Jack in the Box, page 3
How are you supposed to know when you’re right? What does experience teach you about casting, about movement, about any of it? What would cause someone as experienced as either Mike Nichols or Bill Ball to be led astray? Because we are ever anxious to have something solid to hold in our hands, to depend upon. We want to know … to have proof so we don’t make the same mistake over and over again.
It occurs to me that among the most neglected of all our human characteristics, instinct is the one dismissed most readily. Has any parent, any educator, any mentor ever credited your own instinct as perhaps among the most valuable of your available resources? The answer is, predictably, no. If anything, we’re taught to reject our instincts, to be suspicious of them, and encouraged to intellectualize, instead, the options open to us, choosing the one we find most “reasonable.”
This strikes at the heart of what I have recently begun to realize about this entire process of directing: that whatever else, we are all of us basically animals with an animal’s sense of survival, which, when you come right down to it, is what instructs us to flee, to hide, to withdraw, to leap, to dare … “fight or flight!” … to survive! It’s perhaps the major element that has allowed us all to get to this point in our evolution, and yet, we’re never encouraged to seriously honor it. How many times have any of us said to ourselves over a lifetime some variation of “I knew I shouldn’t have…” and here, fill in the blank … “gone there…” “stayed over…” “driven in that condition…” “kissed her or him…” “bought that…” “worn that…” or, worse, “said yes.” Over and over, after the fact, we confess that somehow we knew full well the unerring validity of what we felt, and in our artful analysis and careful methodology, rejected that voice and went ahead and made the mistake we now rue and even must apologize for.
Believe me, I’m not making a case for throwing over the reins and disavowing the rules that are either apt or repeatedly helpful. But what I am saying is that in pursuit of truth—a truth one wishes to guide onto the stage in the continual effort to hold that damned mirror up to nature—it is imperative to listen to one’s inner voices, and to learn to trust them.
I find it remarkable that most directors can have so little idea of the effect they have on the very actors they’ve chosen. I don’t always! But years ago the late Richard Easton, a close personal friend as well as a wonderful actor, said of me that what he liked best was that, for him, I appeared to simply face a room full of actors and begin there, not relying on any preconceived fixed idea, but obviously making out of whatever was in front of me something that consisted of whatever they were freely able to give to me. Period. I suppose that’s true. But what I do feel has evolved over decades is that more and more I am trying to listen for what is actively stirring in the room before me, to rely more on my instinct for what’s present, what has potential, what options appear to exist at that moment, rather than protecting some ground plan, and in that way, willing myself to get closer and closer to that desired, elusive lightning in a bottle we so admire, while at the same time being willing to risk everything to discover the work virtually at the same time as the actors themselves. You have to patiently uncover within the living moment the one truth everyone in the room recognizes as being universal. It is the same instinct that tells you she is the right actress for the part, that that designer is closest in sympathy to the kind of production you are hoping to realize, or that that last, rewritten version of the speech is finally, goddammit, the right one. The real discovery is made, finally, when you allow yourself to get out of the way and trust. Trust the talent you have carefully assembled in the room, and, more important, trust your blind eye, the neglected, the hair-on-the-back-of-the-neck-raising, the ever-mysterious instinct.
Make sense?
… I was afraid of that. Right. We’ll just have to keep trying.
2
The Italian Job
Inspiration as oxygen
Roberta Maxwell and Paul Winfield in my first Othello, at the Old Globe theatre in San Diego, 1984
I was in San Diego, standing in the middle of the rehearsal room in July 1984 while, around me, the likes of Paul Winfield, my Othello, and Roberta Maxwell, my Desdemona, were negotiating the specific Shakespearean difficulty of being deeply physically attracted to each other, while still haunted by the very paranoia and deceit that were keeping them apart, when a voice from the doorway abruptly said: “Jack! I’ve got to talk to you! Now!” It was my costumer, the late Lewis Brown, a bona fide eccentric who had had something of an active and splendid career basically in television, but whose passion and palette were more suited to classical plays and sumptuous operas. Now, at this point in his life, he depended both professionally and emotionally on a seasonal continuity at the Globe, where his glorious sketches flew like so many colored leaves around the costume shop in a profusion that seemed an inexhaustible blizzard of creativity. Dressed in his beloved, paint-spattered lab coat, he motioned me away with an imperious, blue-dyed finger, his figure both bulky and agitated.
We took a short break as he pulled me over near the mirrors on the wall. “You’ve got to go to Los Angeles,” Lewis said, not bothering to apologize for the unusual interruption. “Tonight, if possible,” he added, pulling me farther away from the curious, interrupted actors, eager to continue their work. I felt both distracted and confused. I was deep into my first Othello, one of the few major efforts I had yet to tackle, and, as usual, time was of the essence; there was never enough of it to ever feel remotely confident that I was preparing with the depth and specificity required, and anyway, Lewis himself must have been as far behind with his own schedule as I was with mine. “Are you nuts?” I answered, searching my script further for some insight that might better explain the nature of Desdemona’s state of mind. “Tonight!” he bellowed into my ear. “The last Tempest performances of the Olympic Arts Festival are playing tonight and tomorrow.” He took the script out of my hands and grabbed my shoulder, peering directly and intensely into my face. “I’m serious! You have got to see the Strehler Tempest. I mean it! I think it’s the most important thing that you may ever experience!” I reclaimed my my script and looked levelly at him. He was not given to emotional hysterics, to say nothing of hyperbole. Normally, he spoke almost as if with clenched teeth, a fixed jaw, a grim expression of eternal disappointment on his face, and bored, half-lidded eyes. Now he was practically shaking. Behind him stood Tom Hall, our business manager, looking curious. He, too, could see Lew was in something of an unusual state.
“Pull yourself together,” I answered mildly, stepping back a little to gain perspective. “I’m blocking as fast as I can, and I’m never going to make techs in time with two more acts ahead of me! I’m not going anywhere!” Lew grabbed my arm and whipped me around, pushing me out into the hall, where Tom was standing nearby. “I’m not going to say this again,” he snapped. “Sometimes you have to break your own rules: you will never experience anything like this production as long as you live. You more than anyone I know need to see this! Your future could depend on it!” That statement alone would have produced a guffaw from me under most circumstances; it’s the sort of thing one hears in the movies and never in real life. But Lew was grim, his eyes staring into mine with a seriousness I don’t believe I had ever experienced before. “It closes tomorrow night. I can’t imagine you can even get a ticket, but if you don’t it will be a crime against everything I believe in. I promise you. I’ve never said anything like this to you before: You above everyone must go! You just must!” He stopped, nearly winded, and apologetically handed my script back to me. “Sorry,” he quietly added. I looked at Tom, who was smiling. “I mean,” I began, “how could I even consider something like that? I can’t take a day off!” Tom held taut reins over nearly everything we did, and was anything but profligate with time and resources, but he astonished me now in one of the rare ways he often did. “Why not?” he said almost playfully. And then, with a small gesture to the room behind us, he added, “They clearly don’t know their words yet. Why not give them tomorrow … that’s Saturday … to study? You should be able to catch the matinee and drive back in time for Sunday, refreshed, and,” he added sourly, “and who knows? Maybe even inspired?”
“Do it!” Lew thundered. “Oh my God, do it! You won’t regret it, I promise you. You’ll thank me! I’m saying, you more than anybody! It’s gonna change your fucking life!”
I did it! I actually walked out on a rehearsal I had no business canceling; drove up to Los Angeles; somehow, with Tom’s help, contrived to get a single ticket for the matinee; and found myself in what appeared to be a rather disappointing, old-fashioned, nearly academic theatre space. To be honest, I don’t have an accurate impression of most theatres in Los Angeles; they don’t stand out as they might in New York, or, say, London, or any other theatrical world capital. What I do recall is a curiously awkward, square forestage, taller than the usual elevation, between orchestra and proscenium, and the impression was of a space more accustomed to lectures and debates than the magical and celebrated piece I was about to witness. I found my seat on the house left aisle, only six or seven rows from the front, and, completely alone and curious, watched the house lights dim. What on earth did I think I was doing?
What appeared suddenly before me almost defied logic. Where there had been a dull and dark curtain hanging before us, the stage was now filled with billowing waves, thunder, lightning, and the silhouette of a masted schooner softened by a restlessly moving scrim, small but utterly convincing, crashing through amazingly realistic stormy seas, rain pelting … the works. Voices in Italian were wheeling about as, above the proscenium, the famous text began emerging, printed in English for the American audience to follow. The effect was both mesmerizing and beautiful, a tiny world that belonged anywhere but on a stage, and then, in a furious blackout, suddenly we were aware of a massive mast rocking left and right, the illusion of a deck in peril, while dark figures threw ropes to each other, sliding from side to side. This was, indeed, a tempest none of us had experienced in a theatre before, Il tempesta, thanks to the Piccolo Teatro de Milano, Giorgio Strehler the maestro in uncontested control.
There, immediately after, in a white space, stood Prospero, a tall and noble figure in the warm and hypnotizing person of Tino Carraro, who called to Ariel, his spirit, and in the opening scene following his interview with the lovely Miranda, I began to lose a grip on my own reality and realize why I was there. “Come with a thought,” he crooned in that exquisite language. A tiny actress, Giulia Lazzarini, looking rather like a version of Giulietta Masina, the comic/tragic wife of Fellini, in a white skullcap and dressed in what can be described only as a silk “baggie,” loose, square-cut, and billowy, appeared suspended from a rather enormous rope connected to a harness concealed within the costume and reaching up to the flies. She was barefoot, but when she floated down from the blackness above, the garment shifted this way and that, all in seeming slow motion since it was made of finest silk, and likewise, when she loped across the stage in elaborate, wide, jumping steps, the garment moved like pure magic around her, giving her no definable shape but, rather, the illusion of fantastical movement unlike anything I had ever seen. But beyond this, we could see that she was connected offstage to an unseen technician by this most obvious and unapologetic rope, a technician with whom she must have been partnered virtually for decades. They were, obviously, one, a team so exquisitely calibrated that he could hoist her up in the air while she performed glorious acrobatic flips and turns, alighting—and here I do not exaggerate—on the very extended single forefinger of her master, Prospero, who would then effortlessly toss her up and over his head to land precisely and elegantly on the other forefinger.
I was in an entirely new realm. I let the Italian just wash over me since I knew well the text, and gave myself up rather to the imagination unfolding before me. A few minutes later, it was gratifying to see Strehler’s first lord scene was just as tedious and boring as mine had been, or nearly any other I had ever experienced. More to the point, all we had onstage before us in the white canvas surround, with a bleached sun seemingly obliterated by monochrome mists behind it, was an enormous pile of sand left of center with, as I recall, a single naked light bulb suspended above it. The light cue, which became brighter and brighter as the seemingly uncut and verbose narrative unraveled, did nothing to quicken my pulse, and the effort of watching the action and checking the dialogue above was more irritating than I had expected. So distracted, I simply was not prepared for what began to evolve thereafter. I’m not entirely certain how this was achieved, but Caliban made his entrance from beneath the stage by backing up out of a hole and toward us, so that, in actuality, he emerged anus first! Naturally, this is not an angle we ordinarily expect or frankly even recognize, so for a moment we were utterly uncertain as to what precisely was being presented to us, the bizarre angle evoking almost the silhouette of a crustacean. A monster, indeed!
And so it went, revelation after revelation … the harpy scene, one of those effects one usually “does one’s best” with and then, head down, one shamefacedly sprints ahead, was the first of the final series of genuine coups de théâtre concocted for us, with a combination of a trapeze that allowed Ariel, disguised as a bat, to break the proscenium and be hurled directly over the first ten or fifteen rows, aided by unearthly screams and a subtle use of strobe lighting that was genuinely terrifying. I believe I must have actually screamed myself, though the reaction of the entire audience was so unexpected that one couldn’t be certain who was making which involuntary noise.
The best was about to be revealed. In the last act, the elegant Prospero came down stage center to deliver the great speech in which he abjures his powers and gives up necromancy. It was not difficult to follow the Italian for those great lines “… I’ll break my staff / Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, / And, deeper than did ever plummet sound / I’ll drown my book.” Thus spoken, he raised the wooden staff above his head and snapped it in two. Immediately, all hell broke loose: the entire front of the stage—that curious “square” construction that had preoccupied me earlier—collapsed summarily into a pile of rubble, literally destroying the entire downstage area on the very edge of which Prospero had placed himself. It was an impossible gesture, this ritual and sudden destruction of what had been both solid and substantial throughout the entire performance. Now it was lumber, canvas, junk … mere obvious theatrical paraphernalia. The effect was impossible to evaluate … how on earth was this effect achieved? Prospero called Ariel to him one last time, and she descended gracefully from the vast darkness above. He stood behind her and unhooked the nearly industrial thickness of rope attached to her. As he released the rope, it shot into the flies with a whirring sound that seemed to extend out to the farthest reaches of the universe as they both watched it whip out of sight. Then, quietly and gently, he said merely, “… e libera!” and let his hands drop from where they had been holding her up. She was locked in his embrace, and slowly she turned and, for the first time, actually “saw” the audience sitting in the dark. She couldn’t believe her eyes! Like a frightened animal, she climbed down, making her way over the rubble before her until she stood on the actual floor of the auditorium with us, just upstage of the first row of seats. She glanced tenderly behind her at her master and then, eyes wide with wonder and sheer disbelief, slowly turned to actually make contact with us before rushing up the aisle and out of the theatre. I cannot to this day call up the memory of this astonishing moment without tears blinding my eyes. “Free,” indeed! Not only of the play, but of our common life experience—she was “gone with a thought,” as she had originally appeared.
Prospero, too, with nothing like the easy athleticism of Ariel, then made his way precariously over the ruins of the forestage and, standing where Ariel had just acknowledged us, delivered his beautiful epilogue, “Our revels now are ended…” And he, too, was gone.
And then the curtain call. To thunderous applause, the company of Italians slowly trooped out from stage left in a single row, with Ariel and Prospero bringing up the very rear. They took their time, and were drinking in the roaring approval, when Prospero stepped forward and raised his arms, and the entire forestage rose in a single breath to completion, as it had first appeared to us, but from the planks of the floor we saw now no fewer than eighteen, or perhaps twenty-four, young men and women in blue bathing caps, visible only from the shoulders up, taking their call: this was the unseen ensemble that had been responsible for the glorious effect of a tumultuous ocean, done with bands of varicolored silk to the specific choreography of the music, and who were the singular troupe of magicians responsible for the collapse of the stage we had just witnessed and its resurrection, as well as God knows what other moments of similar magic we’d thrilled to.
There is this phrase I’ve already employed, “coup de théâtre,” which literally means a physical blow of theatre that knocks you metaphorically out. But it happened! I know for a fact that I quite seriously dropped to the floor twice while experiencing Il tempesta. I no longer remember if it was the harpy scene, the collapse of the stage caused by the snapping of the staff, or that final moment of the curtain call, but I honest-to-God had to pick myself up off my knees twice! It had never happened to me before, and it has never happened since. But the Italians knocked me on my ass, and in doing so woke me up in a way for which I was not prepared.
