Artists, especially actors, are like priests and shamans in that they induce in their audience an experience, if only for a moment in time, of the transcendent, of the eternal. Alessandro, a character in Mark Helprin’s novel A Soldier of the Great War, puts it movingly: “To see the beauty of the world is to put your hands on lines that run uninterrupted through life and through death. Touching them is an act of hope, for perhaps someone on the other side, if there is another side, is touching them, too.” In a similar way, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin, in the novel The Idiot, ponders the visions he has during epileptic seizures, which disclose to him an extraordinary “sense of life,” of “a sort of sublime tranquility, filled with serene, harmonious joy, and hope, filled with reason and ultimate cause.” Even if these rare and beautiful moments were caused only by his brain misfiring, Myshkin decides it doesn’t really matter. The veil had been lifted, and he had glimpsed something so powerful that it gave his life meaning. This mystical awareness comes to us in moments of artistic communion, when nothing more than words, sounds, lines, pigments, or gestures become filled with the spark of divinity, and we feel, however briefly, that we are connected to eternity and that we are seeing the world, and ourselves in it, as it really is.
Here was the promise of Juilliard: If I mastered my craft, and absorbed its techniques into my marrow, then I could reach into the mystic, hold in my hands the threads that Albert Murray said connect us all, and draw the people gathered round the stage in the darkness, amid the chaos and confusion and pain of the human condition, together and into the light. Perhaps the revelation of beauty, and the truth, goodness, and harmony it embodied, would change their lives. Perhaps it would even save the world, or at least the world of some lost soul, desperate for a lifeline amid a raging flood.
I thought, What a wonderful, powerful craft I’ve been called to.
And I don’t think I was the only one in my family who received the calling. I always thought Daddy didn’t understand my desire to be an artist, but when I saw the sophistication of his photographs, I knew otherwise. Amos Pierce was born with the gift, but he never had the opportunity to develop it.
When I started talking to him about photography, it opened up a side of Daddy that I hadn’t known. Listening to this furniture store stock employee by day turned maintenance man at night talking at a high level about aesthetics—I thought, Who is this man?
THAT MAN WAS MY FATHER, who by his example was reminding me that you can study your craft so intently that it won’t ever leave you, no matter where you go in life. My conversations with Daddy taught me that art is not something that you do; it is something that you are. When I discovered the hidden side of him, Daddy was outwardly simply a stock clerk and a janitor in late middle age, taking care of his store and his buildings, and through that, providing for his family. But in his heart, he was an artist who in his early twenties roamed the streets of Manhattan with his camera, seeing the world through a lens and expressing his vision in photographs.
Now I knew that the artist that my father was had come down to me in my genes. I was the same age Daddy was when he left for New York to study art. That gave me great comfort. But I also carried the legacy of the artist that my father was never able to become. Life and love intervened, diverting him from his path. I owed my existence to this fact; how could I possibly regret it?
What he couldn’t do with his photography, he did with his sense of manhood, with a sense of love and duty that allowed another artist to be born, to thrive, to grow, and to become the artist and man I am today. He sacrificed his artistry so that my artistry could bloom. But now the man who was once called Little Amos by a sentry in Pontchartrain Park was determined to fulfill the hopes his father held for himself as a young man.
I was going to be an actor.
But what kind of actor should I be? Juilliard exposed us to many different styles of drama. My teachers wanted us to understand Shakespeare and Chekhov, O’Neill and Odets, and even contemporary dramatists like John Patrick Shanley. I knew from this experience that the key to my success as an actor would have to be diversity. That is, I would have to train to do theater, television, and film. I would have to be adept in both classical and contemporary drama. And I would have to be as good at comedy as I was at tragedy. To be sure, this would help me professionally, but it was also what I wanted to do. The professional road was opening up before me, and Albert Murray had expanded my horizons further than I ever could have imagined. By the time graduation day arrived in 1985, my Juilliard education had empowered me to journey as far and as wide as my heart desired.
SIX
ART & LIFE: “A MAN MUST HAVE A CODE”: BUNK
If you want to be a professional actor, it helps tremendously to attend Juilliard, Yale, New York University, or one of the country’s other top acting schools. But you still have to pass your Leagues.
The League auditions—so called because they were once sponsored by the League of Professional Theater Training Programs—are the trial by fire that fresh theater grads must pass to launch their careers. All the major agents, casting directors, and theater movers and shakers come to New York for a weekend to see what new talent has to offer. It’s not the only way to get a job in stage, film, or television, but there are no opportunities like the Leagues to show your stuff to the show business elites who can make your career.
The weekend of my League auditions, held at Juilliard that year, graduating seniors from the twelve top acting schools assembled to perform two short scenes each for the most intimidating audience imaginable. The unwritten rule at the Leagues was that you shouldn’t do scenes from classical drama. At Juilliard, we had been studying classical drama intensely, but we warned ourselves that this training could be for a theater that didn’t exist anymore. Tragic though that might be, lamentations for the golden age of theater do not pay the bills. Young actors need to work. Like all my colleagues, I chose to present something commercial.
I teamed with Thomas Gibson, who would later find television success on Dharma & Greg, Chicago Hope, and Criminal Minds, for a scene from the 1958 film The Defiant Ones, in which Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier play escaped convicts chained to each other. They have to overcome their mutual racial hatred and cooperate for their own survival. That was a relatively easy scene.
The other one I chose was from Caligula, a 1944 drama by the French existentialist novelist and philosopher Albert Camus. Sidney Lumet brought the drama to Broadway in 1960. It’s a dark and difficult play that portrays the sadistic Roman emperor as embracing violence, destruction, and excess as a way to give meaning to his life. The scene I chose, from act 2, is a dialogue with Scipio, a young poet and admirer of the emperor’s, despite the fact that Caligula has murdered his father. When Scipio recites his verse to Caligula, the emperor belittles him about the power of poetry. Caligula taunts him about his “anemic” lines, destroying Scipio’s artistic confidence and tempting him to join a conspiracy of assassins.
Maybe it was not the most appropriate material for a two-minute audition, but it turned out to have been one of the most effective auditions I’ve ever done.
Why? Because it left the professional audience curious about why I had made such a risky choice for a League audition. They thought it said something about my courage as an actor. Most actors will walk into an audition room and do what’s expected. I learned from that experience at the start of my career that I should always be willing to do the unexpected. I hadn’t studied for four long years in one of the world’s best acting conservatories to hide my ability to handle verse, prose, and classical material. I wanted those producers and casting directors in the room to know that Wendell Pierce was a classically trained actor prepared for anything.
THE LEAGUE AUDIENCE’S positive reaction solidified my belief that if I was going to have a vital career as an actor, I was going to have to know how to perform classical theatrical texts as well as more accessible mate
rial. I would need to be equally facile on stage and screen, both big and small. I was going to have to be as good with Spielberg as I was with Shakespeare.
I came out of the League auditions with an agent, and I spent the first year of my professional life suffering from a bad case of “impostor syndrome.” Nobody knows that I’m not that good, I kept thinking, hoping that I would complete each job before I was found out. My psychological safety net that rookie year was the assurance that if this acting thing didn’t work out, I could always go back to New Orleans and get into local media.
At sixteen, I had produced my own community television show for WDSU, the city’s NBC affiliate. It was a current affairs broadcast called Think About It. I also put together a black history radio documentary series, trying to sell it to WYLD-FM, the New Orleans R&B powerhouse. The station executives there said it was good, but it needed higher production values. Brute Bailey, the station’s program director, brought me in on Saturdays to teach me the basics of radio: playing music, mastering announcing, doing commercials, and so forth. I was picking up how to be a talent both on the air and in the production process.
Brute eventually let me take over from him the weekly jazz show Extensions from Congo Square. I created my tag line, which I delivered in a slow, sensual, Barry White–like purr: “Extensions from Congo Square: the merger of technical proficiency and expressive thought . . . jazz.”
During summers when I was home from Juilliard, Brute let me go on air. I learned so much from him about developing a work ethic. He loves radio, and was so meticulous about doing it right. He was listening to the station at all times, and if he heard a mistake, he would call you in the booth. He was aggressive, he was ambitious, he was a perfectionist—and he had a great influence on me.
If acting didn’t work out, I knew that I had friends at WYLD who would find a slot for me. Besides, Joyce Eves, a Pontchartrain Park neighbor and community affairs director at WDSU, told me that on the basis of my work on Think About It, I could have a job at the TV station if I wanted it. A media career in New Orleans wouldn’t have been a bad life at all.
And then I was cast in a movie—a small part in a scene with Tom Hanks in The Money Pit. After that, I landed a role in a revival of the Kurt Weill–Maxwell Anderson musical Lost in the Stars, a stage adaptation of Alan Paton’s 1948 antiapartheid novel Cry, the Beloved Country. And then a producer cast me in a musical, a touring production of Queenie Pie, the unfinished (and rarely performed) jazz opera that Duke Ellington was writing when he died in 1974. With a libretto by George C. Wolfe and the Duke’s musical fragments knitted together by his son, Mercer, Queenie Pie put me on the road to Philadelphia, where the opera had its world premiere, and then to Washington, D.C., Ellington’s hometown, where the opera played at the Kennedy Center.
I SPENT EVEN MORE TIME in Washington back then, doing a play at the Folger Theater and an episode of the television crime drama A Man Called Hawk, starring Avery Brooks. I was in D.C. working when I learned a powerful lesson about acting, auditioning, and self-confidence.
Actors often get tangled up psychologically in the audition process. Some feel that they are compromising their integrity by having to audition. They believe it is a form of groveling, of begging for work. This is silly. An audition is a business presentation, nothing more. If you don’t get the role, it is not a judgment on your worth as a human being. It only means that the people hiring actors for this project didn’t think you were right for that particular job.
My greatest audition experience was for a role I did not get. In fact, that failed audition became one of the highlights of my career. As a young actor, I walked into a rehearsal hall determined to make an impact. I was auditioning for a new Broadway musical called Big Deal, directed by the legendary director and choreographer Bob Fosse. Fosse was one of the theatrical world’s all-time greats. His credits include the choreography for both the stage and film versions of Damn Yankees, and direction and choreography for the Broadway and silver-screen versions of Sweet Charity, Chicago, and Cabaret, for which Fosse won a Best Director Oscar, beating out Francis Ford Coppola’s turn in The Godfather.
Bob Fosse was a giant, and his reputation and skill were expected to make Big Deal a very big deal. Writing about the show in The New York Times, critic Frank Rich said that Fosse was “the last active theater choreographer who knows how to assemble an old-fashioned, roof-raising showstopper in which every step bears the unmistakable signature of its creator.”
I was determined to make my audition for Fosse memorable. When my moment came, I burst into the rehearsal hall and snarled that I was taking over this joint. It was from the scene in the play I was auditioning for. I entered in character, throwing everyone into confusion. Fosse sensed what was going on, and played along. He came around the other side of the table to do the scene with me, directed the stage manager to put some music behind us, and off we went, Pierce and Fosse, onstage together, snorting and pawing and ready to smash our horned skulls together like two raging bulls.
The scene as written was shot through with masculine ferocity, and for me, a young actor squaring off against this demigod of the American theater, I felt like Jacob wrestling with the angel. At the end of the scene, Fosse approached me in character and growled, “Let me tell you something.”
“What are you going to tell me?” I snarled back.
Fosse broke character and said, “You’re good, Wendell. I think you’re a little young, but we’ve got to use you in something.”
Relief!
Later that day my agent said, “What did you do today?” I told her about my daring showdown with Bob Fosse.
“Yeah, that’s it,” she said. “He called and said you’re too young for this role, but he promised that he’s going to work with you this year.”
Could it be any more perfect?
A year later, I was back in D.C. on another project when I turned on the evening news and heard Bob Fosse was dead. He had been in rehearsals for a Sweet Charity revival in Washington that day when he dropped dead of a heart attack. I was crushed, first of all for Fosse himself, second for the loss to American theater, and finally, for myself: I would never be able to work with the great man.
Then it hit me: Wendell, you did work with him.
True, we had an audience of maybe two or three, but I truly worked onstage with Bob Fosse. That was precious. I had been given the opportunity to do something thousands of actors dreamed of doing. It changed my way of thinking about auditions. After that, I never took another one for granted.
After a year of supporting myself with film and stage roles, I had to admit a difficult truth to myself: I’m an actor. Why was it difficult? Because I am often afraid that I am an impostor on the verge of being found out. Every job I got my rookie year was a shock. Really? They want me? I found it hard to trust my success.
That’s the hardest admission for a lot of artists to make—to accept they are, in fact, an artist, and need to stop withholding that psychological commitment to their vocation. The fear of failure is so very strong. It occurred to me at that early stage in my career that I was focusing on the wrong things. I would do ten auditions and not get a callback, and I thought those failures defined me, instead of the one callback I did get.
Not only was I wrong to give failure greater credence than success, but I was also wrong to see those unsuccessful auditions as failures at all. The audition process, I came to see, is your opening and closing night, all in one. When I took the stage at an audition, I was going to enter into that brief communion with another film or theater artist, and show them who I was and what I could do with the role. Here it is, thank you very much, I hope you enjoyed it. Keep moving on. Nothing is lost. Everything is gained.
I made my Broadway debut in 1988, in the American production of Serious Money, Caryl Churchill’s financial-world satire. My parents flew to New York for the opening. It was especially gratify
ing to show my father, who had been skeptical of my love of the stage, that I was making it as an actor.
My big Broadway break came in 1991, when I took over the lead role in The Piano Lesson, playwright August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning drama about the past, the future, and black identity. Then again, all of Wilson’s plays are about the past, the future, and black identity. In discovering August Wilson’s art, I not only found the embodiment of Albert Murray’s vision of what the African American artist can be, but also gained insights that would define my own approach to my art and my life.
We had never had an African American playwright with a body of work that existed on the level of Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, Edward Albee, and Arthur Miller. And to have someone of that caliber give voice to the African American experience—my experience, and the experience of my family—was a great discovery for me.
Personally, Wilson revealed to me that Mamo and Papo’s story, which I had always held dear, was the material of the highest art. In Wilson’s plays, I see and hear the tales of my own family, their struggles, their victories, and their defeats. He shows how African Americans dealt with challenges and how, to steal a line from Faulkner, they not only endured, but triumphed.
August Wilson understood these people. My people. Our people. And with his gifts, he enshrined them in the artistic pantheon.
Professionally, I knew that I would be able to go further in my work as an artist and wouldn’t be limited in my roles. Wilson was providing for generations to come a multitude of characters, a multitude of stories, a multitude of opportunities to enlighten the human experience through theater. As The New Yorker’s theater critic John Lahr wrote in a 2001 appraisal of Wilson’s work, “His audience appeal almost single-handedly broke down the wall for other black artists, many of whom would not otherwise be working in the mainstream.”
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