Sleeping Where I Fall: A Chronicle

by Peter Coyote

  In the Diggers, Peter Berg found it possible not only to create events that clarified the line separating inside and outside but also to do so in a manner that changed people from audience to participants. Peter’s term for this transformation was “creating the condition you describe.” Of course the first question was “What is the condition you want to describe?” From the Diggers’ point of view, it was a society liberated from the carnivorous aspects of capitalism, a culture offering more enlightened possibilities for its members than the roles of employee or victim.

  The Diggers will be prominently featured in this narrative later. What is important at this moment are the questions and intentions that eventually led us off the stage and into the streets.

  This Digger vision was soon to claim my allegiance as well—but at the moment I was fascinated with absorbing the rudiments of a new style of acting and other skills particular to a commedia performer.

  My first performance for the troupe was as Dottore, a pompous, caped blowhard with a ruffed collar and black half-mask featuring a bulbous nose. The production was a retooled version of Molière’s The Miser, and though I can no longer remember the political spin we put on it, I have seen excerpts of my performance on an old film and cringe at my substitution of enthusiasm for physical precision.

  Performing outdoors demands a certain vocal power and grandness of scale from the actor. You are competing with traffic, dogs, children, drunks, and the myriad distractions of urban life. Posture and gesture must reinforce (or purposely contradict) the intention of dialogue, and to do this effectively, gestures must be precise. To be precise, a movement must have a clear beginning and end, sharply discriminating it from gestures that precede or follow it. Random movements and nervous fidgets must be rigorously eliminated.

  Movements of commedia characters begin from zero, a technical term for one of several postures that exemplify the fundamental attitudes or attributes of the character. One of Pantalone’s zeros, for instance, is modeled on a duck: chest puffed with self-importance, butt thrust back, left hand raised with the index finger pedantically erect, right hand flat on the belly, head cocked with self-satisfaction, knees bent, and feet almost at right angles to each other. Pantalone has other zeros as well, and when the actor is not moving, he returns to one of those postures to present a clear physical ideogram of the character.

  Because they are so simplified, movements that originate from zero are powerful. It takes much practice, however, to isolate the body’s various parts and edit out all superfluous motion. Try whipping an arm and hand out from the chest and pointing without looking at the hand, as if you were saying, “Never darken my door again!” in a melodrama. Make sure the movement is executed so that the shoulder, arm, hand, and finger finish in a perfectly straight line, parallel to the floor. If the finger dips or rises at the end of the hand, even minimally, the gesture’s visual power will be diminished. Such responses must be automatic, something you could do in your sleep, so that you are free to concentrate on stage business and creative impulses that arise during a performance. This is equally true of knowing your lines. Nothing will stifle an impulse or break concentration more rapidly than having to grope for dialogue. Roman Polanski once phrased it aptly: “If you have to think about hitting the brakes in your car, it’s already too late.”

  The Mime Troupe had adapted commedia dell’arte for contemporary purposes, and consequently our relationship to it was more complex than it would have been had we simply been living in the sixteenth century. Ronnie Davis explained it to us in the following way:

  In a highly stylized play, the actor usually has one task—to play the character. In our adaptations we [give] our actors three jobs: play yourself, play the character and play an Italian who was a commedia performer. The person [must] act himself while reading the script, simply to understand the situation, the conditions, the motives of the character and the point of the play. This is the simple Stanislavsky technique where action and objectives are discovered without trying to perform the text.

  The second layer of refinement or the development of the physical mask requires physical characteristics such as a duck walk for Pantalone; a swinging bravado for the lover; snap, crackle and suspicious looks for Brighella. And accents—French (for lovers), Italian (Dottore and servants), or Jewish and Mexican with their concurrent gestures. The personal attributes of the actor [are] changed or extended to create the mask.

  The third level—historical imitation of Italian actors—require[s] some study of commedia dell’arte and preparation [to] produce a rich stage characterization. Each modern actor [must] find his/her Italian counterpart. Francesco Andreini played Capitano Spavento (ca. 1600); Guiseppe Biancolelli as Dottore; Isabella Andreini as first lady. . . .

  These levels of reality, one concrete (self) and the other two assumed (mask and Italian actor), allowed for constant shifting of characterization and play. When the actor lost the character’s believability or failed to make the audience laugh he could change to the Italian role . . . or when a dog walked across the stage, the performer could break character as Italian actor and comment from his own vantage point, or if he was skilled enough he might stay inside the mask (role) and deal with the intrusion as the character. The ad lib (improvisational wisecrack) was the oil of transition.

  While we were writing scripts and splitting political hairs about content, we would also dedicate long hours to practicing physical and psychic transitions under the drill-sergeant watchfulness of Ronnie and senior members John Robb, Judy Goldhaft, Jane Lapiner, or Sandy Archer.

  It was thrilling, setting up shop in a park under the pungent eucalyptus trees, summoning a crowd, and making them laugh and hoot appreciatively. The archetype of the traveling player is a powerful one, and I felt imbued with it every time we drove our vehicles to a performance site, unloaded our baskets and boxes, and erected the stage. Following the troupe’s notorious arrest the previous year, our audiences became fiercely partisan and appreciative. There could be no better balm for the confidence.

  As my skills developed, I took pride in my newfound ability to improvise with the best of the company. The split consciousness that both participates in and witnesses an event (which had helped me survive my father’s “wrestling lessons”) now served me excellently. One part watched, corrected, anticipated, and strategized while the other part performed. Ironically, I felt whole instead of divided, as if I had found a use for a heretofore extra part of myself. I discovered a natural propensity for movement and goofy looniness. Acting was a way to excel at something that existed outside the construct of winning and losing. It demanded much and was unforgiving of failure, but it was great fun—and best of all, my victories caused no one else pain. In fact, the reverse was true. Audiences want people to succeed onstage. They get nervous if they see lapses of confidence in a performer. When I recognized this fact, it unleashed large amounts of previously conflicted energy in a very constructive manner.

  The unexpected was commonplace at Mime Troupe performances. When church bells drowned out a performance, the entire cast spontaneously began pantomiming speech, pretending that we were screaming at one another and could not be heard. When a noisy drunk clambered onstage in midperformance one day, I embraced him, in character, as if I had mistaken him for a lover. We twirled around the stage together in an infatuated dance, flirting, while the audience roared its appreciation. On the fourth blissful pass, I “accidentally” danced him off the edge of the stage back onto the grass. Whatever pique might have been generated by his dismissal was mitigated by the applause, and he rejoined me onstage for a grand bow while the audience cheered the troupe’s adaptability and his good sportsmanship.

  It is a heady experience (one from which I have never recovered), doing something you love and believe in and getting paid for it. Bonds of friendship and mutual experience thickened rapidly, and before long, I was a certified member of this quirky family. Changed by hard work, new skills, and new ideas, I was establish
ing myself among the other actors as a peer. I remember thinking during my first Thanksgiving dinner with my new family, “This is as good as it gets.” In many ways, this remains true.

  5

  the minstrel show

  Some months after my initiation into the troupe, I was asked to replace John Broderick in the role of Bones in The Minstrel Show. This was either a heartening show of confidence in my ability or represented desperate straits for the troupe, because The Minstrel Show was not only a wildly popular piece but also a rare cultural epiphany perfectly in sync with the historical moment.

  After much group research into that old and well-loved (by whites) theatrical form, the show had been written by Ronnie and Saul Landau and refined through company improvisation. At one time in America there were more than three hundred companies performing in blackface, singing, dancing, and doing “nigger”-joke routines. The troupe turned the form inside out to use it as a vehicle for investigating racial issues.

  Our play was formatted like an authentic minstrel show with six performers (three white and three black) in blackface, curly wigs, sky-blue silk tuxedos, and white gloves. The cast was “fronted” by a white Interlocutor who “controlled” the “darkies,” served as the straight man, and represented “respectable” (white) values.

  The show opened with a high-stepping, tambourine-slapping cakewalk, accompanied by banjos. This was the commedia warm-up raised to a higher level, designed to boost energy and demonstrate to audiences that they were in the hands of skilled performers. The high-spirited “darkies” frolicked and sang under the relaxed control of the benevolent Interlocutor, then segued into old vaudeville groaners. Nothing scary here:

  Inter: Gentlemen, beeeeee seated!

  Gimme: (leaps up) Wish I was rich, wish I was rich, wish I was rich!

  Inter: I heard you the first time, Mr. Gimme.

  Gimme: Did you? But de fairy gimme three wishes, and dem was it.

  Inter: Where did you see a fairy?

  Gimme: On a ferry boat! (All guffaw. Gimme sits.)

  Inter: Mr. Bones, are you a Republican or a Democrat?

  Bones: (jumping up) Oh, I’m a Baptist.

  Inter: Come, come. Whom did you vote for last time?

  Bones: Robinson Crusoe.

  Inter: What did he run for?

  Bones: Exercise! (All yuk yuk. Bones stays standing with Interlocutor.)

  Inter: Now cut out the foolishness. Are you a Republican or a Democrat?

  Bones: Democrat.

  Inter: And your wife is also a Democrat?

  Bones: She was, but she bolted.

  Inter: Bolted the party?

  Bones: No, just me. When I come home late, she bolts de door! (All guffaw.)

  This traditional cross fire reinforced majority views of black people as happy, expressive children. The dynamics on the stage represented the dynamics in the culture at large.

  The first inkling that something was awry appeared during a sentimental rendition of “Old Black Joe.” As the “darkies” turned their backs to the audience and bowed their heads respectfully, the Interlocutor began a mawkish recitation: “I hear those gentle voices calling . . .” But not all the minstrels stood so respectfully. One in particular (the role I inherited) could be observed mimetically unzipping his fly and struggling to remove an extraordinarily large penis that was obstinately tangled in his underwear. Once freed, he began stroking it surreptitiously with concentrated dedication. This furtive masturbation counterpointed the increasingly passionate declamations of the Interlocutor, who by this time was on one knee, weeping copiously. As the chorus sang, “I’m a-comin’, I’m a-comin,” my act of genital worship culminated in an orgasm of preposterous proportions and subsided spasmodically with a bit of stage business involving wiping my white glove on the back of my nearest neighbor as the unwary Interlocutor was being helped offstage in a state of emotional collapse.

  This was not Maria Callas at the Met, but it effectively punctured audience expectations, and the howls of appreciation (or the boos and the sound of blunt objects whistling toward the stage) indicated clearly the audience’s politics. After this deliberately tasteless (but funny) bit of Brechtian commentary, the Interlocutor began to lose control of the stage. Utilizing additional wigs and masks and wearing agitprop signs to identify characters as “White,” “Cop,” “Liberal,” and so forth, the minstrels “mutinied” and mounted their own scenes, reviewing all of “Nego” [sic] history in an acidulous investigation of hypocrisy on both sides of the color line.

  “Nego History Week,” for example, remembered Crispus Attucks, the first black man to be killed in the Revolutionary War. Our hero, played to perfection by the laconic Willie B. Hart, was pushing a broom when he was killed. Toussaint-Louverture, Booker T. Washington, Teddy Roosevelt, George Washington Carver, black soldiers in Vietnam, and Martin Luther King Jr. were all revisited and analyzed from the perspective of the minstrels’ “newly liberated” stance.

  Sections of the show highlighted rancorous dialogues between black “liberals” and “radicals” clarifying their relative positions and strategies. In one chilling scene, a white cop killed a black kid for threatening his authority—with a harmonica. When this scene, which began with a lot of jiving and quick street patter, escalated to the point where the cop pointed his gun and stamped his foot on the hollow stage to create the sound of his fatal shot, the previously rollicking audience froze. The silent tableau of Cop, dead Kid, and horrified Friend could be sustained for an excruciating length of time without the slightest rustle from the crowd.

  The minstrel show appeared at exactly the right historical moment, when the civil rights movement and emerging black consciousness fused with a social upheaval in the nation’s youth to make society appear suddenly permeable and open to both self-investigation and change. Audiences, even uncomfortable ones, of all colors recognized its originality and toughness. Thirty years later, I walked backstage to pay my respects to Anna Deavere Smith after seeing her extraordinary one-woman show about the 1992 Los Angeles riots. I told her, in what must have appeared to be amazing hubris, that I had seen nothing of such aptness, synchronicity, and power since I had had the good fortune to appear in The Minstrel Show years earlier. It was clumsy of me to say so but true, and to some degree the success of both shows depended on their appropriateness to the political moment.

  Part of the gag of the show was that it encouraged audience members to try to distinguish white from black players. In doing this, they were forced to confront their own prejudices, since all the performers played black stereotypes equally well. As actors, we too had been forced to face these issues in developing our characters; we’d had to answer to one another for our own prejudices and unexamined assumptions, and we used this experience to our advantage in provoking the audience.

  We did not skewer only liberals. No piece ripped the scales off buried prejudice as thoroughly as the “Chick/Stud” scene, about a black “Stud” who picks up a white “Chick” in a bar and takes her home. The scene begins just after sex. One of the actors is wearing a White Girl mask with fixed blonde braids and an expression of yearning compassion. Both actors stand on an empty black stage, isolated in single spotlights. The White Girl is fretting and struggling to say something.

  Stud: For Christ’s sake, if you got something to say, say it.

  Chick: What’s wrong?

  Stud: Nothin’s wrong, baby, you got a problem and I was just solving it for you. Felt pretty good, didn’t it? Yeah, the white man invented that problem for black man to solve.

  Their conversation oscillates between stereotypical positions, the Chick being more and more earnestly liberal and the Stud more exaggeratedly self-important:

  Chick: . . . You may have the body of a man, but emotionally you’re a child. You can’t know me as a woman!

  Stud: Woman! Ain’t nobody tole you, baby? You ain’t nothin’ but a white chick. You’re status and satisfaction and revenge. You’re pussy and pale skin and
you know no white man can satisfy you like I can. Now me, I’m different. (At this point the Stud begins taking himself incredibly seriously, puffing himself up.) I’m all NEGRO. I got the smell of Negro and the hair of Negro and all the goddamn passion of Africa and wild animals. (beat) I haven’t got the same hang-ups, have I?

  When the Chick reaches the inane apogee of her position and exclaims passionately, “You do want to love me, you neeeeeed to love me,” the Stud’s response—“Sheeet! You been reading too much James Baldwin”—invariably brings the house to whistles and cheers.

  At this point the minstrel playing the White Chick takes off the mask and skirt and, holding the skirt beneath the mask to create a puppet, moves into the spotlight; the rest of the actor remains in the dark so that the illuminated puppet takes on a life of its own. It moves tenderly, provocatively, toward the Stud. He acts cool at first, then becomes frightened as the Chick comes closer, taunting and coming on to him. The Stud responds violently, grasping the Chick puppet and strangling it as the operator lowers it slowly to the floor. When it is “dead,” the Stud discovers that the skirt and mask are “empty.” The first minstrel, still holding the mask, laughs and is joined by the rest of the cast, also laughing, who chase the Stud offstage, teasing him.