Drama (25 page)

While we were on location in Europe, three of Paolo’s friends paid him a visit. By chance these three men had gathered in a nearby city to work on the script for a film that they would shoot in New York City the following summer. One of these friends was a screenwriter, one a director, and one an actor. Among them they were in the process of reinventing American movies. Their film would be dangerous, disturbing, and brutally real. It would be one of a handful of 1970s films that would shake Hollywood to its roots. It would be called
Taxi Driver
. The screenwriter was Paul Schrader. The director was Martin Scorsese. The actor was Robert De Niro. Their presence made poor Rock Masters look like a dinosaur nearing extinction.

[26]

Broadway Baby

© Al Hirschfeld. Reproduced by arrangement with Hirschfeld’s exclusive representative, the MARGO FEIDEN GALLERIES LTD., NEW YORK.
www.alhirschfeld.com
.

F
or me, the 1970s was Broadway. From
The Changing Room
in 1973 until the end of the decade, I acted in a dozen Broadway shows. It feels as if half of my waking life in those years was lived within the ten square blocks of the New York theater district. To be sure, I occasionally worked elsewhere. I did a couple of plays off-Broadway, one in D.C., one in San Francisco, and another one back at the Long Wharf. I directed two or three more times. I played smallish parts in a few more movies, one of which even took me back out to Hollywood for a month. But Broadway was my gravitational center, and I spent the overwhelming majority of my time there.

How do you distill a decade of work on Broadway without sounding like a tedious windbag in a theater bar? Describing each one of those dozen plays would be like describing all the marching bands after a parade has passed by. Each band may have its own distinctive look, sound, and personality, but in retrospect they all become one big clamorous blur. How can I persuade anyone that there was anything special about any of my twelve Broadway shows in the seventies, or that they were even worth seeing? Theater is of the moment. Breathless self-praise, no matter how descriptive, can never recapture its impact after the fact. Simply put, you had to have been there.

And yet each of those shows was a formative and memorable chapter in my own history. Those twelve directors, those half-dozen playwrights, those nine different playhouses, those scores of fellow actors, those endless hours of rehearsals, those hundreds of performances, those tens of thousands of spectators, that army of drama critics and their reams of theater reviews—all of these played a role in shaping me as an actor. I have always felt that my early Broadway years were an incalculable gift, a priceless part of my actor’s education. By the end of that decade I knew who I was onstage. I had learned what I did well and, more to the point, what I did badly. I had my successes and my failures, my rave notices and my withering pans. But nearly all of this took place in the friendly confines of the theater district. My hits and misses were watched not by the vast American film and television audience but by a comparatively tiny population of demanding yet forbearing New York theatergoers.

To sum up my 1970s career—“Turning the accomplishment of many years / Into an hourglass”—let me offer a kind of scorecard of my Broadway credits during that time. It is a portrait in numbers, a list that tracks the gradual evolution of a stage actor’s persona. From this shorthand history I emerge as a fully formed actor at the dawn of the eighties, ready for the famous and infamous showbiz events of my later life:

Six Brits

Of the twelve characters I played on Broadway during those years, six of them hailed from different corners of the British Isles. I was a North Country rugby player (
The Changing Room
), a Scottish cookbook writer (
My Fat Friend
), a Manchester milkman (
Comedians
), an Irish stoker (
Anna Christie
), a Belfast bicycle shop owner (
Spokesong
), and a shambling English suburbanite (
Bedroom Farce
). This string of heavily accented Angles, Saxons, and Celts was born of two factors. One was the wave of new British playwrights who were infusing and invigorating New York theater at that time. I acted in plays by David Storey, Trevor Griffiths, Stewart Parker, and Alan Ayckbourn, while neighboring marquees displayed the names of Harold Pinter, Simon Gray, Christopher Hampton, David Hare, and Peter Schaffer. Five of my six British roles in those years were in plays that had made their mark in London the season before.

The other factor, of course, was my recent stint in a London drama school, absorbing all things British. My two years’ exposure to British accents, idioms, and manners had uniquely qualified me to take professional advantage of the British invasion. The half dozen Brits that I portrayed were among my first several performances on Broadway, leading most theatergoers to conclude, quite logically, that I was not an American actor at all. As entire years passed without a single week of unemployment, this didn’t bother me in the slightest. At least not for a while.

Six Premieres

Six of those twelve productions in the seventies were American premieres. That fifty-percent ratio between new and old material is roughly what I’ve managed to maintain for most of my stage career. To be sure, revivals are a much safer proposition. Great revivals make great theater. They do great business. Theatergoers love them. I love them myself. Indeed, they formed the core of my father’s best work when I was growing up. The audience for a revival sits there in the risk-free confidence that they are watching a play that has withstood the test of time. It’s
sure
to be good. The only question is will it be as good as the last two or three revivals of the same play?

This is not the case with new writing. Any new play is a breathtaking leap of faith. The odds against success are appalling. Taking a chance on new material is fraught with danger. It relies on courageous producers, daring actors, and smarter, more adventurous audiences. But even with all those elements in place, the danger is still present. The critics are ready with sharpened knives. Flops will always outnumber hits. But that very danger is what makes a new play so exciting. Besides, you get the privilege of working with the man or woman who actually wrote your lines. You are a vital part of his or her creative process. When Samuel French finally publishes the play, there’s your name right next to your character. It is not for nothing that an actor is said to “create” a role when he premieres it.

But there is a more basic reason why new works have such an appeal for a stage actor. The illusion of the first time, the elusive goal of every moment onstage, is far more potent when the audience has no idea what they are about to see. My most thrilling experiences onstage have been at those moments when a new play was unveiled for the first time. Everyone knows how
Death of a Salesman
ends. However stirring the performances, the salesman always dies. But in 1988, when I appeared on Broadway in the world premiere of David Henry Hwang’s brilliant play
M. Butterfly
, no one knew what they were in for. We pinned their ears back with the shock of the new.

Three Comedies

Three comedies out of twelve plays is not much of a percentage, but those three comedies were a lot of fun.
My Fat Friend
was the first, early in the decade. Near the end of it, I was in Alan Ayckbourn’s
Bedroom Farce
. I was one of an entire cast of American replacements who took over for the play’s original cast, imported from the National Theatre of Britain. In that gloriously funny production, I worked under the direction of Sir Peter Hall. The comic climax of the play involved the collapse of a desk built from a do-it-yourself kit. In that scene, actress Judith Ivey and I managed to trigger the loudest laugh I’ve heard from any theater audience anywhere.

Photograph by Sy Friedman.

But the comedy that was sandwiched between those two shows was the great one. In 1978 I played George Lewis in
Once in a Lifetime
, by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman. This was an extravagantly daffy production directed by Tom Moore at the Circle in the Square Theatre.
Once in a Lifetime
is a classic American comedy from 1930, the first of eight collaborations by Kaufman and Hart, and the subject of a substantial section of Hart’s great theater memoir
Act One
. Acting in this play revealed to me the true genius of the American comedy tradition. It also revealed to me one of my own untapped strengths. For the first time I played a role that can best be described as a comic “holy fool.” Perhaps the most likely archetype for this role is the character created by the great Stan Laurel. As the holy fool, I turned out to be a natural.

The inciting incident of
Once in a Lifetime
is the arrival of talking pictures in 1927. Three New York–based vaudevillians named Jerry, May, and George impulsively sell their comedy act and rush out to Hollywood to join the “talkies” revolution. Jerry and May are the wisecracking comics in the trio. My part was George, their dim-witted “deadpan feed”—the holy fool. In the first scene of the play, Jerry and May devise a scheme to make a fortune in Hollywood by teaching dramatic speech to silent film stars. As a part of their scam, they anoint George “Dr. George Lewis,” a renowned speech expert, and instruct him to keep his mouth firmly shut wherever the three of them go. As the plot unfolds, Kaufman and Hart paint a zany portrait of the glittering frenzy of Hollywood in those days. In that insane world, the vaudeville trio are fish out of water, navigating the shoals of the movie business. With inexorable comic inevitability, George, the dopey innocent, makes a series of colossal blunders in executive suites and soundstages. Every one of his faux pas is hailed as a stroke of genius by the panicky movie muckety-mucks. The holy fool ends up ruling Hollywood.

Courtesy Tom Moore.

T
he play is a miracle of comedy engineering. Kaufman and Hart time their plot twists, cross-purposes, and comic reversals with the precision of rocket scientists. The laughs build exponentially to the point where the audience can barely take it anymore. Read the play sometime. At a certain point in the second act, George Lewis bellows a five-word line into the face of the scowling movie mogul Herman Glogauer. The line is “You turned down the Vitaphone!” Out of context, the line means nothing. But at that point, in that scene, it ignites a nuclear blast of laughter. Night after night I would yell that line into the face of the formidable comic actor George S. Irving. The two of us would stand there, nose to nose, for as long as we wanted. The audience would only stop laughing when we decided it was time to shut them up. It was pure comedy joy.

Many years later I worked on another comedy. It also featured a group of fish out of water. This one was not a play, it was a television series. The series lasted six years on NBC and churned out 138 episodes. In effect, each episode was a twenty-two-minute one-act farce. Each was written by a two-person writing team, not unlike Kaufman and Hart. During the week of rehearsals for each show, the entire fifteen-person writing staff would pitch in on rewrites. At the very beginning of our six years on the series, I met with the writers for the first time. We talked generally about the tone of the show, the essence of its comedy, and the comic interplay among its four main characters. These four characters were a team of researchers embedded in an Ohio college town, trying to blend into the native population while masking their true identities and intentions. Despite their great intelligence, the four researchers are clueless and naïve. They regularly make a godawful mess of things. But they always survive their self-made disasters and they often triumph. In other words, they are a team of holy fools. In that writers’ meeting, I invoked
Once in a Lifetime
to the writing staff and urged them all to read it. Kaufman and Hart, I declared, would have been a perfect writing team for our show. If they were alive today, I said, they wouldn’t be writing for Broadway. They’d be writing for us. Our show was called
3rd Rock from the Sun
.