Notes on a Cowardly Lion (48 page)

“If it's not comic,” replied Berghof, “it's nothing. It becomes completely dry if it is played with a raised finger and all kinds of symbolic overtones which do not communicate the meaninglessness to an audience.”

Lahr struggled with Berghof's terms and began analyzing the play on the philosophical level Berghof had broached. He didn't get far. Berghof stopped him, echoing Beckett's sentiments written in 1964: 'T don't like to talk intellectually about a play which has to be played simply in order to be an intellectual play. I would like to talk about how you go to sleep or how you eat the carrots. The words are there. If they have meaning, the meaning will come out.”

Berghof's attitude intrigued Lahr. He seemed confortable with ideas, and, at the same time, extremely theater-wise. He began to put Berghof to the test. “Now, for instance, how would you play the opening speeches? There's no laughs in them?”

Berghof proceeded to act out the situation. “Now I'm not as good an actor as Bert—certainly not as good a comedian—but I'm pretty good. At least I could make things clear. He liked that. I was showing him instead of talking. We went through the play. We had an absolute rapport. I don't like to talk either. I have been on the stage since I was sixteen; and I know what is a legitimate problem and what is a lot of talk. What matters is that something is true and human, that you get true sensations.”

Berghof's demand for theatrical honesty paralleled Lahr's attitudes. They continued reading through the play. “Bert had a very clear and simple attitude toward the work. One of his words which I really adore is ‘That's phony,' ‘No, that's not real,' ‘No, that's hokum.' These are the words I remember most about his reaction to production ideas. He wasn't satisfied with being funny; it had to be true and real too.”

The interview had taken ninety minutes, but Berghof could not gauge whether Lahr's questions and enthusiasm were a vote of confidence. Lahr himself was still uncertain whether laughter could be coaxed up from the interpretation Berghof outlined. They came to the final image of the play, where Estragon, having failed to hang himself with his rope belt, speaks the final lines with his pants down. The technical problem of sustaining an audience rapport during this moment had plagued Lahr in Miami. It had never created the sense of sadness or the laughter that Lahr felt was on the printed page.

“Well, how are you going to make
that
work?”

“I worked on that for a long time in my studio,” said Berghof. “I've got a very simple device.”

“How are you going to get away with it and not be offensive?”

As Berghof recalls, “I said ‘That's very simple,' and then dropped my trousers.”

Lahr did not laugh. He stared at Berghof; and then glanced at Lester's paneled office. Looking back at the director, he said “You're going to direct this play. You're my man. Anybody who drops his pants for a moment in the theater is my man as a director.”

Berghof had been accumulating information on
Waiting for Godot
since its European debut in 1954. On the cluttered shelves of his study were boxes crammed with programs, pictures, and articles about the various productions. (Lahr would never see that den or realize that Berghof kept a picture of him, frozen in a wild grimace, on a bulletin
board in front of his desk.) Berghof's extensive research on the play and his fluency with the characters as well as with the personalities of the actors playing them made rehearsals much smoother than the Miami production.

A cast was assembled quickly. In early April, two months after Miami, rehearsals began. “One of the rules I established with the cast was that I was not going to intellectualize the play, but work.” Privately, Berghof interpreted the play on a very intellectual level, but he feared that any discussion of ideas would limit the human experience he was trying to evoke from his actors. “I studied Bosch and Brueghel in detail. I used certain attitudes in the paintings for the visualization of the images in the play. I'd never tell actors that. But in Brueghel and Bosch, you have actions pertinent to Beckett. They are doing something very strange and often very silly, but with great intensity and naturalness. I go to such things because you absolve yourself from theater gimmicks.”

Berghof also did not tell Lahr that he kept pictures of all the actors pasted throughout his script. “I like to see what actors look like in others parts. If I'm supposed to help an actor to be good, I have to understand him: his face, his cheekbones, his arms. I like to understand everything, so that when I ask an actor to do something, I know his responses.”

The other members of the new cast were better acquainted with Beckett and the problems of production than the Miami entourage. E. G. Marshall had seen the play twice in England; and Kurt Kasznar, who played Pozzo, flew to England to view the production before going into rehearsal. Berghof capitalized on the enthusiasm and expertise of his actors. A seriousness of purpose and a sense of direction pervaded the rehearsals. For Lahr, it was like discovering a new play. “With Herbert's direction the play began to open up. E. G. was brilliant; Kasznar was right. I began to function properly.”

Berghof tried not to push Lahr into false significance, but let him discover his own emphasis. Lahr responded with confidence and immense energy. “Bert has a way of rehearsing,” recalls Berghof, “that I wish other actors would learn. He came to rehearsal half an hour before it started, got into his working clothes. He was very anxious to get to work. He kept saying to me, ‘Let's get on the floor.' And he worked—sometimes seven hours straight. We got an unbelievable amount accomplished. In two weeks we were practically ready.”

Berghof worked hard at building Lahr's confidence. He had realized
long before rehearsals that his main task would be assuaging Lahr's fear of another failure in the role. Alvin Epstein, whom Berghof had signed as Lucky, remembers that the director made him come down to his studio to go over his part two weeks, before the production went into rehearsal. “Once we go into rehearsals,” Berghof told him, “I can't spend any time with you.”

Berghof's method of directing the play gave run-throughs a special flavor. “He would prod you and push you and giggle and laugh,” recalls Epstein. “It was like making love to the actors, a constant dance back and forth. He'd get up and show you. Then he'd say, ‘You do it better. You do it better, darling,' and then you did it, and he'd say, ‘Oh, that's
wonderful!'
It was like that for four weeks.”

In rehearsal, Berghof was often astounded by Lahr's ability to respond to a dramatic suggestion. “When you looked at him (sometimes I was only two feet away) he was absolutely true, unfailingly true. Every experience—the crying—everything. It was absolutely unheard of. He never knew how he knew; it came to him. His instincts to look for where he could get emotion were there. Gide once said, ‘All the tedious research becomes worthwhile if you have one inspired moment.' Lahr was inspired. I believe acting is a game of make-believe, like children play. Bert plays that game; he goes into a rehearsal like a child going to the park. I found Bert's style came from content. I hate ‘style.' Everything Bert did came from an experience and made a form. He didn't find a style first, but rather the experience made a form.”

Lahr's face took on new dimensions in the play. He ate a carrot with hungry joy; he took off his shoe with a peace beyond satisfaction. He crawled; he whined. Berghof was amazed to see how he could convey insight without extraneous gesture. “Bert once told me that as a young actor he was called ‘one-take Lahr.' He had only to look at an object once and he'd get a laugh. What is a double-take anyway? You look at an object; you see it, but you don't understand its meaning. You leave it and walk away from it. While you are walking away, it dawns on you what the object really is. You look back. Delayed recognition. Now Bert was able to look at something—a tree, a carrot, a shoe—see it, and it suddenly dawns all over his face. He doesn't need to go away from the object. That is fantastic. It shows an immense acting sensitivity.”

Lahr's gestures found the rhythm and purpose of Beckett's prose. He was used to doing funny things with his arms and legs, turning the costume into part of his personality. Epstein, who had worked with
Marcel Marceau and studied with Etienne Decroux, was amazed. “So much had to do with the kind of clothes he was wearing, the shoes, the hats. The idea of his movement, the physical feel of it seemed to me the perfect Beckettian tragicomic gestures. It wasn't campy. In another context it might have seemed like a puton. It wasn't. It was absolutely right within the framework of the play, sluggish and sloppy, but precise.”

The recognition of excellence was not onesided. Once the stage manager came to Epstein's door. “Mr. Lahr would like to see you.”

Epstein was flustered. “I immediately thought, ‘Oh my God, what have I done?' He never summoned me to his dressing room; we were on very good terms.”

When Epstein came to see Lahr, he found him edgy but affable. “He hemmed and hawed and said, ‘You're a very talented young man, Alvin. You've a great future.' I didn't know what he was driving at. But I knew I hadn't committed the irrevocable crime of stepping on a laugh. He was embarrassed. He finally blurted out, ‘I hope you don't mind me saying this. I think you ought to change your name. I did. Lahr's not my name.'”

When Berghof told a New York newspaper, “Lahr's a primitive, God bless him,” Lahr read the statement with interest. He checked the word in his dictionary, making sure it was not pejorative. He relaxed under Berghof's careful respect. Their association (Lahr refers to it as a “marriage”) led him to many discoveries.

In rehearsals, Lahr made his own personal additions. “I never changed a word of the text; but I put in business like crawling and saying ‘Aaah!' The reaction was in the text, but not the way I did it—with the pointed finger, as much as to say, ‘I do understand, but I don't.' When the messenger boy came with news of Godot I'd shake him; E. G. would sometimes shake me, saying ‘What are you doing?' I'd cover my face. When I took my hands down, my face would be this horrible mask of torture and frustration. I'd crawl off sobbing. A shock went through the audience. I could hear them gasping …”

Lahr's inventions and the fine work of the other actors gave the play an immense dramatic potential that even Lahr had not imagined. In his mind, it began to take a shape equivalent to the praise heaped on it from literary circles. Tennessee Williams had called it “one of the greatest plays of our time.” Jean Anouilh had called the Paris debut of
Waiting for Godot
“as important as the premiere of Pirandello in 1923.” The previews played to an enthusiastic audience. Lahr found
himself exhilarated by the play, which, under Berghof's direction, he saw for the first time as revolutionary. He was aware that many people looked upon its production in America as an event of crucial importance to the theater. William Saroyan had said, “It will make it easier for me and everyone else to write freely in the theater.”

But the memory of Miami lingered. Lahr still feared that laughs would not come. He pestered Berghof with the same statement daily: “There are not going to be any laughs.”

Ironically, on opening night, Berghof's big worry was that laughter would dominate the delicate balance of the play's mood.

Berghof called Lahr aside at the last runthrough. “You know Bert … be careful not to do too much out there.”

“Herbert, I'm not going to do anything opening night. Oh no. Not on opening night.”

Berghof recalls that “as I walked away I thought to myself, ‘What does he mean now? Is he going to do anything or not?'”

Berghof's answer came soon enough. At the end of the play, the entire audience at the Golden Theater stood up and applauded Lahr. “They bravoed, standing on their feet,” Lahr remembers, “like if it was a symphony.”

The production was a triumph, but Lahr's performance made it special. “It was a unique evening. Bert was so unfailing in his instincts on how to play to a first-night audience. He gave his best performance on opening night—it was his purest. He somehow felt that if he was really pure it would be acceptable. He's quite right because everybody is there waiting for the actor to send the laughs out; and he wasn't doing it. I'd never seen him as clear, as simple and to the point.”

In the dressing room, Lahr was besieged by well-wishers. One woman came to the door and asked to speak with him. When he turned to greet her she began crying. “Oh Mr. Lahr … Mr. Lahr,” she said, and ran from the room.

Lahr can recall only one other moment of an evening he considers his greatest theatrical triumph. Moss Hart, who had come backstage, turned to Mildred as he left: “Tell Bert to hang up his dancing shoes.”

Berghof referred to the critical praise Lahr received as “unheard of” and compared the notices to those received by Kean, Barrymore, and Duse. Lahr simply remembered the respectful tone which most people took toward his work, and the strange excitement he felt. “I couldn't wait to get to the theater each night. It was an experience I'll never forget; it was the most satisfying moment on stage I've ever had.”

Lahr's personality charted the wasteland of Beckett's play. As Richard Watts observed in the New York
Post
—

Mr. Lahr, in addition to being enormously funny and touching in the role, somehow managed to seem a kind of liaison between the narrative and the audience, a sort of spiritual interpreter whose warmth and humanity extended across the footlights and caught up every spectator in a shared experience.

Once during a performance, he forgot his lines. Impelled by the play's movement and its sense of dreamlike repetition, he turned to the audience and confided, “I said that before.” His instinct was right; the break with his own strict sense of professional propriety, shocking and insightful. The audience sensed Lahr's struggle as their own.