Notes on a Cowardly Lion

by John Lahr

Actors Talk About Acting

  Lahr was conscious of Bottom’s responses toward others as much as his faux pas. “The laughter was mostly an attitude, a reaction to Thisbe, to the court audience when they were making fun of me. They’d laugh at me. I’d get angry. I always wanted to get off, leave the stage. Some of them would hold me back. I’d always complain to Quince in pantomime what they were doing to me, that they were so bad …”

  Lahr proudly claimed that he never changed a word of Shakespeare’s text (“there are a lot of people out front, devotees, who know the play better than you do, and if you change the text they resent it”). But he added his own touches to Bottom’s disastrous denouement as Pyramus. He was able to move the role from travesty to something more human and complex—a situation approaching satire.

  When a wardrobe mistress offered to taper Bottom’s outfit for him, Lahr got an idea, from which he fashioned the rest of his performance. “I had them make a special belt which I had fixed so that the dagger I wore in the scene really held up the belt. When I took the dagger and stabbed myself, I did a death scene with my pants falling down.” He added an extra fillip by trying to wriggle back into the pants like a child catching up with a hula hoop. Lahr also managed to get sufficiently annoyed at Thisbe as they spoke through the wall that he stuck his fingers in her eyes. “It was one of the biggest laughing scenes I’ve ever done.”

  Lahr’s buffoonery shared much with the Shakespearean wildness. As a clown he had always carried his exploration of sounds and gestures beyond the demands of ordinary speech. These flights of spontaneity related to Shakespearean tradition, and made it easy for him to adapt to Bottom’s style, even if it sometimes was incomprehensible to drama critics.

  Interviewer: You say that you put gnong, gnong, gnong here in the role of Bottom because you felt it fitted. Yet you may change it—why?

  Lahr: You see, the reason I may change it is this. I don’t think that Shakespeare, when he wrote this, ever figured a fella would do that. I understand that whoever played Bottom made noises like a donkey or some sound that conveyed that it was braying.… I will let the audience decide … They’re liable to say what the hell is he putting that in here for.

  Interviewer: Have you made a study of all sounds of animals?

  Lahr: No, no. I’ve made a study of nothing.

  Interviewer: You just neighed like a horse.

  Lahr: Well, you hear a horse, you hear a horse! I did it one day, and it sounded all right. I never neighed like a horse before.

  Actors Talk About Acting

  Even though repertory added prestige to his career, he was not anxious to carry on work in the classics. “They’ve asked me to do Falstaff and the gravedigger in Hamlet at Stratford. I thought Falstaff was too much of a departure at my age, too much of a challenge. I just didn’t want to work that hard. I’m a perfectionist, when I go into a thing, I work hard. Falstaff would be a tremendous job.”

  But the reviews from his Shakespeare tour are mounted on a placard in his bedroom; and his success made him something of a Shakespearean scholar at the Lambs Club. Complaining about material, yet spurning the classics; fretting over money, but looking upon repertory work as the last resort (“I guess if I needed to eat, I’d do it”), Lahr’s intentions are contradicted by his instincts for theatrical excellence.

  Why does he balk? His comedy has awed critics and been catered to by America’s theatrical talent—but he refuses to see himself as a creator. In his eyes, he is a craftsman, in as mundane an enterprise as his father’s upholstery business. Repertory theater raises an idea of work for which he has neither the social conscience nor the youthful zest. Can comedy be taught? Can actors learn from something as private as Lahr’s personal movements? People have told him “yes”; he is flattered by their confidence, but cynical of the outcome. In his experience, theatrical history is made by individuals. His theater training conceived the stage as an individual vehicle, not a group sport. He resists anything that hints at idealism. “Will you stop this artistic stuff!” he says, in one of his many final statements on the subject. “I know my business. Okay, so maybe it would be more satisfying to do Waiting for Godot off-Broadway or join the APA. But you can’t pay your rent with a bag of satisfaction, can you?” His infuriating materialism is contradicted by another insecurity. “You’ve already sold me to the repertory. What makes you think they’d want me? They haven’t asked me.”

  Repertory theater may offer the possibility for change in the performing arts, but Lahr cannot understand the necessity for it. His eyes can only see the last testaments of old-world “quality.” Mansions have given way to skyscrapers; theater people are now “intellectuals.” Comedy, as he knew it, has gone out of vogue, its present practitioners self-conscious and limited; actors are overpraised and undertrained. Even the nature of entertainment has taken a turn for the worse in his eyes. Where once songs had sheen and polish, they are now jagged with social protest and statement that offend his sense of simple diversion. Movies (mostly foreign) astound him with their frankness. (“Why, I’ve seen everything there is to see on the screen. Nothing’s left to the imagination.”) He sees decadence in the present without understanding the injustices of the past. “Once, when I was up in Poole’s buying shoes (I think they were seventy dollars then, now they’re a hundred and thirty) an old lady said something I’ll never forget. She told me, ‘Young man, the one thing this generation has lost is a sense of quality.’ And you know, she was right.”

  Lahr cannot see the quality in repertory or the importance of his participation in it. Sitting in front of his television, shaking his head in disgust at the headlines, he moves away from the world. He dreams of getting away from the city he can never leave, of learning Spanish in order to live cheaply in Majorca or getting a cottage on an inland Florida waterway so he can fish and breathe “good air,” returning to New York when jobs come up. His voice rises when he contemplates his vision. He points, without looking into anyone’s eyes, toward the world he fears. “Filth! Rape! Beatniks!… That’s what we have today in everything. In our movies, on our stages, in our society. What is it? Can you tell me? It can’t be a reaction to the War, that’s been over nearly twenty years.”

  Lahr’s final bout with the classics was in 1966, when he played Pisthetairos in Aristophanes’ The Birds in the first (and last) Ypsilanti Greek Theater Festival in Michigan, a curious repertory venture that spent a half million dollars to revive ancient literature and to lure stars to participate in the event. For Lahr, the part (as well as the price) was right. He was receiving thirty-five hundred dollars a week for four performances, a car, and free hotel accommodations. A similar contract had been arranged for Dame Judith Anderson (Lahr refers to her ambiguously as “The Dame”), who was starring in Aeschylus’ Oresteia. The repertory intention reflected the usual regional confusion between cultural excellence and booster spirit. By committing itself to the star system necessary to attract tourists to the region, the Festival unwittingly initiated the economics of inevitable destruction. Before the plays even opened, the Festival had run out of funds; it was forced to solicit its operating costs of thirty-nine thousand dollars each week during its four-month engagement.

  When The New York Times announced Lahr’s adventure, it was not hard to see the proximity of Aristophanes’ intention to Lahr’s obsessions.

  The character Mr. Lahr will play is sick of bureaucracy, high prices, and taxes. He wants to leave a war-exhausted country to live in Cloud-Cuckoo Land (a sort of Utopia situation between gods and men), where he can live in peace.

  If the impulse of Greek comedy was to thumb one’s nose at authority, Lahr had an instinctive sympathy with the political anarchy Aristophanes was suggesting to Athens in the fifth century B.C.The Greek comic theater had resembled a musical revue, with songs and dancing. Its comedians had been given free rein in the festivities, with the ultimate effect being more theatrical than literary. Lahr responded to Aristophanes’ free-wheeling format; Aristophanic humor
, like Lahr’s, came from a conservative impulse that was skeptical of change. As he admitted to Newsweek: “I never knew Aristophanes was a writer of comedy … I did this stuff in burlesque. His stuff is all such fun and satire—of religion, legislators, avarice, war. He was a reformer, even more than Dickens—that’s what I think in my unerudite way.”

  Lahr was in for more surprises. The director, Alexis Solomos, who had made his reputation directing Greek comedy, sent assistants to block Lahr’s show, a Greek custom that confounded the American star. The score to The Birds was not available until two weeks before opening. But most ludicrous of all, the translation on which Lahr had accepted the job (Walter Kerr’s) was changed on arrival because the director, heeding the advice of a Michigan classics professor, had chosen the William Arrowsmith version. In all this confusion, the American star system and the repertory idea locked horns.

  Lahr found the translation unactable, hollow instead of sensuous, antique where it should have been current. “It was stilted and dull. It wasn’t funny; there weren’t any jokes in it. I understand that in Greek comedy the comedian was supposed to take charge and do anything he wanted in the play.” With this vague historical mandate, Lahr instituted his own changes. In one speech Pisthetairos bemoans the many degradations to the bird kingdom, one of which is being served as food. Arrowsmith translated the Greek:

  And then you’re taken, they sell you as tiny hors d’oeuvres for a lunch And you’re not even sold alone but lumped and bought by the bunch.

  Lahr cut out everything in the stanza but the most visceral response—to eating. His rewrites are more playful and vivid:

  They hunt and kill you when they can. And if that isn’t enough, they fling you in a dish, throw sauce in your face, and call you a casserole, a fricassee, a la cacciatore …

  In Lahr’s mouth, the word “fricassee” becomes as scurrilous a blasphemy as “zounds.”

  The impulse to make the classics contemporary has become fashionable over the years. If Lahr rewrote in order to perform the work, he ran into conflicts with Aristophanes’ outspokenness. Lahr, who loved the vulgar, balked at blatant use of it. “Some of the lines in the translation are salacious; and I thought they would offend the audience. There’s such a thing as doing double entendre cleverly. You couldn’t say ‘shit’ or ‘fart’ and do it subtly, could you? I had to say other things. Ruby Dee played the goddess Iris, and one of my lines to her was, ‘You sail my way again and I’ll lay my course up your beautiful legs; and believe me, you’ll be one flabbergasted goddess when you feel the triple ram of this old hulk.’ Having a following of children through The Wizard of Oz and the commercials, I thought it would hurt my career, so I refused to do it. The director insisted that I speak the lines. Well, I did it for one performance in our first preview. Every time I said these words, you could feel a natural tenseness and absolute silence in the audience. No laughter—nothing. The next day, the Ypsilanti paper came out and said the play was not only vulgar but totally unacceptable to the audience in Ypsilanti, which I knew it would be. It was a church-going community, and I was almost sure that, if these words weren’t deleted, the ministers would go to their pulpits and preach against it. I had no recourse but to call Equity.”

  Suddenly the defender of public morals, Lahr wanted to expurgate the text. His role of censor got national attention; but his censorship was tenuous. His tomcat’s leer mocked his official statements to the contrary. What he really wanted was to eliminate vulgarity without wit. But he was at home with innuendo when defying the audience and speaking, as Aristophanes’ henchman, back at the critics.

  Every bird will take to the air and cover you

  With the vilest vituperation.

  For a man who balked at obscenity on stage, his biggest laugh came when Pisthetairos and his crony watch a female bird being hotly pursued by a male. When the crony inquired about the species of her lover, Lahr replied, “That must be her husband—the horny pecker.”

  Lahr thought of leaving the production instead of making a tedious and painful stand about it. Mildred, writing from his trailer dressing room adjacent to the ball field, confided—

  I really feel for your father. He is having great difficulty with the words. I’m afraid to say anything for fear he’ll quit. I think this is important for his career.

  An Equity ruling assured Lahr’s stay at Ypsilanti. They said that while the director had artistic control of the production, Lahr did not have to say anything he did not think proper for the stage. The news was leaked to the press; and Lahr became the topic of controversy.

  The most vociferous attack come from John Ciardi of Saturday Review, who, although he had not read Arrowsmith’s stage translation or seen the production, skewered Lahr for hiding his career behind children. Arrowsmith was a renowned Greek scholar; and in tampering with academic truth, Lahr raised invective as well as eyebrows. “The obscenity wasn’t funny,” says Lahr. “It was against all the basics of theater—which is enjoyment. I wanted to make the audience laugh—which I did. If I hadn’t rewritten that translation and played it the way it was—audiences would have walked out.” Ciardi saw things differently, offended by Lahr’s claim that the language was “not fit for children” and anxious to point out that vulgarity, violence, and sexuality were swallowed wholesale by adolescents with every television hour.

  No, Mr. Lahr, it won’t work. If your psyche feels uneasy about the vocabulary of Aristophanic gusto, that of course is understandable.

  … You don’t know me, Mr. Lahr, and I can’t reasonably ask you to take my word for the essential Greek of it. But I know you do know Arrowsmith and I know he will bear me out. If you really want to know something about Greek theater, ask him. And if you don’t want to know about it, what are you doing in it … I know you mean well—or I’m willing to pretend I believe so—but I insist on believing Aristophanes meant better …

  August 13, 1966

  Lahr was protecting his audience, but also himself. He was not a moralist, although his laughter burlesqued human values. He lived for an audience’s response and in fear of its silence. Critics, like Ciardi, argued in the name of poetry, but Lahr was trying to keep alive the comic intention on stage. Lahr’s freedom, his comic ad libs, were in the Aristophanic tradition. As Robert Corrigan points out in his essay on Aristophanes—

  Like our late George S. Kaufman, or more recently Bob Hope, Aristophanes was a master of the phraseology and attitude of the wisecrack. But the basic strategy of the wisecrack is to keep the audience with you.

  Lahr knew he could not hold an audience’s good spirits with vulgarity; he also realized that Greek mythology and politics were dusty footnotes to contemporary life. He appended his assortment of modernisms. When Ruby Dee made a spectacular “flying” entrance, Lahr put her in place, exclaiming, “You interplanetary Peter Pan.” When a two-man horse cantered in, Lahr topped the gag, saying, “Ye Gods, it’s Pegasus.” He sang the “Road to Mandalay,” relying on his vibrato “m’s” to carry to the back of the ball park; and he stumbled hilariously over ancient Greek names (“Agamem-nem-nem”)—with the same droll simplicity he spelled them out phonetically in his script. He dismissed poet and priest as ruler of Cloud-Cuckoo Land with blows from an inflated bladder; and his cop act echoed through his retorts to a finely plumed female who strutted by—“Great Zeus, what a hunk of stuff!” Occasionally, he was forced to comment on the planes that droned over the stadium or the weather, which interrupted many afternoons in the amphitheater. After one thunderstorm, which left the stage looking like an aerial photograph of the Great Lakes, Lahr entered and, noticing the puddles, observed, “This is the biggest birdbath in the world.”

  Lahr’s performance was Aristophanic even if the production was not. The music was reduced to the clarion call of a burlesque trumpet; the dances were cut, at the last minute, by the director. Yet Lahr’s performance had a fullness that compensated for a cast not completely professional and an enterprise that never made up its mind whether
it was opting for Broadway or repertory. The London Times was, perhaps, the most judicious appraiser of the performance, commenting that The Birds offered “the spectacle of Lahr in spirited but unequal combat with literature.”

  The spectacle had a humor and special integrity for his family, who watched him work in temperatures that mounted to 100º on the open stage. The man who slumped in his dressing-room chair during intermission with a thermometer in his mouth, worrying about his health, the audience, the New York Mets, his children’s seats, took surprising charge of himself on stage. The performance discovered dimensions of energy that the audience saw only as carefree delight.

  He loped off stage like a startled cow—ungainly and cumbersome, trying to remain inconspicuous in his old age. At the end of the play—his nose reddened like a burlesque top banana, his back decorated with flimsy feathers—his movements recalled many evenings in other roles and the fantasies he had tried to tell us as children. The conviction of his playing expressed an understanding beyond the words he knew for it. His face was wrinkled like an apple too long in the sun; his head festooned with a hat that made him look like a Jewish cockatoo. He rode haughtily astride a chariot, his eyebrows at self-important right angles to his eyes. He won the Queen; he flourished the thunderbolt; and for two hours, at least, he ruled the world with a hellion’s gaiety. The key to the city of Ypsilanti (and his salary) never seemed as substantial as his playing or the enjoyment he created.

  Ypsilanti proved that low-comic humor, as a specialty, could pass for satire but not substitute for it. Critics would praise Lahr’s artistry while bemoaning the tameness of the adaptation. Lahr, predictably, pointed to the box-office receipts, where The Birds outgrossed Oresteia.

  He had helped the festival acquire international attention in its first year; but his salary foreshadowed the inevitable extinction of such classical junkets for the future. He had managed, at seventy, to turn a sure disaster into an enjoyable evening. But it was a fatuous and finally self-destructive battle, a fight he waged often during the decade to maintain his own sense of theater for audiences whose view of the world had been changed by mass media. Ypsilanti was a personal success. But the Festival had been drained of funds, its intention being impossible to fulfill under Ypsilanti’s self-imposed circumstances.