by Patti Lupone
The new director was a guy named John Berry and he joined us in Washington. Berry had virtually no experience with musicals at all. His chief asset was that during his time as an expat in Paris, he’d come to know Marcel Pagnol, the man who wrote the film on which the musical was based. That was not nearly enough to compensate for the fact that he was an obnoxious human being with absolutely revolting personal hygiene. He had dirty fingernails, greasy hair, dandruff on his collar, and a really shoddy personality. One day I sat down near him—who knows why—and he said, “What—did you come over here to suck up to the director?” In your dreams, douchebag; I said to myself. You are beyond disgusting.
And as if his personality wasn’t bad enough, he had no idea what he was doing. As one reviewer put it, “With an awkwardness that is painful, Berry squashes every chance for a build, punctures every potential uplift, stamps out all possibilities for charm, and then shrugs helplessly over the mess he has made.” I thought the critic was too kind.
The song “Bread” was still in the show, but our rehearsals were now focused on a boule game that would be the show’s new opening. There were endless hours spent throwing balls in a kind of slow motion. Good one, John. You really saved the show with that one.
He rubbed everyone the wrong way—literally. He actually came to blows with Pierre Epstein. Pierre and John got into an argument about something. Pierre was so enraged that he lifted a café table over his head and started wielding it like a medieval axe, preparing to smite the evil ogre Berry. Berry came after Pierre with his fists cocked, and there was a moment in time when everything froze, as we waited for one or the other to throw the first blow. That’s when some people grabbed Pierre and pulled him away, and others grabbed John and pulled him away.
The rest of us went running out of the rehearsal room—some in tears, some in shock, all of us asking, “Why are we going through this in our lives?” In situations like that—I’ve lived through them a couple of times in my career—your head is spinning. Your eyes can’t focus. You feel inhuman, but you’re experiencing supremely human emotions: terror, disorientation, and denial. You begin looking around in a desperate attempt to find something to laugh at, or you will sink into utter despair. I felt like I was in purgatory. Would I go to heaven now because the show would finally close? Or would I continue my descent into hell, where there would be no “Meadowlark,” just Sorvino’s ear-splitting high C’s and endless rehearsals of “Bread”?
Meanwhile, even though November 21, 1976, opening night at the Martin Beck, was fast approaching, at D.C.’s Kennedy Center Opera House we were still rehearsing by day and performing at night. Bad word of mouth spreads faster than good—our audiences were tiny and getting smaller by the day. The decline in the audiences matched the decline in the show itself—it was a long way down from playing the sold-out Dorothy Chandler in Los Angeles. Finally at a matinee at the Kennedy Center in D.C., we set a house record for the least-attended show in the history of the place: We had 25 people in the 2,700-seat house. These people didn’t have the good sense to get into one row. All we saw was a sea of red.
And while I was suffering in The Baker’s Wife, it never escaped me that The Robber Bridegroom had become a success on Broadway. I questioned my decision many times.
After one of our last matinees, John Berry called the company to the stage. He looked at me and said, “ ‘Meadowlark’ is cut tonight, and for good.” This reduced my part to, “Hello, Aimable. Good-bye, Aimable. Hello, Aimable.” That was my cue. I walked off the stage.
“Where are you going?” he called after me.
“To my dressing room.”
“Get back here!” he demanded. “There’s notes.”
“Go to hell,” I replied as I kept on walking.
I went into my dressing room, slammed the door, took a magazine, and threw it at the mirror. It didn’t make the right sound, so I picked up my wig block and heaved it at the mirror. Still not right. I grabbed my makeup mirror and hurled it as hard as I could—a resounding crash was followed by the tinkling of shattered glass. Ah, that was the right sound.
I started crying and screaming uncontrollably. I kept screaming, regardless of the effect it would have on my voice for the evening show. I was keening like a banshee—I just couldn’t take it anymore.
The company swooped down on my dressing room like a flock of seagulls—a flock of seagulls bearing Valium. They were actually giving me Valium before the evening performance! They opened my mouth, put the Valium on my tongue with a little water, tilted my nose to the ceiling, and rubbed my throat till I swallowed.
When they left, Bobby Borad came into my dressing room, sat me down, and said, “Patti, relax. We’re closing.” It was just two days shy of our opening at the Martin Beck Theatre. The three-sheets and the posters were up. The marquee was lit. My name was finally in lights on Broadway. And I couldn’t wait for them to pull the plug.
Because our closing notice went up right before a Wednesday matinee, we had to be paid our full weekly salary—highly unusual and rarely done. Needless to say, the entire company rejoiced. So did the ushers. At the sight of the notice on the call-board, there were tears of joy, raucous, delirious laughter, hugs and kisses. This was a closing notice!
After our performances that day, we went to an usher’s house and had one helluva celebration. Our hosts had actually baked a collection of breads with inscriptions like “So long!” “Good luck!”
“We’ll miss you!” and “You’ll never have to rehearse ‘Bread’ again!”
This was my first taste of how vicious and emotionally debilitating a musical could be.
My agent had thought The Baker’s Wife would make me a star. Instead, it put me on the unemployment line. After the show closed, I returned to New York a deeply wounded and emotionally scarred human being. Kevin and I were still together, but he couldn’t shake me out of my depression. I was in Valium withdrawal for nine months. I gained forty pounds. I lived in a blue robe and slept fourteen hours a day. I’d wake up, go to the refrigerator, eat, and then go back to sleep. I should have bronzed that blue robe.
6
David Mamet and Me
Peter Weller and me as Nicky and Ruth in The Woods.
In 1976, David Mamet boarded the bus with The Acting Company in Louisville, Kentucky, and rode it to Columbus, Ohio. Unbeknownst to us, John had commissioned him to write a play for the company. In the end, he didn’t write the play, but he took that ride with us, sat in a seat right behind me, and watched the loud and nonstop antics of the now eleven liberated actors. He didn’t say much but he smiled a lot. I can’t remember when David and I became friends. All I remember is that we became fast friends, and when I finally got off the road for good, we started hanging out together in Chelsea, where we all lived—Kevin and I on West Twenty-first Street, and David on West Twentieth. It was a lovely twist of fate. He’d come over to our apartment and I would make us all breakfast. We would spend days together. He always brought me little trinkets, all of which I still have. Somewhere in that burgeoning friendship, David asked Kevin, Sam Tsoutsouvas, and me to act in one of his plays. The play was called All Men Are Whores. We did it at the Yale Cabaret in New Haven on November 20, 1976, less than two weeks after The Baker’s Wife closed in D.C. and before the Valium withdrawal kicked in. I think there were more people in that little cabaret than at the last performance of The Baker’s Wife!
David directed. It was my first experience with this man whose words, rhythm, and subject matter were curious to me. He was mesmerizing when he talked—about anything—but especially when he talked about acting, and about his plays and about the language of his plays. He was an important teacher in my growth as an actor. I’ve always believed that my association with David gave my career an added dimension and weight. I have an uncanny ease with his language and characters. He’s extremely musical and I guess so am I. It was evident to me in his writing just how musical he was, but it was a complete surprise to see him sit down a
t the piano and start playing. He’s bold and raw and I’m definitely that, if anything. I’ve always been able to lose myself in David’s theatrical world. It’s one of my favorite places to be: onstage in a Mamet play under David’s direction.
David was just beginning to be recognized as a playwright, and had written and directed Sexual Perversity in Chicago in 1974 at Goddard College, his alma mater. The following year, American Buffalo was presented at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. He was on the verge of becoming the fabled David Mamet with the opening of the Broadway production of American Buffalo, starring Robert Duvall, Kenneth McMillan, and John Savage. I remember walking down West Forty-seventh Street and both of us looking up at his name in lights on the Barrymore marquee. It didn’t sink in with either of us.
While we were at Yale, he asked me to do The Woods. He handed me the play in the dormitory we all spent the night in and said, “Read it.” David was the first playwright to ask me to originate a role in one of his plays. I read The Woods, and I shook—it was such an intense piece. I didn’t quite understand it but I liked him so much and I also realized that this young American playwright was asking me to take a risk with him. I decided then and there that I would follow him anywhere. Kevin wanted to play the part of Nicky but David refused. “No,” he said, “it will break up your relationship.”
Well, Kevin didn’t play the part, but it still broke up our relationship. The emotions churned up by the play were incredibly powerful. There are just two characters, Nicky and Ruth. David called it “a celebration of heterosexual love.” Ruth loves Nicky. Nicky ends up hitting her. The play deals with mixed signals and violence. Peter Weller was cast as my Nicky.
But before we went into rehearsal, I did a winter stock play at the Poinciana Playhouse in Palm Beach, Florida. The play was A Lion in Winter with Fritz Weaver and Beatrice Straight. David joined me there and we managed to get into trouble. I remember the two of us walking down the street in broad daylight, scaring the shit out of the old folks passing us. “Young people on these streets? Must be muggers!” “Yeah, kind of …” David and I were actually thrown out of the Breakers hotel. We found a golf cart after our ejection from the hotel and started making doughnuts on the golf course. We were bad together. At one point we were in a restaurant, and who knows what happened. It wasn’t a pleasant meal. We were paying the bill and complaining to the hostess about our server. Something didn’t sit well with David—her answer, most likely. What I saw next was David flick a dollar bill to the floor as if the bill had a weight on it. I mean in one fell swoop that bill dashed to the floor. “There’s your money,” he told her. “You’ll have to pick it up yourself if you want it.” I saw David’s rage. I was scared and thrilled by it. It’s a rage I can translate onstage.
David was one of the founders and artistic directors of the Saint Nicholas Theatre in Chicago. That’s where we would premiere The Woods. David, Peter, and I left for Chicago. We stayed in the Lincoln Hotel and I entered a period in my life that would drastically change me forever.
David used to live and write in the Lincoln Hotel. Perhaps the place was good discipline for a writer, but it was in fact a flea-bitten dive. There was an all-night restaurant attached to the hotel called Jeff’s Laugh In, and that’s about all there was to it. I was miserable—back on the road rehearsing a play that was forcing me to look deeply into my heart, and then having to go “home” to a squalid hotel room. I began to fall apart emotionally because of the effect the play was having on me. The story of love and the relationship of these two lovers hit too close to home. My relationship with Kevin was teetering again. I would rehearse scenes that were reminiscent of my life with Kevin and I wouldn’t be able to leave those feelings in the rehearsal room. They wouldn’t go away, these persistent voices telling me how much I had been lying to myself, lying to Kevin, and how much Kevin had been lying to me. There were also powerful feelings developing that were turning into love for Peter—my Nicky. My world was disintegrating. I couldn’t separate the play from my own life and I couldn’t find a way out of this depression. No one knew that I was sobbing on the floor in my hotel room every night. Kevin was in New York, David was getting together with Lindsay Crouse, Peter was in a longstanding relationship, and I was lost—alone in that disgusting hotel room and emotionally lost. My best friend, Jeffrey Richman, flew to Chicago to hold my hand a couple of times. My demeanor changed, but I wasn’t clear if it was the effect the play was having on me or if I was primed for a life-changing experience. Everything was happening around this devastating play. Some people could see that I was in bad shape—women mostly—and they tried to help as best they could, but I had to make my own admissions and changes. The irony is that all of this angst fed the character.
We opened The Woods on November 11, 1977, and the reviews were good. I loved a line one reviewer used: “To congratulate David Mamet on his ear for speech is to miss the main thing about him. He is no ear, but a stethoscope.” What fun it is to speak his dialogue and unravel his complex characters. I refuse to let it be said that David cannot write female roles. I’ve played several of them and they are deep emotional beings. He loves women. He’s a great acting teacher as well. When I began working with him, I was struck by how he could reduce the craft of acting to its most fundamental procedure and simplify the task. His directives, such as “Let the script do the work, you have the fun,” taught me to focus on the text. “Dare to live in the area where you do not know what is going on” taught me to trust the concept of letting go of control. It was interesting to watch David the director edit David the playwright. He is not so possessive and precious about his writing. It’s all in the interest of telling the story. David trusts actors as well. When we were rehearsing a reading of his play The Blue Hour, we had a note session. The actors were sitting in the house and David was on the stage. He stopped the note session to say, “Leave actors alone, they’ll make the perfect stage picture.” If only more directors would trust the actor.
David left Chicago after we opened. I was stuck in a run of this extraordinary, difficult, devastating play, depressed as hell in freezing Chicago—not what I bargained for. I had good times, though, even as I tried to make sense of my miserable life in that disgusting hotel room. I met great people in Chicago. Besides the women, there were two of David’s best friends, JP Katz and Rokko Jans, Bill Macy, Colin Stinton, the cast of David’s play The Water
Engine, and Muhammad Ali. Yes, Ali—go figure. It wasn’t a total loss. The ignominious end to the Chicago experience was at the closing night party at the Lincoln Hotel. Kevin came to visit me. In a drunken stupor I declared my love for Peter to Peter with Kevin standing right next to me. Silence. Kevin took me back to my room. We held each other in bed and re-committed ourselves to the relationship—until he slept with a chorus girl in Boston while he was doing On the Twentieth Century. We finally broke up for good six months later. I sat in a rocking chair in the middle of my apartment, blared Also Sprach Zarathustra, and kept thinking, I’m alone, I’m alone with me. I have to stop lying and grow up.
Joe Papp wanted to bring The Woods to the Public Theater. He wanted me as Ruth, but he didn’t want Peter, and he didn’t want David to direct. I was upset because my performance was based on Peter’s acting and David’s direction, but eventually with David’s encouragement I agreed that I would do it. I ended up not doing it and the reason was Evita.
David had now found a home in New York City, the Public Theater, so I started working with him there. I joined the Chicago company of The Water Engine when, for some reason, two women were fired. I replaced them, completed the run at the Martinson Theatre, and took the play to the Plymouth Theatre on Broadway, opening March 6, 1978.
It’s a play about a radio station that puts on the radio play The Water Engine. During the course of the evening, the actors switch back and forth between the real characters in The Water Engine and the radio station actors. The Water Engine play is about a guy who has invented an engine that runs on
water. The government does not want these plans patented, so they kill the inventor and his blind sister—but not before he mails the plans to the local drugstore kid.
When I went to see it downtown at the Public, it was great. It was done in a theatre where food and alcohol were served—a kind of cabaret environment. While the houselights were still up, the actors entered the stage, chatted with one another, checked props, etc., then an ON AIR light came on as the houselights dimmed, and one of the actors, Colin Stinton, came down to the microphone at the edge of the stage and welcomed the studio audience and the affiliates to “WCMJ 590 on your radio dial.” The audience became very silent—we were “On the Air.” (Of course we weren’t, but the theatrical device was brilliant and worked.)
When we moved uptown to the Plymouth Theatre on West Forty-fifth Street, some major changes occurred. For one thing, the fourth wall was dropped. The fourth wall is the space between the actor and audience, from the foot of the stage out to the depth of the theatre, and if there’s no fourth wall, the actors see and acknowledge the audience. If it’s dropped, we are staring into a void even if we make eye contact with the audience. But it’s still a black void, a middle distance. Musicals don’t have the fourth wall when the character is singing. But the wall is dropped when scenes are played unless the character has an “aside,” a line directed to the audience. The fourth wall was not dropped when we played downtown, so we acknowledged the audience, and the audience was in the studio with the radio actors, us.
We didn’t know why the director would make such a radical change to the way we had been playing it. With this new direction that the play was taking, Colin Stinton said to Steven Schachter, the director, David, and Joe Papp, “You can only be an audience member once, then you start to second-guess the audience. We start at the beginning of the play every night and you never take our point of view into consideration.” I spun around at his words. I hadn’t ever thought of it that way. I just blindly trusted my directors, but it’s so true. Who knows the audience’s temperature better than the actor who is playing to them—the storyteller telling the story from the foot of the stage back out to the house? Producers and directors lose perspective on a play after multiple viewings. They have a tendency to forget that the audience will see it only once. As a result, the creators often second-guess themselves and their audience. They stop trusting their initial instincts. I thought Colin was brave and brilliant to protest this move, but they dropped the fourth wall, anyway. As a result, the play lost that precious intimacy and we only ran for a month. Who knows if it was because of that change. I had such a great time doing it, though. It was a Mamet environment. I got a little scared every night places was called and I entered the playing area. It just smelled of danger: The lighting was dark and shadowy, the set was a 1930s radio station, complete with a sound-effects booth, the story was dangerous and prophetic. It was delicious, brilliantly conceived and directed, and the production fit the Plymouth Theatre perfectly. I loved this company of actors. I was so sorry The Water Engine closed.