An Improvised Life (10 page)

I felt barraged with the endlessly varied agendas of the people who were attending, and I quickly realized this is what had been driving me nuts over the years—the cacophony of egos and personal needs. I was desperate for some silence. Some sense of awe, of humble anticipation of what might be coming. The doors of the auditorium eventually opened and we were let in, and the lot of us scrambled for our seats, talking, complaining, rummaging through programs,
trying to figure out where to stash our stuff, oddly girding ourselves against the onslaught of the Beethoven, most of us doing everything possible to avoid the chance of open connection, or confrontation with what was before us.

The music started. I stayed blind, trying for once to feel the entire experience rather than attempting to block out the audience, or anything else that I might have considered extraneous. I wanted to feel everything going on, not just the music onstage but everything happening in the hall. As the music continued the audience slowly began to settle down, and it soon became clear that we were hearing an extraordinary performance of the 9th. The orchestra was on fire. About five minutes into the first movement, the varied personal agendas in the audience began to melt down and then slowly disappear, all agendas, those of audience and musicians alike, until finally the only purpose or meaning in the hall was Beethoven’s. And then by the end of the third movement even Beethoven’s agenda was gone, and we were swept up in what
he
had been swept up by, what lived through him, and all of Carnegie Hall became one living organism, one thing with a couple thousand moving parts. We had let go, and we lived inside that majestic vision of brotherhood and unity and heroism written over two hundred years ago.

We had become the music.

When the piece finished, when the applause died down, there was a split second of recognition of what had taken place. I could sense a subterranean desire sweep through
the audience to hang on to this connection that had been forced on us by the music, this unearthly unity and love that Beethoven’s music
insists
on. For a split second you could feel in the audience a need to join hands and link together and look each other in the face, or grab each other and embrace, a need to apologize for a lifetime of neglect, to cry, to tell each person in the hall that we would always love them, that we always
had
loved them.

And then the moment was over. And slowly the discussions began, the intellectualizations, the looking for overcoats, the program searches, the rush to the restaurants and garages. And I took off my dark glasses and finally knew what my anxiety had been about. For me, going to Carnegie Hall had always been going to church. I knew that what I would find there, in those rare, exalted moments, would be a holy experience. I went there to abandon myself to the power not only of the music but, even more importantly, to the occasional unity that presents itself when a group of artists catch fire and become one thing. When what rules the evening is the essence of the music, not the people playing, or those listening to it. And I began to realize that the underlying message that runs through all of the group art forms, whether it be dance, music, theater, or film, is: “Look at us! We can get along! We can do this beautiful thing and we are doing it together and actually
enjoying
each other! There is hope for us after all!”

This is the message that runs underneath and through all the group art forms. I don’t know what else would explain
an audience’s desperate need to know that they’d been part of something grand and joyous and unifying, or even to know that an actor had fun making a movie. And I find myself thinking, my God, if we can’t get along playing music, dancing, singing, pretending we’re other people, what possible hope is there for the people who work at the U.N.? For doctors? For research scientists? For teachers? For all those places and professions where lives are at stake? What we do as performers
has
to be joyous and it
has
to be generous. The audience needs to know.

CHAPTER TEN

Somewhere along the way I became a director. It was not part of my life plan, nor was it a profession I thought I had any particular talent for. I never thought of myself as a leader and I didn’t want to be one.

But one day I got a call from a couple of friends who were in rehearsal for an off-Broadway play. They said the cast was foundering under bad leadership, and they asked if I would consider coming in and taking over the direction. I wasn’t working at the time so I said I’d take a look at a rehearsal and see what I thought.

I went to the theater and watched a run-through, completely confused about what I was seeing. The play made no sense to me, and without a handle on what it was supposed to be about I felt I couldn’t be of much help. They thanked me for coming in, and I went home. Two weeks later they called again. They’d hired a second director, and after a few days he turned out to be as bad as the first. Would I come in again and take another look?

I went back and watched another run-through. This time, although I still felt the play wasn’t working and the acting stiff, I could at least follow the plot, even though I didn’t understand it. I had nothing else on my plate at the time and I liked the idea of helping my friends in the show, so I said I’d take over. With my heart in my mouth I started rehearsals. I had no craft as a director and no idea of where to begin, so I sat there and watched. All I knew was that I could determine when something felt false or incomprehensible to me.

To my surprise, when I made suggestions, the actors would actually try them. When they’d ask me why I was telling them to do certain things, I found to my further surprise that I could come up with reasons that satisfied them. As the days went on I began to enjoy my new hat, and I found that as the newly clarified moments in the play piled up on each other it all started making sense. To my delight, I discovered that it was quite funny. The play opened, ran for a year, and I started getting some off-Broadway directorial work.

At every opportunity, I would hire the actors I’d worked with at Second City. My second play was
Little Murders
, by Jules Feiffer. Two of the cast members were from Second City, Andrew Duncan and Fred Willard. Then came
The White House Murder Case
, also by Jules Feiffer, and once more most of the cast was from Second City: Andrew Duncan, again, who as far as I was concerned was the unsung hero of Second City, Anthony Holland, J. J. Barry, Paul
Dooley, and Peter Bonerz, who was from another successful improv group called The Committee.

Whenever I work with actors with improvisational training, my rehearsal time is cut in half. It’s been my experience that a lot of actors don’t really read scripts. They read their parts and pay only cursory attention to the other elements of the play. As a result they don’t know their function within the totality of the event, and it becomes a director’s job to fit the actor into the piece as a whole. Actors with improvisational training almost always understand the shape of the event they’re working within. I think it’s at least in part because improvisational actors are simultaneously their own writers and directors. When you’ve improvised long enough you develop instincts—about the style of the piece you’re working in, but also about when to take over, when to step back, where to position yourself physically onstage while leaving room for the other actors, when to come on and when to get off. Since no one is in charge, generosity becomes a survival technique. These skills transfer easily into working on written material. Most actors bury their heads in the role, forgetting that in a wellconstructed piece each role has a function. Being aware of that function makes finding the character that much easier, and good improvisational actors tend to excel at knowing their function within the whole.

Improvisation became a natural tool and I used it frequently as a director, particularly when a scene wasn’t making sense to the actors. When this happened I’d look for an
improvisational “paraphrase” for the scene—a completely different situation for the actors, but one containing the same emotional essence. Oddly enough, the paraphrase could sometimes be completely transparent, and the actors would not see it. In working on the essence of the scene in this way, almost invariably what actors discovered in the new situation could be translated back into the text.

My favorite example of this took place while we were rehearsing
Little Murders
. There is a scene in the play where the Newquist family is being introduced to their daughter’s new fiancé, Alfred. Alfred comes into the home with his bride-to-be and the family makes a great show of accepting their prospective son-in-law. Alfred stays totally uncommunicative, giving the family nothing in the way of social graces, and the tension mounts. What I wanted was for the Newquists to become more and more forced as their efforts turned to nothing. I wanted their gaiety and the party atmosphere to turn hollow and theatrical. The actors had trouble achieving this effect, and I felt the reason was that good actors instinctively don’t want to look false. What I was asking them to do seemed to go against their instincts and years of training. But I’ve always loved to watch people performing in real life. I get a kick out of the faces people put on that often have nothing to do with what’s taking place inside. As much as it happens in life, this is difficult to pull off theatrically because false simply tends to look false. But in this case it felt very much needed, so I decided to try an improv. I told the family, Elizabeth Wilson, Jon Korkes,
Vince Gardenia, and Linda Lavin, that the president of the United States had decided that as a Christmas present to the country he was going to pay a special visit to a handpicked American family. Then I took aside Fred Willard, who was playing Alfred, and told him that when he came in with his entourage he should say and do absolutely nothing. The improv started and I watched as the family prepared for the president’s visit with intense anticipation and excitement. Then Fred came in with his people and he stood there. Smiling. Giving the family nothing. The family started out the scene in a state of genuine excitement, and within a few minutes you could see them beginning to strain, working at their joy. They tried everything they could think of to warm him up, to get him to react. Anything. Fred did nothing. After about ten minutes their enthusiasm became false and hollow, their smiles painful, their laughs more like coughs. Another five minutes and they fell on the floor exhausted, laughing their heads off. They got the paraphrase completely, and through the many months that they performed the play they never lost it. What was interesting to me was the transparency of the improv. It was so close to the content of the scene in the play that it was almost impossible not to see through it, but they didn’t, and the improv worked exactly as I hoped it would.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

There is an unconscious ritual that actors go through in nearly every play I’ve directed. We’ll have been rehearsing the play for about three weeks, and during a break an actor will come up to me in a state of intense agitation and say, “I can’t understand this scene; it’s driving me crazy. I don’t know what the character is doing here. I’m at a complete loss, and I feel completely hamstrung.” My inevitable answer is “You’re playing the scene right now.” The actor stops in his tracks and realizes the truth of what I’m saying. The emotional state he has put himself in while telling me about his impasse is exactly where the character needs to be during the scene.

I thought about this for a long time before I realized that it was because actors don’t like to look confused. Who does? Who wants to appear to an audience as if they don’t know what they’re doing? It makes people look amateurish, and who wants that?

But what’s taking place in rehearsal is that in each instance the actor is confusing his own loss of control with
that of the character. What I have to impress upon the actor each time it happens is that this loss of control, this confusion, this being really stopped in one’s tracks without a clear place to go, is
riveting
. It’s a place of pure potential, a place where anything can happen, a wonderfully deep and empty place. I’ve seen this moment over and over in people’s faces when I watch old episodes of
Candid Camera
—the perplexed look, the totally empty space people fall into when they’re confronted with outlandish behavior. I laugh at this emptiness far more than I do at most controlled, thought-out comic behavior. When actors have the courage to present us with this open, vulnerable, empty moment it is pure gold. “I don’t know who I am, I don’t know where I am, and I don’t know what I’m doing.” It’s the essence of the ideas expressed so beautifully in the book
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
, by Shunryu Suzuki. He says in the prologue: “In Japan we have the phrase
shoshin
which means beginner’s mind.... This does not mean a closed mind, but actually an empty mind and a ready mind. If your mind is empty it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.”

When an actor has the courage to really embrace this state, which will occur over and over again during the course of his career, his work will get richer and more interesting.