Jack in the Box, page 21
In the last scene of Henry IV, Part Two, Hal, now king, confronts his old consort, and Falstaff sues for his favor … to be welcomed, to be included, to be at least acknowledged by the young man who had meant so much to him. And Hal’s famous icy reply is this: “I know thee not, old man.” I’ve never spoken with anyone who witnessed that scene in the lobby of the theatre. I’m confident the security guard would not have known the quote, would not have relished the irony. Two Shakespearean actors, in opposite parts of the same building. Two different points of view. Two different results. What are the chances?
You know? You can’t make this stuff up.
12
The Best for Last
Working more closely than most, and often, with Sir Tom Stoppard
Stoppard and me at the curtain call of the only Coast of Utopia marathon we saw, 2006
Tom Stoppard. Sir Tom Stoppard, our most distinguished living playwright. My friend Tom.
Is that true? Is it possibly a contest, and would he not be considered the best? Is that even fair to the others I’ve met, encountered, learned from, even lived with? The most recent of his plays I’ve directed, possibly the last of his work I shall ever direct, was an atypically short play compared to his usual output, minor when compared to the Coast trilogy, called The Hard Problem. I don’t think Tom would think of the play as remotely minor in any way; he is always all in, top to bottom. Setting aside the fact that it ran an astonishingly brief ninety minutes and was written in a single act, as well as the fact that it played in the intimate Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater Lincoln Center, as opposed to in the vast Vivian Beaumont, where many other premieres of his in New York had been lavishly presented, it was the last Stoppard work to be produced by the National Theatre of Great Britain under the inestimable artistic leadership of Nicholas Hytner, the last, in fact, of the myriad marvelous productions he himself created during his many years of stewardship. And like three major Stoppardian productions before it, when transferred under the guidance of André Bishop to Lincoln Center Theater, it seemed inevitable that I would direct it. The subject, if any of Tom’s plays can ever be reduced into a single “subject” rather than “orbits,” was fundamentally the issue of consciousness. Taken at its simplest, that comes down to … “Is it science, or is it God?” Certainly, the subject alone would hardly qualify remotely as “minor,” but truth to tell, it appears to have come and gone at its first viewings, less celebrated than many of the others: The Real Thing, The Coast of Utopia, Arcadia, even his most recent West End effort, Leopoldstadt. Well, they can’t all be Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, can they?
Ring! “It’s Tom” comes the rich, cake-like voice over the phone. Although it’s not “Tom,” precisely; it’s closer to “Thomm,” a syllable so individual that it needs no further identification … Could it possibly be anyone else? It’s not a name … more a badge, a musical note, perhaps. I don’t know anyone who can effectively reproduce this polyglot accent, and several try. Ethan Hawke gets the swing of it, but not the depth … “bless ’im,” as the playwright himself might charmingly put it. I don’t believe I have a relationship with Stoppard; I believe we have relationships. Let me count the ways …
1. THE ESTEEMED PLAYWRIGHT
Although I am pathetic when it comes to remembering or even noticing dates, I have it on the best authority that I met Tom Stoppard in March 1988, and can prove it, too. Although I was living in San Diego at the time, as artistic director of the Old Globe theatre, I was in New York, probably for casting reasons, when I received a phone call from Manny Azenberg, the producer of virtually all of Neil Simon’s work after he split with his first producer, Saint Subber. Because of my long association with Neil and Marsha Mason, to whom Neil was then married, Manny and I were familiar pals, always happy to run into each other whenever it occurred. Manny was inviting me to breakfast to meet Tom Stoppard with the purpose of a possible berth for Tom’s play Hapgood in the Globe’s upcoming season. I have no recollection of where this meeting took place, but I do recall my astonishment that although it was March, it was to be outside. It seemed odd to me at that time that they would suggest an alfresco setting for coffee and a brioche in brisk March, until I discovered that with Tom’s incessant smoking, he couldn’t abide to be indoors and deprived of a cigarette for even the length of, well, coffee and a brioche, so there we were, clustered around a small table somewhere in Midtown Manhattan, chilly but doing our best. I hadn’t read Hapgood, and knew virtually nothing about it, but that was hardly going to be an issue. For the Globe to be considered an appropriate venue for any play of Tom Stoppard’s was all the selling I required, and we half attempted to move dates and schedules around like our precarious paper napkins until it became evident that Tom was fresh out of cigarettes, and although he had seemed both pleasant and welcoming upon my arrival, I began to assume his evolving distraction must be due to the fact that he required a swift supply of nicotine, not that he was necessarily growing indifferent to me. “Would you like to accompany me?” He smiled down at me upon rising, and I was up like a shot, leaving Manny alone to deal with the check while we moved off together in search of an appropriate kiosk.
How did we happen to speak of fly fishing? No idea. But we did. He must have casually mentioned the subject, and I seized on it like a rainbow trout grabbing for a Royal Coachman … At last, a subject about which I could at least contribute something. My father had been an expert dry fly fisherman all his life, and despite the fact that his passion had skipped a generation in my case, I had been carefully disciplined by the age of ten to cast a dry fly deftly into a teacup across the entire parking space of my father’s northern Michigan log cabin retreat, which had neither electricity nor running water at the time. I wasn’t much for fishing, but I could talk a fair deal about it. Tom’s expression lit up, and as we floated to and from the promised cigarettes, he studied me fully for the first time. Suffice it to say that the effect of that gaze is considerable. I believe Stoppard to be one of the two or three most seductive human beings I have ever encountered, and although I frankly acknowledge his appeal to and for a wide category of stunning women, the vestigial frisson, though unintentional, was still pretty profound. When we returned with his Marlboros, something had shifted, and we all parted with enthusiasm and a sense of some possible future.
I happened to attend the premiere performance of M. Butterfly that very evening, which is how I know it was March 20, 1988. I was alone, I believe, because I hadn’t initially intended to go at all, and once there, I began to sense a few problems with the production, directed by the inestimable John Dexter, although it was to prove a major success on both sides of the Atlantic. Still, for someone to have a serious sexual relationship with another person for a period of years without ever suspecting they might not be a woman after all, I found increasingly difficult to swallow, if that’s not too vivid a metaphor. A one-nighter, perhaps. A weekend, maybe. But years? That suggests a lack of focus in my estimation. As the evening concluded, I found myself streaking up the aisle, elbowing someone else as eager for the exit as I. It was Tom Stoppard, and, amused and surprised to find each other in a kind of accidental footrace, we exchanged the inane pleasantries all professionals do, being more sensitive than most others about eavesdroppers. As fate would have it, we both turned toward the open air of Eighth Avenue, and, doing so, felt as if we’d been let out of school. “I have to say, I rather loathed it,” Tom said over his shoulder. “I didn’t believe a word, did you?” “Not a fan flutter,” I responded, and we found ourselves cackling in guilty collusion. Another plus!
The weeks rolled on, and I returned to San Diego without further word from either Tom or Manny. One day, Tom Hall, my administrative partner, showed me an item in the Los Angeles Times announcing a production of Hapgood at the James Doolittle Theatre intended for the coming season, starring the Australian actress Judy Davis. I don’t recall thinking much else about it, other than what an interesting choice she was, but since we’d encountered no further discussions about the property, and the Globe hadn’t been holding a space for it, it seemed merely one of those missed connections with which the regional market is rife, and we’d obviously all gone our separate ways. A year or so later, while I was searching for plays for a new season, it occurred to me that the Globe was currently blessed with a little collection of really superb farceurs, all happily available, the depth of which is rarely seen west of Broadway … Brian Bedford, Paxton Whitehead, Tom Lacy, Dakin Matthews … a marvelous quartet perfect for something hilarious and demanding, like Tom Stoppard’s farce Rough Crossing. I sent out an inquiry about the rights, only to learn that Peter Wood, a longtime favorite collaborator of Tom’s, had already secured them. There it was, once again … the inevitable plight of the regional director. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but since we, as a producing organization, were responsible for mounting something like twelve to fourteen productions per year at that point, a brochure was imperiously waiting to be printed, so I had to move on.
A year later, Stockard Channing was summoned to the West End to re-create her amazing performance in Six Degrees of Separation, and, as I’ve previously reported, Stoppard turned up one evening at her theatre with a copy of Hapgood tucked under his arm. After drinks and compliments, and after she had expressed interest in doing the play—what Tom called his “loose tooth,” since he felt it had never gotten its proper due—she suggested me as a possible director for the subsequent Lincoln Center engagement, and I was to learn how Tom and I were to intersect from his perspective—the complete opposite of what I had presumed, as well as a further revelation of the ways Tom perceives things and how he, in turn, is usually perceived.
One thinks of significant figures like Tom in the abstract; you consider them, of course, but conversely, it never occurs to you that they may think of you in a like manner—as if the Eiffel Tower had feelings, say. It turned out that initially, Tom felt genuine sadness and guilt for the way the Globe, in general, and I, in particular, had been summarily dismissed from the original Hapgood offer. Then—who knew?—he was doubly pained when he saw the rights to Rough Crossing futilely crossing his desk. Yet another perceived grievance, in his estimation. So when Stockard mentioned me as a candidate for Hapgood, it seemed like a way to rectify everything in his eyes, and also sounded like the right directorial choice for Stockard and André. The production was offered to me, just that quickly.
What’s Shakespeare’s delicious joke? “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have Hapgood thrust upon them?” A script that combines elements of quantum physics, at least two sets of identical twins, and the threat of international spying is not exactly a recipe for a boulevard comedy, despite Tom’s pervasive wit and a host of vivid, fascinating characters. It begins with a baffling dumb show in a locker room adjacent to a swimming pool where various identical figures slip various identical briefcases under the respective cubicle doors without a word of dialogue to explain the proceedings, other than the clandestine signal of towels being slung over those same doors. Looking back upon the entire experience, it’s impossible not to suggest that that’s the easy part.
But Tom Stoppard, as the playwright, is never impatient, and never remotely condescending, despite having every right to be both. He began quietly to spoon-feed me the elements of quantum physics, as well as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and I often felt like I was in the company of a very wise, very gentle pachyderm, who completely understood that if he was not careful, he might innocently put a foot down and crush me with his immense intelligence. It was never Tom who acted that way! That was how I perceived our evolving tutorials. No passage was meant to be merely obvious. No inference was too tedious to trace and trace again until I began to see the puzzle coming together. Midway through our weeks of prep came the astonishing revelation, to Lincoln Center and André Bishop, at least, that Stockard fully intended to pop off somewhere for a few weeks to do a film, and, swallowing hard, André quietly went about making the complicated adjustments that would see our production dates delayed for months if not more. But what a boon to me! Those precious weeks were essential for me—and for Tom to make clear to me what the word “essential” actually meant.
And what did I assume I had to bring to this abstruse table? I’m not entirely certain I had time for or confidence in anything as reductive as a “vision.” Tom had done his best with me, then returned to London, while, in his words, “we learned it,” leaving me alone with my cast, but as often happens, they soon began to find their own rhythms, and their own chemistry. The company was a mix of the new and the familiar: Stockard, of course, whom I had never directed but considered a close friend; David Lansbury, Clifton Davis, and David Strathairn were all new to me, as was Brían O’Byrne, but Josef Sommer I knew from my ACT days, and Michael Winther had played several roles at the Globe. Left to our own devices, of course, we immediately formed that comfortable battalion of denial common to all acting companies who assume they are on the cusp of the kind of revelation never even dreamed of by the poor author. Imagine my surprise, if that’s remotely the right choice of words, when Tom arrived back in New York just in time to witness my staging of the end of his first act. It was just the men—Sommer, Davis, Strathairn, and O’Byrne, I believe—and as we sat in the baldly lit Mitzi E. Newhouse with no warmth and less magic available, I found myself growing smaller and smaller in my seat, my eye only occasionally drifting over to where Tom sat, his legs crossed, his gaze narrowed, and even though we were in a sacred theatre space, a cigarette in one hand, a “smokeless” ashtray cupped in the other. The last scene of the act concluded to complete silence. I had made what in the theatre is often wryly referred to as “a choice,” sticking my directorial neck out just barely. Sensing the chill in the air and the growing terror enveloping the company, I managed to say, “Tom, do you have anything you’d like to offer?” He elegantly unfolded himself, rising above us in the third or fourth tier of the auditorium, and, stretching lazily, said, “Well, other than perhaps the fact that all the wrong people are on the stage, I suppose it’s fine!”
Even now, I have to suppress the gasp that similarly sucked all the air out of the Mitzi that afternoon. And here I rush to Tom’s defense … Honest to God, he was forever lowering booms of this dimension and heft on unsuspecting actors, as well as on me, and he had no idea what he was saying, or, rather, how it might possibly be interpreted. I know that to be a fact, after something like five separate experiences with him surveying similarly trembling companies of actors. When one reminds him exactly of what he has occasionally said in public, I have seen him quail and visibly wince, stoutly denying any such thing, but I have witnesses to prove it, and I often relish bringing up these horrendous examples whenever possible. I will be revisiting one or two of the worst of these bursts of candor as we progress, but what I understand now, and often leap eagerly into the fray to remind actors of, both in Tom’s presence and outside it, is that the text is not casually spun out by him. He sits alone before a yellow legal pad and, writing with an ink pen in his crabbed handwriting, carves these monuments of speech in a slow and agonizing process. And as he has said to me upon many occasions—“But that’s what I meant!” He sees the words, and knows their value precisely, knows what they can and must carry, and, to be honest, he is “hearing” only what he’s written, not paying all that much attention to what the actor or even the director is about. It is, first and foremost, the correct vowel, the pronounced final consonant, that occupies him. It’s Tom and the text … Tom and the words … It’s a mad exaggeration, but I sometimes feel as if he’s often forgotten we’re there at all.
In this case he wasn’t bent on merely insulting us, or sweeping us aside, or in any way undercutting me. He had recently sat for hours on an airplane, wondering what had become of his text. And what he experienced at first view was more or less the antithesis of what he knew had to fulfill that expectation. And so out came those words … After which, I promise you, he fell over himself to apologize and try to explain.
He didn’t mean that! Well, yes, he did, but not as bluntly as it popped out. And he did explain. And all of it wasn’t bad. And all of it wasn’t useless. And I felt very much like the fat tossed into the fire, but we got through it. And we survived to go on! That, ultimately, is the only point.
It appears that clarity and precision, bouncing between Tom and me, carried the day. That and sex. We mustn’t forget sex. Because, at the outset, whatever else I finally brought to that table, sex might have been the paramount and secret ingredient, and I was never again to let it go. Occasionally, I suppose, the appearance of sex might be attributed to a choice of direction, but in this case, whether it was intentional or not, sex was quietly almost everywhere you looked, beginning and not ending with Ms. Channing, who has her own spells to weave, and weave them effortlessly, she does. But at the same time, this production represented my first collaboration with the prodigious Irish designer Bob Crowley. He had only just previously triumphed with his stunning designs for Carousel, a hit on both sides of the Atlantic, and although on the occasion of the opening-night party we were first introduced and then seated at a table together by the producer Liz McCann, a fellow Irish person, Bob didn’t seem to take remotely to me, and I found him icily diffident at best. So there! He was due to leave town anyway the next day, and we were still without a design team when André Bishop suggested I try my level best to convince him to do Hapgood, unlikely as that appeared to me. Literally about to depart for the airport, Bob agreed to briefly cross the street to what was once called the Ginger Man restaurant, where I treated him to a glass of white wine and a tiny mushroom tart. Where to begin? How to assess whether or not he and I had any chance at chemistry? I took a leap: “Do you know Tom Stoppard?” I queried. He confessed they had never met, and I seized upon that fact as if it were the Rosetta stone, appalled that two such masters of theatre, living in the same city, didn’t know each other. It piqued Bob’s interest, and removed me temporarily from center stage, and before you knew it, he declared himself game, and we were on our way to becoming the Irish brothers we clearly were always destined to be, if only our idiotic social insecurities hadn’t nearly lumbered the entire opportunity.
