Jack in the Box, page 15
Marsha’s criticism has no edge to it; that is what makes it so easy to face. Years of honing her skills as an actress, one whose responses were, from her earliest work, utter spontaneity, have left her virtually guileless. You can see it in every frame of every film she made: the candor … the truth … the clarity. She seems incapable of manipulation; although that might make her seem even naive, her ability to assess, judge, protect, and evaluate would be welcome on the Supreme Court. Over decades of meals, rehearsals, meditations, discussions, and even a few disappointments (that she has forgiven me for my lack of useful support in my direction of her in Friedrich Schiller’s Mary Stuart is a typical tribute to her loyalty), she has taught me finally the best lesson of all: the relief that pure honesty brings. And recently, as she begins to reevaluate, in her majority, what more she has to offer our industry, I see a remarkable director emerging before me, and along with the list of six previous associates I might have helped release into the stream, she’s clearly going to be a welcome inevitability.
* * *
How do women’s perspectives differ from mine? How should they? Because I truly believe they do. The individual gloss that each of these remarkable women has added to my own vocabulary, for whatever reason, feels to me utterly different from any of the insights and tools offered by my male mentors. And I hear them differently, too, their voices, their otherness as I reach to further interpret the actor’s process, always so deeply personal and private, and in a way, even invasive. With their help, I’ve possibly been able to glimpse another “gear,” one that continues to serve me every day, and for which I am truly grateful.
10
I Liked Mike
Ultimately, there is no way through the impenetrable thicket without the gift of the invaluable mentor, and of my many chosen examples, the last was Mike Nichols
In Martha’s Vineyard with Mike Nichols; Diane Sawyer; their son, Max; and his wife, Rachel
We met in April 2004, Mike Nichols and I. Well, truth to tell, we’d met earlier. Several times, in fact, but this seems to be the most likely date when “it” all resolved—when it finally and genuinely resolved.
So it’s April 2004, at the restaurant Marea, on Central Park South, his favorite, and at the hour of 1:00 p.m., my cab pulls up to the curb. Or have I just taken the subway down from Central Park West? That seems more likely … We find ourselves in the foyer of the brightly lit establishment with the long, generous bar on the left, and with the dining room spilling down a few stairs to the right, where, inevitably, in the corner banquette sits a beaming, anticipatory Mike, a tall glass of iced tea before him, and perhaps a glass of Sancerre as well.
He would not have been sitting there long, but he was always, always first, no matter how I tried. Indelible, that image … Mike smiling, arms outstretched, crowing out to me that I should sit here, or perhaps here, next to him. On the other hand…? He picks up his glass, raises it to my approaching figure …
I won’t sit just yet.
The chasm that separates the truly famous from the rest of us is vast, indeed. From my fraternity room at the University of Michigan in the early sixties, it stretches away beyond the dim limits of the Atlantic Ocean. I’m listening to a very popular record album with one of my Delt brothers, and we’re both staring at the turntable as if at the Dead Sea Scrolls, for spinning out before us comes the sound of Mike Nichols humming a little Bach melody as he seemingly settles beside Elaine May in a sketch called “Back to Bach,” a cut on their recent and enormously successful album. They are brand-spanking-new. They are not only new; they are the latest nouvelle vague to be crashing against the solid shore of our Midwestern squareness. Sophisticated, absinthe-dry: there is something musical about the way they intersect, spar, parry, and we stand open-mouthed with silent laughter, lest our outbursts sully the next deft thrust. Mike can say a phrase like “semi-class” or “brandy Alexander” in that distinct, slightly nasal way that can make your toes curl with silent, exquisitely repressed joy. It’s not a joke; it really isn’t. But it is effortlessly observed, a skill he holds in common with the immortal Elaine May, who can occasionally better him at his own game. Or is he simply being a gentleman?
There are heroes one aspires to meet, if only to obtain a selfie or an autograph. As in the case of a sports figure, there is a world where you can imagine lining up just for sweaty proximity, not to talk, God knows, and not in any way interfere, but just to be able to say that for a moment in your life, you breathed the same air, stood adjacent, in the same locker room, for example. That’s enough. But not with Mike. Never with Mike. From the inception of our friendship, his was a universe apart: I could appreciate him, I could celebrate him, but proximity? No way.
Some years later I was employed as a lowly temporary speech and diction teacher for Hunter College in Manhattan, and the best friend of one of my teaching fellows happened to be the company manager of the new, blazing hit Barefoot in the Park by Neil Simon, the now-documented directing debut of Mike’s, from which there was never to be a descent of any kind. For anyone aspiring to a possible life in the theatre, access to a choice bit of gossip, or even crumbs from the fabled table of this echelon of working professionals, was manna, so the mere mention of Mike and how he’d crafted that hit was repeated and overworked by us lowly teaching denizens as if we’d actually been present. For example, we learned early of the courtesy extended by the management to Mildred Natwick, an actress d’un certain âge, who was being given a car to drive her back to her Upper East Side apartment in the evenings after performances, a luxury undreamed of in the late sixties. And it was in this way that I began to hear rumors of exactly what kind of magic Mike generated that could so stun the Broadway community, as if it came from another planet. The apparent secret of his direction, as far as I could discern from this distance, was that he laughed. He laughed from his seat in the orchestra, over and over again, a hearty, wildly encouraging laugh that propelled the actors onstage to new heights of brilliance. He was, it was said, their very best friend! Astonishing! There had to be more to it, obviously, and I’m not sure this detail registered in any serious way at the time, but clearly, it stuck.
By the early nineties, I was settled and secure as artistic director at the Old Globe in San Diego, and beginning to spread my wings, if modestly. I’d done a lovely play of A. R. “Pete” Gurney’s called The Cocktail Hour, as a kind of pentimento gesture to former APA-Phoenix Repertory efforts, which Pete so admired, even casting alums Nancy Marchand and Keene Curtis in the leading roles, and Holland Taylor and Bruce Davison as their WASP children, in a Globe production that was successful enough to warrant a transfer to the Promenade Theatre on upper Broadway for a generous run, earning the cast various nominations for acting awards in that season. I cannot recall what took me to London during the following spring, but while there I became aware of a new production recently opened about the American theatre scene in the 1840s, called Two Shakespearean Actors and written by the American playwright Richard Nelson. With good press and some excitement in London, it seemed clear the production was destined for a New York transfer of some kind, and I found myself, on my return flight, with a purloined copy in my hands, while seated next to me in the airplane slept an old chum, John Goodman, sleeping off a bit of a bender after wrapping a film he’d just been doing in England.
I was nearly thunderstruck by the play. Here was the kind of thing often done in England but rarely attempted in the States: a play based on our own history of an encounter between Edwin Forrest, America’s great Shakespearean tragedian at the time, and William Charles Macready, a towering English star, when both actors went head-to-head playing Macbeth on the very same night, causing the memorable Astor Place riots. And the Brits were doing it? I was outraged. Lincoln Center Theater, at that time run by Gregory Mosher and Bernard Gersten, was the theatre rumored to be receiving the imminent transfer. As soon as I got off the plane, I called Greg, whom I had actually directed while he was still a student at Juilliard, and who was something of a regional colleague, since he had come to Lincoln Center Theater by way of the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. It happened that at that time, Mike Nichols had been his great champion, helping obtain the job at Lincoln Center in New York, but I knew nothing of this. What I did know was that this was a rare and marvelous opportunity to present American theatrical history on the commercial stage, and it seemed as if an Englishman had somehow secured the job of directing it. “Greg,” I nearly bellowed over the phone, “you just can’t give this script to a Brit! It doesn’t have to be me, it could easily be Danny Sullivan, or Marc Lamos, but be it on your conscience if you give to someone from England the chance to interpret us on the stage!” He laughed at my dramatic umbrage, but reasoned that because the director had been successful in London, there really was no proper way to fire him.
I was dumbfounded when, about two weeks later, Mosher called me to say the original British director was suddenly unavailable to do the transfer, and the play was falling to me. With the creative assistance of Billy Hopkins at Lincoln Center Theater, I managed to put together a sensational company of no fewer than thirty actors, headed by Victor Garber and Brian Bedford, including the likes of Zeljko Ivanek, Daniel Davis, Eric Stoltz, Frances Conroy, Hope Davis, Judy Kuhn, Tom Lacy, and Katie Finneran, in her Broadway debut. It became something of an event that season, forever cherished by me when it was reported at curtain time for the last performance, that a young man approached the box office and said, “Do you happen to have a pair of tickets under the name of John Kennedy?” and so managed to cadge the last two existing seats.
Greg Mosher proved a valuable and extremely loyal producer during this experience, and since Mike was still close to him in those days, Mike had been invited to the first preview. He was genuinely thrilled with the results, and spent entirely too much time afterward trooping up the towering staircase, upon which were stacked, like poker chips, something like twenty separate dressing rooms. He made it his business to visit every single dressing room and congratulate the entire company personally. The only other person traveling up and down that staircase was me, of course, and as I kept passing him, with him glancing obliquely in my direction, I just couldn’t bring myself to blurt out, Mr. Nichols, I’m Jack O’Brien, and I directed it. I just couldn’t.
The next morning, Greg called me to report that Mike had been fairly ecstatic, and would I like his notes? Would I?! I took down the number Greg gave me and called immediately. Mike was charming and warm and most congratulatory, and gave me only one serious note: “When you get to that second act,” he said in his sly, nasal tone, “cut every other word until you get to the last scene.” I knew what that meant, impractical as the advice might sound. Richard Nelson had, as most playwrights do, a tendency to overwrite, accompanied by an aversion to cutting anything, and the final duo scene between Macready and Forrest is a glorious end to the show, with much too much verbiage on the way to it. “Every other word” was something of an unrealistic exaggeration, but Mike’s philosophical weight gave credence to my attempts as we struggled to pare the text down to its final version.
I didn’t have a relationship with my hero yet, clearly, but I had received the benefit of his wisdom, along with my first real lesson from him: when giving notes to a fellow director, don’t offer too much … try to give practical advice that can make an actual difference. “Change the color of that ghastly wig,” or “Her hem looks uneven in the ballgown,” or, even better, “Cut every other word” until you get what you want. Be helpful. But be brief, too!
And so we leap ahead to 1994, when I have been blessed and potentially cursed with the responsibility of Tom Stoppard’s ambitious Hapgood for the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater in Lincoln Center—what he refers to as his “loose tooth” of a play, one that had had its day in London, but somehow left the critics and the audiences more baffled than entertained. A play composed of spies and twinning and elements of quantum physics, all twisted together, and beginning with a silent charade during which identically dressed men appear in the changing room of a local swimming pool, slipping identical briefcases under closed doors, all of which is meant to make sense, but … not immediately! Tom had recently visited a theatre in London with that very script of Hapgood reportedly under his arm, and had attended a performance of John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation, in which Stockard Channing was repeating her New York triumph to universal praise. He had the instinct that she might bring that exact fresh attack to his play, and since she and I had been good friends over the years, she volunteered that I might be the right person to direct it. Tom and Mike had been close associates and friends, since Mike had delivered his brilliantly self-assured production of Tom’s hit play The Real Thing on Broadway. I have no idea if Mike was ever initially asked to direct Hapgood, but if so, he had obviously declined, and since he was also a friend of Stockard’s, and was responsible for her first major film role, in the mistimed comedy The Fortune Cookie years earlier, opposite both Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty, it came to pass that the very evening Mike chose to see Hapgood, he’d also arranged to have a late supper with Stockard and her lover, director of photography Dan Gillham. I had also been politely included, by Stockard, if not Mike.
As fate would have it, I was sick as the proverbial dog with a leveling case of the flu, and needed more than anything to take to my bed of pain and not inflict my coughing or my mucus on anyone else. But come on! Dinner with Mike Nichols? When would I get another such opportunity? I was miserable. I was beyond stuffed up. And after the performance, when it was obviously time for me to retire, I recall approaching a table behind which sat Mike and to his right, Stockard, and to her right, Dan. I took the single chair opposite them all, and to this day have no remote memory of what restaurant it happened to be, nor a memory of any food that was consumed. Mike being Mike, he took the reins as well as the responsibility of both entertaining and praising Stockard for her performance, and because she and Dan clearly had a previous history with him, there was little need for me to participate, in practically any sense of the word. I was, in truth, barely able to sit up at the table, and spent most of the meal peering up from under my fevered brow, and waiting for an opportunity to bounce up from the table linen a fragment of what might pass for wit. That, at least, might help illustrate that, whatever else, I might not be a complete waste of time.
I don’t remember our discussing either Tom’s play or my work on it, but I do remember the timing of one or two tiny bons mots that resulted in Mike meeting my bleary eyes with something like a raised brow of approval.
As a result of the remarkable success of Hapgood, it seemed almost inevitable that Tom’s next play, The Invention of Love, would fall to Lincoln Center Theater, and, subsequently, to me. Although André Bishop and Bernie Gersten might have had some reservations about the commercial viability of so daunting and dense a subject as the life and oeuvre of A. E. Housman for a New York audience, the critic John Lahr was tireless in his insistence that their theatre had, indeed, an obligation to represent this remarkable play to a Broadway audience, and in 2001 I once more found myself—this time in the beloved Lyceum Theatre, in which I had served my apprenticeship to Ellis Rabb and the APA-Phoenix Repertory decades earlier—with a brave and truly beautiful production of this play designed to perfection again by Bob Crowley, and headed by Richard Easton and Robert Sean Leonard, who were both awarded Tonys for their individual performances at the conclusion of the season.
Again, I have no knowledge of any exchange between Tom and Mike during the genesis of the play. Richard Eyre, at that time the artistic director of the National Theatre, had done both the premiere and the subsequent transfer to the West End, but whether the die was cast in some way that inextricably joined Lincoln Center with me, or whether Eyre himself, as had been the case with the original director of Two Shakes, was simply unavailable to repeat his direction when the time came for production, is of no consequence. What is, however, relevant is that once again, after an early preview, Mike accompanied Tom as we all adjourned across Forty-Sixth Street to some anonymous bar with members of the cast and crew for a celebratory drink. And my world began that afternoon to turn in a very significant direction.
