On Put-ins and Generals...

For reasons beyond anyone's control, I've had to recast a supporting role in the play. The actor taking the role is coming in today. He comes highly recommended.

So today, consequently, we'll have what's known as a "put in" rehearsal. We literally put the actor into the show.

I've been here before as an actor. The first time was years ago in a six month tour of The Fantasticks. I was put in as El Gallo. The actor playing the role was in charge of teaching it to me which was unfortunate because apparently he was bitter about leaving the show. Had nothing to do with me but he was being replaced for some reason. The weird part was that he was the one putting me in. Just the two of us rehearsing the role, alone in a dusty rehearsal space with nothing but a few chairs and a step ladder (El Gallo spends an inordinate amount of time sitting on this silly ladder during that simple, but elegant play). I'd had a few days to memorize the songs and lines (back then I could actually DO that in a few days). So he was assigned, by some clause in his Equity Contract, to do this. He resented me deeply. Even though he immediately acknowledged that I'd had nothing to do with the replacement, he still wasn't too warm towards me. It was a long time ago and I don't remember a lot about it except one line he said to me during the put in. At one point El Gallo has to ride in on an "imaginary" horse. I ride up to the ladder, dismount, and as I recall, immediately sing a song. I asked him, "Okay, so what I do with the horse?" He said, without missing a beat, "Oh, fuck, I don't know, ask Uta Hagen what you do with the fucking horse." All these years later I still smile about that one.

Some years later I was asked to step into the opera singer's role (Tito) in Lend Me a Tenor at a small, Equity theatre down on beautiful Sanibel Island, Florida, called Pirate Playhouse. Yeah, I know, really dumb name for a theatre. I had two days to learn it and get in front of an audience. I was in rehearsal for something like twenty hours in two days. Which was a good thing. The bad thing was the director didn't believe in "marking" it, so he made me play it full-out for those two days. By the time I was in front of the audience I had virtually no voice left. This is the problem with directors that have never been actors - they don't understand what it takes to do the actual work. This guy certainly didn't. He'd never been on stage in his life.

It is a sorrowful thing, but somewhere in the early twentieth century the theatre in this country began to be run by directors and not actors. For centuries, here and in England, the theatre was run by actors. "Actor/Managers" they were called. Nowadays, nearly every major theatre in the United States is run by a director; more often than not, a director who has never acted a day in his or her life. Pity. What this means in the over-simplified, final analysis is that now most theatre in this country is about blocking rather than acting. It is singularly responsible, in my opinion, for a butt-load of bad theatre.

My next put-in rehearsal was a few years later for an innocuous little British farce called Run For Your Wife. I never got this play. Really dumb little show. But audiences LOVE this thing. They devour it. The first time I did it, the play itself ran an hour and forty minutes. On opening night it ran two hours and fifteen minutes...the added time was because we had to HOLD FOR LAUGHS. That means that the actor has to wait a bit because the laughter is so loud, he has to "hold." Fortunate for this put-in rehearsal, I already knew the lines.

So the put-in rehearsal is nothing new to me. I like to work fast anyway.

One final note about this business of directors running the theatre these days. It's natural, of course. The director runs the rehearsal process, so, by proxy, he runs the theatre itself eventually. I don't like it and I think it churns out bad work, but that's beside the point. A lot of theaters around the country call themselves "actors theatres" including the famous one in Louisville. Not surprisingly, however, that theatre is run by directors. Go figure. The exception to this rule for a long time was Chicago's prestigious Steppenwolf. Actors completely ran that thing: Sinise, Jeff Perry, Terry Kinny, Malkovich, John Mahoney, Laurie Metcalf, a few others. But now even that artistic giant is in danger of being over run by the renegade ego of the director.

NoHo Arts Center, where I work as the playwright-in-residence, is run by an actor. This is one of the things that drew me to it. An actor makes the final decisions. As it should be. His name is James Mellon, and, like myself, even though he does a lot of other things - direct, write, produce, sing, etc. - he is an actor first. To the layman this might sound like a small and possibly unimportant distinction. To me it is a huge slab of encouragement. It is tantamount to a soldier running the army that has actually been in a battle as opposed to a civilian running the army that has only watched movies about battle.

Controversial? No, I really don't think so. Just common sense.

See you tomorrow.

Making a Roadmap.

Sat around and did some table work last night. I know, I know, I wrote earlier how much I hated table work. Well, I do. But you have to do it at least once. And we skipped that part of the rehearsal because of our time constraints, so the cast and I decided to do it last night. And it was a good thing. Often what is obvious to me is not always so to the actor. And vice versa, I might add.

The funny thing is, the play apparently stands quite nicely on its own. This is a relief to me. As we all sat around the stage last night reading a bit, discussing it, going back to the text, doing it again, talking about a beat here, a beat there...well, a sort of weird thing happened. As we got into the second act. We stopped interrupting ourselves. We all just sort of hunkered down onto the play and started acting it. Didn't really occur to us to stop and discuss. So while we started out with good intentions, eventually all of us just wanted to act the play.

The second act of this thing is fraught with emotion. This is not "teacup acting" as a buddy of mine used to say about doing anything written by GB Shaw. It's also not typical "southern gothic" acting either (you know, as in a lot of Williams and Inge and those guys...everybody sweating and staring off into the far country, remembering some dead relative). This is. instead, quite definitely "early steppenwolf" acting. The entire play seems on the verge of breaking into a deadly fistfight at any given time. The press, early on, was calling this "Rock and Roll Theatre." In Chicago they called it "In your face acting." Whatever its called, that's what seems to be happening.

The best experience I've ever had in the theatre occurred twenty five years ago. It still remains unmatched in my mind. It was a production of the play Orphans at the Westside Arts in NYC. Steppenwolf had brought it to NY with Terry Kinney, Kevin Anderson and my buddy, John Mahoney. I didn't know John then, but we have since become friends. A dear, sweet, talented, funny man.

So I'd been in NY less than a week. My friend Robert Fiedler (who passed away this year, sadly) suggested we go see this "hot, new play" called Orphans. I had, up to that point, seen Hurley Burley (third row center, Sigourney Weaver on stage buck naked for about fifteen minutes less than twenty feet from me, thinking to myself, I LOVE THIS TOWN), Dreamgirls (the only time I've ever seen an internal standing ovation when Holliday belts out I'm Not Goin' at the end of the first act), and Kevin Kline in Arms and the Man (kinda dull, actually). So we go see Orphans. The play opens with Kevin Anderson sitting in a window sill blowing bubbles from one of those bubble bottles, the kind we had as kids. The great jazz artist, Pat Metheney, scored the entire piece. The stage lights were blue tinted, the music started low and began to build, Anderson sat placidly in the window doing his thing, the music continued to build...and build...and build. Finally, the entire theatre was rocking from the volume. Complete stillness, imagery, an eccentric pose on stage and this music is so loud the seats are shaking. Suddenly, after what seems an eternity, the stage lights bump up and the play starts. Doesn't sound like much when I describe it, but my God, it was terrific theatre. Gary Sinise had directed the piece. It was a magnificent start. After that the play is an emotional roller coaster. In my head, I always knew theatre could be this way, so immediate, so startling. But I'd never actually seen it with my own eyes. I was transported. Awash in the possibilities.

Since then I've stolen that opening (not literally) many times. I think there are two ways to start a play...either sneak up on the audience with a sort of fascinating ambiguity or come right out and slap 'em upside the head. Praying Small is the former, EAST/WEST is the latter.

That was a great week of theatre, my first week in NYC. A couple of days later I saw Mandy Patinkin in Sunday in the Park with George (to this day, my favorite musical theatre piece). He parted my hair for me. Even though I ended up doing a lot of musical theatre in my career (because I could sing), I was never a huge fan of it. But Patinkin...well, I'm not sure I can even describe how good he was in that role. He stamped it, in my opinion, the same way that Brando stamped Streetcar or Robert Preston stamped Harold Hill. I have seen the play many times since then (I even DID it) and can't get Patinkin's defining work out of my head. The role belongs to him forever, as far as I'm concerned.

Now, remember, these actors were all working on a new play when they did this. There was no compass, no video, no roadmap for any of them. Brando was doing the words to Streetcar for the first time, Patinkin was singing the soaring music of Stephen Sondheim for the first time, Robert Preston was spitting out the words to Trouble for the first time, and Kevin Anderson, Terry Kinney and John Mahoney were exploring Lyle Kessler's sad and brilliant play for the first time.

So last night as we sat down and earnestly read through From the East to the West I was thinking, "These guys are the first to do it, they're stamping it, they're defining who these characters, these people ARE." They are MAKING the roadmap as they go along, building the compass for what, hopefully, will be hundreds of actors to follow. They are not just pretending, this group of blazing, young pros. They are actually creating from dust a new thing altogether. How perfectly exhilarating.

Sometimes, like a few moments last night, the best I can do is watch them and shake my head.

See you tomorrow.

On Popcorn and Steak...

"All great truths are simple." Tolstoy

Time to talk about The Naked Face. A quick history...the term itself comes from Sir John Gielgud. My mentor and early acting teacher, Michael Moriarty, stole it from him. I stole it from Michael.

In essence, it is a reference to the singular repose of the actor while performing. There are actors we've seen that do it with complete authority; Anthony Hopkins, Ben Kingsley, Moriarty, of course, Judi Dench, Joan Allen, Stanley Tucci and John Gielgud all come to mind.

"Acting is not about emotion. It is about the supression of emotion." This is the underlying premise of the technique.

There is an old acting adage, it is more interesting to watch someone try NOT to cry than it is to see them cry. A truism to be sure.

Actors wanna attack the "big moments." It's only natural. Moriarty used to always say about that - treat the steak like popcorn and the popcorn like steak. To the uninitiated that simply means to throw away the instinct to "play" the big moment. Here's the thing...the playwright owns the big moment. It's already there in the words. There is no reason; in fact it is downright detrimental in most cases, to act ON TOP of the words. The words already give the moment import. Now, as always, there are exceptions to the rule. My buddy, John Cook, a fine actor in Chicago, used to say, "There is only one rule in acting - and that is, there are no rules."

The actor need only say the lines with clarity and conviction (brings to mind George Burns' famous quote, "Acting is all about sincerity, if you can fake that, you've got it made.") and let the AUDIENCE place what they WANT to feel upon him. Hopkins and Dench and others do this with complete authority. They are fully aware of what they're doing.

Example: If the line is, "My dog just died." The emotion is inherent IN the sentence. The actor needn't enhance it with a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth.

This is, of course, a massive simplification. And again, there are always exceptions. But this is essentially where we are in the process now with From the East to the West. I am, strangely, the biggest culprit at this point. I tend to act up a storm when it is completely uncalled for. Yup, yup, yup. Thank God this young cast of pros do what I say and not what I do.

The play is blocked. We're acting it now, working the moments, the beats, as it were. Editing the work. Not the actual text, but all of the bells and whistles that we, the actors, are trying to place on top of the text. This is, in my opinion, the reason there is so much bad theatre in the world. And God knows, there is. The actors just do, well, too much. Makes the entire evening of theatre unavoidably tiresome.

The most common note I give in rehearsals is this, "Throw it away." By throwing it away, I simply mean to not give the line so much weight. Let it stand on its own. EAST/WEST is chalk full of "moments." The actor, instinctively, wants to play them all. Not necessary. If everything is important then nothing is important. The audience can't make the distinction about what is urgent if we play it ALL as urgent.

As a director, the late Paul Newman used to constantly say, "Earn your pauses." He was saying exactly this. If an actor decides to take a big, dramatic break in the dialogue, he had better be sure the audience will allow him to do that. More often than not, the pause has not been "earned" and the audience is simply waiting for someone else to talk. They don't have the advantage of a film close up (although most stage actors feel they are on camera even when they're not - this is to be expected - we are children of film and watching great work in the movies is what made most of us want to become actors in the first place...unfortunately, the stage doesn't work like that). So consequently it becomes about "focus." Who has it? Who doesn't have it? Who gets to say the line WITH it. This is where the director, ostensibly, comes in.

Richard Burton once gave advice to a young actor on stage. The young guy was taking this long, long dramatic pause before saying his line. Burton allegedly told him, "You do realize, don't you, Love, that no one has the slightest idea you're about to speak. In fact, worse, they think you've forgotten your line." The young actor was aghast. "What do you suggest?" Burton said simply, "Clear your throat, then you can wait all day if you want."

It's called an internal pause and is really the only way to get around the dreaded dramatic silence on stage coming from the over-zealous actor. It's simple. Make a sound, however slight, the stage audience turns to you, you've got the focus, pause all fucking day...then say the line. It's a trick, a device, but one that can work in the right hands. Chances are you won't read about it in any of Uta Hagen's writing. Or Sanford Meisner. Or Bobby Lewis. Or Stella Adler. These guys, bless their hearts, are more interested in teaching an actor how to "rehearse" than they are in teaching him how to actually save his ass in front of an audience.

Personally, I hate pauses. Used to live for them. I still take them because at heart I'm an actor. As a director I scold myself all the time for them.

So here we are at the turning point of rehearsal. This is where the rubber meets the road. This is where we define and crystalize the drama itself. This is where we make conscious decisions to treat steak like popcorn and popcorn like steak.

Can't wait to get to it tonight. And I have a cast of young professionals that are sharp as knives. They "get" the idea of "throwing it away." They understand the concept of "letting the audience do the work." They wait patiently for their chance to do the play by a flash of lightning. They are, every single one of them, a better actor than I was at that age. I fucking love that.

See you tomorrow.

On Critics and Lightning Flashes...

Like most people in the theatre I have a love/hate relationship with the critics. Michael Moriarty, who has had some of the most soaring reviews possible and, during the late seventies, some vicious notices, too, most notably from the late critic for The New Yorker, Pauline Kael, once told me this one night after I had gotten one of the bad ones: "Critics are like eunuchs at an orgy, they can watch but they sure as fuck can't join in." I have always remembered this.

The last time I did Deathtrap, one of those plays I kept getting hired for over and over, I was a bit bored with it. So I consulted with the director and decided to do the character of Clifford Anderson (Christopher Reeves played it in the movie with Michael Caine) with a slight, self-conscious stutter. At the time I thought it a fairly good idea. Plus it had the added benefit of making me shake loose some line readings I had already set in stone (from having done the play so often). Apparently one of the critics didn't get it (or maybe my stutter was just not believable) and the review read something like, "If Mr. Morts had bothered to learn his lines, he might have made an effective Clifford." Oh, boy. I was furious. And, as always for the actor, powerless to do anything about it.

Early on I got into a habit of looking up old reviews before I did a character. I would trot over to the Lincoln Center Library and pour over every written word about the play I was about to do. On occasion it was really useful. I have no compunctions about stealing from another actor, particularly if they happen to be a good actor. One I remember is when I did Wait Until Dark. I found a review of when Robert Duvall had done the play on Broadway in the sixties. The critic (I forget which one now) commented on how frightening it was when Duvall had casually put on a butcher's smock before attacking the blind girl with a knife so as to not get any blood on his clothes. That bit is no where in the script. It was the actor's invention. So I stole it. And sure enough, when the reviews came out for the play, every single one mentioned the butcher's smock.

There are others that come to mind. When Peter O'Toole, one of my favorite actors, did Pygmalion in London and New York in the eighties, Frank Rich said, "Watching Mr. O'Toole in this role is like watching a very dangerous secretary bird on stage." Always liked that. When John Gielgud did a play in the seventies on the London stage, he had a death scene apparently. I think it was a Pintor play, but I don't recall exactly. The anonymous critic wrote, "When Sir John lets out his last breath he makes a curious sound as though a small bird had been released from his throat." Liked that one, too. Richard Burton was the recipient of a great line by Walter Kerr upon doing Equus in the seventies. Burton, of course, at one time had been the heir apparent to Olivier's throne but had, in the minds of many, squandered his talent on second rate movie projects. Kerr wrote, after having seen opening night in New York, "Mr. Burton may be the most promising middle-aged actor on the planet." Talk about your back-handed compliments. And then there is the venerable, afore-mentioned critic Pauline Kael when she famously wrote about Last Tango in Paris (my blog references this, of course) and Marlon Brando. "Brando has changed the face of an art form." Wow.

Dorothy Parker has had a few memorable quips during her short stint as a critic for The New Yorker. The most famous being her comment on Katherine Hepburn in a dreary little piece of writing in the thirties, "Miss Hepburn runs the gamut of emotions from A to B." Any actor worth his salt can quote that one. But my personal Parker favorite is her review of a play called I Am a Camera. It is also noteworthy as the shortest review ever printed in that magazine. It said simply, "No Leica." Still makes me smile.

So what is the purpose of the critic? To let the reader know whether the play is worth paying money to go see? Or to help the process by commenting on the nuts and bolts of the production itself? Ostensibly so the company can go back and make changes? I don't know.

The notice that has made the largest impact on me as a writer/director/actor, however, is one written in the nineteenth century. The great actor David Garrick had toured with Shakespeare's Richard III for many, many years. He was, arguably, the last great English stage actor before Olivier inherited the mantle. While doing Richard in London an anonymous critic wrote this remarkable sentence: "Watching David Garrick play Richard is like reading Shakespeare by lightning flash."

Now, THAT is how it should be. My imagination soars thinking of what that performance must have been like. What an amazing thing to say about someone's work.

Come see From the East to the West at NoHo in February. Cause that's what we're gonna do. We're gonna make the audience feel as though their watching a play by lightning flash. That's a promise.

See you tomorrow.

The Ghost of Plays Past...

I've been fortunate enough to have had about 15 or so of my plays done over the years. The first was a play called Closin' Time way back in 1983 in Springfield, MO. Like most young playwrights, I set it in a dive bar. For some reason novice playwrights tend to think profound and enlightening things happen in bars. One of my early mentors, Dr. Robert Bradley, gave me some very practical advice about writing for the stage. He said, "What makes this night different from other nights? If there's nothing cataclysmic about this day or this night you're writing about, why write it?" He was right. Nonetheless, I set it in a bar. I discovered there is a different thrill to writing than there is to acting. As an actor one's choices and talent are on display. As a writer one's very intellect itself is on trial.

That play is so amusing as I think back on it. As I recall, it was about a young bartender trying to make a choice about either leaving for college or staying and working in the bar for the rest of his life. Some of the dialogue made no sense whatsoever. I was tremendously influenced at that time in my life by Tennessee Williams. I suspect I'm not alone there. So now and then one of the three characters in the play would gallop off on a flight of pseudo-poetry about jasmine and sweating and black birds and Oedipus complexes and what have you. For no reason at all.

The first play I had produced in NYC was called Changing It to Brando, a piece about two young guys that have just moved to NYC to become actors but in the final analysis are actually too scared to leave their apartment. So they live this fantasy life, making up stories and events and living their entire existence in the small, cramped apartment they share. It is notable for a couple of things...one, my friend John Bader directed it (quite competently, I might add) and two, I learned a lesson about casting friends in my plays. I cast a guy I worked with, another waiter, in one of the roles (I took the other one). Even though this guy was a delight to be around, a fun guy, really smart, he was a terrible actor. Froze instantly like a rabbit in headlights. "Tharn," I believe is what Richard Adams calls it. Bader begged me to fire him. But I didn't because I couldn't stand the idea of hurting his feelings. The play suffered and I learned to never do that again.

The following year two of my plays were done in NY - both surprisingly successful. Golden Eggs, a one-person show directed by a fine, sensitive director named Jeff Wood and DAD/SONS, also directed by Jeff and co-starring my good buddy and forever-working actor, Brad Greenquist. The latter of the two was essentially a long one-act and was up with another one-act by the writer, Jim Uhls, who went on to write Fight Club featuring another Springfield native, Brad Pitt.

A few more plays in NY, some good, some not-so-good, and skip ahead to Rochester, NY. I was seeing a volcanic actress, Korean-American, and decided to write a play for her. It was called Barking at Lighted Windows. She was very good in it. And even now, as I look back on it, it was not a bad piece. We, however, were not so good together...oil and water. The explosive personal relationship we shared spilled over onto the stage. It produced some good theatre but bad karma.

A short time after that I made a decision to leave the theatre behind and do something "important" with my life...so I went back to school and eventually became a drug and alcohol counselor in Chicago. But of course like any great truth in a life, I couldn't leave the theatre behind and eventually wrote another play called Praying Small. The play, not surprisingly, is about recovery from addiction.

It has had a remarkable life thus far, in fact we're doing it at NoHo in April (See poster at right). Submitted for the Pulitzer, lots of other things, and I'm happy with it. For whatever reason, it tends to touch people where they live. I'm proud of it. And in the upcoming production I've been persuaded to take the lead role myself. Intimidating and exhilarating all at once.

But before that one, this one - From the East to the West. I'm also acting in that one with a bunch of gun-slinging, hungry, young actors here in LA. They are a talented bunch and already, early in rehearsal, I am beginning to realize I can't get away with any "tricks." These guys are too honest for that. I'll look like a bad soap actor next to them if I try it. I'm pleased about that. I like an acting challenge now and then. At some point I'll blog about these extraordinary bunch of performers. But right now I'm just trying to keep up with them. Being young and full of talent is, sadly, far different from being older and full of talent. These guys are so good they're still surprising themselves.

Rehearsal tonight. Tons of lines. Remembering the blocking. Toning down the performance. Trying to multi-task on stage.

When I act in a piece I've written it is important to keep in mind why I wrote it in the first place. That is to say, I harken back to those wonderful words of advice from Bob Bradley - "Why is this night different from other nights?" Great and simple words, those. Reminds me of a very basic truth about theatre. It concerns and it thrives upon the extraordinary, the awesome, the unexpected beauty of life. There is no room for the mundane in the theatre. There may be moments of it on the journey to the spectacular, but they are fleeting. Those moments are skipped over on the path to what makes this night different from all others. So I look forward to tonight, this different night, when I'm surrounded by artists that still surprise themselves.

See you tomorrow.

On Michael Moriarty...

When I was long about 17, I decided I would be a professional actor. I grew up in a small town in Missouri and to aspire to something so odd was, well, odd. But I was very lucky because I had this really genuine drama teacher in High School by the name of Doug Allbritton. He wasn't your typical High School drama teacher. He had actually been a professional actor in NY for a time and had made a cognizant decision to give it up for a teaching position and a family life. That decision informed the trajectory of my life. So there I was in small town Missouri playing roles like Ben in The Little Foxes and Charley in Where's Charley, all under a very sure and experienced hand. He and his late wife, Nancy, fed me books and films and music that otherwise I simply would not have had contact. Very fortunate for me, indeed.

So there I was at 17 keeping a journal about acting. One night around this time Doug and Nancy had me over to watch a film called Bang the Drum Slowly. A movie with Robert DeNiro (which is why I wanted to see it) and a guy named Michael Moriarty (whom I had never heard of). I still have that very pretentious journal written in scribbly, self-important handwriting from 1978. The entry for that night reads, "Saw Bang the Drum Slow (sic) tonight. DeNiro is very good. But there's another actor, Michael Moriarty, that I can't take my eyes off. He's amazing. Hopefully we'll work together someday." As God is my witness, that's exactly what I wrote.

Skip ahead to 1985. I had been in NYC for a few months and couldn't get arrested. Couldn't even get my foot in the door anywhere. I was bartending at a restaurant in the basement of the Empire State Building. Working the day shift and its really slow and so I'm sitting there one day skimming through Backstage (that's the actor's trade paper for NY) and tucked away on a back page in the paper is this little square in the corner that says simply, "Michael Moriarty Teaches Acting" with a number to call attached.

Could this be THE Michael Moriarty, I was thinking? I called the number. Some girl said, yeah, be there at seven on Wednesday night at blankety-blank address. So I wrote it down. Now, mind you, up to this time I had taken classes all over NY trying to find someone I really connected with as an actor. HB Studios, Uta Hagen, Stella Adler, Circle Rep, many others. None of it was enlightening for me, all just a bunch of yapping, an unfortunate extension of the worst of academia. Nobody was actually teaching ACTING.

So Wednesday rolls around and I go to the address. Turns out its IN Michael's actual apartment. So for whatever reason, I thought the time for the class was six instead of seven. I arrived an hour early. The doorman gave me a quizzical glance, but buzzed me up anyway. The door was ajar and I heard piano music wafting out of the apartment. I later found out Michael is a world-class jazz pianist. I knocked lightly on the door and when no on answered, simply walked in (I was from Missouri, what did I know?). Down the long hallway and into the huge living room. There sat Michael Moriarty playing some Duke Ellington, swaying slightly, eyes shut. I cleared my throat and he looked up. Of course, he was the very picture of kindness, even though I was way early. Invited me to sit and brought me some cookies and hot tea. I was simply stunned. He asked about my career (of which I had no answer cause I didn't HAVE a career). We chatted, I told him I was a big fan and had enjoyed his work since I was 17. I remember asking him what it was like to work with Robert DeNiro, a question I'm sure he'd fielded before. He said, "I have no idea. I didn't ever get to know him. He never came on set as himself, he never broke character." I thought that was neat.

Anyway, actors began to drift in...Charlie Sheen, Jo Anderson, Brad Greenquist, working actors all. To say I was intimidated would be the understatement of the century. We gathered in another huge room in Michael's apartment and everyone started working on monologues and scenes and poetry and screenplays and one person even sang a song. I sat in the back transfixed. Finally, after about three hours, Michael looked at me and said, "Chris (I didn't have the courage to correct him), got anything for us?"

It is important to understand that I had already learned more about acting in one night than I had in the previous five years of classes. Here I was, working for an actor, one of the best in the world, that already had two Tony Awards, two Emmy Awards, two NY Film Critic Awards, Three SAG Awards, several Golden Globes and a ton of others too numerous to mention. Here I was, about to show my stuff to a guy that Frank Rich had called, upon seeing his Richard III at Lincoln Center, "the most riveting actor on the NY stage since Brando."

So I got up and did a monologue. And there was silence. After a few moments, Michael said, "Uh, ya got anything else?" So I did another one. More silence. He said, "Got something comedic?" I did another one. Silence. "Got a Shakespeare?" I did one. More resounding silence. "Got any character pieces?" I did another. Silence. "You got one with an accent?" I did it. I think I ended up, remarkably, doing eight monologues for Michael, back to back, without a single comment on any of them. When I finally finished the last one, he said simply, "See me after class, Chris." I was devastated. I had done my best, it wasn't good enough, and he was going to refer me elsewhere. Perhaps to some Special Olympics class.

Around eleven o'clock everyone started filtering out. I shuffled around until it was just us again. Michael said, "Thanks for sticking around. Listen, you don't need to be in this class." My stomach flipped. "I teach a very small master class on Thursday. This class is gravy for you, you're way beyond what I do here. I'll see you on Thursday." My feet didn't touch the sidewalk as I skipped to the N train. One of the top ten or twelve actors in the WORLD had just told me I was too good for a normal class, that I needed to be in his "Master" class. I don't remember exactly, but I think I actually wept a bit. Maybe I COULD do this after all.

That night was one of three or four hallmark moments in my life. Paradigm shifts. Everything changed. I embarked on Frost's "road less travelled." And it was about to make all the difference.

Michael Moriarty taught me more about the craft of acting over the next five years than I had thought possible. He teaches the actor how to ACT not how to PREPARE to act. He is one of a handful of bonafide geniuses I have ever met. In addition, for whatever reason, he chose me to be one of his proteges. He took a personal interest in my career. And eventually, he even learned my first name.

You wanna see some brilliant work? Go to your local Blockbuster, or look through your Netflix and pick up a mini-series from the late seventies called HOLOCAUST. It stars Michael Moriarty, Meryl Streep, James Woods, Rosemary Harris and Fritz Weaver. Watch Michael in it. Because it really doesn't get any better than that. He is the finest actor I have ever seen or personally met, even now, twenty four years later.

See you tomorrow.

On Hamlet and Roanoke...

Ralph Richardson, my favorite of the "big three" - Olivier, Gielgud and Richardson - said, "Repetition is the soul of art." It is a quote I often think about. He was speaking, of course, primarily as an actor, although I think it applies to other disciplines as well.

To the non-artist, the incidental creator, the weekend craftsman, it doesn't make a lot of sense. To the professional it makes all the sense in the world. Tiger Woods didn't become the greatest golfer on the planet by being a talented golfer...no, he hit, quite literally a million golf shots before anyone had ever heard of him.

There's the old joke of the tourists in NYC. They stop a man on the street and ask, "How do we get to Carnegie Hall." The man says, "Practice, practice."

Well, Sir Ralph nailed it. Until the actor has done the show and the lines over and over and over and over...he is not in the moment. He is worried about what to say next. He is waiting for the other actor to stop talking so he can talk. That's not acting. That's memorizing. Sort of like Truman Capote's line about Jack Kerouac, "That's not writing, that's typing."

So yesterday we read through From the East to the West. I have an extraordinary cast. We sat down, riffed a bit, talked some about the schedule and then dove in. No marking ("marking" is when the actor just skates through it - like a dancer too tired to do the leap and turn, he just moves his wrists in such a manner as to let people know he just "jumped and turned."). Full out right out of the gate. That's how I like it.

When I had a few good friends over to my house last month to do a reading of the piece before some final rewrites, one of the actors was the amazing John Schuck. The way the piece is written, before anyone says a word, John's character has a long and somewhat emotional monologue. So there we were, casually lounging about the front room, drinking tea and coffee and soda, munching on chips and fruit, joking around, telling old theatre stories. Finally, after a bit, I said, let's get started. Schuck sat up and attacked the script. Mr. Schuck is an old pro, been around forever, and knows his way around a script. He set the bar so high with the first monologue it was amusing to watch the other actors sit up and look around as if to say, "Well, shit, I guess I have to ACT today." Suddenly all informality was thrown out the window. The competitive edge was on. It was a barnburner of a reading, all because John Schuck didn't "mark" it. I like readings like that. And that's exactly what happened again yesterday.

The script needs a tiny bit of work...throw out a line here, rewrite a short scene there...nothing to really be concerned about. The painting is there, I just need to add a few shadows and lines.

My young cast is amazing. I don't thing they really know what they have in their laps, but that's good, I think. It is the cool thing about youth. I have seen probably twenty Hamlets on stage in my life. I've seen Kevin Kline do it, Kenneth Branaugh, Chris Walken, William Hurt, Daniel Day Lewis, Ralph Fiennes, and a slew of lesser names. You know what? The best Hamlet I ever saw was in Roanoke, VA. I was down there doing a new play festival, a really good play called The Dropper written by the veteran actor Ron McLarty. Anyway, in the cast was a young kid, maybe 17. John Beard was his name. After the play was done, I stuck around to do another show there, 1776, I think it was. Young John and I had become friends during the run of The Dropper. So he called me one night, a few weeks later, and said, "I'm doing Hamlet at my high school. We're doing a run of it at an afternoon assembly this Friday. Can you come?" I was filled with dread. The thought of spending my Friday afternoon in a high school auditorium watching the greatest play ever written being disemboweled by a bunch of teenagers was daunting, to say the least. But a friend is a friend and I said yes.

The production was awful. As bad as you might imagine. But in the middle of this mess was the most vital Hamlet I had ever seen. The kid nuked the role. Chewed it up. Make it frighteningly immediate. An urgent performance. I was astounded.

Afterwards, I chatted with him a bit backstage. He told me, in beautiful naivety, "This guy can really write (referring to Shakespeare), And he's got a whole BUNCH of plays. I can't wait to get to them all." It's the way theatre should work. He played Hamlet as though no one had ever said those words before. As though it were a new script being shopped around. As though he were the very first to discover the power of that perfect, perfect play.

That's how my young cast attacked From the East to the West yesterday. I was well pleased. I was humbled.

Repetition is the soul of art. Yep.

See you tomorrow.

Throwing Out the Opening Pitch...

Today is our first read-thru of From the East to the West at NoHo Arts Center. Opening Day. Not sure who's gonna throw out the first pitch yet.

I've been here about 120 times before. First read-thru, first rehearsal, first cast meeting. It's a very exciting day for the actors, the director and everyone involved. A few I remember with some interest.

Ordinarily the actors are on pins and needles because often times they don't know who they're up with. At least I always was. But that may be because often times I was the hired gun. The ringer brought in to upset the balance of power. The opening read-thru of Moon for the Misbegotten was like that. I was doing Jamie Tyrone in that particularly distressed piece of writing by Eugene O'Neill. Opening day was disastrous. As it is in many cases, I knew no one in the cast that day, shook hands with everyone, had a pastry and a cup of joe and just started acting. The director, who I suspect works in a factory somewhere today, wanted us to "whisper the lines with no inflection," because he wanted to "mold the music." Er. Someday I'll write an entire blog on bad directors. Actually, that's a lot of material, so maybe four or five blogs with a "...to be continued" attached to each.

I did Lost in Yonkers six times. Six different productions. One of them won a whole slew of Jeff Awards in Chicago - I was doing Louie, as always, the tough but ultimately soft gangster. On opening day once again I knew no one - I had been shipped in from NY for this one. But a weird thing happened. Turns out we had all done the piece elsewhere...some, like me, several times. So when we started the read-thru, none of us opened our scripts. The entire cast just hit the lines at a dead run. Remarkable. Now, mind you, this was a big-time, hotsy-totsy production. Big Equity theatre, big names in the cast, all that. It was cool.

Taught me something, that opening day. Something I had been waffling over for several years. Some time back I read John Gielgud's autobiography. A little gossipy for my taste but some of it was quite interesting. In it, Sir John said he always came to the first rehearsal OFF BOOK. That is to say, he memorized the lines, regardless of the size of the role, before opening day. This is in direct opposition to the standard American, method-influenced, approach. One must discover the line organically as one discovers the "still life" of the set and one's surroundings. Horseshit. An early revelation about Mssrs. Stanislavski and company. Although for the real actor rehearsal is the golden time, the most fun, but it is NOT why we're there. We're there for the fat lady (again, Sallinger, thank you).

I have, for years, urged my students to come in off book. Most ignore me. Hell, I ignore me.

There may, in fact, be some merit to Mr. Stanislavski's organic, discovering approach. But I think he failed to grasp the overwhelming ability of the American actor to rationalize, not to mention his inherent laziness.

I remember working, several times, I'm sorry to report, with a despot of a director in South Florida. Rather fancied himself the Otto Preminger of the stage. In my mind I always picture him in a lion-taming costume. He was infatuated with "table work." That's when the cast is not allowed to get on their feet and actually work for a long time after opening day. He just wanted to read the script over and over and "talk" about it. Oh, my lord. This guy would sit and pontificate endlessly. I think on one of those occasions we were doing a play called Born Yesterday, the old movie with Billie Holiday. We sat and discussed the play till I thought I really might just fall off my chair in a dead faint. While a decent script it was hardly Lear or Hamlet. These kinds directors, charlatons all, just don't want to let go. Directors like this think, for some ego-laden reason, that they, rather than the actors, have the final say in the presentation of the piece. This guy still runs a theatre down there, and still routinely churns out bad work. Oh, well.

So, today is a big day. A fun day. We'll hit the ground running. The last time this play was read publicly was almost a year ago today at a small theatre in Chicago. I was doing some work in Indiana at the time and came up to see the reading. It wasn't bad, actually. And I was gratified to learn that the theatre had to turn away about 100 people because it was filled to the rafters. It was just a little Saturday afternoon reading of a new play.

I think it safe to say, a lot of people have been waiting for this one. In Chicago I was told by a good buddy of mine at Steppenwolf that this play had been discussed for several years now and in fact some theatre folk thought it was a myth, that it didn't exist at all. That makes me smile today.

It does exist. And it is the best I can do at the moment. It is a deeply personal piece of writing that I have long refused to show. But today, we show it, and work on it, and get it on its feet.

I am reminded of Sondheim's line in Sunday in the Park with George..."Look, I made a hat. Where there NEVER was a hat!" He has a way with words, that Steve.

See you tomorrow.

From the East to the West

A quick one. Gentle Readers will notice the new poster to the right (that's stage left for the actors reading this). All came about rather suddenly, actually. The Artistic Director of NoHo, James Mellon, and I decided to go with a benefit performance of the new piece, a "tweeking production" as it were, before the play moves to a larger venue. When it does move, John Schuck, the amazing actor you may have seen about a thousand times on television and in movies (for you older folks, he played Sgt. Enright on the old McMillan and Wife series - for you younger tots, he's constantly on Law and Order) is attached to the play in the lead role. Also my buddy and wonderful actor, John Bader, is attached in a supporting role.

This is gonna be really fun and really hard. We have 23 days to mount this thing. First readthru tomorrow at 10 AM. Everything cast except one role. Excellent young actors. And (I'm having nightmares about this) I'm stepping in as not only the director but also in the role that Mr. Schuck will eventually play. It's another huge role. As soon as we close I go into rehearsal for Praying Small. Why do I do this to myself?

Truth is, I wouldn't have it any other way.

Incidentally, the incredible poster design is courtesy of Chad Coe.

See you tomorrow.

On Learning the Damn Lines...

I've done a few big ones. Lines galore. And each and every time, it's really, really difficult. I did a one-person show some time back called "Give 'Em Hell, Harry." James Whitmore originally did it. In fact, there's a filmed version of the actual stage play back in 1975 and, unbelievably, Whitmore actually got an Oscar nod for it. I guess because it was on film it was eligible, even though it was simply a camera pointed at him onstage. Anyway, it's a big one to learn. Two and half hours, more or less, of being Harry Truman on stage. Did it for a long stretch back on the east coast.

To learn it, I thought I'd play with a few different techniques. I have a few friends, decent actors all, back in NY that swear by the tape recorder method. Tape the entire role, sometimes even the entire play, in a monotone and read it into a tape recorder and then listen to it over and over and over, ad nauseum. On the surface, it seems maybe the most painless method available. The problem is, my mind wanders. I lose focus. Tried it with the Harry gig and it started out swimmingly. I always had the headphones on, everywhere I went; the store, driving (this was before the cell phone laws), sitting around the house, everywhere.

I quickly learned an ugly truth about myself; I don't have the focus for this. I couldn't concentrate on the words. They were just so much noise in the background of my life. I call this technique now The Osmosis Technique. For me it is tantamount to sleeping with the script and hoping the words come to you in your sleep. It just doesn't work for me. I suspect some of that has to do with my own failings as a person lacking the skills to concentrate for long periods at a time, though.

Another technique, which actually does work to a certain extent, is the writing approach. The actor actually writes the words over and over. Whole notebooks filled with the same lines. Sort of like Jack Nicholson in The Shining writing the same sentence over and over. Creepy scene, that. So I tried it. My hand cramped up and I lost interest. I found that in addition to being frustrating, learning lines became physically painful. Out that one went.

I once asked Sam Waterson (one of the most "normal" people I've ever met that also happens to be an actor) what he did. Remember, Sam did a two hour, one-manner about Lincoln back in the day. He said exactly what I was afraid he was going to say..."Pace and talk, pace and talk, do it again, just pace and talk." Er.

Moriarty shared a technique I thought was sheer lunacy until I tried it. He told me to learn the "big chunks" backwards. That is to say, start with the last sentence of a long monologue or soliloquy and then learn the second to last sentence and so on and so on. He said the human mind will instinctively move quickly toward what it knows best, and what it knows best is what it learns first. He said that's how he learned Richard III when he did it at Lincoln Center. I tried it. It works. But it's too hard. Again, the old focus problem. I'm just not disciplined enough for it.

There is a famous story of Olivier learning Othello in a field of cows. He wanted his voice a full third lower than his actual speaking voice for the role. To do this, he felt he had to first LOSE his own voice. So he would march out every morning to a neighboring field full of cattle and begin shouting Othello's lines. Oh, to be a fly on the wall, or more appropriately, a fly on the cow, for that one. The image is startling: Lord Olivier out amongst the beasts of burden screaming the great lines of Shakespeare at six in the morning in the English fog.

So today, I'm back to Sam Waterston's very practical advice. Pace and talk, pace and talk. That's what I'm doing today. I did it yesterday. And I've found, like I did back in my Harry Truman days, that I really only have about three to four hours in me. My mind begins to reject after that. It's like every morning I have a gallon bucket to fill in my head. Once I've filled it with as many memorized words as it will hold, everything else just spills over and is useless.

I remember the late Mick Denniston, a good director and friend, telling me tongue-in-cheek, "The script is just a guide." He was referring to my unfortunate habit of paraphrasing. Well, this time I'm paraphrasing myself. So every single time I get lazy as an actor I'm disrespecting the playwright. And I'm finding the two exist in a fragile, small room in my head. They're forced to hang out together day after day. I'd very much like the playwright to be the Alpha Male in this hesitant co-existence. But the actor, as always, the actor is very, very slippery.

Oh, and you'll notice I'm starting to discover the bells and whistles of the blogging world. Note the new pics to the right. That's stage left for the actors reading this.

I'll see you tomorrow.