by Alan Arkin
After several abortive and frustrating months, and a feeling of impending doom, I found a character who, although I took him seriously, managed to make the audience laugh. I hung on to this one character like a life preserver. For weeks he was my survival mechanism. He was the only character I would go near. Whatever my assignment, I’d do it as this one character. I suppose it wasn’t surprising, since from the beginning I always thought of myself as a character actor—someone who transforms himself into other people. I had no interest in being myself onstage. In fact, there was no possibility of my playing myself on the stage because I didn’t know who I was. I didn’t have a clue. I only knew myself as other people, and this character that I found, whoever he was, became my anchor.
In the months that followed, as I became more comfortable and secure, I started to let go a little and I began to explore other characters. I found a proud and untrusting young Puerto Rican, a devil-may-care Italian worker, a stalwart and stoic old Jew—all of them immigrants or misfits. I felt at home as a foreigner. As a stranger. As anyone who was an ocean away from his own environment and a million miles away from his own identity, whatever that was. Interestingly, at that time I was aware only of the great variety of characters I was playing. The fact that they were all foreigners and misfits didn’t occur to me until years later when I had started down a path of self-examination, and realized that this was the way I saw myself.
For all the intense work I had done within the craft, within the confines of the safe and comfortable box I called acting, I had done no work on the mystery of my own self. In fact I had no idea that work could be done on this self, or that help was available out there from endless sources and in hundreds of modalities. I was too busy enjoying the fruits of a quarter-century of preparation to notice that outside my life as an actor I had almost no life at all.
CHAPTER FIVE
Here’s the way the shows at Second City worked. There was a formal part of the evening that lasted about forty-five minutes. Then there was an intermission, at the beginning of which the performers took suggestions from the audience. The second half of the show consisted of improvisations based on the suggestions given to us by the audience. These suggestions were in categories such as current events, people in the news, movie titles, book titles, song titles, and proverbs. During the twenty-minute intermission, the eight of us raced backstage to formulate the second half of the show, trying desperately to come up with material that might work. We’d pace, we’d think, we’d smoke, we’d sweat, we’d confer with each other in a desperate attempt to create viable material. Two-people relationship scenes, blackouts, pantomimes, the reworking of old jokes—every night was guerrilla warfare or a kamikaze raid. Before going onstage to perform the improv section of the show, we lived in a state of terror. Sometimes, on weekends, we did two shows a night, which meant we got to feel this terror twice. But what a gift it was! What a deep and concentrated training it was, and what a blessing. And the intensity of those shows! My God, we’d play ten, fifteen, sometimes twenty different characters during the course of an evening. Some ideas worked, some didn’t; the ones that worked became part of a library of characters we’d hang on to and even use later on, after we’d moved away from improvisational theater and were acting in plays or movies, or even if we’d switched over to writing. But most importantly, the thing that separated my experience at Second City from every other endeavor I’ve ever been connected with was that we were in an arena where we were allowed to experiment. To change. To grow. And not only that, we were we allowed to fail. Allowed to fail! And audiences came to the theater knowing this was very likely to happen. They knew that part of every evening wasn’t going to work. They came to Second City to see process unfold, and they knew that if one scene was terrible there was every possibility the next one would be memorable.
God help us, we are living in a civilization where failure is a dirty word. It’s become a moral issue. If you fail at something you are a bad person. Failure doesn’t look good on ledger sheets. You have to explain it to stockholders, and sadly this kind of thinking has permeated every nook and cranny of our civilization. We don’t have the time anymore to learn from trial and error. We have to do everything right the first time, and continue to do it right ever after. But how in the world are we to grow if we don’t fail? Is it possible to have an endless series of successes without falling on our faces? I suppose it is, but I think it would entail doing the same things over and over again without taking chances, without taking risks or exploring our limits, without finding out what we can and can’t do. And if we don’t grow, we decay. It’s that simple. Nothing in our universe is static. There’s no other possibility. At Second City we weren’t allowed to decay. My gratitude for permission to fail, granted by our producer, Bernie Sahlins, and our director, Paul Sills, is endless. There are people who come up to me to this day and talk about improvisations they saw at the club almost fifty years ago, and in their faces you know that these memories were magical and have stayed completely alive.
One night, about six months into my life at Second City, I improvised a scene with one of the women in the company that got an enormous audience reaction. It was a relationship scene and it ran over fifteen minutes, which was much longer than most of the material being done at the club at that time. With Sills directing, we rehearsed it for the next few days, fine-tuned it, and put it into the show. It was perhaps the best work I’d ever done, and certainly one of the best things my partner had ever done. Around that time the club was approached by some producers who wanted us to do an hour-long special for Canadian television. This would be a huge break for many reasons, not least of which was that it would be the first time any of us had ever been on television. The special would be shot in our theater, with a live audience, and my new scene with this actress was to be one of the centerpieces of the show.
As the weeks went on and the TV special loomed closer, I began to feel that the actress I was working with was no longer relating to me. I felt she’d stopped listening to anything I said, and working with her started becoming unpleasant and difficult. The TV show was upon us, and once again I felt my career—my whole future—was at stake. As we continued to perform the scene in the club, I became more and more frustrated. During the scene every other word out of my mouth was “Listen!” and each night it became more emphatic. “Listen! ” I’d say to her. “Listen to me!” I couldn’t seem to make any impact; I couldn’t get her to play ball or to bounce off me. Looking back at it now, I know that her behavior came out of fear. At the time it felt like selfishness, something that she was doing to upstage me and take all the attention for herself, and it drove me crazy. I became so annoyed with her and the way the scene was going that I started to miss laughs, my timing was thrown, and I even began to feel that the audience was starting to dislike me. They didn’t seem to be concerned with my partner’s selfishness; they didn’t notice that she wasn’t listening to me, one of the first lessons every actor is supposed to learn. In fact, the worse it got, the more I struggled, the more positive the audience’s reaction to her seemed to be. I began to intensely dislike the audience, feeling betrayed by what I’d felt until then had been a very intelligent crowd, a university crowd. We had a following, for God’s sake, people who came back, show after show, and up to now had demonstrated taste and intelligence. I started to hate them, and the actress too, and I began to dread doing the scene. Once again I felt my career slipping away.
I tried everything I could think of to fight my way back into the scene. I tried rethinking my character; I tried not paying any attention to the actress, both to regain my power on stage and to give her a dose of her own medicine. I tried to punch up my delivery, I tried talking louder, I tried interrupting her. Nothing worked. A day or so before the TV show, as a last resort, in desperation, hoping for any straw to hang on to, I found myself thinking, “I’m going to love her. Whatever she does, I’m going to accept her just the way she is—I’m going to love her.” Whe
re that idea came from, I will never know. It was completely out of character, completely unlike me. I had never before thought in those terms. At that point in my life the word love was not much in my vocabulary, but there you are, desperation does interesting things. I went onstage that evening with one thought in my mind, “I’m going to love her. Whatever she does, I’m going to love her,” and the whole scene came back to me. The character came back, my laughs came back, the audience regained their intelligence, and I found some peace for the first time in weeks. It was probably the most important realization I had ever come to. At that time I didn’t have the wisdom to realize that I had stumbled upon a crucial tool for life—it was simply a way to make the scene work, which was the deepest understanding I was capable of reaching. My work onstage seemed manageable, sometimes even understandable and concrete. Life offstage was an impenetrable mystery. I wish I’d had the sense then to realize that for a big life, a macro life, the walls between career and life have to come crashing down, but I had not yet reached that level of self-knowledge. It took another five years for that idea to begin penetrating my consciousness, and even then it came by microscopic increments. At the time I was still too much in the thrall of earning a living in the field I had been plowing for twenty-five years. There were still worlds to conquer.
For the next six months things got better and better. The group became tighter, we took endless chances, our repertoire grew broader, we had an intensely socially conscious base that we all shared, and we felt proud of our niche and thumbed our noses at “the commercial theater.” I remember an evening when David Merrick came to the show. At that point Merrick practically owned Broadway. He showed up at Second City on a packed Friday night, without a reservation, announced his name, and the manager said, “Oh, hi. We have a full house but we can probably find a place for you to stand in the back.” “I guess you didn’t hear me,” Merrick said imperiously. “My name is David Merrick.” The manager said, “Oh! In that case we’ll definitely find you a place to stand in the back.” Merrick watched the show standing in the back. We all thought it was great.
I stayed with the group in Chicago for a year. I found out, very late in the year, that when I was hired it was intended that I front a second wave of actors, the second company ; the first company had long been slated to go to New York. But I had gotten along so well with them that I was now asked to stay with the first company and join them in their Broadway debut. Needless to say, I was ecstatic.
From my one year in Chicago I gained ten years worth of experience. We all did. We did every kind of scene imaginable. We played characters of all ages, throughout history. We played every nationality, we played children, we played animals, we played extraterrestrials and machines. We did mime, we did political satire, we sang songs. One time we did a twenty-minute fake Mozart opera, brilliantly composed by our resident composer/pianist, Bill Mathieu. Once we did a three-minute farce that took place in a Chinese restaurant. One of the actors had to leave for a few days; Tony Holland took over his part without any rehearsal, and that night the scene lasted eighteen minutes. We’d never heard such laughs. For the next few days we tried to recapture what had happened, but we were never able to.
The company became so successful that we bought the building next door to try longer, more experimental works. The first production in the new theater was a musical, a Chicago-based version of The Threepenny Opera, again brilliantly composed by Bill Mathieu, and it was done without a book. It had a written scenario a few pages long that the company improvised upon for several weeks, and it became a solid hit. I played MacHeath (Mack the Knife), and stayed with the show for the first couple of months. Then they hired an actor to take my place, since the first company, which now included me, would soon be leaving for New York and Broadway.
During one of my last performances (with Sills spending the days rehearsing my replacement), I came to the theater, went on, and found that I was in the wrong play. I struggled through the first act and at intermission held an impromptu meeting with the cast. “What the hell is going on?” I asked. “What play are we doing?” They told me that during the rehearsal with my replacement that afternoon, Sills got tired of the way the show was going and decided to change the story. To rewrite it. Nobody had bothered to tell me. I pleaded with the cast to do the second act as we’d rehearsed it, since I hadn’t been informed of the changes and hadn’t been at the rehearsal. After reviewing my desperate situation, and since Sills wasn’t around that evening, the cast grudgingly agreed to do it the old way until I left Chicago, which would be a few days later. But for an hour, in front of hundreds of people, I had been in one play, the rest of the cast in another. It was the first of several classic actors’ nightmares that I’ve lived through. There were more to follow.
CHAPTER SIX
We did not take New York by storm. We lasted on Broadway for only about three months, but during that time we developed a devoted group of fans, one of whom was Charlie Ruben, a restaurateur, who liked us so much that he decided to open a club for us in Greenwich Village. He found a place a block away from New York University, we opened, and we were an instantaneous success. We got rave reviews everywhere—newspapers, magazines, TV, and radio—and since we were a block away from New York University we had a built-in college audience right in the neighborhood. The NYU crowd was our kind of people.
A few months into our run we received another TV invitation, this time from David Susskind, who at the time had a hugely successful talk show. He wanted to devote an entire hour and a half to us, using our own format, and staying completely out of the way. We did his TV show and the next night, at the theater, we had a packed house, reservations for months to come, and a whole new uptown audience, less intellectual but with more money and better clothes. They laughed at all the right spots—all the literary references, our raised eyebrows, the pregnant pauses, the catch phrases that were the flavor of the month in local magazines or newspapers, whether they had any specific relevance to the scene or not. Being a complete snob, I left the stage one night after what seemed like a particularly self-congratulatory audience, and said in a huff, “I hate this damned bunch of pseudo-intellectuals. They don’t know what the hell we’re talking about, they’re only laughing because they want us to know how smart they are. You mention the name Thomas Mann and you get a laugh.” My next scene was with Severn Darden, one of our resident geniuses. It was a scene in which he was a sales clerk in a men’s store and I was a customer trying on some clothes. Halfway through the scene I mimed putting on a new jacket, turned to Severn for his approval, and said, “How do I look?” “Wonderful!” Severn replied, and then, with a smirk, “You look just like Thomas Mann!” The audience went wild, but I felt I had been trumped by Severn, and I seethed through the rest of the evening. It was a strange new kind of experience.
One night, several months later, about five minutes before the first show, Charlie Rubin came barreling backstage. He was sweating and panting, his eyes were bulging out of his head, and there was a huge grin on his face. “Guess who’s out there!” he bellowed. “Who?” we asked grudgingly, not caring all that much. “Groucho Marx!”
Now normally we didn’t care a whole lot about the celebrities in the audience; most of us were still wearing our iconoclast suits, or trying to. But Groucho was different. He was the original iconoclast. Breaking rules was his stock and trade. Not only that, but he’d been improvising before anyone in this country had ever heard of the word, so we were both honored and terribly excited to hear that he was in the audience, and we bolted onstage with a tremendous burst of energy. We wanted to perform for Groucho, one of our few mentors.
Throughout the first act, the show went wildly well. The audience was having a terrific time, I’m sure in great part from seeing Groucho enjoying himself. About halfway into the second act there was a scene that had been part of our repertoire for months. The country was in the middle of the cold war, Kennedy and Khrushchev were going at each other hot and h
eavy, and our scene consisted of the two of them fielding questions from the audience as if they were conducting a press conference. Andrew Duncan, the company’s political expert, played Kennedy; he was knowledgeable, intelligent, and witty. Zohra Lampert played a wonderfully complex Jackie. And I played Khrushchev, wearing, for some reason unknown to anyone including me, one of those peaked cab driver’s hats. I suppose I felt it looked proletariat. As Khrushchev, I was able to avoid making any kind of intelligent political statement by speaking only in Russian gibberish. In that way I could emote my brains out without knowing a thing about politics, a topic that interested me not at all. Severn was my translator, and it became his job to interpret my rambling histrionic nonsense and somehow make it relate to the audience’s questions. That’s the way it was supposed to go.
We trooped out onstage, and after Andrew made his usual introductory remarks we opened the “press conference” to the audience for questions. Immediately Groucho’s hand went up. Having not much choice, Andrew pointed to him. Groucho said, “This question is for Mr. Khrushchev.” I nodded. “Where did you get that hat?” he asked. I answered in my fake Russian; Severn said something in English, I think it was “Bloomingdale’s.” The audience laughed.
Andrew asked the audience for another question. Groucho’s hand went up again. What were we to do? Andrew pointed to him. “How much was the hat?” he said. Gibberish from me. Severn said something, I forget what, but we could begin to feel where this was going and we were helpless to do anything about it. We were trapped up there. Groucho’s hand went up again. “What’s the material?” he asked. “Is that a wool gabardine?” Gibberish from me. Severn said something, but the handwriting was on the wall. We were beginning to come apart at the seams, and the audience loved it. Groucho kept asking question after question about the damn hat I was wearing: “Would it come in a seven and a quarter?” “Would you consider selling the one you’re wearing?” By around the sixth question the audience was hysterical and so were we. We were unable to keep ourselves intact. We were all turning into Jell-O. We soon found ourselves laughing harder than the audience and finally just ran offstage in surrender. Luckily we managed to regroup in the next scene and finished the evening with a semblance of professionalism, very happy that Groucho didn’t give us any more help.