Clurman, a nonstop talker, was by turns funny and serious but always animated and passionate; he had devoted himself not only to altering the course and very nature of the American theater but also to persuading everyone that this was a worthy enterprise.
It’s thanks to Clurman that we have an American theater. Before the 1930s, most American dramas were all variations on the upstairs-downstairs theme, exploring the exploits of the upper classes and their servants. My Man Godfrey, the classic 1936 “screwball comedy,” is the perfect example: an eccentric heiress socialite finds a hobo and hires him as her butler, only to have him teach her about “real life.” Mannered and formulaic, most dramas were also either transplanted from England or written by Americans about England and the English (only musicals, derived from the minstrel and vaudevillian traditions, were homegrown).
Top-notch American actors such as John Barrymore studied in England, cutting their teeth and earning their credibility by performing Shakespeare. English acting schools stress voice and verse—that is, learning to use the voice as an instrument, and to speak verse so that it sounds not like poetry but like live speech. American acting schools were nearly nonexistent. In fact, the drama program I was enrolled in at Boston University was in its very first year.
As an undergraduate studying drama at the University of Paris, Clurman found himself questioning his identity, seeking to define, as an American, what set him apart from the Europeans he met in the classroom and on the streets. “Where are the American actors and playwrights?” he asked himself. “Where are plays that tackle the unique American experience?” There was no shortage of great American artists: Whitman, Melville, and Emerson were transforming poetry, novels, and essays. Even American painting was coming into its own. But American theater, which had been hopelessly mired in things English, was now wiped out by the stock market crash of 1929. There were no plays written by Americans about Americans—about pioneers, businesspeople, shop owners, immigrants; there were no plays that embodied the adventurous, freewheeling, optimistic, entrepreneurial American spirit.
Meeting Constantin Stanislavsky, the founder of the renowned, influential Moscow Arts Theater, further changed Clurman’s life, and the future of American theater. Stanislavsky used a method of teaching acting that would eventually come to be known as “method acting.” His theories represented a huge break with the past. Before Stanislavsky, actors were urged to leave their own feelings offstage and inhabit the roles of the characters they were playing. Stanislavsky urged actors to delve into their own pasts, to dredge up their own emotional reactions to situations, and portray these on stage. If the character needs to appear envious, for instance, Stanislavsky instructed the actor to remember a moment when he felt envious in his life and bring that to the part. He devised a series of exercises to help actors access these hidden parts of themselves.
Method acting has a huge following in this country—Marlon Brando, Eli Wallach, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, and Robert DeNiro, among many others, were trained in it—thanks to Stella Adler, Lee Strasberg, and Harold Clurman, who adopted and adapted it. But Stanislavsky’s feelings about the role of the theater had an equally profound effect on Clurman. Stanislavsky, who worked with both Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov, believed that actors should work together in an ensemble company. Only by working together day in and day out, rehearsing a broad range of material, could they learn to really trust each other—and this degree of trust was essential to acting of the highest caliber. Stanislavsky was after realism and emotional honesty. Actors had to be believed, even more than they had to be understood.
As a director at the Group Theater, Clurman began to articulate his own ideas about American drama, completely distinct from the European tradition. Under his direction, Clifford Odets’s groundbreaking plays—Awake and Sing! Golden Boy, Waiting for Lefty—gave American audiences real Americans to care about, root for, and cry over: taxicab drivers working twelve-hour days for five dollars a week trying to decide whether to unionize and risk the little they had for the promise of so much more; two-bit boxers who yearned to give up the corrupt ring for the purity of music; lower-class families living in too-small apartments in the Bronx who struggled to hold on to their Marxist ideals while taking in boarders and handling out-of-wedlock pregnancy. These were the issues and ideas roiling America during the Depression. Long debated by politicians, covered in newspapers, and talked about by everyday people on street corners and on bread lines, they finally found their first theatrical expression in Clurman’s theater. The Group Theater staged more than a series of innovative plays—it staged a coup. American theater was never the same.
When that company fell apart, Clurman turned to Broadway, where he produced groundbreaking plays by Eugene O’Neill, Carson McCullers, and Arthur Miller. But he never lost his vision and never tired of tackling big ideas. “The purpose of theater,” he said that night, “is to intensify our understanding and desire for life.”
By the time Clurman finished talking, I was also in tears. Here was a man talking with such fervor and passion about the work that I planned to commit my life to. I was invigorated by hearing him speak.
For our very last production as students, Peter decided to mount Chekhov’s The Seagull. He cast me as Arkadina, an aging actress whose lover, Trigorin, a writer, falls in love with her son’s friend Nina, who is yearning to begin her own career on the stage. Arkadina is a woman who has lived a full life and who has weathered many storms in her life and has learned how to take control of events that threaten her. Nina, on the other hand (who is the “seagull” of the title), is young and rushes naively toward life, unaware of what awaits her. Like a seagull, she drifts along the currents of life, at the mercy of external forces. This was Peter engaging in a bit of therapeutic casting. I could have played Nina easily, but playing Arkadina was another matter. I worked as hard as I could and brought all the craft I had to work with me every day. But every time we got to the scene in the play where Trigorin confesses to Arkadina that he wants to leave her for the young Nina, I would start weeping and could not proceed. By the night of our final dress rehearsal, Peter was so frustrated with me that he lost control. “You are a coward!” he shouted within earshot of every person connected to the production. I walked out of the theater and just kept walking. I knew I was in trouble because I didn’t even know where I was. I looked around, saw a pay phone, and dialed the psychiatrist I had been seeing. He wanted to know where I was, and I was so lost that I just whispered, “I don’t know, I don’t know.” “Olympia. Look up. What does the street sign say?” he asked calmly. Within minutes, the doctor drove up and took me home. He gave me a tranquilizer and I fell asleep until late the next morning.
I had no idea at the time how much playing Arkadina tapped into my own feelings of rejection and sorrow—feelings I had refused to acknowledge when N left me. I had not shed a tear about N—then or since. I had succeeded too well at burying my feelings and denying how wounded I was. It all seemed to be coming up now, though.
That night at the theater, everyone was buzzing with opening-night adrenaline, except Peter, who was keeping a very low profile. I heard that he had suffered some kind of collapse after I walked out. A couple of actors in the cast glared at me, but Peter’s wife came by the dressing area with some yellow roses for me. “Good luck tonight,” she said.
That night, during the scene with my lover, I began to weep but I managed to say all my lines. I took Peter’s suggestion and did a bit of stage business. I took a handkerchief from my skirt and smoothed it on the floor before I—Arkadina—kneeled down. One of Arkadina’s characteristics is that she’s incredibly fastidious. Because I portrayed her so, even in this heartbreaking scene, it made the audience laugh. In the end, Arkadina prevailed, and so did I.
Toward the end of my second and final year, I chose three performance pieces I needed in order to qualify for my master’s degree. A classic: Clytemnestra in Agamemnon; a contemporary American, Mary Tyrone from Eugene O
’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night; and a Japanese classic in which I played a bird goddess. I wrote my master’s thesis on Bertolt Brecht.
After graduation, a number of us from the BU program were invited to pull together a company and so made our way to Buzzards Bay on Cape Cod. We had a primitive theater—the stage and chairs for the audience were under a tent. When it rained or the wind blew, we had to run around and anchor the flaps. We put on six plays that season, but the most sensational one was our production of La Ronde, written at the turn of the century by Arthur Schnitzler. La Ronde is about the transmission of venereal disease and it caused quite a sensation when it was first staged in the early twenties. In fact, it was banned and Schnitzler was charged with obscenity. Apparently, things hadn’t changed much during the intervening fifty years, because when we mounted our version in 1957, the town fathers of Buzzards Bay decided that we, too, were engaging in public obscenity and revoked our performance license. We retaliated by making the performances free (which meant we didn’t need a business license at all) and worked strictly on donations. This was the first professional performance that my parents ever came to. I was playing the whore—the one who triggers the venereal disease outbreak. Every performance was attended by a picketing crowd, including the one my parents came to see. I remember looking out from the stage after the show and seeing my father, sitting there stone-faced. After the show, he was unable to speak to me. My mother said he was too upset at seeing me play “that part.” The charges against us for staging La Ronde were eventually dropped in court in Boston.
We finished our summer on the Cape and a core group of about eight of us decided to go to Boston and open a theater company. We found a space, an empty loft, on the third floor of an old building on Charles Street in Beacon Hill. We had to build everything ourselves—the stage, the seats, and the prop and dressing areas. Then we had to build the sets, make the costumes, and even print the tickets—everything! We planned a season and assigned jobs, and mine was acting as the group spokesperson when dealing with our landlords or other vendors. I enjoyed doing this job and, as it turned out, I was good at it.
We called ourselves the Actors Company, and our first year was rocky, exhilarating—and a success. We revived La Ronde and it did very well, though this run was much less scandalous than our run on the Cape. We did a production of Sartre’s No Exit, Federico García Lorca’s Blood Wedding, Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, Tennessee Williams’s Orpheus Descending, and Truman Capote’s The Grass Harp. We were hailed as “one of Boston’s most exciting up-and-coming theaters.”
That summer, we took on a producer, the lawyer who defended us on the obscenity charges the summer before, and did another summer of stock on Martha’s Vineyard. I was even approached by a New York talent agent who told me to call her if I ever got to the city. I took her number and forgot all about it.
When we got back to Boston that fall, we added a director to our staff and moved into a bigger theater in downtown Boston on Warrington Street. Though we still called ourselves the Actors Company, we named our theater the Charles Street Playhouse so that theatergoers would know that we were the young company from Beacon Hill. The space on Warrington Street was on the second floor, above a lesbian bar. Depending on the backstage configuration, we often had to walk through the bar to get from one side of the stage to the other. I remember walking through the bar during The Crucible, by Arthur Miller, and everyone in the bar would fall silent and stare at this eighteenth-century woman in full costume.
But it wasn’t that easy to get the theater open. Every time we thought we had everything up to code, some inspector would cite us for another violation. This was beginning to cause real problems, as we were seriously short on cash and in jeopardy of closing before we had even opened. That’s when “Big Joe,” our landlord, came to our rescue.
Everyone said that Big Joe was “connected,” but I liked him because he was so direct, and I particularly liked his wife, who was an ex-stripper. He understood our dilemma. “Meet me here tomorrow morning at seven A.M. and I’ll show you how we open a theater in Boston, little lady.” The next morning, I was standing in front of the theater when Joe pulled up in an enormous black car. The driver kept the car idling at the curb while Joe went into the theater. I watched as each inspector came in, looked at the theater, and talked to Joe. Joe would reach into his pocket, take out a huge wad of cash, and peel off a few bills. Then the men would shake hands. When the last of the inspectors left, Joe turned to me and said, “And that, little lady, is how you open a theater in Boston.”
We had a second well-attended season, but our group began to change and things began to fall apart. The lawyer who produced the summer season left. A Boston businessman and our director decided the two of them would form a producing team. They told us we would all be creating an ensemble, but as the year went on it became clear they wanted control of the company. They wanted to bring in outside actors. We saw the writing on the wall. We were being marginalized and people began to leave, but I stayed until the bitter end. The producers insisted that they owned all of the props and costumes and other materials the company had either made or purchased during our first year. I was outraged by how we had been lied to and deceived. One night, I got a friend to drive me to the theater. When we got there, I asked him to wait with the engine running and I headed directly to the costume closet, grabbing as much stuff as I could carry. With my arms full, I started to run across the balcony of the theater. From down on stage, I heard the producer yell, “You can’t take those—they’re not yours.” Then I heard Big Joe say, “It’s okay. Let the little lady go.” I threw all the costumes into the back of the car. “Step on it!” I yelled—I was scared. I called my cousin Michael, who was then practicing law. I asked him what to do. Without missing a beat, he said, “Time to go to New York.”
Chapter Seven
I GOT TO New York in late 1959, when I was twenty-eight years old. I had exactly fifty-seven dollars in my pocket. My friend and former roommate Roberta had taken an apartment in the East Forties, and she suggested I stay with her until I got work and could find a place of my own. I was grateful for her couch and her generosity.
I loved the energy and diversity of Manhattan and I loved the anonymity of the crowded streets. Everyone was from someplace else. Everyone had a different story to tell. I felt free of my preoccupation with ethnicity, since I was surrounded by it. I wasn’t “other”; in this city, everyone was “other.” Now the challenge was making a place for myself as an actress. I spent every evening reading the trades and every day running around town to find auditions. In order to audition, you needed an appointment, but I had no contacts, so I tried to crash auditions! I had no agent, no manager—I didn’t even have a résumé or a headshot. I must have seemed right off the farm. All I had was one good pair of shoes and a lot of drive. My money was dwindling. Roberta never asked me to contribute to the rent, but it bothered me. It was finally getting through to me that making a living as an actress was not going to be easy. The first thing I had to do was pay my bills, which meant getting what actors call a “job-job.” Physical therapy was an option, but that was a real job, eight hours a day with no time or energy for anything else. Waitressing was perfect for me. The first job I got was in a deli-restaurant, but I didn’t last long, only long enough to get my own apartment.
I found a roommate, a darling young actress named Linda Lavin, who had worked at the Actors Company on the Cape. That first year I took whatever job I could: I waited tables, proofread, worked at Bloomingdale’s, and I even worked as a secretary for a short time until my boss found out that I had lied when I said I knew stenography and was a good typist. I could do neither! All I cared about was getting acting work. I just knew I had to be an actress.
Maybe I should have been frightened by how little I understood the business, but I was blessedly ignorant and determined to succeed. But success was more than getting a
job and paying my rent. I’d been in New York for months and all I’d really done was work a series of non-acting jobs and wear down the heels on my one pair of shoes. One day I was sitting on the steps of the New York Public Library, where I’d stopped on my way home and decided to sit outside. People-watching was great, free entertainment. I was watching all the little dramas of people’s lives playing themselves out when I realized that on either side of me were the two massive stone lions that guard the steps of the library. They were named by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia during the Great Depression and for the mayor symbolized the persevering spirit of all New Yorkers. Their names are Patience and Fortitude. Sitting there, I decided in that moment that I would not only survive here but—to use the phrase William Faulkner used when he accepted the Nobel Prize—I would prevail.
If ever there was a time to be in New York, the late fifties and early sixties was it. The theater was exploding with thrilling, risky, avant-garde work like Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, which won the Tony in 1960. Or Genet’s The Balcony and Edward Albee’s Zoo Story and Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. The theater scene was experimental and exciting and I wanted to be part of it.
I wanted to reconnect with acting. I didn’t want to lose my energy for it while I was waiting tables and going on auditions. I went back to class to study with Peter Kass, who was now teaching privately in New York. And I found myself a therapist. I still felt I needed clarity in my life in order to work and love the way I knew I could.
On New Year’s Day, 1960, I had just stumbled home from a wonderful New Year’s Eve party. I had barely gotten myself to bed and the phone rang. It was Alan Ansara from Peter Kass’s class. He was starring in The Breaking Wall down at the St. Mark’s Playhouse.
“Olympia. Something’s opened up and I think it’s right for you,” he began. “It’s a small part, an Italian peasant.” I sobered up. “But you have to be here now. They need someone to start immediately.”
Ask Me Again Tomorrow Page 11