I entered an inner office to find Quintero sitting alone. The usual anonymous faces, other producers and casting directors, were oddly absent from the audition room. Quintero rose to his feet and extended his hand to greet me. He was a big man of Panamanian descent with dark bronzed skin and a pearly white smile. He immediately noticed Tropic of Cancer in my hands, and his face lit up.
“How do you like the book?” he said.
Uh-oh. The book was just going to be a prop, something to burnish my intellectual image. Now the director wanted to discuss it in depth. What the hell was I thinking? This was going to be my undoing.
I responded with some generic praise and quickly shifted the conversation over to Henry Miller’s lectures that I stage-managed at my old acting school. The conversation mercifully veered into questions about Jack Garfein, whom Quintero knew. We had a lively talk about our mutual friend, and I started to relax, enjoying the chat.
I’ve always felt that a little animated conversation at an audition helps to book the job. It lets people in the room see who you really are. On the other hand, if the schmoozing goes on too long, you can lose your focus on the all-important reading. An actor never lands a role because his anecdotes were better than his reading. At last the conversation came to a lull, and I figured it was time we got to work.
Quintero studied me with his piercing brown eyes, like a poker player holding all the aces. The silence started to feel awkward. I lifted my play, ready to read my scene with him.
He finally said, “Very nice to meet you. Thank you for coming in.”
My heart dropped like an anchor. What? No reading? What’s going on?
Quintero thanked me a second time. When the director thanks you for coming, not just once but twice, he is saying you should leave the room, now.
I understood the audition-speak and stood up, shell-shocked. I shuffled out of the room without reading a single line of dialogue. I’d failed at my first and, probably last, New York audition.
I walked up Broadway in a daze, heading back to my uncle’s place on West End Avenue and 71st Street. I replayed the meeting in my mind. What did I do wrong? He must’ve seen some flaw in my character. I was, after all, flaunting a book that I’d never read. That was dumb. My shame shifted to anger. At least they let you read your audition scene at Hollywood interviews. Even if you’re a moron, they give you your shot. New York was even tougher and colder than I’d heard.
I entered my uncle’s apartment and flopped onto the sofa, numb from Quintero’s sucker-punch. The phone’s answering machine had a red light blinking, so I pushed the playback button.
Stark Hesseltine’s voice crackled, “Barry, they want to book you for the role you read for in The Skin of Our Teeth. Give me a call. Congratulations.”
I said aloud, “The part I read for? I didn’t read for anything!”
I was shell-shocked, again, in a good way this time. I couldn’t believe it. I played the message two more times to confirm what I’d heard, and it started to sink in: The first New York audition I ever went to, for the biggest production of the year, and I got it! Damn!
Then, insecurity replaced my elation. I wondered if Quintero realized that I’ve never done any professional theater work before. I’d been in a couple of high school plays and did scenes galore at the Actors and Directors Lab, but that was nothing compared to being in the biggest play of the upcoming Broadway season. I got the shivers.
My Uncle Bernard came home and I announced the news. Being a lifelong New Yorker and very knowledgeable about the theater, he tried to put my fears to rest.
“Quintero never has an actor read for a role,” he said. “It’s belittling. If the casting director brings you in to meet him, he assumes you’ve got talent. You’re going to do fine.”
I tried to take his encouragement to heart, but the goose bumps remained.
I found out later that my uncle was right about Quintero. He doesn’t have actors read for him. He’s more interested in the person’s character and personality, hoping it will fit the role he’s trying to fill.
Apparently, Quintero saw something in me that fit Messenger Boy, a character who is a bit of a braggart and an exaggerator. Maybe he could tell that I hadn’t read Tropic of Cancer after all. Whatever the case, I was headed for Broadway.
Rehearsals commenced four weeks later. The first morning we sat in a big circle. José announced that he had no great vision or personal theme that he wanted to impose on us. It wasn’t a confession of inadequacy or lack of intellectual perception. His plan was to find the reality of the play as our rehearsals evolved, through our mutual exploration of Thornton Wilder’s words. The end result would be organic and truthful. This was the process that Quintero used on all of his plays. It became clear that this was not going to be a network TV kind of experience.
The first reading of the play by the actors began, and I was all eyes and ears. Elizabeth Ashley approached her role with Southern sass and free-flowing intensity. She was playing the part of Sabrina, the outspoken maid who lives with the play’s Antrobus family.
Alfred Drake was cast as Mr. Antrobus. Known best for his work in musicals like Kismet and Oklahoma! Drake read his words as if reading notes off a musical chart, going high and then low. Frankly, he gave his best performance on that first day. Not much changed after that.
Martha Scott, who was playing Mrs. Antrobus, projected an earth mother quality, grounded yet playful.
Steve Railsback was cast in the pivotal role of the son, Henry Antrobus, a part that was originally played by Montgomery Clift in the first Skin production in the 1940s. Railsback impressed me the most in that first reading. He had a brooding, dangerous aura that was perfect for the role Henry, a character that was a surrogate for the Bible’s evil son, Cain. Railsback’s charisma and explosive anger served him well years later when he stunned television audiences playing Charles Manson in the TV miniseries, Helter Skelter.
After the reading, I wanted to get to know Railsback better. He seemed to be the cast member closest to my age. I was hoping to make a friend, or it was going to be a long, lonely journey. After a bit of small talk, Railsback asked if I wanted to go with him to a surprise birthday party at the Actors Studio where he was a member. I was hesitant, not knowing the guest of honor. Railsback assured me it would be okay. I asked who the party was for.
“Elia Kazan,” he said.
Elia Kazan? Director of A Street Car Named Desire, On the Waterfront, and East of Eden? One of the greatest film directors of all time? Hell, yes, I’d like to go to the party!
Going inside the New York Actors Studio on 44th Street was like entering the Vatican of acting schools. This was the training ground for so many great artists: James Dean, Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, Al Pacino; the list of former well-known students goes on and on. The place reeks of history and importance.
We located Kazan. The party had already begun, and actors and actresses surrounded the director. Some of the guests were famous faces while others were up-and-comers like Harvey Keitel, Treat Williams, and Mickey Rourke. Kazan greeted Railsback like a son. The great director had, in fact, discovered Railsback and given him his first lead role in the film The Visitors. What an amazing day: Broadway rehearsals in the morning, parties for Kazan in the afternoon.
After the party, Railsback and I taxied across town to the East Side. His girlfriend, Wendy Sherman, cooked us dinner, a healthy organic cheese and onion pie. Over our meal, he confessed that he was a huge fan of My Three Sons when he was growing up in Texas. He said that he couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw me sitting among the cast members earlier that day. That caught me by surprise. I have always been so naive about the impact of Sons. He sounded more in awe of me than I was of him. That day was the beginning of another hugely influential and important friendship. Railsback became a great inspiration, in my acting and in my life. He still is.
Rehearsals plowed forward. One of the biggest problems Quintero faced was blending the different acting
styles among the show’s stars. Elizabeth Ashley was mercurial, unpredictable, and prone to improvise upon Wilder’s text. She was crafting a character that existed in her own universe. In contrast, Martha Scott was religiously faithful to Wilder’s words and thrived on what the other actors were giving. Alfred Drake was working in his own vacuum, too. From day one, his performance seemed as choreographed and preplanned as a dance step. Once he had rehearsed a scene a couple of times, his performance hardened like cement. Railsback, on the other hand, was full of real emotion and spontaneity, having trained at the Actors Studio.
After work one day, Railsback told me that he accidentally stepped on Drake’s foot in a scene they were rehearsing. The grand old man of musical theater didn’t bat an eyelash, completely ignoring the fact that his shoe was pinned to the floor. Steve said he purposely pressed harder with his boot to see if he could get a reaction from Drake, anything that resembled human emotion. The elder actor ignored the pain and plowed ahead, singing his lines without a care in the world. Not exactly “in the moment” acting.
As for my big scene, I was the Messenger Boy who bursts into the Antrobuses’ home to warn them about the dangers of a new ice age that’s occurring. For those of you who’ve never read The Skin of Our Teeth, the play follows the Antrobus family through the trials of three historical epochs: act one takes place during the ice age; act two is in modern times at a Shriner’s convention where corruption and vice run amuck; act three is set in the future, after the apocalypse.
Quintero wanted me to enter my scene with great urgency; the glacial ice was only blocks away from the Antrobus home and about to swallow it up.
The first time I performed my scene, I gave myself an imaginary prior circumstance (an actor’s device). I envisioned a pack of feral dogs chasing me to the Antrobuses’ front door, hoping this might energize me with a sense of panic. I made my entrance in the scene and barely got two words of dialogue out of my mouth before Quintero held up his hand.
“Hold on, Barry. I want you to make your entrance again, with more urgency this time.”
I nodded and went offstage. This time I pictured a gang of thugs, cold and hungry, roughing me up. I imagined escaping from them and running to the Antrobus house to take refuge ... and then I burst onto the stage to begin the scene. I got through my first speech about the massive glaciers, and then Quintero stopped me again.
“Stop, please. Barry, I need to really feel how dire your situation is. It’s not quite there yet. Do it over.”
I nodded obediently, but I could feel a knot in my stomach tightening. The director wanted something from me, and I was not delivering.
I did the entrance a couple more times, trying to add more prior circumstances. I combined the angry thugs with the feral dogs, and threw in a charging herd of wooly mammoths, too. Still, Quintero wasn’t satisfied.
Quintero came up onto the set and wrapped an arm around my shoulder. I thought he was going to escort me to the nearest exit. Instead, he smiled, mischief in his eyes.
“I want you to try something, Barry,” Quintero said, giggling. “Run.”
“Uh ... run? Right here?” I asked.
“Yes. Run. Go ... Now!” Quintero replied.
I looked out at the entire company of actors who were sitting in the audience watching. I felt like running ... right out the door. I started to jog around the stage.
“Faster!” Quintero barked.
I ran faster.
“Jump over those chairs!” Quintero said. “Don’t stop tell I tell you.”
I jumped and ran around the stage as Quintero went back into the audience to watch the action.
Quintero watched me leap chairs and tear around the stage for a few more minutes and then he yelled, “Okay, Barry, now make your entrance!”
I went right into the scene, huffing and puffing, trying to catch my breath as I spoke of the advancing ice and the people suffering. Instinctively, I flopped down exhausted on a sofa next to Sabrina (Ashley’s character) and started to flirt with her! Our world was supposedly freezing over, but I still had time for carnal thoughts about the sexy maid. It was an odd moment, but human and amusing. All kinds of interesting behavior evolved out of that simple but brilliant direction.
When the scene finished and I made my exit, Quintero led the cast in applause. Lesson learned.
We had four more weeks of rehearsals in New York and two weeks of out-of-town performances in Birmingham, Alabama. Despite Quintero’s directorial skill and Wilder’s brilliant words, the play was a chaotic mess. The warring acting styles of the stars certainly contributed to the difficulties. More than that, Skin is a damn hard piece of theater to mount. Previous productions, with stellar casts that included Fredric March, Tallulah Bankhead, and Montgomery Clift, all failed to master the play’s challenging structure, which unfolds like an evening of one-acts, each one being set in a different epoch. We were in a constant struggle to bring the creative elements together, performances and the written word. Occasionally the play gelled, but nobody seemed to know why or how to recreate the magic.
As for my work in the play, I was having a ball playing to live audiences for the first time. Quintero certainly had other bigger problems to focus on, but he took time to critique my work every night. He liked everything I was doing except for the last sentence in my final speech. In that particular passage, I recited the many different ways that information is disseminated: from word of mouth, to newspapers, radios, and TV, all of man’s amazing inventions. I was excited as hell in my delivery, and Quintero approved. When it came to the final line, “What hath God wrought?” the director wasn’t satisfied. He wanted to hear wonder and awe in my voice, and I wasn’t getting it.
To help me discover what was missing, Quintero would cite personal experiences to illuminate the feeling. That was his favorite directorial method with actors. He told me how it felt coming to New York City from rural Panama and seeing the blazing, electric power of Times Square: “What hath God wrought?” Another night he spoke to me about a newsreel that showed a fiery atom bomb exploding and its subsequent devastation: “What hath God wrought?” All his examples were evocative, and each night I’d try to make them my own.
After the show, Quintero would grin and say, “You were quite good tonight, except for the last line about ... ” That was the routine that followed practically every preview performance. I wanted to please him, but no matter what I tried, the line reading was not quite right. It was driving me nuts.
After two weeks of shows in Birmingham, we boarded a plane to take us to Washington, D.C., and I was still grappling with the dreaded line. As I looked out the window of the flying aircraft, gazing at the patchwork of farmland and twisting rivers far below, I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was Quintero.
“We’re flying at thirty thousand feet at five hundred miles per hour. Birds can’t even keep up!” the director said, shaking his head. “Imagine that? ... What hath God wrought?” His eyes twinkled, passing along yet another note about my troubled line.
It was an “ah-ha!” kind of moment for me. Something clicked, and from then on I nailed the line in most every performance. Quintero would grin and nod afterward. What a gentle and persistent soul he was.
We began our final week of previews in Washington, D.C., before the gala opening at the Kennedy Center. The play was still a hodge-podge theatrical event, wildly out of sync in the acting department.
Not only was the play on unsteady ground, our inspired leader, Quintero, was about to fall off the wagon. He had a notorious history of alcoholism and started work on Skin sober and clear headed. As stress of the production mounted, you could see his hands quivering from the nervous tremors.
It’s probably not fair to point fingers at anyone and say they were the cause of his fall. Nonetheless, Liz Ashley’s liberties with the play’s text were driving poor Quintero crazy. Every night in previews, she’d eat up more and more scenery, strutting around in a skimpy maid’s outfit that was straight out o
f a cheap porno flick. Her hammy performance, complete with ad libs and winks to the audience, was shifting the focus of the play onto her character rather than the plight of the Antrobus family. Quintero tried hard to rein her in, hoping to get some balance in the show, but Ashley was beyond direction. She was doing a solo act, and the other actors were just props in her burlesque performance.
Opening night finally arrived, and we had one of our better nights. The show actually came together in some weird way. Call it luck, opening-night energy, whatever, but the play had drive and purpose, and the audience loved it.
The major newspapers gave Skin decent reviews and heaped praise upon Ashley for her over-the-top performance. Perhaps she realized that the only way for our disjointed production to succeed was to go bonkers onstage every night.
Of course, that’s not the way Quintero saw it. He truly felt that her performance was distorting the play. The more Quintero begged her to tone it down, the more Ashley ad-libbed, particularly now that the critics had validated her instincts.
Quintero couldn’t take it anymore. He sold his interest in the show and formally announced he would be leaving. His work as director was done, and now the play belonged to the players. It was like having your father tell you he’s moving away and that your crazy Aunt Liz will be in charge now. We gulped and prepared for a wild ride.
From then on, every actor was looking out for himself. If you saw the play on Friday and again on Saturday, you’d see a different performance. Luckily, our run in Washington didn’t depend on media reviews or sold-out shows to survive. There was big money behind the play. It was the Kennedy Center’s celebration of our country’s two hundredth birthday. Nobody wanted to see the first gala show disappear in a week or two. That would have looked utterly unpatriotic.
We marched forward for another six weeks of performances. No matter what dramas were occurring onstage or backstage, I was having a blast.
Working at the Kennedy Center had other perks, too. One of my favorite things to do was watch the great ballet dancers Margo Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev perform at the opera house. After performing my big scene in act one, I had about forty-five minutes to kill until I came on again in the second act as a drunken conventioneer (I did two other smaller roles in addition to the Messenger Boy).
The Importance of Being Ernie: Page 14