by Patti Lupone
The formation of the Juilliard Acting Company was the prelude to the formation of a repertory company in earnest, which is exactly what happened when we graduated in May of 1972. I ended up with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, a seat on a Domenico bus, and four years of employment.
The journey was worth far more than the piece of paper at the end. Juilliard taught me to remain open to everything in my life, to every period of theatre, to every style of acting. That lesson was tremendous. I wish I’d studied better, developed more technique. But I also learned that those skills would never be enough. There would always be something intangible about the connection between the actor and the audience. Some of the actors in my class were technically brilliant. They had beautiful speaking voices, beautiful diction, beautiful projection, but they were not very good actors. You can be taught to act, but you can’t be taught the X factor.
School was incredibly hard. We were all psychologically ripped to shreds. We had to rebuild character, confidence, and emotional stamina. Some of us made it and some of us didn’t. In my class there were attempted suicides and mental institution lockups. The pressure and the competition were intense, but I grew as an actor because I was tested, not because I was supported. I truly believe you learn more from failure than you do from success. I spent four years there, and it was one of the most painful experiences of my life. I kept saying, “I came here with an open heart and soul. Why am I getting beat up?” I don’t think they intended to beat us up. Their intention was to build strong American actors articulate in technique, style, and comprehension. Was it worth it? Absolutely. The craft of acting, the process of learning how to act, is such an investigation of one’s soul and being. However painful it was, I wouldn’t change a minute of the experience, because it prepared me for everything in this business, including the worst experiences my career and my life would survive. The blows took their toll, no question. But I came out a much stronger person and a much stronger actor.
4
The Acting Company
1972–1976
The full company in 1975, our fourth year. I owe my career to John Houseman.
PHOTO © JACK MITCHELL
There were many casualties among the original thirty-six members in Group 1 of the Drama Division. Only seventeen of us lived through all the rigors of Juilliard and graduated—fourteen from the original class plus the three advanced students. We brave warriors were the group that became John Houseman’s repertory company. He kept our class together after critic Mel Gussow of the New York Times hinted in a review that this company should stay together. While we were still under the auspices of the school, we were called the Juilliard Acting Company. After graduation we couldn’t use the word Juilliard in our title anymore, so we became the City Center Acting Company, and when our affiliation with City Center ended, we became just The Acting Company. In 1972 the name sounded so pretentious and we took a lot of heat from our critics. However, The Acting Company is in its thirty-seventh year, still touring classical theatre, and the only repertory company of its kind in America.
The transition from performing at Juilliard to performing as a national repertory company was to a certain extent seamless. Once we graduated, we took select plays from our third- and fourth-year repertoire and spent the entire month of July in performance at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in Saratoga Springs, New York. This was the best job a young actor could have. We were plying our craft while we were in residence with the New York City Ballet. We would walk across the lawn from our theatre to theirs and watch them rehearse. We all hung out at the same pool on our breaks and days off. It was summer, always a sexy time to me. The grounds of the Performing Arts Center were gorgeous. The swimming pool was part of the Gideon Putnam Hotel, located behind our theatre just beyond the tennis courts. It was a huge pool, with a Grecian theme, and to see the glorious bodies of the New York City Ballet just lolling around in their string bikinis and thongs was almost too much to take. We didn’t necessarily become friends with them, but in the four years I spent at Saratoga, I came to idolize the artistry of Gelsey Kirkland, Suzanne Farrell, and Allegra Kent. George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins were the artistic directors, and a few of us turned into hushed and excited fans when we’d see them wandering the grounds. I remember them coming to see Anton Chekhov’s The Three Sisters our second year and hearing Balanchine exclaiming to Robbins when the play was over and they were heading back to the amphitheatre, “RUSSIANS DON’T TALK LIKE THAT! WHAT A BUNCH OF CRAP THESE ACTORS ARE!” He gesticulated wildly all the way back across the lawn. I was thrilled he even noticed what a bunch of crap we were.
That first summer was quite successful for our newly professional acting company. We received great reviews and we started to develop an audience in Saratoga. It was also the summer that the boys came out … as if we didn’t know. There was such an emotional release one night when, in the dorm we were all living in, one, then another, and then another screamed, “I’m gay!” “I’m gay, too!” “I’ve always been gay!” “Not as gay as me!” and celebrated their freedom at LAST! We confirmed our love for them, celebrated with them, and deeper bonds were formed.
After Saratoga we returned to New York and made our off-Broadway debut September 27, 1972. We performed at the Good Shepherd Faith Church on West Sixty-sixth Street. For all intents and purposes, we were back at Juilliard, because the church is located practically next door. We spent late September and most of October in the church performing our Saratoga repertoire, Gorky’s The Lower Depths, Brendan Behan’s The Hostage, Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware Women, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The School for Scandal. Our reception was very good, so we were off to a great start. Then we hit the road—theatre vagabonds working fifty weeks out of the year. The touring aspect, being on the road for months at a time, was totally new to us and we were in for some big lessons. We lost several bookings our first year because our training at school only prepared us for three performances of the play we’d been rehearsing. That’s all we ever did. On the road when we got to the fourth performance of any given show, our performances fell apart. We weren’t taught to maintain a characterization or a show. We basically stunk, while we behaved like spoiled brats fresh out of some fancy acting school. I remember Potsdam, New York, one of our first stops. Someone mouthed off about “this shithole of a place” while the presenter was standing right outside the dressing room door. We never saw Potsdam again. We had to learn so much more than maintenance on the road—manners and diplomacy for one thing, adaptability being the biggest challenge, and the most important lesson, how to “ghost” in hotel rooms to save money. We all picked out a seat on a Domenico Line bus, chose friendships that would endure a lifetime, and designated an area in the bus restricted for entertainment, which included smoking, poker, and pot. This lasted four years, with actors coming and going and the entertainment changing as ennui set in.
My first head shot.
Our backstage crew that first year consisted of one stage manager who could also hang and focus lights, one prop man, and one wardrobe supervisor/dresser—a three-person crew loading in six classical sets and costumes that were not built to tour. The sets were built for the three performances we did at school. We had a big truck to haul the shows and a driver who looked kind of dangerous. He traveled our sets and costumes with his girlfriend and his dog. This gangster actually had affection for us. He would show up at our motel room parties and find the chair that would make him the center of attention. We all paid our respects to him and a few of the girls dared to sit on his lap. I’ve forgotten his name, but I can still see his face, those sexy and threatening eyes of his, and his girlfriend’s long black hair. He drove The Acting Company truck for three years. We hated to see him leave. We all loved him, even after he pulled up to the loading dock of the theatre we were playing one night and started revving the engine of his eighteen-wheeler while we were performing the third act of The Three Sisters. The noise was deafening. When we found out it w
as our driver, we politely asked him why he did that. “I wanted you to speed it up,” he barked. “I got a long way to drive.”
Whatever you say, you handsome devil with that dangerous thing you got going, I thought. Before you go, let me sit on your lap.
Speaking of speeding it up, our bookers never referred to a road map when they were routing us that first year. There were times when we exceeded the hours of travel Actors’ Equity rules permitted. If we obeyed the rules, we’d never make the performance. We would literally arrive just in time to throw up bus sickness, throw on a corset, do the play, check into a motel, and the next morning be back on the road for another long haul. We were doing one-night stands. Our crew had to strike the sets, load them out, and in many cases drive several hours to our next stop. They would load in at seven A.M., work all day, and call the show at night. The whole thing repeated itself day after day. The actors had it easier than the crew. The crew drove themselves. We had the greatest bus driver for the entire four years, Bob Blount. I wonder where he is? We loved him very much, too. He would drive that bus like it was a jet plane, smooth and fast. He never got a ticket, and if there was time between performance dates, he would take us to the Grand Canyon or a ski resort in Colorado. I’ve thought about him and hope he’s well. I truly loved that man.
We took Brendan Behan’s play The Hostage to Bronx Community College, where this time, as we were preparing for the performance, the stage manager was laughing his head off with tears in his eyes. We asked, “What’s so goddamn funny, Tommy?”
“There are more of you than there are of them,” he said. We had eleven people in the audience and they alternated between watching us and the basketball game. The basketball game won. We ended up with nine people at the end of the show.
We had no masking (black drapes that delineate onstage from offstage), so when we exited, the audience saw us walking out of doors stage right and stage left into classroom hallways. The ultimate humiliation came at the finale of this deeply political play. The company stood in a V and sang the Irish ballad and IRA favorite “The Patriot Game,” written by Dominic Behan, Brendan’s brother. The music was recorded and the tape was at the wrong speed, the slowest speed, and stayed on the slowest speed for the entire song. The only person who sang in tempo with the tape was Leah Chandler. The rest of us were laughing—at Leah, and at our pathetic situation.
Our first year was just the beginning of the theatrical and life lessons that would serve us better than we ever imagined. Like the first day of school, we didn’t know what hit us. Then again, we were an intrepid group and the stranger the situation, the more fun it was.
We were having the time of our lives because we were doing the thing that we had trained so hard for. We had already gained theatre experience, but there were even bigger lessons ahead. One of the biggest was learning how to adapt to the kinds of stages we found ourselves playing. All of a sudden we weren’t in the nurturing womb of our Drama Division theatre. We knew how to project in that space. We knew the sight lines and we knew the comfort level. We had freedom. Now we had new stages, new backstages, and new audiences to understand and conquer in only a couple of hours at best. This was blessedly a time when we weren’t encumbered with microphones. However, in one theatre, The Acting Company management had to send for our voice teacher, Liz Smith. No one had ever seen a theatre this big. It was someplace upstate New York on a college campus. I have no idea why it was so big unless it was designed for graduation ceremonies. Liz did her best to save the show. She taught us how to project in the space but also how to measure the volume level to preserve the language and the comedy. I mean, this was a barn—big! We did our best but I don’t think we succeeded that night. The play was Sheridan’s The School for Scandal. There I was in pink silk and lace sitting on David Schramm’s lap shouting down his ear, “SIR PETER, SIR PETER! YOU MAY BEAR IT OR NOT, AS YOU PLEASE; BUT I OUGHT TO HAVE MY OWN WAY IN EVERYTHING, AND WHAT’S MORE, I WILL, TOO!”
We performed on every possible configuration of a stage. We played Baptist altars, black boxes, gymnasiums, jewel boxes that were on the verge of abandonment, and we played nonexistent stages. We also played some of America’s most beautiful theatres, the Fulton Street Opera House in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C., to name two. Our experiences were different at each stop. We often encountered miscommunication between the theatre’s technical director and our technical director. In one particular case when we came to the theatre, we saw that our set didn’t fit on the stage—another adjustment. Where and how do we make entrances and exits in Measure for Measure with the set falling off the stage? I mean literally falling off the stage. This time they could hear us but they couldn’t see us. We abandoned the downstage right and left entrances. That part of the set was floating midair. All those years adjusting to stages ultimately gave me the ability to walk onto any stage and know how to play it in about ten minutes.
Things improved over the following years, though in our second year at Saratoga we were faced with what seemed like an insurmountable dilemma. We toured fifty out of fifty-two weeks of the year. When and where would we be in one place long enough to rehearse a new season? Saratoga, of course! In order to go back on the road for a third year, we would have to perform our existing repertoire at night and rehearse four new plays simultaneously during the day. We had enough plays from school to get though the first two years but now we faced this enormous test. We were never out of rehearsal that month. I remember being pulled out of rehearsal for Jean Anouilh’s The Orchestra to rehearse my scenes in Christopher Marlowe’s Edward the Second. There was an overall sense of panic: Could we accomplish this? We could rehearse one play in a month’s time, but four?
An interesting thing happened to me while I was juggling these roles. It turned into a great advantage. I’ll put an enormous weight in the development of the character—psychological, emotional, whatever. But in this instance, as I left one character midstream, mid-scene even, and went across the hall to rehearse the next one, when I returned to the first one, a bubble had burst. There was an ease and enhanced depth in the characterization. It was as if the pressure was taken off one character and placed on the next one. And so it went for all four characters. It was almost easier to develop four at once than to develop just one. I don’t recommend it, but we were forced into that situation. It was a great lesson.
I was capable of multitasking with a sense of relaxed comprehension. It was actually fun to do. It became easy because it was fun. Acting has to be joyful. It can’t thrive in an overwrought state. The audience absolutely knows when an actor is uncomfortable, and they can’t be taken on the journey of the story if the actor is internalized—meaning too much in their head. And truly, the actor’s only responsibility is the telling of the story. We have to enter the stage confident and with a certain command in order to relax an audience and gain their trust to follow us. It was a revelation. I suppose the lessons were flying fast and furious because I was doing so much acting. It was also the year that I learned to leave the character and the play onstage. I got sick of acting. I wanted my life back. I worked hard to leave the theatre each night as me, not as the remnants of the character I had just played. Doing this allowed me to observe all kinds of very interesting things. I’m so curious, anyway, but it’s a hard lesson for any twenty-year-old to learn: to get out of the way of their self. I guess I was able to get out of the way of myself because acting was being shoved down my throat. To this day I’m one of the first people out of the stage door at night. Leave it onstage, and carry on with your life.
It was also in that second year that two momentous events occurred. John Houseman saw a “Naked Run for God” and the entire company got crabs—the common term for “pubic lice.” “The Naked Run for God” was the equivalent of “streaking.” It came about on the road because three of my classmates needed something to do in the off-hours. Cynthia Herman, Jed Sakren, and Sam Tsoutsouvas were the principal players. John
had heard about the Naked Run and wanted to see one. We were living in a soon-to-be-abandoned Skidmore College dorm in Saratoga. John also lived there to prove a point: If he could live there, so could we. It was a hellhole. It looked, felt, and smelled like a prison, which we also played that summer—Comstock Maximum Security Prison. We brought The Hostage to the prisoners. Now, that was live theatre! The prisoners had an attention span of about two minutes. Then they started to get disruptive until the guards shouted for quiet. All was silent until they lost interest again. Eventually they got involved with the story and started shouting at the characters onstage. It was frightening and exciting. The actors playing the male prostitutes had the most to worry about. At the end of our play, we went into the auditorium and mingled with the lifers. I found myself staring at a beautiful blond boy who was in turn staring at the striking of the set, totally mesmerized. His face was angelic, like an awestruck child. I felt as if he wanted to be up there, that he’d never seen anything like this before. That somehow it was magical and he wanted to step into it. I wanted so badly to talk to him and ask him why he was in a maximum-security prison. I didn’t because I was scared but mostly because I didn’t want to break the spell he was under. As I stared, I wondered what would have happened to this guy if he had discovered the theatre when he was younger. Would he be involved now? Would he be a tech director, a lighting or set designer, or would he have ended up in jail, anyway?
Anyway, back to the “Naked Run.” Cynthia, Sam, and Jed arranged it on this one particular night after a show. We all assembled in the common room and waited for the runners. Here they came running naked, nothing unusual, until Cynthia knocked on Mr. Houseman’s door. He came out of his room in a knee-length bathrobe. She dis-robed him, knelt down, and with her lily-white hands, cupped his soft penis and kissed it.