice? I want my baby! [He waits a moment; then he hangs up and dials again] Eunice! I'll keep on ringin' until I talk with my baby! [An indistinguishable shrill voice is heard. He hurls phone to floor. Dissonant brass and piano sounds as the rooms dim out to darkness and the outer walls appear in the night light. The "blue piano" plays for a brief interval. Finally, Stanley stumbles half-dressed out to the porch and down the wooden steps to the pavement below the building. There he throws back his head like a baying hound and bellows his wife's name: Stella! Stella, sweetheart! Stella!"] Stell-lahhhhh!

EUNICE: [calling down from the door of her upper apartment] Quit that howling out there an' go back to bed!

STANLEY! I want my baby down here. Stella, Stella!

EUNICE: She ain't comin' down so you quit! Or you'll git th' law on you!

STANLEY: Stella!

EUNICE: You can't beat on a woman an' then call 'er back! She won't come! And her goin' t' have a baby!... You stinker! You whelp of a Polack, you! I hope they do haul you in and turn the fire hose on you, same as the last time!

STANLEY: [humbly] Eunice, I want my girl to come down with me!

EUNICE: Hah! [She slams her door]

STANLEY: [with heaven-splitting violence] STELL-LAHHHHH!

[The low-tone clarinet moans. The door upstairs opens again. Stella slips down the rickety stairs in her robe. Her eyes are glistening with tears and her hair loose about her throat and shoulders. They stare at each other. Then they come together with low, animal moans. He falls to his knees on the steps and presses his face to her belly, curving a little with maternity. Her eyes go blind with tenderness as she catches his head and raises him level with her. He snatches the screen door open and lifts her off her feet and bears her into the dark flat.]

After Kazan withdrew, Irene Selznick, Audrey Wood and Williams exchanged letters considering different directors - Josh Logan, John Huston, Tyrone Guthrie (Williams dismissed the idea immediately: "he is English. This is an American play.") - none of them felt as right as Kazan, although Logan was the closest. Anyway, it all ended up being a moot point, because negotiations reopened with Kazan. He was concerned about having Selznick mess up his process, not used to working with her as a producer - as a matter of fact, he originally said he would only direct Streetcar if Selznick were fired. Back, forth, back forth - Kazan negotiated for artistic control (he had mentioned some elements in the script he wanted to have re-worked), also billing - all the usual contract stuff. Kazan was on board. Williams was ecstatic. Wrote to Gadge again.

Tennessee Williams to Elia Kazan, May 1, 1947:

Irene says you think the play needs considerable re-writing. As you never said this, or intimated it, in our talk or your letter, I don't take this seriously, but I think it is only fair to tell you that I don't expect to do any more important work on the script. I spent a long time on it and the present script is a distillation of many earlier trials. It certainly isn't as good as it could be but it's as good as I am now able to make it. - I have never been at all difficult about cuts and incidental line-changes but I'm not going to do anything to alter the basic structure - with one exception. For the last scene, where Blanche is forcibly removed from the stage - I have an alternative ending, physically quieter, which could be substituted if the present ending proves too difficult to stage. That's about all the important change I could promise any director, and only that if the director finds the other unworkable.

If you are content with this understanding about the script - then I can just say - "Irene, I want Gadge and won't take anyone else." AUDREY and Bill would back me up and I think I could run interference for you all the way down the field.

Scene 1, Streetcar Named Desire:

BLANCHE: How did he take it when you said I was coming?

STELLA: Oh, Stanley doesn't know yet.

BLANCHE: You - haven't told him?

STELLA: He's on the road a good deal.

BLANCHE: OH. Travels?

STELLA: Yes.

BLANCHE. Good. I mean - isn't it?

STELLA: I can hardly stand it when he is away for a night...

BLANCHE: Why, Stella!

STELLA: When he's away for a week I nearly go wild!

BLANCHE: Gracious!

STELLA: And when he comes back I cry on his lap like a baby...

BLANCHE: I guess that is what is meant by being in love.

By May 1947, Kazan's contract was set. Williams, after a couple of months of crazy negotiations, went to Cape Cod for some "tranquility". He wrote to Kazan again from there.

Letter of Tennessee Williams to Elia Kazan, May 1947:

Needless to say, I am eager for your ideas. I think this play has some excellent playing scenes but there are also some weak passages and some corny touches. I am determined to weed these out as much as possible before we go into rehearsal. You and I may not agree about exactly which and where these are but I am sure a lot of good will come out of consultation between us. The cloudy dreamer type which I must admit to being needs the complementary eye of the more objective and dynamic worker. I believe you are also a dreamer. There are dreamy touches in your direction which are vastly provocative, but you have a dynamism that my work needs to be translated into exciting theater. I don't think "Pulling the punches" will benefit this show. It should be controlled but violent. I went to see "All My Sons" again. I was more impressed than ever, the way lightning was infused into all the relationships, everything charged with feeling, nothing, even the trivial exchanges, allowed to sag into passivity. Yes, I think you can try new things in my play. In that sense it might be good for you, and it will certainly be good for me. It is a working script. I think we can learn and grow with it and possibly we can make something beautiful and alive whether everyone understands it or not. People are willing to live and die without understanding exactly what life is about but they must sometimes know exactly what a play is about. I hope we can show them what it is about but since I cannot say exactly what it is about, this is just a hope. But maybe if we succeed in our first objective of making it alive on the stage, the meaning will be apparent.

On second visit to "Sons", I decided that [Karl] Malden was right for Mitch. I hope you agree. The face is comical but the man has a dignified simplicity and he is a great actor. I also met Burt Lancaster. Was favorably impressed. He has more force and quickness than I expected from the rather plegmatic type he portrayed in The Killers. He also seemed like a man who would work well under good direction.

As that last paragraph indicates, both Williams and Kazan were turning their minds to casting. Williams discussed the casting of Blanche with Audrey Wood.

Tennessee Williams to Audrey Wood, mid-June 1947:

I would not recommend investment in this show to any friend until that part [Blanche] has been satisfactorily cast. By satisfactorily I mean with a really powerful dramatic actress in the part. [Margaret] Sullavan is strictly compromise on that score. She is the sort of actress that would get "excellent personal notices" but do the play no good: unless she has more on the ball than we derived from her readings. Right now [Jessica] Tandy is the only one who looks good to me and I am waiting till I see her and hear her. Could you leave a piece ($5000.) open until Blanche is cast? Then I'll know whether or not Mother ought to invest.

Another question: will Tandy be in New York this summer? Could she come East for inspection here? If she was the Blanche we dream of, then I could dispense with the Coast trip which I dread making, as I would probably have to travel alone, and when I got there, would probably be subjected to intense pressure for script changes: the best I can do for this production is to stay in good shape for rehearsals. There isn't much in the script that should be altered until we know the exact limitations of the Blanche selected and hear the lines spoken. I will do a lot of cutting then. The rewrite on Scene V does not read as well as original but I think it will play better and is more sympathetic for Blanche. (Makes Mitch more important to her).

Jo Mielziner signed on to design Streetcar.

Tennessee Williams to Margo Jones, early-July 1947:

Jo's designs for Streetcar are almost the best I've ever seen. The back wall of the interior is translucent with a stylized panorama showing through it of the railroad yards and the city (when lighted behind). It will add immensely to the poetic quality.

Both Kazan and Williams had John Garfield in mind for the part of Stanley Kowalski. Kazan and Garfield went way back to the 30s, in the days of the Group Theatre, and Garfield was now out in Hollywood, becoming a movie star. He balked at the idea of coming back for an open-ended run which would keep him out of Los Angeles indefinitely. So although the trade papers announced that Garfield had signed on to play Stanley (this in early August), that was not actually the case. Garfield only wanted to do it for four months, a limited run, and he also wanted to be guaranteed the role in the film, should it be made into a film. Irene Selznick turned Garfield down, and so they had to, again, look for another Stanley.

Tennessee Williams to Audrey Wood, August 25, 1947 in the middle of the Garfield brou-haha:

A good many things have happened to upset and disturb me in connection with the management of "Streetcar" and I am sure you would want me to tell you frankly about them. In the first place, the new last scene of the play, the crucial scene upon which the success or failure of the play may very well depend, has either been lost or deliberately withheld for it is not in the new scripts ... I worked on various versions of this scene the whole time I was on the Coast and in Dallas and on the train coming to New York. I delivered it to a typist at the Selznick office together with the other (less important) revisions with the clearly stated and unmistakable direction that all of these revisions were to be incorporated in a new script. I did this so that Gadge would have the new script, and particularly the new last scene, to read and consider when he went into his Connecticut retreat. It now turns out that Gadge has never seen my revision of the last scene. He told me this on the phone. Weeks are passing at a period when every day counts, without any exchange of view on this all-important last scene. A mystery is made about it. Nobody even seems to know where my original copy of it is? Now this is the sort of high-handed, officious and arbitrary treatment that seems to characterize the Selznick company. My work is too important to me, in fact it has always been an is now even more so - for me to accept this sort of treatment from a company that has only produced one failure which closed out of town. I suppose this sounds as if I were gnashing my teeth with rage. I admit that is true. I am. I am willing to accept the bungling of the Garfield deal and the nerve-wracking battle that was waged to secure the right director, but when arbitrary action is taken interfering with my irreductible rights as an author, I'm not going to take it. This is not a sudden display of peevishness on my part. I entered the agreement with Selznick because we were led to believe that we would have what we wanted in every respect and that there were great advantages to be derived from her management in casting due to her Hollywood connections. These advantages have not materialized. In fact the casting alone has been just about the biggest headache I've had in my theatrical experience - outside of Boston. I am not alone in this opinion, as you must know if you have talked to Kazan. It was bad management that announced Garfield in the papers before he was signed and I strongly suspect that good management would have signed him. The play has already been damaged and compromised before it has even gone into rehearsals. .. I am not going to lose this play because of poor management and I am going to see that it is protected in every possible and reasonable way because that is what I have a right to expect as the one who has given most and who has the most at stake. A play is my life's blood...

The actor George Beban was flown out here from the Coast and read for me this morning. This actor has had summer stock experience and has chased a stage coach in a Grade B Western. It was his first time on a horse. He is more adventuresome than I. I don't want to put my play under him. He gave a fair reading. He is of medium height with a rather tough and virile quality but he was monotonous, there was no gradation to his reading, no apparent humor or dexterity which comes from experience and from natural acting ability. He read one scene on his feet and his body movements were stiff and self-conscious with none of the animal grace and virility (When I say grace I mean a virile grace) which the part calls for and it made me more bitterly conscious than ever of how good Garfield would have been. I think it was a brutal experience for this actor, and I do regard actors as human beings some of them just as sensitive and capable of disappointment and suffering as I am. I don't understand why he was put through this ordeal with no more apparent attributes than he showed this morning. Of course it was a great strategic error, if the Selznick office hoped to interest me in this actor, to accompany him with the new scripts, for when I saw that my final scene had been left out I was somewhat distracted from anything else. I am sure, however, that I gave the actor a pretty fair appraisal, notwithstanding this factor. None of us, Gadge, Irene or I, were at all impressed by the screen-tests we saw of him on the Coast.

That leaves us with Marlon Brando, of the ones that have been mentioned to date. I am very anxious to see and hear him as soon as I can. He is going to read for Gadge and if Gadge likes him I would like to have a look at him.

A couple of days after Tennessee wrote this letter, Elia Kazan took Marlon Brando up to Provincetown to meet the playwright, and to read for the role of Stanley. Brando was only 23 years old, so Williams had originally rejected even the idea of seeing him for the role at all, since in his mind Stanley was around 30. He was too young. Brando had had a couple of New York hits, had gotten some notice already - but he wasn't a star yet. He also was a terrible "auditioner", as many great actors are. People who were pushing Brando for the part were naturally concerned that if all they did was have Brando read from the script, he wouldn't show up well at all. Kazan understood about the difference between audition and performance - that someone can be incredible onstage and be awful at auditions. He had seen Brando onstage and knew he had the "magnetism" that could work very well for Stanley. He sent Brando the script. Brando read it and was very impressed but also scared out of his mind.

Brando to reporter Bob Thomas:

I finally decided that it was a size too large for me, and called Gadg to tell him so. The line was busy. Had I spoken to him at that moment, I'm certain I wouldn't have played the role. I decided to let it rest for a while, and the next day Gadg called me and said, 'Well, what is it - yes or no?' I gulped and said, 'Yes.'

Kazan then took Brando up to Provincetown to meet Tennessee Williams. It's rather a notorious meeting, told by all the different parties who were there - Brando, Williams, etc. Williams was sitting in his beach house, with Pancho, the crazy hot-tempered lover, and a couple of his friends from Texas (Margo Jones, and others). Everyone was drunk. The electricity and the plumbing was not operational - it had gone out a couple days before - so they sat there in the gathering dark, whooping it up. This was when Brando arrived from New York. Brando strolled in, assessed the situation, walked into the bathroom, stuck his hand down the toilet to unclog it - and then fiddled with the blown fuses to get the electricity back on. Imagine a young Brando doing this. Brando was no idiot. I'm sure he himself was aware that "reading from the script" as an audition was not his strongest point, and perhaps doing a little plumbing and electrical work as the playwright looked on would help his case. Or who knows, maybe it was completely unconscious and he thought, "What the hell? No lights? No toilet? I can fix that!" Whatever his motivations, when he finished with the blown fuses, he stood in the middle of the living room and started his audition. He only got 30 seconds into it before Williams stopped him. Williams told him he had the part, and then promptly gave him bus fare to go right back to New York to sign the contract. 30 seconds in the beach house living room, reading Stanley - and Williams knew. He's my Stanley. Not a moment to lose. Here's money, go back to New York right now, sign the contract.

Irene Selznick remembers her first meeting with this new young actor, as he signed a two-year contract in her office:

He didn't behave like someone to whom something wonderful had just happened, nor did he try to make an impression; he was too busy assessing me. Whatever he expected, I wasn't it. He seemed wary and at a loss how to classify me. He was wayward one moment, playful the next, volunteering that he had been expelled from school, then grinning provocatively at me. I didn't take the bait. It was easy going after that. He sat up in his chair and turned forthright, earnest, even polite.

Scene 2, Streetcar Named Desire:

STANLEY: Have you ever heard of the Napoleonic code?

STELLA: No, Stanley, I haven't heard of the Napoleonic code and if I have, I don't see what it -

STANLEY: Let me enlighten you on a point or two, baby.

STELLA: Yes?

STANLEY: In the state of Louisiana we have the Napoleonic code according to which what belongs to the wife belongs to the husband and vice versa. For instance if I had a piece of property, or you had a piece of property-

STELLA: My head is swimming!

STANLEY: All right. I'll wait till she gets through soaking in a hot tub and then I'll inquire if she is acquainted with the Napoleonic code. It looks to me like you've been swindled, baby, and when you're swindled under the Napoleonic code I'm swindled too. And I don't like to be swindled.

STELLA: There's plenty of time to ask her questions later but if you do now she'll go to pieces again. I don't understand what happened to Belle Reve but you don't know how ridiculous you are being when you suggest that my sister or I or anyone of our family could have perpetrated a swindle on anyone else.

STANLEY: Then where's the money if the place was sold?

STELLA: Not sold - lost, lost!

Tennessee Williams to Audrey Wood, August 29, 1947:

I can't tell you what a relief it is that we have found such a God-sent Stanley in the person of Brando. It had not occurred to me before what an excellent value would come through casting a very young actor in this part. It humanizes the character of Stanley in that it becomes the brutality or callousness of youth rather than a vicious older man. I don't want to focus guilt or blame particularly on any one character but to have it a tragedy of misunderstandings and insensitivity to others. A new value came out of Brando's reading which was by far the best reading I have ever heard. He seemed to have already created a dimensional character, of the sort that the war has produced among young veterans. This is a value beyond any that Garfield could have contributed, and in addition to his gifts as an actor he has great physical appeal and sensuality, at least as much as Burt Lancaster. When Brando is signed I think we will have a really remarkable 4-star cast, as exciting as any that could possibly be assembled and worth all the trouble that we have gone through. Having him instead of a Hollywood star will create a highly favorable impression as it will remove the Hollywood stigma that seemed to be attached to the production. Please use all your influence to oppose any move on the part of Irene's office to reconsider or delay signing the boy, in case she doesn't take to him.

Brando was signed. Kim Hunter was signed. Malden and Tandy were signed. Now the rest of the cast needed to be filled out.

Tennessee Williams to Irene Selznick, Sept. 8, 1947:

I would like to have a hand in the selection of Eunice. But I am sure that you all can weed out the field and let me look over the final contestants. As for the poker players: I am sure Gadge will do a good job on them. There is the Mexican and Steve Hubbs in addition to Mitch and Stanley. Steve should be a big beefy guy. The Mexican is called a "Greaseball". Might be cast accordingly. I would say all men around Stanley's age, or a bit older. Eunice is a coarse and healthy character. The nurse is a bit sinister: a large and masculine type. I don't know whether or not you want to use the Mexican woman selling the tin flowers. Check with Gadge on that. If not her speeches can be easily deleted from the script.

As for the last scene, I will give it another work-out. I feel that my last revision on it is the best to date. It has not as much "plus-quality" in the writing as I would like. However I think it will play well. Where it lacks most is the dialogue between Stella and Eunice: there is still something too cut-and-dried in the necessary exposition between them. I will try (but can't promise) to improve on that. It may soften too much. We mustn't lose the effect of terror: everybody agrees about that.

Scene 11, Streetcar Named Desire:

STELLA: Everything packed?

BLANCHE: My silver toilet articles are still out.

STELLA: Ah!

EUNICE: [returning] They're waiting in front of the house.

BLANCHE: They! Who's "they"?

EUNICE: There's a lady with him.

BLANCHE: I cannot imagine who this "lady" could be! How is she dressed?

EUNICE: Just - just a sort of a - plain-tailored outfit.

BLANCHE: Possibly she's- [Her voice dies out nervously]

STELLA: Shall we go, Blanche?

BLANCHE: Must we go through that room?

STELLA: I will go with you.

BLANCHE: How do I look?

STELLA: Lovely.

EUNICE: Lovely.

[Blanche moves fearfully to the portieres. Eunice draws them open for her. Blanche goes into the kitchen.]

BLANCHE: [to the men] Please don't get up. I'm only passing through.

[She crosses quickly to outside door. Stella and Eunice follow. The poker players stand awkwardly at the table - all except Mitch, who remains seated, looking down at the table. Blanche steps out on a small porch at the side of the door. She stops short and catches her breath.]

DOCTOR: How do you do?

BLANCHE: You are not the gentleman I was expecting.

In October, 1947. Tennessee Williams wrote a letter to "Pancho", his lover and companion.

We start rehearsals Monday. Gadge is full of vitality and optimism. Miss Tandy has arrived in town looking very pretty with her new blond hair and all the script changes have been approved and finally typed up.

Rehearsals for Streetcar began in October.

Here is Elia Kazan, a cunning canny man, who worked with every actor differently, pulling each one aside, whispering, cajoling, manipulating. But here he is in working with Brando:

With other actors, I'd always say what just what I want: 'You do this. No, I don't like that, I want you to do it like this.' With Marlon ... it was more like, 'Listen to this and let's see what you do with it.' ... I'd heard about his parents, but not from him, and I never asked. I treated him with great delicacy. One reason he got to trust me - as a director - was that I respected his privacy... I was always hoping for a miracle with him, and I often got it.

Blanche Dubois, scene 1, Streetcar Named Desire:

Now, then, let me look at you. But don't you look at me, Stella, no, no, no, not till later, not till I've bathed and rested! And turn that over-light off! Turn that off! I won't be looked at in this merciless glare! Come back here now! Oh, my baby! Stella! Stella for Star! I thought you would never come back to this horrible place! What am I saying? I didn't mean to say that. I meant to be nice about it and say - Oh, what a convenient location and such - Ha-a-ha! Precious lamb! You haven't said a word to me!

Tennessee Williams to friend Margo Jones, October, 1947, after rehearsals had begun:

I cannot find words to tell you how wonderful Jessica [Tandy] and Gadge are, and what a superb combination their talents appear to be. I have never seen two people, except maybe you, work as hard on anything. Or have as much respect for each other, which is so important. Gadge's method is to stage one new scene a day and to go over all the preceding scenes in sequence. Tomorrow, Monday, he will stage the final, eleventh scene, which I think is the crucial one. We have not come into conflict on any point. Occasionally I have to suggest a little less realistic treatment of things, to which he always accedes. His great gift is infusing everything with vitality. Sometimes in his desire to do this he neglects to dwell sufficiently upon a lyric moment. However this is not through failure to comprehend them, and he is always eager for my advice. Everybody is working out fine with the possible exception of Kim Hunter. She was very bad at first, is now improving but will, I am afraid, always be the lame duck in the line-up. She too is working like a fire-horse but is not a very gifted actress and shows up badly in contrast to one as emotionally and technically rich as Jessica.

Williams wrote in his memoirs:

Kazan was one of those rare directors who wanted the playwright around at all rehearsals... Once in a while he would call me up on stage to demonstrate how I felt a certain bit should be played. I suspect he did this only to flatter me for he never had the least uncertainty in his work.

Kazan describes how he would pull Marlon aside and start to give him direction, and in the middle of him speaking, Brando would turn and walk away. Not in a dismissive manner, but because Brando needed very little explanation. If you talked too much, it would leave him. Kazan would suggest - Brando would pick up on the subterranean message - walk off and think about it and then try it.

Kazan on Brando:

Look, Marlon was always at arm's length and he felt safe there, uninspected, unprobed. How much of the potential penetration was based on my insight, as opposed to stuff I picked up here and there, I don't know... It's my trade, though. I know where to look, where to put my hand in, what to try to pull out, what to get.

Brando's feeling that the play was a size too big for him was intensified by the knowledge that John Garfield had been the first choice. He couldn't get that out of his head, the anxiety that he was second-banana. He would mutter, "They should have gotten John Garfield" in the middle of rehearsals when he was struggling. His insights into the character of Stanley, however, are invaluable. He really SAW Stanley and in my opinion he shows the lie behind that whole "you have to like the character you are playing" malarkey that so many actors subscribe to. (However, Brando was a genius. So we have to factor that in. He is an unusual case). But he didn't like Stanley. Not one bit. Marlon was strong, athletic, but not an aggressive brute like Stanley. Here he is on Stanley Kowalski:

A man without any sensitivity, without any kind of morality except his own mewling, whimpering insistence on his own way ... one of those guys who work hard and have lots of flesh with nothing supple about them. They never open their fists, really. They grip a cup like an animal would wrap a paw around it. They're so muscle-bound they can hardly talk.

That is incredibly insightful analysis.

A well-known fact now, after one week of rehearsal, Brando moved into the theatre, sleeping on a cot backstage. He immersed himself entirely in the role. This was not out of bravado, but out of insecurity. He honestly didn't feel he could do it. The only way for him to at least attempt to succeed was to never ever leave the part. He stopped eating, sleeping. He was late to rehearsals. Kazan, rather than being impatient for results, was tender. Gentle with Marlon. The other actors were at another level, almost performance-level, as Marlon was still mumbling and wandering around. This was not affectation. This was true struggle. Marlon Brando is so imitated now that it is hard to remember just what a revolutionary moment this performance was. It didn't come out of nowhere. Brando had great talent, yes, but part of that talent was knowing how his own talent operated, and that meant mumbling, not committing - not yet - holding back, wandering around, and trying to feel his way in. It was very frustrating for the other actors, who were more straight-line Broadway professionals.

Karl Malden describes a moment in rehearsal:

We were rehearsing the bathroom scene, the one where I come out and meet Blanche for the first time and Stanley says, 'Hey, Mitch, come on!' Now, as we were working on it, every day would be different. Marlon would come in before you said your line, or way after you said your line, or even before you had anything to say. The best was all wrong.

Anyway, it was just beginning to go well for me for the first time - when you think, Oh, my God, this is it - and boom, he hit me with one that just upset everything. I said, 'Oh, shit!' and threw something and walked offstage, up into the attic. Kazan said, 'What the hell happened?'

'I can't concentrate,' I told him. 'I was going along beautifully and all of a sudden in comes this jarring thing. It throws me. It's impossible.' I was furious and explained that it had been happening regularly. He said, 'Wait'.

Kazan made a little speech the next day for the cast, saying:

Let's talk this out right now. Karl, you have to get used to the way Marlon works. But Marlon, you must remember that there are other people in the cast also.

Scene 6, Streetcar:

MITCH: I told my mother how nice you were, and I liked you.

BLANCHE: Were you sincere about that?

MITCH: You know I was.

BLANCHE: Why did your mother want to know my age?

MITCH: Mother is sick.

BLANCHE: I'm sorry to hear it. Badly?

MITCH: She won't live long. Maybe just a few months.

BLANCHE: Oh.

MITCH: She worries because I'm not settled.

BLANCHE: Oh.

MITCH: She wants me to be settled down before she- [His voice is hoarse and he clears his throat twice, shuffling nervously around with his hands in his pockets.]

BLANCHE: You love her very much, don't you?

MITCH: Yes.

BLANCHE: I think you have a great capacity for devotion. You will be lonely when she passes on, won't you? [Mitch clears his throat and nods] I understand what that is.

MITCH: To be lonely?

BLANCHE: I loved someone, too, and the person I loved lost.

MITCH: Dead? [She crosses to the window and sits on the sill, looking out. She pours herself another drink.] A man?

BLANCHE: He was a boy, just a boy, when I was a very young girl ...

Tandy was especially thrown off by Brando. Brando lived backstage, with a set of weights and his bongo drums, his clothes were filthy and ripped, she just did not understand this way of working. But they all soldiered on.

By mid-October, the cast was ready for a run-through. Stella Adler was in attendance, as well as Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy's husband. After a couple of weeks of trying to "find" the part, Marlon suddenly gave a full-blown white-hot opening-night performance - which startled and electrified everyone present. Nobody forgot that day when they realized they were looking at a young man who was going to be a giant giant star. It made Hume Cronyn nervous. Streetcar was about Blanche, not Stanley. If Stanley is so superb, so watchable, that Blanche seems incidental to HIS journey - then isn't that counter to what the play actually is. Cronyn actually spoke to Kazan about it. It wasn't that Brando was bad, or that Tandy was bad - it was that the CONTRAST in acting styles and intensity made Tandy look weaker as an actress, despite her already-long illustrious career.

Later, Kazan said:

Perhaps Hume meant that by contrast with Marlon, whose every word seemed not something memorized but the spontaneous expression of an intense inner experience - which is the level of work all actors try to reach - Jessie was what? Expert? Professional? Was that enough for this play? Not for Hume. Hers seemed to be a performance; Marlon was living on stage. Jessie had every moment worked out carefully, with sensitivity and intelligence, and it was all coming together, just as Williams and I had expected and wanted. Marlon, working 'from the inside', rode his emotion wherever it took him; his performance was full of surprises and exceeded what Williams and I had expected. A performance miracle was in the making.

Streetcar opened in Boston for a tryout run and played from November 3 to November 15, 1947. There was already bubbling issues with censorship - especially in regards to the rape scene, which was causing controversy already.

During rehearsals, Kazan (in particular) was concerned that Brando's performance would be so strong and vital that it would tip the balance of the play. More on this later, in a great quote from Kazan. Anyway, the reviews they got in Boston were fair - with Tandy getting most of the press, people raving about her performance. The earthquake that was Marlon Brando wasn't quite making itself felt yet. Tandy was the big star. Brando was 23 years old. Phenomenal. But so far, the play was in balance.

Streetcar then moved to Philadelphia for another tryout (November 17-29) before coming to New York for its premiere. The buzz was starting. People were starting to notice. The play was sold out, and the reviews were superb. Not just of the acting, but of the play itself. There seemed a consciousness that something big was about to happen.

And then finally, New York. Streetcar Named Desire opened on this day, in 1947.

Tennessee Williams, letter to Jay Laughlin, December 4, 1947:

Streetcar opened last night to tumultuous approval. Never witnessed such an exciting evening. So much better than New Haven you wdn't believe it; N.H. was just a reading of the play. Much more warmth, range, intelligence, interpretation, etc. - a lot of it because of better details in direction, timing. Packed house, of the usual first-night decorations, - Cecil B'ton, Valentina, D. Parker, the Selznicks, the others and so on, - and with a slow warm-up for first act, and comments like "Well, of course, it isn't a play," the second act (it's in 3 now) sent the audience zowing to mad heights, and the final one left them - and me - wilted, gasping, weak, befoozled, drained (see reviews for more words) and then an uproar of applause which went on and on. Almost no one rose from a seat till many curtains went up on whole cast, the 4 principles, then Tandy, who was greeted by a great howl of "BRavo!" from truly all over the house. Then repeat of the whole curtain schedule to Tandy again and finally ........... 10 Wms crept on stage, after calls of Author! and took bows with Tandy. All was great, great, GREAT!

Elia Kazan in his memoir on Stanley/Brando and how it tipped the balance of the play - a very revealing anecdote:

But what had been intimated in our final rehearsals in New York was happening. The audiences adored Brando. When he derided Blanche, they responded with approving laughter. Was the play becoming the Marlon Brando Show? I didn't bring up the problem, because I didn't know the solution. I especially didn't want the actors to know that I was concerned. What could I say to Brando? Be less good? Or to Jessie? Get better? ...

Louis B. Mayer sought me out to congratulate me and assure me that we'd all make a fortune ... He urged me to make the author do one critically important bit of rewriting to make sure that once that "awful woman" who'd come to break up that "fine young couple's happy home" was packed off to an institution, the audience would believe that the young couple would live happily ever after. It never occurred to him that Tennessee's primary sympathy was with Blanche, nor did I enlighten him ... His misguided reaction added to my concern. I had to ask myself: Was I satisfied to have the performance belong to Marlon Brando? Was that what I'd intended? What did I intend? I looked to the author. He seemed satisfied. Only I -- and perhaps Hume [Cronyn, Tandy's husband] -- knew that something was going wrong ...

What astonished me was that the author wasn't concerned about the audience's favoring Marlon. That puzzled me because Tennessee was my final authority, the person I had to please. I still hadn't brought up the problem, I was waiting for him to do it. I got my answer ... because of something that happened in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, across the hall from my suite, where Tennessee and Pancho [Tennessee's companion at the time] were staying. One night I heard a fearsome commotion from across the hall, curses in Spanish, threats to kill, the sound of breaking china ... and a crash ... As I rushed out into the corridor, Tennessee burst through his door, looking terrified, and dashed into my room. Pancho followed, but when I blocked my door, he turned to the elevator still cursing, and was gone. Tennessee slept on the twin bed in my room that night. The next morning, Pancho had not returned.

I noticed that Wiilliams wasn't angry at Pancho, not even disapproving -- in fact, when he spoke about the incident, he admired Pancho for his outburst. At breakfast, I brought up my worry about Jessie and Marlon. "She'll get better," Tennessee said, and then we had our only discussion about the direction of his play. "Blanche is not an angel without a flaw," he said, "and Stanley's not evil. I know you're used to clearly stated themes, but this play should not be loaded one way or the other. Don't try to simplify things." Then he added, "I was making fun of Pancho, and he blew up." He laughed. I remembered the letter he'd written me before we started rehearsals, remembered how, in that letter, he'd cautioned me against tipping the moral scales against Stanley, that in the interests of fidelity I must not present Stanley as a "black-dyed villain". "What should I do?" I asked. "Nothing," he said. "Don't take sides or try to present a moral. When you begin to arrange the action to make a thematic point, the fidelity to life will suffer. Go on working as you are. Marlon is a genius, but she's a worker and she will get better. And better."

Marlon Brando on doing Streetcar and becoming famous:

You can't always be a failure. Not and survive. Van Gogh! There's an example of what can happen when a person never receives any recognition. You stop relating: it puts you outside. But I guess success does that, too. You know, it took me a long time before I was aware that that's what I was - a big success. I was so absorbed in myself, my own problems, I never looked around, took account. I used to walk in New York, miles and miles, walk in the streets late at night, and never see anything. I was never sure about acting, whether that was what I really wanted to do; I'm still not. Then, when I was in "Streetcar", and it had been running a couple of months, one night -- dimly, dimly -- I began to hear this roar.

Scene 10, Streetcar:

STANLEY: Oh! So you want some roughhouse! All right, let's have some roughhouse! [He springs toward her, overturning the table. She cries out and strikes at him with the bottle top but he catches her wrist] Tiger - tiger! Drop the bottle-top! Drop it! We've had this date with each other from the beginning!

NY Times review:

December 4, 1947, NY Times

FIRST NIGHT AT THE THEATRE by Brooks Atkinson

Tennessee Williams has brought us a superb drama, "A Streetcar Named Desire," which was acted at the Ethel Barrymore last evening. And Jessica Tandy gives a superb performance as a rueful heroine whose misery Mr. Williams is tenderly recording. This must be one of the most perfect marriages of acting and playwriting. For the acting and playwriting are perfectly blended in a limpid performance, and it is impossible to tell where Miss Tandy begins to give form and warmth to the mood Mr. Williams has created.

Like "The Glass Menagerie," the new play is a quietly woven study of intangibles. But to this observer it shows deeper insight and represents a great step forward toward clarity. And it reveals Mr. Williams as a genuinely poetic playwright whose knowledge of people is honest and thorough and whose sympathy is profoundly human.

"A Streetcar Named Desire" is history of a gently reared Mississippi young woman who invents an artificial world to mask the hideousness of the world she has to inhabit. She comes to live with her sister, who is married to a rough-and-ready mechanic and inhabits two dreary rooms in a squalid neighborhood. Blanche - for that is her name - has delusions of grandeur, talks like an intellectual snob, buoys herself up with gaudy dreams, spends most of her time primping, covers things that are dingy with things that are bright and flees reality.

To her brother-in-law she is an unforgiveable liar. But it is soon apparent to the theatregoer that in Mr. Williams' eyes she is one of the dispossessed whose experience has unfitted her for reality; and although his attitude toward her is merciful, he does not spare her or the playgoer. For the events of "Streetcar" lead to a painful conclusion which he does not try to avoid. Although Blanche cannot face the truth, Mr. Williams does in the most imaginative and perceptive play he has written.

Since he is no literal dramatist and writes in none of the conventional forms, he presents theatre with many problems. Under Elia Kazan's sensitive but concrete direction, the theatre solved them admirably. Jo Mielziner has provided a beautifully lighted single setting that lightly sketches the house and the neighborhood. In this shadowy environment the performance is a work of great beauty.

Miss Tandy has a remarkably long part to play. She is hardly ever off the stage, and when she is on stage she is almost constantly talking -- chattering, dreaming aloud, wondering, building enchantments out of words. Miss Tandy is a trim, agile actress with a lovely voice and quick intelligence. Her performance is almost incredibly true. For it does seem almost incredible that she can convey it with so many shades and impulses that are accurate, revealing and true.

The rest of the acting is also of very high quality indeed. Marlon Brando as the quick-tempered, scornful, violent mechanic; Karl Malden as a stupid but wondering suitor; Kim Hunter as the patient though troubled sister -- all act not only with color and style but with insight.

By the usual Broadway standards, "Streetcar Named Desire" is too long; not all those words are essential. But Mr. Williams is entitled to his own independence. For he has not forgotten that human beings are the basic subject of art. Out of poetic imagination and ordinary compassion he has spun a poignant and luminous story.

Brooks Atkinson was a longtime "watcher" of Tennessee Williams, and his reviews really showed his thoughtful understanding of what Williams was attempting. Williams loved to hear what Atkinson had to say, and they enjoyed a long private correspondence as well. On December 14, 1947, as the Streetcar uproar was in crescendo, he wrote another piece in the Times, expressing some reservations about the play. Now this is interesting: Atkinson, a discerning perceptive man, felt that the play was weakened because it arrived at no moral conclusion. The playwright takes "no sides in the conflict". He felt that Williams was limiting himself by refusing to come down on one or the other side.

Williams jotted off a note to Atkinson in response, which gives a feeling of their open communication:

Tennessee Williams to Brooks Atkinson, Dec. 15, 1947:

At last a criticism which connects directly with the essence of what I thought was the play! I mean your Sunday article which I have just read with the deepest satisfaction of any the play's success has given me. So many of the others, saying 'alcoholic', 'nymphomaniac', 'prostitute', 'boozy' and so forth seemed - though stirred by the play - to be completely off the track, or nearly so. I wanted to show that people are not definable in such terms but are things of multiple facets and all but endless complexity that they do not fit "any convenient label" and are seldom more than partially visible even to those who live just on the other side of "the portieres". You have also touched on my main problem: expanding my material and my interests. I can't answer that question. I know it and fear it and can only make more effort to extend my "feelers" beyond what I've felt so far. Thank you, Brooks.

Irene Selznick describes the opening night:

In those days, people stood only for the national anthem. That night was the first time I ever saw an audience get to its feet, and the first time I saw the Shuberts stay for a final curtain ... round after round, curtain after curtain, until Tennessee took a bow on the stage to bravos.

In general, at least in terms of critical acclaim, Brando was not singled out. It is only retrospectively, that people seemed to understand what had happened. But actors knew. Directors knew. Insiders knew what it was they were seeing.

Here is Robert Whitehead on Brando in Streetcar:

There were no models for Brando. His relationship to the sounds and poetic reality of Williams was particularly embracing; what Tennessee wrote, both in relation to the age and Marlon's sensibility, it all worked ... That particular kind of reality existed in a way that it hadn't ever before.

Here is Maureen Stapleton:

It goes well beyond talent. It's male. It's talent plus.

Joan Copeland, actress, younger sister to Arthur Miller, said:

Watching [Brando in Streetcar] was like being in the eye of the hurricane.

Blanche Dubois, scene 1, in Streetcar Named Desire:

They told me to take a street-car named Desire, and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at - Elysian Fields!

Dakin Williams (Tennessee Williams' brother):

Blanche is Tennessee. If he would tell you something it wouldn't be necessarily true. And Blanche says in Streetcar, 'I don't tell what's true, I tell what ought to be true.' And so everything in Blanche was really like Tennessee.

Tennessee Williams on the set of the Broadway production of Streetcar Named Desire

Acting Notebook

More of the notes I took in grad school. (Here is more.) Same year, same cast of characters: Doug Moston, teacher of Classics, great great class. Sam Schacht, the brilliant vulgar man who ran the PD Unit, a dreadfully long workshop every Friday, meant to develop projects - ("PD" stands for Playwriting/Directors Unit). Then there were also the seminars we went to, with luminaries from the acting world. Shirley Maclaine, Lauren Bacall, and Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson are featured here - the notes I took from those seminars. Some of this stuff still makes me laugh out loud today. Then there were the pieces I was rehearsing for - William Saroyan's "Hello Out There" (excerpt here), and two new plays - "Gertrude Down" and "German Lullaby" - both of which ended up coming to fruition, not just in the grad school atmosphere, but afterwards (photos here and here). I was involved in full productions of both of those. But here, in the notebooks, they are in very early developmental stages, the scripts still being worked on, the casts not nailed down yet. Oh yes, and there was also a random marriage proposal in the middle of this. I said "yes" to the proposal. He then took it back. hahahahaha It was a crazy time.

I am so glad I kept these notebooks. Some of it is still useful, just in terms of understanding acting and writing - the things I "got" from my great teachers. But a lot of it is just JOKES, and I was reading through this this morning and laughing out loud all over again.

9/4/97 Doug Moston - Classics

"That's where your juvenile delinquents were manufactured." - Doug Moston on Hell's Kitchen

the power of words -
Don't give a word more power than it can handle
Not every word has the same weight

PD Unit

"It's like you've been thru some sort of horrific marriage." - Sam

"A half-hour where you stink is no great shakes." - Sam

Go back and look at Brando's private moment in Last Tango in Paris

Sam is a born teacher. It is his calling.

Hello Out There - we just got a big ol' green light - move forward with the project

Sam: "I wanted people to be ready to bring in work today---"
Barbara: "Oh, for cryin' out loud."

This room is so dreadful. The lighting. The air conditioning noise. That wavy thing above us. What the FUCK is that?

9/7 German Lullaby rehearsal

Death is present here. Eroticism. Codependent.
Sim: caretaker?
Truth or Dare game

Beginning of scene: so happy to see her! Don't play the subtext. Deny what is going on. It is not happening.

9/9 Classics

"He was known as Midtown Murray." - Doug on his father running the most famous actor's poker game

"I want the work." - Harvey Keitel on why he had invested in Lee's classes

antithetical thought - play the opposites off of each other.
Iambic pentameter - the character acknowledges his own cleverness with that rhythm - and double entendre
No extra words

9/9 PD Unit

Cowboy Mouth - Chaos.

"That's a Greek word." - Sam

Alexander Haig: "I'm in charge here!"

"We could do a merchandising tie-in." - Sam

"We have 2 striving artists yearning to be free." - Sam

Classics
Macbeth monologue:
dead for breath - assonance. It sounds - perhaps the Messenger is out of breath? It has a panting sound to it. "here" "Thane" "had" "breathe" had" "than" ...
Announcing the arrival of the King that night - some urgency perhaps.
Thane - soft vowels, short words

The sense is in the iambic pentameter. Do not invent more. Go to the verse already there.
*To be or not to be
That is the question.*

9/11 Classics

"I'll give you a hint. Boats." - Doug Moston trying to make the class say "Spanish Armada" - After the Armada, Britain ruled the waves - people started investing in boats - strong upperclass emerges - the theatre begins (the Burbidges - John and Richard) - 1576 - The Theatre - built by John Burbidge - round

9/11 PD Unit

Arcadia - Tom Stoppard -
actors: Matt and Barbara

Sam: "The grapes don't solve the problem."

Sam: "Not everything is Hat Full of Rain."

Barefoot in the Park - actors: Elena, Michael

Sam: "It's like trying to revive a 2nd rate dead horse."

I need to re-read Brendan Behan's The Hostage and Moonchildren by Michael Weller

Home Free - actors: Wade and Kara
We see Lawrence in a room alone, tapping the wall with the end of a coat hanger to get the attn. of his "audience" - Claypone and Edna are his students for the moment. Kara's character, at this point, know that she is going to die.
"This play is like 2 panic attacks meeting each other." - Sam
2 scared people trying to find comfort.

"Hoffman's won Oscars playing morons and bums." - Sam

Somehow I think that if actors are bored watching something ... what is the good of doing this? Like Sam said: Recognize when you are bored. It's not that you are being rude to your fellow students by being inattentive. Boredom is a sign that something is not working. It is a valid response.

"The Ski Lift Named Denial." - Jen on doing Streetcar in Vermont

9/16 Classics

"So the idea is - she's not there. She's in between those sticks." - Doug

Lady Anne: Set down, set down your honorable load

"I am not a necrophiliac," said Tom in dead earnest.

Learn enough about Shakespearia so that you look like a native citizen, not a tourist.

Shakespeare controls the traffic onstage with the language. As Doug says, he lets the actors know - "Stop. This broad's makin' a speech."

If it's heightened language - then you choose to speak in heightened language. Heightened state of emotion.

Simple and complex language.
Simple? Keep it simple
Complex? What verbal conceits make it complicated?

Lady Macbeth: The raven himself is hoarse.
Give me the daggers

9/16 PD Unit

Buried Child - actors: Tom, Nina

"Anything can be good. If it's good." - Sam

To extract a scene: it needs to have its own internal arc. Make sense on its own

Am I Blue - by Beth Henley - actors: Michael, Kara, Cheryl
The writing of this play is lousy. Lifeless. You'd have to invent the subtext. With plays like Streetcar or Death of a Salesman - the subtext is IN the lines.

"If there's any poetic dimension to this, it escapes me." - Sam

"She's not a waif physically. She's a waif emotionally." - Sam - on This Property is Condemned)

Breathless - movie - long scenes, jump cuts
The thing that gives it its stature is the legends. When you stand back, you see the universal. It is in the fragments that you ahve the uniqueness.

"Then why these scenes in this specific order?"
Sam: "I have no idea."

St. Joan - actors: Tom, Kelly

"Yeah, fuck you, Rich!" - Sam

"Tom, you fuck-head, listen to me!" - Sam

"Do whatever you want to do. Just don't have a rod up your ass and think you're playing Shaw." - Sam

"Cast well, and then shut up." - Gene, to the directors

"All the plans that you think you've made may be just delusions on your part." - Sam

9/17 German Lullaby rehearsal
The monologue: Did I really kill the cat? Who's the predator in the relationship? Play the ambivalences in the piece. There's a time bomb in this house.

9/18 Classics
Lady Macbeth - "infirm of purpose" - complex way of saying you're weak. Heightened state. Shakespeare puts that texture into the text.

12th Night: "This is Illyria, Lady." Beautiful.

Suit the action to the word and the word to the action.

As You Like It
seem ... semen?

If you think it's bawdy, it's bawdy. If you don't think it's bawdy - it's only because you haven't worked it out yet.

9/18 PD Unit
A Loss of Roses - by William Inge - actors: Barbara, Tom
Warren Beatty made his stage debut in this

"I know I've been manipulating you, but I think I've been helpful to you." - Sam to Barbara
Barbara: "You have."

Snow Angel - Elena, Michael
It's one thing to act material - it's another thing to embody material.

"It looks like your soul is adrift in the wrong play." - Sam to Michael

Gertrude Down
Kevin: "What's it about?"
Matt: "It's about a door."

"You talk a little bit like a French art critic." - Sam to Rich

9/18 Hello Out There rehearsal

Looking at myself in the mirror.
His heart is larger than life.
Remember that feeling of: This encounter is going to change my life.
In a world of stick figures, he is a Michelangelo.

9/20 Ludlow Fair rehearsal
Moment before - work on that.
What do I want from her?
What would I be doing if this scene weren't happening?
Really work the flu

9/22 Shirley Maclaine
"We all came out of the same cave."

On dancing: "I loved the regimentation. I loved the freedom."
"I learned how to negotiate movement under duress."

"I was the only virgin on that train."

George Abbott under the pool with her on his shoulders - "to prove how virile he was"

Hitchcock in the audience when she went on for Carol Haney: "You see why I believe in destiny."

The Trouble with Harry - directed by Hitchcock
He said to her: "Before you say that line - dog's feet." (Meaning: Pause. "Paws.")

Some Came Running
Frank Sinatra: "Let the kid die, and she'll get the nomination." And that's what happened.

"That's why men don't like to marry actresses!"

She loves sex. It oozes off of her.

On the Rat Pack: "I cleaned the crackers out of their beds."

The Apartment - directed by Billy Wilder
On Wilder: "He had this magnificent yardstick of a brain."
That last scene was done in one take.

On Wilder: "He would watch us run a scene, and he would say, 'That's very good. Now do it again, and take out 13 seconds.'"

Faster is always better.

"It's all about listening, isn't it?"

Sweet Charity -
On Cy Coleman: "He thought with his fingers."

The Turning Point
On Anne Bancroft: "Annie wanted to always be in character."

Terms of Endearment
"So this brings in my other life. Are we ready to go there?"

On Jack Nicholson: "He makes you a constant surprise to yourself."

On moonlight, and writing: "feminine energy of remembrance"

Steel Magnolias
"collective feminine energy"

Postcards
On Meryl Streep: "This woman is truly channeling."

9/23 Classics

"You mean ... Hamlet gets in the elevator ... but he won't go down?" - Leslie

"I think that you have to establish with your robot ..." - Leslie

Do what the character does. Remember Occam's Razor.

"Friends, Romans, Countrymen
Lend me your ears" - rhetoric - he is building his argument through the verse

9/23 PD Unit

There are more things in heaven and earth,
Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Cloud Tectonics - by Jose Rivera

"This was a bore." - Sam

"You look like you have parentheses around you at all times." - Sam to Cheryl

Sam: "Blackout. Slow fade."

Sam: "Renee Taylor, in reality, is larger than life."

9/23
Michael Gilio on my answering machine yesterday:
"Will you marry me. Let's get married, Sheila. Call me back with your answer."
Las Vegas. New Year's. 1997. Let's do it, Gilio, let's get this thing done.

9/25 Classics

"The King comes here tonight." - simple
Use the verbal conceits. Play them all. Iambic pentameter, assonance, alliteration.

Clues in the writing help you to be able to play it.

"Berlady". (By Our Lady) - character from the country, this is a regionalism - it means that the Capulets are nouveau riche - it means that Juliet has to marry Paris. Status. Materialism.

The Apothecary in Romeo and Juliet - count the "I" sounds.

9/28 Hello Out There rehearsal
Passion - as well as loneliness
The fire in the play
Good and evil
prairie out the windows
Isolation
Urgency, stakes

9/30 Classics

"I always get cast as the eunuch or the fool." - John

Sections of Hamlet are very close to passages in the Geneva Bible

Verbal conceits: express passion thru language
figures of rhetoric - Antony's speech
euphemism: "My father passed away" as opposed to "My father died"
stychomythia: rapid-fire dialogue overlapping - alternating liunes
onomotopeia
metaphor

Prose: less precision - but it still can be heightened
Verse: precise - the writer is directing you, telling you where to breathe/pause - tells you what to stress

Don't give up who you are when you get into this - but do give it up momentarily in order to break the code

Use the punctuation. Pay attention. This is where Shakespeare is directing you.

"Double, bubble, toil and trouble." - troche - not iambic

Colon: you can drop your voice - do it in a way that still holds the audience's attention - or a shift of gears. You are still traveling in the same direction, you're just shifting gears.

9/30 PD Unit

Barbara, dressed in green, lying spreadeagled on the floor, trying to relax. Sam said, "You look like a human pool table, Barbara."

10/6 Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson

Anne on her first moment "acting" as a little girl: "I said this poem, I got a laugh, and it was ecstasy - and after, I hid in the cellar."

Her Shirley Temple imitation

Studied with Herbert Berghoff at New School 1944 - he got her a scholarship at the Neighborhood Playhouse

"I have an affinity for the Italians. This is an Italian shirt, actually." - Eli

"We were the only Jews in a sea of Italians." - Eli

"Acting means to ACT." - Anne

Eli - onstage in his first big part - with katherine Cornell: "I cut 14 of her lines." Strasberg's main advice to Eli was: "Wait for your cue!"

Anne hated improvisatiion

"In acting, take nothing for granted. You don't know what's going to happen." - Lee Strasberg

"And for the next 7 years, we did nothing but Tennessee Williams." - Eli

On The Misfits - Eli and Clark Gable fooling around - John Huston: "For Christ's sake, would you guys cut it out?"

Anne: "Please. Let's go on. I'm going to say something profound."

"It's a Method, not the Method." - Anne

Eli, arriving in England: "It's so green here."
Laurence Olivier: "Naturally. It's been raining for the past 300 years."

Marlon Brando in Stella's class: "Chickens don't know about atom bombs."

On The Rose Tattoo - directed by Elia Kazan
Elia experimenting with fantasy (Camino Real)
Written for Anna Magnani - Maureen Stapleton auditioned 6 times
Eli turned down From Here to Eternity for Camino Real

On Camino Real
Kazan: "Go on and make friends." He would pit actors against each other.

Anne's break was with This Property is Condemned

Summer and Smoke - directed by Margo Jones
"It was like music."

"Not a hit in those days meant it ran for 6 months." - Eli

Eli talked about Tennessee's laugh. "Make voyages. Attempt them."

O Men, O Women - Anne had a 20 minute monologue
"The more I cried, the more the audience laughed."

Middle of the Night
Edward Robinson - She went to stand up, he put his hand on her shoulder, shook his head
Josh Logan: "Don't ever get attention with a pause."

Anne on pros and cons of working with Eli: "The pros are obvious. You share the same taxi."

Sir John Gielgud said to Anne, about being onstage with Olivier: "Larry is a terrible giggler." (Anne has a problem with laughing on stage)

Anne on marriage: "We drank Manhattans and we have no memory of our wedding night."

Baby Doll - this was Eli's greatest experience.

The Magnificent Seven - 2 gold teeth
Eli: "I've played a lot of Mexican bandits since then. I wonder why."

Steve McQueen shaking the cartridge - taking attention from Yul Brynner. Eli said, "McQueen was very clever."

The Misfits:

Anne: "Marilyn Monroe was a man's friend. She wasn't a woman's friend."

Eli on Clark Gable: "Clark never had a mother in a movie."

Anne on Clark and Marilyn in The Misfits: "The movie was disturbing to our fantasies of these people."

Monty's first scene in the phone booth: one take

Anne, on going to painful places as an actor: "And we go there with delight!"

Eli took a class with Martha Graham. She shouted at him: "Would you for God's sake walk as though you carry the seed?"

Clifford Odets said, "I always start a play in the middle of a fight."

Eli on working with Milo O'Shea - Eli wasn't nervous about the play until Milo whispered in his ear, right before the curtain went up: "Thank God you've got the first line."

Eli on marriage: "Marriage is not for sissies."

Anne looked at him at one point and said, "This relationship isn't going to last."

Coppola to Eli, on Godfather III: "You are an old old OLD friend of the Corleone family."
Eli: "If I'm such an old old OLD friend of the Corleone family ........ then why wasn't I in the other Godfather movies?"

10/8 German Lullaby rehearsal
This is the death of our relationship. It just takes us a while to realize that.
Eroticism in the air.
The intimacy is in the silences, the gestures.
Who is leaving who here?
I am yours. You are mine.
Who is she to me?
I can be on a precipice. I live on the edge.
The night gives us permission to exaggerate.
*I lose myself in her lush dramatic personality. This is where our sex life goes. I fight for my identity.

It's 3 a.m. She's been gone all day.

10/9 Classics
Characters pursue their objectives verbally

"I'll buy that parentheses and I'll raise you a mid-line ending." - Doug

The conspiracy scene in Julius Caesar - all the "s' sounds ... makes it sound like incessant whispering

Gear changes in thought need to be audible

Suit the action to the word and the word to the action.

Sarah Siddons' Lady Macbeth

10/9 PD Unit
We read German Lullaby - Sam said to Lesley afterwards: "Lesley, you should be very proud of yourself for what you have created."

Wade gave me a backrub.

Sam discussed subtext - for him a play needs subtext - that "subterranean tide pulling us forward."

Sam on PD issues: "The main issue is the bored actors."

Sam to me and Jen: So how are you 2 Irish broads doing?
Me: We were just sitting here appreciating you.
Sam: Oh - really? (he got all excited - stretching his arms)
Me: Yeah. You're not afraid of anything, are you?
Sam: No. (He went right there with me)
Me: I can tell. Have you worked really hard to get that?
Sam: Yes.

God, I love him. That no bullshit honesty. He's so there

10/14 Classics

Romeo and Juliet - Eileen and Rebecca
scene between Juliet and the nurse
Line 1339: Juliet: "I would thou hadst ..." play up the "I" sound
Don't forget the given circumstances
The Nurse: aching bones. Sexual innuendo. Maybe it goes over Juliet's head, but it's for the audience and for herself
"Is it good or bad" - antithetical
"Go thy ways, wench" - perhaps to herself
"Where is your mother" - make sure no one hears

Macbeth - Steven, JM
"Hark, peace" - the owl scares the shit out of her - to the audience? Try to get their sympathy - which is a real task

Shakespeare puts the actor in the position of the character

10/14 PD Unit

Sam to the directors: "Actors at their best are fantastic creatures. If you give them the correct stimuli - character, circumstance, objective - and then Get Out of the Way - they can work miracles."

I want to work on Arthur Miller's Some Kind of Love Story

10/15 German Lullaby rehearsal
I love her for all her big-hearted dramatic qualities - i don't have any of that - and the very thing I love about her will become our point of dissension
alarm bells: she hasn't been eating. She also has never disappeared like this before.
The character has never thought all that much about being German
"She was a Jew!" - this is a surprise when it comes out. I have the capacity to say that? We love each other - this is why it is so disturbing.
I always knew she was Jewish - it was never a big deal
The past is haunting our relationship
The collective guilt of the Germans
Rain is the 3rd character in this play. It is in this room with us. And then when it stops, it's like the silence is loud.
What else is wrong in this relationship?

10/16 Classics
Negotiate each moment. Don't act like you've already made choices. Discover the choices.
If you follow the language correctly - it will create an attitude within you that is the character. It's a direct line to the playwright's head.

This stuff can take you over like a mask if you let it.

Augment the performance with performer's instincts - but don't start there

Caesura: rhetorical pause. Provides audience a chance to catch up. Named for Caesar. He was dyslexic probably and paused a lot.

10/16 PD Unit

Speed the Plow - out of context this scene is hard to follow. The relationship is not clear.

"Relaxation should not be a spectacle." - Sam

10/18 Hello Out There rehearsal
p. 19: establishing myself to him

"Since last night" - testing waters? See if I can tell him what happened last night between us.

Moment before - remember: he has just called me Katey.

"Well, yeah, except me." I am trying to segue here into my more personal stuff.

Mike: "If I'm her knight in shining armor, then she is my angel."

I know that feeling with a man.

p. 23 clear and heightened sense of danger. Urgency growing.

Premonition at the end. "I want to tell you something." I would die for him. I would kill for him.

10/19 German Lullaby rehearsal
watch Night Porter again - the eroticism. Pain = pleasure. That is our relationship.

The moment with the clip-on earrings: seduction, uncertainty

Monocle on a ribbon, maybe. Subtly militaristic outfit perhaps.

10/20 LAUREN BACALL

"I have spent half my life quaking with nerves."

"My childhood was not thrilling."

On her father: "He was a negative factor."

She would read Grimm's Fairy Tales with a flashlight under a blanket

On her high school: "I went to school with five thousand girls."

On Juliet's death scene: "It's supposed to be sad. It's not supposed to be pathetic."

"I would cut school and go see Bette Davis movies in the theatre. I'd sit there and cry and smoke."

She stalked Bette Davis.

Graduated high school at 15.

Went to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts - with Kirk Douglas. "I learned how to fall down stairs. I learned how to walk with a book on my head."

On animal exercises: "Yes. We did animal exercises. Never used it in my life."

"I was an usherette."

"George Kaufman was my friend till the end of his life."

Diana Vreeland put her on the cover of Harper's Bazaar. Howard Hawks saw it. "Howard Hawks said to me: You would be good in a movie with either Cary Grant or Humphrey Bogart and I thought: 'Cary Grant!!'"

On To Have and Have Not - "Hawks wanted me to be not tough - but insolent."

On The Big Sleep: "I love that movie because nobody knew what it was about, including us." Who pushed the dude off the pier? "Howard called Raymond Chandler who wrote the book and he didn't know. But it worked."

On Dark Passage: "Bogie was the camera in that movie."

On the Rat Pack: "In he'd come - ring a ding ding - and he'd go right to the bar." - Bacall talking about Frank Sinatra. "Frank loved married couples."

"And I walked into this party and the Hope Diamond was there."

On Key Largo and John Huston:
"If the boom boy had a suggestion, John would listen."
"Huston was also called The Monster. For good reason."

On Young Man With a Horn:
"I had a giant crush on Kirk Douglas."

The African Queen - Katharine Hepburn carrying the full-length mirror in a raft down the river

On Designing Women - this movie was filmed while Bogie was dying at home. "He wanted me to do it. Bogie wanted me to work so that I could come home and have something to talk about."

"Gregory Peck was not bad to look at, you may have noticed."

"Bogie was a last century guy. He lived by the 10 Commandments. I had a great time with him. Some people never have that."

"The 3 people I knew who had such strength of character were Bogie, Katharine Hepburn and my mother."

On The Shootist - filmed while John Wayne was dying: "He never spoke of it."

Lauren to John Wayne: "It's a beautiful day, isn't it?"
John Wayne: "Every day you wake up, it's a beautiful day."

On her book: "Writing By Myself was very cathartic. And yes, I wrote every word."

On Barbra Streisand and Mirror Has 2 Faces: "I worship talent. Just being in her presence was terrific. She was terrific."

10/21 Classics

Julius Caesar: Portia: says "ungentle" twice - implying that he is normally gentle with her.

Objective: and then add a Why - see if the objective can't go to another level - personalize the choices.

Stella Adler: "Your talent is in your choices."

"The interest in custard pies is seeing them hit people."

"Our consciousness stands guard at what might be revealed."

Doug on DeNiro: "Robert DeNiro doesn't get to be different anymore."

10/22 PD Unit

Me to Wade: "I went to the Book Fair ..."
Wade burst into laughter.
Wade: "I love you, Sheila."
Me: "Oh, Wade. I love you too."

Sam, at one point: "Who do I have to fuck to get out of here is what I want to know."

Sam: "I'm just trying to keep my spirits up."

Liz on SRO hotels: "You could be killing people in there and no one would care."
Wade: "Where is this?"

Kara: "Are we still not allowed to be naked in school?"

Sam: "All this love of Jesus is just as obsessive as any other form of narcissism."

Sam: "You know who originated this part? It was Geraldine Page."
Kara: "I bet she sucked!"

10/23 Classics
Doug to Eileen: "Eileen, you're brilliant. Now I'm going to ask you not to be."

Measure for Measure - the 1st speech of Duke - the punctuation gives him the sound of a gov't official -

10/23 PD Unit

Sam: "Fences is a masterpiece of structure."

"Do you have the time?"
"What am I, fuckin' Swiss?"

10/28 Classics
Julius Caesar - Heaven - elision, almost always one syllable - heav'n

Doug was Harold Clurman's assistant

"Amanda, you need to watch out for the Nice Girl Police." - Doug

It's not about the answers. It's about the questions.

Make the end of the last thought the beginning of the next thought

10/28 PD Unit

"Speaking of surly and disrespectful, where is Kara?" - Sam

Quote from Gingerbread Lady: "My apartment is on a sublet from Mary Todd Lincoln."

Sam: "If you do a high-class piece that lays an egg, no one will think: 'Boy, that's a high-class broad.'"

Sam: "I wouldn't care if you had them do it on pogo sticks."

Sam to D.: "To whatever degree you can get it up, try to create some authentic misery."

Sam: "Method acting the stereotype is eyeballing your partner, mumbling, breaking up your sentences in illogical ways. You can be 100% full of shit and be a Method actor."

Kazan said to Geraldine Page when directing Sweet Bird of Youth - she was afraid of the audience, terrified - He told her that the more frightened she was as an actress, the more she should attack the audience. It's one of her greatest performances.

Sam: "I studied with Strasberg for 21 years and I never felt that gave me the license to be an asshole."
Michael: "So where'd you get your license then?"

10/30 Classics

Lesley: "Let's go from 'Where is your mother' - so you can have your moment where you get horrified."

Doug: "Your acting is like a little fake tree. Oh, look how real that looks!"

11/4 Classics

Preconceptions get in the way of your talent expressing itself.

Take the car out of drive, put it in neutral, and see the shape of the land.

"Hamlet is a tragedy where there is a part left open"

Excerpt from W.H. Auden's lecture on Hamlet, February 12, 1947, at the New School for Social Research in NYC:

If a work is quite perfect, it arouses less controversy and there is less to say about it. Curiously, everyone tries to identify with Hamlet, even actresses - and in fact Sarah Bernhardt did play Hamlet, and I am glad to say she broke her leg doing it. One says that one is like a character, but one does not say, "This is me." One says, "I am more like Claudius, perhaps, than I am like Laertes," o "I would rather be Benedick than Orsino." But when a reader or spectator is inclined to say, "This is me," it becomes slightly suspicious. It is suspicious when all sorts of actors say, "This is a part I would like to do," not "This is a part I have a talent to do." I would question whether anyone has succeeded in playing Hamlet without appearing ridiculous. Hamlet is a tragedy where there is a part left open, as a part is left open for an improvisational actor in farce. But here the part is left open for a tragedian.

Shakespeare took a great deal of time over this play. With a writer of Shakespeare's certainty of execution, a delay of this kind is a sign of some dissatisfaction. He has not got the thing he wants. T.S. Eliot has called the play "an artistic failure". Hamlet, the one inactive character, is not well integrated into the play and not adequately motivated, though the active characters are excellent. Polonious is a pseudo-practical dispenser of advice, who is a kind of voyeur where the sex life of his children is concerned. Laertes likes to be a dashing man-of-the-world who visits all houses - but don't you touch my sister! And he is jealous of Hamlet's intellect. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are yes men. Gertrude is portrayed as a woman who likes to be loved, who likes to have romance in her life. And Horatio is not too bright, though he has read a lot and can repeat it.

The plays of the period in which Shakespeare wrote Hamlet have great richness, but one is not sure that at this point he even wants to be a dramatist. Hamlet offers strong evidence of this indecision, becaue it indicates what Shakespeare might have done if he had had an absolutely free hand: he might well have confined himself to dramatic monologues. The soliloquies in Hamlet as well as other plays of this period are detachable both from the character and the plays. In earlier as well as later works they are more integrated. The "To be or not to be" soliloquy in Hamlet (III.i.56-90) is a clear example of a speech that can be separated from both the character and the play, as are the speeches of Ulysses on time in Troilus and Cressida (III.iii.145-80), the King on honor in All's Well That Ends Well (II.iii.124-48), and the Duke on death in Measure for Measure (III.i.5-41).

Shakespeare, at this time, is interested in various technical problems. The first is the relation between prose and verse in the plays. In the early plays, the low or comic characters - Shylock as well as Launcelot Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice, for example - speak prose. An intellectual character like Falstaff speaks prose, in contrast to a passionate character like Hotspur, who speaks verse. In As You Like It, contrary to tradition, both the hero and heroine speak prose. In Twelfth Night, Viola speaks verse at court and prose to herself, and the characters in the play who are false or have no sense of humor speak verse. Those who are wiser and have some self-knowledge speak prose. In the tragedies Shakespeare develops an extremely fertile prose style for the tragic characters. Hamlet speaks both verse and prose. He speaks verse to himself, in his soliloquies, and in speeches of violent passion to others, as in the scene with his mother. He otherwise usually speaks prose to other people. There is a highly developed relation to prose and poetry in all the plays of this period. In the last plays Shakespeare exploits verse more exclusively, and tends to use prose when he is bored, or when he needs to fill in the gaps. In Antony and Cleopatra, the boring characters use prose, the rounded characters, verse.

Shakespeare is also developing a more flexible verse. He started off with the end-stopped Marlovian and lyric lines that were suitable to high passion. In Hamlet he experiments with the caesura, the stop in the middle of the line, to develop a middle voice, a voice neither passionate nor prosaic. Hamlet also shows a development in Shakespeare's use of the double adjective. From such a phrase as "sweet and honey'd sentences" in Henry V (I.i.50), which is tautological, he moves to pairs of adjectives in Hamlet that combine the abstract and the concrete: Laertes' "And keep you in the rear of your affection / Out of the shot and danger of desire" (I.iii.34-35), for example, Horatio's "These are but wild and whirling words, my lord" (I.v.133), and Hamlet's "Led by a delicate and tender prince" (IV.iv.48). George Ryland's book, Words and Poetry, is very good on Shakespeare's language and style.

In this period, also, Shakespeare appears to be tired of writing comedy, which he could do almost too well - he was probably bored because of his facility in the genre. Comedy is limited in the violence of language and emotion it can present, although Shakespeare can include a remarkable amount of both in his comedies. But though he wants to get away from comedy, he doesn't want to go back to the crude rhetoric of King John and Richard III or to the lyric and romantic rhetoric of Romeo and Juliet and Richard II. He doesn't want a childish character, who doesn't know what is going on, like Romeo and Richard II, nor a crude character like Brutus, who is a puppet in a plot of historical significance, where the incidents are more important than the characters. Finally, he doesn't want a character of fat humour that the situation must be constructed to reveal. And having done Falstaff, he doesn't want to go back to the crude character.

Shakespeare's very success as a dramatic poet may have led him to a kind of dissatisfaction with his life that is reflected in Hamlet. A dramatic poet is the kind of person who can imagine what anyone can feel, and he begins to wonder, "What am I?" "What do I feel?" "Can I feel?" Artists are inclined to suffer not from too much emotion but rather from too little. This business of being a mirror - you begin to question the reality of the mirror itself.

Shakespeare develops Hamlet from a number of earlier characters who are in differing ways proto-Hamlets. Richard II is a child, full of self-pity, who acts theatrically but who is not, like Hamlet, conscious of acting. Falstaff is like Hamlet, an intellectual character and the work of an artist who is becoming aware of his full powers, but he is not conscious of himself in the way Hamlet is. When Falstaff does become conscious of himself, he dies, almost suicidally. Brutus anticipates Hamlet by being, in a sense, his opposite. Hamlet is destroyed by his imagination. Brutus is destroyed by repressing his imagination, like the Stoic he is. He tries to exclude possibility. The nearest to Hamlet is Jaques, who remains unexplained and can take no part in the action.

Carrie Fisher: "Wishful Drinking"

Last night I went to see Carrie Fisher's one-woman show Wishful Drinking at Studio 54. (Side note: Ingrid Bergman's daughter was there. Pia Lindstrom. Spitting image. And I heard her laughing at one point, and thought: Holy crap, that's Ingrid's laugh.) I've been a fan of Fisher's writing for a long long time, and if you haven't listened to her commentary track on the DVD of Postcards from the Edge, all I can say is, you are missing out. She's smart, hilarious, acerbic, and when she nails a phrase, there is sometimes a moment of stunned recognition in an audience, like: wow. Let me just SIT in that for a minute. There were many moments like that in last night's show, which was wonderful. I would find myself laughing uproariously, and then she would say something that yes, would be funny - because she just has a knack for putting things in a humorous way - but the underlying truth would be so searing that you could FEEL its impact in the audience. So we were laughing, but we were also nodding to ourselves thinking, "How true that is ..."

"Resentment," she said, "is like feeding yourself poison, and waiting for the other person to die."

There wasn't a self-indulgent moment in the whole night, and that's really saying something, when you consider the story she has to tell: addiction, mental illness, rehabs, not to mention her absolutely insane upbringing. She can see it all as funny. Not because it IS funny, but because she lived through it. And some things you just can't make up.

For example, she was diagnosed with manic-depression. A couple years later, someone told her that her picture was in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, used to illustrate bipolar. She was baffled by this. What? What picture of me is in there? Me in therapy? She eventually tracked down the journal, and saw the picture. There was a big screen at the back of the stage, where pictures were projected throughout the night, and suddenly there it was: On one side, an official-looking page of text: BIPOLAR blah blah blah ... and on the opposite side? A sulky picture of her AS PRINCESS LEIA. Insane. She was a middle-aged woman when she got her diagnosis, and Princess Leia's image was the one they chose. Hysterical. So bizarre. Like - who has a life like that?

She is also a Pez Dispenser, which became a running gag throughout the night.

"So not only am I a Pez Dispenser, but I am also used as an illustration in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology."

I think my favorite part of the night was when she was trying to explain the insanity of her parents' marriage and what went down back then. Her daughter, who is 17 years old, had a little flirtation with a boy who was somehow related to Mike Todd (Elizabeth Taylor's husband who died in a plane crash). Now, if you are up to date in Hollywood lore, then you know that Eddie Fisher (Carrie's father) went to "comfort" Elizabeth Taylor in her time of grieving, and he left his wife (Debbie Reynolds) within the week to be with Elizabeth.

Carrie said, "He RACED to her side to comfort her. And then he comforted her from THE FRONT."

Carrie's daughter came to her and said, confused, "Now ... help me understand ... am I related to this boy I have a crush on?"

So began Carrie's lecture to us on "Hollywood Inbreeding 101" (those words were projected onto the back screen). Down from the wings above came an enormous flow-chart, covered in familiar faces, with lines drawn from one face to the other. She got a big pointer, and then walked us through the whole thing. It was a masterpiece of self-deprecating and honest humor. There was audience participation, because there was so much repetition in the story (infidelity, divorce, remarriage - often to the same person - divorce again) - that Carrie would ask a specific audience member in the first row (her name was "Judith") to finish her sentences. "So then the clouds came in, and Judith, what happened next?" Judith called out from her seat, "They got divorced." Carrie went on, "But then they ran into each other again, they felt nostalgic, and then what happened, Judith?" Judith called out, "They got remarried."

The Hollywood Inbreeding lecture was my favorite part of the show. I could have watched her walking around with that pointer for an hour more.

Her words about the insanity of Star Wars were awesome, and the best part is is that George Lucas came to see the show in San Francisco. She tells the well-known story about how she was doing a costume fitting, and she went to show George the white dress that Leia wears. He looked her over and said, "You can't wear a bra." Carrie asked, "Why, George?" He said, "Because there's no underwear in space." Carrie was laughing, saying, "And he said it with such certainty - like he had BEEN in space, and he KNEW." So George Lucas comes backstage after seeing the show, and the first thing he said was, "You know why there is no underwear in space?" (Not "good job, Carrie", not "great show") She said, "Why, George?" He said, "Because of zero gravity, you could be strangled by your own bra."

Makes perfect sense.

Fisher was told she needed to lose 10 pounds when she got the role of Leia. "Please realize," she said to us, "that I weighed 105 pounds at that point - and 90 of it was IN MY FACE. So what do you do when someone has a wide face? Naturally you give them a hairdo that MAKES IT EVEN WIDER."

The set for her show was like a comfy cozy living room, with big overstuffed chairs, and cans of soda that she would sip on throughout the night. She would curl up in the chair, as though she was in her own house. She also was basically wearing her pajamas. Silk men's pajamas and a long bathrobe, which I just loved, because it took the edge off. It made it all seem perfectly normal, that she would be telling us intimate details of her life - because why wouldn't she? She was in her pajamas.

Her sensibility is inherently comic. That was probably her saving grace. She knows her demons very well, and she has given them room to breathe and express themselves. She doesn't seem bitter, although her humor can be quite sharp.

What I am left with, ultimately, is the impression that I just spent 2 hours in the presence of a really nice woman, someone I am glad I got to know. Just a little bit.

And this may be strange to say, since I don't know the woman, and have no stake in her life whatsoever.

But watching her up there, stalking around with her pointer, cracking jokes about her crazy parents, and making an entire packed Broadway audience roar with laughter - I felt really proud of her. I thought: Good for you. Good for you.

(Pia Lindstrom. Yes. I am a member of the paparazzi)

Look out: Gerko is watching!

You should probably read this post first, a description of some of the worst shows I have ever been in. So bad that a man stood up during one of them and shouted at us actors on the stage, "WHO THE HELL WROTE THIS SHIT?" and then stormed out noisily. (Full story in that link there.)

For that particular show in question (it was called Sitcom - again, full story at the link above) I played the slutty daughter, akin to Christina Applegate in Married with Children. My dear friend David played my heavy metal slash guido boyfriend. We were filled with shame, as we writhed around on the couch tearing at each other's clothes, in front of a disenchanted and increasingly annoyed audience. The play, a spoof on sitcoms, also featured a furry creature who lived behind the couch. His name was Gerko. He was played by a wonderful actor named Rich Hutchman, who was reduced to lying behind the couch with this damn puppet who kept popping up to comment on the horrifying action unfolding.

Some promotional photos were taken for Sitcom, the crowning glory of which is below the jump.

There is so much that is funny about the photo. Please just factor in the SHAME we were feeling. And it was written by a dear friend, a wonderful writer and actor - and directed by a fantastic director, another good friend - but the show just was not good. It was a disaster of epic proportions. The playwright has gone on to success, but there is one particular reviewer in Chicago who cannot help himself - EVERY time this reviewer writes about another one of my friend's plays, he HAS to reference Sitcom. Even though it was years ago. "Unlike Sitcom ..." "Those of you who remember Sitcom ..." Dude cannot let it go. It was a play of legendary badness. So although you may not SEE our shame (we're pros!), it is there. Another thing: David's face!! His arm!

I've known David since I was 16. We've been friends forever. That alone makes this a funny photo.

But the funniest thing is that GERKO overlooking the scene. Rich Hutchman, a wonderful actor, is crouched gamely behind the couch, puppet on hand, talking in a funny voice, eavesdropping on the family he lives with.

I love actors. Even in our shame, we are glorious.

At least there's a RECORD of it all, to live on through the ages.

Cousin Kerry = Dead Mum

My cousin Kerry O'Malley last night joined the Broadway cast of Billy Elliot, playing Billy's Dead Mum, a heartwrenching part. She'll be playing the role through September 6.

Congratulations to Kerry!

One of the stranger coincidences right now is that my friend Caitlin is cousins with Trent Kowalik, who plays one of the Billys. We have been laughing about how our cousins (random) are in the same damn Broadway show right now. What are the odds.

Cheers to my gorgeous Dead Mum cousin - can't wait to see the show!

The only god is a god of carnage.

God of Carnage, Yasmina Reza's Tony-award winning play, is a four-character symphony that is playing like a bat out of hell on Broadway right now, and I consider it a must-see. If you live in the area, or if you are visiting, do not miss it - and if you can, see it with the original four actors - James Gandolfini, Marcia Gay Harden (winner of this year's Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play), Hope Davis, and Jeff Daniels. It runs about 90 minutes without an intermission - which is great, because to step out of the momentum of the play would kill it. It requires that nobody (not the characters, nor the audience) gets to take a breath. It shows an evening that starts out one way and then goes south, and then after going south, it plummets to the deepest hot core of the earth, where all civilization is stripped away, and people basically lose their fucking minds. It reminded me a bit of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, except that George and Martha are rather on the edge from the beginning, eager to play "party games" with their hapless guests, and it is the two unwitting guests who end up being stripped not just of their civilized behavior, but their entire personality structures and ideals and values system. In God of Carnage, all four characters begin with the veneer. Nobody is conscious of what is going on underneath - in the group dynamic or in themselves. It seems as though they are truly having a discussion (very funnily written) about a playground fight between their two sons. We in the audience can sense the undercurrents but the characters can't yet do so. There is a wonderful tension in those opening scenes.

To describe how things go south, and what the various triggers are, would be to ruin the exhilaration of seeing it for the first time. I went into it not knowing much about it, except for being familiar with Reza's other plays, and also knowing it just won some Tonys. There is no surprise in the plot, akin to the surprise of George and Martha's child (their "secret") in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, but the surprise (and the delight) comes in watching these four spectacular actors create this EVENT - from wholecloth. The end of the play has to be IN THEM from the beginning, but in the beginning there are zero clues as to where we will be going. What a ride. What an exhilarating ride.

It's another one of those rare theatrical events where everything is in perfect balance. No one is clearly having a "star turn", they each get equal play, they each have their "moment", but like I said in the beginning - it is a symphony. To take out one part to analyze it would wreck the fabric of the whole. These four actors are creating this organic event TOGETHER, and God, there were moments where I found myself laughing, clapping, and saying stuff like, "Holy crap" out loud (and I was not alone) - not because it was fun or funny or a hoot, but because what I was seeing up on that stage was so out of hand, and yet so truthful, that I couldn't believe my eyes.

I didn't have time to think or analyze or step back. My eyes raced from one person to the other to the other, thinking, "Oh, how will she take that ..." "Oh shit, forgot about him over there ... what's going on with him ..." "My God, look at Marcia Gay - WHAT IS SHE DOING??"

One of the things that was so incredible about the acting of Gandolfini, Harden, Daniels and Davis is that eventually it becomes one of the most physical of plays. People run around screaming. People throw things. People wrestle. But when the lights go up, we see four characters sitting politely on two couches, and everyone is talking in a nice low manner, all civilized and "Oh yes, we understand how it is on the playground ... but our boy lost a tooth ... what can we do about it?" "It is so wonderful how understanding you are being ..." ... and by the end the four of them are wrecked shells of who they used to be. And somehow it is all hysterical AND heart-wrenching at the same time. Nothing is played just for laughs.

Its interesting, I would like to read the script just as a document and see how it reads. There are some terrific lines, and all of the characters are clear and well-written, but in my opinion it's the acting that makes it transcend. Again, I'd have to read it to see what I think. To be clear, when you sit down and read a play like Streetcar Named Desire or Long Day's Journey Into Night, they are fantastic pieces of literature all on their own. Yes, an actor can make it live, can leave an indelible impression (phone call for Marlon Brando) - but the scripts can be read on their own. I am not sure if that is the case with God of Carnage - I'll have to read it. But it seems to me that there might be something a bit thin at the heart of it, a bit too clever ... but no matter, no matter. The four actors in question (and the direction) delve as deeply into this event as they can possibly go, and you forget you're watching a play, you forget you're watching four big stars go at it up there ... You are gripped by the throat and you are never allowed out of it until the lights go down 90 minutes later.

There is a staggered quality to the journeys of the characters. Some are harder nuts to crack (Marcia Gay's character, for example - but boy, when she lets loose, you feel like, "Uhm, this woman is going to be in Bellevue in a matter of moments if someone doesn't DO SOMETHING"), but when things start falling apart, boom boom boom, down they all go, like ninepins. They are inextricably linked. They aren't even good friends. This is not like a Big Chill scenario, where all the chaos and sexual shenanigans and drunkenness come out of the fact that this is a big group of friends with a long history, and they all know WAY too much about one another, and there is nowhere to hide. No, God of Carnage is about the meeting of two couples, for the first time. They have been brought together because the son of Hope Davis and Jeff Daniels has "attacked" the son of Jim Gandolfini and Marcia Gay Harden with a stick. So to watch these two couples unravel is astonishing, because I couldn't help but think, "Holy crap, these people are gonna wake up tomorrow morning and be like ... was that ME last night? What the hell happened??"

I have "favorite" moments in my head for each actor, the take-aways of these four great performances:

1. Gandolfini is so funny, so so good here - true and real and ugly and funny, and there isn't a moment he doesn't nail. But you don't feel him cashing in on his giant Sopranos success (although he is perfectly perfectly cast here), he's not winking at the audience or anything like that. Like I said, there are no star turns here. Nobody is "slumming". These are actors at the top of their collective game, and it was so much fun to see him just let loose in the midst of this new environment. At one crucial crazy point, he suddenly gets up and walks across the stage, taking off his shirt. He is taking off his shirt because he is out of his mind and he's fed up with playing polite, and fed up with the insinuations about his character, and the best part about the gesture is that it feels like a surprise, it feels like a grizzly bear suddenly standing up. The best thing to do when you see something like that is to either lie down and play dead, or whip out your crossbow and take that ferocious beast down. It'll be you or him. That's what it feels like. (phone call for Timothy Treadwell). This is a man who has been domesticated, and almost fully. But suddenly, no more, no more. He's had it. But the way Gandolfini sort of staggers across the stage, taking off his shirt, is so hilarious, so real, that when I saw it the audience erupted into excited laughter. The laughter of recognition, fear, and also just the thrill of being in the presence of an actor who has actually been driven out of his mind to such a degree that he has to start whipping off his clothes.

2. Jeff Daniels is so damn good that I had a difficult time not just tracking HIM and what he was doing. I had to remind myself that there were three other people on the stage. What he is up to is subtle, and subversive, and many times he has very difficult moments where he's on his cell phone in the background and he has to make his voice go low, to let the other actors be heard, and then he has to surge back into the focus, with one beat - and there's a ba-dum-ching quality to what is going on, and he nails it, every single time. It was fabulous. Because that takes technique, that takes an understanding of being on stage and an understanding of ensemble acting. Now of course I am not surprised that Jeff Daniels has all of these things. But it was so exciting to see it in such high gear, and to see him operating at such a high level of consciousness. He created a character - a kind of cool distant lawyer, always on his cell phone, a bit annoyed that he has been roped into this bogus "meeting" about something he finds hard to take seriously in the first place ... but he also has to have a three-dimensional awareness of what everyone else is doing on that stage at all times, since his "moment in the sun" doesn't really come until very late. He is the counterpoint to the other three lunatics. He paces around, barking orders into his phone, eating the carefully prepared food with a fork, while standing up, and it's so damn hilarious and rude. You never ever catch Daniels "acting", but make no mistake: this is not just a guy "listening and talking" up there, or behaving, or doing something that is wholly natural. He has to have the timing of the entire piece in his DNA, because he is not the driving force, he is on the support team - until the very end, when he emerges as the one who will speak the title of the play and make it explicit for us. Of course it would be HIS character who understands that God is a "god of carnage". Jeff Daniels makes everything look easy and that is why I couldn't take my eyes off of him.

3. Hope Davis is so off-the-charts with her acting (no surprise there) that it is her unraveling that really becomes the focus of the entire thing - until, of course, Marcia Gay takes over, and then Gandolfini takes over, and finally Daniels takes over. But she's the one who takes the fall first. She seems the most fragile, but in the end we realize she's in touch with something much deeper than the rest: her own rage, her own sense of alienation and meaninglessness - which was trembling there with her in the civilized beginning. She has the most transparent of masks, so of course that's why she goes down first. Very early on in the play, she gets physically ill. I was sitting in the third row, so I could see everything: how Gandolfini's face literally got beet-red when he screamed into the phone at his mother, the food spitting out of Daniels' mouth as he inhaled it while talking on his cell phone ... and I swear I watched Hope Davis' face literally go a sickly green color, directly before she got sick. This actress is beyond good. I wanted the play to go on for another hour so I could just watch what kept rolling across her face. It's a tour de force.

4. And Marcia Gay Harden. I have seen her onstage before, but never in a role of this magnitude. She's the one with the toughest ego, in a way, the one who has a vested interest in the "role" she has given herself to play in the world. She has art books stacked on her coffee table, she is committed to the problems in Africa, she is a do-gooder (something that Jeff Daniels totally clocks her for in a devastating observation - "Women like you, custodians of the world, depress men."), and she speaks in a soft modulated voice, all calm and caring and "reasonable". That's why her disintegration of personality is so hilarious and so disturbing. She had one moment, when she is so far gone, so furious, so out of control, and she's leaning over to pick something up off the floor - and Gandolfini, her husband, embarrassed for her, says something to her like, "Honey, you're making a scene -" but he barely gets any words out before Marcia Gay, bent over at the waist, kind of cocks her ass right at him, as though she's firing a gun off, doesn't straighten up the rest of her body, still hunched over, and screams up at him on the diagonal, in a horrifying screech, "IDON'TGIVEASHIT." I nearly could not recover from that moment - it was such a funny and AWFUL moment of unleashed rage, and her physicality was so specific, but it didn't feel like a "bit", or that she had planned it out beforehand. She has become a beast of the field, and all bets are off from that point on.

I am not sure if I would say that this is a great play, in and of itself. But I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that what is going on right now at the Bernard Jacobs Theatre on 45th Street is an EVENT of the highest order.

Don't miss it.

Abigail Adams on her blackberry

Last night at around 7 p.m., Kerry and I were emailing back and forth. It was fast and furious and had to do with men and getting ahead of ourselves and various heartcracks and how we should do whatever Mike says and also our cats and how much we love boys, in general. There were almost no pauses between emails.

But then I realized what time it was. 7 pm. Kerry is now playing Abigail Adams in the Paper Mill Playhouse's production of 1776 (buy tickets here - great show!!), which I went to see last Sunday with Siobhan and Ben - and the show was at 7:30.

I emailed Kerry, "Are you in costume right now?"

"Yes."

So. Kerry was dressed like this, emailing me from stage left.

I still laugh at Kate, dressed up in some bullshit fashion from the ancien regime, all very fin de siecle, calling me from DURING her show and then hanging up hurriedly. But to picture her in a powdered wig and beauty mark and decolletage on her cell phone ... Too much.

For example, at one point last night, Kerry responded to something I said with: "OMG! Heartcrack!"

Picturing her saying something like that dressed like that just makes me happy.

Inappropriate hilarity that could not be stopped.

In college, I was in a production of Lanford Wilson's The Rimers of Eldritch (excerpt here). It is a grim bleak play about a bunch of hopeless people.

I was in it with Mitchell, Brooke, Nancy, other dear friends. I'm still very proud of that show, and what we were able to create. Great experience.

However.

We had a photo call after one of the productions. All of the photos I have of that show are from that night. And Brooke and I, who played best friends (teenage girls), were possessed by a DEMON of laughter, of the laughing-in-church kind and we could not stop. We would get it together for one particular shot, and the second the camera clicked, we would EXPLODE in laughter again. We got in trouble, for God's sake! We got yelled at! "Girls, we have a lot to get through - can you keep it together?"

We could NOT. It ended up not even being funny. It was more like agony. We would determinedly not look at each other, but we could FEEL one another peripherally ... I could see Brooke's shoulders shaking, and I would LOSE it which would set her off. The bad thing about all of this (or, one of the bad things) is that it was one of those shows where everyone was onstage at the same time. So even if the focus wasn't on us, we were in the background, so not only were we ruining our own shots, we were ruining other people's (which was much much worse). We laughed, I am not kidding, for four hours straight. We cried rivers of tears. We had to have our makeup redone. We were unbelievably unprofessional.

The joke began in this way: The play, as I mentioned, is grim and dark. Nobody in the play is happy. It is a terrible story. So there's that. It's not like we could somehow turn our laughter into something that would work for the photos. We were totally TRAPPED. We played Patsy and Lena, two bored high school girls in the 1950s in a little dust-bowl Bible Belt town. Brooke played Patsy, a restless "fast" girl, a bit of a slut in those days, she put out ... and she had big dreams for herself. She was gonna get OUT of that town. (Keep dreamin', sister.) I played her kind of dumpy sidekick, Lena, who was a much more conventional person. She had a boyfriend, and that was important to her ... she wants to get married and have kids, settle down in the town ... but she also has deep THOUGHTS about things and wants to SHARE it with her boyfriend, who, frankly, couldn't care less, and basically tries to date-rape her every time they go out. Lena, of course, is a virgin (unlike Patsy), and wants to be one on her wedding night (typecasting. Well. At the time). Her dreams for herself are so different from the reality. There are awful wrestling-match scenes between the two of them, where she would be trying to talk about the universe or God and he's putting his hand down her blouse. But this is the guy for her. Lena is not the type to flirt around, or find someone more suitable. She'll marry him. And in a year or two she will be as grim and judgmental as all the other women in the town.

Meanwhile, Patsy is falling in love ("love") with an aimless trucker who comes through town, who seems glamorous, like he could take her somewhere, take her out of the town ... but she's going to sleep with him, get pregnant, and in the process trap him and herself.

Okay, so there's the setup. BLEAK.

Brooke and I had been friends for a year or so when we did Rimers, but Rimers solidified our bond. To this day, if we find ourselves at a bar picking out songs on the jukebox, Brooke will glance at me and say, "We are totally Patsy and Lena right now."

So the joke during photo call, which began innocently but then ballooned into a laughing fit that annoyed pretty much EVERYONE was that during the scenes when we weren't in focus, but were in the background, we started joking that the two of us would be boozing it up like two blowsy whores - so the characters in focus would be doing their thing, but in the background would be a blurry image of the two of us, teenage bobbysoxers, clinking glasses, or rubbing our breasts lasciviously at the camera or bending over to take it up the ass as we winked grotesquely at the camera - all SO not in the world of Rimers ... and finally, we couldn't stop. We found it so hilarious that we were totally overtaken. We would stand in the background of scenes, arms clenched across our stomachs, trying to hold it in while the photos of the other actors were taken. Tears streamed down our faces. We were reprimanded repeatedly. We begged for mercy. "I'm so sorry - we can't stop!!"

So now. I have those Rimers photos. I am amazed at how much we were able to keep it together. Each photo represents about 4 or 5 tries from the photographer to get us in between wild guffaws. But she ended up getting the shots she needed.

At the end of the night, the costume designer wanted stills of each character in their costumes, so there was one photo taken of me, in my dress, and then Brooke and I had to stand together and get our picture taken. These last photos were not about acting, it was only about the dresses we were wearing, so we were able to let it out a little bit. We weren't playing a scene. In the first one, I am obviously blurry, I am moving on by, completely undone by the hilarity I am trapped in. In the second one, you can see that we are both a bit blurry, and I look, frankly, insane. A demon has overtaken me and it has worn me OUT.

I love these pictures. The birth of a lifelong friendship.

"How many real adult times have you been in love?"

From Diverting Devotion, a wonderful play by Mike O'Malley

NANCY. My turn. How many times have you been in love?

HENRY. Real times?

NANCY. You've faked being in love?

HENRY. No, but "real" can be a very murky thing for people when it comes to love. There's high school love, which, when people are going through it, they think it's real, but then you look back and all it is, is just ... puberty juice. Then you got your basic college-love illusion, where feelings are blown way out of proportion by the fact that you can have sex somewhere other than a car.

NANCY. Some people experience real love at that age.

HENRY. At that age people are in love with the idea that they're in love. They like how it makes them feel grown up. Then they're crumbled when it ends because they realize it wasn't a real adult love. (Beat) I'm gonna say that real adult love happens when two people who have been completely devastated by either of these delusions try to make a go of something new. When two formerly heartbroken folks make a choice to pursue new feelings for new people armed with the knowledge of how much it could waste them. That's love. Knowing the risk. Knowing it could blow up and wreck you. But still diving in.

NANCY. Henry, you're avoiding the answer.

HENRY. What?

NANCY. How many real adult times have you been in love?

HENRY. Oh. Zero.

NANCY. That's depressing. Drink.

One of the great things about being in the theatre

... is that you get to see your best friends dressed up like this on a regular basis.

"Yours, yours, yours" - Kerry O'Malley as Abigail Adams

Yes, yet another O'Malley cousin rockin' the planet.

My dear cousin (and friend) Kerry will be playing Abigail Adams in the Paper Mill Playhouse's upcoming production of 1776.

A wonderful interview with Kerry here about the project.

Good job, Kerry. You do us New Englanders proud.

Can't wait to see it.

Saltpeter. Pins.

"Enter a chorus of lepers."

A biography that I am drooling to read (eventually, when I get back up on the reading horse for real): Michael Holroyd's A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving, and Their Remarkable Families, a dual biography of Henry Irving and Ellen Terry. I'm so excited!

While the review in the WP is a bit annoying (Oh, so short chapters = good book? Hm.) - it also captures the reviewer's excitement about the entire book ("the most completely delicious, the most civilized and the most wickedly entertaining work of nonfiction anyone could ask for"), and I find it infectious. I also enjoy the bit about the chorus of lepers.

I can't wait to read it.

I know a bit about Henry Irving and Ellen Terry - they come up all the time in any theatrical-history reading you're going to do, but I have also read her marvelous memoir. I wrote a giant post about Ellen Terry - you might find it interesting. She appears to have been one of those women - powerful, yet somehow light-hearted still, fun - that captures the imagination of men everywhere. People were obsessed with her. Oscar Wilde of course (you can read some of the lyrics he wrote in homage to her in that Ellen Terry post) - and the painter Watts (who immortalized her time and time again - he also married her) - George Bernard Shaw - royalty - the list goes on and on. But she, although wonderful at her job, a chameleon really, was not an imperious kind of person. She must have been something else on stage, boy, but in person, it sounds like she was fun, vivacious, and emotionally available. Not a drip.

Henry Irving is an interesting case as well. I have heard the stories about him from his contemporaries, who left records of his meticulous process and hard work - but I am excited to learn a little bit more about this giant of the stage, whose name is nearly totally forgotten today.

Here is one of my favorite anecdotes about Henry Irving, which brings tears to my eyes, no matter how many times I read it.

Ellen Terry writes:

Henry Irving is the monument, the great mark set up to show the genius of will. For years he worked to overcome the dragging leg ... he toiled, and he overcame this defect, just as he overcame his difficulty with vowels, and the self-consciousness which in the early stages of his career used to hamper and incommode him.

Only a great actor finds the difficulties of the actor's art infinite. Even up to the last five years of his life, Henry Irving was striving, striving. He never rested on old triumphs, never found a part in which there was no more to do. Once when I was touring with him in America, at the time when he was at the highest point of his fame, I watched him one day in the train - always a delightful occupation, for his face provided many pictures a minute - and being struck by a curious look, half puzzled, half despairing, asked him what he was thinking about.

"I was thinking," he answered slowly, "how strange it is that I should have made the reputation I have as an actor, with nothing to help me - with no equipment. My legs, my voice, everything has been against me. For an actor who can't walk, can't talk, and has no face to speak of, I've done pretty well."

And I, looking at that splendid head, those wonderful hands, the whole strange beauty of him, thought, "Ah, you little know!"

Glorious. Can't wait to read Holroyd's book. What a find!

Henry Irving (if you go read the excerpt I posted from Terry's book, you can really see how in-depth she goes about his brilliance as an actor, his process)

Painting of Ellen Terry and Henry Irving in Abelard and Heloise - by Henrietta Rae

The great Ellen Terry

I ask again. Where is my time machine to go see these two perform together?

"This irresistible ... Paris original ... I'm wearing tonight ..."

I've posted this photo before and I want to share it again.

Because it is important to remember, that even when you become an adult, and you are trying to navigate adult relationships, and maybe even nab a husband like this poor character ... inside, you are still an anxious geeky teenager, yearning for acceptance.

It is not a comfortable truth, but it is a truth nonetheless.

Playing this part (Miss Krumholtz in How to Succeed in Business) was hilarious for me, because my God, she is so vulnerable. But also so brave. Putting on a brave smile over the SHRIEKING NEUROSES beneath.

In a humorous side note, my friend Mitchell played my boss. We had very little to do with each other onstage, but of course we made up a whole story that he was sexually harassing me on a daily basis, chasing me around the office, and while Miss Krumholtz was perhaps horrified, because she just wants a husband dammit, and she is a true lady, not a slut in any way - she also endured it because ... maybe it means that her boss 'likes' her?

No, Krummy, I don't think so.

But I don't want to shatter her dreams. I mean, look at her face.

RIP Horton Foote

Great American playwright and Academy-Award winning screenwriter Horton Foote has died.

Ben Brantley writes, in his lovely appreciation of Foote's work, that

"[Foote] achieves his deepest effects by indirection and accretion of details, but the words are characteristic of his harsh sentimentality. He infused his characters with warm blood from his own, empathetic heart. But he also looked upon these same people with a cold and ruthless eye.

I think he loved all his characters — even the silly, mean and mercenary ones (of which there are many) — but he was too honest to let any of them off the hook. That means that each, on some level, was born to realize that to be alive is to be alone in the dark.

Brantley's article brought me to tears. Don't miss it.

Here are two posts I wrote about Foote:

One about his one-act play "The Old Beginning".

One about his one-act play (one of my favorites of his) "The Blind Date".

Ted has two tributes up:

Our tender sharp-eared cultural chronicler

Deep wells

Ted writes:

I am realizing that this book reminds me of the plays of Horton Foote, but particularly his The Habitation of Dragons so redolent is it of a single moment of tragedy in a family's life. Foote writes in an unfancy American idiom of the dramas that buffet ordinary folk in early 20th century small town Texas, rather than Ireland. His words aren't inherently dramatic, they just contain the simple moments of lives unadorned, but moment builds upon moment until his characters are moved on a mammoth current of action that, in the case of Habitation of Dragons, is heart-rending. Foote is best known for the screenplays of Tender Mercies, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Trip to Bountiful. He has written for the American theater from its heyday in the 1950s and is, I believe, still writing. I have directed and acted in a couple of his plays. I consider them required reading.

Horton Foote was 92. He was still working, up till the time of his death. The lights of Broadway were dimmed last night in his honor.

His voice will be missed.

"The performance is now." - Suzanne Farrell

Like most people, I have heard of Suzanne Farrell and knew she was a big deal in the world of ballet. Names like Gelsey Kirkland and Allegra Kent and Darci Kistler ... well, first of all ... aren't those all just great names? They SOUND like famous people. But their fame is enormous, and while I have never seen any of them perform, I am aware of their status. I'm just doing some ballet catch-up here! I just finished reading Joan Acocella's essay on Suzanne Farrell, in her book Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints (post about the book here). Other essays I completed this long weekend of flu-recovery and regrouping (not to mention plotting and scheming and conniving like a teenager) were essays on Jerome Robbins, Bob Fosse, Twyla Tharp, Martha Graham, Frederick Ashton, and Lincoln Kerstein. FASCINATING. I know just enough about these people to make it even more interesting for me. Well, about Fosse I know a bit more ... but I was not aware of Jerome Robbins' actual journey of life, and the back and forth between Broadway and ballet, and how he did what he did, and the style he came up with ... Anyway, these essays are amazing to me and I highly recommend the book. I'm moving now into yet another more intellectual section - essays on Mencken, Dorothy Parker, M.F.K. Fisher, Saul Bellow ... I know a lot of these people only through their writing, so I am interested to hear Acocella's take, and the biographical details that she weaves into her essay in such a graceful manner. This book really came along at the right time for me. Her writing is easy, yet just challenging enough to keep me engaged. I can feel her personality in the writing. This book is the opposite of "dry".

Acocella's essay on Suzanne Farrell came out in The New Yorker in 2003, and was focused on the brand new Suzanne Farrell Ballet, a company run by Farrell, the former star-ballerina and muse of George Balanchine (one of the many muses, but perhaps the most important one?? Out of my league here ...)

In reviewing the latest offering from the Suzanne Farrell Ballet, Acocella takes the opportunity to give us an entire retrospective of Farrell's life, and I am sure to ballet fans all of the details are well-known. Farrell and Balanchine were as talked about in the world of ballet as Brad and Angelina! Acocella really captures that time - and what it was like to be a ballet fan in New York City at that time, the excitement, the sense of involvement and personal ownership. My friend Ted, a native New Yorker, told me a little bit about it - because his mother is one of those huge ballet fans. So exciting!

But I was more interested in the character of Suzanne Farrell herself. A small obsessive personality, she, as a teenager, became the primary focus of Balanchine, who basically turned his entire ballet company into a vehicle for HER. He changed his style, he adjusted his taste, he had a vibrant "late period", which - in a man of his years and experience - is quite extraordinary. Farrell was not well-liked, although respected - there was a lot of envy of course, and she could be aloof and narrow (according to Acocella and the dancers who knew Farrell at the time.) Farrell was 16 when Balanchine plucked her from the barre and made her a prima ballerina. Resentment. But Farrell, like, I am sure, all ballerinas at that level, kept her nose to the grindstone, and didn't get distracted. I was most interested in that dynamic: the geek, the obsessive, the person who openly admitted doing "nothing" on her days off ... she had no interest in any life outside of ballet ... but then also the person who was, apparently, so fearless and so willing in rehearsals, that all Balanchine had to do was ASK and she would say "yes". She had no hesitation, no intellect getting in the way - just sheer physical trust. And so she grew ... she grew as an artist in an accelerated manner, and he grew with her ... and the entire company basically had to get out of the way. So on the one side, we have the prim nerd who does the crossword at home and reads her Bible every morning, and on the other side, we have the wild gyrating muse of the greatest man in ballet in the 20th century. Extraordinary. But I'll let Acocella take it from here. It's a marvelous piece, and I'm glad I got to know Farrell a bit better. One anecdote in particular (her directing another ballerina in her company) brought me to tears. It is just the kind of thing I like to hear: it's about the work.

From Acocella's essay on Farrell called "The Second Act"

Farrell was the most influential ballerina of the late twentieth century. Others before her had done what could be called modernist ballet dancing - lean and wild, as opposed to the plump and decorous nineteenth-century model - but Farrell, under Balanchine's tutelage, carried that project further than anyone else. What she performed was still classical ballet - she got out there with her hair in a bun and did glissade, assemble - but in her the classical style seemed to have sunk to the bones of the dancing. The flesh was something else, an awakened force. When she bent down into an arabesque penchee, you thought she would never stop. (She was the first dancer I ever saw touch her forehead to her knee in penchee.) When she executed a triple pirouette, and tilted as she did it, and then - without ever righting herself - plunged directly into the next jackknife or nosedive, you thought the walls were falling in. As Arlene Croce wrote, Farrell "made audiences sweat".

Here's the current-day anecdote that brought tears to my eyes:

A constant theme of her teaching is symbol-making. Susan Jaffe, formerly a principal dancer with American Ballet Theatre, told me about working with Farrell on Mozartiana for the 1995 season at the Kennedy Center. Balanchine made Mozartiana two years before his death, and many people believe that it is about his death. The music for the first section is Tchaikovsky's resetting of Mozart's Ave, Verum Corpus, a musical prayer, and as the curtain opens the lead woman (Farrell in the original), dressed in black, comes forward in bourree - the gliding-on-point step - meanwhile raising her arms very slowly. In learning the ballet, Jaffe was having trouble with the arms, so Farrell spoke to her. She told her that Balanchine had taken those arms from a statue of the Virgin Mary in the Church of the Blessed Sacrament on West Seventy-first Street, a few blocks from where he lived. Jaffe, who also lived near there, knew the statue, which is actually a rather ordinary marble Madonna, but with lovely arms, which she holds out to us softly, as if she were giving us something nice. No surprises here: death, prayer, Madonna, mercy. And maybe it was the memory of the statue which enabled Jaffe, when she finally performed Mozartiana, to use her arms as wonderfully as she did. I don't think so, though. "In that arm movement," Jaffe said to me later, "you bring your fingers together, and then open your arms. So this movement opens up into art and history - the neighborhood Balanchine lived in, and what he saw, and the history of the world." What Jaffe got from Farrell, it seems, was not so much a description as a suggestion, an idea: of something small, and one's own, opening out into something great, which then becomes one's own, too. With Farrell, Jaffe says, you work "from pictures in your mind, rather than 'Is this a good fifth position?'"

God, I find that so moving. Directors who use suggestion like that ... as opposed to something too literal, or corrective ... are my favorites, and always helped me feel totally free, like I could do this, I could do this on my own.

Obviously Jaffe's technique was fine. Farrell didn't need to work with her on that. She needed her to think about something, that would help her bring out the idea of the moment - and that is something that is very difficult to describe or pass on. Directors who can do that have a gift.

A couple more excerpts:

Farrell, as a dancer, had certain technical shortcomings - she wasn't a jumper, and she couldn't really do allegro (fast, small, fine-cut steps) - but no one in the world was more musical. Her connection to music seemed to be something acutely neurological. ("Even in rehearsal," she says, "when the pianist would start to play, I would get nervous, agitated.") As she sees it, music and dance are much the same thing. "There's sound in movement," she says, and space in sound. The dancer's job is to show - or make - the relation between the two: "There's a clarinet cadenza in Mozartiana that's very hard to count, but say you count it out, and it's thirteen counts. So you tell yourself, 'All right, I've got time for three pirouettes.' But what about the music's internal time? What if one note is louder, so it needs a bigger response from you, and that takes longer? What if the clarinettist doesn't have as much breath that night, so the music sort of fades in and out? You can't really dance to counts, or I couldn't. On any given night, at any given point, I didn't know if I was going to do three turns, or two, or four. You have to dance in the drama of the music, in that timing, at that moment."

And lastly:

[Balanchine] wanted big steps, steps that could fill that echoing stage [at the new theatre at Lincoln Center]. But he was certainly influenced by the fact that he now had, in Farrell, a young wildcat who was dying to do big steps. And so, in collaboration with her, he developed a new style. Farrell calls it "off-balance" dancing, and its off-balance qualities - the reckless tilts and lunges - were indeed the first thing one noticed about it, but it was also new in its utterly plastic musicality and, above all, in its scale. Farrell's movement came in bolts, in waves, in tearing trajectories. (Balanchine rarely sent her out onstage without an expert partner, one who could prevent her from hurling herself into the orchestra pit.) Even when her dancing was slow, it was wild: pooling, flooding. And she performed this way not just in Balanchine's new ballets but in his old ones as well. She changed the repertory, and, as other dancers emulated her, she changed the company. In time, she affected every American company. If, today, American ballet dancers are notably headlong - feat-doers, ear-kickers - that is due in part to Farrell. And if, when they are also profound, they are profound in a cool, exalted, unactory way, that, too, in large measure is Farrell speaking, or Farrell and Balanchine.

Some images below of this teenage phenom, who was so young at the time of her great triumphant debut, that Balanchine had to take her out to Dunkin Donuts afterwards to celebrate. Amazing.

Nureyev and gender

I still can't really read, but here are some Nureyev images, since he's been on my mind. I am halfway through the Nureyev book, and hopefully I'll get to finish it some day.

I love the androgyny of Nureyev in the pictures below (especially the one of him and Fonteyn, with him upside down - in the classic swan dive usually associated with females, her head close to his crotch level). It's gorgeous, erotic, but also unsettling to regularized gender roles, up-ending convention, which is one of the main things Nureyev appears to have contributed to ballet. As a youth, in Russia, the style was that the male was basically the "heavy" - he was meant to be statuesque, strong, and classical, and be able to lift the female about. Macho. Unemotional. This sort of static dancing, although highly technical, requiring great skill, bored Nureyev, and he got some intimation of the winds of change going on in the West, through seeing grainy tapes of this or that ballet dancer in the West, and he realized (perhaps without articulating it to himself) that things were changing "out there", outside of Russia, and he needed to be a part of it. Rigid preconceived notions of gender dissolving. Nureyev stopped modeling himself on the male dancers he saw around him, and began focusing on the ballerinas, imitating THEM, bringing their long flowing grace into the male parts ... and at the time it was hugely controversial.

Good for him.

He's so beautiful, and so strong, but there is also a softness about him that lets you, the viewer, in. It was a revelation at the time. It occurs to me that this is similar to the great conversation Catherine, Desirae and I had in the comments section to this post, about Kurt Cobain, that most superstars have a certain amount of androgyny. The hard mixed with the soft, female and male ... We were talking there about rock stars, but you can see it in actors too, especially the old-school actors with their set recognizable personae. Joan Crawford - all woman, all curves and legs, but with a backbone of steel and a hardness to her. Gary Cooper - all man, all lanky legs and straight-edges, but with the ability to show us behind the mask, all the softness and hopes and fears, in a way that would be "typically female". The obvious examples of Marlene Dietrich, who consciously toyed with gender in every role she played. Montgomery Clift, Katharine Hepburn, Rosalind Russell, Cary Grant, Barbara Stanwyck ... each had some aspect of androgyny to them, either conscious or no, which (to me) just makes them even more universal.

Nureyev made this androgyny his stock-in-trade. Well, that, and being the best dancer he could be. I think a lot of his persona was not so much calculated and consciously created, but just the result of a killer instinct.

"We only lived when we danced." - Rudolf Nureyev

"They seemed aware of each other even when their backs were turned. When their eye met, a message was passed." -- Alexander Bland on Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn

"To see Fonteyn was one thing. To see Nureyev was another thing. But to see Fonteyn and Nureyev together, on the same stage, with their particular love and assurance, was almost indescribably special." -- NY Times, 1979

"Combine the smolder, the mystery, the dynamic presence, the great streaks of vivid movement which Nureyev gives us with the beauty, the radiance, the womanliness, the queenliness and the shining movements of Dame Margot…" -- Walter Terry, ballet critic

"You couldn't believe they both hadn't sprung from the same school." -- Ninette de Valois, director of Royal Ballet

" ... two ends meeting together and making a whole." -- Ninette de Valois

"My husband called it [the partnership of Nureyev and Fonteyn] a celestial accident. To probe into its componenets is like trying to analyze a moonbeam." -- Maude Gosling, (ballerina wife of writer Nigel Gosling - good friends of Nureyev - and the two wrote a dance column together, under a joint pseudonym, Alexander Bland)

"Emotionally, technically, physically - in every way. They were just meant to meet on this earth and dance together." -- Ninette de Valois

Excerpt from Nureyev: The Life, by Julie Kavanagh:

When their rehearsals recommenced in Italy, Margot, despite having broken their deadlock, sensed a major challenge. Who in the audience would look at her "with this young lion leaping ten feet in the air and doing all these fantastic things?" Enormously competitive by nature, she also thrived on adventure and risk (the side that had made her a faux-guerrilla in her husband's abortive minirevolution in Panama in 1959). Tapping into this, Rudolf taunted her one day by saying, "So - you are Great Ballerina. Show me!" Suddenly she found herself virtually outdancing her partner, while he watched "puzzled," asking himself how it was possible that she, "without technique was doing technical things, and me, taught the best technique ... not always there?" Only too aware of her stature - her name in world terms being far better known than that of Ulanova - Rudolf himself now "felt a bit ... Well, when I'm onstage beside her, who's going to look at me?" He had always found it extraordinary the way Margot, even without this new virtuoisic confidence, could make her impact felt not through showy aplomb but through her soft, lyrical, English restraint and unforced line. There was no trace of sensationalism in her artistry, yet something so excitingly internalized that, even when standing motionless, she could draw all eyes toward her. "She came onstage," as Rudolf said, "and she made light."

"I've found the perfect partner." -- Margot Fonteyn

"We become one body. One soul. We moved in one way. It was very complementary, every arm movement, every head movement. There were no more cultural gaps; age difference; we've been absorbed in characterization. We became the part. And public was enthralled." -- Rudolf Nureyev

"In many ways they were very bad for each other. Margot had always been so serious and professional, but she changed entirely when Rudolf was around. They were never on time, and we'd sit in the bus waiting to go to rehearsal until finally they would roll up giggling and joking like a couple of children." -- Annette Page, a Royal Ballet principal

"I never saw her so liberated. The confidence it gave her was incredible. It was a development of somebody who suddenly had about ten years taken off her." -- Ninette de Valois on the 1962 production of Le Corsaire (their debut)

Excerpt from Nureyev: The Life:

Waiting in the wings for her entrance, the ballerina admitted that she found it so exhilarating to watch Rudolf that she lost all nervousness for herself. She claimed that it was her belief that the audience was looking at him, not her, that had allowed her to relax, and "really dance for the first time".

"He was transfigured when he danced. I'd never seen such unearthly beauty. He seemed unreal; not of this world - like an archangel." -- Ballet fan on Nureyev

Excerpt from Nureyev: The Life:

"We have to remember what Rudolf looked like back then on a staid British stage," says writer and photographer Keith Money: "The bare midriff and all that glitzy Soviet campery were to some the absolute height of bad taste." Most people, however, were transported by the sight of this exquisite youth yearning up toward Margot as the curtain fell, his fingers splayed, his back arched and pelvis thrust forward - "like a great Moslem whore". And it was not only his passion and animality that were so stirring, but the speculation their union prompted about the ballerina's own sexual depths. It made Verdy think of the King Kong legend - a "scene of seduction and cruelty ... like the whole thing really was a bedroom ... and you were watching through the keyhole."

"He brought her to a higher pitch of approach. He came at a period when she had lost Michael [Somes - Fonteyn's dance partner for 14 years] and it was all rather run of the mill. Suddenly this enormous impulse came, and she just responded to him." -- Frederick Ashton

"Had I been younger, I would have found it extremely difficult to accommodate Rudolf's very fixed ideas and his, shall we say, outspoken way of expressing them. Quite simply, we were so far apart that we could come together." -- Margot Fonteyn

Excerpt from Nureyev: The Life:

No Royal Ballet premiere had ever been so eagerly anticipated as the charity gala on March 12, 1963. It had been a risk submitting a nineteenth-century penny-novel melodrama to a public just waking up to a new era of kitchen-sink reality (even Ashton admitted his story was "old hat"). But to Peter Brook, reviewing the ballet for The Observer, the dancers' depth of conviction not only brought dramatic credibility to their roles, it breathed life into the genre itself, making "the most artificial old forms suddenly seem human and simple." There was certainly nothing conventionally "balletic" about Margot's display of anguish, the kind of raw, visceral emotion said to have defined Sarah Bernhardt's portrayal of Marguerite. It was a starkness that derived from the novel, not the play, which is as trite, sentimental, and far removed from the original as the 1966 film of Marguerite and Armand is from the stage version of the ballet. Ashton wanted a kind of jarring effect from his dancers, their primal lack of inhibition countering the billet-doux sweetness of what had gone before. Keith Monty still remembers the bluntness of the closing image: "When at last he let her hand fall away, she let it thump of its own weight onto the stage. Audibly. It was simply gut-wrenching, and so final. I'd never experienced quite that sort of theatrical involvement before - of being absolutely wrung out."

"Margot always said that for her, real life comes when she's onstage. I absolutely agree. We functioned between those snatches of real life onstage. We only lived when we danced." -- Rudolf Nureyev

Terminal Bar

I've always been a little bit obsessed with the play Terminal Bar, by Paul Selig. An end-of-the-world story, along the lines of Stephen King's The Stand, where all of humanity has been wiped out by a plague, only in Terminal Bar it is explicitly AIDS that is the killer. It takes place in a small dump of a bar in New York City, with decaying corpses all around, and three people - the last people on earth - have gathered. One is a prostitute, worldly-wise and cynical, who, as her specialty act for her clients, dresses up as the Statue of Liberty and roller skates around. (Alex played that part in a production. I'm so obsessed with the play that I'm jealous - I want to be in it!!!) One of the characters is a gay boy who has been living in the underworld for a long time, having anonymous sex in the "glory holes" bathrooms, and he is terrified and bereft at the death all around him. And the last character - the character I am dying to play - is a Southern lunatic who has gotten on a bus and somehow ended up in New York. She insists she is a virgin, that her marriage was not consummated - and yet she also appears to be vastly pregnant. The pregnancy turns out to be a fake, she has stuffed a feather pillow up her dress. She is clearly dying of AIDS as well, and her hair is falling out in chunks - but she is living in such total denial that she carries a super-strength bottle of Aqua Net around and teases her hair until it is in a tower on her head, re-applying makeup over and over and over until she is caked with it ... and then, to cap it all off, taking Polaroids of herself every five minutes to see what she looks like. All the mirrors have been smashed in Terminal Bar. I love that character. She has some of the best lines in the play. She may sound like an idiot, but she's not. She just has no language to describe the new world she is in. She has a wise-cracking air herself, she's a steel magnolia indeed - funny funny lines ... and she finds herself almost falling in love with the Statue of Liberty, or lust, more like it ... but again, she has no language to provide context. To say she's gay is unthinkable to her (I'll take Ted Haggard for 200, Alex). But things slowly start to break down, as the three cavort and drink and avoid the corpses and refuse to talk about the plague ... These people did not know each other before meeting up here. It is the end of the road.

I love the play. It's only a one-act but it feels full-length, with three awesome juicy characters.

I worked on it in grad school, playing the part of my dreams, and it was a lot of fun, although frustrating, because all I wanted to do was rehearse the play for realz and put it up!

The funniest and weirdest thing is that I got a Polaroid camera (of course) to take photos of myself through the scene. The whole point is that she has to look at herself immediately - the Polaroids become her mirror. "How am I doing? Do I look sick? Do I need more Aqua Net? More rouge?"

It's grotesque. But somehow hilarious as well.

It's almost unheard-of to take pictures of yourself in the middle of a scene, so these two photos make me laugh. The second one is TERRIFYING. She really is under the impression that she looks like a million bucks!

And please, where did my upper lip go? I have never smiled like that before or since, thank the good Lord above, JESUS.

The Alvin Ailey flat-back series

Here is a picture of my dear friend Shelagh and myself, before dance class at the great Alvin Ailey dance studio. We took classes in the famous Horton technique - which involves the "flat-back series", great for balance and also your abs and thighs - lots of squats and lunges - all with your back flat as a board ... but it sure makes you look ridiculous. We would watch the real dancers - the real Alvin Ailey dancers - taking classes and we would watch them do the same flat-back series and think, "God, it looks so elegant when they do it. We look like crouching Hobbits hidden midgets."

Dressing room

This is the dressing room at the Shattered Globe Theatre in Chicago. That place STANK. We all felt that there must be a rat decaying behind the walls or something. But oh, the hilarity in that co-ed dressing room. Hard to even describe, but we all remember it well.

"Even his walk made him different from everyone else."

I'm reading Nureyev: The Life, by Julie Kavanagh right now, and it is superb!! I don't know anything about ballet, and know very little about the ballet world itself - and while the bare bones of Nureyev's story are familiar to me (he was world-famous for my entire life) I didn't know anything else. I was not aware that he was Muslim, for example. His grandfather was a well-respected mullah in their small village. Stalin's persecution of the Tatars, as well as all the various religious groups in the Soviet Republics, made Nureyev's religion against the law - and while he never was a practicing Muslim, he was drawn to churches his whole life. He adored the ritual, the "show" of it. I suppose part of it was because such rituals were banned in his homeland. It is fascinating. Kavanagh was a ballet dancer herself, so one of the things I truly appreciate about this book is her knowledge of dance itself, and what it was - technically and emotionally - that made Nureyev so special. She is able to make someone ignorant, like myself, understand the technicalities - the differences he brought to things like plies, and what the differences are between the different "schools" of ballet - Danish, Russian, French, English - etc. It's also fascinating in terms of the Cold War. The chapter on his defection reads like one of the greatest spy thrillers of all time. You can't believe it really happened that way, but it did.

Additionally, any author who approvingly quotes from Robert Conquest's book to support her themes and to create the appropriate atmosphere is okay in my book. Conquest is one of my all-time idols and I felt a weird proprietary thrill when I saw her quoting from The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine and The Great Terror. Yup. It really WAS that bad. The stories of how all of Nureyev's friends and family were persecuted as a result of his defection are devastating.

I also appreciate Kavanagh's honesty about Nureyev's personality, which was notoriously difficult. One of the impressions I am getting from the book, so far, and it is really moving - is that Nureyev was one of those people who was aware, very early on, that life is short, we do not have a lot of time, and you have to take your chances when you can find them. You also must make your own destiny. You want to dance for Balanchine? Make it happen. He was ruthless, relentless, and he always always always had his eye on the ball. This made him a nightmare, even for other geniuses in the field, who perhaps had more of a balanced response to life ... but Nureyev was not balanced. It was dance, and dance only. This was a man with a destiny. You can sense it. And he could too. Such creatures are rare.

I am loving the book. Highly recommended.

Here's a picture of Nureyev, age 14 or 15, in a ballet studio in Ufa, where he grew up. This was before he moved to Leningrad, and joined the Kirov.

Scanning Tuesday

The big night of my performance in After the Fall - a big night for me, in general. My parents were there, my sister Jean, my brother Brendan, Brendan's friend Justin, my dear friends Brett and Liz, my aunt Regina and uncle Tom ... the production was at Circle in the Square Downtown and it was just one of those magical nights, when you feel proud, happy, successful, and you are surrounded by people who love you and want to celebrate you. It was a night that glittered.

There's one here of my dad looking at me in a proud and tender way. I think my uncle Tom took this picture, and I am very grateful.

Scanning Sunday

Shots from a ridiculously fun show I did about 10 years ago - it was a new play, a spoofy crime noir, with dialogue like Reservoir Dogs, and a mysterious character named "Gertrude" who is never seen, but is omnipresent, frightening. When Gertrude commands, you jump off the bridge. A mix of Pinter and Tarantino - a cast of five women (all awesome funny people) - and their characters all dressed either like floozies or glamour-girls - while I wore an old-fashioned navy blue man's suit, a fedora, a tie, and I also chain-smoked Lucky Strikes. Everyone was afraid of me. I was completely humorless. It might be the most fun I have ever had on stage. It was never explained in the script why my character - a woman - dressed like Humphrey Bogart in a film noir in the 1940s, but I made up a whole story for myself about the whys and wherefores of the whole thing, and loved my costume, almost more than the play itself.

The whole thing was a blast. The script won a couple of nice awards, and that made me happy. It had a lot of wit.

Scanning Friday

A couple of things about the photos below:

1. I was in a play (a couple different versions of it over the years) and it told the story of a couple, already on the rocks obviously - who are up late at night, with the rain pouring down (neat effect on the window)... and over the course of the play, some things come out about the past of my character (or, more specifically, something her grandmother did during the Holocaust) that pretty much destroys the relationship between the couple. It was meaty, juicy stuff - and I loved doing it.

2. I did not, however, love the haircut that I got a day before we opened the first production (photos below). I was so upset about the hair (the uneven badly-done layers, the strange swoop of bang in the front) that I actually cried in the chair at the salon. I wouldn't have cared so much but I knew that the haircut would now live on forever in the photos of the production. And so it has.

3. I love these photos because the photographer took them during a production, first of all - not staged scenes during a special photo call with no audience, which sometimes can have an artificial posed look to them. Here, we are actually in the process of doing the show, and it certainly makes a difference in what the photos look like. Also, the dude was in the damn back row, so as to be unobtrusive to the rest of the audience- but look how close he got in his zoom. Love that. I like that closeup one of us on the couch - because it looks (to me) as though we are having a private conversation, but we're in front of a live audience. That's the way it should be. But kudos to photographer-man for capturing the moment.

The theatre was not huge, by the way, but neither was it small. He managed to be everywhere, nowhere, unobtrusive, and also competent - all at the same time. I want a zoom lens like that.

Scanning Wednesday

This one's for you, Tracey.

Just wanted you to know that the children are praying now.

I think it's time to call Child Protective Services,

Scanning Wednesday

In college, I played Anne Shirley in the giant production of Anne of Green Gables, the musical. It was a huge coup for me, getting the part, I had to work my ass off, and the show ended up going on to compete in the regional Kennedy Center ACTF (American College Theatre Festival) which was one of the most exciting experiences of my life. The next year, I played a chorus girl in Edwin Drood (and I had no lines) and I almost had more fun with that, because the pressure of being the STAR was off - but there was nothing quite like being "Anne".

The great thing about our college was that we cast from "outside" as well - local actors who were adults - and these were not Catherine O'Hara and Fred Ward in Waiting for Guffman - many of them had acted at Trinity, or in the well-respected second-tier theatres - fantastic actors - so we rarely had 21 year old students putting on wrinkle makeup and grey hair to play the old person... we had the real deal. So we the students usually played our own ages, and then the cast was filled with authentic people who were right for their parts. Makes a huge difference in the feel of the show.

The guy who played Matthew - Chris Brayton - was just a fantastic man, in his late 40s, probably - with a long Amish-type beard, and a gorgeous baritone voice. You just melted when you heard it. And Matthew is a hard part - he stutters, stammers, has no social graces, yet if you don't believe that he falls in LOVE with that talkative 12 year old orphan - the entire thing won't work. He nailed it.

At the end of the play, Anne has had some triumph - maybe academic, the details escape me - and she is wearing the dress with the puffed sleeves that Matthew went and got for her, against Marilla's wishes. Anne is all hyped up in her excitement, and Matthew is quietly proud of her - and at the end of the scene, she sits at his feet - and he sings the heartbreaking simple song "Words" - basically how he "can't find the words" to say what is in his heart.

Not a dry eye in the house, peeps. I'm just sayin'. Especially if you are already familiar with Anne and know about what happens to Matthew.

Here's a photo of him singing "Words". I just think it's a beautiful photo - look at his face. It looks like Lincoln or something. And the way the light is hitting it ...

I would be sitting there, all happy and proud of my Anne triumph, and I would hear the sniffles start to come from the audience, and - in one case - great heaving sobs.

It was awesome!

Cry, bitches, cry!!

Scanning Wednesday

I have written ad nauseum about the half-hour Macbeth I was in. I have detailed the journey of the five witches (YES. FIVE. The play was much shorter but there was enough room for FIVE witches) and how we were alllllll about our makeup.

This is my friend Jen. Over the course of the show, she would systematically try to make her hair bigger and bigger, to shield her face.

I'm not sure, I have to check my notes, but this could be the funniest photo ever taken.

Scanning Tuesday

Okay, so I am outrageously proud of this photograph.

I was in a show my freshman year of college - it was a jolly Victorian murder-mystery - and there were a lot of kids in it. Big crowd scenes.

One of the little girls, who wore a red cape in the show, liked to jump rope backstage. I happened to snap this photograph of her coming down the hall backstage - and she looks truly DEMONIC. The lights are off because it is during a show ... so she appears to be coming at me like some demonic angel of death!

I love this picture so much. Especially because it is not posed - she was truly just having an innocent moment of fun during her long boring stretches backstage - but the photo just happened to come out creepy as hell.

Scanning Sunday

In the 4th grade, I played Gretl in a production of Hansel and Gretl.

Here I am, slaving away at my sewing, beside my brother Hansel.

Scanning Sunday

More theatrical exploits! This is me backstage during our wonderful college production of Edwin Drood. I played a music hall floozy. I don't think I've ever had so much fun in a show in my LIFE.

Scanning Sunday

"Consider yourself ... AT HOME ..."

Another example of my earlier acting career. I played Artful Dodger in the school play.

Joe Hurley would be so proud.

Scanning Sunday

A snapshot of me during one of my earliest theatrical productions. I played a grumpy cynical mirror in a local production of Sleeping Beauty. I was absolutely brilliant!!

I was 10.

The Bard's meme

Got this from Ted.

What was your first introduction to William Shakespeare? Was it love or hate?

I honestly can't remember. Since I've always been obsessed with acting, I imagine my introduction was quite early. It wasn't a literary introduction so much - it was a performance introduction. He was a man of the theatre. I read his stuff looking for monologues, because he counted as "classical". I have always loved Shakespeare. I love the challenge of performing it (it can bring me to my knees!), and I also love reading it out loud, to this day. Other people do yoga. And I suppose I should do some yoga too. But to relax, I read the sonnets out loud. When I was about 12 years old, my parents took me to a production of Twelfth Night at the local university (where I ended up going) and I was transported. Malvolio was such a buffoon! When he descended the stairs wearing the yellow stockings with the blue ribbons, thinking that was what was wanted of him, I almost died laughing. What a pompous ass! The production was marvelous - funny, sexy, and clear as a bell to me, the tween in the audience. When you see a production like that, it makes you want to try to say the words yourself, and make them come as much to life as those actors did.

Which Shakespeare plays have you been required to read?

In my career, I would imagine all of them. I took a couple of Shakespeare courses in college, and we read most of the plays - and the rest were covered by my various acting classes. And now, like I mentioned, I just read them for fun. There isn't one of his plays I haven't read, but I honestly can't remember what I read for class, and what was just for pleasure or preparation. I started this whole Shakespeare project on my blog (here's the Two Gentlemen of Verona piece) and ... well, I would love to get back to it. I had a ton of fun putting that piece together. One thing that I have never done (which was the original point of the Shakespeare project) was read the plays in chronological order.

Do you think Shakespeare is important? Do you feel you are a “better” person for having read the bard?

Of course Shakespeare is important. To say he's "not important" is like dismissing our entire heritage. That would be totally retarded. Of course he's important. And to the second question - I already think it's funny that "better" shows up in the question in quotation marks, which already betrays the bias or insecurity of the person who wrote the quiz. To just blatantly say, sans quotes, "Yeah, I think I'm a better person" is far too assholic to be borne, and so the protective quotation marks are there to keep us all safe. No, I don't think I'm a "better" person. But I do feel grateful and blessed that Shakespeare is in my life, and also that I know him well enough to refer back to him in my mind, in moments of stress or conflict, that I can call upon his plays to provide context to the messes of MY life ... I feel really enriched because I know him. But better? Or, oops, should I say "better"? No. Some of the kindest most loving people I know have never read a play of Shakespeare's. Big whoop. Or should that be "big" whoop? Or big "whoop"? But in all seriousness, I love that I can see a random act of kindness from somebody and immediately go to that line in Merchant of Venice in my head ("how far that little candle throws his beams ... so shines a good deed in a naughty world"). Other people have said things about random acts of kindness ... but no one has said it as well as Shakespeare did in that line.

Do you have a favorite Shakespeare play?

I am partial to As You Like It, Hamlet and Much Ado About Nothing.

How do you feel about contemporary takes on Shakespeare? Adaptations of Shakespeare’s works with a more modern feel? (For example, the new line of Manga Shakespeare graphic novels, or novels like Something Rotten, Something Wicked, Enter Three Witches, Ophelia, etc.) Do you have a favorite you’d recommend?

I love adaptations! I am not a purist. Sometimes, in stage productions, a director has a concept - and it just doesn't work all the way through ... but when the concept really hits it can be exhilarating. I LOVED the recent Macbeth I saw with Patrick Stewart. I didn't think there was possibly a way to make those witches frightening - I've seen the play so many times, I have been a witch myself ... It's usually silly. The Macbeth stuff is gripping, but it's hard to make those witches scary. But this production? Those witches were fucking SCARY. Bra-VO. That probably had a lot to do with the Stalinist concept - and the sense that the witches were the agents of the KGB, or something omniscent ... creatures that could be everywhere at once ... those girls were TERRIFYING. When a concept doesn't work, you can feel the play collapse. I liked Baz Luhrman's adaptation of Romeo and Juliet but he did not deal, sufficiently, with the fact that modern-day gangs would use guns, they would not have sword fights. It was tongue-in-cheek, how he handled it - and I know lots of people liked it, but I didn't. You can't be tongue-in-cheek with Romeo and Juliet. Gangs use guns nowadays. They would not have long-drawn-out fights with swords or knives. I'm not saying you can't transplant the play into a modernday era, but I think you need to deal with that pesky issue in a more honest fashion than he did. The MTV inspired filming is also perfect for that young-teens-in-love story ... but I thought his way of dealing with the fact that there are no guns in the play was a copout. Shakespeare's plays must be dealt with on their own terms. If you try to make Taming of the Shrew into a feminist manifesto (as nearly every production now does), it WILL COLLAPSE. The script does not support your academic and politically correct reading of it. So please, directors, I beg of you. Stop trying. The best "adaptation" of Taming of the Shrew that I ever saw was that one episode of Moonlighting with Cybill Shepard and Bruce Willis sparring around the table in Elizabethan costume. (my favorite clip below) Yes, yes, yes, that is exactly how that text needs to be handled. Taming of the Shrew not only can handle the tongue-in-cheek, but it needs it desperately. If you play it straight, the audience of today will not stand for it. So the asides and snarks are just marvelous in that Moonlighting episode ("If you're a man, you gotta love the 16th century") ... and it makes the play (which is, in actuality, already a play within a play - it is already something totally artificial) perfectly realized. It was absolutely brilliant, a highwater mark in television as far as I'm concerned. Your best bet with that material is to go with a 1930s/40s-era screwball comedy vibe - something that predates the modern gender-definitions (which was also the hot-and-heavy intellectual-and-sexual-sparring vibe captured in the Raul Julia / Meryl Streep version in Central Park - I saw a video of that production, which made Streep a star, and it is, to date, one of the most exhilarating things I have ever seen in my LIFE). But seriously: if you try to make that play into "I am woman, hear me roar" - the text will not support you. So STOP TRYING, GODDAMMIT. The play is good enough on its own. Stop imposing. It doesn't work. Also: the parts that DON'T fit into our modern-day concept of gender are the best parts, the most troubling parts ... don't avoid them, or try to iron them out ... PLAY them for all they are worth.

Thank you.

I know no directors are listening to me, because Taming of the Shrew continues to be a pesky problem, and that's a shame. I really feel that any director who wants to put up that play needs only watch, oh, The Big Sleep or Only Angels Have Wings, or Bringing Up Baby - hell, just watch ANY Howard Hawks movie - and you will be halfway there.

The last exchange in The Big Sleep goes like this:

She: And what about me?
He: You? What's wrong with you?
She: Nothing you can't fix.

I can hear the heads explode in women's studies departments around the country, but that's the whole point. If you watch The Big Sleep and feel that Lauren Bacall is in any way oppressed or victimized, you need to have your head examined.

What’s your favorite movie version of a Shakespeare play?

I loooooooooove the Much Ado About Nothing with Emma Thompson and Branagh and all the rest. More than any other production I have seen of that glorious piece of playwriting - that adaptation captured the sheer joy of the thing. It is a delight.

Promoting my peeps: Kerry in "White Christmas"

So White Christmas continues its New York juggernaut, including performing at the NYSE ... and at the moment, my cousin Kerry is pretty much everywhere. Just so you know. It's kind of like those melancholy scenes in Notting Hill when Hugh Grant is trying to forget the lovely Julia and a bus drives by with her face plastered across the side. Not that I'm melancholy. Or trying to forget Kerry.

I'm just saying. She's everywhere. Watch your back.

And Kerry, uhm, not sure if you've noticed but ...

Robert DeNiro appears to have his arm around you.

Just thought you should know. In case you were not aware of it.

Anyone who is coming to New York this holiday season: White Christmas is not a show you want to miss! I saw it last year in Boston and it is a lovely show, beginning to end, funny, smart, heartwarming, and gorgeous, with a heart-stopping number by Kerry in the second act. Jean and I almost held our breath through the whole song, it was just too intense. Chock-full of Irving Berlin songs. What more do you want??

Tickets and special packages here.

Promoting my peeps: Mitchell: "Santaland Diaries"

Sooner or later, I will be able to promote MYSELF but in the meantime:

Chicago-People! Listen up!

My dear friend Mitchell has returned for (what) the 4th year running (maybe even more) to the Theatre Building to perform in David Sedaris' Holidays On Ice - the hilarious stories of Sedaris' experiences as a Macy's Christmas Elf.

Uhm ...

I find this terrifying. Please look at the Santa mug on the table and tell me you are not scared.

When: Fridays and Saturdays : 9:30 p.m. (ends January 3)
Sundays : 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. (ends January 3)
Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays : 7:30 p.m. (ends January 3)
Except December 25 and January 1
Price: $22-$24
Event Phone Number: 773-327-5252
Ticketmaster: 312-902-1500
Box office: 773-327-5252

More information here.

Mitchell, I'm going to kill you for that photo! I wish I could fly out there and see it!

From the cell phone camera: BAM

This is from when I went out to Brooklyn to BAM to see Patrick Stewart in Macbeth. The night was very windy, as I recall - and there were these giant floodlights that made the sides of buildings look eerie, noirish, or futuristic.

White Christmas news

A great compilation of photos from the production is in Playbill.

An interview with the cast of White Christmas in Backstage. I love this one comment from Kerry:

Well, it is a showbiz musical in that it's about entertainers who are doing numbers, but it's not self-mocking in the way that so many shows are of this time. We're not making fun of show business.… It's living in the style, as opposed to commenting on it.

How refreshing! And the show does work on that level: a sweet sincere and un-ironic level. It's gorgeous.

Larry Clarke has "Perfect pitch" at the Roundabout

A revival of David Rabe's Streamers just opened here at the Roundabout, and Larry Clarke (great friend of my brother, and of the entire O'Malley clan in general, not to mention Cashel) plays Sergeant Cokes.

Larry and J.D. Williams

The review is up in the Times. It's a great review. I've been looking forward to seeing it. Larry played the role in a production in Boston at the Huntington that garnered such raves they have brought it to New York.

The review closes with these words:

“Streamers” is not perfectly put together. The play circles its themes for too long and becomes repetitive. And the monologue that closes it, delivered with perfect pitch by Larry Clarke as the gonzo Sergeant Cokes, is overwritten.

But this last, rambling speech contains a truth that sheds a hard light on all that has passed. Only the soused Sergeant Cokes, suffering from heart problems, achieves a measure of wisdom about what matters and what doesn’t, given the unpredictable coming and the unavoidable fact of death.

Hearing Richie sobbing, he interrupts his tale of a fatal freak accident to ask what’s wrong. “He’s queer,” Roger answers. Unexpectedly, this bleary-eyed man’s man doesn’t flinch. “Boy, I tell you it’s a real strange thing the way havin’ these heart arrhythmias give you a lotta funny thoughts about things,” he says. “Two months ago — or maybe even yesterday — I’da called a boy who was a queer a lotta awful names. But now I just wanna be figurin’ things out.”

Good for you, Larry. Can't wait to see it.

Here's the whole review.

Images of Ophelia

Here is a scene from the great Canadian television series Slings and Arrows. The company of actors is rehearsing Hamlet, and it is not going well. The actress playing Ophelia, Claire, is terrible and nobody knows what to do about it. She is a niece of a board member and nobody can get rid of her. She makes a mockery of Ophelia's mad scene, dancing around, letting daisies drop, singing in a fluttery voice, as though she actually believes this is American Idol. Jeffrey, the loose cannon director, fresh out of a mental institution, stops her during rehearsal.

CLAIRE [as Ophelia]
And will not come again
No no he is dead
Go to thy death bed ...

JEFFREY
Stop. For God's sake, stop.

CLAIRE
What?

JEFFREY
Where is this coming from?

CLAIRE
What?

JEFFREY
This staggering about with your mouth open.

CLAIRE
You're being sarcastic again with me. Please don't be sarcastic with me.

JEFFREY
Actually, I'm not. Sorry.

CLAIRE
Ophelia's mad.

JEFFREY
Right.

CLAIRE
I'm playing her madness.

JEFFREY
And how does staggering about with your mouth open suggest madness?

CLAIRE
I'm not mad.

JEFFREY
Right.

CLAIRE
And I never have been, so I have to simulate it.

JEFFREY
Right.

CLAIRE
I'm using sense memory. I'm remembering what it was like being stoned and I'm using that. I'm disoriented, my head is spinning, I think that's what it's probably like when you're insane.

JEFFREY
Right. Well. It's not. Trust me. That's what it's like when you're stoned.

CLAIRE
Oh, forgive me, I mean no disrespect, but I don't have your experience with insanity.

JEFFREY
Right.

CLAIRE
And this is hard, anyway, because I can't take any meaning from the text. Ophelia's just singing nonsense songs.

JEFFREY
Right. Claire. Claire, Claire, Claire with the hair. Ophelia is a child. She has been dominated by powerful men all of her life and suddenly they all disappear. Her brother goes to France, her father is murdered by her boyfriend and he is shipped off to England. She is alone for the first time, grieving and heartbroken and guilty - because, as far as she is concerned, it is all her fault. She ignored her brother's advice and fell in love with Hamlet and now her father is dead - all because of her - and the pain and the loss and the shame and the guilt, all of this, is gnawing away inside this little child's mind and it comes out as 'little songs'. 'And will he not come again? And will he not come again? No. No. He is dead. My father is dead and I killed him.' 'Kay? Now, let's try it again ... without the Vietnam flashback.

And now: the scene itself:

Hamlet, Act IV, scene 5

LAERTES
How now! what noise is that?
Re-enter OPHELIA

O heat, dry up my brains! tears seven times salt,
Burn out the sense and virtue of mine eye!
By heaven, thy madness shall be paid by weight,
Till our scale turn the beam. O rose of May!
Dear maid, kind sister, sweet Ophelia!
O heavens! is't possible, a young maid's wits
Should be as moral as an old man's life?
Nature is fine in love, and where 'tis fine,
It sends some precious instance of itself
After the thing it loves.

OPHELIA
[Sings]
They bore him barefaced on the bier;
Hey non nonny, nonny, hey nonny;
And in his grave rain'd many a tear:--
Fare you well, my dove!

LAERTES
Hadst thou thy wits, and didst persuade revenge,
It could not move thus.

OPHELIA
[Sings]
You must sing a-down a-down,
An you call him a-down-a.
O, how the wheel becomes it! It is the false
steward, that stole his master's daughter.

LAERTES
This nothing's more than matter.

OPHELIA
There's rosemary, that's for remembrance; pray,
love, remember: and there is pansies. that's for thoughts.

LAERTES
A document in madness, thoughts and remembrance fitted.

OPHELIA
There's fennel for you, and columbines: there's rue
for you; and here's some for me: we may call it
herb-grace o' Sundays: O you must wear your rue with
a difference. There's a daisy: I would give you
some violets, but they withered all when my father
died: they say he made a good end,--
Sings
For bonny sweet Robin is all my joy.

LAERTES
Thought and affliction, passion, hell itself,
She turns to favour and to prettiness.

OPHELIA
[Sings]
And will he not come again?
And will he not come again?
No, no, he is dead:
Go to thy death-bed:
He never will come again.
His beard was as white as snow,
All flaxen was his poll:
He is gone, he is gone,
And we cast away moan:
God ha' mercy on his soul!
And of all Christian souls, I pray God. God be wi' ye.
Exit

LAERTES
Do you see this, O God?

I went a little "insane" myself below. Images of Ophelia through the centuries: actresses who have played her, painters who have painted her ... the erotic ones, the violent ones, the pre-Raphaelite ones, the art Deco ones ... I couldn't stop gathering images. Once I decided to do this post (I've been reading a biography of Oscar Wilde, and most of his painter friends - the pre-Raphaelites and decadent aesthetes all did paintings of Ophelia, so I decided to look some of the paintings up - and as I started digging, I found myself getting further and further into the world and moved out of that late 19th century era and into other eras, until finally I was totally and utterly lost (in the best way) - and figured I would do kind of in imitation of this one I did about images of Moby Dick. I very quickly realized that I, to put it mildly, was NOT the first one with this idea. BOOKS have been written about portrayals of Ophelia in paintings and etchings! I also found many old photographs of actresses who have played the role (including one of Ellen Terry - see if you can pick her out!) - not to mention some more modern 20th century ladies.

I love to see all of the different sensibilities of the artists, and how they see it, how they enter in, what it is that calls to them about this particular character, especially her mad scene and her drowning scene.

The Books: "The Story Of My Life" (Ellen Terry)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

The Story of My Life, by Ellen Terry

This is one of my favorite books in my entire collection, just in terms of it as an object. Second only to the first-edition Ulysses that my dad recently gave to me. The book I have is a second or third edition according to the copyright page (I can't quite tell which) - but either way, the book I own actually came out around the time that it was published. Boy, they knew how to make books back then! The pages are thick and shiny, and you can see the indent of the print on the page. There is a frontispiece of Ellen Terry, and a beautiful title page, with ceremonious curly-cue print. It's a big book, her life was long and full of many events - and scattered throughout are glossy old photographs, etchings, and paintings - of Ellen Terry in all of her great roles. I almost feel strange reading such a book because the book itself is a work of art.

But in terms of the book itself: What a book!!! What a life!!

She writes in simple prosey language, but with an emotionality that shines through. Her character sketches of the people she knew (Tennyson, Oscar Wilde, Shaw, Sarah Bernhardt - the woman knew EVERYONE) are riveting. It's a book that takes its time, too. She doesn't hop and skip over events, she delves in ... to rehearsal processes, and long conversations she had about art, and acting, and Shakespeare. She is interested, primarily, in the work, and the whole book is a long paean to the life of an artist. Anyone interested in acting should definitely read this book - but anyone interested in the entire history of that era should also check it out. The upheavals in art and criticism in England at that time, the pre-Raphaelites, the decadents, the aesthetes ... she was part of that group.

Lewis Carroll (or "Dodson" as she calls him affectionately) adored her and her sisters (not surprisingly) and took this photo of Ellen and her sister Kate.

Ellen Terry was born into a theatrical family. She was third generation "show trash". Her parents were famous comic actors, and they had eleven children - most of whom went into show business as well. Gordon Craig, famous scenic designer, was Terry's illegitimate child. She did not believe in "pushing" her children - whatever they wanted they had to fight for on their own ... but obviously her successes and example rubbed off, as many of them went into the theatre as well. As a matter of fact, the legacy continues. John Gielgud was Ellen Terry's great-nephew. Extraordinary. I love Terry's anecdotes about her children coming to see her perform. Funny stuff:

My little daughter was a severe critic! I think if I had listened to her, I should have left the stage in despair. She saw me act for the first time as Mabel Vane, but no compliments were to be extracted from her.

"You did look long and thin in your gray dress."

"When you fainted I thought you was going to fall into the orchestra - you was so long."

Ellen Terry describes her own childhood and there are some really funny moments when my 21st century sensibility is gobsmacked by the childrearing practices of the day. Her parents, naturally, had to work at night at the theatre, so they would lock their children in their hotel room and go off to do the show. Some of the children were infants, others only 5 or 6, and in charge of taking care of the little ones. Nothing bad ever happened. Terry describes kneeling on a window seat, looking out into the night, waiting for her parents to return. She has a vivid memory, as most actors do, and she is able to bring that to life in her writing. It's truly wonderful stuff.

Terry, naturally, went on to the stage, because there was really nothing else to do in such a family. She made her debut as a young child in 1856, playing with the great Charles Kean in The Winter's Tale. She traveled with her parents, performing with them at times - but it became clear very early on that light comedy would not be Ellen Terry's forte. She eventually became known as the premiere actress of Shakespeare in England, and that reputation exists to this day. She performed in stock theatre, regional gigs - she was playing major roles in Shakespeare by the time she was 15. As a young woman, she had huge hits - she played Portia in Merchant of Venice in 1875 and it was such a huge hit that it was what she became known for. She re-created the role of Portia many times in her career. Not only was she a star in the theatre world, but she served as muse for the literary types who hovered around her. London was a much smaller place back then (although I suppose the art world is small wherever you go) - and the circles of art intersected. Writers went to the theatre and came home and wrote sonnets to the performances they had just seen. Oscar Wilde, in 1890, wrote a sonnet after seeing Terry play Portia:

PORTIA
to Ellen Terry
I marvel not Bassanio was so bold
To peril all he had upon the lead,
Or that proud Aragon bent low his head,
Or that Morocco's fiery heart grew cold:
For in that gorgeous dress of beaten gold
Which is more golden than the golden sun,
No woman Veronese looked upon
Was half so fair as thou whom I behold.
Yet fairer when with wisdom as your shield
The sober-suited lawyer's gown you donned
And would not let the laws of Venice yield
Antonio's heart to that accursed Jew-
O Portia! take my heart; it is thy due:
I think I will not quarrel with bond.

He also wrote the following poem to her at the Lyceum Theatre:

As one who poring on a Grecian urn
Scans the fair shapes some Attic hand hath made,
God with slim goddess, goodly man with maid,
And for their beauty's sake is loath to turn
And face the obvious day, must I not yearn
For many a secret moon of indolent bliss,
When is the midmost shrine of Artemis
I see thee standing, antique-limbed, and stern?

And yet- methinks I'd rather see thee play
That serpent of old Nile, whose witchery
Made Emperors drunken,- come, great Egypt, shake
Our stage with all thy mimic pageants! Nay,
I am growing sick of unreal passions, make
The world thine Actium, me thine Anthony!

I'm reading Richard Ellmann's majestic biography of Oscar Wilde right now, and he was great friends with the actors of the day - he was trying to become a playwright, first of all, and needed more than anything for one of the star actresses to decide to do his new works (not an easy task) - and he was also always looking for evidence of artifice - not a bad word, in his lexicon - where the surface, the form, completely captured the inner life of beauty. Actors and actresses were perfect examples of this.

Ellen Terry married three times, and her first marriage was to the painter G.F. Watts. This is another example of the circles of art intersecting. Watts had seen all of the Terrys in their various productions - and did many paintings of all of them, the most famous being the ones of Ellen. You'll recognize them.

That last one depicts her as Ophelia in Hamlet (although she had not yet played that role at the time Watts imagined her into it.)

Her performances drew raves, and she eventually crossed the ocean to tackle the American audience and had great triumphs there as well. In 1878, Terry became part of the great Henry Irving's Lyceum Theatre company. She was basically co-producer with him, as well as his leading lady. They were partners for over 20 years, and played every Shakespeare play, multiple times - in London, and also in traveling shows. They were the dynamic duo of the time, an unbeatable team. She made her name (even more so) with some of the roles she performed with Irving. Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing (one of the best parts for women in the entire Shakespeare canon) was one of her biggest successes. Here she is as Beatrice:

Henry Irving was her dear partner, and friend - and a great inspiration to her. When he died, she found she could not work for a while, because all joy had gone out of the pursuit with him no longer around. She loved him dearly. Listen to this excerpt from her book about him. It makes me want to cry.

Henry Irving is the monument, the great mark set up to show the genius of will. For years he worked to overcome the dragging leg ... he toiled, and he overcame this defect, just as he overcame his difficulty with vowels, and the self-consciousness which in the early stages of his career used to hamper and incommode him.

Only a great actor finds the difficulties of the actor's art infinite. Even up to the last five years of his life, Henry Irving was striving, striving. He never rested on old triumphs, never found a part in which there was no more to do. Once when I was touring with him in America, at the time when he was at the highest point of his fame, I watched him one day in the train - always a delightful occupation, for his face provided many pictures a minute - and being struck by a curious look, half puzzled, half despairing, asked him what he was thinking about.

"I was thinking," he answered slowly, "how strange it is that I should have made the reputation I have as an actor, with nothing to help me - with no equipment. My legs, my voice, everything has been against me. For an actor who can't walk, can't talk, and has no face to speak of, I've done pretty well."

And I, looking at that splendid head, those wonderful hands, the whole strange beauty of him, thought, "Ah, you little know!"

Here she is with Irving:

Her correspondence is rightly famous, and she carried on a lengthy one with George Bernard Shaw. After the partnership with Irving ended, Terry became artistic director of the old Imperial Theatre, and wanted to devote their seasons to the new playwrights, such as Ibsen and Shaw. Controversial stuff. The business was not a success - maybe Terry's first failure (besides her marriages) - but the resulting correspondence with Shaw is enough to make me look at it as a ringing success. I love one of the things he wrote to her about playing Shakespeare:

Play to the lines, through the lines, but never between the lines. There simply isn't time for it.

Brilliant. It reminds me of the great anecdote Anthony Hopkins tells about acting in Shakespeare with Laurence Olivier very early on in his career. Hopkins, a melancholic Welshman (is there any other kind) gravitated towards the American style of acting, the "Method" acting of Brando and Clift - and tried to bring all of that to his role in Shakespeare. He was trying to show the subtext, and make it real for himself, etc. etc. not realizing that Shakespeare has already done all of that work and unlike other playwrights - it is all in the language. Olivier coached Hopkins and told him, "The thought is in the line. The only time you pause is at the end of the line where there is punctuation - because that means the thought is over." Don't add more thinking to it. Because the thought is in the line. That is one of the greatest challenges for any actor playing Shakespeare and you can see actors (mainly American) mucking that up time and time again. But I love Shaw's dictum: :"There simply isn't time for it."

Here is Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth:

Stunningly beautiful, isn't it?

Shaw said about Terry: "Every famous man of the 19th century- provided he were a playgoer- has been in love with Ellen Terry."

She was a great and beloved star. It's interesting - there was a time when Terry had considered giving up the stage, and I think she did stop working for about 1 or 2 years. Her parents were devastated. Hysterical. Other parents are devastated when their children go INTO show business, hers were devastated when she stopped.

From all I have read about her (and she shows up in any biography of that time - her life intersected with so many others) - she comes across as a lovely warm funny and quite formidable person. She was highly unconventional, modern in her attitudes - and yet also part of this ancient trashy enterprise that was the theatre. She was not a glorified prostitute as many of the leading ladies at that time were, with minimal talent, but great beauty to inspire men to lust and dirty thoughts in the midst of the Victorian properness. Ellen Terry was the real deal - an actress and entrepreneur who also had a canny business sense and, along with Henry Irving, helped bring well-produced and insightful productions all across England, ireland and America. She took risks. She had a low tolerance for being bored. And instead of whining about being bored, she would change her life at the first sign of it. When it was time to move on from something (be it an acting role or a marriage), she moved on. She had a "wild nature" (said one of her friends), and she was able to use that wild-ness beautifully in her 50-plus-year career. She did not self-destruct. She did not descend into infamy as so many other actresses of the day did (because theatre was seen as a barely respectable thing to do ... but Terry, being brought up in it, was saved from that attitude. To her, being an actress was the only logical thing she COULD do.)

Her reputation as a great actress remains intact, although no one alive today has seen her perform. She lived long enough to do a couple of silent films, but in general, her retirement was quiet. She lived to the age of 81. She bought a farm in Kent. She loved dogs. She slowly went blind, and eventually succumbed to dementia.

But the love of the populace remained - she was not forgotten. Her fame was still near enough at that point that she was remembered. Her social life was always intense, she was not a recluse or a serious dramatic woman. She was "vivacious" (the word most often used to describe her) and had what can only be described as eternal curiosity about her fellow man and the planet on which she lived. She wasn't "over" anything. She was not a cynic. She did not succumb to sophistication or bored European jaded-ness. There was always something in her that was like a little child, that little child kneeling on the window seat, looking out into the night, and wondering at the beauty of it all.

She must have been something else onstage. How I would love to have seen her.

The book is so PACKED with great anecdotes that I really struggled with which excerpt to pick. I thought I'd go with one where she talks about Irving playing Hamlet. It really gives a feel for the book.

She, of course, had heard of Henry Irving - and even seen him perform - but Hamlet was by far the most ambitious thing he had attempted. Just listen to how she analyzes it, and how she takes us through how great his Hamlet was, step by step. I especially love her observation about how Irving played Hamlet's famous speech to the players. Brilliant!!

She's a wonderful writer.

I had so much fun tracking down all the images for this post.

EXCERPT FROM The Story of My Life, by Ellen Terry

Hamlet was by far the greatest part that he had ever played, or was ever to play. If he had failed - but why pursue it? He could not fail.

Yet the success on the first night at the Lyceum in 1874 was not of that electric, almost hysterical splendor which has greeted the momentous achievements of some actors. The first two acts were received with indifference. The people could not see how packed they were with superb acting - perhaps because the new Hamlet was so simple, so quiet, so free from the exhibition of actors' artifices which used to bring down the house in "Louis XI" and "Richelieu," but which were really the easy things in acting, and in "Richelieu" (in my opinion) not especially well done. In "Hamlet" Henry Irving did not go to the audience. He made them come to him. Slowly but surely attention gave place to admiration, admiration to enthusiasm, enthusiasm to triumphant acclaim.

I have seen many Hamlets - Fechter, Charles Kean, Rossi, Frederick Haas, Forbes Robertson, and my own son, Gordon Craig, among them, but they were not in the same hemisphere! I refuse to go and see Hamlets now. I want to keep Henry Irving's fresh and clear in my memory until I die.

When he engaged me to play Ophelia in 1878 he asked me to go down to Birmingham to see the play, and that night I saw what I shall always consider the perfection of acting. It had been wonderful in 1874. In 1878 it was far more wonderful. It has been said that when he had the "advantage" of my Ophelia, his Hamlet "improved." I don't think so. He was always quite independent of the people with whom he acted.

The Birmingham night he knew I was there. He played - I say it without vanity - for me. We players are not above that weakness, if it be a weakness. If ever anything inspires us to do our best it is the present in the audience of some fellow-artist who must in the nature of things know more completely than any one what we intend, what we do, what we feel. The response from such a member of the audience flies across the footlights to us like a flame. I felt it once when I played Olivia before Eleonora Duse. I felt that she felt it once when she played Marguerite Gauthier for me.

When I read "Hamlet" now, everything that Henry did in it seems to me more absolutely right, even than I thought at the time. I would give much to be able to record it all in detail - but it may be my fault - writing is not the medium in which this can be done. Sometimes I can remember every tone of Henry's voice, every emphasis, every shade of meaning that he saw in the lines and made manifest to the discerning. Yes, I think I could give some pale idea of what his Hamlet was if I read the play.

"Words! words! words!" What is it to say, for instance, that the cardinal qualities of his Prince of Denmark were strength, delicacy, distinction? There was never a touch of commonness. Whatever he did or said, blood and breeding pervaded him.

His "make-up" was very pale, and this made his face beautiful when one was close to him, but at a distance it gave him a haggard look. Some said he looked twice his age.

He kept three things going at the same time - the antic madness, the sanity, the sense of the theatre. The last was to all that he imagined and thought, what charity is said by St. Paul to be to all other virtues.

He was never cross or moody - only melancholy. His melancholy was as simple as it was profound. It was touching, too, rather than defiant. You never thought that he was wantonly sad and enjoying his own misery.

He neglected no coup de theatre to assist him, but who notices the servants when the host is present?

For instance, his first entrance as Hamlet was, what we call in the theatre, very much "worked up". He was always a tremendous believer in processions, and rightly. It is through such means that Royalty keeps its hold on the feeling of the public, and makes its mark as a Figure and a Symbol. Henry Irving understood this. Therefore, to music so apt that it was not remarkable in itself, but merely a contribution to the general excited anticipation, the Prince of Denmark came on to the stage. I understood later on at the Lyceum what days of patient work had gone to the making of that procession.

At its tail, when the excitement was at fever heat, came the solitary figure of Hamlet, looking extraordinarily tall and thin. The lights were turned down - another stage trick - to help the effect that the figure was spirit rather than man.

He was weary - his cloak trailed on the ground. He did not wear the miniature of his father obtrusively round his neck! His attitude was one which I have seen in a common little illumination to the "Reciter", compiled by Dr. Pinches (Henry Irving's old schoolmaster). Yet how right to have taken it, to have been indifferent to its humble origin! Nothing could have been better when translated into life by Irving's genius.

The hair looked blue-black, like the plumage of a crow, the eyes burning - two fires veiled as yet by melancholy. But the appearance of the man was not single, straight or obvious, as it is when I describe it - any more than his passions throughout the play were. I only remember one moment when his intensity concentrated itself in a straight-forward, unmistakable emotion, without side-current or back-water. It was when he said:

"The play's the thing
With which to catch the conscience of the King."

and, as the curtain came down, was seen to be writing madly on his tablets against one of the pillars.

"Oh, God, that I were a writer!" I paraphrase Beatrice with all my heart. Surely a writer could not string words together about Henry Irving's Hamlet and say nothing, nothing.

"We must start this play a living thing," he used to say at rehearsals, and he worked until the skin grew tight over his face, until he became livid with fatigue, yet still beautiful, to get the opening lines said with individuality, suggestiveness, speed, and power.

Bernardo: Who's there?
Francisco: Nay, answer me; stand, and unfold yourself.
Bernardo: Long live the King!
Francisco: Bernardo?
Bernardo: He.
Francisco: You come most carefully upon your hour.
Bernardo: 'Tis now struck twelve; get thee to bed, Francisco.
Francisco: For this relief much thanks; 'tis bitter cold ...

And all that he tried to make others do with these lines, he himself did with every line of his own part. Every word lived.

Some said: "Oh, Irving only makes Hamlet a love poem!" They said that, I suppose, because in the Nunnery scene with Ophelia he was the lover above the prince and the poet. With what passionate longing his hands hovered over Ophelia at her words:

"Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind."

His advice to the players was not advice. He did not speak it as an actor. Nearly all Hamlets in that scene give away the fact that they are actors, and not dilettanti of royal blood. Irving defined the way he would have the players speak as an order, an instruction of the merit of which he was regally sure. There was no patronizing flavor in his acting here, not a touch of "I'll teach you how to do it." He was swift - swift and simple - pausing for the right word now and again, as in the phrase "to hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature." His slight pause and eloquent gesture was the all-embracing word "Nature" came in answer to his call, were exactly repeated unconsciously years later by the Queen of Roumania (Carmen Sylva). She was telling us the story of a play that she had written. The words rushed out swiftly, but occasionally she would wait for the one that expressed her meaning most comprehensively and exactly, and as she got it, up went her hand in triumph over her head. "Like yours in 'Hamlet'," I told Henry at the time.

I knew this Hamlet both ways - as an actress from the stage, and as an actress putting away her profession for the time as one of the audience - and both ways it was superb to me. Tennyson, I know, said it was not a perfect Hamlet. I wonder, then, where he hoped to find perfection!

James Spedding, considered a fine critic in his day, said Irving was "simply hideous ... a monster!" Another of these fine critics declared that he never could believe in Irving's Hamlet after having seen "part (sic) of his performance as a murderer in a commonplace melodrama." Would one believe that any one could seriously write so stupidly as that about the earnest effort of an earnest actor, if it were not quoted by some of Irving's biographers?

Some criticism, however severe, however misguided, remains within the bounds of justice, but what is one to think of the QuarterlyReviewer who declared that "the enormous pains taken with the scenery had ensured Mr. Irving's success"? The scenery was of the simplest - no money was spent on it even when the play was revived at the Lyceum after Colonel Bateman's death. Henry's dress probably cost him about £2!

My Ophelia dress was made of material which could not have cost more than 2s. a yard, and not many yards were wanted, as I was at the time thin to vanishing point! I have the dress still, and, looking at it the other day, I wondered what leading lady now would consent to wear it.

At all its best points, Henry's Hamlet was susceptible of absurd imitation. Think of this well, young actors, who are content to play for safety, to avoid ridicule at all costs, to be "natural" - oh, word most vilely abused! What sort of naturalness is this of Hamlet's?

"O, villain, villain, smiling damned villain!"

Henry Irving's imitators could make people burst with laughter when they took off his delivery of that line. And, indeed, the original, too, was almost provocative of laughter - rightly so, for such emotional indignation has its funny as well as its terrible aspect. The mad, and all are mad who have, as Socrates put it, "a divine release from the common ways of men," may speak ludicrously, even when they speak the truth.

All great acting has a certain strain of extravagance which the imitators catch hold of and give us the eccentric body without the sublime soul.

From the first I saw this extravagance, this bizarrerie in Henry Irving's acting. I noticed, too, its infinite variety. In "Hamlet", during the first scene with Horatio, Marcellus and Bernardo, he began by being very absent and distant. He exchanged greetings sweetly and gently, but he was the visionary. His feet might be on the ground, but his head was towards the stars "where the eternal are." Years later he said to me of another actor in "Hamlet": "He would never have seen the ghost." Well, there was never any doubt that Henry Irving saw it, and it was through his acting in the Horatio scene that he made us sure.

As a bad actor befogs Shakespeare's meaning, so a good actor illuminates it. Bit by bit as Horatio talks, Hamlet comes back into the world. He is still out of it when he says:

"My father! Methinks I see my father."

But the dreamer becomes attentive, sharp as a needle, with the words:

"For God's love, let me hear."

Irving's face, as he listened to Horatio's tale, blazed with intelligence. He cross-examined the men with keenness and authority. His mental deductions as they answered were clearly shown. With "I would I had been there" the cloud of unseen witnesses with whom he had before been communing again descended. For a second or two Horatio and the rest of the world did not exist for him ... So onward to the crowning couplet:

" ... foul deeds will rise,
Though all the earth o'erwhelm them to men's eyes."

After having been very quiet and rapid, very discreet, he pronounced these lines in a loud, clear voice, dragged out every syllable as if there never could be an end to his horror and his rage.

I had been familiar with the scene from my childhood - I had studied it; I had heard from my father how Macready acted in it, and now I found that I had a fool of an idea of it! That's the advantage of study, good people, who go to see Shakespeare acted. It makes you know sometimes what is being done, and what you never dreamed would be done when you read the scene at home.

At one of the audiences I was much struck by Irving's treatment of interjections and exclamations in "Hamlet". He breathed the line: "O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt," as one long yearning, and "O horrible, O horrible! most horrible!" as a groan. When we first went to America his address at Harvard touched on this very subject, and it may be interesting to know that what he preached in 1885 he had practiced as far back as 1874.

"On the question of pronunciation, there is something to be said which I think in ordinary teaching is not sufficiently considered. Pronunciation should be simple and unaffected, but not always fashioned rigidly according to a dictionary standard. No less an authority than Cicero points out that pronunciation must vary widely according to the emotions to be expressed; that it may be broken or cut with a varying or direct sound, and that it serves for the actor the purpose of color to the painter, from which to draw variations. Take the simplest illustration. The formal pronunciation of A-h is 'Ah', of O-h, 'Oh', but you cannot stereotype the expression of emotion like this. These exclamations are words of one syllable, but the speaker who is sounding the gamut of human feeling will not be restricted in his pronunciation by dictionary rule. It is said of Edmund Kean that he never spoke such ejaculations, but always sighed or groaned them. Fancy an actor saying:

'My Desdemona! Oh! oh! oh!'

"Words are intended to express feelings and ideas, not to bind them in rigid fetters; the accents of pleasure are different from the accents of pain, and if a feeling is more accurately expressed as in nature by a variation of sound not provided by the laws of pronunciation, then such imperfect laws must be disregarded and nature vindicated!"

It was of the address in which these words occur that a Boston hearer said that it was felt by every one present that "the truth had been spoken by a man who had learned it through living and not through theory."

I leave his Hamlet for the present with one further reflection. It was in courtesy and humor that it differed most widely from other Hamlets that I have seen and heard of. This Hamlet was never rude to Polonius. His attitude towards the old Bromide (I thank you, Mr. Gelett Burgess, for teaching me that word which so lightly and charmingly describes the child of darkness and of platitude) was that of one who should say: "You dear, funny old simpleton, whom I have had to bear with all my life - how terribly in the way you seem now." With what slightly amused and cynical playfulness this Hamlet said; "I had thought some of Nature's journeymen had made men and not made them well; they imitated humanity so abominably.

Hamlet was by far his greatest triumph, although he would not admit it himself - preferring in some moods to declare that his finest work was done in Macbeth, which was almost universally disliked.

The Books: "Timebends: A Life" (Arthur Miller)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Timebends: A Life, by Arthur Miller

This is truly bizarre. Today happens to be Arthur Miller's birthday. His is the next book on the shelf. So happy birthday, Arthur Miller.

When Timebends came out, in 1987, I remember there being mixed reviews. I think mainly folks were expecting salacious revelations about Marilyn Monroe - and the book decidedly does not deliver on that score. But why does it not deliver? Because Marilyn Monroe was not some unearthly sexual goddess to Arthur Miller. She was a real girl, sweet, troubled, innocent, lovely - and she was his wife. He does not take us into their bedroom, and he does not "explain" her. She can't be "explained" by one person alone, and it is not up to Miller to interpret her for us. The Marilyn sections of the book are very lovely - I loved the picture of her that emerged ... but it's certainly not the whole book, it is not even the context in which the entire book is placed. It is an event, like any other ... something that made up a good deal of his emotional life for some time, as well as his creative life (as he tried to write material that would show the world she was a "real actress"). (Once upon a time I put together a giant post called "The Making of The Misfits" - filled with photos and book excerpts about that troubled film-shoot. The whole thing really had began as Miller's desire to write something he felt Marilyn could do, something worthy of her.) But in general, the Marilyn in the book is revealed as a real person, maybe more beautiful than most, certainly more famous ... but a woman with anxieties, quirks, and a lovely sense of humor and intellect that he found captivating.

Additionally, there is a lot of politics in the book (which is also not surprising) - and in many ways it gives a grand sweeping look at the journey of the American Left from the 30s to the 50s ... well, and yes, into the 60s - but by then many of the definitions had changed. Miller was from New York, and had grown up going to see productions at the Group Theatre, that bastion of the American Left, and had been gobsmacked by Clifford Odets' fiery language, and the vision that theatre could be somehow relevant and revolutionary. His compassion for the downtrodden, the persecuted, the forgotten masses could be seen as radical (and it certainly was at the time) - yet at the same time he had great contempt for the Soviet system of oppression and censorship, and worked hard through his life to support the persecuted writers in the Soviet bloc. And while he had seen the downside to American capitalism in his own family misfortunes, he was also amazed during the groundbreaking production of Salesman in Beijing in 1983 - which took China by storm. I actually remember some of the news reports about that production trickling down to me in junior high. I had read Salesman by then, so I knew of it ... but that production can be seen, in certain lights, as a watershed moment in China's cultural history. People went NUTS for Salesman in China. They had gone NUTS for Salesman in America in the 1940s and there, 50 years later, in a Communist country, they went nuts again. Even more nuts. Miller was amazed by the response. The curtain would go down at the end of the production, and Chinese men in suits would be hugging one another in the aisles, weeping. Amazing. It had spoken to them, to their experience, their hopes and dreams - another culture, another political system - none of that mattered. The message of Salesman, of the inherent dignity of man, despite his financial success, had a deep deep resonance for the Chinese. Salesman traveled, in other words. John Updike shares an interesting anecdote about Miller, which, I think, might surprise some people who just brush Miller off as a radical:

I went to the Soviet Union [in 1964] for a month as part of a cultural exchange program ... I came way from that month ... with a hardened antipathy to communism ...

There was something bullying egocentric about my admirable Soviet friends, a preoccupation with their own tortured situations that shut out all light from beyond. They were like residents of a planet so heavy that even their gazes were sucked back into its dark center. Arthur Miller, no reactionary, said it best when, a few years later, he and I and some other Americans riding the cultural-exchange bandwagon had entertained, in New York or Connecticut, several visiting Soviet colleagues. The encounter was handsomely catered, the dialogue loud and lively, the will toward friendship was earnest and in its way intoxicating, but upon our ebullient guests' departure Miller looked at me and said sighingly, "Jesus, don't they make you glad you're an American?"

Miller's family lost everything in the stock market crash, and so their situation was quite reduced. I believe they moved to Brooklyn, a huge downward step, off the island, so to speak, and Miller was a young child, but very much remembers the stress and fear of that time. Much of his memory would be put to use later on when writing Death of a Salesman - the tenement buildings, the change of Brooklyn from a more rural area to something crowded and fetid ... Not to mention the fact that he did have an uncle who was a salesman, a brash funny and vaguely pathetic man - an early prototype for Willy Loman.

I did not go into Timebends with any specific expectation like some people did. I didn't think, "He had BETTER talk about Marilyn Monroe for 300 pages straight!" Or "He had BETTER dish on how he felt about Kazan and the HUAC - if he doesn't? I will HATE the book" ... or etc. etc. I found some of it didactic and rather humorless, and much of his political sections were boring and preachy ... but you move through them and then get on to the business of theatre. To Miller, it all was one. You can tell that in his plays as well. His plays always have a "message", some social, political, or cultural message ... and it is that reason that they can sometimes seem didactic in a way that Tennessee Williams' plays never do. It's interesting: they were contemporaries, the two giant stars of the American stage, the two men (with O'Neill and Odets in the generations before paving the way) who brought an American voice and an American perspective where before there had been none. Much of the Broadway fare in the early years of the 20th century, up into the 1920s, was written by Americans, sure, but they took as their inspiration the works of Noel Coward, or Shaw, or other Europeans. It was not a truly American art-form. Vaudeville was, but not the mainstage of the Broadway theatres. That began to change with O'Neill - and Odets ... two wildly different playwrights with different perspectives ... but they cleared the space for what would happen in the 40s, and 50s - when out came playwrights like Miller, and Williams, and Inge, and Saroyan. These playwrights are American to the core. It is a voice I am talking about, a sensibility - it is its own thing, and these guys helped put American on the map, at least in a theatrical sense.

Miller's book details his own part of that historic moment in our cultural life.

It has since come to light that Miller and his last wife - Inge Morath, a photographer - had a child who had Down's Syndrome, and Miller was so horrified and embarrassed that he put the child in an institution and never saw him again. He never even acknowledged the child's existence. For decades. Inge Morath would go to visit her son, but it was a horrible situation. The child is now a man, and many of Miller's old friends have reached out to him - but Miller himself never did. And there's not a word of this in Timebends, which is truly chilling. The daughter he had with Morath - Rebecca - is now a director, actress, writer - and wife of Daniel Day-Lewis - and Miller showers her with praise and love in Timebends. The story about the Down's Syndrome child came out this past year - so reading Timebends in the 80s, you'd never ever know that this giant THING was missing. Miller had some major demons going on, obviously, and I do wonder what price he paid (psychologically, I mean) in keeping this huge thing a secret. His last play was Finishing the Picture (2004) and it was (obviously, if you know Miller's life) the story of the making of The Misfits, with its star actress going deeper and deeper into madness and incomprehensibility, as the hard-drinking macho cast and crew wait for her to appear, so that they can "finish the picture". Miller was 90 years old, and there he is ... going back in time to a moment when maybe he thought he could "save" someone ... going over it and over it (as he had done before, in his play After the Fall) ... maybe in doing so he thought he could change his own past. He died before the revelation came out about his abandoned son, so naturally there has been MUCH chatter on the airwaves about it. For my part, it makes me look at his work in a different way: the evocations of fathers and sons, so common in his work ... the passing on of the torch, so important in all matters of family and mortality ... what do we pass on? What have we, as men, as fathers, made of ourselves? What can I give to my son? What do I have to give? There is a whole new way to look at these existential questions now. It's awful, but I wonder if a lot of his torment and didacticism came from the fact that he had done this awful thing and he felt the need to hide it.

The excerpt I share below is giant, so sit back, and get ready. It is the story of the making of Death of a Salesman, and it is not only my favorite section in the book - but perhaps my favorite section of ANY book. He's an elegant writer, not too emotional, but his memories of that time in his life are intense and you really get the sense that he was pushing himself THROUGH something, he was dreaming himself into a space where he could find his voice and share it. Not an easy thing to do. He had already had one success - All My Sons ... but with Salesman he went deeper. It was profound for him. I will not re-cap his thoughts here - they are all below.

But the elements of this story resonate for me, and have for years, ever since I first read it:

-- his experience of seeing Streetcar Named Desire for the first time, and what it said to him, what it did to him ... It basically gave him permission. To go big, to go huge, to be relevant and important ... not to imitate Williams, that could not be done, they were different men ... but to stop being microscopic and go into the macro-level. (His giving-of-the-props to Williams here is incredibly generous. Because he could very easily have taken the credit himself for what happened to American theatre in the 1940s ... Salesman was as huge a phenomenon as Streetcar ... but he doesn't. He hands that to Williams.)

-- his feeling that he needed to build a shack with his own hands to write the play (he didn't know why he had to, but he knew he did ...) Here he is in front of the shack, many years later.

-- the fact that he would finish work on the play after a long day, and find that he had been crying all day ... without even realizing it

-- Kazan signing on to direct - a huge deal. (And Kazan's response to reading the play for the first time ... gulp ...)

-- finding their Willy Loman. The story of Lee J. Cobb - who was really too young for the part, he was the contemporary of Arthur Kennedy who played his own son ... but how Cobb basically insisted that the part was his and his alone.

-- then - the UNBELIEVABLE story of the moment in rehearsal when Lee J. Cobb "got it". I have goosebumps right now just thinking about it.

-- and then: opening night ... and what happened in that theatre that night.

It is a magnificent story, from beginning to end, and one I treasure. It feels, in a weird way, like it belongs to me. In the same way that I feel that the signing of the Declaration of Independence belongs to me, or that Walt Whitman belongs to me, or that the first walk on the moon belongs to me. These are stories that make up our culture, our history ... and they are part of me, mine.

At the end of Death of a Salesman, Willy's wife Linda says what are probably the most famous lines in the entire play:

Don't say he's a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.

And so it has.

EXCERPT FROM Timebends: A Life, by Arthur Miller

Already in the sixties I was surprised by the common tendency to think of the late forties and early fifties as some sort of renaissance in the New York theatre. If that was so, I was unaware of it. I thought the theatre a temple being rotted out with commercialized junk, where mostly by accident an occasional good piece of work appeared, usually under some disguise of popular cultural coloration such as a movie star in a leading role.

That said, it now needs correction; it was also a time when the audience was basically the same for musicals and light entertainment as for the ambitious stuff and had not yet been atomized, as it would be by the mid-fifties, into young and old, hip and square, or even political left and middle and right. So the playwright's challenge was to please not a small sensitized supporting clique but an audience representing, more or less, all of America. With ticket prices within reason, this meant that an author was writing for his peers, and if such was really not the case statistically, it was sufficiently so to support an illusion that had a basis in reality. After all, it was not thought particularly daring to present T.S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party on Broadway, or Laurence Olivier in a Greek tragedy, or Giraudoux's The Madwomen of Chaillot, or any number of other ambitious works. To be sure, such shows had much shorter lives than the trash, but that was to be expected, for most people would much rather laugh than cry, rather watch an actor being hit on the head by a pig bladder than by some painful truth.

The net of it all was that serious writers could reasonably assume they were addressing the whole American mix, and so their plays, whether successfully or not, stretched toward a wholeness of experience that would not require specialists or a coterie to be understood. As alienated a spirit as he was, O'Neill tried for the big audience, and Clifford Odets no less so, along with every other writer longing to prophesy to America, from Whitman and Melville to Dreiser and Hemingway and so on.

For Europe's playwrights the situation was profoundly different, with society already being split beyond healing between the working class and its allies, who were committed to a socialist destiny, and the bourgeois mentality that sought an art of reassurance and the pleasures of forgetting what was happening in the streets. (The first American plays I saw left me wondering where the characters came from. The people I knew were fanatics about surviving, but onstage everyone seemed to have mysteriously guaranteed incomes, and though every play had to have something about "love", there was nothing about sex, which was all there was in Brooklyn, at least that I ever noticed.) An American avant-garde, therefore, if only because the domination of society by the middle class was profoundly unchallenged, could not simply steal from Brecht or even Shaw and expect its voice to reach beyond the small alienated minority that had arrived in their seats already converted to its aims. That was not the way to change the world.

For a play to do that it had to reach precisely those who accepted everything as it was; great drama is great questions or it is nothing but technique. I could not imagine a theatre worth my time that did not want to change the world, any more than a creative scientist could wish to prove the validity of everything that is already known. I knew only one other writer with the same approach, even if he surrounded his work with a far different aura. This was Tennessee Williams.

If only because he came up at a time when homosexuality was absolutely unacknowledgeable in a public figure, Williams had to belong to a minority culture and understood in his bones what a brutal menace the majority could be if aroused against him. I lived with much the same sense of alienation, albeit for other reasons. Certainly I never regarded him as the sealed-off aesthete he was thought to be. There is a radical politics of the soul as well as of the ballot box and the picket line. If he was not an activist, it was not for lack of a desire for justice, nor did he consider a theatre profoundly involved in society and politics, the venerable tradition reaching back to the Greeks, somehow unaesthetic or beyond his interest.

The real theatre - as opposed to the sequestered academic one - is always straining at the inbuilt inertia of a society that always wants to deny change and the pain it necessarily involves. But it is in this effort that the musculature of important work is developed. In a different age, perhaps even only fifteen years later, in the sixties, Williams might have had a more comfortably alienated audience to deal with, one that would have relieved the pressure upon him to extend himself beyond a supportive cult environment, and I think this might well have narrowed the breadth of his work and its intensity. In short, there was no renaissance in the American forties, but there was a certain balance within the audience - a balance, one might call it, between the alienated and the conformists - that gave sufficient support to the naked cry of the heart and, simultaneously, enough resistance to force it into a rhetoric that at one stroke could be broadly understandable and yet faithful to the pain that had pressed the author to speak.

When Kazan invited me up to New Haven to see the new Williams play, A Streetcar Named Desire - it seemed to me a rather too garishly attention-getting title - I was already feeling a certain amount of envious curiosity since I was still unable to commit myself to the salesman play, around which I kept suspiciously circling and sniffing. But at the same time I hoped that Streetcar would be good; it was not that I was high-minded but simply that I shared the common assumption of the time that the greater the number of exciting plays there were on Broadway the better for each of us., At least in our minds there was still something approximating a theatre culture to which we more or less pridefully belonged, and the higher its achievement the greater the glory we all shared. The playwright was then king of the hill, not the star actor or director, and certainly not the producer or theatre owner, as would later by the case. (At a recently televised Tony Awards ceremony, recognizing achievement in the theatre, not a single playwright was presented to the public, while two lawyers who operated a chain of theatres were showered with the gratitude of all. It reminded me of Caligula making his horse a senator.)

Streetcar - especially when it was still so fresh and the actors almost as amazed as the audience at the vitality of this theatrical experience - opened one specific door for me. Not the story or the characters or the direction, but the words and their liberation, the joy of the writer in writing them, the radiant eloquence of its composition, moved me more than all its pathos. It formed a bridge to Europe for me, to Jouvet's performance in Ondine, to the whole tradition of unashamed word-joy that, with the exception of Odets, we had either turned our backs on or, as with Maxwell Anderson, only used archaically, as though eloquence could only be justified by cloaking it in sentimental romanticism.

Returning to New York, I felt speeded up, in motion now. With Streetcar, Tennessee had printed a license to speak at full throat, and it helped strengthen me as I turned to Willy Loman, a salesman always full of words, and better yet, a man who could never cease trying, like Adam, to name himself and the world's wonders. I had known all along that this play could not be encompassed by conventional realism, and for one integral reason: in Willy the past was as alive as what was happening at the moment, sometimes even crashing in to completely overwhelm his mind. I wanted precisely the same fluidity in the form, and now it was clear to me that this must be primarily verbal. The language would of course have to be recognizably his to begin with, but it seemed possible now to infiltrate it with a kind of superconsciousness. The play, after all, involved the attempts of his son and his wife and Willy himself to understand what was killing him. And to understand meant to lift the experience into emergency speech of an unashamedly open kind rather than to proceed by the crabbed dramatic hints and pretexts of the "natural". If the structure had to mirror the psychology as directly as could be done, it was still a psychology hammered into its strange shape by society, the business life Willy had lived and believed in. The play could reflect what I had always sensed as the unbroken tissue that was man and society, a single unit rather than two.

By April of 1948 I felt I could find such a form, but it would have to be done, I thought, in a single sitting, in a night or a day, I did not know why. I stopped making my notes in our Grace Court house in Brooklyn Heights and drove up alone one morning to the country house we had bought the previous year. We had spent one summer there in that old farmhouse, which had been modernized by its former owner, a greeting card manufacturer named Philip Jaffe, who as a sideline published a thin magazine for China specialists called Amerasia. Mary worked as one of his secretaries and so had the first news that he wanted to sell the place. In a year or two he would be on trial for publishing without authorization State Department reports from John Stewart Service, among a number of other China experts who recognized a Mao victory as inevitable and warned of the futility of America continuing to back her favorite, Chiang Kai-shek. Amerasia had been a vanity publication, in part born of Jaffe's desire for a place in history, but it nevertheless braved the mounting fury of the China lobby against any opinion questioning the virtues of the Chiang forces. At his trial, the government produced texts of conversations that Jaffe claimed could only have been picked up by long-range microphone as he and his friends walked the isolated backcountry roads near this house. Service was one of many who were purged from the State Department, leaving it blinded to Chinese reality but ideologically pure.

But all that was far from my mind this day; what I was looking for on my land was a spot for a little shack I wanted to build, where I could block out the world and bring into focus what was still stuck in the corners of my eyes. I found a knoll in the nearby woods and returned to the city, where instead of working on the play I drew plans for the framing, of which I really had very vague knowledge and no experience. A pair of carpenters could have put up this ten-by-twelve-foot cabin in two days at most, but for reasons I still do not understand it had to be my own hands that gave it form, on this ground, with a floor that I had made, upon which to sit to begin the risky expedition into myself. In reality, all I had was the first two lines and a death - "Will!" and "It's all right. I came back." Further than that I dared not, would not, venture until I could sit in the completed studio, four walls, two windows, a floor, a roof, and a door.

"It's all right. I came back" rolled over and over in my head as I tried to figure out how to join the roof rafters in air unaided, until I finally put them together on the ground and swung them into position all nailed together. When I closed in the roof it was a miracle, as though I had mastered the rain and cooled the sun. And all the while afraid I would never be able to penetrate past those first two lines. I started writing one morning - the tiny studio was still unpainted and smelled of raw wood and sawdust, and the bags of nails were still stashed in a corner with my tools. The sun of April had found my windows to pour through, and the apple buds were moving on the wild trees, showing their first pale blue petals. I wrote all day until dark, and then I had dinner and went back and wrote until some hour in the darkness between midnight and four. I had skipped a few areas that I knew would give me no trouble in the writing and gone for the parts that had to be muscled into position. By the next morning I had done the first half, the first act of two. When I lay down to sleep I realized I had been weeping - my eyes still burned and my throat was sore from talking it all out and shouting and laughing. I would be stiff when I woke, aching as if I had played four hours of football or tennis and now had to face the start of another game. It would take some six more weeks to complete Act II.

My laughter during the writing came mostly at Willy's contradicting himself so arrantly, and out of the laughter the title came one afternoon. Death Comes for the Archbishop, the Death and the Maiden quartet - always austere and elevated was death in titles. Now it would be claimed by a joker, a bleeding mass of contradictions, a clown, and there was something funny about that, something like a thumb in the eye, too. yes, and in some far corner of my mind possibly something political; there was the smell in the air of a new American Empire in the making, if only because, as I had witnessed, Europe was dying or dead, and I wanted to set before the new captains and the so smugly confident kings the corpse of a believer. On the play's opening night a woman who shall not be named was outraged, calling it "a time bomb under American capitalism"; I hoped it was, or at least under the bullshit of American capitalism, this pseudo life that thought to touch the clouds by standing on top of a refrigerator, waving a paid-up mortgage at the moon, victorious at last.

But some thirty-five years later, the Chinese reaction to my Beijing production of Salesman would confirm what had become more and more obvious over the decades in the play's hundreds of productions throughout the world: Willy was representative everywhere, in every kind of system, of ourselves in this time. The Chinese might disapprove of his lies and his self-deluding exaggeration as well as his immorality with women, but they certainly saw themselves in him. And it was not simply as a type but because of what he wanted. Which was to excel, to win out over anonymity and meaninglessness, to love and be loved, and above all, perhaps, to count. When he roared out, "I am not a dime a dozen! I am Willy Loman, and you are Biff Loman!" it came as a nearly revolutionary declaration after what was now thirty-four years of leveling. (The play was the same age as the Chinese revolution.) I did not know in 1948 in Connecticut that I was sending a message of resurgent individualism to the China of 1983 - especially when the revolution it had signified, it seemed at the time, the long-awaited rule of reason and the historic ending of chaotic egocentricity and selfish aggrandizement. Ah. yes. I had not reckoned on a young Chinese student saying to a CBS interviewer in the theatre lobby, "We are moved by it because we also want to be number one, and to be rich and successful." What else is this but human unpredictability, which goes on escaping the nets of unfreedom?

I did not move far from the phone for two days after sending the script to Kazan. By the end of the second silent day I would have accepted his calling to tell me that it was a scrambled egg, an impenetrable, unstageable piece of wreckage. And his tone when he finally did call was alarmingly sober.

"I've read your play." He sounded at a loss as to how to give me the bad news. "My God, it's so sad."

"It's supposed to be."

"I just put it down. I don't know what to say. My father..." He broke off, the first of a great many men - and women - who would tell me that Willy was their father. I still thought he was letting me down easy. "It's a great play, Artie. I want to do it in the fall or winter. I'll start thinking about casting." He was talking as though someone we both knew had just died, and it filled me with happiness. Such is art.

For the first time in months, as I hung up the phone, I could see my family clearly again. As was her way, Mary accepted the great news with a quiet pride, as though something more expressive would spoil me, but I too thought I should remain an ordinary citizen, even an anonymous one (although I did have a look at the new Studebaker convertible, the Raymond Lowery design that was the most beautiful American car of the time, and bought one as soon as the play opened). But Mary's mother, who was staying the week with us, was astonished. "Another play?" she said, as though the success of All My Sons had been enough for one lifetime. She had unknowingly triggered that play when she gossiped about a young girl somewhere in central Ohio who had turned her father in to the FBI for having manufactured faulty aircraft parts during the war.

But who should produce Salesman? Kazan and I walked down Broadway from the park where we had been strolling and talking about the kind of style the production would need. Kazan's partnership with Harold Clurman had recently broken up, and I had no idea about a producer. He mentioned Cheryl Crawford, whom I hardly knew, and then Kermit Bloomgarden, an accountant turned producer, whom I had last seen poring over Herman Shumlin's account books a couple of years before when Shumlin turned down All My Sons. I had never seen Bloomgarden smile, but he had worked for the Group Theatre and Kazan knew him, and as much because we happened to have come to a halt a few yards from his office building as for any other reason, he said, "Well, let's go up and say hello." When we stood across the desk from him and Kazan said he had a play of mine for him to read, Bloomgarden squeezed up his morose version of a smile, or at least a suggestion of one he planned to have next week.

This whimsical transforming of another person's life reminds me of a similar walk with Kazan uptown from a garage on Twenty-sixth Street where he had left his old Pontiac to be repaired. He began wondering aloud whom he should ask to head a new acting school to be called the Actors Studio, which he and Clurman and Robert Lewis and Cheryl Crawford were organizing. None of these founders was prepared to run the place, Kazan, Clurman, and Lewis being too busy with their flourishing directing careers, and Crawford with her work as a producer. "Lee Strasberg is probably the best guy for it. He'd certainly be able to put in the time." In due course Strasberg became not only the head of the Actors Studio but also its heart and soul, and for the general public its organizer. So his work there was made possibly by his having been unemployable at the right moment. But that, come to think of it, is as good a way as any to be catapulted into world fame.

Willy had to be small, I thought, but we soon realized that Roman Bohnen and Ernest Truex and a few other very good actors seemed to lack the size of the character even if they fit the body. The script had been sent to Lee Cobb, an actor I remembered mainly as a mountainous hulk covered with a towel in a Turkish bath in an Irwin Shaw play, with the hilarious oy vey delivery of a forever persecuted businessman. Having flown himself across the country in his own two-engine airplane, he sat facing me in Bloomgarden's office and announced, "This is my part. Nobody else can play this part. I know this man." And he did indeed seem to be the man when a bit later in a coffee shop downstairs he looked up at the young waitress and smiled winsomely as though he had to win her loving embrace before she could be seduced into bringing him his turkey sandwich and coffee - ahead of all the other men's orders, and only after bestowing on his unique slice of pickle her longing kiss.

But while I trusted his and Kazan's experience, I lacked any conviction of my own about him until one evening in our Grace Court living room Lee looked down at my son, Bob, on the floor and I heard him laugh at something funny the child had said. The sorrow in his laughter flew out at me, touched me; it was deeply depressed and at the same time joyous, all flowing through a baritone voice that was gorgeously reedy. So large and handsome a man pretending to be thoroughly at ease in a world where he obviously did not fit could be moving.

"You know - or do you? -," Lee said to me one day in Bloomgarden's office a week or so before rehearsals were about to begin, "that this play is a watershed. The American theatre will never be the same." I could only gulp and nod in silence at his portentousness - which I feared might augur a stately performance - and hope that he would make Willy come alive anyway.

But as rehearsals proceeded in the small, periodically abandoned theatre on the ratty roof of the New Amsterdam on Forty-second street, where Ziegfeld in the twenties had staged some intimate revues, Lee seemed to move about in a buffalo's stupefied trance, muttering his lines, plodding with deathly slowness from position to position, and behaving like a man who had been punched in the head. "He's just learning it," Kazan shakily reassured me after three or four days. I waited as a week went by, and then ten days, and all that was emerging from Lee Cobb's throat was a bumpy hum. The other actors were nearing performance levels, but when they had to get a response from Lee all their rhythms slowed to near collapse. Kazan was no longer so sure and kept huddling with Lee, trying to pump him up. Nor did Lee offer any explanation, and I wondered whether he thought to actually play the part like a man with a foot in the grave. Between us, Kazan and I began referring to him as "the Walrus".

On about the twelfth day, in the afternoon, with Eddie Kook, our lighting supplier, and Jimmy Proctor, our pressman, and Kazan and myself in the seats, Lee stood up as usual from the bedroom chair and turned to Mildred Dunnock and bawled, "No, there's more people now ... There's more people!" and, gesturing toward the empty upstage where the window was supposed to be, caused a block of apartment houses to spring up in my brain, and the air became sour with the smell of kitchens where once there had been only the odors of earth, and he began to move frighteningly, with such ominous reality that my chest felt pressed down by an immense weight. After the scene had gone on for a few minutes, I glanced around to see if the others had my reaction. Jim Proctor had his head bent into his hands and was weeping, Eddie Kook was looking shocked, almost appalled, and tears were pouring over his cheeks, and Kazan behind me was grinning like a fiend, gripping his temples with both hands, and we knew we had it - there was an unmistakable wave of life moving across the air of the empty theatre, a wave of Willy's pain and protest. I began to weep myself at some point that was not particularly sad, but it was as much, I think, out of pride in our art, in Lee's magical capacity to imagine, to collect within himself every mote of life since Genesis and to let it pour forth. He stood up there like a giant moving the Rocky Mountains into position.

At the end of the act, Del Hughes, our sweet but hardheaded, absolutely devoted, competent stage manager, came out from a wing and looked out at us. His stunned eyes started us all laughing. I ran up and kissed Lee, who pretended to be surprised. "But what did you expect, Arthur?" he said, his eyes full of his playful vanity. My God, I thought - he really is Willy! On the subway going home to Brooklyn I felt once again the aching pain in my muscles that the performance had tensed up so tightly, just as in the writing time. And when I thought of it later, it seemed as though Lee's sniffing around the role for so long recapitulated what I had done in the months before daring to begin to write.

The whole production was, I think, unusual for the openness with which every artist involved sought out his truths. It was all a daily, almost moment-to-moment testing of ideas. There was much about the play that had never been done before, and this gave an uncustomary excitement to our discussions about what would or would not be understood by an audience. The setting I had envisioned was three bare platforms and only the minimum necessary furniture for a kitchen and two bedrooms, with the Boston hotel room as well as Howard's office to be played in open space. Jo Mielziner took those platforms and designed an environment around them that was romantic and dreamlike yet at the same time lower-middle-class. His set, in a word, was an emblem of Willy's intense longing for the promises of the past, with which indeed the present state of his mind is always conflicting, and it was thus both a lyrical design and a dramatic one. The only notable mistake in his early concept was to put the gas hot-water heater in the middle of the kitchen, a symbol of menace that I thought obvious and Kazan finally eliminated as a hazard to his staging. But by balancing on the edges of the ordinary bounds of verisimilitude, Jo was stretching reality in parallel with the script, just as Kazan did by syncopating the speech rhythms of the actors. He made Mildred Dunnock deliver her long first-act speeches to the boys at double her normal speed, then he doubled that, and finally she - until recently a speech teacher - was standing there drumming out words as fast as her very capable tongue could manage. Gradually he slacked her off, but the drill straightened her spine, and her Linda filled up with outrage and protest rather than self-pity and mere perplexity. Similarly, to express the plays' inner life, the speech rate in some scenes or sections was unnaturally speeded or slowed.

My one scary hour came with the climactic restaurant fight between Willy and the boys, when it all threatened to come apart. I had written a scene in which Biff resolves to tell Willy that the former boss from whom Biff had planned to borrow money to start a business has refused to so much as see him and does not even remember his working for the firm years ago. But on meeting his brother and father in the restaurant, he realizes that Willy's psychological stress will not permit the whole catastrophic truth to be told, and he begins to trim the bad news. From moment to moment the scene as originally written had so many shadings of veracity that Arthur Kennedy, a very intelligent citizen indeed, had trouble shifting from a truth to a half-truth to a fragment of truth and back to the whole truth, all of it expressed in quickly delivered, very short lines. The three actors, with Kazan standing beside them, must have repeated the scene through a whole working day, and it still wobbled. "I don't see how we can make it happen," Kazan said as we left the theatre that evening. "Maybe you ought to try simplifying it for them." I went home and worked through the night and brought in a new scene, which played much better and became the scene as finally performed.

The other changes were very small and a pleasure to make because they involved adding lines rather than cutting or rewriting. In Act I, Willy is alone in the kitchen muttering to himself, and as his memories overtake him the lighting brightens, the exterior of the house becomes covered with leaf shadows as of old, and in a moment the boys are calling to him in their youthful voices, entering the stage as they were in their teens. There was not sufficient time, however, for them to descend from their beds in the dark on the specially designed elevators and finish stripping out of their pajamas into sweaters and trousers and sneakers, so I had to add time to Willy's monologue. But that was easy since he loved talking to himself about his boys and his vision of them.

The moving in and out of the present had to be not simply indicative but a tactile transformation that the audience could feel as well as comprehend, and indeed come to dread as returning memory threatens to bring Willy closer to his end. Lighting was thus decisively important, and Mielziner, who also lit the show, with Eddie Kook by his side, once worked an entire afternoon lighting a chair.

Willy, in his boss's office, has exploded once too often, and Howard has gone out, leaving him alone. He turns to the office chair, which in the old days was occupied by Frank, Howard's father, who had promised Willy shares in the firm as a reward for all his good work, and as he does so the chair must become alive, quite as though his old boss were in it as he addresses him: "Frank, Frank, don't you remember what you told me? ..." Rather than being lit, the chair subtly seemed to begin emanating light. But this was not merely an exercise in theatre magic; it confirmed that we had moved inside Willy's system of loss, that we were seeing the world as he saw it even as we kept a critical distance and saw it for ourselves.

To set the chair off and make the light change work, all surrounding lights had to dim imperceptibly. That was when Eddie Kook, who had become so addicted to the work on this play that his office at his Century Lighting Company had all but ceased operations, turned to me and said, "You've been asking me why we need so many lights. [We were using more than most musicals.] The reason is right there in front of you - it takes more lights to make it dark." With fewer lights each one would have to be dimmed more noticeably than if there were many, each one fractionally reduced in intensity to create the change without apparent source or contrivance.

Salesman had its first public performance at the Locust Street Theatre in Philadelphia. Across the street the Philadelphia Orchestra was playing Beethoven's Seventh Symphony that afternoon, and Kazan thought Cobb ought to hear some of it, wanting, I suppose, to prime the great hulk on whom all our hopes depended. The three of us were in a conspiracy to make absolutely every moment of every scene cohere to what preceded and followed it; we were now aware that Willy's part was among the longest in dramatic literature, and Lee was showing signs of wearying. We sat at either side of him in a box, inviting him, as it were, to drink of the heroism of that music, to fling himself into his role tonight without holding back. We thought of ourselves, still, as a kind of continuation of a long and undying past.

As sometimes happened later on during the run, there was no applause at the final curtain of the first performance. Strange things began to go on in the audience. With the curtain down, some people stood to put their coats on and then sat again, some, especially men, were bent forward covering their faces, and others were openly weeping. People crossed the theatre to stand quietly talking with one another. It seemed forever before someone remembered to applaud, and then there was no end of it.

Happy birthday, Eugene O'Neill

Today is the birthday of American playwright Eugene O'Neill.

He made his New York debut - with a one-act play presented in a night of three one-acts - at the new Playwrights Theatre - on 139 Macdougal Street, in Greenwich Village. It was the first season for this new theatre. The evening of one-acts were:

The Game, by Louise Bryant (ahem)
King Arthur's Socks, by Floyd Dell
Bound East for Cardiff, by Eugene O'Neill. (I posted an excerpt of this play here)

O'Neill was completely unknown at the time. He went on to write some of the most influential American plays ever written - he won 4 Pulitzer Prizes - and he is the only American playwright to win the Nobel Prize. His work is untouchable, as far as I'm concerned. Nobody else even comes CLOSE.

In 1916, the Playwrights Theatre was formed by a group of young artists - they all were up in Provincetown on vacation - and they built the Playwrights Theatre on a wharf.

They called themselves the Provincetown Players. They did everything, they were a true ensemble.

When the idyllic summer ended (and you can see Warren Beatty's version of all of this in Reds) - the Provincetown Players relocated to Greenwich Village (where many of them lived already) - and opened up their theatre on Macdougall.

This was the beginning of Eugene O'Neill's career. He got enough of his short plays produced over the next 4 years - that his reputation began to grow - until finally Beyond the Horizon, his first full-length, opened on Broadway in 1920.

In the premiere of Bound East for Cardiff - O'Neill played the "second mate" which is basically a walk-on. He had one line:

"Isn't this your watch on deck., Driscoll?"

O'Neill's father, James, had been an actor, very popular, very successful, touring about with popular plays of the day. Long Day's Journey Into Night was autobiographical. Eugene O'Neill was raised Irish Catholic, and his rejection of the faith devastated his father - just like in the play. O'Neill's father was also an alcoholic (like James Tyrone) - and has also given up a career as a Shakespearean actor for a part in a very commercial (but worthless) production called Monte Cristo. James Tyrone is haunted by the great Shakespearean actor he could have been ... and so was O'Neill's dad. Like Mary Tyrone, O'Neill's mother in real-life was a morphine addict. Just like in the play, she became addicted to morphine after an incompetent doctor proscribed it to her following a difficult childibrth. Jamie is modeled after O'Neill's real-life brother, an alcoholic whoremonger who was basically a huge failure at whatever he tried to accomplish. Eugene had an older brother named Edmund - who had died when he was a baby. In the play, the baby who died is named Eugene. Like Edmund, Eugene O'Neill sailed for years, living a restless peripatetic constantly-broke life. He took odd jobs. O'Neill was also not what you would call a hearty man with a hearty constitution. He was fragile, and eventually got tuberculosis. He spent 6 months in a sanatorium for treatment - turberculosis was a very dangerous disease.

O'Neill was a man with demons, make no mistake. His plays are all personal, all drawing from his own life, but it was as though he held off on family matters until the very end ... it was too dangerous, too frightening to even face. There's a reason why Long Day's Journey is so relentless, so depressing, so spectacular. It had been boiling up in him for decades.

On Sunday, Aug. 13, 1916 - A.J. Philpot, a journalist for the Boston Globe wrote a piece about the Provincetown Players - and mentioned Eugene O'Neill - the first moment of recognition of this great great writer:

Many people will remember James O'Neill who played "Monte Cristo." He had a son - Eugene O'Neill - who knocked about the world in tramp steamers - and saw life "in the raw," and thought much about it. He is one of the Players, and he has written some little plays which have made a very deep impression on those who have seen them produced here.

"some little plays". Amazing, right?? Knowing what was coming? Knowing the impact that O'Neill would eventually have?

Here's a photograph of O'Neill at Sea Island Bend (photographer: Carl van Vechten)

O'Neill, due to ill health, was unable to attend the Nobel Prize banquet in honor of him (in 1936) ... but he wrote his speech out, and had James E. Brown read it for him. Here it is in its entirety, but I liked this part especially:

This thought of original inspiration brings me to what is, for me, the greatest happiness this occasion affords, and that is the opportunity it gives me to acknowledge, with gratitude and pride, to you and to the people of Sweden, the debt my work owes to that greatest genius of all modern dramatists, your August Strindberg.

It was reading his plays when I first started to write back in the winter of 1913-14 that, above all else, first gave me the vision of what modern drama could be, and first inspired me with the urge to write for the theatre myself. If there is anything of lasting worth in my work, it is due to that original impulse from him, which has continued as my inspiration down all the years since then - to the ambition I received then to follow in the footsteps of his genius as worthily as my talent might permit, and with the same integrity of purpose.

Of course, it will be no news to you in Sweden that my work owes much to the influence of Strindberg. That influence runs clearly through more than a few of my plays and is plain for everyone to see. Neither will it be news for anyone who has ever known me, for I have always stressed it myself. I have never been one of those who are so timidly uncertain of their own contribution that they feel they cannot afford to admit ever having been influenced, lest they be discovered as lacking all originality.

No, I am only too proud of my debt to Strindberg, only too happy to have this opportunity of proclaiming it to his people. For me, he remains, as Nietzsche remains in his sphere, the Master, still to this day more modern than any of us, still our leader. And it is my pride to imagine that perhaps his spirit, musing over this year's Nobel award for literature, may smile with a little satisfaction, and find the follower not too unworthy of his Master.

Beautiful. Beautiful.

Oh, and naturally, because I must:

Eugene O'Neill wrote Long Day's Journey Into Night (what a title) in 1939, but it was never performed in his lifetime. His wife remembered the summer he wrote it. He would stay in his study all day working, and emerge in the evening, with his eyes puffed up and red from weeping. He wrote and wept. He wept and wrote. All day long, in his study, emerging as though from a nightmare every night, before going back in to face it every day. And damn, you can tell that from the language in that play that he had ripped out a piece of his own heart in writing it. An astonishing and painful exorcism has taken place. It's a bleak play. If you find the hope in it, lemme know, would ya?

On his twelfth wedding anniversary with his wife Carlotta, O'Neill gave her the script of the play with this note:

For Carlotta,
on our 12th Wedding Anniversary
Dearest: I give you the original script of this play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood. A sadly inappropriate gift, it would seem, for a day celebrating happiness. But you will understand. I mean it as a tribute to your love and tenderness which gave me the faith in love that enable me to face my dead at last and write this play, write it with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones.

These twelve years, Beloved One, have been a Journey into Light, into love. You know my gratitude. And my love!

Gene
Tao House
July 22, 1941

The haunted Tyrones. O'Neill knew what it would take to get that story out of him. Naturally, he put it off. A couple of his plays (Moon for the Misbegotten and Long Day's Journey) had their major ground-breaking productions after O'Neill's death. It is not that his success was posthumous, that is obviously not the case ... but his stature has just grown over the years. To me, even with the Tennessee Williams' and the Arthur Miller's ... he is THE American playwright. In many ways, his work paved the way for the others.

So happy birthday, "Gene". Thank you for "facing your dead" at last, and putting that to paper.

EXCERPTS FROM O'NEILL'S WORK
Moon of the Caribees
Bound East for Cardiff
The Long Voyage Home
In the Zone
Ile
The Iceman Cometh
Anna Christie
Long Day's Journey Into Night

The Seagull on Broadway

On January 20 of this year, I bemoaned the fact that I did not have a private jet to zip over to London to see the latest production of The Seagull, starring Kristin Scott Thomas as Arkadina which sounded so delectable and brilliant - the reviews were universal raves, the kind that emanate across the Atlantic. It doesn't happen with all plays - but it happened with that one.

Well, it's now come to Broadway - with a couple of cast changes - but it is essentially the same production. It only plays through December 21 so I have to scare up the cash (not an easy thing right now) to go see it. Some productions are once-in-a-lifetime opportunities - like seeing Christine Ebersole in Grey Gardens. This is one of those moments.

Ben Brantley's review just came out and it's one of those goosebumpy reviews that makes me realize: Okay, better buy a ticket NOW because once the entirety of New York reads that review they'll all want tickets as well. It's a thoughtful examination of what works in the play and I also like his thoughts on Chekhov:

As willfully idiosyncratic as Chekhov’s characters are, they are all cut from the same nubbly cloth of exasperated loneliness and misfired intentions. Chekhov’s work sees the human condition as an exercise in frustration that is both comic (“Ha! They can’t get what they want”) and tragic (“Sob! They can never get what they want”). And he works both sides of that equation more successfully than any playwright.

I also was excited to read this bit about the actress playing Nina:

Ms. Mulligan’s delectably dewy but determined Nina is just the girl to rouse him from his lethargy. More than any actress I’ve seen, she captures the raw hunger within Nina’s ambition, the ravening vitality as well the vulnerability. This is no mere fluttery sacrificial seagull. There’s a reason that the mother-fixated Konstantin falls in love with her.

Such a hard part. I've seen the play many times, and I have to say: I have never seen a good Nina. Natalie Portman was terrible in the production in Central Park - she just did not know how to use her instrument (her acting talent, I mean) in that context ... it couldn't be big enough, sad enough, pathetic enough ... She is skilled in film-acting, but she failed miserably on a stage where she needed to project - not just her voice, but her spirit and energy - out to the cheap seats. Not only that - but the matter of interpretation is always difficult with Nina - but you have to "interpret" it - you can't just say the lines and hope the play fills in the rest for you. Nina goes through a shattering journey. She is destroyed. Yet ... "I am a seagull" ... she survives. Her innocence is tarnished forever, and she also has realized that she does not have the talent that she burns to have ... she can never be a Duse. It's a terrible revelation. Tough part. I am excited to see this Nina - because Nina has the potential to be the most wrenching memorable person in the play ... if played well!!

And here is Brantley on Kristin Scott Thomas - as Arkadina - the manipulative scene-stealing mother/big star in the play ... her performance was hailed so strongly in the British production that it basically just seemed UNFAIR that I couldn't see it:

Ms. Scott Thomas’s performance is funnier, sadder and braver than it was in London. Arkadina’s fears of fading away assume an almost clownish aspect as she scampers coquettishly to show she could play a girl of 15 or literally grovels in self-abasement before Trigorin. Striking grandly theatrical postures from the age of Duse and Bernhardt, this Arkadina knows that the only way to get attention in life is to be larger than life. Ms. Scott Thomas draws her with a vividness that is equally free of mercy and malice.

"equally free of mercy and malice". Pretty damn fine observation there.

I loved this photo of the production because to me - her pose (speaking of Duse or Bernhardt) looks like something you would see in an old daguerrotype ... of a production at the old Yiddish theatre in New York ... or one of those smoky vaudeville houses where occasionally a play of substance would be put on ... What I am trying to say is that her attitude in the photo below is not modern. Nor should it be. This is an actress from the 19th century. As Arkadina is.

Look out, Winter Garden

My friend Sean joins the Broadway cast of Mamma Mia tonight after touring with the show for what now feels like a decade and a half. He and his boyfriend Guy (Guy of the "purple signs") have just moved to New York and I have not had a chance to see either of them yet - due to the fact that I have been out of town for two weeks - and also that the second they hit town they began to search for an apartment to buy (and my God, is that a full-time occupation - I think they found one though) - and also Sean has been full-time rehearsing for his Broadway debut. But September 24th - tonight - is the night he goes on ... and I'm really excited for him.

I stole this picture from his Facebook. Because that's what I'm all about these days. Theft and dishonesty.

I just loved it - the excitement in the picture, and the anticipation of the big moment which is now, finally, HERE.

Congratulations, Pastor Sean! Break a leg!

Happy birthday, Clifford Odets

Clifford Odets (playwright in the 30s and 40s - inspiration to Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, a generation of playwrights - and he inspires still although some of his plays have dated badly) kept a journal throughout his tumultuous life.

One year of that journal has been published - 1940 - and the title of the book is "The time is ripe: The 1940 journal of Clifford Odets". It's a classic. Practically required reading for those of us in the theatre, but chock-full of stuff that would be interesting and illuminating to anyone. Marvelous first-person document.

A couple biographical notes:

Clifford Odets was catapulted into fame in the early 30s with his play Waiting for Lefty. He became a resident playwright with the influential Group Theatre - and they put on many of his plays - which are now considered classics: Awake and Sing, Paradise Lost, Golden Boy - just to name a few. He was the voice of the Great Depression, of the angry radical, the Jewish New Yorker, the downtrodden, the hopeful. Odets was a Zeitgeist kind of guy. It's one of the reasons why he found his later career so strenuous and difficult ... when you tap into a Zeitgeist of a certain time and place (and not just tap into it - but give voice to it) it can be nigh on impossible to translate that into another time/place. I love all of Odets' plays - not just his famous 1930s plays - I love Big Knife, I love Country Girl, I love The Flowering Peach ... but his time, his PLACE, was the mid-1930s. And that's IT. Without context, Odets' work does not translate. HIs writing does ... and he is imitated to this day. Sylvester Stallone counts Odets as an influence in writing Rocky (and you can totally hear it - the street poetry, the rough edges) ... Tony Kushner ... everyone. Odets was the start of that kind of playwriting in this country.

His work is very much of a time and place - although the writing is good enough for ALL times. But his plays all have "the Great Depression" as an extra character. Without understanding that context, his plays may seem ... trite, or small, or naive. His theme is how the individual man can maintain his dignity, his human worth, in the middle of a capitalist society. He has written lines like, "Is life written on dollar bills?" WORTH has nothing to do with money ... but when you have no money, it sure as shit is difficult to remember that. His plays in the 30s insist upon human dignity, but also (like in Golden Boy) insist on the fact that there is compromise, and tragedy. This is where he can seem, to modern eyes, a bit naive - but it is essential to place him in his context.

But what remains (for me anyway) is not so much the thematic elements, the snapshot of urban life in the 30s - but the language. Odets' language!! It's raw, it's poetic, and it's not realistic. It's street poetry.

We got the blues, Babe -- the 1935 blues. I'm talkin' this way 'cause I love you. If I didn't, I wouldn't care ...

Or

You won't forget me to your dyin' day -- I was the first guy. Part of your insides. You won't forget. I wrote my name on you -- indelible ink!

Or this, from the same scene = I love this line:

So I made a mistake. For Chris' sake, don't act like the Queen of Romania!

Or

Yes, yes, the whole thing funnels up in me like a fever. My head'll bust a vein!

Or

A sleeping clam at the bottom of the ocean, but I'll wake you up. I'm through with the little wars: no more hacking, making a pound in a good day. Like old man Pike says, every man for himself nowadays, and when you're in a jungle you look out for the wild life. I put on my Chinese good luck ring and I'm out to get mine. You're the first stop!

And then this famous exchange from Golden Boy, immortalized in millions of acting classes across the country:

JOE. What did he ever do for you?

LORNA. [with sudden verve] Would you like to know? He loved me in a world of enemies, of stags and bulls! ... And I loved him for that. He picked me up in Friskin's hotel on 39th Street. I was nine weeks behind in rent. I hadn't hit the gutter yet, but I was near. He washed my face and combed my hair. He stiffened the space between my shoulder blades. Misery reached out to misery --

JOE. And now you're dead.

LORNA. [lashing out] I don't know what the hell you're talking about!

JOE. Yes, you do ...

Excerpts from his plays:

The Flowering Peach
The Country Girl
The Big Knife
Rocket To the Moon
Golden Boy
Paradise Lost
Till The Day I Die
Awake and Sing
Waiting For Lefty

Harold Clurman wrote about Odets:

Odets wrote some of the finest love scenes to be found in American drama. An all-enveloping warmth, love in its broadest sense, is a constant in all Odets' writing, the very root of his talent. IT is there in tumultuous harangues, in his denunciations and his murmurs. It is by turns hot and tender. Sometimes it sounds in whimpers. It is present as much in the scenes between grandfather and granson in Awake as in those of Joe and Lorna in Golden Boy. It is touchingly wry in Rocket. This explains why these scenes are chosen by so many actors for auditions and classwork.

The Group Theatre lasted almost a decade - from 1931 to 1940.

Odets' first play was Waiting for Lefty. He had been ignored by Strasberg (the leader of the Group) when he kept saying he had plays he wanted to be put on. He just wasn't seen as serious. As the left-wing political world heated up in the early 1930s, Odets became involved in various Communist organizations - and found that his talents were actually wanted in that world. The Group Theatre actors were also looking for ways to become involved - and Odets wrote this play called Waiting for Lefty - which was going to be performed at the Civic Repertory Theatre, one-night-only - as part of a larger programme - It was a benefit for New Theatre magazine. The play was rehearsed on its own, Strasberg had nothing to do with it ... but all the Group actors were involved. Kazan, Ruth Nelson, Carnovsky, Phoebe Brand, John Garfield (known as "Julie" then) ...

Waiting for Lefty was performed for the first time at the benefit on January 6, 1935. It is a night that has gone down in American theatrical history. One of our most important events. In it, the "new theatre" was, indeed, born. Yes, many others at the time were also pushing the boundaries and breaking down the oh-so-polite and witty and high-class themes to be seen on Broadway. Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre - the "voodoo Macbeth" - there were theatrical EVENTS in those days ... when an audience, struggling with the Depression, with hard times, were looking for something else ... were looking for a change of tone from the Philip Barry Noel Coward material so popular at that time. Nothing against those masters of their craft ... but in 1935, their time was done. It had grown stale. There was a Depression going on ... where was that being expressed in the theatre? Waiting for Lefty occurred like a lightning bolt from another planet - the planet of Truth.

January 6, 1935 is a crucial day in our cultural history in this country. Almost up there with the opening of Glass Menagerie on an ice-drenched night in Chicago a little over a decade later.

Wendy Smith, in her comprehensive book on The Group, writes about what happened at that benefit (oh, and a word of warning to the usual suspects: If anyone swoops in and tries to inform me what idiots these people were because of the eventual terror of Stalin and their own ignorance about what Communism is, I'll delete. I am not posting this to say I agree with Communism - anyone who reads me and who has been reading me should very well know my thoughts on that score. I am posting it because it is a great night of the theatre, one for the books in terms of social and cultural significance - and if you are unable to talk on that level here, well. You know where you can go. Thanks.)

NOW. Onto that historic night in 1935:

Lefty was one of several works scheduled as part of an evening organized by the League of Workers Theatres to aid New Theatre. The benefit staff assigned it no particular importance: the mimeographed one-sheet program simply said, "Waiting for Lefty, presented by the cast of Gold Eagle Guy," with no mention of either author or individual actors. The stage manager, Robert Riley, who booked the entertainment and decided the order of appearance, believed that Anna Sokolow's troupe of dancers was more important than a new play by an unknown actor/writer, and he announced that they would appear last. Odets was furious, arguing vehemently that his play deserved the favored final spot. Riley gave in, only to encounter a new problem. The Group hadn't warned him that the show required lighting cues; he had to work them out hastily with the electrician during the intermissions between the other acts. When the lights went up on the bare stage, with Morris Carnovsky as the corrupt union leader directly addressing the audience as if they were his rebellious membership, no one expected anything except another casual piece of agitprop thrown together for a good cause.

Within moments everyone in the theatre knew better. As the actors began to speak Odets' stingingly authentic language - so radically different from either the affected patter of the Broadway show-shops or the wooden sloganeering of agitprop - audience members found themselves swept up in a drama they seemed to know intimately, from deep inside themselves, even though they'd never heard a word of it before.

They gasped when Ruth Nelson as the angry wife said, "Sure, I see it in the papers, how good orange juice is for kids ... Betty never saw a grapefruit. I took her to the store last week and she pointed to a stack of grapefruits. 'What's that,' she said." They cheered when Tony Kraber, playing the scientist who refuses to develop poison gas, punches his evil boss (Carnovsky again) in the nose. They murmured sadly when the young lovers Phoebe Brand and Julie Garfield were forced by poverty to part. They jeered at Russell Collins as a company guy and applauded when Gadget Kazan exposed him as "my own lousy brother!" They laughed sympathetically at Bill Challee as a desperate young actor too ignorant to know what a manifesto is and took Paula Miller to their hearts as the tough producer's secretary who gives him a dollar to buy some food and a copy of The Communist Manifesto, telling him, "Come out in the light, Comrade." When Luther Adler, playing a young doctor fired because he is a Jew, closed his scene with the communist salute, more than one person answered him from the auditorium with a clenched fist thrust in the air. It was beyond politics. They used the CP salute as Odets defined it in Lefty's last scene: "the good old uppercut to the chin," a rejection of all the forces that hurt people and kept them down, a commitment to fight for a better life.

To Kazan, seated in the auditorium waiting for his cue, the response was "like a roar from sixteen-inchers broadside, audience to players, a way of shouting, 'More! More! More! Go on! Go on! Go on!'" Swept up by the passion they had aroused, the actors were no longer acting. "They were being carried along as if by an exultancy of communication such as I have never witnessed in the theatre before," wrote [Harold] Clurman. The twenty-eight-year-old playwright was awed by the emotional conflagration he'd ignited. "You saw theatre in its truest essence," Odets remembered years later. "Suddenly the proscenium arch of the theatre vanished and the audience and actors were at one with each other."

As the play mounted to its climax, the intensity of feeling on and offstage became almost unbearable. When Bobby Lewis dashed in with the news that Lefty has been murdered, no one needed to take an exercise to find the appropriate anger - the actors exploded with it, the audience seethed with it. They exulted as Joe Bromberg, playing the union rebel Agate Keller, tore himself loose from the hired gunmen and declared their independence: "HELLO AMERICA! HELLO. WE'RE STORMBIRDS OF THE WORKING-CLASS ... And when we die they'll know what we did to make a new world!"

"Well, what's the answer?" Bromberg demanded. In the audience, as planned, Odets, Herbie Ratner, and Lewis Leverett began shouting "Strike!" "LOUDER!" Bromberg yelled - and, one by one, from all over the auditorium, individual voices called out, "Strike!" Suddenly the entire audience, some 1,400 people, rose and roared, "Strike! Strike!" The actors froze, stunned by the spontaneous demonstration. The militant cries gave way to cheers and applause so thunderous the cast was kept onstage for forty-five minutes to receive the crowd's inflamed tribute. "When they couldn't applaud anymore, they stomped their feet," said Ruth Nelson. "All I could think was, 'My God, they're going to break the balcony down!' It was terrible, it was so beautiful." The actors were all weeping. When Clurman persuaded Odets to take a bow, the audience stormed the stage and embraced the man who had voiced their hopes and fears and deepest aspirations. "That was the dram all of us in the Group Theatre had," said Kazan, "to be embraced that way by a theatreful of people."

"The audience wouldn't leave," said Cheryl Crawford. "I was afraid they were going to tear the seats out and throw them on the stage." When the astounded stage manager finally rang down the curtain, they remained out front, talking and arguing about the events in a play taht seemed as real to them as their own lives. Actors and playwright were overwhelmed and a little frightened by the near-religious communion they had just shared. Odets retreated to a backstage bathroom; his excitement was so intense he threw up, then burst into tears. The dressing room was hushed as the actors removed their makeup. They emerged onto 14th Street to find clusters of people still gathered outside, laughing, crying, hugging each other, clapping their hands. "There was almost a sense of pure madness about it," Morris Carnovsky felt.

No one wanted to go home. Sleep was out of the question. Most of the Group went to an all-night restaurant - no one can remember now which one - and tried to eat. Odets sat alone: pale, withdrawn, not talking at all. Everyone was too dazed to have much to say. It was dawn before they could bring themselves to separate, to admit that the miracle was over.

There had never been a night like it in the American theatre. The Group became a vessel into which were poured the rage, frustration, desperation, and finally exultation, not just of an angry young man named Clifford Odets, but of every single person at the Civic Rep who longed for an end to personal and political depression, who needed someone to tell them they could stand up and change their lives. The Group had experienced the "unity of background, of feeling, of thought, of need" Clurman had said was the basis for a true theatre: during his inspiring talks at Brookfield, at the thrilling final run-through of Connelly, in some of the best performances of Success Story. Never before had they shared it with an entire theatre full of people, never before had it seemed as though the lines they spoke hadn't been written but rather emerged from a collective heart and soul. Theatre and life merged, as Clurman had promised they could.

Waiting for Lefty changed people's ideas of what theatre was. More than an evening's entertainment, more even than a serious examination of the contemporary scene by a thoughtful writer, theatre at its best could be a living embodiment of communal values and aspirations. Theatre mattered, art had meaning, culture wasn't the property of an affluent, educated few but an expression of the joys and sorrows of the human condition as they could be understood and shared by everyone.

Goosebumps. No matter how many times I read that (or descriptions from anyone who was there that night - either in the audience or up on stage) - I get goosebumps.

No wonder Odets had a sharp fall later in life. How on EARTH could anything he would EVER do top such a debut??

The Time is Ripe describes the year of the Group's demise. Night Music, Odets' latest play (which I ADORE - it is very difficult to find, and never produced anymore - my dad found it for me in the library and Xeroxed me a copy - Great play.) - was a huge flop. This was devastating for Odets - the critics were very cruel. They had built Odets up - and man, they loved tearing him down.

The theatre ensemble folded.

All members scattered to the 4 winds - John Garfield, Franchot Tone, Frances Farmer, Morris Carnovsky, Stella Adler, Lee Strasberg, Elia Kazan - and yet they were forever linked, they forever had a relationship with one another - because of their experiences in the 1930s.

In honor of his birthday, I've posted a bunch of excerpts from his journal below. Some are funny, some are thought-provoking, some are lyrical - he is at the height of his powers here. He is about to go into his long decline - which is sad, because he has such fire and energy here. In 1944, he made his directorial debut with None but the Lonely Heart - starring Cary Grant. This was the second part Grant was nominated for an Oscar for - mainly because of the big crying scene at the end. (The fact that Grant would not be nominated - then or now - for his performance in His Girl Friday - is just indicative of how silly those awards can be!!)

He and Grant were friends until the very end - and Odets had a particularly sad end. The guy had a long way to fall, and boy, did he fall. Grant would lend him money, or go and sit with him and talk and laugh and try to help his friend. None but the Lonely Heart is obviously Odets-ian - the themes, the compromises (it's always about choosing money or love, choosing money or humanity) - but what's really interesting about it is how great it LOOKS. The MOOD of the movie is really the reason to see it. It has an almost Fritz Lang-ish feel to it, eerie, melancholy, big empty urban streets, the alienation of urban life made manifest in the dark cobblestones - it's a great looking movie.

But now, in honor of his birthday, some excerpts from his journal from 1940. Obviously Clifford was all about Beethoven. Beethoven, and thoughts on FORM. Great stuff.

January 21, 1940

I am growing uneasy -- a new play is coming on. For me, this creative uneasiness excuses everything. Otherwise my inability to follow up assumed personal responsibilities would be another strong item to make my life unhappier than it is. Everything-for-the work is practically the only way I can feel and think -- notice that I put the word feel before think. Right now, these days and weeks, I am very clear in my relationships with the theatre, friends and intimates, almost the world. And that clarity of relationship is the prime necessity for doing good work.

Loneliness -- the business of living alone -- seems to have one of two results for a man. Either it makes him excessively romantic; or it makes him sour and bitter. Sometimes, however, there is a curious blending of both, a tart personality emerging, a sort of eccentric. In fact, all three results add up to an eccentric.

January 23, 1940

The period of courtship, in any matter, gets to be a shorter and shorter affair with me. This is because I am getting shorter and shorter on self-delusion. Let us get to the heart of the matter, I feel, and let us get there quickly and put things on a working basis. I am anxious for results and impatient, unfortunately, with the steps which lead up to the results. This is growth from one point of view; from another it is sheer backsliding.

January 21, 1940

John Barbirolli conducting the Schubert Seventh this afternoon, on the radio. An English musician or conductor! -- the very words are contradictory! Although there are some good words to say for [Sir Thomas] Beecham, who seems to have lifted himself into the top ranks of conductors by sheer will. He plays everything with great muscularity, forcing the music. Particularly true is this of his Mozart. He has discovered the "demon" in Mozart and will have the demon out even if he breaks the orchestra apart! But he really has his points, Beecham.

But Barbirolli? We went over on the same ship when we went to London with Golden Boy...He scowled and strode darkly through the passageways of the ship, romantic and glamorous, or trying to be. It's easy to hear, in his conducting, that he is quite a mild fellow, so mild that I keep looking to see what is holding up the music from behind. The symphony board here, in the case of Toscanini -- since they claimed that people came to see and hear only T. -- erred on the side of distinction. Then they got Barbirolli, whose personality would not overshadow the aggregate personality of the orchestra ... and they erred on the side of extinction!

March 24, 1940

Form, form. I go crazy when I hear some of these goofs say I have no form! Debussy had no form? Certainly not -- he had none of Beethoven's form! And some of Beethoven's last piano sonatas had no form. Yes, none of Mozart's form. These idiots do not realize that there is no such thing as abstract form! Form is, like style, an intensely personal thing. The trust is that my plays have much more form and shape and pattern than thousands of well-made American plays which are simply a scaffolding holding up nothing. I am a talented individual, seeing and handling material in an individual and creative way. And these so-called critics do not understand that when they ask for a ready-made form from me they are simultaneously asking for the death of my talent.

Well, everything is your own fault -- you read what those stupid men write!

April 8, 1940

In the music of Berlioz you will find something petulant, like a man with a toothache. I write this because I am thinking of the "Roman Carnival" overture which I played this afternoon. There is something historical about this piece, some strange and new outburst -- the "peeve" has come into art, the sense of personal rejection, the man unwanted and unheeded. What a strange sad man Berlioz must have been. Aaron Copland says the music of Berlioz is strange too, in the sense that one never knows where it is going or what the artist's intention is (if I am reporting correctly) but I don't understand what Aaron means: the music is followable enough to me. One might almost say that the nerves and hysteria of the modern man have come into the art with Berlioz, too.

April 25, 1940

Every [movie] studio has its own style in writing. A Warner Brothers picture always has an interesting linear quality about it, but is always dead in parts. The picture I saw last night, Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet, In some ways it is such an ordinary picture that one is apt to overlook the remarkable assembly and compression of the machinery, for it is a piece of machinery, dead all over, inhuman, but machinelike in its precision and use of parts. Characters never have any doubts which pull them two ways -- they are one thing, one color, good or bad, moving only in one direction, on one dimension. In a word, they are not dialectic -- they are without those contradictions which are in themselves the source of the deepest human drama.

But I most not forget the superb old German actor, [Albert] Basserman, who played Koch, the great German scientist, in this picture. He had only several small scenes in the picture, but he immediately made every American or English actor in the cast look like a boy. How he did this I am unable to say, perhaps with great repose, a WHOLE grasp of the character, really talking to the other characters instead of acting talking. He was well aware of the meaning of every situation in which he found himself and it was to that meaning he gave himself, never to something abstract, never to, for instance, nobility in general. In a word, he acted, he was active, he understood, he dealt with!

April 17, 1940

In the early evening went to Lee Strasberg's house for dinner. Paula's mother was there [Ed: Paula was Lee Strasberg's wife - an INFAMOUS individual - Marilyn Monroe's controlling acting coach - the bane of John Huston's life - there's a whole story in there], preparing the dinner, and I understood a great deal about Paula from seeing her mother's weak face. For the first time in ten years the tensions are down between Lee and myself -- so we were both able to relax.

He spoke of what he called "the blight of Ibsen", saying that Ibsen had taught most writers after him how to think undramatically. He illustrated this by an example. A man has been used to living in luxury finds he is broke and unable to face life -- he goes home and puts a bullet in his head. That, Lee said, any fair theatre person can lay out into a play. But it is not essentially a dramatic view of life. Chekhov is dramatic, he said, for this is how he treats related material: a man earns a million rubles and goes home and lies down on them and puts a bullet in his head.

I LOVE that!!

April 12, 1940

Perhaps the main activity of the romantic, often idealist, is that of giving, that of offering himself up, of throwing himself at the world. The trouble beings when the world coldly refuses him. Nothing daunted, again the leap, again the throwing of the self. Again repulsed, again and again! Finally, you have a tired, embittered, and frustrated man, or one of resignation, or one who has learned to modulate his behavior and values to those of the world.

In Beethoven we have the glorious exception to all the rules.

He never stopped the fierce activity of throwing himself at the world, of demanding attention for his values above all others, of insisting on the validity of what he was above all current social values.

This persistence created, finally, one of the greatest bodies of art the world has ever seen, but it cost the man dearly -- it cost him his life, his home, his friends, all ordinary comforts and amenities. It crippled him almost beyond recognition. But even on his deathbed he suddenly started up and threw himself at the world with a clenched fist.

April 9, 1940

Mozart, in his best work, has the profound sadness of a man trying to break out of a form not his own personally: which is to say a man trying to break out of prison. Child and man of his age, he was above it by being underground in it. On the other hand, the personal tragedy of Beethoven, the man, is that HE DID BREAK THROUGH THE FORM! (In Mozart's case it is like the Negro who walks around, personal life in him, contained in a social form which he did not make and from which he can never escape!)

In certain periods where the forms of art are breaking down (because of social breakdowns and changes) it is a bondage, a sign of servility, to work within those forms when one's content is in advance of the times. It was between these two worlds that Mozart was beginning to be caught by the time he had reached the age of independent manhood. Against him was ranged the entire world of common usage of the artist, represented by his employers and his very own father, a perfect servant and minor diplomat. The overlords did not want to know or hear what he was feeling and sensing; they wanted only the shell of his genius, never the substance. Here, in the simple and natural protection of his genius, is where Mozart began a subtle change in his life.

He pretended a servility (as Haydn did not have to pretend) by retaining the old decaying forms. And this is how he went underground -- he moved around in these forms freely, saying exactly what he wanted to say, loading them with a rare precise vehemence (which Beethoven was later to bring up into daylight!), often expressing all sorts of censorable materials behind opera masks.

He is a man of great elegance in his art, not all of it natural to his nature. His technical equipment is excellent and enviable. His playing contains a contained feeling of which he is somewhat afraid; and he possesses, when you think of it, little quality of the spirit. His name is Heifetz, and you know all of this when you hear him fiddle Mozart.

March 29, 1940

The man of genius walks, talks, sleeps, eats, loves, and works with a load of dynamite in him. If he carries this load carefully -- balance -- its power for good work and use is enormous -- it can landscape a whole mountainside. Abuse -- out of balance -- is suicide and a bitter grave.

It is in this sense that the artist, if he makes a proper amalgam, is beyond good and evil, for everything in him is for creation and life.

For example, let us say that Dostoevsky had impulses of rape in his heart.... See how a great artist held this part of himself within his recognition and acceptance of what he was. Its creative uses were enormous. It gave him work, tone, feeling, anguish, a wealth of feeling. Finally, it was just such "weaknesses" which gave Dostoevsky's novels their religious ecstatic fervor.

In other words ... inner contradictions are not solved by throwing out half of the personality, but by keeping both sides tearing and pulling, often torturing the self, until an AMALGAM ON A HIGH LEVEL OF LIFE AND EXPERIENCE IS ACHIEVED! For the artist there is not "bad". He must throw out nothing, exclude nothing, but always hold in balance. When he has made this balance he has made and found his form.

March 25, 1940

Life was mysterious and impressive to Beethoven, and like a true artist, he was gratified when it showed his face to him. The caprice of fortune he understood very well, the uncertainties of life were always with him. This is clearly in all of his music. What is the romantic temperament? It is amazed, impressed, delighted and enraged by the caprice of life. It is impulsive, swaggering, remonstrating, scolding, pleading, straining, sulking, appealing, denouncing the unfairness of life. It is the romantic who cries out that he is out of harmony with life -- by which he means that life is not in harmony with his vision of the way he saw it as a youth with moral and idealistic hunger to m ix his hands in it and live it fully and deeply. The classic art is to accept life, the romantic to reject it as it is and attempt to make it over as he wants it to be. The classic accepts the forms and conventions of life around it, the romantic breaks them down, rejects, and rebels against them -- they do not fit him -- they were made for the dead and let the dead clutch them in the graves! Yes, with the romantic it is all self-discovery and self-exploration. The injustice and coldness of life is constantly throwing him back on himself, and it is from this center of the expanding demanding growing ego that the romantic functions. The romantic's nature inwardly is one of chaos; this is because there are no accepted or standard values for him -- he will not and does not accept a code made by others. Everything must be tested and measured by his own experience -- anything else is rejected.

It is typical that Beethoven scorned the teachings of Haydn and only when much older was able to return to those lesson books and say that he should have paid attention in his youth to the lessons. But to have paid attention would have implied not a Beethoven but a Haydn! The roar of pain which comes from the romantic is real pain, albeit often a pain self-made.

Beethoven roars, Chopin complains, Brahms is resigned and sad. But in each case their pain comes from this real meeting: their ideal vision of life met the reality of life, and they are left with this utterance, "What, is that all it is? Is this all? Nothing else? Down with it!"

True, there is something vastly self-destructive in the essential nature of the romantic, but when he is a good artist he builds a form to gird him in, to prevent the scattering of his life -- his art teches him a way of life and he lives it! Simply that he insisted till the moment he died that his ideal vision of life, of the conduct of men and their interrelationships, was the correct and most valid way to live -- his world was better, and he was willing to fight and die for this belief: he did!

The romantic of the Stendahl type is rare. He understands what has happened to him and his aspirations -- HE DOES NOT ASPIRE IN HIS WORK -- and this detached sense of what has happened later forms the basis of his work, writing, in this case. But this is possible only when the man waits for a good ripe age before setting to work. Stendahl, if we chose, we could call a "romantic iconoclast", the romantic turned ironist, psychologist who looks underneath to reveal with contempt the pitifully paltry forms of life and convention around him.

March 24, 1940

You cannot live in old forms, or work in them, when your life has brought you ahead to a new point. Try better to keep a child in last year's coat. It is simply an intolerable contradiction which must be resolved consciously in order to bring the life and/or work up for a higher level of creativity. Otherwise the spirit dies a death and sterility is the only outcome.

Beethoven is the only man or artist I can think of at the moment who never once faltered in this difficult task: he was a fanatic! He hacked and chopped, twisted and tortured, but he did not EXCLUDE a drop of his experience from his work; in each phase of his life he found the right form for an increasingly higher and deeper experience. That is Beethoven's final lesson, if an artist may teach a lesson. Life is a series of rebirths, year after year more difficult, never to be refused, but always to be worked with, coped with, understood, used and used by, never going back, but always moving ahead and higher. Which is what Beethoven did. Easy words to write, these!

Why is Brahms an inferior artist, all other things equal? Because his last period is given over to "resignation" and acceptance. he did not have that same passion of the HEART which was Beethoven's. That is why any last Brahm's work is child's play compared to any last Beethoven work.

Beethoven's work, it must be said, represents the deepest expression of man's faith in life which has ever been written by a man. No artist before or since has expressed so deeply the will to live and accept every fact of life, to be both figuratively and literally crucified for his belief that the way to conquer life is to live without ever once relenting or letting up in that living.

It was Beethoven who understood the passion of Christ, not Bach, for he lived it and experienced it while Bach heard about it in a sort of secondhand way. What some writer once said is true: Bach sacrificed the Church, Beethoven sacrificed himself. His last quartets, a record of his sacrifice (or crucifixion), are more moving to the modern man than any page in the Bible.

March 17, 1940

The bad reviews of Night Music threw me back on myself, but that was good, that is very good, that is as it should always be! But the self independent, resolute! Let there be light, an inner light, a personal light, a light which touches unconscious negative plates of the plays to come with exactly the correct intensity. Keep away from those sensitive negative plates all light from the outside, but all! Later there will always be time to respond to the outside beams.

In this entry he describes the out-of-town tryout of his new play "Night Music" - It would be the last play the Group Theatre did as a company. The failure of "Night Music" was the death knell for the ensemble - despite the fact that it is a LOVELY play. But Odets - radical revolutionary playwright of the early 1930s - wasn't supposed to write lovely comedic romances. The audience wouldn't forgive him for it. It was seen as a BETRAYAL, not just a play they didn't like.

February 22, 1940

The performance of the play was tip-top -- the cast had never been better. The play suffered from what had always been wrong with it because of a certain lack in the direction -- a lack of clear outlining of situations, a lack of building up scenes, a certain missing in places of dramatic intensity. But none of these things was enough to do vital harm to a beautiful show, smooth, powerful and yet tender, fresh, moving, and touching, with real quality in all the parts. But I could see during the first act that the audience was taking it more seriously than it deserved; and I knew that the old thing was here again -- the critics had come expecting a King Lear, not a small delicate play. It all made me very tired, but at the end I thought to myself that it didn't matter, for the show was more or less what I intended; it was lovely and fresh, no matter what the critics said. And I knew, too, that if another and unknown writer's name had been on the script, there would have been critical raves that day.

People surged backstage after the curtain -- they all seemed to have had a good time. There were the usual foolish remarks from many of them -- "Enjoyable, but I don't know why," etc., etc. Also a good deal of insincere gushing from a lot of people who would like nothing better than to stick a knife in your ribs, God knows why!

I invited some people down to the house for a drink. Along came the Eislers, Kozlenkos, Bette, Julie [John] Garfield, Boris Aronson, Harry Carey and his wife, Morris [Carnovsky] and Phoebe [Brand] later, Harold [Clurman], Aaron Copland and Victor [Kraft], Bobby Lewis and his Mecican woman, etc., etc. We drank champagne, Scotch when the wine ran out, talked, smoked, filthied up the house, listened to some music. Then they went and I dropped into bed, dog-tired, unhappy, drunk, knowing what the reviews would be like in the morning. In and out I slept, in and out of a fever -- all of modern twentieth-century life in one day and a night.

February 22, 1940

Stella Adler was there with a party, smoke-eyed and neurotic -- usually when you are dying she is more dramatic about the event than you are!

February 1, 1940

In the Moussorgsky songs, if you do not have the emotion you do not have the song, not even the shadow of the song. Chekhov could hope to find and did find actors to play his plays; where can the talent of Moussorgsky find singers to sing his songs? For the point of each of M's songs is not in the notes, not in the words, but between them, a sort of suggested emotional line without which the song simply does not exist. Here is where the conventional songsinger is shown up for what he is, a tracer on glass, a sharper or duller instrument at his use, but not more. The trouble with the damn singers, unless they are fat and fifty, is that they do not give themselves a chance. They don't listen to the songs, they are not open to the music and what it emotionally suggests. Leaving aside the emotional significance, they can't even play with humor, with charm, deftness, alertness. Their backsides should be kicked off till they ache!

January 27, 1940

Perhaps this constant uncovering of the self is one of the prime impulses in the creative mechanism, it and the constant effort to relate the self to persons, things -- a woman -- outside of the self. All of the characters in my plays have the common activity of "a search for reality". Well, it's my activity before it's theirs. And before it was mine it was the activity of almost any serious artist who ever lived, from the breakdown of feudalism till today. When you say an artist died still looking for his form, as, for instance, Beethovern and Cezanne did, you mean he died still looking for his reality.

A man named Turner wrote a book on Beethoven and was very smart -- he called the book "Beethoven -- the search for reality." Woe to the artist who is able someday to look at his life and say, "Yes, this is it. Here I rest."

January 23, 1940

But one must make sure to write from a firm core even though, in my opinion, an attempt to reach as broad an audience as possible should always be taken into consideration. I thought once that it would be enough to play in a small cellar, but I soon saw that those who would come to the cellar were not the ones in need of what I could say.

January 17, 1940

Much of love for me is in giving. Unfortunately, I am not one of the receivers in life. I receive badly, restlessly, shamefully.

That last one kills me. I am the same.

Happy birthday, Clifford. And thank you thank you for your plays.

Miss Krumholtz. Unplugged.

I've posted this ridiculous backstage photo of myself before ... but Miss Krumholtz came up the other day in conversation, so here she is again. In all her desperate clunky glory. She's a geek. She cannot compete in the Meat Market of Courtship. The "irresistible Paris original" which makes all the other ladies in the office look willowy and gorgeous makes her look like a halfwit in an ill-fitting prom dress. She cannot see without her glasses. But her smile is courageous. She will survive. And she'll try to be cheerful, no matter what. Even as the world of males completely ignores her.

The Gallery Players: Man Of La Mancha

The Gallery Players in Brooklyn celebrates its 41st season this year - 41st! - Bravo!!

Last night I made the trek to go see my dear friend Jen in one of her dream roles Aldonza (or: Dulcinea) in Man Of La Mancha. Kind of a neat thing: Jen's mother has played the role of Aldonza four times, in various theatres - and it was in a production of Man Of La Mancha that Jen's mother met Jen's stepfather. Jen's stepfather has a boat called "Dulcinea". Sniff, sniff. So Man of La Mancha is a real connector in Jen's family, so it is just so so awesome that she would eventually get that same role. Passing on the torch.

Believe it or not, I had never seen a production of Man of La Mancha! I knew the story, and knew a couple of the songs (you know, the famous ones) - but had never seen it. So what a fun experience it was, to see it for the first time. I was mopping tears off my face at the end.

But! I also loved how funny it was! I mean, Spanish Inquisition? Prisoners? Funny? Well, frankly, yes. I loved the spirit of the company, and I loved the kind of improvisational feel that they brought to it (which is totally appropriate, if you think of the set-up - with Don Quixote assigning roles to prisoners who have to just jump up and begin "acting" ... ) Everyone was terrific.

Jen killed me. She KILLED ME.

We were roommates for nine years. Nine. Years. That's more successful than many marriages. We have since parted ways, as roommates, but she's one of my dearest friends.

Watching her at the end of the show, staring up into the lights, with tears on her face, a scarf over her head ....

Fuggedaboutit. I was toast.

It runs through May 18th. If you're a New Yorker, you can buy tickets here.

"April hath put a spirit of youth in everything."

Today is (supposedly - at least it's the agreed-upon date) the birthday of William Shakespeare. April 23, 1564.

One of the things I think about when I think about Shakespeare, or one of the things that inevitably comes into my mind, is my late great teacher Doug Moston, who died in 2003 (check out the comments there, too - I don't know any of those people, but they all had worked with Doug at one time or another and found their way to my post. Beautiful). Moston (an awesome awesome teacher) was responsible for getting Shakespeare's first folio (from 1623) published in facsimile. In facsimile, people. So it's basically well-done Xeroxes of the folio's pages. I own it. It's indispensable for actors, I think, but would also be fascinating for anyone interested in Shakespeare in general.

Modern versions of Shakespeare, modern editors ironed out his punctuation, regularizing it, etc. But ... in a lot of cases, the modern editors are looking at these plays as academic texts, works of literature - as opposed to scripts meant for actors to play. If you have the plays in facsimile (ie: how they looked in the first folio) - you can see an even deeper level of Shakespeare's intent as a playwright. Modern editors sometimes have added exclamation points, which I find a bit insulting. An exclamation point is an editorial comment - it says: "Here's how to say this line". It's directorial, mkay? You are saying, with that punctuation: "The emotion behind the line should be THIS." Shakespeare used very little "emotional" punctuation marks in his work. Almost none. He used periods and commas, and that's pretty much it. I don't want some EDITOR to tell me how to play Lady Macbeth.

Let's do a little compare and contrast, shall we?

Awhile back I wrote about what came to be known between me and Michael as the "twixt clock and cock" monologue from Cymbeline which I was working on at the time. I had the folio by me - and I wanted to compare it to the Riverside Shakespeare version - and check it out. Line by line. Fascinating. (And yes - "f" are "s"s in the folio. You get used to it after a while.) Here is how the two stack up, side by side. I'll comment after.

Riverside Shakespeare version:

False to his bed! What is it to be false?
To lie in watch there and to think on him?
To weep 'twixt clock and clock? if sleep charge nature,
To break it with a fearful dream of him
And cry myself awake? that's false to's bed, is it?

Folio version:

Falfe to his Bed? What is it to be falfe?
To lye in watch there, and to thinke on him?
To weepe 'twixt clock and clock? If fleep charge Nature,
To breake it with a fearfull dreame of him
And cry my felfe awake? That's falfe to's bed? Is it?

Let's look at the differences. The first "false to his bed" in the monologue is NOT an exclamation in the folio -although it appears in the Riverside as an exclamation. In the folio it is a QUESTION. Enormous difference, in terms of the playing of it! Also - in terms of the MEANING. What is Imogen DOING here? What is she actually saying?

My interpretation is: when it's a question, she - after reading his letter - is still trying to process what her husband just said to her. She is still in a state of shock, where she must just repeat what she just heard. "False to his bed?" She's stunned, disoriented. She can't believe this has happened. Whereas, with an exclamation mark, like in Riverside - she immediately jumps to the anger and the hurt. She is pissed, and defending herself. "False to his bed!" (Subtext: the NERVE of that guy!)

But no - the folio has it as a question. HUGE difference.

Also, the last line:

In the Riverside, it's all one sentence - with commas added.

"that's false to his bed, is it?"

It's all one thing, one thought. In the folio - it's more choppy. "That's false to his bed? Is it?" Her thought process is still erratic (Olivier was right: the thought is IN THE LINE.) ... so she's asking one question: "That's false to his bed?" Then she realizes she is not done, and questions again: "Is it?"

To me - the folio is MUCH more plain, in terms of emotion. You can feel Imogen's processing of the betrayal - in the punctuation. In the Riverside, it's ironed out a bit - modernized. And so the thought itself has been changed. Tsk tsk tsk.

That's false to his bed? Is it?

I prefer that one.

Let's move on.

In the same way that Shakespeare does not overdo it in terms of exclamation points and emotional punctuation, there are no stage-directions in his plays (as written) except for: Enter and Exeunt. Shakespeare put all of the stage directions INTO the language. Fascinating. If someone needs a torch to see through the darkness, Shakespeare will have the character say something along the lines of, "I can't see. It's too dark. Hand me that torch." The action ("hand me"), the props ("torch"), the motivation ("I can't see"), everything, is all in the language. Modern playwrights would add a stage direction to fill in the blanks: Horatio picks up a torch and squints through the darkness. See the difference? Although it's funny, I knew a playwright once who took the cue from Shakespeare, merely because she had been burned so many times with productions of her plays not being true to her intent. She said, "I have learned that if you want a character to be drinking a cup of coffee during the scene, if you think it is crucial to your plot that your character be drinking coffee - as opposed to tea, or as opposed to not drinking anything at all - you have to have the character say, 'I am going to have a cup of coffee' or something thereabouts. It has to be in the language, not in the stage directions- because then they can't cut it."

Shakespeare's plays, back in the day, were not extensively rehearsed. There wasn't much planning out beforehand. There was a troupe of well-trained actors who could learn things quickly, and knew, basically, how to project their voices, how to fight with swords, and how to play make believe. And because paper was expensive and scarce, they wouldn't be given the whole script - they would only be given their part. Imagine!! So you have to fit it in to the whole, you have to know how to do that. That's where the word "role" comes from: each part was written out on a "roll" of paper, and so you would be handed your "roll" to learn. Moston, as an experiment in classes, would do the same thing ... he would have parts written out on "rolls" and you would have to get up with other actors ... and try to make the scene happen, the way they did back in the day. I mean, people make jokes about Shakespeare's "O! I am slain!"s at the end of sword fights, but if you think about it: that is a stage direction. That is telling the actor (who might not have the whole play at his disposal) Okay. Die now. Those actors at the Globe were pros, man, they knew how to do crap like that ... You see "O I am slain" and you know: Yup. Time to die. Shakespeare doesn't write as a stage direction: Elaborate sword fight. Macbeth eventually dies. Uhm, no. Everything you need to know (as an audience member, and as an actor playing it) is in the language of the play. Marvelous.

The story of the "folio" is an amazing story, and I am so grateful that I studied under Doug Moston, that I worked on Shakespeare, using the folio as opposed to modern versions of the script.

All of this reminds me of something I began on the blog last year and never really followed through with - basically because life happens, and so did Dean Stockwell, and I couldn't keep it going ... but it is on the back burner, as something I would like to continue: read the plays in chronological order - or at least in what is generally agreed-upon to be their chronology - and write posts on each play. I decided to start with Two Gentlemen of Verona - it was either that or Comedy of Errors or the Henrys ... but I went with Two Gents. It was fun - I would like to start that series up again. Many of the plays I have not read in years. There are the old favorites - I read As You Like It and Hamlet for fun, they're plays I dip into all the time - but Richard III? It's been years. Anyway. Just another example of all of my plans and there not being enough time in the damn day.

Came across a very fun article which lets you know only a couple of the phrases (and words) invented (or co-opted) by Shakespeare :

Eaten out of house and home
Pomp and circumstance
Foregone conclusion
Full circle
The makings of
Method in the madness
Neither rhyme nor reason
One fell swoop
Seen better days
It smells to heaven
A sorry sight
A spotless reputation
Strange bedfellows
The world's (my) oyster

And don't forget:

Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.

Thanks, Bill, for your greatness. Maybe you were born to it. Maybe you achieved it. Maybe it was thrust upon you. Or maybe Christopher Marlowe wrote all the plays, and you just get all the credit. I doubt it, but who knows. Thanks anyway. And happy birthday.

In honor of the Bard, here is a huge post, made up mostly of excerpts from other people. But first - let's look at what the facsimile looks like, what you will get if you look at the folio:

Awesome!!

I'll start with a wonderful excerpt from the book Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, by Stephen Greenblatt.

Here he discusses Midsummer Night's Dream. One of the cool things about Midsummer is that, of all of his plays, it is the one where scholars have been unable to find a souce for it. Shakespeare did not invent plots, he used stories that were already in existence. But scholars believe that Midsummer may very well be the only one of his plays directly from his imagination.

By 1595, Shakespeare clearly grasped that his career was built on a triumph of the professional London entertainment industry over traditional amateur performances. His great comedy [Midsummer] was a personal celebration of escape as well as of mastery. Escape from what? From tone-deaf plays, like Thomas Preston's A Lamentable Tragedy, Mixed Full of Pleasant Mirth, Containing the Life of Cambises, King of Persia, whose lame title Shakespeare parodied. From coarse language and jog trotting meter and rant pretending to be passion. From amateur actors too featherbrained to remember their lines, too awkward to perform gracefully, too shy to perform energetically, or, worst of all, too puffed up with vanity to perform anything but their own grotesque egotism. The troupe of artisans who perform "Pyramus and Thisbe" -- the weaver Nick Bottom, the bellows-mender Francis Flute, the tinker Tom Snout, the joiner Snug, the tailor Robin Starveling, and their director, the carpenter Peter Quince -- are collectively an anthology of theatrical catastrophes.

The laughter in act 5 of A Midsummer Night's Dream -- and it is one of the most enduringly funny scenes Shakespeare ever wrote -- is built on a sense of superiority in intelligence, training, cultivation, and skill. The audience is invited to join the charmed circle of the upper-class mockers onstage. This mockery proclaimed the young playwright's definitive passage from naivete and homespun amateurism to sophisticated taste and professional skill. But the laughter that the scene solicits is curiously tender and even loving. What saves the scene of ridicule from becoming too painful, what keeps it delicious in fact, is the self-possession of the artisans. In the face of open derision, they are all unflappable. Shakespeare achieved a double effect. On the one hand, he mocked the amateurs, who fail to grasp the most basic theatrical conventions, by which they are to stay in their roles and pretend they cannot see or hear their audience. On the other hand, he conferred an odd, unexpected dignity upon Bottom and his fellows, a dignity that contrasts favorably with the sardonic rudeness of the aristocratic spectators.

Even as he called attention to the distance between himself and the rustic performers, then, Shakespeare doubled back and signaled a current of sympathy and solidarity. [Note from Sheila: It occurs to me that this is what Christopher Guest accomplished in Waiting for Guffman. Anyone who has been an actor has suffered through shows like that one. Most of us have done loads of community theatre. You can scoff at it, and scorn it ... and there's a lot to scorn. But Christopher Guest approaches it with affection. Which is why I think that movie is so wonderful. Yes, we laugh at those people, but we love them too. Okay, back to Will.] As when borrowing from the old morality plays and folk culture, he understood at once that he was doing something quite different and that he owed a debt. The professions he assigned the Athenian artisans were not chosen at random -- Shakespeare's London theatre company depended on joiners and weavers, carpenters and tailors -- and the tragedy they perform, of star-crossed lovers, fatal errors, and suicides, is one in which the playwirght himself was deeply interested. In the period he was writing the "Pyramus and Thisbe" parody, Shakespeare was also writing the strikingly similar Romeo and Juliet; they may well have been on his writing table at the same time. A more defensive artist would have scrubbed harder in an attempt to remove these marks of affinity, but Shakespeare's laughter was not a form of renunciation or concealment. "This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard," Hippolyta comments, to which Theseus replies, "The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse if imagination amend them." "It must be your imagination, then, and not theirs," is her rejoinder (5.1.207-10) -- the spectators' imagination and not the players' -- but that is precisely the point: the difference between the professional actor and the amateur actor is not, finally, the crucial consideration. They both rely upon the imagination of the spectators. And, as if to clinch the argument, a moment later, at the preposterous suicide speech of Pyramus --

Approach, ye furies, fell.
O fates, come, come,
Cut thread and thrum,
Quail, crush, conclude and quell
(5.1.273-76)

-- Hippolyta finds herself unaccountably moved: "Beshrew my heart, but I pity the man" (5.1.279).

When in A Midsummer Night's Dream the thirty-year-old Shakespeare, drawing deeply upon his own experiences, thought about his profession, he split the theatre between a magical, virtually nonhuman element, which he associated with the power of the imagination to lift itself away from the constraints of reality, and an all-too-human element, which he associated with the artisans' trades that actually made the material structures -- buildings, platforms, costumes, musical instruments, and the like -- structures that gave the imagination a local habitation and a name. He understood, and he wanted the audience to understand, that the theatre had to have both, both the visionary flight and the solid, ordinary earthiness.

That earthiness was a constituent part of his creative imagination. He never forgot the provincial, everday world from which he came or the ordinary face behind the mask of Arion.

I think that's kind of a beautiful analysis of that play. Mitchell - (a friend who just played Puck in Indiana Rep's production of Midsummer): what say you?

Additionally, I'm going to post a couple of quotes from a book I positively adore: Michael Schmidt's Lives of the Poets.

This was a book recommended to me by the doppelganger, and I tore through it ferociously. If you like poetry, I highly recommend you pick it up. What's really great about this book (a survey of English-language poets, from Richard Rolle of Hampole to Les Murray - quite a wide span of time) - but what's great about it is that Michael Schmidt is not an academic. He has nothing to do with academia. He is a publisher, and a reviewer. He is a poetry fan. He doesn't write from the dusty halls of a university, and he is not trying to impress. He chooses poets he loves, and tells us why he loves them and why he thinks so-and-so is important. It's a wonderful book, really accessible.

How he deals with Shakespeare is especially interesting. Because this book spans so much time, Shakespeare is just another name on a long long long list ... and yet ... of course ... he overshadows pretty much everything. His shadow even goes backwards, so that the poets that came just before him don't stand a chance either. It's very interesting.

In Michael Schmidt's view, the poet whose legacy suffers the most is Ben Jonson. Here is what he has to say about that:

Jonson suffers one irremediable disability: Shakespeare. Alexander Pope underlines the point in his Preface to the Works of Shakespeare (1725): "It is ever the nature of parties to be in extremes; and nothing is so probable, as that because Ben Jonson had much the more learning, it was said on the other hand that Shakespeare had none at all; and because Shakespeare had much the most wit and fancy, it was retorted on the other, that Jonson wanted both. Because Shakespeare borrowed nothing, it was said that Ben Jonson borrowed everything."

In the plays the proximity of Shakespeare does Jonson the most harm, though he writes plays so different from his friend's that they seem distinct in kind and period. Part of that difference is Jonson's poetic balance, deliberate artistry: he knows what he wants to say and has the means of saying it, no more or less. He speaks for his age, while Shakespeare speaks for himself. Jonson's art is normative, Shakespeare's radical and exploratory. In Jonson there's structure and gauged variegation, in Shakespeare movement and warmth. Coleridge disliked the "rankness" of Jonson's realism and found no "goodness of heart". He condemned the "absurd rant and ventriloquism" in the tragedy Sejanus,staged by Shakespeare's company at the Globe. At times Jonson's words, unlike Shakespeare's, tend to separate out and stand single, rather than coalesce, as though he had attended to every single word. His mind is busy near the surface. He is thirsty at the lip, not at the throat....

Dryden's criticism is telling at one point: Jonson "weaved" the language "too closely and laboriously" and he "did a little too much Romanise our tongue, leaving the words he translated almost as much Latin as he found them." Dryden ends with the inevitable verdict: "I admire him, but I love Shakespeare."

The following excerpts are from Schmidt's chapter on Shakespeare.

When drama began to be printed, blank verse was an ugly medium. Printers did their best to set it out prettily but got little enough thanks for their labors. Not wholly unconnected with this, some of my predecessors harbored bad feelings about William Shakespeare. About the work and the way it broke upon the world. Not about the man, born in the same year as Marlowe yet somehow seeming his junior an dhis apprentice. The great painter William Turner once said of Thomas Girtin, who died at twenty-seven, "Had Tommy Girtin lived, I should have starved." But Girtin died, Marlowe died; and Turner lived, Shakespeare lived. Laurels are awarded accordingly.

Poems vs. the plays - here's what Schmidt has to say:

The greatest poet of the age -- the greatest poet of all time, for all his corruptions -- inspires in publishers and in other writers a kind of vertigo. For Donald Davie Shakespeare represents "a vast area of the English language and the English imagination which is as it were 'charged', radio-active: a territory where we dare not travel at all often or at all extensively, for fear of being mortally infected, in the sense of being overborne, so that we cease to speak with our own voices and produce only puny echoes of the great voice which long ago took over that whole terrain for its own." This is true of the plays. But had Shakespeare produced only the epyllia, the Sonnets and the occasional poems, we'd have a much more proportioned view of him, smaller in scale than Jonson, Donne, Spencer and Marlowe. The poems are excellent, but it is the language and vision of the plays that dazzles. The slightly absurd scenario of Venus and Adonis, the excesses of Lucree and the unevent brilliance of the Sonnets would not by themselves have changed the world. Venus and Adonis was, it's true, Shakespeare's most successful poem. By the time he died, ten editions had been published, and six followed in the two decades after his death. There was money in that large, bossy, blowsy goddess almost eating alive the pretty lad. Nowadays it is read because it is by Shakespeare. And Lucree, with its cruel eloquence, its harsh tracing of one of the most brutal tales of rape in the classical repertory, while better balanced and constructed, touches unreflectingly on matters that require a less restrained psychology than the poet can provide...

This is a story about poetry, not drama or literal prostitution; the plays I'll leave to someone else. I'm concerned with "the rest", a handful of works that the poet took most seriously; the epyllia Richard Field published, the 154 Sonnets and "The Phoenix and the Turtle". I could add songs from the plays, but once you dip into a drama, where do you stop? A monologue is like an aria, a description can be like a whole pastoral or satire. And which songs are Shakespeare's, which did he pull out of Anon.'s bran tub? Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love's Lavours Lost, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venic, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Measure for Measure, Cymbeline, A Winter's Tale and The Tempest all include detachable songs, but the plays snared them and that's where they belong.

Shakespeare is so much at the heart -- is the heart -- of this story that even by skirting around him we take his measure. Apart from his genius, Shakespeare had some real advantages. The world for him was new, as it had been for Chaucer. There were the navigators' discoveries, there was the rising power of the monarch, new industry, new learning.

Here Schmidt talks about the mystery hidden within the Sonnets:

The Sonnets have attracted a critical literature second in vastness only to that on Hamlet, and so various that at times it seems the critics are discussing works entirely unrelated. They contain a mystery, and the critic-as-sleuth is much in evidence. Unlike sonnets by his contemporaries, none of these poems has a traced "source" in Italian or elsewhere; most seem to emerge from an actual occasion, an occasion not concealed, yet sufficiently clouded to make it impossible to say for sure what or whom it refers to. Setting these veiled occasions side by side can yield a diversity of plots: a Dark Lady, a Young Man, now noble, now common, now chaste, now desired, possessed, and lost. All we can say for sure is that desire waxes and wanes, time passes. Here certainly, the critic says, are hidden meanings; and where meanings are hidden, a key is hidden too. Only, Shakespeare is a subtle twister. Each sleuth-critic finds a key, and each finds a different and partial treasure. A.L. Rowse found his key, affirming that Shakespeare's mistress was the poet Emilia Lanyer (1569 - 1645), illegitimate daughter of an Italian royal musician and also an intimate of the astrologer Simon Forman, who gives a brief picture of a brave, cunning operator. Her 1611 volume of poem includes ten dediocations and cleverly celebrates the Dowager Countess of Cumberland, the poet's particular quarry, in company with Christ and biblical heroines. The words she attributes to Eve are the first clear glimmer of English feminism in verse. Eve may -- almost innocently -- have handed Adam the apple, but Adam's sons crucified, in the bright light of day and reason, Jesus Christ. "This sin of yours hath no excuse, or end."

There is a further mystery: Who is "the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets Mr. W.H." to whom the poet (or the publisher?) wishes "all happiness and that eternity promised by our ever-living poet"? The T.T. who signs the dedication is Thomas Thorpe, publisher-printer in 1609 of the poems: W.H. may have been his friend, who procured the manuscipt, or Shakespeare's lover, or a common acquaintaince - William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke? Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton (dedicatee of the two epyllia)? William Hervey, Southampton's stepfather, getting the poet to encourage his stepson to marry? Much passionate energy is expended on a riddle without a definitive answer. Thomas Thorpe was a mischievous printer. I suspect he knew what he was doing: no title page in history has been more pored over.

You can tell Schmidt is a publisher, right?

Here's more on the Sonnets:

There is not a linear plot to the sequence of the sonnets. Ther are "runs", but they break off; other "runs" begin. Is it a series of sequences, or a miscellany of them? Some editors reorder the poems without success. Sonnets 1 - 126 are addressed to a young man or men; the remainder to a Dark (-haired) Lady. There may be a triangle (or two): the beloveds perhaps have a relationship as well. The poems are charged with passionate ambiguities.

Those who read the poems as a sonnet sequence were for a long while baffled. The Sonnets were neglected, or virtually so, until 1780, when they were dusted down and reedited. They did not immediately appeal, but gradually, during the 19th century, they caught fire -- fitfully, like wet kindling. Wordsworth, Keaths, Hazlitt, and Landor failed to appreciate them. Those who love them properly are fewer than those who enjoy them. Those who love them properly are fewer than those who enjoy arguing about them. W.H. Auden argues (credibly) that "he wrote them ... as one writes a diary, for himself alone, with no thought of a public." T.S. Eliot suggests that like Hamlet they are "full of some stuff that the writer could not drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate into art. And when we search for this feeling, we find it, as in the sonnets, very difficult to localise." Now the public clambers over them, prurient, with several dozen authoritative guides.

And now (you can sense reluctantly) Schmidt talks about the plays.

Drama could be profitable: this discovery coincided with "the coming into the field of the first pupils of the new grammar schools of Edward VI", men who did not resent or distrust commerce and entrepreneurship. A new class of "mental adventurers", the classically educated sons of merchants, made the running. Marlowe was the son of a cobbler, Shakespeare of a prosperous glove maker of Stratford-on-Avon, where the poet was born in 1564. Both were provincials, one educated at the grammar school at Stratford, the other at King's School, Canterbury. They were harbingers of the social change that would culminate in the Commonwealth.

One of Shakespeare's advantages was an apparent disadvantage. He was not university-trained. "When Shakespeare attempts to be learned like Marlowe, he is not very clever." That is part of the problem with his epyllia. But Ford Madox Ford reminds us that he had "another world to which he could retire; because of that he was a greater poet than either Jonson or Marlowe, whose minds were limited by their university-training to find illustrations, telles quelles, from illustrations already used in the Greek or Latin classics. It was the difference between founding a drawing on a lay figure and drawing or painting from a keen and delighting memory."

Sidney advises: "Look in thy heart and write." In the Sonnets, Shakespeare takes Sidney's counsel without the platonizing the great courtier intended. The heart he looks into is singularly complex and troubled, and the poems he writes from this impure "I" are as full of life as the plays.

I'll let Puck's words that end Midsummer close this post. They seem appropriate:

If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber'd here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend:
if you pardon, we will mend:
And, as I am an honest Puck,
If we have unearned luck
Now to 'scape the serpent's tongue,
We will make amends ere long;
Else the Puck a liar call;
So, good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends.

Moose Murders: "the standard of awfulness against which all Broadway flops are judged"

This great NY Times article by Campbell Robertson made me laugh out loud. Moose Murders, a play that ran on Broadway for one night only (not counting 2 weeks of disastrous previews), garnered some of the worst reviews in recorded theatrical history - they're even worse than the reviews for, oh, Waterworld ... ... and the show has now passed into theatre mythology. It was the biggest flop ever - not so much monetarily but because of the vitriol it spawned. People wonder: "Was it really that bad??" Since no one saw it but that first night audience, who can tell? It's now just part of the oral history of Broadway. Anyway, it's a wonderful article - where they track down the original players, and talk about what, exactly, it was that went so wrong.

I mean, listen to the opening lines of Frank Rich's original review in 1983:

From now on, there will always be two groups of theatergoers in this world: those who have seen ''Moose Murders,'' and those who have not. Those of us who have witnessed the play that opened at the Eugene O'Neill Theater last night will undoubtedly hold periodic reunions, in the noble tradition of survivors of the Titanic. Tears and booze will flow in equal measure, and there will be a prize awarded to the bearer of the most outstanding antlers. As for those theatergoers who miss ''Moose Murders'' - well, they just don't rate. A visit to ''Moose Murders'' is what will separate the connoisseurs of Broadway disaster from mere dilettantes for many moons to come.

Holy crap! Even THEN people seemed to know that they had witnessed something historic! There are lots of flops, sure, but only a precious few become historic flops. I got one word for you. Ishtar. Or no, how 'bout two words. Heaven's Gate. I know it probably wasn't funny at ALL to be in such a play - but still, some of Rich's language here is hilarious:

This loathsome trio is quickly joined by a whole crowd of unappetizing clowns.

Wow.

Frank Rich wrote another piece about Moose Murders, with a bit more distance (oh, say, a MONTH) - it's a rumination on the "particular pleasure" of seeing "a legendary flop". Only a month had passed since Moose Murders had closed and it had already passed into legend. Now that is a bad show.

Rich writes:

What makes certain bombs into legends? It's hard to say, precisely - they don't wear fur coats. Once it was a mark of distinction for a play to close in one night, but in these troubled times even that phenomenon is a sad commonplace. Some theater people define legendary bombs by the amount of money that went down the drain, or the high caliber of talent expended, or the extravagant foolhardiness of the esthetic mission. Others let Joe Allen, the theater district bistro, be the final arbiter: that restaurant has a whole wall bedecked with posters from a select group of famous turkeys. Whatever the definition, it can't be quantified - a flop just must have a certain je ne sais quoi to rise to legendary status. But what I do know is this: the only Playbill I've saved thus far in this decade is the one from ''Moose Murders.''

But now, with over 20 years having gone by, the stories of Moose Murders have grown and it has now become a badge of honor to have been in the damn things. Which I think is so hysterical as well. Campbell Robertson writes:

The reviews, which were not helped by the man reeking of vomit who sat in the third row during a press preview, made the 14 performances of “Moose Murders” legendary in theater history. Cast members trumpet their involvement in Playbill biographies. The number of people who claim to have seen the show, at the Eugene O’Neill Theater, seems to have multiplied beyond physical possibility, like those who claim to have seen the Beatles at Shea Stadium or Game 5 of the 1956 World Series.

Reading the kind of grimly humorous present-day comments from everyone involved - what a delight. Arthur Bicknell, who wrote Moose Murders, was asked if the play was really that bad! He replied, “Was it really that bad? The simple answer is yes.” One critic at the time suggested that Bicknell change his name, that was the only way he would survive such a disaster.

Holland Taylor had replaced Eve Arden after a preview - because Eve Arden had basically said, "Fuck this, I'm outta here." Holland Taylor was reached for comment for the present article and she said that stepping into that nightmare was quite an experience.

“There were things that I put my foot down about and changed,” she said in a telephone interview. “But there were things I couldn’t change. Like the play.”

I love her.

Taylor said that the play was “a misshapen thing at an almost Shakespearean level" (I'm laughing out loud) - but that it also taught her a lot. You always learn more from the bombs than from the successes.

Dammit.

I so wish I had been there.

Great article (read the whole thing). Kudos to the writer for getting such great quotes from everyone, and kudos to all the original players who were so forthright in their memories about such a colossal bomb.

UPDATE: Just found another eyewitness account.

So when people ask me if I saw Moose Murders, I have to answer: "Yes and no." For I lasted--I mean this--11 minutes, still the shortest time I've ever spent at a show. Had I known the play would become infamous and not just another quick closer, I might have stayed on. But I'd been on a business trip, had schlepped my luggage to the theater, was sweaty and hungry and not in the mood to have my intelligence insulted any more than it had to be. So I missed the second-act scene that I heard about later, where the quadriplegic magically bolted from his wheelchair and kicked a moose-suited man below the belt.

And June Gable, who was in the show, is quoted as saying:

"You know, thank God, I have very little memory of the show. It was an outrageous experience and it was one reason why I left the business shortly afterwards. I actually went to India and spent a year there searching for the meaning of life."

Happy birthday, John Millington Synge

Today is the birthday of Irish playwright John Millington Synge - born on this day in 1871. He was author of The Playboy of the Western World, Riders to the Sea, and more - not to mention his wonderful book about his time on the Aran Islands, called, coincidentally, The Aran Islands. Playboy is now in the history books, not only for being a wonderful play, and part of the theatrical revolution going on in Ireland at the time (the creation of the Abbey Theatre, etc.) - but also because of the riots that broke out when it opened (they are now known as "The Playboy Riots"). Things got so out of hand that a police squad had to stand along the edge of the stage during the performance, so that the actors wouldn't get hurt or mobbed. If I had a time machine, I would LOVE to go back and be there on the opening night of that play.

Synge wrote:

Ireland, for a few years more, we have a popular imagination that is fiery and magnificent, and tender; so that those of us who wish to write start with a chance that is not given to writers in places where the springtime of the local life has been forgotten, and the harvest is a memory only, and the straw has been turned into bricks.

Synge's time out on the Aran Islands, off the wild west coast of Ireland, gave him the nuggets of inspiration for many of his plays. Out there the "native language" was still spoken, out there he could encounter the real Ireland.

Synge had spent a lot of time in Europe, taking courses in French literature, immersing himself in different cultures, reading Baudelaire, writing poems, chasing girls ... You know, all La Boheme stuff. He remained interested in his own country, his own heritage - but there wasn't really a place for him there. (Interesting: NOW it's hard to imagine Ireland without Synge, but he had to TAKE that ground, he had to claim it - it didn't exist before he came along.) Yeats' whole nationalistic literary (and theatrical) movement (in broader terms - the Irish literary revival) drew Synge back to his home country - the Abbey Theatre was formed - things were HAPPENING in Ireland. In retrospect, it all seems inevitable. Of course Synge would not only come back to be part of that movement, but he would end up defining that movement.

Yeats gave Synge a piece of now legendary advice (and this is a direct quote):

Give up Paris, you will never create anything by reading Racine, and Arthur Symons will always be a better critic of French literature. Go to the Arran Islands. Live there as if you were one of the people themselves; express a life that has never found expression.

In the middle of what was, essentially, an Irish cultural revival, Yeats (having been out to the Aran Islands) recognized that there was something untouched out there, a primitive life, Irish language still spoken, the culture not corrupted. Yet. It was a race against time.

The leaders of the cultural movement in Ireland at that time all had the same idea: Inspiration lay in the West of Ireland. Go west. Go west to find the real Ireland. (Interesting, to think of the final paragraphs of Joyce's The Dead (excerpt here).

So Synge took Yeats' advice and went west.

The story of his four trips out to the Islands make up his book The Aran Islands, a wonderful rich travelogue, a classic of the genre. I highly recommend it!! He sits around turf fires with the various storytellers, and listens, and writes the folktales and anecdotes down later. These stories contain the germs of Playboy, the germs of Shadow of the Glen, the germs of Riders. Yeats was right. With all of Yeats' airy-fairy Celtic frippery, he understood that a powerful culture lay beneath the surface, a culture that had never been shown to the world, never been expressed.

Not surprising, then, that Playboy of the Western World would cause such an uproar.

Here is an excerpt from Máire Nic Shiubhlaigh's marvelous book The Splendid Years: Recollections of Máire Shiubhlaigh as told to Edwa, which is the story of the Irish National Theatre. Máire was an actress, highly involved with the cultural revival of the time, and a member of the Abbey Theatre. Her memories of Synge (and also her memories of the "Playboy riots") are fascinating. Here she speaks of Synge:

John M. Synge who came to us with his play direct from the Aran Islands, where the material for most of his later works was gathered, was born near Dublin in 1871, graduated at Trinity College, and shortly afterwards left Ireland for the Continent, living alternately in Germany and France, where he made a rather precarious livelihood as a violinist and contributor to literary magazines. Yeats had discovered him in Paris in about 1897 and, recognizing the quality of his writings, had brought him back to Ireland, where he introduced him to Aran, prophesying that in the beautiful lyrical prose of the western peasant he would find an original vehicle for dramatic composition. He was right. Synge went to Aran for a month, and stayed there, on and off, for a matter of years. He drew his inspiration from the hearths of the tiny whitewashed cabins and the harsh rocks of the western seaboard, gathering tales and expressions from the old and the young of the most picturesque portion of Ireland. In a short life -- he died at the early age of 38 -- he wove them into sombre dramatic tapestries, embroidered with the rhythmic language of the Irish peasant. His prose, highly musical and enriched with flashes of the most beautiful poetry, he devised simly by transcribing direct from the Gaelic of the islands. It is most difficult for an actor to master; most effective if delivered correctly.

She's got that right. I did a scene from Playboy in a class in graduate school, and while my scene partner and I had a hell of a lot of fun working on it, it was DAMN difficult to get that language right. Not just the language, but the rhythm, the tone. It doesn't matter if you get the words all correct, and remember all your lines, if you say them in the wrong rhythm. Rhythm is everything.

Back to Synge.

He was a gentle fellow, shy, with that deep sense of humour that is sometimes found in the quietest people. His bulky figure and heavy black moustache gave him a rather austere appearance -- an impression quickly dispelled when he spoke. His voice was mellow, low; he seldom raised it. But for his quiet personality he might have passed unnoticed at any gathering. During rehearsals of his play, he would sit quietly in the background, endlessly rolling cigarettes. This was a typical gesture, born more of habit than of any desire for tobacco -- he gave away more cigarettes than he smoked. At the first opportunity, he would lever his huge frame out of a chair and come up on to the stage, a half-rolled cigarette in eaach hand. Then he would look enquiringly round and thrust the little paper cylinders forward towards whoever was going to smoke them. In later years he became the terror of fire-conscious Abbey stage-managers. He used to sit timidly in the wings during plays, rolling cigarettes and handing them to the players as they made their exits.

He didn't set out to revolutionize Irish theatre. He didn't set out to be a genius, or to write great plays. He just wrote down what he knew. That was the ONLY way this guy could write. And it turned everything upside down.

Here is Máire's description of some of the objections to Shadow, just to give you an idea of what was going on, and to also set the stage for the "Playboy riots". Synge was, indeed, ahead of his time. The world is rarely kind to those born ahead of their time.

The piece was "un-Irish" wrote some reviewers, an "insult" in fact to the peasant women of Ireland whom Nora Burke was taken to typify. There was an immense verbal furore about it. A number of writers claiming that Synge was slyly attacking the institution known as the "made marriage", and attributing it solely to Ireland, raised all sorts of objections. Others wrote of the character of Nora Burke: "Nora Burke is a lie". Of the play they said: "It is no more Irish than the Decameron. It is a staging of the old-world libel on womankind -- the Widow of Ephesus."

Now, I do not propose to analyse the extraordinary attitude adopted towards the play. Indeed, the attacks were launched so suddenly that few of us were even able to gather what they were all about. Perhaps it was that the Irish play-going public of that time was so used to the "genteel" comedy of the established theatre which I mentioned earlier -- the entertaining but not very realistic stuff that was time and again put before it -- that it couldn't swallow a credible satire. In those days if an actress played an unpleasant part, then it followed that she was an unpleasant person. Similarly, if a dramatist wrote a nasty play he was a nasty fellow. Then, of course, there was the fact that Ireland was on the threshold of a renaissance. Everybody, writer, politician, artist, was at pains to eulogise over the beauty of the Irish character. The advent of a comparatively unknown writer who painted an unpleasant if realistic picture of the peasantry at such a time was, to say the least, unwelcome. The Dubliners who raised the loudest objections could not accept In the Shadow of the Glen as a play. They refused to be entertained.

In 1907, the Abbey Theatre produced Playboy of the Western World. Máire, who was there, writes:

The "Playboy Riots", as they came to be known, indicate very clearly some of the difficulties that the Abbey was called upon to face during its first years -- and they show how the theatre, under Yeats, managed to surmount them. When this play is produced in Dublin now it is recognised and enjoyed as a work of art. In 1907 it drove a number of people into such a frenzy that they nearly wrecked the Abbey. I am in rather a good position to describe the riots because I was in the audience during some of them. Curiosity had taken me into the theatre, as it had taken many another person that week.

It was about the end of 1906 that Synge finished the Playboy ... Yeats later mentioned that Synge took considerable trouble over the piece and scrapped a number of earlier versions before he fixed on the one which was eventually produced...Yeats never tired of recounting the care which Synge lavished on the piece. This, indeed, may have been indirectly responsible for the reception accorded the play by some sections of the public, whose main argument against it was that it was "a slander on the peasantry of Ireland". As in the case of The Shadow of the Glen, its realism gave offence. The only differnce between it and any other play that did not take was that the public, instead of showing its lack of interest in the accepted way -- by its non-attendance -- displayed its disapproval by rioting in the theatre throughout the play's run. The most unusual feature of the affair was that although the players appeared on the stage and acted their parts for a whole week, the uproar caused by the audience was so great that the play was never really heard on any night but the first, and those who took part in the demonstrations on subsequent occasions were dependent on opinions of the firstnight audience and a few rather hysterical newspaper reports. As the week progressed, the trouble instead of lessening, increased, and before the run of the play was half over, the management felt compelled to call for the assistance of the police to preserve order.

The explanations put forward by the rioters during the week were many and varied and it is worth remarking that no two people appeared to base their objections on exactly the same thing. Some objected to the piece because "it made a hero out of a murderer" (the play deals in part with the welcome accorded by a West of Ireland village to a weak-willed boy who believes he has just killed his father); others claimed that the language used was too strong; more contented themselves by saying that the play was "vicious, untrue, and uncalled for" -- a "hideous caricature" in fact; while a considerable number based their objections on the assumption that the piece was a deliberate attack by Synge on Ireland in retaliation for the manner in which The Shadow of the Glen and The Well of the Saints had been received.

(All of this makes me think of what Joyce said, when it became apparent that no Irish publisher would go near The Dubliners and he would have to look outside his own country for a publisher: "It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs round my stories. I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilization in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass."

Máire describes what it was like in the theatre, on the opening night of Playboy of the Western World, January 26, 1907.

The first act went well. There was laughter at the right places and the correct degree of solemnity was maintained when it was demanded. But during the second act I began to feel a tenseness in the air around me -- I was sitting in the pit -- and there were murmurs from the stalls and parts of the gallery. Before the curtain fell it was obvious that there was going to be some sort of trouble. Faint calls and ejaculations like "Oh, no! Take it off!" came from various parts of the house and the atmosphere gradually grew taut. In the third act things really came to a head and those around began to stamp the floor and shout towards the stage, the noise gradually increasing until the voices of the players were drowned. People stood up in their seats and demanded the withdrawal of the play, and when it became clear that the cast was determined to see the thing out to the end, tempers began to fray. The auditorium became a mass of people pulling and pushing in all directions. By the time the curtain fell on the last act, the crowd was arguing and fighting with itself. People in front leaned over the back of seats and demanded quiet -- a lot of people seemed to be doing this -- and those at the back responded by shouting and hissing loudly. The crowd which eventually emerged into the street was in an ugly mood.

Despite vicious and hysterical reviews the play went on. One of the objections was that the word "shift" appeared in the play (meaning: "chemise", or "slip", whatever you want to call it). Christy - the lead character in the play - says - in what is now acknowledged to be a fine piece of dramatic literature, and one of the classic monologues of the stage: "It's Pegeen I'm seeking only, and what'd I care if you brought me a drift of chosen females, standing in their shifts itself, maybe, from this place to the eastern world?" This was seen as a shock and an outrage.

The Press and the public called for the play to be closed, the hysteria mounted, but the Abbey refused to capitulate. Obviously, Synge had struck a nerve. But things were getting out of hand, it was a violent atmosphere in the audience ... and so Yeats tried to quell this fire. Máire describes:

On the third night Yeats addressed the audience before the curtain rose. If anyone had anything to say against the piece they would be welcomed at a debate which he would be glad to arrange in the theatre at some other time. He was interrupted several times. He asked the interrupters to at least listen to the play so that they would know what it was they were objecting to.

It is just like those idiots who protested Scorsese's Last Temptation without even seeing it. I have no patience and no tolerance for people like that. I'm pretty open-minded, you know "live and let live", but everyone has their limits, everyone has their thing that they cannot endure - and I cannot bear people like that. I don't want to listen, or try to "understand where they're coming from". That's the thing. I DO understand where they are coming from, and that is why I have contempt for them. My contempt comes directly FROM understanding. Their sense of themselves is so fragile that it's a house of cards. Even the fact that Scorsese's movie EXISTED threatened their entire world view. Fine. Go home then and read only the Bible and close the blinds and don't let the big bad nasty world touch your precious house of cards, and let those of us who actually want to SEE the movie decide for ourselves.

Such people have always existed. Their complaints are always the same. As a matter of fact, without the idiots, there would have been no such thing as "The Playboy Riots" - which catapulted Irish theatre onto an international stage. So I suppose we should be grateful in a way! Nothing like someone screaming, "NO ONE SHOULD SEE THIS" to make something into a big giant hit.

Back to the Playboy Riots:

As on the first night, the opening passages were listened to quietly, and even evoked a little laughter. Halfway through the second act, however, a murmur arose in the pit and a man a few rows away stood up and, without any apparent reason, hit the person beside him. A gasp ran around the whole house and the lights went up. All around him the crowd was breaking into disorder.

Within minutes, the audience in the pit and stalls was completely disorganised, and the crowd in thte back and side galleries was almost as bad. Almost everyone was standing. The noise was deafening. Yeats appeared on the stage and pleaded with the sensible members of the audience to remain quiet. His voice was drowned by catcalls, cheers, much stamping of feet, and from somewhere at the back ,the notes of a toy trumpet which came from the centre of a group of young men who looked like university students. He continued to speak, but his words were apparently objected to by those in front, for a howl of protest went up from the stalls and parts of the side gallery, which increased in volume as those behind joined in or tried to cheer the protest down. On the stage the players stood in little knots, discussing the occurrences amongst themselves.

As the noise increased and several arguments broke out around the theatre, Yeats left his place on the stage. A few minutes later the doors into the auditorium opened and to the horror and surprise of most of those present, a body of police entered. At the same time the curtain came down and a semblance of order was restored -- partly due to the sight of the uniforms ...

After a brief speech by Yeats, and the ejection of the more truculent members of the audience, peace was partially restored, and everyone sat down again. At this stage it would have been impossible for anyone to get out. After everyone had been quietened and the greater part of the audience reseated, it would have been dangerous for anyone to stand up. Those who did so were immediately surrounded by hefty policement and shepherded, not too gently, in the direction of the vestibule.

Meanwhile, the orchestra, a recent addition to the theatre, began to play. The music seemed to help matters somewhat, and things almost returned to what they were before the play began. There was much discussion and gesticulation going on however. The affair was still far from settled.

After some time the orchestra retired, the lights were lowered and the curtain went up. Almost immediately the audience reverted to what it had been before the arrival of the police. Not a word of the play could be heard. The cast eventually gave up speaking altogether and went through the piece in pantomime. [Note from Sheila: God, I wish I had been there to see this. It must have been extraordinary.] As the play progressed the noise increased. Men and women stamped the floor, banged the backs of their seats with their fists, shouted and sang alternately. On the stairs from the stalls a man stood, dramatically addressing no one in particular.

The players courageously went through the whole piece. During this time several arrests were made and the police were kept busy operating between the doors and the hall. Just before the play ended I saw an opportunity to escape and took it. Almost everyone in the row where I had been sitting had vanished. I was able to make a dash for the door at the rear of the pit while the police were busy in the front of the house. My last impression of the scene was the sight of a figure standing on a seat somewhere about the centre of the stalls and the sound of a few bars of God Save the King, which were quickly stifled as someone pulled the singer down.

Amazing. The play continued to be performed, and continued to generate riots and protests, garnering the attention of the world. "What is going on over in Ireland right now? What exactly are they protesting??"

Synge died an early death, in 1909, but he left an indelible mark - not only on Ireland, but on theatre as a whole.

I'll end this post now, with a quote from Synge's beautiful book The Aran Islands (and I will post a photo, too, of Synge staring out into the Atlantic, from one of the Islands).

In the following excerpt, he describes leaving the Arans after a couple months' stay ... and returning to the bustle of Galway:

I have come out of an hotel full of tourists and commercial travellers, to stroll along the edge of Galway Bay, and look out in the direction of the islands. The sort of yearning I feel towards those lonely rocks is indescribably acute. This town, that is usually so full of wild human interest, seems in my present mood a tawdry medley of all that is crudest in modern life. The nullity of the rich and the squalor of the poor give me the same pang of wondering disgust; yet the islands are fading already and I can hardly realize that the smell of the seaweed and the drone of the Atlantic are still moving round them.

Brooklyn Academy of Music: Macbeth

I saw Patrick Stewart do Macbeth tonight, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It was a lovely evening. It's freezing today and I trekked out there, and emerged into the utter chaos of Atlantic and Flatbush. A couple was having a screaming fight about a drug deal gone awry on the sidewalk. The girl shouted, "There's fuckin' police all around us right now. They're already curious about what we talkin' about - let's get the fuck outta here!" And then. The Scottish play! Perfect. It was like I had already seen the Flatbush Avenue version of "Unsex me here"! I had a glass of wine in the lobby, warming up, and people milled about, and it was a wonderful atmosphere. At intermission, a couple struck up a conversation with me about the play, and it was great fun. We were trying to figure out where the hell Banquo was going when he ran off before intermission. We missed a line of dialogue or something. I mean, I get that he knows he will be killed. But where the hell you going, bro? But it was fun. I liked them. They were wondering who MacDuff was - they hadn't caught his name. "Who was that man with the wife and kids?" "That was MacDuff - he's a noble who was really close with Duncan. And I hate to break it to you, but his whole family is dunzo in the next act." hahahaha

This production (highly acclaimed in England, and now here for a run) takes place in Stalinist Russia, which I loved. It had a more chilly quality than some other productions of it I've seen. The set was stark and bare, no scene changes. They used video projections during certain sections - which was QUITE effective, for the most part. Like the forest moving. That was projected. Things abstracted, becoming more and more fragmented - as Macbeth and his Lady wife slowly went mad. There were a couple of moments - just a couple - when I thought it was over-produced. The play itself, just as a work of literature, is terrifying. It's one of the most gruesome of all of Shakespeare's plays. I mean, the monologue that reports on the deaths of MacDuff's family - you just get the picture in your head of children screaming and being slaughtered. You really don't need to add TOO much to it. For the most part, I thought the video projections were awesome (the visions of enormous totalitarian armies marching, with Soviet-esque banners waving - very evocative) - but a couple times I was pulled out of it.

Patrick Stewart was incredible. His soliloquies ... God, he didn't hit a wrong note. I had a moment when he was doing the "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" monologue where I almost got disoriented and I didn't know what to focus on. First of all, his performance of it - quiet, bitter, underplayed - he just SAID it ... was marvelous. You just lost yourself in it. But because of that, I was suddenly struck by the words - yet again ... you know, it's easy to take Shakespeare for granted. And to hear it - really HEAR it ... to hear that language, to hear those words that are so well-known now, so damn famous ... and to realize, as though for the first time, just how damn brilliant Shakespeare is. It's like being in the actual presence of God. Or a higher power. Whatever you want to call it. It's beyond "good". It is an emanation of a deep and human truth, passed down through the ages ... and here it is. Before us. A man wrote this. A human being wrote this.

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

It boggles the mind.

Kate Fleetwood played Lady Macbeth like Eva Peron. She thristed for power. She emasculates her husband like a pro. Patrick Stewart's body language in response to her "are you a man?" comments was wonderful. Subtle, and eloquent. He just kind of collapsed, a little bit. Not hugely. But he strutted in in their first scene together - and she embraced him, and they were kissing, and passionate - saying their opening lines - eating each other up, his hands all over her, her breasts, her thighs ... and then she starts going off on what she thinks needs to happen next, and she is so far beyond him at that point, she is so much further down the path ... that he is struck dumb, in response. A bit helpless. What is she asking me to do? He is wearing military garb, combat boots, he is the picture of a virile strutting man. But Lady Macbeth just unmasks him, disarms him ... He is helpless and she uses that against him. She was terrific.

I have seen so many terrible "Out damn'd spot" monologues ... you know, the actress uses it as an opportunity to become a gibbering gleaming-eyed maniac. Kate Fleetwood was real. And because it was real to her - she WAS out of her mind. Her hands writhed about, and I actually started feeling the sticky blood all over MY hands, just watching her. This was no kitchen-sink acting. She rose to the occasion. But without any fanfare. The play is horrifying. It's horrifying in its action, and the plot points. But even more so - it is horrifying psychologically. The two of them cannot stop their ambition, and for a moment - all seems possible. But to live with the repercussions, to walk through life knowing that murder got you there ... neither of them are up to that.

The relationship those two created was fantastic. You believed they were husband and wife. They played all the notes right. The chiding, the sex, the way they know what the other person is going to say even before the words are out ... They were marvelous together.

But my favorite part of the whole production - was how they handled the witches. SO GOOD. SO SO GOOD. Those witches are tough, man ... tough to play (and I should know, since I played one of them once, in a production so bad it still makes me shiver - post about it here, and photos here, here, here ... horrors. I heard some of my lines come back to me in the play at BAM and felt a shiver of shame. "Doubtless it stood ..." ACK!). It's so easy to go over the top. And how do you make "double double toil and trouble" scary?? It so easily can just be SILLY.

These witches were truly frightening. BRAVO. To the director and the production design, the costume design ... who came up with the theme for those witches. They were omnipresent. They weren't isolated out in a wild heath (the way I've seen it done in many productions) ... they weren't cackling and rubbing their hands over a froggy-filled fire. They all wore grey institutional dresses, with white aprons, and white veils on their heads. They were either nurses on the battlefield, or workers in the kitchen. They were in disguise. They took on many guises. They were all of the same physical type - young women, thin, probably 22, 23 years old. Little thin women. You couldn't tell them apart, they were identical. And they scared the SHIT out of me.

great work. I have never before seen a production of Macbeth where the witches were actually frightening. These girls were malevolent. They had the bodies of teenagers, but they were dressed as rigid identical matrons. Black tights, black shoes. They chopped up food in the kitchen, wielding knives, slashing at bread, and then carrying it to the table, holding the knife behind them in a clenched fist. The action went on around them, but they were always there. And occasionally - Patrick Stewart would glance up at one of them, and hesitate for a bit. It would give him a start. Do I know that girl? Have I seen her before? She ladles soup onto my plate ... but there's something about her ... she seems familiar ...

The witches were my favorite part of the show. Very innovative. I've never seen them handled so well.

Last night. 10:30 pm. Union Square Theatre

We were beside ourselves with excitement. So much of Eddie Izzard's stuff is "had to be there" humor. Like his whole discourse on the Church of England and how that somehow inevitably leads to "cake or death". You really just have to see the whole thing. He's not a punchline-type guy. How can one describe why the phrase, "What is it, Sebastien, I'm arranging matches ..." is HILARIOUS? You just have to see the whole thing!

So to describe to you why, at one point last night, I was laughing so hard tears were streaming off of my face ... will be rather difficult. First of all, there was his acting-out of the "Thou must not covet thy neighbor's ox" commandment.If you're familiar with him, you know he starts with something concrete - and then basically plays it out to its logical (and insane) conclusions. Like his re-enactment of the building of Stone Henge. "Oh, we're building a Henge, are we? Lovely! It's not far, is it?" Or also his whole re-enactment of dinosaurs (imagining what it would be like if dinosaurs had morality, and he suddenly became a T. Rex letting someone else go ahead of him in line) and God basically just doodling whatever the fuck he wanted on a sketch pad - "He will weigh 10 tons, he will have three horns on his head, and he will be a vegetarian ..." He also did a re-enactment of Hannibal and the Alps and the elephants - and he did it IN LATIN. The guy is fucking crazy. He discoursed upon the Stone Age, and he did a whole thing about hunter-gatherers - and suddenly he became the best berry-gatherer in the world - (see, it's all "had to be there") - and other people in the tribe had to stand around holding baskets ready to catch the berries because they were coming so quickly. He did a whole thing on giraffes doing charades. hahahahahaha And I was very pleased with his bit on spiders. And how scary they are. "And so straight men and lesbians are left to deal with it ... We may hate spiders, but gay men and straight women hate them more." He's obsessed with Wikipedia. He looked up the word "spoon" for us, onstage. That became a running gag. I never realized how hilarious Wikipedia is ... just the concept of it.

The guy is brilliant. We were in the FIRST ROW. He was right there!

No more transvestite garb. He looked kind of like a scrubby old English professor. Blazer, black T shirt, jeans.

I'm basically in love with him. It was so so so fun. I'm SO glad to have seen him in person.

From Tennessee Williams to Irene Selznick

It's 1950 and Tennessee Williams, now famous, is struggling to complete his next play - The Rose Tattoo (excerpt here). He has gone to Rome to finish it, but finds himself anxious, and in the middle of a heat wave. Elia Kazan, his preferred director, had another commitment (to direct Viva Zapata) - and had also expressed doubts about the play itself, which sent Tennessee into a tizzy. As a matter of fact everyone - Audrey Wood, his agent - Cheryl Crawford - a potential producer - and Irene Selznick - had all expressed doubts about the play. He continued to work. He accepted their comments, and he agreed in the most part - he was struggling so much to complete the play that he felt the struggle had to show in his writing. He felt he had lost the ease of his youth - with becoming famous, etc. He took the comments, he worked, he rewrote, he restructured ... and meanwhile, the production began to approach. They found a new director (once Tennessee let the Kazan - or "Gadg" as he was called - thing go) - and they courted Anna Magnani for the part, but she said no (she ended up doing a film version of it). They cast an unknown actress - Maureen Stapleton as the lead. It would make her a star. But before then - was the long struggle to just work on the play, against what felt to Tennessee to be insurmountable odds. Nobody seemed to have belief in it. Nobody was saying, "Yes! This is great! Keep going!"

In the middle of this, he writes a letter to Irene Selznick - who had produced Streetcar, if I'm not mistaken - and had told him her reserves about The Rose Tattoo. I post the letter in full below.

It's one of the most extraordinary documents from an artist I have ever read.

First of all, he is unfailingly polite to all of these people - they are colleagues, they have had great successes together in the past - he trusts their opinions. He's never a snot. He is a true old-school gentleman with elegant manners. But the following letter absolutely blows me away. I suppose it's something I need to hear right now - and I just read it last night ... it spoke to me, the truest part of me, the deepest most personal part - where I am most wounded, where rejection hurts the most ... and yet where I will not give up hope or self-belief.

This made me think of all of the writers on strike right now. The writers - so often misunderstood, sneered at, looked down upon ... and yet to sit down, and still write - in the midst of such an atmosphere - is true courage. That's art.

You must take the criticism. Yes. If it is worthy, and meant to help - not harm. But there also comes a moment when you must OWN your own artistry, whether or not anyone buys it, gives a shit, or even likes it. It's a tough concept because naturally artists do need to make money, and value themselves in the context of the market and how the market values them. But there's a deeper level. There always is. What happens when people DON'T buy? What happens when you hear "No"? And not just once, twice, but thousands of times? Do you crumble? Or do you keep going? Do you let that external "No" become internal?

It's a question of character, yes. And in this case, character = artist.

It's an inspiring letter.

April 1950

Dearest Irene:

It was indeed quite a letter, and yesterday afternoon, when I got it, was very black, the bottom of a long, descending arc that began with the play's completion last month, broken only by the lift given by a brilliantly understanding (though highly critical) letter received from Gadg and a similar one from Molly [Kazan - Gadg's wife] and the enthusiasm of [Paul] Bigelow when I read it aloud which had to be partly discounted as a friend's indulgence - a decline which continued by fairly gentle degrees until yesterday afternoon when your letter knocked the goddam bottom out of it and almost the top off me! For that afternoon, and the night that followed, I believed that you were right, that I had passed into madness and that power of communication was gone. Under the circumstances there [was] hardly any other conclusion to draw. Either you were "dead wrong" or I was crazy. Or that thing had happened which eventually happens to most lyric talents, the candle is burned or blown out and there's no more matches! - Then, of course, came the morning, consistent with its habit. I woke early, recognized Frank [Merlo] and Grandfather and even myself in the mirror - and had my coffee and sat down quietly and rationally to read over the script. Then the amazing thing came about. For the first time since this draft was completed, I liked what I had done and felt that I had done just exactly what I had meant to do in all but a few short passages, that in the play, as a whole, I had said precisely what I had wanted to say as well as it could be said, and the play existed.

Not a ballet, not a libretto, but a play with living characters and a theme of poetic truth, handled with more precision and stringency than ever before in my writing, and in a style, a medium (yes, highly plastic and visual but with those elements an integral, active and very articulate instrument of the play's total expression - not just "effects" for the sake of "effects" or symbols for the sake of being artily symbolic - but a way of saying more clearly, strongly and beautifully those things which could not have been said so well in language if they could have been said at all in language - a progress which I think very marked in the true use of theatre (as distinguished from forms of verbal expression) - a medium worked out with tremendous difficulty in exact, or nearly exact, accord with the very clear and strong conception that it sprang from?

For the first time in my life I knew that I must take a solitary position of self-belief, as an artist, and that I could take it proudly because I had earned it. I had not skimped or scanted or hedged or cheated anytime, anywhere, during the year and four months in which I had struggled with the adversaries of doubt and disappointment and fatigue, the many mornings that were brick walls and the few that came open, the exhausting see-saw of exhilaration and despair, the continual, unsparing drain of all I had in me to give it. That was the history of it, and this was the culmination. I had to believe. I believed.

I hope you will forgive me now for indulging myself in argument with some of your points of objection. It will do me good. You say the emotion is "felt by the characters but not shared by the reader". I wonder if emotions in a play are usually, or even ever, shared by the reader? If they were, would there be any point in the production of a play, in translating it from the cold page to the warm and living instruments of the stage? Would there be any real need for great actors and brilliant directors and for designers and technicians? I don't think a play is so different from a sheet of music, and there are not many people who can read a sheet of music and hear the music in a way that would obviate an orchestra or singer. The parallel is particularly fitting to this particular play which consists, so much, as you have observed, of signals, notations, as though to various instruments whose playing together will create the expression. Then you say: "Were I to see rather than read the play, I fear I would be at a loss to understand the sources of sustained crisis under which Pepina labors". I venture to guess that with the collaboration of someone like [Anna] Magnani and someone like Gadge you would find these "sources" far easier to understand, for then the play would come out of the notes and signals and would live before you. "Sustained crisis" is true. But throughout the play (which is about a "sustained crisis") that condition is fully documented and justified. It opens, for instance, with a highly emotional woman telling her passionately loved husband that she is to bear him a child. A crisis. The death of the husband is, of course, another crisis. But how is either of these difficult to understand? In the following acts of the play - the visual and violent "knife-scene" with the daughter, the devastating revelation of the husband's betrayal, first the struggle against it and finally, gradually, the acceptance of it - this, too, is sustained crisis, but I can't for the life of me see how it would seem not motivated, not comprehendible to any of us who have loved or suffered any great loss or disillusionment in our lives, I don't expect this sustained crisis, which is the play, to be felt in reading but I cannot doubt that in performance, with skill and power, an audience could be made to feel it deeply and to enjoy its katharsis. I was well-aware, while writing the play, that the high pitch of emotion in the characters, in keeping with their race, temperament and most of all with their situation, (the crises in which they're involved) might make exhausting demands on everybody concerned. For this reason many of the scenes are deliberately low-keyed, particularly in the writing, the speeches, and the intensities are given quiet, almost submerged, forms of expression and the burden transferred as much as possible from the actor to the visual, plastic elements which you condemn as "effects". Scenes are cut-off and under-stated but always with at least some (muted) expression of the essential things, and the contrapuntal use of the children is like a modulated counter-theme or "cushion" to these intensities - (this will come out much more clearly in the final draft, for the separate play of the children developed very late in the play's composition). The great advance I have made in this play - technically, as a theatre-craftsman - is what you call its "penalizing minimum" of dialogue and the effects which you seem to think are extraneous ornamentation.

No, I feel no resentment about your letter and I do feel gratitude for your writing me what I hope was exactly what you felt, although I suspect you could have eliminated the pacifying reference to "ballet or libretto" and said, more bluntly, more kindly cruelly - I dislike it intensely! You're not the only one who does. I think Audrey and Bill are probably just as disappointed in it as you are. Who knows, at this point, who is right? But I would like to see it tried, produced, and I shall make an effort to see it.

Thanks and all the love as ever,

Tenn.

Acting Chekhov: a compilation of quotes.

All excerpts below from The Actor's Chekhov : Nikos Psacharopoulos and the Company of the Williamstown Theatre Festival, on the Plays of Anton Chekhov - a book I just adore. It's extensive interviews with all of the actors who were "regulars" at the Williamstown theatre festival (conceived by the fiery Greek Nikos Psacharopoulos) - they were known for their brilliant Chekhov interpretations - with actors such as Blythe Danner, Christopher Walken, Austin Pendleton, Olympia Dukakis - major heavy hitters. Blythe Danner and her daughter Gwyneth Paltrow actually did a production of The Seagull there about 10 years ago - before Paltrow really hit it huge - and Paltrow has talked about how she basically grew up at Williamstown, playing on the lawn while her mother rehearsed, moving her dolls around silently during rehearsal, etc. Kind of wild that she would get to go back there and perform with her mother. Lovely. It's a production I wish I had seen. Frank Langella was a big Williamstown actor - and it was like a family. They would go back summer after summer, sometimes doing the same plays - alternating roles, etc. Anyway, Nikos is now dead - and The Actor's Chekhov is a series of interviews with Nikos and also with all of his "regulars". It's a real actor's book for actors - but hopefully non-actors will get a lot out of it too.

Nikos was all about PROCESS.

Acting Chekhov: "long runs of plays"

Nikos Psacharopoulos:

Actors only ever go wrong in long runs of plays because they haven't found that unfinished part of themselves to filter through whatever role they're playing every night. Find that one unfinished thing in you, which is informed by the circumstances of the play, and you'll never go wrong.

Acting Chekhov: Plums

Interview with Olympia Dukakis:

Something very interesting happened the first time I did Paulina in The Sea Gull. She comes to them in the third act, and says, "Here are the plums for the journey." And when I was researching it I thought, why is she giving him plums for the journey? It always seemed like she was a batty person! And then I began reading what it was like to go on a journey then. There was a long time on the train, it was very difficult, the food was very bad, people would get diarrhea, constipation. And when I read that I knew what it was! Bowel movements! So, I mean, I could play that! That's something that's a private thing, you don't announce it to everyone. I mean, if I came up to you and you were going on a trip and I said, "Here's some Ex-Lax," I wouldn't make a big announcement! I would try to be confidential about it. So that helped me with how the moment should be acted. But even then, I thought the audience doesn't know this, they don't know that that's what plums are about. The line should be prunes! An audience will know prunes.

Now the word in the text is plums, there's no getting around it, the specific literal translation was "plums". At least that's what I was told again and again by Kevin McCarthy. Because Kevin had been in that production with Mira Rostova, he considered himself the big Chekhov expert among us. He didn't think it should be changed. As usual I didn't go up to Nikos and say, "Listen, I think we should change this, blah blah blah." I just did it one day in rehearsal. Nikos fell over with laughter! … Kevin was apoplectic. But I felt – it's not the specific word, that's true, but this is the spirit of it, this is what's intended, this is what Chekhov wants the audience to know the woman is doing …

Nikos waited till Kevin had given me my scolding and left the room and then he came over and said, "Keep it in."

Acting Chekhov: Intuition

Interview with AUSTIN PENDLETON

JEAN HACKETT: But playing Tusenbach in Three Sisters was different. You mentioned that with that role, you came to a real breakthrough in your work. What was that all about?

AUSTIN PENDLETON: Well, first of all – this was something I always thought Nikos (Psacharopoulos) was wonderful at with people he knew and loved and who loved him. When we did Three Sisters – that was a summer – it was the most painful summer, I think, of my life, so far. Emotionally speaking, I was an open wound walking around up there. Some very painful things in my life that summer. And of course Tusenbach is a character who is in perpetual pain.

And Nikos … Now let me try to find exactly the words for this, because it's a very exact, specific thing. Nikos, as I intuited at the time, knew everything, internally, that was going on with me. I intuited this, but then I much later found out, indirectly, that in fact he actually did know. But he never said a word about it. He just created a rehearsal atmosphere where you knew he wanted everything from you. He wanted you to bring in everything that was going on and he wanted it working in that rehearsal room. So, first of all, I came in with all this – woundedness – it was all with me, in the rehearsal room. And then Nikos immediately put me on to how active Tusenbach is. And what I saw – I say I "saw" but it wasn't really an intellectual process. The realization happened somewhere in the body, although I don't know where, but it happened. But what I saw was that Tusenbach was a person who converted his pain, he converted all of his great pain into – an appetite for joy.

I sat that, very early on, from the things that Nikos was guiding me to. And, as I said, on top of everything else, I knew that Nikos knew what was going on with me personally, although he never said a word about it. He had that with people he liked and trusted … He would never ever say anything, never presume really, to talk about your life with you, but you knew he knew. And you knew that you were not only being given permission to bring it into rehearsal, but you were being urged to. And through all of this, through all the spoken and unspoken things between us, he got me into the perception that Tusenbach turns his pain into an appetite for joy.

JEAN: And wouldn't you say that's the play too?

AUSTIN: Exactly. Once that alignment took place, I was incapable of not being in the moment in that play.

Acting Chekhov: "in mourning for my life"

Olympia Dukakis:

I remember my brother and I came to New York when I was in college and saw The Sea Gull with Maureen Stapleton as Masha. That was the one with Mira Rostova as Nina. And in this production, when Nina said to Trigorin, "Do you think I ought to be an actress," people in the audience, more than one, yelled, "No!" Unbelievable!

But in that production, Stapleton was, like, on the edge. I still remember the very first cross she made across the proscenium, trailed by Medvedenko, just barely enduring him, and finally he says the line, "Why do you always wear black?" And she says, "I'm in mourning for my life." She said this like: "Oh my God, I've got this creep following me, asking me questions!" You could see that it was funny, but underneath there was a motor running, the clock was running here. Time is running out on these people.

Acting Chekhov: efficiency

Nikos Psacharopoulos:

I think somebody must have told actors that being efficient is great. When they come into an audition they change shirts and open bags and move chairs and readjust – all these things that are totally unnecessary … I love somebody to come in and do it with a sense of … not a sense of efficiency, but a sense of proportion, to just stand up there and use themselves in the best possible way.

Acting Chekhov: courage

Interview with Roberta Maxwell:

I learned how to be very courageous from – Mr. Psacharopoulos. On the opening night – after the first preview of The Greeks, he said to me, "You didn't let that speech go." Big speech! "Let it go! Let it go!" I said, "I can't. I'm afraid." He said, "Let it go tomorrow night." I said, "I can't. there are going to be critics out front tomorrow night. I can't." He said, "If you're going to fail, fail trying to be successful. Don't fail because you're too scared to be successful."

Acting Chekhov: "smash something"

Interview with Laila Robins:

[Christopher Walken] did something wonderful in that scene [in Ivanov]. Sasha has a line: "Exactly, that's just what you need, to break something, smash something." And Chris did this brilliant thing where he then took a pencil and broke it in half. When she says "break something" I feel that Sasha means for him to throw a vase or a chair or something like that! But Chris just did this little, impotent gesture which was so hilarious. And then his next line is, "You're funny." I felt every night when Chris said, "You're funny," it was really heartfelt. It was like he was looking at my terror as an actress and saying, "You're funny!"

Acting Chekhov: Being moody ...

Nikos Psacharopoulos:

In a Greek play it's not that there is a peculiar kind of delivery, it is that somebody's pain is so great that they cry out: "Oooooooooooh!" rather than "Oh!" … The feeling should be exaggerated in order to meet the form. … Do not try to "show" what you think the play is all about by doing something with your acting that comments on the "form" of the material. Do not try to be poetic with Shakespeare, do not try to be lyrical with Williams, do not try to be expressionistic with Brecht and, please, do not try to be moody with Chekhov!

Acting Chekhov: "dramatically effective"

Anton Chekhov:

The demand is made that the hero and the heroine should be dramatically effective. But in life people do not shoot themselves, or hang themselves, or fall in love, or deliver themselves of clever sayings every minute. They spend most of their time eating, drinking, or running after woman or men, or talking nonsense. It is therefore necessary that this should be shown on the stage.

Acting Chekhov: "Don't be afraid to say you're wrong."

I think this is one of my favorite anecdotes of all time. I've posted it on my blog before, but it's too good to leave out now.

Interview with PETER HUNT:

When you hit your head on a wall, back up and go another direction. Don't be afraid to say you're wrong.

My favorite example of that is the Our Town story. Nikos [Psacharapolus] was directing, and Thornton Wilder himself was playing the Stage Manager. For some reason he and I struck up a friendship, and one day we were standing and talking, and Nikos burst out of the rehearsal room and came up to Thornton and said, "The scene isn't working." And Thornton Wilder said, "What? The scene isn't working?" Nikos said, "Yeah, George and Emily, they're on the ladder, doing the homework scene." And Thornton said, "What's wrong with it?" And Nikos said, "It doesn't work." And Thornton said, "What are you talking about, it's a Pulitzer-Prize winning play, it works!" And Nikos said, "It's not working. They're up there, I'm playing all the values, they're in love, he's in love with her, they want to get married – but it's not working." Thornton's jaw drops to the floor and he says, "My lord, what are you doing? It's very simple! He's stupid and she's smart, and if he doesn't get the algebra questions for tomorrow's homework, he's going to flunk. THAT'S IT." And Nikos said, "But Thornton, it's a love scene!" And Thornton said, "That's for the audience to decide." And Nikos said, "Got it!" And he rips open the door to the rehearsal room and yells, "Everything we worked on is off! You're dumb, you're smart! Play it!"

Acting Chekhov: "Imagine things."

Intreview with Nikos Psacharopoulos:

Imagine things. Imagine many more things. Imagine that the water you drink is awful, that the house is hot, imagine that the sheets are smelly, imagine that the house has an echo, imagine there's a big nail, your mother put it underneath, so that you can be stepping on nails all the time. You know? Deal sufficiently with the underlying imaginary circumstances. It's kind of interesting. In life, some people do it, they believe they're always persecuted. I think you should get persecuted on stage, or you should be wooed when you're on stage. … I think you have to allow that paranoia and program for paranoia. Create problems for yourself. … Make your own blocks. If you put a chair in front of the door, there will be something so interesting about opening that goddamn door. Have your props messed up so you can't really reach them. Get something on your hands and have nothing to wipe them with.

Acting Chekhov: Walken as Ivanov

Wish I had seen Walken do Ivanov.

JEAN HACKETT: What was the process with Ivanov?

CHRISTOPHER WALKEN: I loved doing that. I'd like to do that again, actually. It's a much better evening than it's given credit for.

JEAN: What happens with that man? It seems like he starts from a place of complete despair and then just goes lower and lower.

WALKEN: Yeah, but, I mean, he's so funny. There's a scene in it where I think he stands on stage and doesn't speak for about 15 minutes. The party scene in the second act. He says nothing, he just stands there and watches everybody. And I used to get a lot of laughs in that scene. He's so ridiculous!

I saw Walken in The Seagull in Central Park - and he was awesome. Small part - Kevin Kline played the real lead - but Walken wandered through the action, punctuating the scenes with lines - that always sounded thrown away ... not punchlines, but he ALWAYS got a laugh. He was great.

Go, S. Epatha Merkerson!!!

"I'm 53 years old ... and this is the first time I have ever been offered a lead role." -- from S. Epatha Merkerson's Golden Globe speech for Lackawanna Blues.

I am thrilled to see that she has come back to Broadway in William Inge's haunting play Come Back, Little Sheba ... and I was almost nervous for her. I get weird like that. I get invested in someone's career, as though I am their personal agent or manager. I just think she's so good, and I love her. And imagining her in that part!!! How fascinating! The childlike sad little woman, living in her fantasy world ... what a tragic piece of work. I read the play when I was a teenager, and almost resisted it. I resisted the hopelessness, the unbelievable sadness of that world, that woman. So to picture S. Epatha Merkerson - such a strong woman, an intelligent woman - in that role gave me goosebumps. I was filled with hope ... that she would be fantastic.

The review of Little Sheba just came out and I have cried all the way thru reading it. I must see it. And thankfully, it's in New York City - not Kathmandu, so I can actually see it!

The review opens with:

Sometimes, when she stops the restless chatter with which she fills her days and lets the silence take over, Lola Delaney seems to be staring at nothing in the deeply felt revival of “Come Back, Little Sheba,” which opened Thursday night at the Biltmore Theater. Yet as S. Epatha Merkerson portrays this housebound wife of an alcoholic, in a performance that stops the heart, her gaze is anything but empty.

In those moments Ms. Merkerson’s face is devoid of expression, except for her eyes. In them you read, with a clarity that scalds, thoughts that Lola would never admit she is thinking. Because if she did, there would really be no reason for her to keep on living.

The marvel of Ms. Merkerson’s performance in this revitalizing production of a play often dismissed as a soggy period piece is how completely and starkly she allows us to see what Lola sees. Conveying everything while seeming to do nothing is no mean feat — a rare accomplishment expected, perhaps, from seasoned stage stars like Vanessa Redgrave (in “The Year of Magical Thinking”) or Lois Smith (in the recent revival of “The Trip to Bountiful”).

This is so so exciting.

I just mentioned over on Marisa's post about community theatre that Broadway sometimes lags behind community and local theatre - in its resistance to inter-racial casting. In college departments or small towns, it is normal to see blacks playing siblings of whites, etc. - because it's a small pool of actors and everyone must be cast. It gives a nice egalitarian feel to it. Professional opera has gone that route - so if you have the voice, you get the part - regardless of race. But you still don't see that much on Broadway. You get all-black casts of classic white scripts ... but you rarely see that kind of creative casting. Recently, I saw 110 In the Shade, with the marvelous Audra McDonald in the lead role. It's written for a white woman, but again, that doesn't matter. And the character has 2 brothers, and a father. One brother was black, one was white, and the father was played by the fantastic John Cullum (who is white). And it wasn't mentioned, or lingered over - it wasn't a "gimmick" - it was just accepted. I found that SO refreshing. It's about time!! Come Back Little Sheba has gone that route as well, and I'm very pleased to hear it. There is no reason why Romeo couldn't be played by a black man, or Stanley Kowalski being black to a white Blanche or vice versa ... The fact that the marriage in Little Sheba is an inter-racial marriage (and Doc is played by Kevin Anderson - a fine actor) definitely adds some oomph to the script - some layers that might not otherwise be there, although if you know the story - it would TOTALLY make sense. Again, it just makes me happy to see that kind of imaginative production, not limiting itself in terms of its casting. Good for them.

And listen to this excerpt from the review:

[Kevin Anderson's] scalpel-edged viciousness in that scene means that Doc wounds Lola with surgical exactness. And Ms. Merkerson responds with an abjectness that makes you want to rush the stage and intervene. All through the play, Lola has had the air of someone expecting to be rebuffed, put down, hit or sent packing, whether cozying up to Doc or making nice with her supremely competent neighbor (Brenda Wehle, excellent).

Her compulsive chattiness on all subjects — including Little Sheba, the dog that disappeared from her life as completely and inexplicably as her youth — is obviously for keeping at bay the fears that steal up on her when it’s quiet. Ms. Merkerson and this production make sure that even when Lola is talking a blue streak, we also always hear the unspeakable gray silence that lies beneath.

Wow.

And Ms. Merkerson responds with an abjectness that makes you want to rush the stage and intervene.

God. If only all plays could make us respond in such visceral ways. I love it when I want to leap into the middle of the action, and try to save/divert/help ... That's the mark of a damn good play, and some awesome performances.

Go, S. Epatha Merkerson. Here's the review again. I'm so there.

Reviewing community theatre

For some reason, this marvelous essay by John Barry, a freelance writer in Baltimore, about reviewing local community theatre has brought tears to my eyes!! But it goes on a journey first - and I found myself laughing out loud, too - in recognition - and appreciation. And by the end, it really packs a punch. Yes, yes, yes.

And I loved this part, too:

The people on stage were policemen, computer programmers, starry-eyed sophomores, retired schoolteachers. The plays weren't classics, but they weren't exactly cutting-edge: Broadway standbys (Art), comic dramas (Fuddy Meers), zany madcap farces (Lend Me a Tenor!), and musicals, musicals, musicals. And Sondheim.

My readership changed. I was no longer writing for potential theatergoers, people looking for my advice on whether to shell out for tickets. I wasn't even being read by the actors in the plays. I was being read by their best friends and close relatives. And they knew who I was. They knew where I lived. And they knew when I screwed up the names: Thanks for the review and glad you found the show enjoyable. Just a couple of little points...The "stern taskmaster" you describe is actually Florindo, played by Chris Hickle.

hahahahaha God, that is so right ON. But Barry is after a deeper truth, a deeper experience - and it's (for me) at the moment when he recalls a bad review he got 20 years ago ... that I realized: Wow. This essay is not going where I thought it would. Wonderful. (Here's the link to it again) It's one of the best essays I have read in a long long time.

Update:

Marisa's great post on this topic.

I laughed, I cried

Siobhan and I went to Avenue Q last night - she had bought me tickets for my birthday - so nice!! Siobhan saw it when it first came out and raved about it.

My God, it is SUCH a fun show. But for some reason, tears rolled down my face throughout. But I had a huge smile on my face. It was THAT kind of a joyful experience.

I'm still re-living it in my mind. There were some seriously laughoutloud moments - I mean, the whole concept is hysterical: actors holding huge puppets - and the actors themselves are visible, but they are acting "through" their puppets - which are of the awesome Jim Henson Sesame Street variety. And there were times (actually, most of the time) I would totally forget that there was a human being actor standing RIGHT THERE, doing the voices ... and I'd be staring at the huge puppet face, like IT was the one who was really alive and speaking.

Especially Rod. The closeted gay puppet. I loved Rod so much that it hurt. Siobhan and I were howling afterwards about the scene when he's in "therapy" with Christmas Eve - the Japanese landlord on their block on Avenue Q - and he's lying with his head in her lap - his big square blue head, with its round green button nose ... and the actor (who was unbelievable - he had two parts - that show must be such a workout for him - not one second of rest) - the actor is sitting right there, manipulating the puppet, talking in "Rod's voice - but it was kind of a serious scene, so the entire audience (and it was a sold out show) was totally quiet, watching the scene. Rapt. Like Siobhan said, when we were howling later, "Like ... everyone was just transFIXED ... by a PUPPET ..." We totally forgot that "Rod" was not real. Rod is totally real. He is a character.

But the whole thing was great. A truly joyful ridiculous and moving experience. I love that something like that is not only on Broadway, but is a smash hit.

2007 Year in Pictures

This might be my favorite picture so far.

Speaking of Cagney ...

George M. Cohan overlooks the chaos and color of Times Square. He is, as of now, surrounded by construction - which makes him seem even more mythological.

saltpeter ... pins ...

I'm thrilled - going to see this tomorrow night. One of my favorite musicals of all time ... and the last time I saw it, live, was at a small barn playhouse in New Hampshire - during the bicentennial year (that seemed to go on forever ... for those of you who remember 1976 as vividly as I do. Like: is it 1977 yet??? One can only take so much red white and blue. That bicentennial year was nuts!! But I do remember seeing 1776 ... and a family friend played John Adams ... and it was one of the best shows I had ever seen, and I was only 9 years old.)

I cannot WAIT to see it again. I'm dying from my own anticipation.

Come ye cool cool conservative men
The likes of which may never be seen again
We have land, cash in hand
Self-command, future planned
Fortune flies, society survives
In neatly ordered lives with well-endowered wives

We sing hosanna, hosanna
To our breeding and our banner
We are cool

With all the great songs in 1776 that one is, perhaps, my favorite. (Obviously.)

I am going to weep. I am already prepared.

Pumpgirl ... and Rocky Balboa

Review of a play I really want to see. Its reputation precedes it. Interesting comments there about Ireland, and also what is going on over there right now, in terms of plays, and playwrights. It's no secret that Ireland is, once again, ruling the roost theatrically - and have been for the last 10 years or so. Beauty Queen was the start of it - although Brian Friel, of course, has been a huge success here and elsewhere forever. Conor McPherson, Martin McDonough - these guys are awesome. It's nice to see a female playwright getting her due as well, in the midst of that macho atmosphere. Additionally: Geraldine Hughes - a wonderful actress, with a round gleaming-eyed face - a face you just LOVE - is getting marvelous reviews. She played the woman in Rocky Balboa - not really a love interest, but a friend, someone who befriends Rocky ... I didn't even know she was Irish then, her American accent was so good. And the casting of her was perfect - it was wonderful that Stallone hadn't cast a "name" in that part. I think some of it had to do with budget, that film was made on shoestrings, and they probably couldn't afford anyone bigger ... but because of that, because she was a new face - with no associations attached to it - we could just focus on the story and the performances. My thoughts on that film are here. Loved every second of it. And a big part of the appeal was in Hughes' performance - and also the performance of the kid who played her son (what a face!!). Best scene in the movie was when Rocky takes the sullen kid out - and they go to the dog pound to pick up a new dog for Rocky. The thing about Stallone is - he's so good at this acting thing that it's not commented on much. I don't know, I think people think he's just "being himself". Which is malarkey. If you've ever seen an interview with Stallone, then you know how articulate he is, how almost ... elegant he is, in his manners and demeanor. So no. Dude is NOT Rocky Balboa. It does him a GREAT disservice to dismiss him as just "playing himself". The dynamic between Stallone and Hughes is subtle, kind, and open. In true Stallone fashion, he sets her up powerfully for the audience. We LOVE her. It's NOT just about Stallone, and his performance - he has always surrounded himself with powerful secondary characters, who can raise him up, and add to the reality of the movies. Anyway, I loved Rocky Balboa, as you can see. I'm eager to see Pumpgirl, and to watch the beautiful Geraldine Hughes at work again.

My old stompin' grounds

This past Saturday - a freezing cold day - I went up to URI and wandered around, on the quadrangle - and then went over to the Fine Arts Center, where I spent the majority of my time in college. Like 80% of my time. All the doors were opened. No students - they were all home on Thanksgiving break. But I wandered around to my hearts content, strolling down memory lane. Amazing how nothing has changed!

I went down to the girls dressing room - below the stage. I could still smell the powder, the Aquanet - I could still see all of our reflections in those mirrors ... Brooke, Jackie, Liz, Nancy, Julie, Lee ... all of my friends. Actresses. Costumes hung on the rack. Hustle, bustle, quick changes, curlers, corsets, T-strap shoes, hoop skirts, aprons, bonnets ... My locker was over on the left hand side.

My old stompin' grounds

This past Saturday - a freezing cold day - I went up to URI and wandered around, on the quadrangle - and then went over to the Fine Arts Center, where I spent the majority of my time in college. Like 80% of my time. All the doors were opened. No students - they were all home on Thanksgiving break. But I wandered around to my hearts content, strolling down memory lane. Amazing how nothing has changed!

I went down to the girls dressing room - below the stage. I could still smell the powder, the Aquanet - I could still see all of our reflections in those mirrors ... Brooke, Jackie, Liz, Nancy, Julie, Lee ... all of my friends. Actresses. Costumes hung on the rack. Hustle, bustle, quick changes, curlers, corsets, T-strap shoes, hoop skirts, aprons, bonnets ... My locker was over on the left hand side.

My old stompin' grounds

The Fine Arts Center lobby. I wandered around, staring at all the posters - shows from before my time, shows during my time, and shows after. They're all still there. And that lobby!! How many fights did I have with boyfriends in that lobby. How many embarrassing public meltdowns. How much I have gossiped in that space, whispering with Mitchell, being completely annoying because we couldn't believe what good friends we were. We drove everyone crazy. How many classes did I cut - sitting in that very lobby. LIke: Sheila. You have a class IN THAT BUILDING. If you're going to cut, at least get off the premises!! How many nervewracking waits for auditions - that's where we all would pace and wander, before being brought into the various auditions. How many improvisations were done - with Mitchell and David and Jackie - crazy stuff - David picking us all up over his head and whipping us around. A wonderful advertisement for what it was to be a theatre major. It's a beautiful space and I love how much it has NOT changed.

The box office

Posters for The Five Brothers and The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds - two shows I was in.

Poster for The Gingham Dog. David starred in that one. I played his bigoted sister.

Poster for Reckless. David and Nancy starred. Mitchell was hysterically funny as the ridiculous cheeseball gameshow host. I played David's deaf (or pretending to be deaf) paraplegic wife.

Poster for Anne of Green Gables. I played Anne with an "e". The highpoint of my college career.

Poster for Edwin Drood. I think that was my favorite theatrical experience in all of college. I just played a music hall girl, no big part ... and it was the most fun I've ever had. Jackie and I, as music hall sluts, were joined at the hip. We danced, we laughed, we did stupid bits, we heckled each other, we strutted about ... we had an absolute blast.

And now ... looking back: on my past, seen through the lobby.

My old stompin' grounds

The Fine Arts Center lobby. I wandered around, staring at all the posters - shows from before my time, shows during my time, and shows after. They're all still there. And that lobby!! How many fights did I have with boyfriends in that lobby. How many embarrassing public meltdowns. How much I have gossiped in that space, whispering with Mitchell, being completely annoying because we couldn't believe what good friends we were. We drove everyone crazy. How many classes did I cut - sitting in that very lobby. LIke: Sheila. You have a class IN THAT BUILDING. If you're going to cut, at least get off the premises!! How many nervewracking waits for auditions - that's where we all would pace and wander, before being brought into the various auditions. How many improvisations were done - with Mitchell and David and Jackie - crazy stuff - David picking us all up over his head and whipping us around. A wonderful advertisement for what it was to be a theatre major. It's a beautiful space and I love how much it has NOT changed.

The box office

Posters for The Five Brothers and The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds - two shows I was in.

Poster for The Gingham Dog. David starred in that one. I played his bigoted sister.

Poster for Reckless. David and Nancy starred. Mitchell was hysterically funny as the ridiculous cheeseball gameshow host. I played David's deaf (or pretending to be deaf) paraplegic wife.

Poster for Anne of Green Gables. I played Anne with an "e". The highpoint of my college career.

Poster for Edwin Drood. I think that was my favorite theatrical experience in all of college. I just played a music hall girl, no big part ... and it was the most fun I've ever had. Jackie and I, as music hall sluts, were joined at the hip. We danced, we laughed, we did stupid bits, we heckled each other, we strutted about ... we had an absolute blast.

And now ... looking back: on my past, seen through the lobby.

My old stompin' grounds

The light lock. The actor's lounge downstairs. Hallways. Ghosts of my younger self EVERYWHERE. And not just my ghosts - but everyone's. David. Mitchell. Jackie. Nancy. Brooke. Jim. Alec. Judith. All of them. These spaces may LOOK empty, but I assure you: they are not.

My old stompin' grounds

The light lock. The actor's lounge downstairs. Hallways. Ghosts of my younger self EVERYWHERE. And not just my ghosts - but everyone's. David. Mitchell. Jackie. Nancy. Brooke. Jim. Alec. Judith. All of them. These spaces may LOOK empty, but I assure you: they are not.

My old stompin' grounds

The main theatre. Wait til you see the size of the space. We, as students, had no idea how good we had it. You get out in the real world, and you deal with scratchy black-box theatres, seating 70 people ... and you realize: holy crap, the facilities back then were world-class!

Thanksgiving weekend was always the dry tech weekend - students gone, so the technical team can put up the set for the show that opens the following week. I was happy to see nothing had changed. They are doing Little Women, and the dry tech was up and running when I peeked in. I love continuity.

My old stompin' grounds

The main theatre. Wait til you see the size of the space. We, as students, had no idea how good we had it. You get out in the real world, and you deal with scratchy black-box theatres, seating 70 people ... and you realize: holy crap, the facilities back then were world-class!

Thanksgiving weekend was always the dry tech weekend - students gone, so the technical team can put up the set for the show that opens the following week. I was happy to see nothing had changed. They are doing Little Women, and the dry tech was up and running when I peeked in. I love continuity.

My old stompin' grounds

G Studio. Scene of a million acting classes. A million rehearsals. We did a production of Lanford Wilson's Rimers of Eldritch in G Studio - and the place was transformed into an old rickety tumbleweedy kind of town. That place is full of ghosts. Kimber (teacher) smoking his pipe. Scenes being done. Meisner repetition exercises. So many things. Mitchell and I were reminiscing last night about all that went on in G Studio. And it hasn't changed at all. I auditioned for Picnic in G Studio. It was my introduction to the seriousness of what I wanted to do, and how seriously I wanted to take it. That feeling resides in that room to this day.

My old stompin' grounds

G Studio. Scene of a million acting classes. A million rehearsals. We did a production of Lanford Wilson's Rimers of Eldritch in G Studio - and the place was transformed into an old rickety tumbleweedy kind of town. That place is full of ghosts. Kimber (teacher) smoking his pipe. Scenes being done. Meisner repetition exercises. So many things. Mitchell and I were reminiscing last night about all that went on in G Studio. And it hasn't changed at all. I auditioned for Picnic in G Studio. It was my introduction to the seriousness of what I wanted to do, and how seriously I wanted to take it. That feeling resides in that room to this day.

My old stompin' grounds

The exterior of the Fine Arts Center - where I spent the majority of my time in college. The statues say it all. It feels like so many important moments of my life happened within view of those statues. It was a freezing cold day, brisk and blue-skied. With red and yellow leaves abundant everywhere I looked. An autumnal day. Very college-y and it made me very nostalgic.

My old stompin' grounds

The exterior of the Fine Arts Center - where I spent the majority of my time in college. The statues say it all. It feels like so many important moments of my life happened within view of those statues. It was a freezing cold day, brisk and blue-skied. With red and yellow leaves abundant everywhere I looked. An autumnal day. Very college-y and it made me very nostalgic.

The barricades are alive!

We read in some of the coverage of the stagehands strike the following statement - obviously referring to Les Mis and trying to be clever:

"So now ... the barricades are silent."

Uhm - the barricades don't sing. The barricades are inanimate objects. That's like answering the question, "So who are you playing in Les Mis?" with "Oh, the barricade."

"Hey, I just got cast in Camelot!"
"That's great! Who are you playing?"
"Camelot."

"Hey, man, haven't seen you in a while - what've you been up to?"
"Great stuff! Just got cast in the road company of Oklahoma!"
"Dude, that's great! Who are you playing?"
"Oklahoma."

Like: the barricades are ALWAYS silent because they are NOT ALIVE.

Anyway, we've been guffawing with laughter about this whole thing - first of all, the image of the barricades singing and then suddenly falling silent - and we have also had fun coming up with much better "puns" for the strike using Les Mis lyrics. We are amusing ourselves on this grey rainy day.

The Master of the House? There IS no Master of the House because the House is closed.

There will be "empty chairs and empty tables" on Broadway tonight due to the stagehands strike.

Do you hear the people sing? Actually, no we don't, because all the shows have closed.

How long will the strike go on? One more dawn, one more day, one day more.

24601 … more days of striking

Come to me, Cosette, the light is fading … because the lighting designers have gone home.

Exeunt.

We can't stop.

Saint Joan

A production (and performance) I'd love to see.

As played by Anne-Marie Duff, the latest pinup girl of cerebral London theatergoers, Joan is a raw, guileless lass, without a clue about anything the men around her are doing. That’s usually the way of Joan, of course. But the superb, and ultimately very moving, Ms. Duff doesn’t pull the time-honored trick of flipping the internal switch that says “radiance” and making her voice go all trembly and poetic.

This Joan is an energetic, ordinary, irritating lass in all ways but one: her belief. We’ve had plenty of examples of late of how religious conviction can turn ordinary souls into fanatics. And history is filled with unexceptional people who were made exceptional by the fierceness of their confidence, the sense that they always knew they were doing the right thing for the right reason. Ms. Duff makes it clear just how irresistible such confidence can be.

Ah, the ol' Saint Joan "trembly and poetic" trap. Sounds like a really interesting production - love the photos, too.

Romeo and Juliet

It's closing this weekend.

I'm psyched for Lauren Ambrose. She had a solid debut in Awake and Sing, getting some of the best reviews in the cast (example) - and now she's playing Juliet in Shakespeare in the Park..

There's something about her that has always moved me. She's so full - of so much and yet (and this is key to her good-ness as an actress) so uncomfortable with being full. She fought against her own expression, her own emotions, in 6 Feet Under - like so many people do in real life - we don't LIKE to cry, or be sad, or give up anger and be forgiving- we fight against these things. Sometimes with actors, tears or anger seem to come really cheap, because it's a "skill". But when Lauren Ambrose cried on 6 Feet Under, you could always feel her clenching her fists, willing the tears to stop, stop, stop, dammit, stop ... She found tears embarrassing. Again, like so many people do. She grew on me . I wasn't wacky about her at first, it took her a while to get into that character - AND once the series was renewed, she almost visibly relaxed, once she knew her job was safe, for at least another 6 or 7 months. You see that a lot - and she, as the most inexperienced actress in that cast, showed the "oh my god, will this job last?" anxiety more than the others. But once she relaxed? Once she knew she was safe? Great great stuff.

The review is interesting - but here I'm all choked up, reading this:

But it�s Ms. Ambrose who gives the production its devastatingly torn heart.

Best known as the petulant Claire in �Six Feet Under,� Ms. Ambrose, who recently appeared on Broadway in �Awake and Sing!,� makes Juliet into a compelling bundle of mixed instincts. Even at 14, she�s the smartest person in Verona, capable of analyzing exactly what�s happening to her. Had she lived, she might have been a Viola or Rosalind, a Shakespeare heroine to tutor brash men in the finer arts of loving.

But because she is 14 (and you don�t doubt it), Juliet leads not with her head but her hormones. Every line she utters is infused with equal amounts of intelligence and impetuosity. She has enough erotic life force for both herself and Romeo, but Mr. Isaac gallantly contributes his share. And without a hint of the now usually obligatory nudity, this couple can make a drawn-out kiss light up the night, as Michael Friedman�s mood-enhancing (but never mood-pushing) music swells in the background.

Red-haired and luminously pale, this Juliet is a such a brightly glowing candle that the water motif at last makes perfect sense in that final, fatal scene in the Capulet family tomb. It takes a whole lot of water to quench such a flame. But, ah my friends, before then, it gave a lovely light.

Yay for her!!!

Anyway, look at this photo of her as Juliet. See? There's something about her. I feel all emotional just looking at her face there. She BLAZES with emotion.

And look at this set. I've heard much about it - but just look at this image.

That's Lauren Ambrose as Juliet and Oscar Isaac as Romeo - he was Proteus in the Two Gents musical I saw in the park a couple summers ago. That was his debut - and now he's back, as Romeo.

"A birdcage I planned to hang ... I'll get to that someday ..."

Fantastic long article about Christine Ebersole and Grey Gardens in The New York Times Sunday Magazine.

This part made me cry.

�My father started out as a riveter, but he had the soul of an artist,� she said. �He worshiped Shakespeare and had aspirations to be an actor. He claimed that from the first day he laid eyes on me, I was going to be this great dramatic actress.�

And the part about ... standing there, singing with tears streaming down her face at the same time ... but not missing a note, not wavering ... the sound does not suffer from that emotion ... I loved how she talked about that.

Commonplace

Play to the lines, through the lines, but never between the lines. There simply isn't time for it.

-- George Bernard Shaw to actress Ellen Terry on performing Shakespeare, 1896

Commonplace

In the time of your life, live - so that in that good time there shall be no ugliness or death for yourself or for any life your life touches. Seek goodness everywhere, and where it is found, bring it out of its hiding-place and let it be free and unashamed.

-- William Saroyan, preface to "Time of Your Life"

Commonplace

"I quite agree with you, sir, but what can two do against so many?"

-- George Bernard Shaw, 1894. "Arms and the Man", opening night - unanimous cheers and hullaballoo - Shaw goes up onto the stage to take his bow. As he does so - ONE man boos. And the quote above was Shaw's response to the boo-er.

Stagehands on break.

Hot day.

Hot men.

I couldn't resist - they looked so perfect - their poses, the yellow walls ...

"110 in the Shade"

Can't wait!!

May 24 8 p.m. I'm finally gonna see Audra McDonald live in her latest performance - in 110 in the Shade (musical version of The Rainmaker). Seriously - it's about time I see this phenom do her thing in person.

Here's the review in the Times.

Brief excerpt:

Singing for Ms. McDonald is just a more emphatic and articulate way of talking, one that�s needed when emotions are so intense they can�t be captured without the texture and shading of melody. When you listen to Ms. McDonald�s Lizzie sing about the ache of loneliness or her disgust for the words �old maid,� you don�t know how she feels; you feel how she feels. You�re likely to find tears in your eyes by the end of even comic songs.

The woman has gotten reviews along those lines since she first trod Ye Olde Boards ... you know, words like "transcendent", and "powerful" are used repeatedly. I missed her in all of those storied productions. Carousel (1st Tony), Master Class (Tony), Ragtime (Tony). She won 3 Tonys in 5 years. She was 26 years old. I have her albums ... I thrill to her voice ... and I can't wait to see her live. My friend Kate (who just opened in Arcadia in Chicago) saw her in Ragtime and said it was more like watching a "raw nerve" than a Broadway-typical performance. McDonald burned, ached, wailed, crooned - her acting as spectacular as the voice ... but it is the VOICE that makes it all possible.

What is rare is how abandoned she seems at all times. Yet the voice remains in her service. She can use it at will. It is as abandoned, emotionally, as uninhibited, emotionally, as she is. It seems paradoxical - but it takes intense discipline to have a voice be that free. It's like Judy Garland's voice. Or like the young Barbra Streisand's voice. It is capable of expressing everything. There is nowhere that that voice cannot go.

Thrilled! Countdown to May 24 begins.

Audra McDonald in "110 in the Shade"

Scanning Saturday

To anyone who remembers the story of the worst show I was ever in ... (or one of them anyway) ...

This is a photo of the cast (plus Jackie) backstage. This was the show where an audience member stood up during a production and shouted at us, as we were acting, "WHO WROTE THIS SHIT?" Good question, sir.

Our continuous game of Uno backstage was the only way we could manage to get through that horrific experience.

We are being brave here. We are merely enduring the production. It's allllll about Uno.

Happy birthday, Thornton Wilder!

Today is the birthday of Thornton Wilder, American playwright, author of what might be one of the most beloved American plays ever written: Our Town.

Here is one of my favorite anecdotes about Thornton Wilder. If you want to understand the basics of theatre and the art of acting, it is ALL in this anecdote. (If you remember the plot of Our Town, so much the better.)

Peter Hunt (once Executive and Artistic Director of the Williamstown Theatre Festival) relates a story about Thornton Wilder and Nikos Psacharopoulos (founder of Williamstown). Nikos, by all accounts (except for maybe Colleen Dewhurst's - she couldn't stand him) was a genius of the theatre. His productions of Chekhov plays are still talked about. He is considered one of the best interpreters of Chekhov we've ever had in this country. Anyway, Nikos created the Williamstown Theatre Festival in 1955, and ran it until his death in 1988. Thornton Wilder was very involved in Williamstown, and Peter Hunt (who took over after Nikos' death) tells the following story about a rehearsal of a Nikos-directed production of Our Town at WTF:

Peter Hunt: Directing is sometimes doing nothing, sometimes dowin more than you ever thought you could do, every case is different. But what you just said about there being a way of doing Chekhov at Williamstown -- that struck me, because I am Nikos' offspring. I mean he was my teacher at Yale, my mentor at Williamstown, it all rubbed off. Now obviously I do certain things my own way, but still I'm an extension of that. So, what is that? Part of it is caring and having a commitment to all the elements of the theatre -- a lot of directors don't know how to incorporate a set, how to run a tech rehearsal, don't have a visual sense. At the same time caring about the rehearsal environment so that there is an emotional sense in the room that's correct for the play you're doing. I mean, are you having fun doing a comedy? When do you break tension with a joke, when do you allow it to become very serious? He knew how to play all that. Those are lessons I learned just watching him work. Also honesty. When you hit your head on a wall, back up and go another direction. Don't be afraid to say you're wrong.

My favorite example of that is the Our Town story. Thornton Wilder, as I said, was playing the Stage Manager. For some reason he and I struck up a friendship, and one day we were standing and talking ... and Nikos burst out of the rehearsal room and came up to Thornton and said, "The scene isn't working." And Thornton said: "What? The scene isn't working?" Nikos said, "Yeah, George and Emily, they're on the ladder, doing the homework scene." And Thornton said, "What's wrong with it?" And Nikos said, "It doesn't work." And Thornton said, "What are you talking about, it's a Pulitzer-Prize winning play, it works!" And Nikos said, "It's not working. They're up there, I'm playing all the values, they're in love, he's in love with her, they want to get married -- but it's not working." Thornton's jaw drops to the floor and he says, "My lord, what are you doing? It's very simple! He's stupid and she's smart, and if he doesn't get the algebra questions for tomorrow's homework, he's going to flunk. THAT'S IT!" And Nikos said, "But Thornton, it's a love scene!" And Thornton said, "That's for the audience to decide." And Nikos said, "Got it!" And he rips open the door to the rehearsal room and yells, "Everything we worked on is off! You're dumb, you're smart! Play it!" And people were grabbing their handkerchiefs and sobbing during the scene. But the beauty of this story was just -- Nikos' willingness to completely drop it. There was no ego. I mean, this was a man who had a considerable ego, but an ego strong enough to put the work and not himself first.

"Everything we worked on is off! You're dumb, you're smart - GO!" What a beautiful thing for a director to be so flexible.

First of all: There's Thornton Wilder saying: "It's very simple." That's the thing, that's the thing about great playwriting: at its heart, it's very simple. Streetcar Named Desire is a very very simple play. Usually it's the director and actors who over-complicate things. The "keep it simple stupid" mantra is one of the most important things to remember if you're ever blocked, artistically.

The other GENIUS thing about this anecdote is the following exchange:

"But Thornton, it's a love scene!"
"That's for the audience to decide."

And I'll tell ya: that attitude of the playwright is why Our Town will be around long after all of us are gone, it will be performed for generations to come. It's not just a play anymore, it's become part of our cultural tradition. It's not just a respected play, or a well-known play - it is beloved.

Audiences LOVE to be allowed "to decide" things, to not have things handed to them or spelled out. It IS a love scene, but the two characters are talking about algebra. Let the audience decide. Let the audience decide.

And lastly ... I just happen to have this image in my archives. An annotated page in Thornton Wilder's copy of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake [edited!].

Couldn't resist

Walked by the Booth on my way to meet the Trinidadian, and took a picture of one of the photos in the marquee.

The Year of Magical Thinking

Joan Didion

The New York Times review by Ben Brantley. Of course I'm going but I just wanted to point out a couple of things in this review that reiterates my love for Ben Brantley - despite his flaws, etc. I've written about him before. He's very perceptive - and not too snobby - although I want my theatre critic to be a little bit snobby, thankyouverymuch. But one of the main reasons why I love him is that he has not forgotten how to be an audience member - if something works for him, he doesn't over-think it (for example - his glowing review of Mamma Mia - which opened in the wake of September 11 - still has the power to bring me to tears today. You can read my thoughts about that here) What I have always liked about Ben Brantley is his ability to hone in on why something works - and to pull out specific moments to illustrate his point. That's harder to do than you might think.

For example - I reference his review of Christine Ebersole in Grey Gardens here - and the excerpts I post show what I'm talking about. When I eventually saw Grey Gardens - it's not that I wouldn't have noticed Ebersole's genius without Brantley pointing it out - but it's that he did what a critic should do. He provided context. He enlarged the conversation. By that I mean, his message was: Make no mistake. Generations to come will be referencing this performance - so just know that - and see it while you still can. I appreciate that. Especially when I agree with it. He wasn't 100% rah-rah - he didn't like the first act (I didn't either), he wasn't wacky about the younger lead (neither was I) ... but to throw out the baby with the bathwater and not give Ebersole the props she deserves - would be ignorant. Too many critics do that.

So here is Brantley's review of Year of Magical Thinking - the adaptation of Joan Didion's stunning book of the same name. It's starring Vanessa Redgrave. As most everybody knows, Didion's husband John Gregory Dunne (brother to Dominick Dunne) died suddenly in 2003. Didion's book is about her immediate response to grief - the unreality of it, the inability to throw away his clothes ... the 'magical thinking' that death is not really real. Now no matter what I say here cannot convey the power of that tiny little book. I had to endure it and force myself to finish it it was so painful, and searing. She's one of my favorite writers anyway - and there's always been something spare and chill about her prose - it's what appeals to me. It's stripped down. It's like you can feel the hot desert sun of her home state beating down on her head, burning away all that is unnecessary. She has been known to spend weeks editing one of her own paragraphs - she's that specific with what she wants. Omit needless words, omit needless words, omit needless words ....

And Year of Magical Thinking is the opposite of what one would expect in our Quick-Fix culture. It's not self-help. It's not a "how to" book, eg: how to deal with your husband's sudden death. No. Anyone who fears being widowed, anyone who fears losing a loved one will find no comfort in this book. It's a woman's impressions from within the maelstrom of her grief. Things are not logical in immediate aftermaths like that. Your thoughts don't go to healing the wound. Your thoughts go (sometimes) to searing regret (thank you for the phrase, Richard Ford), or turning back the clock, or obsessively going over the last moment you spoke to the now-dead person ... trying to reverse time ... It's a horror. Didion does not write with retrospect - that is the main key to the book's power. She writes from the middle of it. It's relentless, comfortless. Open-eyed horror at what has been lost.

Didion's daughter Quintana - who is around my age - got mysteriously ill right before her father passed and was lying in the hospital in a coma when the death occurred. Imagine waking up from a coma to find you have lost your father. And then - even more horrifying - Quintana - who had this mysterious fever and heart condition which came over her quite suddenly - passed away as the book was going to print. Apparently And Didion decided not to include it. But my God. Quintana - not even 40 years old yet - engaged to be married - passed away. Joan and John had no other children.

So Didion's old age now ... will be alone. No daughter to keep her company, no grandchildren. That's it.

Didion's sentences are cold and clear, horrifying in their brutal spareness. Tough book to read.

And now she has adapted it as a one-woman show for Broadway. Here is a photo of Joan and Vanessa Redgrave - who is playing Joan in the production.

Anyway, Brantley's analysis of what works in book-form and what doesn't quite work in theatre-form is quite perceptive - but my main interest here is his discussion of Vanessa Redgrave's acting, which makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

Listen. Listen to the details of his observation:

As Ms. Redgrave continues to slide through the narrator�s past and present � from the gray world of hospitals and funeral arrangements to a sunny shared familial past � she gives sharp life to a variety of moods: fury at medical incompetence and evasiveness, passionate maternal solicitude, conspiratorial feyness as she speaks of her belief that her dead husband will come back to her if only she performs the right actions.

Some moments � yes, silent ones � are remarkable. I have not, for example, been able to erase from my mind Ms. Redgrave�s face from an early scene. It�s after she, as Ms. Didion, has spoken of seeing her husband silent and slumped in a chair in their apartment at the end of a trying day. �I thought he was making a joke,� she says. �Slumping over. Pretending to be dead.�

Ms. Redgrave�s expression conveys two levels of consciousness: She is in the moment she has just described, irritated with what she perceives to be an ill-timed joke. And she is in the present tense � still angry with herself and the grotesque cosmic prank she has participated in � because her husband wasn�t joking at all.

In that small second or two Ms. Redgrave�s magnificent face, wry and wounded, is the reproachful emblem of the guilt and exasperation that the living so often feel toward the dying and the dead. There is also reflected that disorientation that comes from a death�s abrupt way of changing the rules by which you have always lived your life.

And then an observation like this:

Watch, for example, the attention she gives to a bracelet on her arm, and how she develops it. It will break your heart.

Will do, Ben. I'm seeing it in April.

Vanessa Redgrave as Joan Didion

Full review here.

Commonplace Book - Acting quotes

Ellen Terry - from Ellen Terry's Memoirs

Henry Irving is the monument, the great mark set up to show the genius of will. For years he worked to overcome the dragging leg ... he toiled, and he overcame this defect, just as he overcame his difficulty with vowels, and the self-consciousness which in the early stages o fhis career used to hamper and incommode him.

Only a great actor finds the difficulties of the actor's art infinite. Even up to the last five years of his life, Henry Irving was striving, striving. He never rested on old triumphs, never found a part in which there was no more to do. Once when I was touring with him in America, at the time when he was at the highest point of his fame, I watched him one day in the train - always a delightful occupation, for his face provided many pictures a minute - and being struck by a curious look, half puzzled, half despairing, asked him what he was thinking about.

"I was thinking," he answered slowly, "how strange it is that I should have made the reputation I have as an actor, with nothing to help me - with no equipment. My legs, my voice, everything has been against me. For an actor who can't walk, can't talk, and has no face to speak of, I've done pretty well."

And I, looking at that splendid head, those wonderful hands, the whole strange beauty of him, thought, "Ah, you little know!"

Henry Irving

Ellen Terry and Henry Irving in Abelard and Heloise - by Henrietta Rae

Henry Irving and Ellen Terry

The great Ellen Terry

Commonplace Book - Acting quotes

Eleanora Duse:

I feel that I have never known nor shall I ever know how to act! Those poor women in my plays have entered so totally into my heart and head, that while I am striving as best I can to make the audience understand them, I almost feel like comforting them ... but it is they who, little by little, end up by comforting me! How - and why, and at what point - this affectionate, inexplicable, and undeniable "exchange" takes place between those women and me ... it would take too long and be too difficult to relate precisely. The fact remains that, while everybody else is suspicious of the women, I get along beautifully with them! I pay no attention if they have lied, if they have betrayed, if they have sinned, if they were born crooked, as long as I feel that they have wept, that they have suffered as a result of lying or betraying or loving.

Eleanora Duse

Commonplace Book - Acting quotes

Chekhov, letter to Olga Knipper, Jan. 2 1901:

Describe at least one rehearsal of Three Sisters for me. Isn't there anything which needs adding or subtracting? Are you acting well, my darling? But watch out now! Don't pull a sad face in the first act. Serious, yes, but not sad. People who had long carried a grief within themselves and have been accustomed to it only whistle and frequently withdraw into themselves. So you can often be thoughtfully withdrawn on stage during conversations. Do you see?

Anton Chekhov and Olga Knipper

1997/1998 Acting Notebook

A continuation from this. I've gotten a lot of emails and personal comments about these notebooks - people appreciating them, and feeling inspired by them. So here's another notebook, picking up where that last one left off. It's devastating too because I begin rehearsals for the Macbeth In Half an Hour monstrosity. I shiver in remembrance.

I had so many different projects going on - that I think the notes I kept was my way of keeping myself on track. I probably would not need to take such detailed notes now. But God - it all just rushes back to me, seeing all of this.

PD Unit
Hello Out There - Sam: "2 damaged people find a moment of magic."

11/6 Classics
Rent: Rob Roy - study Tim Roth. His manners. Negotiating status.

11/11 Classics
"hidden direction" in Shakespeare's verse

Hamlet's speech to the players: Live by it.

What is your intention?
To get onto the stage, dear boy. - Sir John Gielgud

"instinctive apprehension of situations" - on Elizabethan actors

1st scene in Merchant - "Ham it up a bit"

"Theatre is nature highly organized." - Ben Kingsley

11/11 PD Unit

"The PD ... boring or otherwise ..." - Sam

"While she's making all this $ on a soap opera, she can do her creepy parts off-Broadway." - Sam

"Don't try to pull yourself together. Fall apart." - Sam to K.

"I feel like a two-bit whore. Next!" - Sam

11/13 Classics

My monologue: don't lie! Keep it simple. Let it go. Plow right through the list - don't linger. Get it out.

Beware of parallel choices, in terms of preparation.

Doug on Ernie Martin: "He ran Actors Studio West with so much love" -

Stimulus - response
Method: create the stimulus - not the response. Pavlov's Dogs, etc.

Doug on inner thought processes of actors: "I'm not a good actor ... I can't create ... my mom and dad will withhold love ..."

Create a situation where you do what the character does.

Doug: "I don't think Polonius ever speaks in prose. He was born speaking in verse. He probably cried in verse."

Doug, on engraving of William Shakespeare: "I mean, this guy looks like a dork."

"We made out inappropriately ... and then he had a moment ..." - Leslie, on Ophelia's speech about Hamlet attacking her

11/13 German Lullaby rehearsal
How long has Polly been gone?
How overdue is she?
It's 3 a.m.
Something's wrong and I know it.
Anxiety.
Smoking?

11/18 Classics

We speak in sound bytes and subtext.

Doug: "Get into a state where you release all of who you are so that control is not an issue."

Doug: "That's the risk. That's the job."

Doug: "Do everything you're scared to do. Go crazy!"

Over-acting is doing more than you feel.

Doug, on failed love: "You may be able to deal with it better, but you don't get over it. You have a hole in your heart forever."

11/18 PD Unit

After the Fall - just relax. Speak. Don't do more than you feel. Be open.

11/20 Classics

"Shakespeare scares you? Why should you teach yourself to run from these things?" - Doug

Incorporate rhetoric into truthful behavior.

If you get the thoughts right, you'll start doing what the character does.

Balanchine's favorite dancers were the ones who spun into walls. Not so careful, not so aware of where they were.

Robin Williams/Jim Carrey - fearless. Moment to moment. Literally second to second expressing what is in their heads.

"Gentle! God! You can call me anything but don't call me gentle!" - John describing a fellow spear-carrier's improvisation during a production of Julius Caesar - they all called him the "Gentle God guy"

11/25 Classics

Doug: "So how was that for you?"
Eileen: "I had fun ... for a chance.

!! Always make the choice that the character is as smart as you or smarter. You may be playing an idiot - but he is negotiating life to the best of his facilities.

Every character has a hidden agenda or secret. Meryl Street in Bridges of Madison County - her secret was she never loved her husband. Make the secret as a conscious choice - and then let it do its work. Use this in As You Like It. I love him. I'm a woman.

"I just gotta get thru the scene." - Al Pacino

"What's it about?" - Doug to Amanda, on her book called Trusting God
"It's about herb gardens." - Amanda

11/25 Macbeth
Try the speech like a telegram - look for only the operative words
What are the most important words to get across the message

11/25 PD Unit

"I don't think it's self-indulgent unless it's self-indulgent." - Sam on crying in stage

Loss. Immediate sensory responses?
WTC bombing.

"Tom?"
"Never mind."

K. says that everything is a "double-edged sword". He uses that phrase all the time. He's so fucking stupid and he thinks that makes him sound smart. Let's count how many times he says "double-edged sword" in the next 3 hours.

"If she's peeing loudly, that's a beer-drinkin' woman." - Tom

Eileen: "I know that women are bad lays, too."

"Are you a spy from Juilliard?" - Sam to Brenda

Sam: "The 'chink in the armor' is not a racial slur ..."

Lesley began throwing paper airplanes at Christine. Everyone is falling apart.

Acting in film:
Think loud.
Talk low.

Sam: "Every scene is Fight or Fuck. Make a choice. Do you want to fight the person you're in the scene with? Or do you want to fuck them? Fight of fuck. Choose."

"You were doing some oddly inappropriate emotional work ..." - Sam to Tom

"in the hallowed halls of ivy ..." - Sam

12/2 PD Unit

"I'm totally confused from an organizational point of view." - Sam

"Totally uninhibited. No apologies. Go." - Sam

Liz: "Every woman in this room has gotten their period --"
Sam: "I don't want that kind of talk here."

According to D., there is only one play in the world. 2 Trains Running. Hamlet? Hedda Gabler? Forget about it. There's only one goddamn play in the world, apparently.

12/4 Classics
Tell the truth.
If you're awkward, give it to the audience with no more or no less than what you feel.

Parenthetical: think of it as an aside

Doug: "Sometimes physicalizing it dissipates the impulse to express it in complex long sentences."

John: "Should I talk about all of my fears before I start?"

Heaven stands in for God (somtimes) - check the edited editions to see what the consensus was

Let the verse direct you

Words at end of lines (with no punctuation): to be punched, accented, but keep going. The operative words at end of line
Mary had a little lamb whose
fleece was white as snow ...

12/4 PD Unit

"Do you want to speak, Richard, or are you just breathing?" - Sam

Brenda told Sam that she is a soprano. Sam said, "I don't care what you call yourself, your high notes stink."

"Life is short. Keep moving." - Sam

Brenda: "Should I use my body?"
Sam: "If you don't use it, I will."

Sam on Method acting: "I'm flopping around honestly in my moments."

Sam: "The punchline is 'The cocksuckers are throwing paper clips' - so you can work your way backwards from there."

I am so sick at heart today for some reason. I hurt all over. My heart hurts. I want to get out of here

12/9 Classics "It came and went ... but it kept going." - Leslie

Cover yourself with the choices you made.

Everything is useful.

Leslie and Amanda - Juliet and the Nurse
obstacles in the scene. "Peter, stay at gate."
"Where is your mother?"

"saying goodbye" - Leslie

Tom "To be or not to be"
musical notes.
1st line: The actor knows his action from the 1st line, 11 beats
Question (capitalized): That is the Quest-ion. Search.
Whether 'tis - contractions are rhetorical figures of speech

Tom: "I'm like racin' ahead on this shit."

Tom: "So should I take it back to the same tired part of the thing?"

Doug: Sublimate means to take your pain, and to make it sublime.

"The demon is smiling because it's being exposed." - Doug to G.

12/9 PD Unit

If you really go after your objective, that takes care of the pacing.

"If you 2 ever decide to start a theatre company ... count me in." - Sam

"Go out, say the line, and get the hell off." - Sam

"They need you to go Ping when it comes up." - Sam on playing the triangle in a huge orchestra

Have you read about Jack Nicholson on the Terms of Endearment set?

"If Alaska is germane to your piece ..." - Leslie

12/9 Macbeth

Gene: "Don't take anything for granted when you're fucking with witches."

12/11 Classics
Taming of the Shrew - Doug told me after I stole his heart. Hugged me after class. "And you ... you stole my heart."

12/11 PD Unit
"I hate it when I don't get jokes." - Elena

There's something weird going on today.

Cosmology. Meryl Streep in House of Spirits

Sam: "Trust yourself. Don't be conservative. Go out on a limb."

Kara: "There's something almost superior to people who are spiritually intact."

Sam: "It's always a mistake for an actor to fight his own instrument. It is like a violin saying, 'I wish I was a piano.'"

"Get Strasberg out of your ass and think about somebody else for a second!" - Sam

"You can't be like - 'I'm not ready for the moment to end' ..." - Sam on being in Les Miz

12/12 Gertrude Down rehearsal
warehouse
outskirts of huge metropolis
Blade Runner
Morning After
Glengarry Glen Ross
Reservoir Dogs

Gertrude: knowledge.
How do you get to Gertrude? The little piece of paper from Gertrude means you're set

Vix: like Michael Madsen. Cool She is the only character who speaks correctly, with proper grammar.

The allegiance of thieves
Territory. Struggle for power
Aggression - get what you want

Lenny's a loose cannon

Chain of command:
Gertrude
|
Her crew
______________________
|
Vix
|
Beadie
|
Huff
|
Lenny
|
Dimples

Vix: am I gay?
"I took an oath" ??

Huff deliverws the plans
Margharitte: who is she?

12/16 PD Unit

"Is that that long-lost play by Chekhov?" - Sam

"I'm a little afraid of my boss." - Barbara

Hamlet to the players: Do not saw the air.

12/16 Gertrude Down Margheritte: did she used to be one of us? Are we missing someone?

I want to break the patterns of my life.

The library: do we normally meet in the library? Leaving messages in books, periodicals? Is Gertrude a librarian?

Whatever my relationship is with Margheritte (lovers?) - it determines how I see Beadie

After the Fall: Notes
Center of attention
Light seems to come from her
She glows
She laughs in the center of her circle of light and love
She looks like an ordinary girl - became American dream girl - she had to dream herself up
Champagne, silver coloring
She feels the image - lives it. I become my own fantasy
Restless and alive
The Misfits: across breakfast table from Clark Gable. She looks at him and says, "You really like me, don't you?"
Walks like a cat in a new house
She is possessable - men sense it
a wild spirit -
like meringue - alabaster -
Innocent. "Here was a girl you'd think would be super aware of guys coming onto her - and she went right past that into another space - far more childlike and interesting."
Modest
I'd rather be a symbol for SEX than some of the other things people are symbols for
Orphan.
Sex is not a dirty word to her - it is others who make it dirty. By itself, it is the purest thing in the world.
She was able to walk into a crowded room and spot anyone who had spent time in orphanages. "Do you like me?" in the eyes - an appeal out of bottomless loneliness

PD Unit
I love how Sam interrupts scenes.

Sam: "So I saw that you had such ecstatic oneness with the part that you were barely in the room with us."

Sam: "The scene lays a royal egg. And I'm thinking: This is not what Stanislavski had in mind."

After the Fall: Notes
Her footprints on a beach are a straight line - this throws pelvis in motion.
Only understands literal truth. Nuance and irony are lost on her.
Raped
Sense of humor collapses when painful images come up
Ludicrously provocative in how she dresses.
ee cummings poem: laughs in thoroughly unaffected way at "it's spring!" - lame balloon man - naive wonder
Surrounded by darkness
She senses she is doomed
She never had the right to her own sadness
No faith
Sees all men as boys with needs for her to fulfill - she just stands aside observing herself
Frigid sexually. No orgasms.
Men = their need
She is incapable of condemning other people
Has no common sense
She knows that men only want happy girls.
She likes old men. Aged men evoke in her an intense awareness of her own power - it turns to pity, love - this is security
Yawning terror
unrelenting uncertainty
can't rest or sleep - addicted to pills, bourbon
adores children and old people - everybody else is dangerous and have to be disarmed by her sexuality
Given power over others by mysterious common consent - no one knows why
quick to laugh
she demands a hero
crazy nobility
uncanny instinct for threat - no reserves to withstand it
Botticelli's Venus
doesn't believe in her own innocence
cursed by her mother

Remember how she listens in Bus Stop

After the Fall: Notes
Quentin's quest for connection to his own life
Tenuousness of human connection
Suddenly - after being loved - you can be thrown into the street - abolished
Play is in the form of a confession
Maggie: seeming truth-bearer
Quentin: constricted, mind-bound - looks to her for the revival of his life
Miller searching for a form that would unearth the dynamics of denial
Unstated question in Camus' book: not how to live with a bad conscience - but how to find out why one went to another's rescue - only to help in his defeat by collaborating in obscuring reality

Camus' The Fall:
about trouble with women - but this is overshadowed by the male narrator's concentration on ethics
How can one ever judge another person once one has committed the act of indifference to a stranger's call for help?

The play: stream of consciousness, abrupt disappearances, verges on montage
Survivor Guilt

After the Fall: Fact Sheet
I work at the switchboard of a law firm in NY
They don't allow dogs where I live. Is it a hotel? SRO?
I don't have a refrigerator
Just bought a phonograph - paying in installments - I only have one record (what record is it?)
"They laugh. I'm a joke to them." They/Them: Men
"I had about 10 or 20 records in Washington but my friend got sick and I had to leave." What does that mean? Washington? What's that about?
Judge Cruise - dying - I tried to say goodbye - Family offered me $1000 - Alexander the chauffeur drove me out to his grave
I left Judge a couple times, but he didn't want me to leave
Used to demonstrate hair preparations in department stores
Sent to conventions - supposed to entertain businessmen - (call girl)
I sleep in the park when it's hot in my room
Quentin: "She's quite stupid, silly kid. She said some ridiculous things. But she wasn't defending anything, or accusing - she was just there, like a tree or a cat."
Quentin: "It would have been easy to make love to her."
Never graduated high school
I like poetry
In the top 3 as a singer
Being courted by a prince - met him at El Morocco
"went up" to see my father - where's up?
My father left when I was 18 months - said I wasn't his
Christening a submarine in Groton shipyard - public appearances
I go to an analyst
Mother used to get dressed in the closet (modest() and smoke in there. She was very moral. She tried to kill me once with a pillow on my face cause I would turn out bad because of her
Masseurs say I have a good back
I disguise myself when I go out
My fake name: Miss None. Like nothing. "I can never remember a fake name, so I just have to think of nothing and that's me."
Sex: "I was with a lot of men, but I never got anything for it. It was like charity, see. My analyst said I gave to those in need. Whereas, I'm not an institution ..."
"She was chewed and spat out by a long line of grinning men."
"You seem to think you owe people whatever they demand."
The worst thing I ever did: I slept with 2 men on the same day. I am haunted by this.
Cream puffs, birthday dress, apples
Tried to die long before I met Quentin
"I been killed by a lot of people. Some couldn't hardly spell."
Who is Frank?

Transition Idea:
2nd scene: Bathrobe lying on mattress
Flowers
Drink/glasses - one drink already poured
I walk out of first scene
"Little Girl Blue" plays
I am in the new set - lights dim - I want to be a sort of silhouette
Take off shoes - unbutton dress - take off dress - take off bra - put on robe - tie robe - drink from drink already poured - sit on bed - Quentin enters
White terricloth robe with hotel insignia - too big - it's important that my pajamas be too big - obviously belonging to a man
Need: 50s bra. Half-slip. Or maybe full slip? Like Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof?

Notes from Mitchell:
Trust Sheila's innocence. Don't try to show her innocence. Trust that it is already there. She is you already. She's you without your edge.

1/7/98 After the Fall
Is Quentin different? What about him is different? What is Quentin? Not who?
Why did mom get dressed in the closet? Shame, rigid, repressed - or ashamed of smoking?
Where is my mother now?
Refrigerator references: I have no refrigerator in the first scene, and 2 freezers in the second scene
What is the relationship with my agent? I'm obviously sleeping with him. Or blowjobs in return for professional protection and career management.
Focus on Quentin. Full focus. Do not get distracted by my own stuff. Eyes always on him. Soak him up

Her line of logic - like a child.
Dog - refrigerator.
It makes perfect sense to me

Page 5: "Why, they going to fire me now?"

Open book. "How could I keep a dog?" (Come on, you know my life!)

Who is Judge Cruze?

"NOW" - in the moment impulsive
Conscious afterwards (Scuse me about my hair ...)

2nd scene: What is frightening me?

I call Quentin - not expecting him to answer - it is midnight. I ask him Can you come over? Why?
The mother story: what is the logic of it? She is "absorbed in her own connections" - what is that about?
Does Maggie know she is smart?
"You're like a god" - what do I mean by this?
My entire life has happened because of him - why?
"You're very moral" he says to me. No one has ever said that to me before.

What do I want from him in this scene?

"They laughed" - it is a stab in the chest (Betty the Loon) - where is my self-esteem?

She is not philosophical about herself.

"I hate the taste" - what do I love about the effect of alcohol? Be specific. Why do I bring it up? How much have I had before this? Is it a martini?

What would other men in this situation do to me? How would they behave as opposed to Q?

Am I testing him at all?
I respect him for not making a pass at me - but do I feel rejected too?
What role dow sex play in my life? What do I get out of it?

1/9/98 After the Fall

1st scene: What usually happens in this sort of situation - talking to strange men? It's not happening her. This surprises me. Who is this man?
--Dirt from Judge's grave - why?
--What is the relationship with Alexander? Give him a blowjob so that he will take me to the grave
-- Why did I leave the judge a couple of times?

2nd scene: Try to use sex to make my panic go away
Panic attack
Need for physical contact - it makes the bad stuff go away - sex is the only remedy
Drunkenness - don't forget she's drunk

p. 9: "What did you mean - it gave you a satisfaction?"
-- where does that come from?
-- It's a clear shift in thought - a gear shift

p. 11 "I don't know anybody like that" - cover up disappointment - he won't be staying with me. I did call someone, asshole! I called you!

Would you open the closet door? Everything stripped away.

Do I normally spend my time with men ignoring my fears so I can alleviate theirs?

It's okay for you to be a man with me, Quentin

2nd scene: If this scene didn't happen, what would I be doing?
My agent is in Jamaica - am I in his house? Who usually deals with my loneliness and depression and where are they now? Why don't I call my analyst? Is he in California? Or is Quentin the last person I called? What would have happened if he didn't answer?

1st scene: What am I doing in the park? Does it have to do with Judge Cruze's family?
Dirt: Have I been carrying it around with me for a while? Did I just come back from the grave?

1/12/98 Gertrude Down
Don't look for approval from anyone

Bank heist
-- Beadie is in the middle of telling the story

You have to have arrogance to survive in this world

Down the rope - close to Gertrude - Knowledge - Power

Vix: Narcissist. Self-involved. It's all about me.

I'm late to the meeting. Why am I late?
We are all operating on different levels of knowlege - Secrets - Everything has meaning

Don't get distracted. Be like a lion staring at an unaware zebra.

1/13/98 Actors Studio Session
Estelle Parsons moderating

1st scene: director Pete Masterson
Tom and Kelly
Okay, what is happening in this scene? Is this an improv? What is the objective?
Acting on your impuluses only is not acting. Remember John Strasberg. I'm just seeing impulse going on.
Relationship?
Her gum?

Pete: letting the actors explore the scene. This is beginning work.

God, you really just have to be so honest up there. Don't pull your punches - don't defend - talk about your choices

How do you effectively say what you worked on.

Arthur Penn's here too.

How to talk about your work without just talking about the plot, or explaining the script.

Estelle: "You talk about him, you talk about the play ... what about you?"

*What did you work on today?*

Just answer the ?
I feel like she judges the character. I feel like she thinks the character is stupid.

Estelle: "A lot of the work was very general."

Harvey Keitel is moderating on Jan. 27

2nd scene - improv
He belches. "What the fuck is that supposed to mean?" Belch. "You motherfucker."

"You're a fuckin' fruitcake, you know that?"

"Whatsa matter, guru?"

"You don't know, Mr. Skirt Man, what I'm gonna do to you."

"Let's see what it does to me. Don't impose. And I really succeeded in that."

"I did not trust my own quiet. I didn't trust that I didn't want to speak."

Arthur Penn: "That was so intensely joyful to watch. I could have stayed here for days. I could have had sandwiches brought in."

I am in love with him!!
Now that is an actor.

"My character has a problem."

"Well, I've been known to make weak chocies."

"Well, when you put it that way ......" Laughter. "Always nice talking wtih you, Arthur."

If you try to avoid cliches ... you go into Cliche-Land.

1/14/98 After the Fall: Notes I've always wanted people to see me, the real person You know why I make fun of myself? So I'll do it before they do. That way it's not so bad, doesn't hurt so much. It's either commit suicide or laugh. Gemini hold nothing back. "She personalized the whole world." Monroe freaked out once about eating a chicken - started weeping: "It had a mother." Intense identification with animals. No shame She could be so subverient and helpless and yet she wound up dominating everyone Her life was like a war zone. She was parasitic. Take take take take. Demand. Live off the juice of others. She's a good liar. Life is balck and white - all or nothing - life is intense. She never forgets, and never forgives. Obsessed with finding Freudian theories for everything.

countless abortions
rapes
no self-consciousness about her body
not a material girl

* What would happen if she allowed herself to be strong? Could anyone tolerate it?

2nd scene: "I have to initiate relationships. With men it's hands off. They don't know what the hell to do with me. After they get me, they don't know what to do either."

She has the psychology of a loving woman who has been treated like a whore her whole life

Help Help Help
I feel life coming closer
When all I want is to die

I saw a star slide down the sky,
blinding the North as it went by,
too burning and too quick to hold,
too lovely to be bought or sold,
good only to make wishes on
and then forever to be gone.

1/18/98 Gertrude Down
Gautier wardrobe, maybe?
Men's suits tailored for women
Elastica

1/20/98 Classics
"Rules are designed to minimize thinking." - Doug

Concentration is a barometer. It's God's way of telling you you didn't make a strong enough choice.

Don't apply yourself to the task if it's not working. Change the task.

After the Fall: Mitchell's notes

"See what happens if you do one rehearsal just as Sheila."

"This is a woman who hasn't learned not to play the subtext."

-- dresses too sexy for office
-- lays it too much on the line

"You open yourself up for attack if you play the subtext."

Think about me, and my role at Lounge Ax with P.: that line I was afraid to cross of being perceived as a joke, a bimbo, a whore. Paranoid about how I was perceived. Am I a joke? What are people saying about P. and me? I have to be in control of that - of how I am perceived - so make a joke out of myself before others can. The point is is that I am in on the joke.

"Men are at the mercy of her sexuality - and so is she."

1/20/98 PD Unit "And if you're a talented prick, who needs you?" - Sam

You aren't only emotionally connected in naturalism

Lee Strasberg: "Your trump card is always the disaster that's befalling you in the moment."

Fall 1996: Acting Notebook

This was the beginning of my second year in grad school. My second year was all about my acting class with Sam. A man who changed my life - just one of those amazing mentors you find - a real "fan" - and yet a person who will make you work harder, who is such a fan that he can say, 'Well, your acting just really bored me. What is going on?" - making me work harder, probe deeper, and also lighten up, laugh a little bit, trust that I had talent - I didn't have to work so hard - How on earth he was able to do all of this, I will never know, and I don't even care. It was a rough year for me on many levels - but I thank God that I found Sam. He's still there for me. It's intense.

So these are notes from his class - and also notes from the 2nd Year Playwriting/Director's Unit. This Unit was led by David Garfield - it was the beginning percolatings of putting together thesis projects, and it was a big drag, I'll tell you that. Drudgery. It wasn't until the next year that I started doing what I wanted to do, and declaring myself - keeping myself independent from those who wanted to either drag me down (Kate, Mitchell - if you're reading this, please think: "How are you, Isis???"), own me, or ... whatever, freeze me out of projects.

This is the beginning of the Summer and Smoke obsession. Just the beginning. I still get goosebumps thinking about that play.

Sept. 5 Sam's Class

"Acting can be like a hand reaching out in the darkness." - Sam

Sept. 6 PD Unit
Lights off. All seems grey. The sky outside, the roofs below us, the floor. Even the air seems grey. The green blackboard has a greyish tint to it. Good energy here. Quiet. Grey. Cool.

Read Garfield's book History of the Actors Studio

Garfield - taught at the Strasberg Institute - studied with Lee, Meisner, Uta Hagen - in the road company of Fiddler on the Roof with Luther Adler

This unit has got to be terrifying to the playwrights.

Garfield: "I was waiting for some brilliant Kazanian insights ... and he said, 'Do it faster.' And it was better.

Sept. 9 Sam's Class
Maybe work on Beirut with Charley

"I have never subscribed to the 'Colors School of Acting.'" - Sam [This is such a funny statement. Basically - a lot of teachers, and actors - believe that an actor needs to show all these different "colors". That an audition monologue should show different "colors" - your "mad" color, your 'sad" color - and so material is chosen because it shows different "colors". This is almost an accepted creed of the craft. Sam was not a big fan of "colors" - but I just thought it was so funny how he said it.]

Sam: "In every scene, pick an objective. A strong one. ATTACK. SEDUCE. BEG."

Sept. 11 Sam's Class

"The difficult must become habit, habit easy, and the easy beautiful." - Sergei Volkonski

Sam: "Acting craft is there if you need it. It's like any carpenter. You don't obsess about hammers. You can use a screw driver if you need one."

Sam: "This business of sucking ..."

Objective. Play the objective. Don't act. DO.

"It's not that important to know who are you are. It's important to know what you do - and then do it like Hercules." - Stella Adler

Sept. 16 Sam's Class Don't worry about feeling, or emotion. Do.

God, I am so happy here. I can't even express it.

Isolate issues. Then re-combine.

"In what ways are you and the character different?"

Sam: "There is a difference between pushing and expressing."

Mind in 2 places at once.

Behavior - It's not there to be interesting. You do it to explore the predicament of your character.

Sept. 16 MARK RYDELL
- leads Actors Studio West

Sandy Meisner: really doing something, as opposed to imitating doing something.

No one wants to talk about Lee Strasberg!

Rydell worked on As the World Turns as an actor. He said it was great training. "Conversational reality."

Movies: "Movies are like trying to catch lightning in a bottle."

On The Fox - Sandy Dennis - "I was the talk of the town for a minute."

On The Rievers and Steve McQueen: "He was psychotic. A wonderful actor. But he was really crazy."

"The material makes its own demands."

On The Cowboys - "I learned very quickly. You don't say to cows: 'Go.'"

"It's all personal. The work is all personal."

On The Rose:
He said to Bette: "Try to fill the bottomless pit every day."
To the cinematographer: "I want the picture to be like an abdominal operation."
On Bette Midler: "She is so precious that I think she should be protected. Like a National monument. Funds should be taken up so that she remains protected. She's that preciolus to me."

On working with actors: "Find the button that frees them to say, 'Oh! I know what to do now!'

Movies: RECORD THE EVENT. That's it. Be very clear what the event actually is. And then record it.

Sam's class
Sam to Stephen: "You're addicted to suffering."
Stephen: "It's the only thing I know."

Sam to Stephen: "You have a quality of latent aggression and vague intensity." !!!!!

Philadelphia Story
Moment before the scene: I have been talking with Mike. I have read his stories. I find them "damned beautiful, almost poetry." I say to him, "I believe you put the toughness on, to save your skin." I recognize a kindred spirit in him. I offer him my little house in Unionville for a place to work. I'm only there in hunting season. I want Mike to stay with me during my conversation with Dexter.

Me and Dexter
He drank whiskey
His drinking made him unattractive to me
I got drunk once on champagne, climbed out on the roof, stood there naked, and wailed at the moon. I have absolutely no recollection of doing this.
Dexter said it was an "affair of the spirit".
Was I frigid?
I despise weakness.

Summer and Smoke 1916 Glorious Hill, Mississippi On the Gulf

Miss Alma Winemiller - had an adult quality as a child
now prematurely spinsterish
excessive propriety and self-consciousness
nervous laughter
years of playing hostess at Rectory
belongs to a more elegant age
airy, graceful

I have attacks of "nervous heart trouble" - panic attacks? I run over to see Dr. Buchanan at 2 or 3 a.m.

I teach singing. I sing in church, at weddings.
I belong to an intellectual group that meets every Wednesday

Father didn't want me to take Nellie Ewell on as a pupil because of her mother's reputation - but I did it anyway. "No one should presume to judge and condemn anyone else."

I keep saying, 'I have a touch of malaria" - True? I am responding to John's observation that I am shaking.

John and I grew up together. "It used to delight you to embarrass me."

John has been away in medical school (Johns Hopkins) - his father has raved to me about his accomplishments (graduated magna cum laude). How long has he been away? How many years?

My mother had a nervous breakdown when I was in high school. I managed the rectory ever since. "In a way, it may have - deprived me of - my youth."

When I go out - it's to the public library or to the park. I have to be selective.

I say to John: "Most of us have no choice but to lead useless lives." He is wasting his divine gift!

John to me: "Sometimes when I come home late at night I look over at the rectory and I see something white at the window."
Insomnia
Heartache
I wait up till he comes home

Dr. John Sr. is a father-figure to me. I say to him, "I don't think I will be able to get thru the summer."

Do people think: "Miss Alma's fading this summer"?

Roger proposed to me. This may be my last proposal. He is:
-- an active church worker
-- he lives with his mother
-- they just moved here
-- he plays the French horn
-- has a position at the bank

Dr. John Sr. is "the one person in town that I have ever been able to rely on for a kind and honest and understanding discussion of my ----- problems."

I am sexually frustrated. And I cannot picture myself in bed with Roger.

All the girls I grew up with have married.

My aunt: "a mysteriously colorful career" in New Orleans "on the old side of town". Shades of Blanche?

I may accept Roger's proposal. I am afraid of being left "high and dry"

I believe in the possibility of deep love between a man and a woman - but with me it could not be based on physical passion.

It offends me when Roger touches me.

When John touches me, I am not offended. "I am not a cold person."

I watch over him at night - every night - sometimes at daybreak when he comes home, sprawled on the steps - whenever he comes in at night I rush downstairs to peek out at him from behind the curtain

I am pitied. People thnk I am an old maid. "I'm still young!" My mother has taken my youth away from me. She never says thank you.

27 Wagons Blue Mountain, Mississippi gnats Masochism - I like pain Think child!!!

Saint Joan Orders from my Lord - Capt. Robert de Baudricourt is to give me armor/horse and some soldiers - and send me to the dauphin. I am being sent to the Dauphin to raise the siege of Orleans. Bertrand de Porlengey and John of Metz have agreed to go with me.

My Lord is the King of Heaven

Faith!

My real father is a farmer.

The English - hold half of the country - right down to the Loire - they have Paris

The Dauphin is in Chinon - like a rat in a corner - and he won't fight

1997: Acting Notebook

Here is where things start to get a bit manic and insane in the acting notebooks. You can tell the difference from the more earnest first-year notebook. I've written before, I think, about the "PD Unit" - which stands for the "Playwriting/Directors Unit" - which basically met all day on Fridays. Or - I had a class in the morning - and then went to the PD Unit - which was, like, from 12 to 7 - brutal. You started to get slap-happy, stir-crazy, whatever ... and sometimes it was so nuts that NOTHING looked good. Everything started to look like crap work. You lost your sharpness of perception. The PD Unit is where plays were developed, directors presented scenes, and actors jostled for position in projects they wanted to be involved in. Sometimes it was a great experience - sometimes it was grueling. Sam - my acting teacher - was the head of my PD Unit - he's a practical man, years of experience, no problem saying to anybody, "Okay, well THAT stunk. How can we make it better" - which was just what the PD Unit needed. The least precious atmosphere possible. We had a great group in our unit - many of whom I am still friends with today. (Eileen? Are you reading? Some of this shit is going to crack you UP.) I would take notes on whatever scenes people were working on - and also the actors involved in each ... but I wouldn't write down whether I thought it was good or not. I wrote down mainly down funny things that Sam would say in response to the scenework. Or profound things, but mostly funny.

So there was the PD Unit ... and I also was taking a Shakespeare class - with Doug Moston - I wrote about him here, one of my best teachers ever. I adored that class. I had no experience with Moston before that class - so his way of teaching, his blunt ham-and-eggs approach to stuff like Shakespeare and Moliere was just terrific. Great class.

This, again, is a mish-mash. Funny quotes from the insane PD Unit - when things would get tense, or whatever - and that was a funny group of people. Even though we were all focused on one goal, which was serious to us, the hilarity that hovered on the edges of all interactions in there ... was so delicious. I hated and loved Fridays, at the same time.

9/4/97 Doug Moston - Classics

"That's where your juvenile delinquents were manufactured." - Doug Moston on Hell's Kitchen

the power of words -
Don't give a word more power than it can handle
Not every word has the same weight

PD Unit

"It's like you've been thru some sort of horrific marriage." - Sam

"A half-hour where you stink is no great shakes." - Sam

Go back and look at Brando's private moment in Last Tango in Paris

Sam is a born teacher. It is his calling.

Hello Out There - we just got a big ol' green light - move forward with the project

Sam: "I wanted people to be ready to bring in work today---"
Barbara: "Oh, for cryin' out loud."

This room is so dreadful. The lighting. The air conditioning noise. That wavy thing above us. What the FUCK is that?

9/7 German Lullaby rehearsal

Death is present here. Eroticism. Codependent.
Sim: caretaker?
Truth or Dare game

Beginning of scene: so happy to see her! Don't play the subtext. Deny what is going on. It is not happening.

9/9 Classics

"He was known as Midtown Murray." - Doug on his father running the most famous actor's poker game

"I want the work." - Harvey Keitel on why he had invested in Lee's classes

antithetical thought - play the opposites off of each other.
Iambic pentameter - the character acknowledges his own cleverness with that rhythm - and double entendre
No extra words

9/9 PD Unit

Cowboy Mouth - Chaos.

"That's a Greek word." - Sam

Alexander Haig: "I'm in charge here!"

"We could do a merchandising tie-in." - Sam

"We have 2 striving artists yearning to be free." - Sam

Classics
Macbeth monologue:
dead for breath - assonance. It sounds - perhaps the Messenger is out of breath? It has a panting sound to it. "here" "Thane" "had" "breathe" had" "than" ...
Announcing the arrival of the King that night - some urgency perhaps.
Thane - soft vowels, short words

The sense is in the iambic pentameter. Do not invent more. Go to the verse already there.
*To be or not to be
That is the question.*

9/11 Classics

"I'll give you a hint. Boats." - Doug Moston trying to make the class say "Spanish Armada" - After the Armada, Britain ruled the waves - people started investing in boats - strong upperclass emerges - the theatre begins (the Burbidges - John and Richard) - 1576 - The Theatre - built by John Burbidge - round

9/11 PD Unit

Arcadia - Tom Stoppard -
actors: Matt and Barbara

Sam: "The grapes don't solve the problem."

Sam: "Not everything is Hat Full of Rain."

Barefoot in the Park - actors: Elena, Michael

Sam: "It's like trying to revive a 2nd rate dead horse."

I need to re-read Brendan Behan's The Hostage and Moonchildren by Michael Weller

Home Free - actors: Wade and Kara
We see Lawrence in a room alone, tapping the wall with the end of a coat hanger to get the attn. of his "audience" - Claypone and Edna are his students for the moment. Kara's character, at this point, know that she is going to die.
"This play is like 2 panic attacks meeting each other." - Sam
2 scared people trying to find comfort.

"Hoffman's won Oscars playing morons and bums." - Sam

Somehow I think that if actors are bored watching something ... what is the good of doing this? Like Sam said: Recognize when you are bored. It's not that you are being rude to your fellow students by being inattentive. Boredom is a sign that something is not working. It is a valid response.

"The Ski Lift Named Denial." - Jen on doing Streetcar in Vermont

9/16 Classics

"So the idea is - she's not there. She's in between those sticks." - Doug

Lady Anne: Set down, set down your honorable load

"I am not a necrophiliac," said Tom in dead earnest.

Learn enough about Shakespearia so that you look like a native citizen, not a tourist.

Shakespeare controls the traffic onstage with the language. As Doug says, he lets the actors know - "Stop. This broad's makin' a speech."

If it's heightened language - then you choose to speak in heightened language. Heightened state of emotion.

Simple and complex language.
Simple? Keep it simple
Complex? What verbal conceits make it complicated?

Lady Macbeth: The raven himself is hoarse.
Give me the daggers

9/16 PD Unit

Buried Child - actors: Tom, Nina

"Anything can be good. If it's good." - Sam

To extract a scene: it needs to have its own internal arc. Make sense on its own

Am I Blue - by Beth Henley - actors: Michael, Kara, Cheryl
The writing of this play is lousy. Lifeless. You'd have to invent the subtext. With plays like Streetcar or Death of a Salesman - the subtext is IN the lines.

"If there's any poetic dimension to this, it escapes me." - Sam

"She's not a waif physically. She's a waif emotionally." - Sam - on This Property is Condemned)

Breathless - movie - long scenes, jump cuts
The thing that gives it its stature is the legends. When you stand back, you see the universal. It is in the fragments that you ahve the uniqueness.

"Then why these scenes in this specific order?"
Sam: "I have no idea."

St. Joan - actors: Tom, Kelly

"Yeah, fuck you, Rich!" - Sam

"Tom, you fuck-head, listen to me!" - Sam

"Do whatever you want to do. Just don't have a rod up your ass and think you're playing Shaw." - Sam

"Cast well, and then shut up." - Gene, to the directors

"All the plans that you think you've made may be just delusions on your part." - Sam

9/17 German Lullaby rehearsal
The monologue: Did I really kill the cat? Who's the predator in the relationship? Play the ambivalences in the piece. There's a time bomb in this house.

9/18 Classics Lady Macbeth - "infirm of purpose" - complex way of saying you're weak. Heightened state. Shakespeare puts that texture into the text.

12th Night: "This is Illyria, Lady." Beautiful.

Suit the action to the word and the word to the action.

As You Like It
seem ... semen?

If you think it's bawdy, it's bawdy. If you don't think it's bawdy - it's only because you haven't worked it out yet.

9/18 PD Unit
A Loss of Roses - by William Inge - actors: Barbara, Tom
Warren Beatty made his stage debut in this

"I know I've been manipulating you, but I think I've been helpful to you." - Sam to Barbara
Barbara: "You have."

Snow Angel - Elena, Michael
It's one thing to act material - it's another thing to embody material.

"It looks like your soul is adrift in the wrong play." - Sam to Michael

Gertrude Down
Kevin: "What's it about?"
Matt: "It's about a door."

"You talk a little bit like a French art critic." - Sam to Rich

9/18 Hello Out There rehearsal

Looking at myself in the mirror.
His heart is larger than life.
Remember that feeling of: This encounter is going to change my life.
In a world of stick figures, he is a Michelangelo.

9/20 Ludlow Fair rehearsal
Moment before - work on that.
What do I want from her?
What would I be doing if this scene weren't happening?
Really work the flu

9/22 Shirley Maclaine
"We all came out of the same cave."

On dancing: "I loved the regimentation. I loved the freedom."
"I learned how to negotiate movement under duress."

"I was the only virgin on that train."

George Abbott under the pool with her on his shoulders - "to prove how virile he was"

Hitchcock in the audience when she went on for Carol Haney: "You see why I believe in destiny."

The Trouble with Harry - directed by Hitchcock
He said to her: "Before you say that line - dog's feet." (Pause.)

Some Came Running
Frank Sinatra: "Let the kid die, and she'll get the nomination." And that's what happened.

"That's why men don't like to marry actresses!"

She loves sex. It oozes off of her.

On the Rat Pack: "I took the crackers out of their beds."

The Apartment - directed by Billy Wilder
On Wilder: "He had this magnificent yardstick of a brain."
That last scene was done in one take.

On Wilder: "He would watch us run a scene, and he would say, 'That's very good. Now do it again, and take out 13 seconds.'"

Faster is always better.

"It's all about listening, isn't it?"

Sweet Charity -
On Cy Coleman: "He thought with his fingers."

The Turning Point
On Anne Bancroft: "Annie wanted to always be in character."

Terms of Endearment
"So this brings in my other life. Are we ready to go there?"

On Jack Nicholson: "He makes you a constant surprise to yourself."

On moonlight, and writing: "feminine energy of remembrance"

Steel Magnolias
"collective feminine energy"

Postcards
On Meryl Streep: "This woman is truly channeling."

9/23 Classics

"You mean ... Hamlet gets in the elevator ... but he won't go down?" - Leslie

"I think that you have to establish with your robot ..." - Leslie

Do what the character does. Remember Occam's Razor.

"Friends, Romans, Countrymen
Lend me your ears" - rhetoric - he is building his argument through the verse

9/23 PD Unit

There are more things in heaven and earth,
Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Cloud Tectonics - by Jose Rivera

"This was a bore." - Sam

"You look like you have parentheses around you at all times." - Sam to Cheryl (??)

Michael G.:
"Will you marry me. Let's get married, Sheila."
Las Vegas. New Year's. 1997.

Sam: "Blackout. Slow fade."

Sam: "Renee Taylor, in reality, is larger than life."

9/25 Classics

"The King comes here tonight." - simple
Use the verbal conceits. Play them all. Iambic pentameter, assonance, alliteration.

Clues in the writing help you to be able to play it.

"Berlady". (By Our Lady) - character from the country, this is a regionalism - it means that the Capulets are nouveau riche - it means that Juliet has to marry Paris. Status. Materialism.

The Apothecary in Romeo and Juliet - count the "I" sounds.

9/28 Hello Out There rehearsal
Passion - as well as loneliness
The fire in the play
Good and evil
prairie out the windows
Isolation
Urgency, stakes

9/30 Classics

"I always get cast as the eunuch or the fool." - John

Sections of Hamlet are very close to passages in the Geneva Bible

Verbal conceits: express passion thru language
figures of rhetoric - Antony's speech
euphemism: "My father passed away" as opposed to "My father died"
stychomythia: rapid-fire dialogue overlapping - alternating liunes
onomotopeia
metaphor

Prose: less precision - but it still can be heightened
Verse: precise - the writer is directing you, telling you where to breathe/pause - tells you what to stress

Don't give up who you are when you get into this - but do give it up momentarily in order to break the code

Use the punctuation. Pay attention. This is where Shakespeare is directing you.

"Double, bubble, toil and trouble." - troche - not iambic

Colon: you can drop your voice - do it in a way that still holds the audience's attention - or a shift of gears. You are still traveling in the same direction, you're just shifting gears.

9/30 PD Unit

Barbara, dressed in green, lying spreadeagled on the floor, trying to relax. Sam said, "You look like a human pool table, Barbara."

10/6 Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson

Anne on her first moment "acting" as a little girl: "I said this poem, I got a laugh, and it was ecstasy - and after, I hid in the cellar."

Her Shirley Temple imitation

Studied with Herbert Berghoff at New School 1944 - he got her a scholarship at the Neighborhood Playhouse

"I have an affinity for the Italians. This is an Italian shirt, actually." - Eli

"We were the only Jews in a sea of Italians." - Eli

"Acting means to ACT." - Anne

Eli - onstage in his first big part - with katherine Cornell: "I cut 14 of her lines." Strasberg's main advice to Eli was: "Wait for your cue!"

Anne hated improvisatiion

"In acting, take nothing for granted. You don't know what's going to happen." - Lee Strasberg

"And for the next 7 years, we did nothing but Tennessee Williams." - Eli

On The Misfits - Eli and Clark Gable fooling around - John Huston: "For Christ's sake, would you guys cut it out?"

Anne: "Please. Let's go on. I'm going to say something profound."

"It's a Method, not the Method." - Anne

Eli, arriving in England: "It's so green here."
Laurence Olivier: "Naturally. It's been raining for the past 300 years."

Marlon Brando in Stella's class: "Chickens don't know about atom bombs."

On The Rose Tattoo - directed by Elia Kazan
Elia experimenting with fantasy (Camino Real)
Written for Anna Magnani - Maureen Stapleton auditioned 6 times
Eli turned down From Here to Eternity for Camino Real

On Camino Real
Kazan: "Go on and make friends." He would pit actors against each other.

Anne's break was with This Property is Condemned

Summer and Smoke - directed by Margo Jones
"It was like music."

"Not a hit in those days meant it ran for 6 months." - Eli

Eli talked about Tennessee's laugh. "Make voyages. Attempt them."

O Men, O Women - Anne had a 20 minute monologue
"The more I cried, the more the audience laughed."

Middle of the Night
Edward Robinson - She went to stand up, he put his hand on her shoulder, shook his head
Josh Logan: "Don't ever get attention with a pause."

Anne on pros and cons of working with Eli: "The pros are obvious. You share the same taxi."

Sir John Gielgud said to Anne, about being onstage with Olivier: "Larry is a terrible giggler." (Anne has a problem with laughing on stage)

Anne on marriage: "We drank Manhattans and we have no memory of our wedding night."

Baby Doll - this was Eli's greatest experience.

The Magnificent Seven - 2 gold teeth
Eli: "I've played a lot of Mexican bandits since then. I wonder why."

Steve McQueen shaking the cartridge - taking attention from Yul Brynner. Eli said, "McQueen was very clever."

The Misfits:

Anne: "Marilyn Monroe was a man's friend. She wasn't a woman's friend."

Eli on Clark Gable: "Clark never had a mother in a movie."

Anne on Clark and Marilyn in The Misfits: "The movie was disturbing to our fantasies of these people."

Monty's first scene in the phone booth: one take

Anne, on going to painful places as an actor: "And we go there with delight!"

Eli took a class with Martha Graham. She shouted at him: "Would you for God's sake walk as though you carry the seed?"

Clifford Odets said, "I always start a play in the middle of a fight."

Eli on working with Milo O'Shea - Eli wasn't nervous about the play until Milo whispered in his ear, right before the curtain went up: "Thank God you've got the first line."

Eli on marriage: "Marriage is not for sissies."

Anne looked at him at one point and said, "This relationship isn't going to last."

Coppola to Eli, on Godfather III: "You are an old old OLD friend of the Corleone family."
Eli: "If I'm such an old old OLD friend of the Corleone family ........ then why wasn't I in the other Godfather movies?"

10/8 German Lullaby rehearsal
This is the death of our relationship. It just takes us a while to realize that.
Eroticism in the air.
The intimacy is in the silences, the gestures.
Who is leaving who here?
I am yours. You are mine.
Who is she to me?
I can be on a precipice. I live on the edge.
The night gives us permission to exaggerate.
*I lose myself in her lush dramatic personality. This is where our sex life goes. I fight for my identity.

It's 3 a.m. She's been gone all day.

10/9 Classics
Characters pursue their objectives verbally

"I'll buy that parentheses and I'll raise you a mid-line ending." - Doug

The conspiracy scene in Julius Caesar - all the "s' sounds ... makes it sound like incessant whispering

Gear changes in thought need to be audible

Suit the action to the word and the word to the action.

Sarah Siddons' Lady Macbeth

10/9 PD Unit
We read German Lullaby - Sam said to Lesley afterwards: "Lesley, you should be very proud of yourself for what you have created."

Wade gave me a backrub.

Sam discussed subtext - for him a play needs subtext - that "subterranean tide pulling us forward."

Sam on PD issues: "The main issue is the bored actors."

Sam: So how are you 2 Irish broads doing?
Me: We were just sitting here appreciating you.
Sam: Oh - really? (he got all excited - stretching his arms)
Me: Yeah. You're not afraid of anything, are you?
Sam: No. (He went right there with me)
Me: I can tell. Have you worked really hard to get that?
Sam: Yes.

God, I love him. That no bullshit honesty. He's so there

10/14 Classics

Romeo and Juliet - Eileen and Rebecca
scene between Juliet and the nurse
Line 1339: Juliet: "I would thou hadst ..." play up the "I" sound
Don't forget the given circumstances
The Nurse: aching bones. Sexual innuendo. Maybe it goes over Juliet's head, but it's for the audience and for herself
"Is it good or bad" - antithetical
"Go thy ways, wench" - perhaps to herself
"Where is your mother" - make sure no one hears

Macbeth - Steven, JM
"Hark, peace" - the owl scares the shit out of her - to the audience? Try to get their sympathy - which is a real task

Shakespeare puts the actor in the position of the character

10/14 PD Unit

Sam to the directors: "Actors at their best are fantastic creatures. If you give them the correct stimuli - character, circumstance, objective - and then Get Out of the Way - they can work miracles."

I want to work on Arthur Miller's Some Kind of Love Story

10/15 German Lullaby rehearsal
I love her for all her big-hearted dramatic qualities - i don't have any of that - and the very thing I love about her will become our point of dissension
alarm bells: she hasn't been eating. She also has never disappeared like this before.
The character has never thought all that much about being German
"She was a Jew!" - this is a surprise when it comes out. I have the capacity to say that? We love each other - this is why it is so disturbing.
I always knew she was Jewish - it was never a big deal
The past is haunting our relationship
The collective guilt of the Germans
Rain is the 3rd character in this play. It is in this room with us. And then when it stops, it's like the silence is loud.
What else is wrong in this relationship?

10/16 Classics
Negotiate each moment. Don't act like you've already made choices. Discover the choices.
If you follow the language correctly - it will create an attitude within you that is the character. It's a direct line to the playwright's head.

This stuff can take you over like a mask if you let it.

Augment the performance with performer's instincts - but don't start there

Caesura: rhetorical pause. Provides audience a chance to catch up. Named for Caesar. He was dyslexic probably and paused a lot.

10/16 PD Unit

Speed the Plow - out of context this scene is hard to follow. The relationship is not clear.

"Relaxation should not be a spectacle." - Sam

10/18 Hello Out There rehearsal
p. 19: establishing myself to him

"Since last night" - testing waters? See if I can tell him what happened last night between us.

Moment before - remember: he has just called me Katey.

"Well, yeah, except me." I am trying to segue here into my more personal stuff.

Mike: "If I'm her knight in shining armor, then she is my angel."

I know that feeling with a man.

p. 23 clear and heightened sense of danger. Urgency growing.

Premonition at the end. "I want to tell you something." I would die for him. I would kill for him.

10/19 German Lullaby rehearsal
watch Night Porter again - the eroticism. Pain = pleasure. That is our relationship.

The moment with the clip-on earrings: seduction, uncertainty

Monocle on a ribbon, maybe. Subtly militaristic outfit perhaps.

10/20 LAUREN BACALL

"I have spent half my life quaking with nerves."

"My childhood was not thrilling."

On her father: "He was a negative factor."

She would read Grimm's Fairy Tales with a flashlight under a blanket

On her high school: "I went to school with five thousand girls."

On Juliet's death scene: "It's supposed to be sad. It's not supposed to be pathetic."

"I would cut school and go see Bette Davis movies in the theatre. I'd sit there and cry and smoke."

She stalked Bette Davis.

Graduated high school at 15.

Went to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts - with Kirk Douglas. "I learned how to fall down stairs. I learned how to walk with a book on my head."

On animal exercises: "Yes. We did animal exercises. Never used it in my life."

"I was an usherette."

"George Kaufman was my friend till the end of his life."

Diana Vreeland put her on the cover of Harper's Bazaar. Howard Hawks saw it. "Howard Hawks said to me: You would be good in a movie with either Cary Grant or Humphrey Bogart and I thought: 'Cary Grant!!'"

On To Have and Have Not - "Hawks wanted me to be not tough - but insolent."

On The Big Sleep: "I love that movie because nobody knew what it was about, including us." Who pushed the dude off the pier? "Howard called Raymond Chandler who wrote the book and he didn't know. But it worked."

On Dark Passage: "Bogie was the camera in that movie."

On the Rat Pack: "In he'd come - ring a ding ding - and he'd go right to the bar." - Bacall talking about Frank Sinatra. "Frank loved married couples."

"And I walked into this party and the Hope Diamond was there."

On Key Largo and John Huston:
"If the boom boy had a suggestion, John would listen."
"Huston was also called The Monster. For good reason."

On Young Man With a Horn:
"I had a giant crush on Kirk Douglas."

The African Queen - Katharine Hepburn carrying the full-length mirror in a raft down the river

On Designing Women - this movie was filmed while Bogie was dying at home. "He wanted me to do it. Bogie wanted me to work so that I could come home and have something to talk about."

"Gregory Peck was not bad to look at, you may have noticed."

"Bogie was a last century guy. He lived by the 10 Commandments. I had a great time with him. Some people never have that."

"The 3 people I knew who had such strength of character were Bogie, Katharine Hepburn and my mother."

On The Shootist - filmed while John Wayne was dying: "He never spoke of it."

Lauren to John: "It's a beautiful day, isn't it?"
John: "Every day you wake up, it's a beautiful day."

On her book: "Writing By Myself was very cathartic. And yes, I wrote every word."

On Barbra Streisand and Mirror Has 2 Faces: "I worship talent. Just being in her presence was terrific. She was terrific."

10/21 Classics

Julius Caesar: Portia: says "ungentle" twice - implying that he is normally gentle with her.

Objective: and then add a Why - see if the objective can't go to another level - personalize the choices.

Stella Adler: "Your talent is in your choices."

"The interest in custard pies is seeing them hit people."

"Our consciousness stands guard at what might be revealed."

Doug on DeNiro: "Robert DeNiro doesn't get to be different anymore."

10/22 PD Unit

Me to Wade: "I went to the Book Fair ..."
Wade burst into laughter.
Wade: "I love you, Sheila."
Me: "Oh, Wade. I love you too."

Sam, at one point: "Who do I have to fuck to get out of here is what I want to know."

Sam: "I'm just trying to keep my spirits up."

Liz on SRO hotels: "You could be killing people in there and no one would care."
Wade: "Where is this?"

Kara: "Are we still not allowed to be naked in school?"

Sam: "All this love of Jesus is just as obsessive as any other form of narcissism."

Sam: "You know who originated this part? It was Geraldine Page."
Kara: "I bet she sucked!"

10/23 Classics
Doug to Eileen: "Eileen, you're brilliant. Now I'm going to ask you not to be."

Measure for Measure - the 1st speech of Duke - the punctuation gives him the sound of a gov't official -

10/23 PD Unit

Sam: "Fences is a masterpiece of structure."

"Do you have the time?"
"What am I, fuckin' Swiss?"

10/28 Classics
Julius Caesar - Heaven - elision, almost always one syllable - heav'n

Doug was Harold Clurman's assistant

"Amanda, you need to watch out for the Nice Girl Police." - Doug

It's not about the answers. It's about the questions.

Make the end of the last thought the beginning of the next thought

10/28 PD Unit

"Speaking of surly and disrespectful, where is Kara?" - Sam

Quote from Gingerbread Lady: "My apartment is on a sublet from Mary Todd Lincoln."

Sam: "If you do a high-class piece that lays an egg, no one will think: 'Boy, that's a high-class broad.'"

Sam: "I wouldn't care if you had them do it on pogo sticks."

Sam to D.: "To whatever degree you can get it up, try to create some authentic misery."

Sam: "Method acting the stereotype is eyeballing your partner, mumbling, breaking up your sentences in illogical ways. You can be 100% full of shit and be a Method actor."

Kazan said to Geraldine Page when directing Sweet Bird of Youth - she was afraid of the audience, terrified - He told her that the more frightened she was an actress, the more she should attack the audience. It's one of her greatest performances.

Sam: "I studied with Strasberg for 21 years and I never felt that gave me the license to be an asshole."
Michael: "So where'd you get your license then?"

10/30 Classics

Lesley: "Let's go from 'Where is your mother' - so you can have your moment where you get horrified."

Doug to Marissa: "Your acting is like a little fake tree. Oh, look how real that looks!"

11/4 Classics

Preconceptions get in the way of your talent expressing itself.

Take the car out of drive, put it in neutral, and see the shape of the land.

Fall 1995: Acting Notebook

Going through all these old notebooks - I came across the notebooks I kept during grad school. At first they start out all work, no play ... which is interesting in and of itself - but the notebooks I kept over the last 2 years, this sort of manic hilarity started to infuse all of them - and there were times reading some of them where I was HOWLING. The comments from Sam - my great acting teacher and mentor (he came into my life in 1996 - so he's not in this particular notebook). He was so irreverent, and yet also so brilliant. The things that are said in acting class sometimes ... are just the funniest things in the world. Because what we are working on is SERIOUS. And yet ... there is a level of absurdity to the entire endeavor. I always loved that dichotomy.

Anyway, here's the notebook I kept about my acting classes and stuff I was working on - my first fall in New York.

It's a mix. This is kind of the serious all-work-no-play notebook. Book lists. Quotes. Personal ruminations. Acting notes. Mish-mash. A lot of this is just me trying to work stuff out - character stuff, writing questions to myself, answering them, contemplating ... I guess I find it hard to believe that this was written so soon after this stuff. It was quite a year.

FALL 1995

Make Voyages.
Attempt them.
That's all there is.
-- T. Williams

Bobby: "Acting is not so much about letting people in. It's about letting you out."

Well, might it not be part of an actor's expertise to produce what is real?
-- Nicholas Mosley

Sept. 1
Watching Dog Day Afternoon with David.
David: "Did you see how when he was screaming - his whole throat and body remained relaxed? That's acting technique."

Sept. 5
Tomorrow. 10 am. Orientation begins. Total unknown. I am positively unprepared. And also pretty okay with that. Walk in with confidence. You know you're not cocky. Breathe in the air. Remember EVERYTHING. You belong here. You have been invited. Remember that audition. Remember how you felt. You felt validated without one soul telling you you did good. You knew it.

You are a child of the universe,
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.

Set yourself up only to be open, receptive, a sponge, ready to be hurt, ready to be wrong, ready to learn. Run screaming into the void.

Run from safety.

Even in small ways. Be yourself. But see, that has never been the real struggle for me. I carry my snail shell around with me. I hide til I know it's safe. I can't do that here. I must stop setting up barriers, inventing things to be afraid of, reasons to run away. Take your moment, Sheila. Own your own life. I am the sorceress. I dreamt of this, and now it has happened.

Don't be afraid. Remember Michael whispering to me over and over and over in the pitch darkness - I will never forget it - fear is death fear is death fear is death, Sheila, fear is death ... Tears sliding down my cheeks. Michael whispering, "That's right, Sheila - cry - scream - laugh - " From whence all this fear? I do not know.

Feel the fear and run through it screaming.

So tomorrow. Walk slowly. Take your time. Be conscious of your breathing. Be open. I am here for a reason. My feelings are mine. My life is mine.

Also. Remember your angel.

Know that you are not alone and never will be so.

Sept. 7
Boloslovsky - read more Boloslovsky

Anne Jackson: "Actors are braver than astronauts."

Meisner: conflict
Conflict is not just a quarrel. Conflict results from the glue between people. Conflict results when you ask the question, "Can either of those people walk away from that?" and the answer is no.

I don't know how this has happened - but so much of who I am is because of him.

Sally Field: razor blades inside, scraping herself raw - Then, just before it's time - letting that inner stuff start to bleed. Make herself available.

How painful this all has been for me. Moving. Leaving my home, my dear friends, my man. And yet I know now why I subjected myself to all of that. I sit in that darkened room - and there were times when I couldn't stop myself from smiling. I'm home. Here is where I should be.

Sept. 12
"calm brilliant power" - David

Sensory work: as if it were the last thing we were going to explore on this earth. Give it that importance.

Lee Strasberg: "If I ask for an apple, just a slice would be fine. Just don't give me 4 or 5 oranges."

Sept. 13
The key to the treasure chest is the 5 senses.

Concentrate. Focus. Engage your will

Sept. 15 - workshop with Estelle Parsons

she talked of Nijinsky

"Have faith in your gift"

"Bring your instrument to the playing space"

"I am my Stradivarius."

Sunday 17th Watched Scarface

What I saw at work there: besides all the character work that he buried - fucking buried himself in - I saw total utter Zen-like relaxation. No tension in the face, the throat - The ACTOR was relaxed - the CHARACTER was tense.

This is what I believe to be my greatest challenge. This is my goal - what I want - and what I will strive for.

Relaxation.

Walking down the street today after seeing Scarface - thinking about Pacino's relaxation - I remembered Kenny's favorite story about Ruth Nelson. When asked the key to acting, she said: "Love and relaxation."

Mary Stuart Masterson:
"I need to do what I can do to do a good job - not try to be a good girl."

On Chris Walken: "the relaxation with which he works is extraordinary" - Wow

On Johnny Depp: "He is a really safe place for me."

"You learn by observing."

"Practice the art of letting go. Don't try so hard to do it. Try to let it do you."

She said, "If you have a structure - then you have freedom." I so believe that. Madeleine L'Engle taught me that. I still am learning a way to work. You can't wait for inspiration. You have to work whether inspiration comes or not.

9-20
Stanislavsky: "In relaxation lay the whole secret, the whole soul of creativeness on the stage. All the rest would come from this state and perception of physical freedom."

Tuesday Sept. 26 Thinking about Action. Strasberg says that action is the most essential element in acting. I think people forget that about Strasberg. They get all caught up in the controversy of effective memory and forget that above all else, says Strasberg, is action. That's what I see in Lily Taylor's work. All of it. She tackles a scene with action. She is Doing. The reality of the Doing. Holly Hunter is that kind of actor, too. Action. What are you DOING?

"Even as I think of smells, my nose is full of scents that start awake sweet memories of summers gone and ripening fields far away." -- Helen Keller

10-2 Lee Grant She spoke of Meisner. Neighborhood Playhouse: -- breaking down a play so that there isn't a mystery - work thru the mystery. You want something - how badly you want it is what makes it exciting. Meisner taught: Keep your secrets precious.

"I like my secrets. It's where your juice comes from."

"Say yes to everything."

"When I get up to do a tough scene - I just have to trust that all the living I've done will be there."

She brought up Trust a lot

She said she lives and feels more intensely in her work, her acting, than she feels in her real life. Same with me.

10-6 Let the leap of faith immerse you in imaginary circumstances.

"Don't be afraid that it will take you nowhere." - E. Parsons

John Strasberg workshop
Think organically.

He said: "Boredom is very important in life. It helps you feel when something is wrong."

"Don't push through. Just direct yourself towards the life you imagine."

"It is in the accident/in the moment of silence that you find out who you are."

10-16 FAYE DUNAWAY
Kazan said to her: "You must not be ashamed of your emotions."

"The rhythms of being an actress - 1. Intensity, 2. Letting it out. It's like a heartbeat." - Faye D.

Faye: "The world of acting leaves nerve endings exposed. You have to learn that if they are touched, you won't die."

On Chinatown: "I tried to give that character a voice full of money."

On Days of the Condor: "That was very interior".

Pinter said: "No answers, no labels, just investigation."

Faye: "The character doesn't know what she is doing, she doesn't know what is in her subconscious - but the actress does. You have to gear up towards the moment of release."

On Network: "I just had to play that one like a bat out of hell."

On acting, in general: "I like to get in my own little world and play. It's private."

On Mommie Dearest: "There was a rift in that woman's psyche. I played the entire performance from inside that rift."

On Mommie Dearest: "It was really supposed to be more like a piece of kabuki - rather than realistic."

On Mickey Rourke in Barfly: "He works for 4 months before doing a role in order to throw it all away the seconds the cameras start to roll and find something else."

Faye: "When the cameras are rolling, I have permission to be the best of myself."

10-20
Working on The Loveliest Afternoon of the Year by John Guare

Remember what the title of the play is. Think more upon this.

-- 11 months of silence
-- What do I do all day?
-- Why? Why don't I speak to anyone?
-- I moved to NYC from Ohio. Why?
-- surrounded by piles of murder mysteries - what is that about?

I have moved to NYC from Ohio to find my soulmate. I know I'll have a better chance of finding him here. So I will wait. I will see what comes my way. And I would rather die than be without him. Literally.

He says to me: "You've saved my life." Likewise for me.

"I want to be married. I like you. I'd like to be married to you."

"Why fall in love with anybody? You just get hurt. I'm young. I'm pretty. I don't need anybody."

I am ready for love. I live in an empty apartment filled with murder mysteries I'm afraid to read.

I'm pretty. I know I'm pretty. This is why I cannot understand why no one will speak to me. Prettiness. Think more about that.

Uncle Vanya
"Life here is dreary and stupid and sordid." - Astrov

10-24
Elizabeth: "By breaking a pattern - we're already unlocking cages in the psyche."

10-26
Concentrate. Relax. Focus. Think of focus as a liquid thing - so that you can pour it. Be in my soul.

11-13 Glenn Close "Bring your whole day onto the stage with you." - Mike Nichols

She likes to work totally within the imagination. Within a character - she likes to have "a library of images from the character's life."

"I have to love whatever character I'm playing."

On live theatre: "Good live theatre should disturb molecules. An audience should come out of the theatre a little rearranged."

2 Character Play - T. William
'Fear is a monster" - ????

I mention a doctor (a psychiatrist?)

Magnust/Artists Management guaranteed press coverage

Felice says I "rage against fascism" to the press - what is that about? Like Stella Adler?

When I first walk in - where am I coming from? Felice says - "I called you" - was I passed out in the dressing room? We arrived at the theatre and I blacked out in the dressing room.

We have had two disastrous seasons in a row - we have no place to return to - we have to go on.

I told Felice to cut his play. What do I think needs to be cut? When I do cut, why? What do I cut? If I'm supposed to start the play at the window: how does the play really start? Is the first line really "who are you calling?"

Are we twins?

The cablegram: when do I notice it? Does he notice me notice it?

Sunflower: Here he says he saw the flower. At the end, I say it. Which way is it?

Esoteric astrology. Need costume jewelry for this part. T-strap shoes. Vintage dress.

Agoraphobia. Nuclear holocaust. Paralyzing self-consciousness.

I don't want to get lost in the play. He does. One of us has to be in touch with reality or we will never come back. He'll kill us both. I have to keep one foot out of the play.

"Fear is a monster" - some kind of incantation (taught by Father?) - to keep the fear back - is it something he would say before astrology readings (me and Felix under a blanket of tents - listening)

My Painting Project [the following image is pasted into my notebook. My assignment was: write a monologue for this woman - what would she say, whose hat is that on the radiator, who is she - and at some point - during the monologue - assume the pose - so that you "become" the painting - for just a moment. It's one of the best acting projects I've ever been assigned. Seriously. True high point. So these are my notes on creating this whole little show out of nothing. ]

-- Scott Joplin - "Solace"
-- stillness
-- smoking
-- contemplation
-- he loves me. He told me when he left last night.
-- stand at window, staring out.
-- he is too much for me. I am gonna fuck this up.

I can't do this. No way.
You're too much for me. Way too much. I don't like how I'm feeling right now. Something's happening to me. When you leave me - I am set adrift. I wander.
I'm afraid to go outside.
Everything hurts.
The air is full of glass.
I did not feel this way before I knew you. Other people can do this. Have relationships and things. But I can't. I am not made right.
When we make love I feel like I have a chance at a life.
I love you. You're nothing special, either, so I don't understand this.
I don't want to get involved. I don't get involved.
You're so fucking nice about all of this. I can't figure that part out. I know I'm a bitch. I'm a bitch on purpose.
In your presence I am disarmed.
I know what people think when they see me. I know what men think. I know who they think I will be. And I don't disappoint them.
Ever since we started sleeping together, I've been having this dream. It has to do with icebergs. Icebergs scare the shit out of me. Most of an iceberg is underwater. Why does that scare me so much? It just does. Huge skyscrapers of ice - and you see 20 feet of it. Same dream every time. I go into it and I know what's coming, I know the end, and I get ready - I succumb to the inevitable in the dream. It's like I'm blind - I can feel myself moving thru space - not space - but moving - and there is something ahead of me. Then boom! Suddenly I can see - and my entire view is this massive fucking iceberg.
I'm not stupid. I know what the dream means.
I want you to see all of me, not just the tip. I want you to see me. But I don't know how to do it. I am going to fuck this up. I might even fuck it up on purpose. Please. Don't let me do that.
You ever see pictures of what happens when an iceberg melts? It's not a popsicle melting on a hot summer sidewalk. It's huge fucking chunks of ice crashing into the water. That's an iceberg melting.