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In the summer after my first year of
graduate school at Catholic University where I had been cast in only one
role and that a walk-on, I was hired by the Town Meeting Playhouse in
Jeffersonville, Vermont to play the female lead in nine productions of
summer stock, whether the lead was ingénue Angelique in Imaginary
Invalid or matronly Beatrice in Breath of Spring. A graduate
of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts was hired to play the male
leads. The company would perform the current show at 8:00 p.m. for a
week and rehearse the upcoming show during the day. The male lead and I
were not required to help build sets or gather props and costumes, as
were the other company members, which gave us latitude to learn lines. I
tried to change my appearance for each part with different hairstyles,
hair colors, and fake hairpieces, and of course changes in costume
helped, except that for several roles I wore my own clothes, which
didn’t lend me a feeling of being someone else. I hadn’t much of a
notion to adjust my way of walking and talking from role to role and so
I expect I came off moving and sounding pretty much the same whether
playing Gillian the witch in Bell Book and Candle or Lady Isabel
of East Lynne. Even so, when would there have been time for
building a character from the outside, to say nothing of creating the
inside of a role? Still, the experience was invaluable for establishing
confidence.
That was stock. The other way for young
actors to learn in the field is repertory, which I encountered while
still in college as an apprentice to the Champlain Shakespeare Festival
in Burlington, Vermont. My apprenticeship involved running props and
playing servants of little or no speech: I attended upon Cleopatra as
Iras in Antony and Cleopatra and held the newborn baby Elizabeth
at the end of Henry VIII.
This summer I visited three estimable
repertory theatre festivals of North America. Shakespeare prevailed at
two: the Stratford of Canada and Shakespeare & Company in Lenox,
Massachusetts; the third was the Shaw Festival at Niagara-on-the-Lake in
Ontario. Typical of summer repertory, a festival actor would be
performing, say, two supporting roles in two different productions
scheduled at various times of the week through much of the season. The
actor would have rehearsed the first role for three or four weeks during
which time he may have begun rehearsing the second role. The actor would
then have played the first role and eventually the second role in four
to eight previews over one to three weeks. (Musicals will rehearse
longer and may preview twenty-plus times over a month or more). There
would have been some degree of daytime rehearsal of a show while it was
still in previews.
This sort of preview arrangement indicates
that producers feel obliged to consider the fiscal needs of the theatre
over the creative needs of the actor. (For example, since 80% of
Stratford’s $46 million operating budget derives from earned revenues,
the Festival no doubt favors previews over rehearsal since previews
garner box office receipts.) But what does it do to the exploratory
process of an actor to put him before an audience after a few weeks of
rehearsal? From university to stock to rep to regional to Broadway,
rehearsal periods are too short. Once an actor goes before an audience,
including a preview audience, exploration pretty much stops and
repetition sets in. Depth and details get sacrificed. Directors
and actors are being compelled to settle for a level of performance well
below that of the Group Theatre who sought the level of the Moscow Art
Theatre. What level of realism, what level of truth, is the going model
and to whom is it acceptable?
The shows I saw this summer were well
produced, the performances were fine, and the festival atmospheres were
entirely enjoyable. But I found myself looking for more depth and
versatility, hoping to see the actor go beyond his customary way of
acting. Maybe actors don’t need to go so deep with language plays like
Shakespeare and Shaw. But even if they wanted to, how could they? When
rehearsals get skimped, what can an actor do but scratch the ground?
What an actor wants is enough rehearsal to unearth the ground, so he can
keep on digging through all the length of a run and not dry up. Stock
and repertory forestall the digging. I would hear townspeople in Canada
say that if you return later in the summer the performances will be
better. But they won’t be better because they won’t be more human. They
won’t be more real. They’ll be more polished and more relaxed but not
more in depth.
Still, repertory has rewards. The Stratford
was fostering a Greek theme: Shakespeare’s Pericles and
Troilus and Cressida conjoined with a unique variation of the
Oresteia trilogy. Beginning with Aeschylus’s Agamemnon and
rather than continuing with Aeschylus’s Choephorae and
Eumenides, the Festival was offering Giraudoux’s Electra and
Sartre’s The Flies. Wonderful programming! The fortunate result
for the actors playing Clytemnestra, Aegisthus, Electra and Orestes was
the opportunity to build the same character from the point of view of
different playwrights from different places and periods: Greek and
French, ancient and modern.
Over at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox,
Massachusetts, I found a radiant Much Ado About Nothing,
skillfully and delightfully conceived by director Daniela Varon.
Building on Shakespeare’s Sicily setting, Ms. Varon transported the play
to the 1950s with Shakespeare’s fraternal dons as Mafioso, honorable and
dishonorable; with Beatrice as a proto-feminist in crinolines; and with
a Sinatra-like Balthasar crooning for swooning girls. Every now and
then, irrespective of rehearsal time, a show pops up like a beautiful
flower with every performance lovely and alive. Much Ado showed
that when the energies of a director and the actors coalesce, a day of
rehearsal can be as fruitful as a week; quality can belie quantity.
Widowers’ Houses (Shaw’s
first play, masterfully written at age 36) at the Shaw Festival likewise
demonstrated what a difference the chemistry can make. Under the
direction of Joseph Ziegler the actors played Shaw as Shaw wants to be
played: smartly, wittily, lively, mannerly, attractively and with a bolt
of electricity from beginning to end. Again, with Shakespeare and Shaw,
it may be that a few weeks of rehearsal is enough, if the production is
fortunate and the actors speak the speech trippingly.
Audiences
come from far and near to the Shakespeare and Shaw festivals in Canada.
They cultivate themselves by reading the plays beforehand and discussing
them afterwards over breakfast at B&Bs. Excellent program notes by
university professors stimulate and supplement discussion. Audiences can
choose a matinee and an evening performance from among four to six
productions in three different theatres on a given day. Over the course
of the Stratford season from May to November, more than half a million
people will see at least one of sixteen productions. The Shaw 2003
season consists of eleven productions of which I saw four in addition to
Widowers Houses: Shaw’s Misalliance, O’Casey’s The
Plough and the Stars, Brian Friel’s Afterplay, and Comden &
Green’s musical On the Twentieth Century.
The United
States is blessed with Shakespeare & Company, and other Shakespeare
festivals continue across the land. In addition we need an American
theatre festival. In particular we need an O’Neill Festival and, I would
like to say here and now, the concept of an O’Neill Festival ought to be
taken up by the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in New London,
Connecticut. A theatre building lies fallow nearby in Stratford,
Connecticut waiting for employment; or a start-up theatre could be built
at the O’Neill Center. We need a Festival to examine the plays of
O’Neill and his progenitors, the Greeks and Strindberg, and those he
generated, including Tennessee Williams who exclaimed that O’Neill gave
birth to the American theatre and died for it. We need an O’Neill
Festival, providing months of stage work for American actors and
directors and affording them lots of rehearsal time. |
