Jack in the Box, page 2
But it’s equally possible that in the case of the soliloquies, nobody moved at all, and the audience, enchanted by the sound and the imagery, were held happily rapt, as if listening to music. But a modern audience, lavishly tricked and constantly teased by the endlessly restless visual cutting that happens in film and television, finds itself hooked on movement. We’ve become too lazy to simply listen without some form of accompanying eye candy. In one of my fund-raising “lectures” to local audiences during my years at the Globe, I used to employ the example of network television, suggesting that the audience go home, turn on a commercial network program, turn the sound off, and, with a pencil, tap the surface of a table each time the picture changed. That was how often their optic nerve was being poked, stimulated, tricked, even, and one rarely got through more than ten seconds of airtime with less than fourteen to twenty “hits.” One wasn’t necessarily listening; one was merely getting high on movement.
With soliloquies, which initially represented “spoken thought,” there was no real need to move, no necessity for blocking. But try it: stand before an audience at a lectern, begin reading your well-crafted twenty-minute speech, and when you glance up, you’ll begin to see glassy eyes staring back at you, heads wobbling on their stems like so many asters in an autumn breeze. You’ve lost them. They’ve drifted away. They can’t hang. As a result, I often personally forgo the lectern, moving back and forth before them in an attempt to refresh the visual picture, and occasionally even appearing to invade the “personal space” of the audience, just to scare the bejesus out of them in order to keep them alert. Don’t underestimate blocking!
Are there rules? Of course there are! I recall, in a précis of one of my own early attempts at the university, a professor calling to my attention something called “a triangle.” He was, of course, trying to discourage me from having my actors all stand in a straight line. You might think one would notice this immediately. And you would be wrong! If I close my eyes and imagine my early work, practically every memory would feature a solid row of smiling faces, regular as fence posts, stretching from proscenium to shining proscenium. And experience eventually reveals the wisdom of geometric shapes, of graceful groupings of actors, and of interesting compositions that feature profiles.
I thought a lot about it initially; now, not so much. There is often a self-consciousness to your early efforts, and sometimes that’s not a bad thing entirely, but if you’re not careful, when it comes to blocking—as the charming phrase has it—the em-PHA-sis is often on the wrong syl-LA-ble. Even in a work as as intrinsically musical as one by Molière or Mozart, which can require brave and often dance-like patterns for showing off the clothes and responding to the florid speech and rhythms, movement for movement’s sake too often supplants clarity with the self-conscious busyness of a director, and that is a temptation I feel is to be avoided at all costs. I’ve come to believe that if it’s the visual movement the audience is following, the direction is in the way, and even if it’s difficult not to want to show off, the more you direct, the less you want them to notice this aspect of the work.
So, how to proceed? If you’re lucky, eventually you might get to work on the big canvases: Shakespeare, opera … twenty actors with broadswords in Henry IV, the triumphal march of Aida—in the latter case, often more than a hundred singers and dancers, none with a single thought in their heads about the war they have just supposedly fought. Is it necessary, you ask? Time being money, the heads of most opera companies (the “producer,” in this case, not the “regisseur,” which is what a stage director is called in opera) will tell you, “No, get on with it!,” as mine did when I found myself treading turbulent water in the midst of directing Aida early in my career. But should one take the time to explain? You don’t have to; get the soldiers in rows, make them smart, efficient, attractive … march down front, turn on the tenth count to your right, and get the hell offstage! That’s the job … Yes, but what of that chorus waving from the ramparts? Again, why not give them direction? Often, in the view of management, the audience is there for the tenor and the soprano; what care they about the thoughts in the minds of the masses? My answer would be that the more you impart, and the more efficiently you create a common language, a common experience, the more the climate onstage subtly changes, and it’s my belief that the audience gets something nearly abstract, something more they may or may not consciously be able to define. And from the perspective of the chorus? Whenever I have spoken to a mass of people as if they mattered to me as well as to the story, they have given their very souls to the event. And so finally, did it matter? It did to me!
Again, back there at my genesis, my mentor, Ellis Rabb, was fearless as a creator of movement and composition, and he generously shared his intentions with me. You could tell he hadn’t given it a conscious thought, but give him fourteen, sixteen men for the Battle of Borodino, say, in his marvelous production of War and Peace, and stand back. He’d wade into the midst of the boys with a lit cigarette in his right hand, beckoning, pushing, deflecting, urging them to raise and unfurl the flags—what he could do with red silk and a wand!—and it was almost like watching a kind of traffic cop with intuitive eyes in the back of his head. There was an incident when he walked off rehearsals of the looming production of that same War and Peace, originally conceived for off-Broadway, which was now being inflated in ways more appropriate for the vast Greek Theatre in Los Angeles, where it was to open our California season. I suddenly found myself pressed into service to complete the blocking, not knowing if he’d return, or if, this time, he was seriously off in a major huff, which I must admit happened more often than we chose to report. I lay awake, panicky, the night before I was to face the troops, and when I finally got up before them the following morning, I did manage to produce some nervous Baroque version of the chaos of colliding men, some falling away, some pushing through … It was pretty dense, that much I recall. To all our relief, Ellis returned a few days later, and, my heart in my throat, I had to watch him witnessing my fledgling effort. But then, apparently not entirely displeased with what he saw, he silently rose, and by eliminating this movement, clearing for that moment, opening up space so the audience might more easily see individual activity rather than just movement, per se, he “corrected” my term paper in a way that left me both astonished and grateful. He simplified what I had determined to make look complex, and it was all over in less than three minutes, less than half the time I had so assiduously staged. Whenever does a young director get the opportunity to see how little it takes for the audience to follow what need not be elaborate, but essential, done by someone with considerably more experience and taste?
As they say, there’s no substitute for experience. Looking back on a lifetime of rehearsals, some overly prepared, several nearly improvised, I see that the repetition of years of facing a blank canvas has finally distilled in me whatever is to be required. I can immediately read the difference between a room written by A. R. Gurney, and one in Moscow in the nineteenth century, written from the point of view of Tom Stoppard. I no longer consider the objective; time has given me enough confidence that I can handle it. What I have found, curiously enough, is that there also exists, somewhere in the parallel universe, a kind of template of what is meant to happen, which, if I’m being truthful, has very little to do with me. The director must be prepared, alert, listening, and hopeful, but the piece itself also “wants” what it wants. The results should come partly from the director, partly from the active intelligence and impetus of the actors, and partly from the play itself, which appears to assert, like the natural flow of water, its own organic truth. All three of these constituents must play a part for the world to spring to something like life, but if you can find and balance the three, you have a fighting chance at delivering it. When you come right down to it, and whenever you feel confused … respect the author.
But for me, ultimately, blocking is not “where it’s at” when it comes to plumbing the hidden secrets of directing. That’s looking through the telescope from the wrong end. It’s not something you need to get right; it’s something you need to get true. You often hear an actor say, “I don’t feel like moving there. Why do I have to? I don’t know, it doesn’t feel right…”
Obviously, something has gone wrong. It might be wise to look at the game from the reverse angle, rather than try to validate personal choices, which inevitably degenerates into arguments. The actor is uncomfortable mainly because the director thinks for myriad reasons a certain move is essential to his own plan. The actor balks. Who is right? Often there is some cant about the director laying down the law … “I’ll tell you why you move there!” the director says archly. “Because of one thing and one thing only … your paycheck!”
My way or the highway, eh? For me, there can be no contest: there is only the responsibility of putting life onstage … life as everyone—writer, actor, audience, and director—recognizes it to be. Alas, people don’t always see things the same way. I can think of only two moments over the years when I was face-to-face with genuine stop-the-music adversity, both involving actresses, one at the beginning of her career, and one, to be honest, nearer the end (and neither was Tammy Grimes). But in both cases, if I conjure up their faces, they are almost identical—bilious, angry eyes staring out of their heads, wet with furious tears.
I won’t name them—what’s the point? In the case of the younger actress, she had just come from appearing in a celebrated television role for which she had become well known, not having been onstage for some time. Her role had been written as terse, tailored to her customary clipped, brief rhythms, so that when asked to do something longer, or to wrangle a speech with more than one point to be made, she froze, simply balked, and, since I had written the adaptation we were staging, openly mocked me as its author. She defiantly “didn’t get it,” and went back on her heels in outraged, panicky belligerence. The older actress, who was terrified of simply memorizing speeches similarly complex to those that had proven equally impossible for the younger actress, began furiously editing the young author’s words. After seeing that I was determined to protect the integrity of his writing, she, a seasoned professional who should have known better, sought him out privately without my knowledge, manipulating a younger, less experienced professional in order to make the speeches more “her” than the character he’d written. In spite of my taking her off to her dressing room for an intense confrontation—which in my experience never pays off—she never relinquished her obsession with reducing the text to something she felt she could at least remember, regardless of the author’s intentions. And no, she couldn’t finally remember her revisions, either.
Confrontation is useless, I find. Your ego gets in the way, as does the actor’s understandable sense of panic, and you become embroiled in a pissing contest, which, to my knowledge, has never made for particularly good theatre. One has to pull the camera back, as I prefer to put it, and will oneself to disengage, realizing that what the actor seems to be complaining about is probably not what’s at stake. The best response I ever found, in the middle of such an imbroglio, was to drop all the posturing and whip around with “Hey! Just a minute! Let’s stop this. Just tell me: What can I do? How can I help make this work for you?” If you begin there, rather than with a justification of your position, it might just result in a near miracle.
What I have discovered over the years is that there seem to be basically two reasons actors rebel. The first is that they believe they are not being heard. Maybe they can’t express this in a way you can understand, but on some level they’re feeling cut out of the process, and I think that is historically more a problem for women facing male directors than for men facing men, who often look forward to going toe-to-toe until something gets resolved. But for eons women have been summarily dismissed, and many of them still sadly expect to have to put up with submitting without a discussion, in spite of the progress we seem to have made in leveling the field. Not seriously listening to an actor’s complaints and concerns is the perfect way to set up a roadblock that, if it doesn’t erupt immediately, will “out” eventually.
The other major reason for rebellion, I believe, is that the actor is privately terrified on some level that they are in over their head, convinced in their hearts they won’t be able to pull it off—which was the case of the younger woman in the previous example. The role she was attempting was iconic; she was at the start of a really remarkable career, but had never tackled anything of this size and expectation before. After she had openly rebelled before the entire company, insulting me and squaring off, I took her out into the lobby and asked her simply what I had ever done to make her think I didn’t want her to be brilliant in the role. Tears streaming down her face, she began to realize perhaps I wasn’t the enemy, and was finally able to take me into her confidence. We got on. But neither actress was, in truth, ideally cast for her assignment, and often, when this mistake is made, there’s virtually nothing one can do but to be supportive, kind, and encouraging. It must be awful to face something one feels is beyond them. What is that called? The “Peter Principle”: rising inexorably to the level of one’s own incompetence? On the other hand, who can resist the offer to play Hamlet, particularly if one has always secretly coveted the role? In this case, the casting is the director’s fault, and no one else’s, so it’s no use blaming the miscast actor. You, as director, have somehow screwed it up. No less an experienced practitioner than William Ball, whose ACT repertory company was one of the glories of the seventies theatre scene in San Francisco, and has now outlived him to survive healthily well into this century, once confessed to me that he blamed himself for any miscasting, and flatly refused to fire the offending, disappointing actor, because, he reasoned, it was he who should bear the responsibility and, if unable to improve the performance, endure the consequences as almost—what?—a kind of public penance?, a posture I could never quite reconcile myself to. Why should a miscast actor and all the subsequently confused audiences have to suffer nightly indignation when it was Bill himself, who, believe me, had no intention of sitting out front repeatedly witnessing his error? Still, I must admit, I admired his taking public, if silent, responsibility for having let his personal emotions cloud his objectivity.
3. CASTING (WHICH SOMETIMES FEELS AS IF IT RELATES TO FISHING MORE THAN THEATRE!)
And so, here we are, being gracefully if guiltily led back to the earlier category, casting, which remains one of the most opaque mysteries of the entire process of theatre. The convenient adage is that irritatingly smug phrase “Casting is 80 percent of the work.” Swell! How helpful is that?
The classic audition is just this side of having one’s fingernails pulled out, except one has somehow volunteered for it. Allowed three minutes, if that, the poor actor walks into an airless room with a table at one end where various people are exchanging résumés, usually drinking coffee, and often eating a distractingly noisy lunch, while at one side sits an upright piano with an often bored pianist, his legs crossed, before which the unfortunate artist plunks down music or simply stands center stage, waiting for some vague signal before trumpeting a piece of memorized text upon which an entire career may be judged. “Thank you,” the standard reply comes. “We’ll get back to you.” Then follows another, equally harrowing act that we might refer to as “leaving the room”—as if coming in weren’t bad enough.
It’s brutal, and yet how else can we create an environment in which it’s possible to witness the presence of that singular spark of individuality we call, for lack of a more precise term, “talent”? It cannot be summoned at will. It cannot be somehow summoned where stolid aridity is present. It usually cannot be defined at all. What can we say? Despite the archaic and even rude nature of the process, on some essential level it works, and so far, nothing better has come along to surpass or even augment its methodology. I have learned to trust it, to stay alert for that quality that just may leap between the hopeful actor and me, and what exactly is that? Often, setting aside the issue of “type,” as to whatever degree the actor appears to resemble something I have decided in my own mind as “what I’m looking for,” it can be as simple as an easy, definable sense of humor, a glint in the eye that tells me they take this neither too seriously nor plenty seriously, and with a nod at the ludicrousness of our hoping some shared essence will leap between us being the order of the day, we get on with it and try to enjoy it. Enjoyment, it must be said, can cover a host of insecurities. I keep thinking the process is not so different from meeting new people socially … first impressions, you know? Sometimes you just plain like someone, want to spend more time with them, wouldn’t mind even sharing a meal. It’s that sense of community, of being at ease as well as curious, that leaves one wanting more. So, holding your breath, you jump—and hire them.
Mike Nichols once confessed to me he had cast a leading role on the advice of chums who were great fans of one particular actress, not because he knew her personally. He let himself be influenced by others, and lived to regret it.
This being Mike Nichols, you can rest assured this was no third-tier actress out of the blue, and having seen her myself in other work, I knew her to be both worthy and undeniably interesting, if not spot-on for the role Mike was offering. This resulted in him saying to me, “Don’t ever hire someone you don’t know!” He didn’t mean this, of course, because that would mean Mike employed the same actors over and over again, and while allowing it to be true that whenever any of us find interpreters we trust and value, we tend to gravitate to them, still, one always needs to find new avenues to explore, because familiarity often leads to laziness, if not outright contempt, the single bane of the glory we tend to associate with classic repertory casting. Having a cadre of wonderful talent you spend a lifetime refining, as in the case, say, of Giorgio Strehler and his resident company of the Piccolo Teatro di Milano (many of them employed for literally decades), begets that rarest of qualities called true ensemble acting, achieved through years of shared experience, and something one almost never sees anymore. But it must also be said that that very same virtue can also dull the anticipation, when you know all too well the strengths and weaknesses of a particular actor, making you think, sadly, you also know too well what the result will be. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t … Eva Le Gallienne was being regaled by Ellis years ago when he’d heard of a particularly bad performance by the wrong actor in the wrong role. “Can you imagine?” he concluded. And Le G, staring off wistfully, responded, “Yes … yes, I can. That’s the problem!”
