Ask Me Again Tomorrow (11 page)

Our understanding of character, or how to play a scene, emanates from the text. An actor must find what his or her place in the play is, and, beyond that, what aspect of life the play is dealing with. Understanding the demands of the play entails dissecting every line, breaking it down into its smallest unit, which is the “beat,” or single action. Every scene is composed of beats and transitions. We had to be able to identify each action, the point of transition, and then the new beat. It’s an act of deconstruction: we hold the finished product—the script—in our hands; our job is to unravel it, to get to the bottom of it, to understand what motivated its coming into existence. About every act, every scene, every piece of dialogue, we have to ask ourselves: Why is my character saying this? What does she hope to achieve? When does the energy in the scene shift?

Actors have to understand the plot as thoroughly as we do the character. A play’s action can be overt or buried. If I want to win you over, that’s the overt action. But maybe I want to win you over because I need you, because I’m afraid of asserting my own independence. That’s a buried plot. Now, suppose I encounter an obstacle: you find someone else you want instead of me. Now I have to find yet another way to win you over.

The specific emotions of a character in a scene are triggered in part by outside elements. If I’m playing a love scene in lingerie, I do it differently than if I’m wearing an evening gown. If I’m sitting down while a man makes a pass at me, I react differently than if I’m standing up. All these changes make a huge difference in how the character comes across.

As Peter taught about the craft of acting, I heard Vitale talking to me about the discipline of fencing. Without craft, or discipline, I’d be at the mercy of my history and my emotions.
With
the benefit of craft and discipline, I’d learn to focus, to channel what I was feeling so that I could express and communicate it. The contradiction coiled at the heart of acting is this: the only way to portray uncontrolled feelings is to control them. You learn how to do that through craft.

Now I had the lead in a play and I thought of something Peter had said in order to keep myself from being overwhelmed by having to play a complex lead character. Peter used the example of Hamlet. “To many he is the most complicated person to walk on stage. Hundreds of books have been written about what motivates him to act as he does. But to me, every actor who plays Hamlet is much more complicated than the character he plays. Every human being is much more complicated than any single fictional character, who is created with certain dramatic needs in mind.”

Another way to look at this, and the way I describe this process to my own students, is to think of a prism. Each of us is like a prism of glass in that we have many facets. The point is to identify what the character is and then turn that aspect of
yourself
toward the light. The first time I grasped this concept was during the production of
The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife,
which gave me the self-confidence to believe I could play a lead in a big show.

While we were rehearsing the show, I had the chance to hear the great Harold Clurman lecture. I knew of Clurman—just about everyone did. The legendary Group Theater, which he’d founded in 1931 along with Lee Strasberg and about thirty others, may have existed for only a decade, but that was long enough for it to completely reinvent American theater.

Clurman took the podium at nine that night and was still going strong at one
A.M
. He talked about the transforming experience he’d had when he was only six and his parents took him to see Jacob Adler, the renowned Yiddish actor, in the then-thriving Yiddish theater on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. “I didn’t understand a word!” Clurman explained, but he was riveted by what he could read between the lines, by the passion, the humor, the camaraderie, the enormous energy on stage. This childhood experience determined his career: he not only devoted himself to the theater but ended up marrying Adler’s daughter, Stella, herself an actress and acting coach.

Clurman, a nonstop talker, was by turns funny and serious but always animated and passionate; he had devoted himself not only to altering the course and very nature of the American theater but also to persuading everyone that this was a worthy enterprise.

It’s thanks to Clurman that we
have
an American theater. Before the 1930s, most American dramas were all variations on the upstairs-downstairs theme, exploring the exploits of the upper classes and their servants.
My Man Godfrey,
the classic 1936 “screwball comedy,” is the perfect example: an eccentric heiress socialite finds a hobo and hires him as her butler, only to have him teach her about “real life.” Mannered and formulaic, most dramas were also either transplanted from England or written by Americans about England and the English (only musicals, derived from the minstrel and vaudevillian traditions, were homegrown).

Top-notch American actors such as John Barrymore studied in England, cutting their teeth and earning their credibility by performing Shakespeare. English acting schools stress voice and verse—that is, learning to use the voice as an instrument, and to speak verse so that it sounds not like poetry but like live speech. American acting schools were nearly nonexistent. In fact, the drama program I was enrolled in at Boston University was in its very first year.

As an undergraduate studying drama at the University of Paris, Clurman found himself questioning his identity, seeking to define, as an American, what set him apart from the Europeans he met in the classroom and on the streets. “Where are the American actors and playwrights?” he asked himself. “Where are plays that tackle the unique American experience?” There was no shortage of great American artists: Whitman, Melville, and Emerson were transforming poetry, novels, and essays. Even American painting was coming into its own. But American theater, which had been hopelessly mired in things English, was now wiped out by the stock market crash of 1929. There were no plays written by Americans about Americans—about pioneers, businesspeople, shop owners, immigrants; there were no plays that embodied the adventurous, freewheeling, optimistic, entrepreneurial American spirit.

Meeting Constantin Stanislavsky, the founder of the renowned, influential Moscow Arts Theater, further changed Clurman’s life, and the future of American theater. Stanislavsky used a method of teaching acting that would eventually come to be known as “method acting.” His theories represented a huge break with the past. Before Stanislavsky, actors were urged to leave their own feelings offstage and inhabit the roles of the characters they were playing. Stanislavsky urged actors to delve into their own pasts, to dredge up their own emotional reactions to situations, and portray these on stage. If the character needs to appear envious, for instance, Stanislavsky instructed the actor to remember a moment when he felt envious in his life and bring that to the part. He devised a series of exercises to help actors access these hidden parts of themselves.

Method acting has a huge following in this country—Marlon Brando, Eli Wallach, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, and Robert DeNiro, among many others, were trained in it—thanks to Stella Adler, Lee Strasberg, and Harold Clurman, who adopted and adapted it. But Stanislavsky’s feelings about the role of the theater had an equally profound effect on Clurman. Stanislavsky, who worked with both Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov, believed that actors should work together in an ensemble company. Only by working together day in and day out, rehearsing a broad range of material, could they learn to really trust each other—and this degree of trust was essential to acting of the highest caliber. Stanislavsky was after realism and emotional honesty. Actors had to be
believed
, even more than they had to be understood.

As a director at the Group Theater, Clurman began to articulate his own ideas about American drama, completely distinct from the European tradition. Under his direction, Clifford Odets’s groundbreaking plays—
Awake and Sing! Golden Boy,
W
aiting for Lefty
—gave American audiences real Americans to care about, root for, and cry over: taxicab drivers working twelve-hour days for five dollars a week trying to decide whether to unionize and risk the little they had for the promise of so much more; two-bit boxers who yearned to give up the corrupt ring for the purity of music; lower-class families living in too-small apartments in the Bronx who struggled to hold on to their Marxist ideals while taking in boarders and handling out-of-wedlock pregnancy. These were the issues and ideas roiling America during the Depression. Long debated by politicians, covered in newspapers, and talked about by everyday people on street corners and on bread lines, they finally found their first theatrical expression in Clurman’s theater. The Group Theater staged more than a series of innovative plays—it staged a coup. American theater was never the same.

When that company fell apart, Clurman turned to Broadway, where he produced groundbreaking plays by Eugene O’Neill, Carson McCullers, and Arthur Miller. But he never lost his vision and never tired of tackling big ideas. “The purpose of theater,” he said that night, “is to intensify our understanding and desire for life.”

By the time Clurman finished talking, I was also in tears. Here was a man talking with such fervor and passion about the work that I planned to commit my life to. I was invigorated by hearing him speak.

For our very last production as students, Peter decided to mount Chekhov’s
The Seagull
. He cast me as Arkadina, an aging actress whose lover, Trigorin, a writer, falls in love with her son’s friend Nina, who is yearning to begin her own career on the stage. Arkadina is a woman who has lived a full life and who has weathered many storms in her life and has learned how to take control of events that threaten her. Nina, on the other hand (who is the “seagull” of the title), is young and rushes naively toward life, unaware of what awaits her. Like a seagull, she drifts along the currents of life, at the mercy of external forces. This was Peter engaging in a bit of therapeutic casting. I could have played Nina easily, but playing Arkadina was another matter. I worked as hard as I could and brought all the craft I had to work with me every day. But every time we got to the scene in the play where Trigorin confesses to Arkadina that he wants to leave her for the young Nina, I would start weeping and could not proceed. By the night of our final dress rehearsal, Peter was so frustrated with me that he lost control. “You are a coward!” he shouted within earshot of every person connected to the production. I walked out of the theater and just kept walking. I knew I was in trouble because I didn’t even know where I was. I looked around, saw a pay phone, and dialed the psychiatrist I had been seeing. He wanted to know where I was, and I was so lost that I just whispered, “I don’t know, I don’t know.” “Olympia. Look up. What does the street sign say?” he asked calmly. Within minutes, the doctor drove up and took me home. He gave me a tranquilizer and I fell asleep until late the next morning.

I had no idea at the time how much playing Arkadina tapped into my own feelings of rejection and sorrow—feelings I had refused to acknowledge when N left me. I had not shed a tear about N—then or since. I had succeeded too well at burying my feelings and denying how wounded I was. It all seemed to be coming up now, though.

That night at the theater, everyone was buzzing with opening-night adrenaline, except Peter, who was keeping a very low profile. I heard that he had suffered some kind of collapse after I walked out. A couple of actors in the cast glared at me, but Peter’s wife came by the dressing area with some yellow roses for me. “Good luck tonight,” she said.

That night, during the scene with my lover, I began to weep but I managed to say all my lines. I took Peter’s suggestion and did a bit of stage business. I took a handkerchief from my skirt and smoothed it on the floor before I—Arkadina—kneeled down. One of Arkadina’s characteristics is that she’s incredibly fastidious. Because I portrayed her so, even in this heartbreaking scene, it made the audience laugh. In the end, Arkadina prevailed, and so did I.

Toward the end of my second and final year, I chose three performance pieces I needed in order to qualify for my master’s degree. A classic: Clytemnestra in
Agamemnon
; a contemporary American, Mary Tyrone from Eugene O’Neill’s
Long Day’s Journey into Night;
and a Japanese classic in which I played a bird goddess. I wrote my master’s thesis on Bertolt Brecht.

After graduation, a number of us from the BU program were invited to pull together a company and so made our way to Buzzards Bay on Cape Cod. We had a primitive theater—the stage and chairs for the audience were under a tent. When it rained or the wind blew, we had to run around and anchor the flaps. We put on six plays that season, but the most sensational one was our production of
La Ronde
, written at the turn of the century by Arthur Schnitzler.
La Ronde
is about the transmission of venereal disease and it caused quite a sensation when it was first staged in the early twenties. In fact, it was banned and Schnitzler was charged with obscenity. Apparently, things hadn’t changed much during the intervening fifty years, because when we mounted our version in 1957, the town fathers of Buzzards Bay decided that we, too, were engaging in public obscenity and revoked our performance license. We retaliated by making the performances free (which meant we didn’t need a business license at all) and worked strictly on donations. This was the first professional performance that my parents ever came to. I was playing the whore—the one who triggers the venereal disease outbreak. Every performance was attended by a picketing crowd, including the one my parents came to see. I remember looking out from the stage after the show and seeing my father, sitting there stone-faced. After the show, he was unable to speak to me. My mother said he was too upset at seeing me play “that part.” The charges against us for staging
La Ronde
were eventually dropped in court in Boston.