The Wind in the Reeds

by Wendell Pierce

  Out of the underground I would emerge into the dazzling light, clean lines, and open space of the Lincoln Center complex on Manhattan’s West Side. There I was, a wide-eyed pilgrim making his way into these iconic temples of the arts. My mission: to study drama and technique at the highest level possible. In front of me stood the Metropolitan Opera. To the side, Alice Tully Hall, and just beyond that, the Juilliard School. I have made it to the inner sanctum, I thought. If I can make it here, I will be initiated into the craft.

  This was the big time. The people teaching my classes in the day were often working on Broadway that night. They were coaching the world’s best actors, they were being quoted in The New York Times. It made me aware of the stakes of the world this kid from Pontchartrain Park was now a part of. It gave me such clarity. There were no guarantees, of course; I could always fail. But the opportunity that had opened up before me was not an illusion, and the future as an artist that I had only dreamed about at NOCCA was much closer to reality.

  It was all on me. It was time to get to work.

  From the very beginning, Juilliard impressed upon me the importance of drive, of focusing on what’s important and not letting go. New Orleans is a wonderful amalgam of culture and people and coming together in a community that lives its art, but when I got to New York, I realized that there were thousands of talented people who understand and appreciate what art is and who want to pursue it as a vocation. If I didn’t step up my game, I was going to be left behind.

  Part of that is simple professionalism, but there was more to it than that. I began to understand that I had entered into a covenant with the community of artists, living and dead, and that I was a novice who had a responsibility to learn all I could from them to uphold the values of the fellowship. The deep knowledge of and sacrifice for the art, the craft, the history, and the culture of drama would be necessary if I were to truly answer the calling I took as sacred and rise to the top.

  In New Orleans, you tended to create from your own experience. In New York, I came to understand that there are so many people who have gone before me on this same journey and who have confronted the same challenges I will confront. I learned the importance of learning from them. The Juilliard experience taught me to discipline my individual passion according to the accumulated wisdom of the community. That’s how I would discover and hone my own voice. This is not something they teach you in the classroom; it’s in the ethos of a place like Juilliard.

  It doesn’t come instantly, though. When I first arrived, I thought NOCCA had given me so much training that there was nothing new to learn. That first semester at Juilliard, I discovered how wrong I was. We worked on the basics—on breath, on articulating vowel sounds, diphthongs, and consonants—but we also were introduced to new concepts. The late director John Stix taught us about the concept of sense memory, which is the idea that your body can have a physical reaction to the presence of powerful memories brought to mind. In class exercises, he asked each of us to make ourselves still and try to call to mind a smell, a touch, a sound, and to see what the memory would do to our bodies.

  At first I couldn’t even wrap my head around this. Then, as I watched the other students discover sense memory, I began to understand.

  I’ll never forget watching this happen to my classmate Ralph Zito. He closed his eyes and induced a sense memory experience. With his eyes still shut, he told the rest of us that he had put himself in the moment when he learned his father had died.

  Stix asked Ralph more questions about the details of that moment and led Ralph through it. Ralph said that the phone rang.

  “Hear that phone,” said John. “What does it sound like?”

  Suddenly, we saw the pain take over Ralph’s body. “I wish I could get that sound out of my head,” he keened. “I wish it could be gone.” He began describing how painful the sound of the ringing phone was. Without knowing what he was doing, Ralph made the rest of us feel the existential agony of an ordinary telephone ring.

  That’s when I came to a new understanding of what acting was: the creation of an inner world so strong, of a conflict so powerfully delineated, that it induces behavior. You don’t have to think, How am I going to do this scene? You create in your mind the reality of your character’s situation, and you do it with such intensity and specificity that the acting flows naturally. It doesn’t even seem like acting.

  The sense memory class revealed to me something I had experienced in New Orleans but had not understood. When I was fourteen, I was in a play called Sunshine, in which my character, a black boy, fell in love with a white girl. I can’t remember the name of the actress who played opposite me, but I recall that as we rehearsed our scenes over and over, the growing physical attraction between us was palpable.

  But we seldom talked offstage. The scene culminated in a kiss, but out of respect for our young ages, the director said we could stop short of the actual kiss in rehearsal. In the first dress rehearsal, though, the director said that now we were going to have to kiss. There was a moment of silence. We were both professional, and we executed the scene flawlessly. That was one of the first times I really understood what a loving kiss was, and how it envelops the whole moment, is all encompassing. You could have heard a pin drop in that audience.

  Thinking back on that experience from the perspective of Juilliard, I realized that I had not fallen in love with the girl. Rather, we had both worked so hard in rehearsal, and delved so deeply into our characters and immersed ourselves in such a profound emotional understanding of what these two characters were going through, that the truth of the moment simply flowed through us. That was the first experience I ever had with catharsis, when I realized that art can truly move people to tell the truth.

  In text class, I learned how to study the language and text of a play to prepare my role. Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter, for example, teaches the observant actor how to deliver his lines as the Bard wrote them. The rhythm inherent in each line of metered verse shows which words, or parts of words, Shakespeare believed to be most important to convey meaning and disclose the character’s motivations. Actors who play Shakespeare have to know how iambic pentameter works so they can understand who their characters really are and convey that understanding to the audience. The meter of Shakespeare’s lines is a coded set of instructions for the actors.

  Juilliard also taught me the critical importance of historical research in creating a role. When I played the Reverend Hosea Williams, the civil rights leader in the film Selma, I immersed myself in the world of the 1960s struggle against segregation. I learned all I could about Williams and the experiences he carried with him to that fateful moment on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge at the film’s climax.

  Hosea Williams had fought under General George S. Patton in World War II and had been seriously injured in a Nazi bombing; he had to spend a year in the hospital recovering. But he earned a Purple Heart. After the war, back home in Georgia and still wearing his country’s uniform, Williams dared to drink from a whites-only water fountain. A white mob beat him so severely that authorities called not an ambulance, but an undertaker. The hearse driver saw faint signs of life, and instead of taking Williams to the mortuary, took him to the hospital.

  This was part of what was in Hosea Williams’s mind as he marched across that bridge toward a white mob and a phalanx of armed Alabama state troopers and a local posse armed with tear gas, whips, clubs, and chains, poised to attack. When I walked over that same bridge in Williams’s footsteps, portraying Williams for the cameras, I had those same thoughts in my mind. I drew on my Juilliard training to allow Hosea Williams to inhabit me physically: my voice, my breath, and everything about the way I moved in that scene.

  If you have studied the script and its language, researched your character and the background of the story you’re telling, and deployed sense memory techniques, and if you have integrated all of these approaches, then when the moment
comes and you are walking across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, as the cameras record, you don’t have to think about what you’re doing. You have created a world so vividly in your mind that all you do is live in the moment, and the truth of the character rolls through you like thunder.

  These principles became foundational for my approach to acting. I have used them throughout my career. That’s when I first became aware that acting isn’t simply about performance, about reciting lines in a convincing way. It is much closer to psychology than I had considered, or even to religion. It is about cultivating the ability to open yourself to a powerful spirit, and at the right moment make that spirit incarnate in your character, and in turn make that spirit, and that character, come to life in the hearts and minds of your audience, in that moment of communion.

  What the pagan did within a sacred circle, what the Catholic priest does at the altar during mass, and what the actor does onstage are all intimately connected. Each of us stops time with our liturgies and draw down the gods so that all present can commune with the sacred and live for a moment within the eternal.

  I learned this and so many other things in my first semester at Juilliard. And I learned how small I was in the face of the task ahead. I had so much to learn, but I was alive in a way I had never been, and I was ravenous. I understood how easily you could work at acting from nine in the morning to eleven at night, six days a week, and still feel that there wasn’t enough time.

  No doubt about it, I was in the right place.

  I wasn’t entirely without friends in New York. When they weren’t on the road playing music, Wynton and Branford Marsalis, my friends from NOCCA, would go out with me. One was a fellow Juilliard student, the other a recent graduate of Berklee College of Music. They invited me to hit the clubs with them. In the early 1980s, the Marsalis brothers were the new young lions in town. In their company, I went to Sweet Basil, the Village Vanguard, Lush Life, all iconic jazz clubs, and saw musicians like Art Blakey, Dizzy Gillespie, and others whose work I knew only from record albums. There they were, in the flesh, playing with a sense of freedom, individuality, and abandonment that was intoxicating to watch. Whatever sense of discipline and order Juilliard instilled in me by day, those nights in the jazz clubs gave me the experience of release—and this too was an important part of the making of me as an artist. Here I was, at the center of the world, working all day at one of the best acting schools in the country, hanging out with the Marsalis brothers at night and meeting legendary jazz musicians who shared their own journeys with me. I didn’t have time to miss home.

  I learned quickly that the total freedom those jazzmen celebrated onstage did not come naturally. They practiced all day, shedding (as in, go to the woodshed and work hard) so they would be ready at night to cut loose. Wynton and Branford introduced me to these musicians, who imparted their own lessons about what it meant to be a real artist. “Wendell, you have to shed, you have to shed,” they would say.

  Night after night of seeing and hearing this at clubs all over New York created a work ethic within me, and a way to approach my studies. I saw in the jazzmen how the greatest artists and the greatest art combine formality with improvisation. Once you have mastered the details of your craft/art and have absorbed them so deeply into your muscles and bones that you don’t have to think about them, then you can release them and express your own individuality. You become the art you create.

  Shedding, I discovered, was as important to me as an actor as it was to the jazz musicians. You shed and you shed and you shed until you can perform your lines with a sense of total abandon. If you’ve constructed your performance well and have shedded to the limit of your endurance, when you say that first line, the rest of the character falls into place, like pins in a lock that opens your best performance with just the right key, like a row of falling dominoes.

  The best example from my career was in 1992, seven years after I graduated from Juilliard. I was playing Boy Willie in the Broadway production of August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson. I was brought on as an understudy for the play’s star, Charles S. Dutton. For some reason, the producers hid from me that Dutton was leaving the show and that this epic role would probably fall to me. I had two weeks to prepare.

  My buddy Victor Mack and I holed up in an apartment and shedded day and night, working on the play. For two weeks I drilled myself on the script and watched every performance during that time. Then the night came when I took over the role. Everyone else in the cast had been performing it for almost two years. They knew how to breathe together. But it would all be new to me.

  In the opening scene, Boy Willie bangs on a living room door offstage. His first line, addressed to another character, is, “Doaker, I’m here!” The audience hears the pounding and the shouting before the lights come up. I was so nervous I could barely stand up, and certainly I couldn’t bang on the door.

  There was a wooden handle and a pallet on the side of the door so the actor could make as much racket as possible with the pounding. I turned to my costar Rocky Carroll, standing in the wings with me, and said, “Rocky, please knock for me. Take the hammer and knock.”

  He did. And with a tiny voice, I croaked, “Doaker, I’m here!” It was nothing. And I knew it.

  That was when I told myself that, thanks to my shedding, I knew this play inside and out, and if I can just stand up and walk through this door and greet Doaker, I will be fine.

  “Doaker, I’m here!” I said, this time shouting. “Doaker! Doaker!”

  Doaker opened the door, and I ran onto the stage and lit right into the play. I was like a tornado that night in my Broadway debut in a lead role. It went magnificently well. When I returned to my dressing room, I sobbed. I knew that the intense two weeks of shedding had lifted me up over the forbidding mountain of anxiety and insecurity, and carried me sailing through the three-hour play. I wept tears of joy and thanksgiving that I had sent myself to the woodshed, and it had paid off.

  I had learned to act like a jazzman plays, mastering the craft so profoundly that I didn’t have to think about it. In other roles, I could improvise without losing the form and the sense of the tune. Jazz was teaching me how to act.

  In fact, it was at the Village Vanguard that freshman fall that I cracked the code of how to play Shakespeare. I was taking a Shakespeare class and was having trouble mastering iambic pentameter. Then one night at the Vanguard I saw a musician named Arthur Blythe. There was one song he played—I don’t recall the name of it, but I can hear it in my head even today. I was humming that song and looking around the club, when Blythe went into his solo. It was free jazz, and he took a long detour from the trail, clambering up and down chords like a fleet-footed mountaineer. Then he emerged back in the song, right in time with his band, which had never left the path. Suddenly, I realized that for the entire ten-minute solo, I had never stopped humming the melody, in time.

  That’s when I had my epiphany. Blythe wasn’t just going out there and playing free jazz with no respect for the structure of the song. He was honoring the structure at all times, leading the audience on an exploration of the vaulting chords and side-chapel harmonies within the song’s architecture. And when he finished his wild and crazy solo, he was right back at the top. He knew exactly where he was the entire time, but was able to do this astonishingly expressive feat.

  Freedom within form.

  Then it clicked for me: That’s Shakespeare. Honor the form, honor the verse and order of the iambic pentameter—but find your freedom within it.

  So I went back to school and suddenly I was able to deliver those lines from Henry V with real feeling for the first time: “O for a muse of fire that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention. A kingdom for a stage, princes to act and monarchs to behold the swelling scene!” I didn’t fight the iambic pentameter, I used it as the form into which I could pour myself. I could be me! I could speak these lines, and I could be me.
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  That created my personal rule: Freedom within form creates great art. That was what studying acting in New York, both in the classroom and in the jazz clubs, taught me. It is what the first jazzmen playing on Congo Square in New Orleans knew as they fit wild African rhythms and exhilarating flights of melodic fantasy into the structure of European brass band music. When I lose my true north, I always think of that.

  Wynton, who was both a friend and mentor, was two years ahead of me at Juilliard. He held the position of first chair in the Juilliard Orchestra, a high honor, while at the same time being one of the hottest young jazz musicians in New York City. Shortly before I arrived at Juilliard, the legendary jazz drummer Art Blakey invited Wynton to join his Jazz Messengers. He was nineteen years old.

  When Juilliard heard that, the school gave him an ultimatum: It’s us or Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. Wynton chose jazz and dropped out of Juilliard. He eventually returned and completed his degree after becoming one of the defining artists of our time. Today, over three decades later, Wynton is the leading jazz musician of his generation, was the founding artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, and in the summer of 2014, took over as director of the jazz program at Juilliard—the same school that forced his hand. Nobody who knew him back in the day could possibly be surprised.

  Many nights I would skip the train ride back to Brooklyn and crash instead at the apartment Wynton and Branford had in the Village. The Marsalis brothers were my primary connection to home. They gave me comfort. Once, I was at their place when Branford came in off the road. “Come here, I want you to smell something,” he said, beckoning me to the fridge.