by Mel Gussow
MG: In the production of Broken Glass at the National Theatre in London, the set was angular and distorted, almost surrealistic. The television version is more straightforward.
AM: It’s very difficult in film, whether it’s television or a movie, to carry off a surreal interpretation of something like that. It would look awkward and imposed, whereas on stage it seemed to me to be perfectly OK.
MG: With Broken Glass, do you have any preference – for the American version, the English version or the film?
AM: I thought we had a pretty good production in New York. I also thought there was something in the British production which simply lifted the whole perfomance to a metaphorical statement. I don’t know that there was any one element in it, except that the set helped. That was a concrete thing. It was a similar thing with The Last Yankee in England. It was played on a stage that looked like it was floating in air. The stage was lit from below, and it looked literally like it was something not quite on the ground. A light was coming out underneath it. There were elements in it that I liked better, but there were also successful elements in our production here. I thought John Heard [in New York] was terrific, probably better than the actor in England.
MG: With Broken Glass in London, there was one major difference, both on stage and on film – Henry Goodman.
AM: Yes. How did you feel about him?
MG: He’s a wonderful actor. He reminds me a bit of Dustin Hoffman: he always brings an edge to his character.
AM: I hadn’t thought of that, but you’re absolutely right. The difference is that he’s far less sophisticated. Dustin gets involved in all kinds of philosophy.
MG: In contrast to the other characters, there’s something underwritten about Gellburg. Goodman caught him.
AM: I think he did. I wonder how it will be received here now on television. You know where it goes on forever? In Germany. Isn’t that interesting? It may be that, to the generation there now in the theatre, this is all ancient history, especially about the foreign reaction to Nazism, about which they know very little.
MG: Why is it that the English embrace you for your political consciousness yet they attack Pinter for his – almost on the same ground?
AM: I really don’t understand it, excepting they have other playwrights who manifestly have social commitments, like Stoppard does. Maybe it’s oversimplifying it, but the English keep producing my plays and they also keep producing Tennessee’s plays and O’Neill’s plays and a lot of other people’s plays that never see the light of day here from one decade to the next. I’m not sure but that a broader audience isn’t brought into the theatre by the fact that the National exists, the prices are pretty reasonable and so on and so forth.
MG: In a sweeping statement, Robert Brustein said he defied anyone ‘to name a single work of art that ever changed anything.’
AM: What does he mean by change? I think works of art change the consciousness of people, and their estimate of who they are and what they are and what they stand for. I think that’s manifest. All classical literature certainly did it. I think people are always looking for images of themselves and of the life they’re leading. If you’re going to use the word change in the narrow sense of political change – yes, of course. But I don’t know that anyone ever made that claim, except occasionally. When Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath, the Congress at the time was deeply affected by it and actually passed laws dealing with the treatment of those farmers.
MG: Was that a rare case?
AM: I would think that was a rare case. I was also thinking of Mark Twain, who gave America an image of itself, which for good or ill can be said to have changed the country in the sense that without that image it would have probably been a different country, mainly the whole idea of the innocent, forever young American with his simple-minded appreciation of reality as against the complications of life. I think that helped to solidify in the American consciousness what we thought we were. We can go into any war secure in the knowledge that we are doing the right thing, because we didn’t feel any guilt about it.
I think Mark Twain’s example, which is, of course, an immense example, shows that politics does change – change in the sense that he managed to syncretize in one image what was lying around loose. He seized what was available to him and made it his own, and made it the country’s own.
I think plays can suggest to people how to behave, how not to behave, what is acceptable, what is unacceptable. I think, in fact, The Crucible for many people brought the consciousness of what was involved in the McCarthy period.
To say you’re going to a theatre or a movie house or to read a book and you’re one kind of person and you close the book or you leave the theatre and you’re totally a different kind of person – that’s ridiculous. But there are accretions of change certainly. Culture does affect people.
MG: Today people will see The Crucible and think about charges of sexual abuse in school and about the religious right.
AM: Absolutely. Some of them will be hostile to it, but others will not be. A work of art sets up terms of reference, in terms of reality. I think Salesman disillusioned a lot of people. It made them aware of what the culture is doing to people.
MG: Athol Fugard had nothing directly to do with the change in South Africa, but he had a great deal to do indirectly with that change.
AM: Absolutely. It’s all by indirection. Very few things change people directly, excepting something like a sudden collapse of the whole stock market. Suddenly thirty million unemployed; that’ll change them. Revolutions change them.
MG: But works of art don’t cause revolutions?
AM: I don’t think so. I don’t think it works that way. It’s far more subtle. We get our images of reality from somewhere, sometimes from newspapers, but after all we’re receiving signals at every moment, especially these days, with television telling us how to behave, how not to behave, what’s allowed, what’s not allowed. These are subtle impulses.
MG: The idea that we can watch a television debate and then immediately get the spin on the debate. We could almost skip the debate and just watch the spin.
AM: I did just that the other night with Gore and Kemp [a debate of the candidates for vice president]. I said to Inge, what are we doing here? I’ll read a book. I can write the rest of this show. The canned quality of it is so apparent. There’s no spontaneity. Sometimes you hate a guy, but he engages you, makes you listen because he’s full of surprises. These guys avoid surprise like the plague. It’s the one thing they don’t want to happen. If one could spring a surprise on the other, he doesn’t know what the response is going to be. It’s the opposite of art, and I don’t think this particular gang has changed anybody or anything. I don’t think it’s reached anybody. Maybe a few simpleminded sophomores in some high school. But it’s a dead duck.
Driving down from Connecticut this morning, I heard [Bob] Dole [running for president] say, ‘Trust me.’ He made one or two remarks. Then he started shouting at the top of his lungs, yelling, ‘Trust me, trust me,’ about six times. It was very strange. It was hysterical, as though people around him said, look you’ve got to drill this into their heads, that they can’t trust him but they can trust you. And so he started yelling at the top of his lungs. Inge, who comes from Europe, said, ‘I’ve never heard that kind of a tone.’ It was almost out of control, although he probably thought he was in control.
MG: Are you working on Timebends part two?
AM: I thought about it. I could do it.
MG: What has happened to you since then?
AM: That was ’87, ’88. [Thinks.] Well, my house burned [Laughs]. I was trying to think of something extraordinary. Maybe I’ve lived a nice quiet life.
MG: What can you tell me about the plays you’re writing?
AM: One [Mr. Peters’ Connection] is a kind of outrageous piece of work. I hope it finishes itself in the next few months. It’s very funny. I’m not sure it’s a comedy. I have a feeling someone in it is going to
die. It’s a play taking place between waking and sleeping. That’s all I can tell you about it at the moment. It’s a curious bite on the world, but I’m far from finished with it. The other thing: I still want to do The Ride Down Mt. Morgan in New York. I’ve been doing some more work on it.
MG: Brustein, of all people, gave it a favourable review.
AM: So I heard. I’m beginning to suspect it. It can’t be good [Laughs.]
MG: The plays come out of your obsessions, out of your life?
AM: My plays come out of some fascination with the character and his story. This new one does too, excepting that our stories have become so fragmented and so discontinuous. Unlike forty years ago, when I was starting, today in the normal course of his life one single individual can be working on five continents, with people speaking eight different languages, and nobody even notes that it’s all remarkable. It’s crept up on us. I’ve got this image, like they used to do in the circus: standing on a ball, which has got the globe on it and we’re trying to stay on top of that ball. But that’s normal.
AM: You know I interviewed Mandela about three years ago for BBC television. That was an education. I asked him, ‘Why do I get the feeling of great peacefulness in this place?’ Admittedly I come from New York and every other place sounds peaceful. He said that it is peaceful. I said, ‘How do you account for that given the conditions?’ This is before the change of regime. He said, ‘Our people know the country is going to them. There’s no reason to get excited. It might happen this year or next year, but it’ll happen.’
MG: Don’t you find it amazing that Mandela spent all those years in prison and survived intact?
AM: I don’t understand it. The only clue I got: he really thinks of himself as a chief, in the ancient use of that word. When I met him, he wore a shirt which had a design on it. At a certain point, he said, this is the design of my tribe. It was a beautiful woven thing. I thought, maybe that’s what kept him going. There’s something kingly about him. Majestic.
MG: What would have happened if you had been put in prison during the McCarthy years?
AM: My own feeling was that we were getting close to that. If I had ended up in a jail cell, maybe I would have written some plays. You get your three meals a day. You might get beaten up occasionally. I rather think the other prisoners would be sympathetic.
MG: Does this mean that, no matter what, you would have written the works you’ve written?
AM: I have a feeling those plays are my character, and your character is your fate. I used to think that had it been a different social situation in New York when I was coming up I would have written more plays. I was up against an absolutely bottom-line theatre, like everybody else was. After a while, if you get thrown back on your face enough times you say, what am I doing this for? What’s the point of all this? Takes a year, two years to write one of these things. Especially when the same play would be played abroad and would be running in twelve different capitals, and not here. Then you begin to wonder, maybe I should be writing in Spanish. Or move to London.
MG: Do you regret any of the plays?
AM: It’s like regretting that you lost your hair. It’s part of my life. I can’t possibly think of not having written one of them, because it was terribly important to me at that moment. I would wish that they had all been accepted. They are, here and there. I have a lot to be grateful for. It’s a world theatre now, which it wasn’t incidentally until the mid ’50s. I remember when they thought it was remarkable that my plays were done in Europe, not because they were my plays but because they were American plays.
MG: But some plays work better than others. Death of a Salesman compared to Creation of the World.
AM: Oh, sure. But I don’t think of it in terms of regret. I think, was there any way for me to have done that differently? Probably there was, but I can’t see it.
MG: Some years ago at a tribute to Harold Clurman at Hunter College, you said Harold wasn’t a good director.
AM: No. Harold needed a director. Harold was a spieler.
MG: Some spieler.
AM: He was great moving actors to express their inner life on stage, but if you’re talking about somebody who knew how to stage that wasn’t Harold. Of course Kazan used to do Harold’s staging when they were at the Group Theatre. Harold would call in Kazan and say, ‘Gadge, do the traffic.’ He wasn’t interested in that. He was interested in the inner life of those people. That’s it.
MG: Harold was a better man, though.
AM: Yes. He did Incident at Vichy, and I didn’t find any astonishing discoveries on his part. Some of the actors did some interesting work. I loved Harold. He did wonderful work on certain things, like [Carson McCullers’s play] Member of the Wedding. That was terrific, but that was right up his alley. Very loose structure. It was storytelling, it was very sentimental, which Harold really was. He was very moved to tears by things. But I didn’t think of him as being all that great a director.
MG: Still you worked with him.
AM: I used to love being around him. We somehow got it on. If there was a problem, Harold didn’t want to hear of it. Problem with a script, problem with an actor: he was a sunshine boy. He wanted life to be fun, happiness. He didn’t like nastiness, loud noises.
MG: In contrast, what did you want in a director?
AM: Somebody who would face reality. Harold led the flight away, but it was always with tremendous charm. I used to listen to him talk to the actors. This is one of the great mysteries of life. He’d get finished talking to them and they were inspired and I would say to them, ‘What do you think he said?’ Nobody could repeat anything and then I realized one day, it’s music, it’s not supposed to be repeated, or repeatable. If you can work that way with a director, with Harold, you could do wonderful things.
In the current issue of the Lincoln Center magazine, they asked for comments about the original Lincoln Center company. Larry Luckinbill described the last gathering of the clan [when it was clear the attempt to establish a repertory company at Lincoln Center had failed]. I wasn’t there. Where Gadge [Kazan], Harold and Bob Whitehead addressed the actors who were now being dismissed, in effect. He describes Harold saying, ‘Well I’ve got to get on with things.’ There was an opportunity there to analyze why an important enterprise had failed. After all it was not a private business. It was a publicly significant enterprise. Not a word. Kazan was loudly proclaiming his right to fail, because of his production of The Changeling. Isn’t that typical?
Kazan was the reality man. Harold was the dreamer, which was precious. It was terrific. I loved to talk to him. But he couldn’t run a candy store. But he wasn’t supposed to run a candy store.
When we were trying to cast All My Sons, Harold would come in every morning, freshly barbered, looking like Wintergreen for President [in Gershwin’s Of Thee I Sing]. He was beautifully coiffed. He would come and sit down and have his shoes shined. I would say, ‘Harold who’s going to play these parts?’ ‘Don’t worry! We’ll get ’em.’ Of course, it was Kazan who did all this.
MG: Just as I fantasized what it would have been like if Harold had run Lincoln Center, I’ve also thought what it would have been like if he had been the chief drama critic of the Times instead of Walter Kerr during that period. What difference would it have made?
AM: It would have made an immense difference. That was where he belonged, and he could have changed a lot. No question. When I was talking before about theatre as metaphor, Harold was always looking underneath the surface. Very often he left out the surface, so actors would say, what am I supposed to do? ‘Do it!’ But I would rather have it that way, because they were inspired. I miss him. I miss him all the time. I could always stop up there and horse around for a couple of hours. He was trying always to defeat the demon which was the commercialization.
MG: On the other hand, Kerr was committed to the commercial theatre.
AM: He was Mr. Show Business – with some elegance. And he knew a lot. He was knowledgeable
and educated. Somebody said to me he was a typical Catholic Jesuit. It was the narrowest use of that art: what he was trying to create. I ran head-on into him. My work was exactly the opposite of everything he thought.
MG: It was your work that he criticized, but on another side, it was also Beckett.
AM: Look, Beckett wasn’t writing his plays in order to get laughs and tears. There was a concept behind this, a metaphor behind this. He was really recreating the world as he saw it. That’s the last thing you’re allowed to do, according to Kerr. Not allowed to do that. He would have accepted Beckett if Beckett had dropped in a few lines indicating that none of this was serious, that they were really waiting for . . . even if they said, God.
MG: Sugar Babies [a vaudeville revue with Mickey Rooney] was one of Kerr’s favourite shows.
AM: We were talking before about culture, about Brustein saying art never changes anything. The obverse of that is that here’s a guy in a very powerful position, who changed the art with his preconceptions.
MG: In spite of that, the playwrights survived.
AM: Put it the other way. If Harold [Clurman] had been there, it would have changed the public’s apprehension of theatre and himself of himself. It’s amazing with the situation we have here now and have had for a generation that we still have managed to create. I guess the force of theatre is so powerful that nothing can stop it. But who knows what was destroyed in the bud.