Jack in the Box, page 22
In a matter of weeks I went over to London to Bob’s studio, where he had, in fact, simply done it. There, in a half-inch model, was, to me, “sex personified,” an elegant arena composed of endless file drawers that masked interlocking turntables, designed to deliver swiftly and silently scene after scene, with delicious elements like twin giraffes towering out of the theatre’s two vomitories, wittily underscoring the hiding-in-plain-sight idea that twinning was the essential point of all the recondite clues. But the sex didn’t end there. One had to add the sumptuous jazz score of my oldest friend, Bob James, so subtle, so sinuous that the score itself went on sale with the rest of the merchandise in the lobby. Or the tight-to-the-body silhouettes of the costumer Ann Roth, or the opening stroke of visual brilliance of the projection designer Wendall Harrington, who projected a beautiful body diving down the back of the set, seeming to “disappear” under the floor, as it silently glided toward the audience. There, with a stroke, was your swimming pool.
No, given that group of very attractive men, and the superb security of Stockard Channing hovering over all, the evening found itself drenched in a climate of confident sexual innuendo, and nothing is quite as provocative to an audience as that, when well done. At one point in the drama, while playing identical twins, and now in the guise of the more louche sister, Stockard had to complete the scene, and with no break, and in full view of the audience, morph back into her original role, appearing at the top of the next scene as the title character. Without a word of dialogue, she slowly crossed from one side of the arena to the other, where she sat down coolly, having made the transition by mystically melting from one persona to the other. During one thoroughly engaged matinee, in full voice, one could hear an elderly patron confide to her silent companion in awe: “She did her job!” Higher praise no reviewer can quite deliver.
2. TOM, THE CELEBRATED COLLABORATOR
I in no way wish to give the impression that Tom was not collaborative in the extreme, or that he wouldn’t do everything within his power to implant within me the most articulate version of what he wanted the production to reflect. Because it was his tradition to “come and go,” rather than simply remain in New York for the entire period of a rehearsal schedule, he was nothing but focused when he was present. After all, each of the productions of his I eventually directed had been done elsewhere, and although he relished the continual refinement of the scripts, he had other assignments and issues to juggle. His preferred method of collaboration had little to do with the visual and everything to do with the most exact of interpretations. And that could be exhausting, to say the least, particularly when the subject at hand was quantum physics, which was very much at the heart of the play. Not precisely my field of expertise, shall we say.
One weekend, Tom was preparing to return to London for a while and wanted to fill me with enough material to keep me thoroughly stoked in his absence. He suggested that I come to his hotel for a late breakfast on Sunday morning and get his notes, after which we might walk up to Lincoln Center together and attend the single matinee performance. I arrived around eleven to find him on the telephone, the air already thick with cigarette smoke, and with a large linen-covered table laden with various egg concoctions, a basket of croissants with jam and butter, and even a rather singular pizza, thrown in just for good measure, I assume. And pots of coffee, of course.
We settled down with the food fairly incidental to the purpose, and the hours flew while he took me virtually line by line through scene after scene, patiently explaining the subtext, the parallels to the science, and the identity of various London locations unfamiliar to me. Before we realized it, we were nearing the half-hour call before the curtain, and we scrambled to stuff our papers into various bags and backpacks. Tom, surveying the fair amount of uneaten food, took a series of linen napkins, wrapped croissants and the pizza into them, and secreted them within his ubiquitous cloth shoulder bag along with cigarettes and matches.
We sat shoulder to shoulder in the matinee, each of us taking our own notes, and after a few minutes afterward spent encouraging and embracing the company, we wished everyone a pleasant day off and left. “I’ll just walk you back to the hotel on my way,” Tom volunteered. “There are a couple of things I might mention as we go.” And although I was beginning to feel slightly “up to here” with Hapgood, her crew of men, and the intense verbiage piling up like leaves around me, I was grateful for his persistence. When we got to the Mayflower Hotel, and I was about to wish him well for his flight in the morning, he said, “Why don’t I just nip up with you to your room and finish just one or two things you might watch out for in the next few days?” “Okay,” I countered, as cheerfully as I could, hoping my eyes weren’t rolling too visibly in my head, and we immediately adjourned upstairs, Tom flinging his coat and scarves in one direction, digging out his notes and legal pads, and settling into the one comfortable chair, as I perched precariously, and I hoped briefly, on the side of the bed.
“One or two things” stretched from five thirty to about seven, during which he asked, “Do you mind if I smoke?” At that time, there were no restrictions in hotel rooms, and, come on, what are you meant to say to such a polite request? He dug out his cigarettes, while producing a few slightly soiled linen napkins, and added, “Well, look! Might as well get our money’s worth from breakfast, wouldn’t you say?” As he raised a window and lit his cigarette, I made some semblance of sense out of the napkins and the pizza beside me on the foot of the bed, and on we went. With the bit in his teeth, he continued enthusiastically a few minutes later, “Mind if I take off my shoes?” Thoughtfully chewing some stale crust, I nodded, and we continued. Around nine, he suddenly said, “Would you care if I took off my socks?” I stopped. “Are you trying to seduce me?” I managed, and we burst out laughing.
It’s odd. Professional relationships can remain as such, and a personal line need never be crossed. And that’s fine. That’s usual. But occasionally, especially when taxed and exhausted, or when your backs are united against a wall, the membrane rips, and you are suddenly no longer where you’d been. Were Tom and I destined to become “friends” as well as professional associates? I have no idea, but without his intellectual striptease, I might not have had the courage to drop all pretense and come clean. Pencils and pads and stale pizza were forgotten as we happily explored the curious common fact that from our utterly opposite emotional poles, neither of us ever felt confident at reading signs, “radar,” or “gaydar,” in my case, and we turned over, for maybe fifteen important minutes or so, an entirely different kind of notation, another kind of intimacy. It was lovely, then picking up where we’d been, and we finished around eleven o’clock. But that, too, is a kind of collaboration. You just cannot always count on it.
The Invention of Love was my next gift coming over from the U.K., again thanks to André Bishop and Lincoln Center Theater. I had been allowed to go over to London and see for myself the production Richard Eyre had directed in what was then known as the Cottesloe, the smallest and most adaptable of the three spaces of the National Theatre. It was my first experience encountering Tom’s signature actor, the late John Wood, who could have stepped fully formed from Tom’s brain, so perfectly did he embody all aspects of what Tom required—effortless intelligence, a magisterial command of technique, and a persona that could rip from highest farce to the deepest philosophical mien in a blink of an eye. From the role of Guildenstern in Tom’s initial success through Travesties and on into Invention, Wood was Tom’s spiritual interpreter, and although I struggled both in the Cottesloe and subsequently in the West End, where Invention eventually transferred, with what felt like the demanding verbosity of the script, whenever John Wood was on point, I was glued to the performance. But without Wood to accompany the production to America, where to turn? I had already proposed to André Bishop my preferred candidate, Richard Easton, who had scored so impressively in our Henry IV. The only other obvious choice was Brian Bedford, but something about the “unknown” element of Easton made him the best and more intriguing choice.
Invention became almost the apotheosis of Crowley and my creative partnership, although we would have done nearly anything to avoid having to prove it initially. By this time, Tom felt thoroughly comfortable with us; there was a trust and a genuine excitement about beginning a new project, at least for him. Crowley and I were nearly poleaxed with fear and intimidation, with a script as dense with Latin and poetic text as it was rife with echoes of undergraduate life at Oxford, featuring a sensitive examination of repressed sexual desire that nearly broke Crowley’s and my hearts. I’ve described already Bob’s and my initial experiment with colored Post-its, our attempt to isolate the individual narrative voices, attempting to make visual sense out of what often read like a kind of intellectual quilting.
As a result, Crowley took flight—that’s the only way to put it—and came up with a production scheme on a mirrored black floor so beautiful, so elegant, so utterly surprising that I was able to follow happily along, thrilled with the “toys” he left at my disposal. What the scheme awakened in me, however, was the memory of my own university years, during which, I kept insisting, “even the nerds were beautiful.” The release of young adults into their own storied environment during their first time away from home brought forth once more a strong sexual impulse to all the intellectual posturing, and I could see the characters as beautiful young birds, reveling in their new plumage and wantonly preening before one another without fully understanding the consequences.
With a production about to take shape, Bob and I were excited to share this far more extensive vision of the play with Tom, who was coming over from London just for the purpose. And there was a great deal to see … images of the “dreaming spires” of Oxford, exteriors, backgrounds for students on bicycles, an entire ceiling of autumn leaves crashing to earth in a single blow. Showing something as extravagant as what we were uncorking to Tom was bound to be complicated. He was naturally comfortable with what he’d had in London … This was nowhere near it. We were off the charts, delirious in our own supposed bravery, waiting for something like Christmas.
In the Beaumont basement, where we were given an office, Tom arrived from London again to take it all in, silently, as was his usual pattern. We went from scene to scene using the model with nearly no comments from him, except when he needed a break to go above for a cigarette, leaving us to look at each other in mute fear and wonder. At the very end of act 1 came one of our bravest attempts: A. E. Housman is giving a lecture, one that begins to fray with elements of his unexpressed longing for the athlete Moses Jackson, while behind him hangs a replica of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man on the supposed wall of the classroom, which, as the lecture feverishly builds to its conclusion, dissolves into the image of the actual Moses Jackson, suited up for racing, breathlessly running toward us as in a strip of sepia film, until the blackout that ends the act.
Here, suddenly, we as collaborators came smack off the rails. Tom hit the ceiling. He was furious. He was unusually tongue-tied. He simply balked and said, flatly, that we could not do this under any circumstances. The image was at complete odds with his intentions. It was, he thundered, “nothing but a cliché,” and he turned on his heel and left the little office. Crowley and I, with André, sat in stunned silence. What were we to do? What could we do? Start all over? What had to come out? What could possibly replace it? We were embarrassed, heartbroken to have put before someone we admired above all others an effort he had declared “a cliché.” It was the last thing we had expected, and the one thing we could not bear. I don’t know how long we sat together, how long Tom was absent, but we remained in a crestfallen silence until he suddenly burst back into the room, waving his defiantly lit cigarette. Smiling, he spread his hands out and announced: “It’s all right. It is! I just figured it out. It wasn’t a cliché then! You’re all right.”
And so we were. But what was that? Having so narrowly escaped calumny, we never really risked analyzing it further, and the inevitable lush beauty of the production that both reached and pleased its audiences never necessitated a reason to go back and dwell on any of it.
But before I do go back and dwell on it, decades later, let me offer one other insight, not dissimilar, to attempt to substantiate my cautious theory about Tom’s atheistic side. We leap ahead now to the year 2002 and the glorious monster itself, The Coast of Utopia. To this day I cannot quite fathom how this event happened to be. I realize some of it had to do with the unique spirit of the late Bernard Gersten, then André’s admirable producing partner at Lincoln Center Theater. Bernie was deeply proud of his association with Lincoln Center, and passionate about the role of a resident company in the heart of New York, having cut his business teeth at the Public years earlier as Joseph Papp’s partner, and having ridden that momentum through the astonishing success of A Chorus Line. His next assignment was a stint at Radio City Music Hall, where, among other things, in 1982 he made it possible for me to revisit my 1977 Houston Grand Opera production of Porgy and Bess, giving me the extra treat of being perhaps the only director to ever create a legitimate theatre piece on that great stage. But Bernie was passionate in other ways and, curiously enough, had a streak of the gambler somewhere within him. With the prospect of doing Tom’s immense trilogy—involving the intellectual awakening of the Russian people near the time of the revolution—came Bernie’s simple declaration that (for reasons forever now buried with him) if Stoppard was to be presented in New York, Lincoln Center would be the place to do it.
And with the grim determination of casting director Daniel Swee, this impossible company began to gather. I recall having back-to-back meetings with Ethan Hawke and Billy Crudup, and that gave powerful impetus to the growing group of familiar actors at Lincoln Center—Jennifer Ehle, Richard Easton, Martha Plimpton, as well as Amy Irving, whose father, Jules Irving, had been the initial artistic director of the complex back in the seventies—a remarkable groundswell of excitement began to occur. These actors, and many more, were being asked to commit to an entire year of exclusive employment for a three-play repertory of a huge work that might have had a distinguished reception when it premiered in London but in no way could be considered a “hot” ticket. To this day I have no idea how it came together so swiftly and so organically, but perhaps for the fact that nothing like this had been attempted in or around Broadway in literally decades. Whatever it was going to be, it wouldn’t happen again, that much was certain. If this was your cup of tea, I imagine, you couldn’t afford to miss it.
By this time, having been through productions of both Hapgood and The Invention of Love, Crowley and I probably considered ourselves something of a well-oiled machine, and yet, invited over to London to witness one of the marathon performances of all three plays presented in one day, we nearly collapsed before this magnificent, flawed, immense effort unfolding before us as in an improbable vision. Invention was one thing … this was entirely another. We couldn’t. We just couldn’t.
A cab was waiting for us when we staggered, exhausted and overwhelmed, out of the theatre around eleven in the evening, prepared to take us to Tom’s digs out at Chelsea Commons, where he was intending to serve us a midnight supper and hear our reactions. We found ourselves practically kneeling on the floor of the cab and swearing to each other not to attempt to wrestle this baffling, half-realized theatrical monster. In any case, we’d have far too little time to study and prepare it. It wouldn’t be fair to Tom, and it could prove fatal for Lincoln Center. Tom was so eagerly awaiting our arrival after the day’s occupation that one glass of wine in, we both found ourselves utterly unable to face disappointing him. To be honest, we just fucking caved. I mean, what are you going to do? It’s Tom Stoppard, for crying out loud!
There was clearly no turning back, so we threw ourselves into it with the most complex creative team imaginable. Crowley couldn’t commit to doing the entire trilogy by himself, so he turned to Scott Pask, a celebrated and gifted designer whose aesthetic he knew well and trusted. Bob decided he would design the first play, Voyage; Scott, Salvage, the third; and they’d somehow collaborate on Shipwreck, the second. No single lighting designer could give up an entire year’s work to serve this effort, so we arranged to have three form a team—Brian MacDevitt took on the first play, Kenneth Posner was to pick up the second, and Natasha Katz would finish with Salvage, and they agreed amongst themselves to commit to a single lighting plot. The massive undertaking of clothes for this extravaganza fell to Cathy Zuber, and Mark Bennett accepted the challenge of meeting the near-symphonic requirements of the score.
One afternoon Crowley and Pask and I met with our various assistants and a cadre of production managers to sort out exactly how we might attempt to accomplish all this. We began by simply looking at what Tom had written for each scene, and asking for the absolute minimum needed to create each one. In the opening of act 1 of Voyage, for example, that would imply a table, eight chairs, a hammock, and perhaps a Russian stove to indicate an interior. Nothing more. Restricting ourselves to only the basics as written in the script, we were able to move economically through the assignments. On a bathroom break, Crowley and I passed each other going in opposite directions. “You sure have a grasp on this one,” he said admiringly. “Really?” I answered. “News to me!” What was he talking about?
