Jack in the Box, page 6
George S. Kaufman, a director as well as a writer, knew the value of a swinging kitchen door, which he employed to stunning effect in the opening scene of You Can’t Take It with You. Rheba, the housekeeper, goes out, and as the door swings back, Essie, the younger daughter, is entering with a plate of candy. It’s a physical gag that repeats and repeats throughout the action, until, in the third act, it delivers the Grand Duchess Olga Katrina herself. If you place the swinging door in any position other than stage left, where Kaufman insists it be, you miss one of the most delicious running jokes in the play’s vocabulary.
But all writers are not always cognizant of specifics to this degree, and a director, not necessarily confident that these directions are meant to be followed precisely, might be at a loss to know if a violation of some kind is at hand. I find I often have an instinct about an area of the stage while studying the material in private, and I begin to conceive what I might do with it. There are areas of the stage more advantageous than others, and it behooves a director to find a moment when no one is present and he or she can move about the set and “feel” the audience before them in the house, sensing that an area, just left of center, for example, has a power that, curiously enough, center stage may lack. Bill Ball used to remind me that you never went near downstage center unless you were delivering the finale of a Mozart opera. It was a bit of a joke in his reference, but I am sympathetic, I confess. Surely, every assignment doesn’t depend on a director understanding the stronger and weaker parts of the stage, and that, in and of itself, can often depend on elements of the design. Again, it’s nearly insulting to bring this up, as it’s an exercise in practically exercising a sixth sense: you would be well advised to stand in the space and feel what it is to be the actor with that yawning black void of the audience before you. In many plays, it may prove immaterial, but when it comes to Shakespeare on a blank stage, or approaching a musical or especially an opera…? Just another example of what cannot be taught but needs to be experienced.
NOTE SESSIONS: A word here, as I digress with some degree of pleasure for a further moment, about Ellis Rabb and Bill Ball, two of the most powerful influences in my life. These two remarkable visionaries, worth a volume apiece, initially undergraduate classmates at Carnegie Mellon University, then known as Carnegie Tech, remained best friends throughout their too-brief lives while creating rival repertory companies of classical excellence, Ellis with APA-Phoenix in New York, and Bill in San Francisco, where the regional company ACT still exists. They tumbled over each other originally in Pittsburgh like amateur aerialists, outdoing each other in elaborate and audacious assaults on theatricality at a time most other directors preferred to remain quietly tight-assed and safe. Not those two!
As an example—although I don’t believe either of them ever attempted it—they admitted they both found themselves attracted to actor/manager Henry Irving’s personal showcase, The Bells, an arcane work they both naturally assumed they would know how to do, and how to do perfectly. As twin aficionados of what’s best expressed as “the large gesture,” no play, no theme, no space was ever too large or intimidating for their imaginations, and for me, as an aspiring director, to have access and be in proximity to their inmost thoughts, visions, and sheer bravery over about ten years’ time was to breathe deep of a kind of preferred template no one else of their generation could ever replicate. Best of all, they taught me the value of note sessions … not just how to give mundane course corrections or urge better performances, but, while doing so, to mold a company into a single purposeful event, to fill with inspiration, mutual imagery enough to compel the workaday actor to want to dare to go beyond his or her limits, and, after the rehearsal or performance, during that hour or so of shared vision, to brand the event as something only the initiates present could possibly bring off. Actors left their note sessions as if from a shower, dazzled, refreshed, and primed for more. They both used everything and anything at their disposal—humor, candor, the most personal of private revelations—to break down artificiality and urge the actor to explore every possible nerve ending. Ellis, the more perhaps naturalistic actor of the two, could supply fresh insights without ever sullying the individual actor’s personal vocabulary, a skill that prevented him from ever having to resort to anything as prosaic as a line reading, while Bill, the more spiritual and bold, had the audacity, at the top of each season, to give the supposedly identical lecture to his company to initiate each new season … his “Positivity Lecture,” it was called, and the company annually sat before him on the floor, mouths open, eyes shining, drinking in his near-Baroque choice of words, as if in church. I caught one of the last of these in the early eighties, perhaps with too many worshipful company reports ringing in my ears to find it completely spontaneous, but there was something undeniably galvanizing about it all. “YOU CAN! YOU MUST!” he would thunder at them, and they clapped their hands with genuine idolatry and belief every time. With no drop of condescension evident, one was simply swept up in the moment, willingly.
What these two iconoclasts helped me realize was that at the end of the day it was wise to “take back” the company. Whatever had occurred, whatever disappointments, whatever discoveries, to sit together and release everyone from whatever good or problematic spell had been cast was also a way to put into perspective the work in general; occasionally one could even impart a more difficult kind of message, the kind that might seem too brutal to publicly confront an actor with, but couched in the abstract, it could become at best a lesson of caution and encouragement for everyone at large, making its point less painfully, more generally. Those last thirty minutes of the day can take you a very long way, if you can make them work for you.
CARE AND FEEDING: Theatre for the director is hardly a lonely journey; it is a constant weaving and reweaving of endless partnerships, beginning with the producer who has brought to market the script, then the playwright, continuing by aligning one’s vision with not one, but usually a series of designers, casting directors, dramaturges, and finally the players, both individually and in the aggregate. In a sense it is a process of employing the resources of everyone else to clarify what attracted you in the first place. So the Siegfried and Roy aspect of entering the cage with the actual animals is not something one does without due consideration, and eventually every director must find his own way to do this, the way that works best for the situation at hand. For a while in the last century, the dominant tone seemed often to be set by the Brits, perhaps coming from their astringent and sometimes traumatic public school experiences, brilliant men like the late Peter Wood or John Dexter, who frankly and openly terrified their companies at will, embarrassing them publicly like vicious schoolmasters. Brian Bedford, replacing Anthony Hopkins on Broadway in Equus, heard, on his first day of rehearsal, the acrid voice of Dexter coming from the back of the darkened theatre. “Now, Brian, dear,” the voice began, “we’re not going to have any of that famous ‘acting’ that you insist on doing, darling, are we? None of that, you know, gorgeous … ‘acting’ you like to do so much of, going all over our stage, are we?” in full volume before the entire company. And that was just day one!
Americans tend to prefer to be liked, which can be a horror of its own. Not George Abbott, who dressed sternly “for business” in a suit and tie and hat for most of his life; nor Mike Nichols, grinning, with his feet up in the orchestra seats, riding his astonishing intelligence and sense of humor, who appeared to cajole performances out of sheer goodwill, but from the star through to the offstage standby, the acting companies tend to vary as individually as orchestras do, and to get the most out of them, all individualities need to be assayed, evaluated, cosseted, and acknowledged. Days may occur when one feels much more a psychiatrist than anyone working on a stage. Directors who have acted, of course, may have an advantage here, depending on what kind of actor they were. I love actors, and I believe they know it. I want them to be marvelous, and I will go any distance to help make that happen. I try to make every effort to control my temper, so that when I inevitably do blow up, probably because it is such a rare occurrence, I find it is often amazingly effective. No good in being too nice! Serious-minded people tend to find that most suspicious! It is not enough to know what result you require; you need to find a method in which the actor discovers this as the natural course of his own individual choices, and so that his ownership of the performance transcends the repetition of your demands echoing ceaselessly in his ear.
TECH REHEARSALS: If there is a time I am perhaps happiest in all the phases of theatre, I would have to say tech rehearsals. I am closest to heaven in an empty theatre, where the final routining and meticulous fussing are imperative. The company has done weeks of serious digging, drilling, exploring, and for the most part has its own private process to refine and secure; otherwise, it’s all the designers, the staff, and the director … the world’s most lavish “train set” for adults possible. My final joy, just before those dreadful people with their tickets and their unrealistic expectations and their narrow-minded resistances are about to descend and forever separate me, in my back row, from my beloved company, is there onstage, days in the dark with no one allowed but the initiates of the mysteries. It’s never the same again, so I tend to make the most of it. On one’s right hand, the production stage manager, who, with his assistants, is the principal arbiter of the work at hand. The allotted time, expensive and anything but cost-effective, is more his or hers than anyone else’s to make shape, to make routine, to secure and make safe all the moving parts that have been only theoretical up to this point. One is wise to focus primarily on this stalwart, and to do one’s best to stay out of his way as he jealously claims, along with the other two “latecomers”—the lighting designer and the sound designer—the necessity of getting cues into the book and into the proper hands while the sands of time pour through that irritating hourglass. On your left, then, probably is the associate director, whispering a stream of creative consciousness that has become your private reference, a director’s last chance to clarify, to be able to repeat and try differently what constitutes the “fixing” of intention in the mind of this second-in-command, who, if all goes well, will unquestionably be doing a great share of the heavy lifting from now on, along with the production stage manager, the other set of hands that must be granted the absolute authority of “what you meant!”
The trick here is always one of awareness, because the clock is ticking and you are at last seeing the results of all that planning and budgeting and second-guessing. There is a tendency for the vision to narrow, for the director’s irritating voice to rise and rise in a steady whine of indignation (of which one is usually blissfully unaware) until tension stretches to the breaking point, and here’s the problem: there are personnel who belong in that theatre, at the stage door, on the fly floor over your head, in the basement far below, who know more about that space than you will ever realize, and not to consider them seriously, not to sweep them up into this penultimate embrace, is to violate the cardinal law of who wins and who fails. No less a figure of self-involvement and unmitigated selfishness than Jerry Lewis, after a lifetime of technical rehearsals, could come into the theatre on only the second day and be able to call each and every union crew man by their first name or even their nickname! Impressive? You bet! The Lunts, as well, Helen Hayes, Noël Coward, the most exalted figures of the past, knew the names of each of their follow-spot operators, as well as the names of their children, and knew, too, the names of the individual dressers, not just their own but those of every other member of the ensemble. That kind of care and consideration generates a loyalty that fame and money cannot hope to replace. I’m made aware of contemporary directors who come and go in tech rehearsals, so glued to their own itineraries that they can walk past stagehands smoking just outside their stage door without realizing that upon those sets of shoulders rests the fate of the entire enterprise. One must pay attention first to these men and women or suffer the consequences of savage legends whispered in nearby alleys, where the real history is written, recorded, and remembered.
In the midst of the flurry of early wonderful musicals I shared with my beloved Jerry Mitchell as my choreographer, we concocted a kind of ceremony we surely should have patented, if possible, because it has proliferated into other managements by our own associates as they’ve made their own individual paths: at the last scheduled break of the evening, say, between 8:30 and 9:00 p.m., we would have a production assistant, carefully instructed and rehearsed, pass through the orchestra bearing a tray of generously sized, steaming-hot white washcloths, scented with lavender and heated in the backstage microwave, the expenses extracted from our own pockets to the tune of about twenty bucks a piece, intended for our designers, their assistants, our assistants, all those who had spent an exhausting day supporting our every whim, so they might swathe their faces and necks and refresh themselves for that last, say, ninety minutes of the night. The first time the old-timers glimpsed this indulgence, you can imagine the waspish comments that were muttered around the house. Not, however, on the second night! It’s astonishing what a simple gesture of consideration and appreciation can mean to a group of people who have the same need an actor has to know to what degree they are valued and appreciated. That aggregate family of technicians is also yours to acknowledge in any way you deem appropriate. You have no idea how often this is neglected in our profession.
CURTAIN CALLS: Back, once more, to my mentors, because Ellis Rabb and William Ball shared a passion for one of the crucial phases of theatrical creativity nearly abandoned in today’s austere and apologetic handling of applause and gratitude … too often an “afterthought” or “not-at-all-thought” issue of the curtain call. Both of these directors believed a curtain call was the final essential gesture, not just a grim ritual of self-conscious mortals, nakedly exposed, and clearly uncomfortable, but an elegantly designed moment between audience and artist when the last twist, the ultimate flourish, might take the evening, already a success, even higher. Their curtain calls were nothing short of spectacular: Bill’s opera buffa parade for Tartuffe, seventeenth-century hats brushing the floor while everyone bowed and curtseyed on the same measure of music, or the whirling cavalcade of his company tearing through the last moments of Six Characters in Search of an Author, until only a single wooden chair remained on a square platform with one bald lamp wheeling madly above it … the “missing” playwright, indeed!
We in APA-Phoenix always fantasized about creating an entire evening of just Ellis’s curtain calls with no play preceding them, which would have to feature his sensational use of actors and unfurled bloodred flags revealing group after group of players for War and Peace while the Soviet army chorus screamed their chorale in the background, or the stunning tableau of Pantagleize, with the curtain simply going relentlessly up and down while more and more characters, stoic and frozen, vanished instantly until Ellis, alone, was left motionless on a six-foot-high wall, the only physical movement in the entire call, his head descending as the last curtain wiped him out. All of this flew by in only forty-five militant seconds of Bob James’s music, you wanted to shout when it was over, and as a result of experiencing both the actors’ and the audiences’ appreciation of this kind of theatricality, to this day I confess to having a clear idea of the call I intend to create, often even before I’ve met my company for the first time. Too few directors realize their last chance to nail their audience is not the author’s written “curtain” at all, but the moment of communal acknowledgment and thanks that follows it, as organic and essential as raising the curtain at the very top of the evening. It doesn’t have to be flashy or choreographed, if that doesn’t suit either the evening or the director’s taste, but dammit, it should at least look intentional and professional, and present the company with distinction and some degree of honor. It’s part of the job.
THE ASSOCIATES: Most directors of experience like to think of themselves as having a gimlet eye when it comes to choosing actors. So why is it not the apparent case when it comes to choosing associates? I do have a theory: I realize that in the best of cases, we don’t choose them; they choose us, and if we could just relax into it and not make it such an issue of “control,” everything would work out fine. Dogs are often the same. When it works ideally, you don’t really choose a dog; a dog chooses you, and when that happens, the result is sublime. Four dogs have convinced me of that truth, and, now that I think about it, so have at least six exceptional associates. Not to hastily suggest I see a parallel between my dogs and my associates, but we’re talking not only loyalty here, but the inscrutable element of human comfort as well, so … maybe it’s not so far-fetched after all.
I unquestionably chose Ellis Rabb, once I had seen what he did, once I had encountered who he was. As a matter of record, he didn’t like me all that much at first, and ever after delighted in reminding anyone of that fact, should they seem remotely impressed by me. No, I haunted him, I hounded him, I entertained his friends, I volunteered for the most menial of tasks until, categorically, I had managed to make myself indispensable, and it was one of the reasons I had such difficulty early in my career allowing myself to let any associate help me: I had been so determined to do “it all” myself to impress Ellis, that to designate any responsibility to another person felt like weakness to me.
