Notes on a Cowardly Lion (46 page)

No one was pleased about opening at the Cocoanut Grove Playhouse in Miami except Myerberg, who had covered expenses with a large guarantee. Schneider, unhappy with the set and with Miami, liked the idea of doing
Waiting for Godot
with Lahr and Ewell in principle, but confesses “I was terrified of doing the play with stars. I was scared that ego problems would get in the way of the play.”

Lahr has his own recollections. “Playing
Waiting for Godot
in Miami,” he says, “was like doing
Giselle
at Roseland.” He was skeptical about opening there, but never completely pessimistic. He brought his fishing tackle and his family to Florida, expecting to enjoy a little of both during the run.

Schneider is haunted by the anxiety of the first production. “We were all babes in the wood. We were groping around there with our shoes off.” Even Lahr, riddled with doubts and petrified of public rejection, clung vehemently to comic simplicity that made sense out of (what seemed to him) intellectual confusion. His childlike recalcitrance caused more uneasiness than he would ever realize. Schneider sensed the problem that would materialize in Miami as he wound up his meeting with Beckett in Europe. “Bert was terrified of it from the beginning. I kept getting telegrams from Myerberg urging me to change my ship reservations and fly home”:

LAHR AND EWELL NERVOUS AND DISTURBED URGE YOU FLY BACK FRIDAY.

MYERBERG

LAHR SLOW STUDY STILL FEEL YOU SHOULD RETURN BY AIR AT ONCE

MYERBERG

Finally, Lahr himself tried to use his own powers of persuasion:

WE FEEL VERY NERVOUS ABOUT SHORT REHEARSAL THINK IT URGENT BEGIN REHEARSAL MARCH 5TH PLEASE MAKE EVERY EFFORT TO RETURN TO MAKE IT POSSIBLE AS SO MUCH SCRIPT AND BUSINESS TO LEARN APPRECIATE MUCHLY CABLE ARRIVAL

BERT LAHR

Lahr's relationship with Schneider is a study in misunderstanding, their association a wry commentary on Beckett's play. Like
Waiting for Godot
, it emphasized not only the limitations of language to convey experience but also the compulsive love-hate relationship of people
engaged in a single enterprise. Vladimir and Estragon play a game to survive life. Lahr did not understand Schneider's language; and Schneider's inexperience and new conception of Beckett would not allow for the comic leeway that Lahr insisted would make the play “work.” At the root of the problem was Schneider's understanding of the symbolic movement of the two main characters and Lahr's lack of it. Schneider's attitude, on one level, is accurate; but Lahr's intuition for play grated with Schneider's idea of its rhythm. “Estragon is rooted in the earth. Restless. Uncomfortable. Hungry. Rooted. Vladimir is the wanderer. He's curious. He's the Intellect. I would have to keep saying to Bert on stage ‘Get back there. Stay on your mark.' Bert didn't like to do comedy standing still. I kept saying, ‘Bert, you can't move around so much, remember Estragon's got sore feet.'”

In saying this, Schneider was not recognizing another symbolic movement, one closer to the rhythms of human relationships, which also clearly pervades Beckett's play. Beckett's stage directions indicate a flexibility and possibility for movement that Schneider did not see, but which Lahr suspected and could not verbalize.

(1)  They look at each other, recoiling, advancing, their heads on one side, as before a work of art, trembling towards each other more and more, then suddenly embrace, clasping each other on the back. End of embrace. Estragon no longer supported, almost falls.

(2)  They listen, huddled together …They relax and separate.

(3)  … Exit Estragon left, precipitately …He looks up, misses Estragon …He moves wildly about the stage. Enter Estragon left, panting. He hastens to Vladimir, falls into his arms.

(4)  He draws Estragon after him. Estragon yields, then resists. They halt.

(5)  They turn, move apart, turn again and face each other.

Vladimir and Estragon come together out of necessity, yet the closer they get the more impossible it is for them to unite. They grope toward one another, then move away with the frantic momentum of burlesque comedians. Beckett's stage directions chronicle their friendship—a pantomime of loneliness and cowardice that Lahr had distilled in his own comic world through the lion, the prizefighter, the cop. The tramps' movement is never able to resolve itself and end in a lasting embrace. They bounce back from their pratfalls unaware of their plight.

Comedy without movement was impossible for Lahr. He balked at Schneider's dicta, at being asked to harness his energy. Lahr was
suspicious and ignorant of the allegorical reasons at the basis of Schneider's demands. When the director would go on stage with masking tape and place strips where he was to stand, Lahr was shocked. “I began to think to myself—this is all wrong. It's stark. This is the wrong approach to the play. It's dire; it's slow. There isn't any movement.”

Schneider's reverence for Beckett may have accounted for his inflexible direction. His intentions and Lahr's were at a Mexican standoff. Lahr felt stifled; Schneider felt hostile. Finally, Lahr confronted him: “‘This is a comedy scene. These are music hall bits.' I could see it. I could see it because that was my basic training—burlesque. He said, ‘I don't know anything about humor.'”

At that moment, the fate of the play seemed sealed in Lahr's imagination. “He was convinced it was his play from the beginning,” says Schneider. “My problem working with him was to make him realize that there couldn't be a ‘top banana' (a word he kept using) in a show of this kind. The play was a game of give and take, a partnership. Lahr kept insisting, ‘There's a feed, and there's a joke.'”

The experience was painful, but Lahr would learn from his mistakes as would Schneider, who would go on to become one of the most successful directors of contemporary theater. However, in Miami the production of
Godot
met with conflicts at every turn.

Schneider was saddled with Myerberg's stylized set—a mound that faced the audience like a parabola. It hindered the actor's movements, and made the stage environment uncomfortable. Schneider was also disturbed by the fact that Lahr and he were staying in the same hotel, a tactical mistake for anyone who could not cope with Lahr's compulsive worry. Lahr would knock on Schneider's door at six a.m., already groomed and fretting over the day's work. “He wanted to discuss the play,” Schneider recalls. “He didn't want to talk about meaning. He would ask me: ‘Am I right for it?' ‘Is it going to work?' ‘Are we going to be a success?'”

Lahr's predictable perfectionism was matched by a predictable hypochondria. He was extremely difficult, beset nearly every day with a new ailment. A doctor was finally hired to sit in on rehearsals. Schneider felt Lahr's continual interruptions for medical reasons were symptomatic of something else. “We had more doctors around that rehearsal hall than I've ever seen. It was always something about his throat, his voice, an ache here or there. It all had to do with the fact that ultimately he didn't want to be there.”

Schneider's insistence that he refrain from using old mannerisms
made Lahr particularly nervous. The pressure was upsetting to him, but ultimately more creative than he acknowledges. Lahr originally wanted to substitute “gnong, gnong, gnong,” for Beckett's pointed and pathetic “Ah!” He argued, but Schneider prevailed. “If he had inserted his old catch phrase, the tone would have been something else. It would have reminded everyone of
The Wizard of Oz.”
Schneider, aware of the uniqueness of Beckett's play, did not want it filled with Lahr's famous musical-comedy mannerisms from the past. Lahr found new ones that matched his body's potential and the play's content.

Schneider's battles to preserve the text seemed incongruous to Lahr, who wanted to approach experimental theater on the only basis of experience he possessed—the musical-comedy stage. The ultimate arbiter of value was the audience. Anything that was not clear to the people out front or stymied their attention should be immediately disposed of. On that theory, Lahr's first instincts were to cut many of Pozzo's and Lucky's longer speeches. He was unable to relate the minor characters to the broader philosophical propositions of the play.

If Lahr's demands for textual changes were unreasonable, his instincts for the tragicomic had a potential that Schneider's own uncertainties kept him from exploring. While Schneider insisted that the play was a partnership, the melding of mind and body, privately he saw the mind dominating the belly (“The play is not about Estragon, but Vladimir”), a moot distinction that shades the comedy toward tragedy rather than vice versa.

Lahr's insight was from the gut. He knew that laughter would complement Beckett's poetry. Schneider leaned toward the poetry, but was afraid laughter would turn it into a romp. Lahr wanted to move away from the weight of philosophical statement as in Beckett's most beautiful passage, where the hobos try and distinguish the quality of sounds. The passage ends:

The laughter highlights the poetry; by deflating the emotion, the sadness of the situation comes closer to the heart. Schneider appreciated the poetry of that particular passage, but felt that “if
that
dialogue gets laughs, it's over my dead body.”

Lahr sensed laughter even at the height of the tramps' chaos. A messenger from Godot appears but cannot offer any information about his master or when he will arrive. The reaction of Vladimir and Estragon to the boy mirrors not only the blundering sadness of their interminable vigil, but also the laughable intensity of any zealot's commitment to values based on a faith not borne out by experience.

As Estragon shakes the Boy, trying to find out the truth, Vladimir intercedes—

The laughter in the situation is not ebullient burlesque laughter; but that of paradox which acknowledges a darker side of comedy, where pain treads the thin, ambiguous line between pleasure and sadness. Schneider disavowed the comic element here also. “When Estragon says ‘I'm unhappy'—to me that's not a comic moment.”

Lahr's disenchantment with Schneider made it difficult for the director and the rest of the cast. “He'd listen to me when he wanted to. I was a kid director.” This lack of trust created conflicts over simple lines. Schneider recalls Lahr could not understand the line “boldly ignorant apes.” “He wouldn't listen to the line. On stage he would throw it away.”

At other times, Schneider tried to devise methods of communicating the intellectual intention of Beckett's play to Lahr's comic intuition. One of his most successful gambits was known to the cast as “the ping pong game.” Schneider would say to Lahr, “Bert, the game is simply to bat the ball over the net.” When Lahr would stumble on lines that involved this kind of playful repartee, Schneider would remind him, “Bert, that's a ping pong game.” Once he understood the spirit of the tart return, he would leap into the lines with gusto. One of Lahr's
fondest passages of the play is precisely one of Beckett's hilarious volleys:

He wilts, vanquished, and turns away
.

Schneider recalls this moment of success with Lahr vividly. “He loved that. You're dealing with a child, in the best sense of the word.”

No one knew what to expect. To Lahr, Schneider grew progressively more hostile and impatient as the older men had difficulty with their lines. To Schneider, Lahr became a bête noire. He found Lahr “elusive, evasive, constantly trying to get out of rehearsing the play.” For Schneider, it was a conflict “to reach him either physically or mentally.”He likens Lahr to his experience with Buster Keaton, whom he directed in Beckett's only movie,
Film
. “Lahr's reactions to Beckett were just like Buster's. He would do anything for you, but he didn't understand it. Buster always wanted to put in old bits. He'd say, ‘Why don't you let me pick up a pencil the way I did in.' Bert wanted to interpolate old business, too. Keaton was quieter, less persistent.”

Lahr's insecurity mounted with each rehearsal. He wanted to help the material; but the content of the play was not easily within his grasp. His only moment of reassurance come when Tennessee Williams, an investor in the production and also in Florida for the opening of
Sweet Bird of Youth
, which followed
Waiting for Godot
into the Cocoanut Grove, introduced himself after a grueling afternoon of rehearsals. “Bert, you're the only one that feels this play.” The moment was important for Lahr—”It gave me confidence.”