Ask Me Again Tomorrow

by Olympia Dukakis

  Chapter Six

  WHEN I BEGAN my master’s in fine arts at Boston University, I felt like a war veteran rejoining a civilian population that had no knowledge of what was happening on the front lines. For two years I had been treating people sickened, paralyzed, or dying from polio. I had lived far from home and moved so often that I had no close relationships. I was part of a national health crisis that involved life-and-death struggles every day. I was only a couple of years older than my classmates, but I felt ancient in comparison. I judged them to be frivolous and superficial. Once again, I felt like an outsider.

  I took a room near the school, even though my parents had very much wanted me to live with them. After all I had been through, I couldn’t bring myself to return home. My life had moved forward and I needed to stay out there in the world. I needed to be on my own, to navigate this part of my education and life on my own terms.

  I was elated to be back at school. I could pursue my dream at my own expense, and I was determined not to squander any of it. I dove into my studies with a single-minded determination, almost obsession. I signed up for as many liberal arts courses as possible, including classes in literature, literary theory and criticism, history, and classicism. I was curious, so hungry for this that I made the conscious decision to forgo a social life and put all of my energies into my studies. I would write myself a weekly study schedule and stick to it. I recall walking by bars on my way home and seeing my classmates socializing and flirting. I thought they were wasting their time, that they should be home studying. I would then get home and study until I was exhausted.

  In my first year in the MFA program, I met one of the great acting teachers and mentors of my life. His name was Peter Kass and he taught the acting class at BU.

  Peter was himself the son of immigrants. He was fearless; he let us bear witness to his own pain, rage, and vulnerabilities. He valued emotional integrity and expected his students to follow his example. He was always forthright and honest, even if it meant he cast himself in a dark light. He ran his classes with a sense of purpose and directness and never flattered any of us with faint praise. He was also unnervingly insightful.

  Acting class was by far the hardest course I took that first year. Peter assigned us parts in scenes that we would perform in front of one another. When he was satisfied with our work in one scene, he would assign another. I had been assigned Lola in William Inge’s Come Back, Little Sheba. While I watched many of the other students move on to their next scene assignment, I struggled with Lola again and again. Peter said nothing.

  In hindsight, I believe he recognized a great resistance in me. Rather than offer suggestions or advice, he just let me go on until I couldn’t stand it anymore. One day in class, I raised my hand, ready to do the scene once again. I heard the class groan at the thought of hearing me do Lola one more time. Peter ignored me and called on someone else. Why was this scene so impossible for me?

  Lola is the wife of an alcoholic, and although he treats her with contempt, she continues to try to ingratiate herself to him, to win his approval and love. I had learned over the years to hide feelings that were too personal or revealing. Rather than tap into my own feelings, I was acting out Lola’s emotional state by illustrating how I thought she would behave. I had decided what I thought were Lola’s feelings and character traits (she was loving, dutiful, compliant), then tried to “indicate” these characteristics. Unlike most of my classmates, I had no prior training as an actress and no experience on stage. I didn’t know how to solve my problems, but I insisted on being given the chance. When Peter passed over me, I felt like my years as a therapist, saving my money for acting class, boiled down to this one moment. I didn’t know what he wanted from me. I felt thwarted, but time was up. We broke for lunch.

  I took off to find Peter and caught up with him in the restaurant where he was having lunch. He invited me to sit down. I was shaking. I demanded that he give me the opportunity to work. He took a long pause, smiled, and said, “Okay, let’s go back. You’re up next.”

  Peter had an ability to meet each student as an individual, to tune into each of us with great insight, and, most important of all, to demystify the craft of acting. To find your way into the text of the play, first and foremost, you had to understand and inhabit the world of the story openly and fully. Peter used the metaphor of being a plumber, and he was constantly exhorting us to make sure we had a “full set of tools” in our plumber’s bag. To extend his metaphor, we had to lay down the pipes, to piece them together—before we turned on the water. It was that unglamorous, but it was vital. The acting meant nothing if the pipes were leaky.

  He asked that we be honest in expressing feelings and our own emotional reactions to the situations in our scenes. I had spent the semester so far withholding my feelings and hiding my own emotional life. That’s why I was still with Lola, having trouble with my scene.

  I was still shaking when I walked into the classroom. I took off my coat and started my scene. The next thing I knew, I found myself in a rage. Where Lola was compliant, I was defiant. Where Lola was conciliatory, I was confrontational. The poor actor playing the husband could barely speak. I had been raised on the performances of Alexandra Dukakis! When it was over, the room was silent.

  That moment marked a true turning point for me. I had found a container to hold what was most precious and dear—my own humanity. That container was the stage. I could now concentrate on the craft of acting.

  I moved into a tiny apartment in a seedy part of Boston with another student, Annie Johnson, and we became each other’s emotional support and sounding board. As I became more and more emotionally honest in class, I found that outside class, I was becoming more and more troubled. I was frightened about where all this was going and what it meant. I was terrified that the feelings that I was now so honest about would take over my life. I couldn’t sleep and was experiencing severe anxiety.

  A psychiatrist prescribed sleeping pills, which helped at night, but in the morning I would have no desire to get up. So he prescribed uppers to help me function better during the day. Then he prescribed Compasine to help even me out in the later afternoon. This was the fifties. Drugs were not acceptable.

  I felt deeply ashamed of needing pills in order to function. One day, while I was walking home from class, I turned and saw a truck coming down the street; I stepped out in front of it. As the truck was bearing down on me, a stranger ran up behind me and pushed me out of the way. When I got home, I went straight to the bathroom, got out a razor blade, took off my shoes and socks, and began cutting my feet. Annie came in at that moment. I tried to hide my bloody feet from her, but she wouldn’t let me. Instead she took the razor blade. “Olympia,” she said calmly, “you can’t do this.” Then she sat with me for a long time.

  The rest of my year was marked by periods of progress in class, and progress in therapy—accompanied by terrible, intense spells of depression and darkness. I had stopped taking the drugs and now I was feeling everything again. One particularly grim period came when a brief relationship ended very badly. I had begun seeing an Albanian poet, the first man I had dated since N had left me. I wasn’t sexually involved with this man yet, nor was I in love with him, but when he announced to me that he was seeing other people, I fell apart. I suffered a full-fledged anxiety attack and took to my bed for three full days and nights. When I was finally able to rouse myself and get dressed, I went straight to the health clinic at BU. While I was waiting to see a doctor, I lit a cigarette and dropped it—burning—into my lap. The next thing I knew there were two doctors standing over me asking me to sign some papers. They thought it best that I check myself into a hospital, where I could be treated for depression. In my gut, I knew that going into the hospital wasn’t the answer. I had worked too hard and waited too long for this opportunity to be here, studying acting. I couldn’t walk away now, not even to save my life.

  My cousin Stelian was the only member of my family who could see what was happ
ening to me. In the middle of my first year at BU, he came to visit and found me in my living room—which I had painted dark, dark red with black trim—surrounded by piles of books, studying with intensity. He took one look at me and knew I was in trouble. Stelian was Michael’s older brother and had always been a kindred spirit. We had played tennis and Ping-Pong together when I was a kid, and he had a sensitivity about him that I had always trusted. He had gone through a tough time in his early twenties, had been hospitalized and treated with, among other things, electroshock therapy. Though he was considered “cured” and was now doing well, something in him was very changed. He was checking on me, to make sure that things never got so bad for me that I’d have to go through what he had.

  He offered to pay for me to see his therapist, and after some prodding, I took him up on this offer. I will never forget his kindness. And that’s how I made my way into formal psychotherapy for the first time. Almost immediately things began to shift and change in my life in ways that terrified me. This particular psychiatrist was a traditional Freudian who met every one of my questions with one of his own. During my initial visit, he asked me why I had come. I answered him: “I want to be able to love and work.” The simple act of stating what I wanted and needed was encouraging, even liberating, and gave me a platform to proceed with my quest for self. I got worse before I got better, but I was no longer as frightened as I had been of walking around leaking feelings from every pore.

  I did draw some comfort from the fact that there was so much “acting out” going on around me. Boston University, and the neighborhood around it, was a volatile place in the late fifties, and looking back, it seems to me it was a prelude to the sixties. There was a lot of drama, promiscuous sex, and even drugs going on, though no one spoke about it. All this was going on undercover, but I knew enough to no longer feel like a total outsider.

  There was one woman in acting class who seemed every bit as “out there” as I was: her name was Jane Cronin. She had short-cropped flaming-red hair that stood up on end. Her look, her persona were very punk—long before punk was born. I wanted to know her, so one day I decided to speak to her, and over time we became very good friends.

  In the meantime, I clung to Peter Kass’s words as I had to Vitale’s coaching. I knew that if I could just stick with it and begin to build my skills as a craftsperson, I would find a path to becoming a decent actor. My work was the one place I was learning a craft. I was learning how to fulfill the demands of the script. By the time the year ended, I was no longer on the fringe of the class. Along with Jane and eight others, I headed off to northern Maine to do summer stock. Finally, I was moving toward something—and not simply running away.

  We went up to Maine on a wing and a prayer: a “producer” one of my classmates knew said he’d sponsor us for the summer, but within two weeks of getting there, we found out he had spent our housing money and we were basically stranded up there with nothing but a lot of energy. We decided to stay. We ate a lot of peanut butter sandwiches and tuna casseroles that summer, and we improvised everything: we borrowed our props and costumes from local thrift shops—then returned them. One time we even used tomato paste to paint a backdrop—it was much cheaper than paint—and the theater smelled like a pizza parlor for the run of Shaw’s Don Juan in Hell.

  On our opening night—my first performance ever in front of a paying audience—I refused to even speak my lines. The other actors on the stage had no idea what was happening to me and continued to play around me. I sat, frozen to my chair. The play was Outward Bound, a 1930s melodrama about seven passengers on a cruise ship. I didn’t utter a word for the entire first act. During the second act, I spoke and was able to get up and move around the stage—but with all the subtlety of a robot. After the curtain went down, I found myself drinking everything I could get my hands on. Once I was completely plastered, I walked out the back door and down the hill toward the lake. I just kept walking. I walked until I was up to my neck in icy cold water. I heard someone yelling; Jane had followed me. She yelled until I came back to shore and told me what a fool I was, then helped me get to bed.

  The next day, no one in the company mentioned my behavior of the night before. On stage that night, I mumbled and stumbled my way through my lines—it was a dreadful performance, but a performance nonetheless. I had at least stayed the course, and I knew that if I could say my lines once, I could say them again. Only next time, hopefully, I would do better.

  I worked this way all summer, putting one tentative foot in front of the other, and started to feel more comfortable being on stage, more comfortable letting myself inhabit the skin of whichever character I was playing. Our last production of the season was A Streetcar Named Desire, by Tennessee Williams. I played Stella to Jane’s Blanche and we had a marvelous time, a wonderful experience. It was the first time that I felt connected to the other players on stage in a way that felt organic and true. We finished out our season, then made our way back to Boston for our second and last year of our master’s program.

  Once back, I auditioned for—and got—the lead in the first major production of the year. It was Federico García Lorca’s The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife. Getting the lead was a total shock. I didn’t even consider myself one of the good actresses in the school—but I was secretly joyous.

  One of the important things Peter taught us was that the craft of acting is all about fulfilling the demands of the play. Actors, he believed, need to study the script the way a plumber does a leak, in order to find out what it is in the script that makes the character, and the play, come alive.

  Our understanding of character, or how to play a scene, emanates from the text. An actor must find what his or her place in the play is, and, beyond that, what aspect of life the play is dealing with. Understanding the demands of the play entails dissecting every line, breaking it down into its smallest unit, which is the “beat,” or single action. Every scene is composed of beats and transitions. We had to be able to identify each action, the point of transition, and then the new beat. It’s an act of deconstruction: we hold the finished product—the script—in our hands; our job is to unravel it, to get to the bottom of it, to understand what motivated its coming into existence. About every act, every scene, every piece of dialogue, we have to ask ourselves: Why is my character saying this? What does she hope to achieve? When does the energy in the scene shift?

  Actors have to understand the plot as thoroughly as we do the character. A play’s action can be overt or buried. If I want to win you over, that’s the overt action. But maybe I want to win you over because I need you, because I’m afraid of asserting my own independence. That’s a buried plot. Now, suppose I encounter an obstacle: you find someone else you want instead of me. Now I have to find yet another way to win you over.

  The specific emotions of a character in a scene are triggered in part by outside elements. If I’m playing a love scene in lingerie, I do it differently than if I’m wearing an evening gown. If I’m sitting down while a man makes a pass at me, I react differently than if I’m standing up. All these changes make a huge difference in how the character comes across.

  As Peter taught about the craft of acting, I heard Vitale talking to me about the discipline of fencing. Without craft, or discipline, I’d be at the mercy of my history and my emotions. With the benefit of craft and discipline, I’d learn to focus, to channel what I was feeling so that I could express and communicate it. The contradiction coiled at the heart of acting is this: the only way to portray uncontrolled feelings is to control them. You learn how to do that through craft.

  Now I had the lead in a play and I thought of something Peter had said in order to keep myself from being overwhelmed by having to play a complex lead character. Peter used the example of Hamlet. “To many he is the most complicated person to walk on stage. Hundreds of books have been written about what motivates him to act as he does. But to me, every actor who plays Hamlet is much more complicated than the character he plays. Every h
uman being is much more complicated than any single fictional character, who is created with certain dramatic needs in mind.”

  Another way to look at this, and the way I describe this process to my own students, is to think of a prism. Each of us is like a prism of glass in that we have many facets. The point is to identify what the character is and then turn that aspect of yourself toward the light. The first time I grasped this concept was during the production of The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife, which gave me the self-confidence to believe I could play a lead in a big show.

  While we were rehearsing the show, I had the chance to hear the great Harold Clurman lecture. I knew of Clurman—just about everyone did. The legendary Group Theater, which he’d founded in 1931 along with Lee Strasberg and about thirty others, may have existed for only a decade, but that was long enough for it to completely reinvent American theater.

  Clurman took the podium at nine that night and was still going strong at one A.M. He talked about the transforming experience he’d had when he was only six and his parents took him to see Jacob Adler, the renowned Yiddish actor, in the then-thriving Yiddish theater on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. “I didn’t understand a word!” Clurman explained, but he was riveted by what he could read between the lines, by the passion, the humor, the camaraderie, the enormous energy on stage. This childhood experience determined his career: he not only devoted himself to the theater but ended up marrying Adler’s daughter, Stella, herself an actress and acting coach.