Patti LuPone

by Patti Lupone

  After Evita, I went back to repertory theatre. Early in 1982 I headed for Minneapolis in the dead of winter to Liviu Ciulei’s production of As You Like It at the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre. Ciulei’s staging of As You Like It was internationally famous, and I was so flattered he wanted me in his production. I had seen his work at Juilliard and was very eager to play Rosalind under his direction. My agent insisted that it wasn’t a smart career move. I could see his point—his commission would be about twelve dollars.

  Minneapolis was experiencing the coldest and snowiest winter in a hundred years. The icicles were three stories high, and potentially lethal if they broke off. From time to time they plunged to the ground, like huge daggers. We were constantly looking up.

  On our first day of rehearsal, the stage manager handed out a Good Housekeeping article entitled “I Froze to Death—and Lived.”

  Rosalind in As You Like It, 1982.

  © GIANNETTI 1985

  With Val Kilmer as Orlando in As You Like It, 1982.

  © GIANNETTI 1985

  The story took place in Minnesota and described a woman whose car broke down at night on the side of the road. Not properly dressed for the cold, she left the car on foot and started to head for the light of a distant farmhouse. In the morning the farmer opened his door to find the woman, frozen stiff as a board, on his front step. He put her in the back of his pickup truck and brought her to the hospital. They defrosted her. She survived, but she couldn’t remember anything about the incident—about slipping into unconsciousness or how she got to the farmhouse.… So how the hell did she write that article?

  I lived in the refurbished attic of the home of two artists, a Swedish woman and her husband, a Chippewa Indian—Hazel Belvo and George Morrison. It was recommended that I put a heater on the engine block of my car before I left New York. I did just that and at night before I went to sleep I would plug my car into an electrical socket on the outside of the house. I thought it was peculiar, but apparently this was not unusual in Minneapolis.

  Liviu had assembled a wonderful company of players, one of whom was David Warrilow. David was considered to be one of the foremost interpreters of Samuel Beckett’s plays. Rehearsals were master classes. Liviu is a scholar as well as a great director. There were wonderful lectures all through the rehearsal period. I remember an actor asking Liviu what style was. “Style is what suits you,” he said. It was so simple and clean.

  His concept for As You Like It was a play within a play. We actors were cast as a troupe of eighteenth-century repertory players, costumes and performances frayed at the edges, playing the roles in As You Like It. Liviu’s production was miraculous. My reviews, however, were a different story. If it’s a hit and the critics say nice things, people will tell you. Unfortunately, if the critics don’t like you, people will find a way to tell you that, too. I wouldn’t have known about my reviews had David Warrilow not called me the day after we opened to tell me how sorry he was.

  “Sorry about what, David?”

  “Oh, your terrible reviews … just terrible, but no worries, Patti, you’re lovely in the part.”

  “Oh, dear … Well, how were your reviews, David?”

  “Well, Patti, they were … GLORIOUS!”

  Great, David. Thanks for calling.

  The Village Voice said my casting was “a brainstorm at night and a nightmare in the morning.” Getting panned is never fun, but it was harder this time around because now the question from the critics was, What was a musical theatre star doing at the Guthrie in a Shakespearean play? It was like Evita gave me a career and then ruined it.

  Great, Evita. Thanks for calling.

  Over the three-month period I was there, I learned that the Guthrie had a curse on it, that the sister city, St. Paul, was the seat of the occult in America, and that Minneapolis was a Mafia stronghold. I loved working with Liviu but couldn’t wait to get out of there at the end of the run for a lot of reasons—three months in the cold, in a cursed theatre, working off lousy reviews being three of them. Oh yes, and I was thrown out of Prince’s music/dance club for unruly behavior and unsavory language. Minneapolis bars taught me to drink a Bloody Mary with a beer chaser. It’s the only way they’re served. Mmm, delicious. Wait a minute, what am I talking about? Minneapolis was fabulous!

  It was barely spring when Peter Weller picked me up and drove me home. He and I were about to reprise our roles in The Woods at the Second Stage Theatre. We started out after the closing night party, so it was rather late. Not ten minutes into our journey, we were stopped by a state trooper. When Peter went for his wallet in his bag in the backseat, he pulled out a cat turd instead. My cat had taken a shit in his bag. You had to laugh. Or I did, anyway. Peter not so much. The cop took Peter’s license and registration, called it in, and when he came back to our car, told Peter there was a warrant out for his arrest in the state of New York. It’s a long story and has something to do with a truck Peter was driving and the Park Avenue underpass—the truck was too tall and got stuck in the underpass, which snarled Park Avenue traffic all day, and they had to cut part of the historic underpass out to move the truck—something like that.

  Peter and I rehearsed and opened the revival of The Woods. My bad reviews continued. John Simon of New York magazine said that I was a poor reason to revive The Woods. (I forget now which “friend” told me that.) I remember one performance where audience members had obviously read our reviews. At a particularly poignant moment in the play, they laughed out loud at us.

  I also remember a knock-down, drag-out fight Peter and I had during a rehearsal. It was early morning and it was a staging dispute on the verge of getting really violent. David Mamet defused it by taking Peter to a bar, and then me antiquing. Peter drank, I shopped. David is a great leveler.

  In February 1983, I did America Kicks Up Its Heels at Playwrights Horizons in New York. As The Baker’s Wife had proved to me earlier in my career, great music and a fine cast are not enough to make a musical work. Bill Finn, our composer, had written a wonderful score. The cast was extremely talented, and included Dick Latessa, Lenora Nemetz, and I. M. Hobson. Nevertheless, this was not a pleasant experience. Something prevented this show from gelling and becoming a really good musical.

  The production was a mess from the beginning, perhaps because we had no director, for one thing. I can’t remember who our first director was, but whoever it was didn’t last long. I think the choreographer took over directing, until she got colitis and left. After the choreographer took off, Bill Finn attempted to direct, but that was a bad idea. He couldn’t write, rewrite, direct, and handle us as a company all at the same time.

  As rehearsals continued to disintegrate, we became known as “the snake pit” by the Playwrights Horizons management. We were sold out through their subscription series, but the word of mouth was not good. I couldn’t understand why management wanted to officially open it. I remember threatening to walk if they brought in the critics, which they initially intended to do. We would’ve gotten butchered. It would have been sticking a dagger in the already bloody heart of this company. We didn’t officially open, and we finished our run as best we could. So much talent was wasted on that stage.

  In the fall of 1983, I appeared in The Thornhill Project, written by Meade Roberts. The cast was fabulous, and included Ben Gazzara, Murray Hamilton, Carol Kane, George DiCenzo, and Polly Draper. This was an odd but wonderful experience. The wonderful part: I was being directed by John Cassavetes and playing opposite Ben Gazzara. The odd part was that Thornhill, a play about Eugene and Carlotta O’Neill, was five and a half hours long and it was terrible. Why was it being done?

  We workshopped it at Westbeth, the artists’ community in the far West Village, with the intention of moving it to Broadway. Our producers were Fran and Barry Weissler. As I rehearsed the play (I played Carlotta to Ben’s Eugene), I kept thinking that this would be my longest one-night stand on Broadway because that’s all it would last—five and a half hours, one night.


  Meade Roberts was a very temperamental man who treated John Cassavetes like shit. During rehearsal he would beckon John to his side by wagging his finger at him with a withering look of disapproval on his face. It didn’t faze John. I can’t remember if Meade rewrote while we rehearsed, but the play never improved. One night I got a telephone call from him. Meade was in a state of delirium, and I told him to come over to my apartment. He did and we talked—or rather, he talked and I plied him with scrambled eggs and Valium. That was my go-to dish in those days.

  In the middle of the rehearsal period I was fired, along with Carol Kane, Murray Hamilton, and George DiCenzo. We were fired because Carol had wisely told us not to sign our workshop contracts; they contained no guarantee that we would be the actors to reprise our roles on Broadway.

  So I didn’t sign my contract, and as a result I was fired—except nobody bothered to tell me until I showed up at rehearsal one day. John looked at me strangely and said, “What are you doing here?”

  “I came to rehearsal,” I replied.

  “You’ve been fired,” he said. “The Weisslers fired the four of you.”

  I was shocked, first, because I was fired, and second, because of the way I found out I was fired—from John, who was surprised that the Weisslers hadn’t told me, or my agent. Because of the Weisslers’ underhanded method of producing this project, a major battle erupted between John and them. He broke off his association and ended up buying the play from them in order to continue rehearsal. Once that happened, he rehired all of us.

  We continued rehearsing. I remember one afternoon when I had to deliver a long, convoluted, and emotional speech in front of Gena Rowlands, who had come to visit John. That was intimidating. She is a great actress, and she was boring holes in me, or so I thought. I never found out if she approved or disapproved.

  Still, the play never got any better—or any shorter. We opened Thornhill at Westbeth, played a couple of performances, and that was the end of that.

  In the spring of 1984, I was cast as Nancy in Cameron Mackintosh’s Broadway revival of Oliver! I don’t remember singing for the director. I believe it was Cameron who wanted me to play Nancy. I went to the Mark Hellinger Theatre and met some of the creative staff. The director showed up much later.

  This should have run longer than the two weeks we did run. I mean, it’s Oliver! It starred Ron Moody, the original Fagin. We were being directed by the original director, Peter Coe; we had the original sets by Sean Kenny; we had all the original costume designs, the original blocking.… Hmm … maybe that was the problem.

  After Ron, Graeme Campbell (who played Bill Sikes), and I were set, the rest of the ensemble was cast by the assistant director, Geoffrey Ferris. We went into rehearsal with Geoffrey for I believe two weeks. When the director finally did show up at rehearsal, two things happened:

  1. He pointed to a chorus woman and said, “I remember the woman who played your part twenty years ago.” I thought, Oh no, we’ll never be good enough.

  2. He fired Oliver. I left the rehearsal room clutching my throat thinking, I’m next.

  It was a blow to everyone, and a bad way to start rehearsal. In reality we never actually rehearsed. We were given the blocking from the original production. There was no exploration, no discovery, no nothing.

  I asked the musical director if I could change the keys to Nancy’s songs. “Absolutely not!” I had to sing in Georgia Brown’s keys, which were much lower than mine. I had major battles with the musical director. One battle I remember concerned the definition of the musical term vamp. Typically a conductor will repeat a musical phrase until an actor is ready to sing. This is vamping. But he never waited for me to finish my dialogue. I believe I said, or perhaps yelled (yes, that’s more like it), “Vamp means vamp till I’m ready.” He was the only one in the building who yelled at the kids. I did not like this man at all.

  One night in my dressing room, Cameron saw me in my Nancy costume and said I would be perfect for a character in Les Misérables, a new musical being done with the Royal Shakespeare Company.

  I said, “Where and when?”

  He said, “London, nine months from now.”

  I sighed and let it go.

  Oliver! is such a wonderful musical. I wish we had run. Ron, Graeme, and I were happy onstage. We played so well and so fair together. The kids were great. Just recently I reconnected with my Artful Dodger, David Garlick. We were a happy company once we opened, but we didn’t sell tickets, and so it goes. We closed. I packed up my dressing room, said my farewells, and headed to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to begin filming Witness.

  Witness, directed by Peter Weir and starring Harrison Ford, was shot in Amish country in 1984 and released on February 8, 1985. This was a great experience because of Peter and Harrison. I played Harrison’s sister. It was a small role and I wasn’t on the shoot for long, but I had a great time doing it. Harrison was completely generous to me and Peter is among the best film directors I’ve worked with. I’m not on movies long enough to become involved with the politics or intrigues. This one was just a good experience. I remember laughing a lot.

  With Harrison Ford, on the set of Witness.

  After Witness, I returned to the stage in Dario Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist. This is a really interesting Italian play based on a true story. A man who was (or was not) an anarchist was arrested, and while he was being interrogated at the police station, he mysteriously fell (or was pushed) out of the window and died. It’s a political farce that began as street theatre during his actual interrogation.

  Jonathan Pryce and me on opening night, 1984.

  Jonathan Pryce was our star and was unbelievably brilliant as Antonio D’Antonio. He taught me an incredibly valuable lesson: “Get to the end of the line.” Make your point is what he was saying. I had no idea that I wasn’t making my point. What I was doing was taking too much time within the line, and as a result I was losing all sense of it by the time I got to the end. I was being indulgent onstage. Thank you, Jonathan. I quote him all the time. Jonathan is such a smart actor, and he remains a great friend. I remember seeing him in Comedians and being electrified by his performance. He is one of the greats, and howlingly funny.

  This turned out to be another short-lived Broadway experience—fifteen previews, twenty-five performances, and we were done. My Midas touch again. Before we opened, Dario Fo was denied entrance into the United States as an “undesirable” because he held leftist political beliefs. (About twelve years later he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. So much for undesirable.) After a vigorous protest by American writers, he was allowed to enter. The dustup made headlines and gave us millions of dollars of free press. It didn’t help nearly enough. Our reviews were not good. Mine especially. Frank Rich of the New York Times questioned my involvement in the play. Again, as at the Guthrie, I had to deal with “What is Evita doing in this play?” I don’t know why the critics were so obsessed with me taking roles in straight plays or why my friends were so obsessed with telling me why the critics were so obsessed.

  I left Evita as a musical theatre performer, but when I initially won the part, I was “refreshing” casting because they had cast an actress. Now it seemed that I couldn’t go back to doing what I had done before Evita, namely plays. Show business has a short memory. I persevered, however, and continued doing what I had been trained to do. It took a long time to get over the hump of not being allowed to move from a musical to a play. I got over it by continuing to play the parts that were offered to me, and fortunately, many people knew me as an actor before Evita.

  The year 1985 started out with a joint phone call from Peter Sellars and Timothy Mayer. Peter had just been named director and manager of the newly formed American National Theatre. He was just twenty-six years old. Peter and Timmy offered me roles in ANT’s first two plays, Henry IV, Part I, directed by Timmy, and The Count of Monte Cristo, directed by Peter, both at ANT’s new home, the Eisenhower Theater at the Kennedy Center in Was
hington, D.C.

  I was to play Lady Percy in Henry IV, Part I and Mercedes in The Count of Monte Cristo. I couldn’t believe my good luck. I accepted, of course, which meant that I would be in D.C. for five months. The first production was Henry IV. Timmy began directing, having just given up drugs, alcohol, and smoking. His opening remarks were stunning, but then it went downhill from there. I can’t remember the details of what happened, but we lost our Falstaff, and John McMartin, who was playing Henry IV, was asked to take on Falstaff as well. He did so expertly.

  We were saved—for the moment. Rehearsals seemed to be going well, but it turned out to be a lifeless and pretty boring production. We got terrible reviews and closed after just thirteen performances. This was getting ridiculous. I had done almost a dozen plays since Evita and none had been hits. Or even semi-hits. And all my reviews stank. And I still didn’t have a boyfriend. I’ve gotta get out of this chapter quick. It’s depressing me.

  That particular company disbanded, except for those of us staying on for Monte Cristo. The premature closing of the very first production was unexpected and a little devastating for this new company.

  On the other hand, The Count of Monte Cristo was a staggering experience and a benchmark in my career. It was as odd and as talented a company as I have ever worked with. The cast included Richard Thomas as Edmond Dantès, Zakes Mokae, and Roscoe Lee Browne. In a reversal of typecasting, Roscoe played the noble good guy and Zakes was the bad guy. David Warrilow and Tony Azito (from Juilliard’s Group I) and I were reunited.