'Golden Child'

My friend Diana and I took out a season’s subscription at the Signature Theatre Company again this year, but instead of the Residency One program, which focuses on the works of a single playwright, we went with the Legacy Program at Diana’s preference, which this year is presenting plays or performances by four earlier writers-in-residence from past seasons.  (I’ve already reported on the first Legacy production, Sam Shepard’s Heartless, on 10 September on ROT.)  As I was still interested in catching the main residency season, three plays by David Henry Hwang, I asked another friend to accompany me.  Although he agreed, after I bought the tickets he had to drop out because of rehearsals for a production of his own he was directing.  I asked Diana to pick up the seat, and so she and I returned to the Pershing Square Signature Center on Theatre Row for the evening performance of the Obie-winning Golden Child on Wednesday, 28 November.  The production had gotten a good notice in the New York Times by Charles Isherwood on 14 November, but I was as much interested in seeing the play, which I’ve never seen, as in catching this particular presentation, so Isherwood’s opinion, however encouraging, wasn’t key.

Golden Child was first staged by James Lapine in New York City, opening in the Newman Theater at the Joseph Papp Public Theater (in a co-production with the South Coast Repertory, which had commissioned the new play) on 19 November 1996 where it ran a little under a month.  After a production at South Coast in Costa Mesa, California, where it played from 10 April to 9 February 1997, Golden Child tried out at the Singapore Repertory Theatre from 13-25 January 1998 and San Francisco's American Conservatory Theatre from 13 February-15 March 1998.  After some revisions during the California and Singapore runs, the production was remounted briefly at Broadway’s Longacre Theatre, opening there on 2 April 1998 for 69 performances.  It won 1996-97 Obies for playwriting and performance (Tsai Chin as Eng Siu-Yong) and was nominated for Tonys for best play, best featured actress (Julyana Soelistyo as Ma and Eng Ahn), and for best costumes (Martin Pakledinaz).  The Signature revival, the first major New York restaging since the début 16 years ago, began previews at the Alice Griffin Jewelbox Theatre on 23 October and opened on 13 November; it’s scheduled to close on 16 December (extended from 2 December).  The production has been directed by Hwang’s frequent collaborator, Leigh Silverman, who first worked with the playwright on the workshop of Yellow Face at the Public in  2007 and went on to stage Chinglish (2011) and the current Golden Child revival.  (Silverman will also be mounting the STC production of Hwang’s new play, Kung Fu, later in the season.)  Presentations of 1981’s The Dance and The Railroad (5 February-17 March 2012) and the writer’s newest work, Kung Fu (Fall/Winter 2013) will follow Golden Child at STC.

The two-hour play begins in 1968 as a teenaged Chinese-American boy interviews his Chinese-born grandmother in Manila about the family’s history.  Hwang has said that Golden Child was inspired by just such a conversation he had with his own grandmother when he was 10: “I felt that it was somehow important that these stories not be lost with her.”  (In the original version, Hwang used a playwright and a ghost to set up the story.)  Set in Fujian (also called Fukien) Province in southeastern China in 1918, the play’s central story focuses on Eng Tieng-Bin, who’s returned home from a three-year business sojourn in the Philippines.  He brings with him modern, westernized ideas—and a British missionary, the Reverend Baines.  To the polygamous Eng, the old ways now seem wrong.  Foot-binding, which he has come to see as disgusting, already has begun for his young daughter, Ahn.  Taking place between the overthrow of the Chinese imperial dynasty (1912) and the eventual establishment of the People’s Republic of China (1949), the play is Hwang’s exploration of Chekhovian terrain: the change from one world to an entirely new one for a people steeped in generations-old traditions: polygamy, ancestor worship, opium-smoking, and the suppression of individualism, among the main ones. 

Born in Los Angeles in 1957, David Henry Hwang was trained at the Yale School of Drama and saw his first play, FOB., staged in 1979 at his dorm at Sanford University where he got his BA; he briefly studied playwriting with Sam Shepard and Maria Irene Fornés (both previous STC writers-in-residence) at what became the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival.  A study of the conflicts between the native-born Asian Americans and their “fresh off the boat” immigrant parents and grandparents, FOB became Hwang’s first major production (and his first Obie) when it was staged by the Joseph Papp Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival in 1980.  (Hwang’s own parents are immigrants to the U.S.)  The play explores a theme to which Hwang returns often (including in Golden Child), making him a prominent voice for not only Americans of Chinese and Asian heritage, but those with recent immigrant roots of many other cultures and nationalities—anyone who endures the conflicts between old traditions and the newly-adopted American ways.  He’s far more than merely an ethnocentric playwright, however; his themes and ideas have implications relevant to us all.  In the ensuing three decades, Hwang has emerged as the most preeminent Asian-American playwright and, having accumulated a slew of awards and honors from every aspect of American letters and culture, including a Tony and a Drama Desk Award (both for M. Butterfly, 1988), three Obies, and a handful of Tony and Pulitzer nominations, a significant voice in American theater.  Hwang’s a writer who always has something to say that’s worth listening to and contemplating, even if the stage production might not fulfill the promise.  Both his dramaturgy and his ideas are substantial.  As a theater writer, he gives special meaning to the phrase “man of parts.”

In addition to M. Butterfly in 1988 and the short run of Golden Child in 1998, Hwang has been represented on Broadway with Chinglish in 2011-12 as well as two Disney musicals for which he penned the books: Aida (2000-04) and Tarzan (2006-07).  The dramatist also contributed a new book for the 2002-03 Broadway revival of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Flower Drum Song.  (Face Value ran for 8 previews at the Cort Theatre in March 1993, but closed without officially opening.  The failure inspired Hwang’s 2007 play, Yellow Face.)  Hwang’s plays have been staged in regional theaters large and small all across the country (and abroad) as well and the dramatist has produced a number of screenplays, including the 1993 film adaptation of M. Butterfly as well as a few TV movies, and opera librettos.  

I didn’t see the earlier New York productions of Golden Child, so I have no basis for a comparison of this revival with the originals (which is probably just as well), but I can see that it must have been a terrific introduction of Hwang and his work to those who were just hearing about him after his Broadway début with M. Butterfly.  It reveals the thematic focus of the writer, presents a view of the ancient culture of his heritage to which he feels so drawn even though he’s grown up as a mid-century American kid (like me, as it happens), and exhibits several of the playwright’s techniques.  The framing device, the mid-20th-century scenes between grandson and grandmother, within which is couched the 1918 family tale, for instance, and the portrayal of “past” characters by the same actors playing “present” ones (the grandmother is played by the same actor, a very young-looking, and terrifically animated Annie Q., who appears as the child Eng Ahn, and her grandson is portrayed by Greg Watanabe who is Eng Tieng-Bin) are central to the production as is Hwang’s use of his own family history.  (I’m not familiar with all of Hwang’s works, but Golden Child may be the most literally biographical of his plays—with the exception of Face Value/Yellow Face, based on an actual 1991 controversy in which Hwang was focal.)  Some may find Golden Child too literal in its depiction of both family lore and 20th-century Chinese history, but considering how unfamiliar most theatergoers probably are with those aspects of American and world events, I don’t think it is.  I, myself, enjoyed the representation of the world of 1918 China and I even appreciated the directness with which Hwang delineated the life of his forebears as they were encountering Western ideas and customs for the first time.  (It’s actually quite amusing to hear the misconceptions and stereotypes the Chinese characters have of European people and ways, especially in light of Western views of Chinese and Asians dating from the same period.  The Chinese characters sometimes call Westerners “Occidentals,” for instance, the same way we used to call Asians “Orientals,” a label about which Hwang’s apparently sensitive.)

One thing I found especially interesting is the portrayal of Reverend Baines, the Anglican missionary Eng brings home with him from Manila.  He’s described by one reviewer as “a man eager to bring Jesus to the entire village” and could so easily be presented as a true “white devil” (which is what Hwang’s Chinese characters often call Westerners, including once inadvertently in front of Baines).  But  he’s not, he’s a well-meaning and respectful man who wants to impart the tenets of his religion to anyone who’s will listen.  Yes, he’s a missionary and proselytizer, which presupposes some level of arrogance, but he tries to learn Chinese and when he encounters the women of the household with bound feet, he shows no disgust or revulsion even as he pressures Eng to stop the practice.  (It’s Eng who orders the unbinding of his young daughter’s feet, with the child’s encouragement but over the protests of Eng Siu-Yong, his first wife and Ahn’s mother, and Eng Luan, his second wife.)  Baines also doesn’t raise the subject of polygamy until Eng Luan, the only one of the three who attends the discussions with the missionary, asks about the Christian policy on the practice.  (She knows that if Eng converts, he must dismiss two of his wives and remain married to only one; she plans to be that wife.)  Even then, Baines explains the Christian view of marriage without outwardly condemning the Chinese tradition.  Now, it should be noted that the Engs’ story unfolds the way the elderly Ahn tells it, and she’s resolutely stressing the conversion to Christianity as a great blessing. 

(I should note that Diana objected to one technique Hwang uses in his depiction of Baines.  As the missionary tries to learn Chinese, we “hear” him speak in pidgin English while the Chinese characters speak perfectly grammatical, unaccented standard English.  Diana wasn’t sure what this signified at first—she asked me what it meant—and then said she thought it was unnecessary.  I don’t agree; it’s a theater convention—that is, it’s not literally real—but it makes its point while, at the same time, turns the mid-century practice of portraying Asians as pidgin-speakers—think Charlie Chan or Mr. Moto in the movies, both played by Caucasian actors—upside down.  Grandma Ahn, in the framing scenes, also speaks pidgin—because she's then talking to her grandson in English while during the flashback story, she’s speaking Chinese with her family.  This isn’t the only instance of theatricality in Golden Child, so it’s not out of line with the overall “highly presentational style” of the play, as New York magazine’s Scott Brown called it, which “takes a bit of getting used to.”  Brown described Hwang’s use of such theatrical devices as on-stage assistants—who help with set, props, and costumes—and ghosts as “somewhere between living-room naturalism and Peking Opera.”)

Ahn, who appears to be about 10 or 12 at the time of the story, clearly views the westernization and the conversion from traditional ancestor worship as an advance and not a betrayal of beloved traditions—she wants her feet unbound, even though she knows it will be painful, and had voiced her distaste for the practice before her mother and “aunties.”  Hwang seems to be presenting the shift from traditional Chinese ways to Western practices as a prelude to the family’s eventual immigration to America and its ultimate Americanization, beginning with his own generation.  According to Golden Child, it’s neither good nor bad at its core, but is simply what happened to a huge number of Chinese (and other Asian) immigrants in the early decades of the 20th century, a combination of hope and displacement that left repercussions down the generations, as suggested by Ahn’s 14-year-old grandson who’s looking for the connection to his cultural heritage that he’s lost.  (He’s travelled to Manila to record his grandmother’s recollections because relatives in America either don’t have the memories or can’t speak English well enough to communicate them—and he doesn’t speak Chinese.)  In fact, Hwang doesn’t really take sides in the conflict between the old ways, as represented by Siu-Yong and third wife Eling, and the new, foreign ones, as adopted by Eng, Ahn, and Luan (who begins wearing western clothes almost as soon as Reverend Baines arrives). 

The three principal modernizers each has a different motivation: Eng chooses to westernize because he’s a businessman and sees the west as the rising economic power with whom he wants to do business and where he wants to succeed.  He also clearly believes that Christian and European ways are stronger and perhaps even more moral that the old Chinese ways.  It is the Future and Hwang says that Eng wants “to move his family forward and himself forward.”  Ahn wants to adopt western practices because she is young and wants to be modern.  She’s already shown a streak of irrepressible individualism—she speaks against foot-binding before her father and Baines arrive—and is viewed by her elders as willful.  (She gets away with it because, she explains, she’s a “golden child,” as her nanny’s husband tells her, having brought him luck at gambling.)  Western ideas appeal to her personality.  Luan approaches westernization as a practical choice.  She sees that her husband is gravitating toward Christianity and she intends to be the one wife standing when that process is complete.  She’s something of a conniver and a manipulator, and as the middle wife, her position in the household is weak because she hasn’t the standing of first wife Siu-Yong or the love Eng feels for the third and youngest wife, Eling, the one he chose for himself, so she sees westernizing as the key to changing that status.  I suspect that Hwang, himself, sees American values reflected in all three impulses—but that he also sees in the other characters’ devotion to the traditional beliefs a form of stagnation that turned China into a sleeping giant. 

The domestic drama, the smaller world within the Eng home, has its own dimensions, as the ideal Chinese family that the women describe in words reveals its secrets and illusions.  The real story of the family dynamic, which develops in detail following the intermission in act two, is about the women, particularly the three wives.  Eng is the engine of change, but he’s nearly ignorant about the goings-on in his house.  The sisterly wives aren’t as united as they say they are and each one has her private issues of which Eng is unaware both because of his long absence and because he’s oblivious to what actually goes on in his house. 

Diana was disappointed that Hwang didn’t express a conclusion of the implied debate or come out with some kind of definitive statement on the subject of westernization, assimilation, tradition, and cultural heritage, but I liked the way he laid out the elements as he saw them and let the characters all convey their own points of view—or imply them.  “Did Tieng-Bin destroy his family or set them free?” asks Time Out New York’s Diane Snyder.  “It’s left to his descendants to discover clarity amid the convoluted muddle of ancestry,” and it feels to me as if the author may have been conflicted about the clash of cultures, so letting us see the various sides without showing us his own conclusion is dramatically the right choice for me.   Indeed, Hwang has said that he starts composing a new play when he has a question, “something I don’t understand,” and he writes plays “to find out how I feel about the issue.”

Director Silverman elicited good, strong performances from the whole cast in any case.  Hwang hasn’t written the characters with many hidden layers, and Silverman didn’t insert any.  It’s all very straightforward and unambiguous.  Each member of the household establishes his or her personality (mostly “her”: Eng is the only male in the household—there are apparently sons, but we never see them—and Baines is the main story’s only other male character) in the first scenes and continues to develop it in a pretty straight line, with one or two little twists. 

While it was hard to buy Watanabe as a teenager in the first and last scenes, he was a credible presence as Eng and persuasively evinced the conviction of a man who’s decided where he needs to go and proceeds to get there.  His Eng Tieng-Bin is still dictatorial, as much as he tries to behave like a more progressive Western man and the contradiction is visible in the character’s demeanor and the difference in the way he treats his rebellious daughter and his disobedient wives.  Annie Q.’s older Ahn comes very close to caricature, with her high-pitched voice and pidgin English, but as the child Ahn, the actress is consistently in sharp contrast to the generally more staid older women, including Lesley Hu’s third wife, Eng Eling.  As Eng Siu-Yong, Julyana Soelistyo (who played Ahn in the 1996 première), is both commanding and prickly in the early scenes, and suitably spooky when she returns as a vengeful ghost later, and Jennifer Lim, as second wife Luan, is determined and calculating.  Matthew Maher’s Reverend Baines, despite a somewhat shaky British accent, is steady and sincere as the proselytizing cleric, exuding a sense of both sympathy and admiration, however unexpected on his part, for his potential converts. 

Neil Patel’s unit set looks exactly like period pavilions I’d seen in China (as well as the example on exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Chinese Garden Court).  Grandma Ahn’s home in Manila transforms into the Engs’ pavilion home in Fujian by the removal of a few panels and the addition of traditional Chinese chairs and magically we’re in 1918 provincial China.  Anita Yavich’s gorgeously brocaded costumes, in various hues of red (the color of happiness in China), and the wives’ makeup (hair styles and wigs were by Tom Watson) instantly evoke the time and place as we’ve come to recognize it from period photos and films set there.  The atmospheric use of Chinese music (the sound is designed by Darron L West) enhances the overall sense that we’ve been transported to the world of Hwang’s great-grandparents. 

In the press, Charles Isherwood was reservedly enthusiastic about the revival.  In his New York Times review, he described Silverman’s take on the play as “more intimate and more overtly comic than” the 1996 première, though, he asserted, “the comedy recedes into the background” as the tension builds.  But, he added, aside from Soelistyo’s Siu-Yong, “[t]he rest of the cast fares less well.”  In the New York Post, Frank Scheck wrote that “the play tries uneasily to meld Western and Eastern styles” but that “Silverman’s well-acted, visually elegant production shows the piece certainly deserves another look.”  Calling the Signature production “engaging,” Joe Dziemianowicz of New York’s Daily News said the play’s “not particularly deep and a bit too jokey for its own good.”  Nonetheless, the News review-writer pronounced Hwang’s family story “well-told” and the STC cast “polished.”  In Long Island’s Newsday, Linda Winer decreed that Silverman’s staging “feels oddly stilted and lacks the elegance of the earlier ones.  The structure is neater, but the reach, less captivating” than the première version.  In the Village Voice, Miriam Felton-Dansky acknowledged that the cast is “talented” and that Silverman’s direction is “graceful,” but ultimately asked “with so many Hwang plays to choose from, why did this one need revival?  Like the less-than-welcome ghost of First Wife, Golden Child might be better off not resurrected.”  In contrast, Back Stage’s Erik Haagensen called Golden Child “one of Hwang’s best works, as entertaining as it is thought-provoking” and dubbed Silverman’s staging of the “exemplary and very welcome” revival “perceptive.” 

In the New Yorker, John Lahr dismissed the revised production, saying, “What began as a cross-cultural drama has been reimagined as a documentary on pre-Christian Chinese customs.  What was theatrically dynamic now feels merely anecdotal,” while New York’s Brown decreed the play “startlingly effective.”  It’s a “rich, bracingly affecting work,” in the words of Snyder at TONY. 

On the ’Net, Elyse Sommer, who saw both the Off-Broadway première and the Broadway remount, said on CurtainUp that she felt “the main characters struck me as having been deepened” from the earlier versions and saw “more humor than I remember.”  On TheaterMania, however, Andy Propst found that the “consistently stylish production” felt “like a bit of a tarnished experience” because of the “disorienting” (which I doubt was intended as a pun, by the way) mixed styles.  “Both the play and production stumble,” Propst declared, “when the action shifts from the distaff members of the Eng household.”  On TalkinBroadway.com, Matthew Murray felt that the play is “awash in a quiet stateliness that doesn't always amplify the theme” and that even Silverman’s “precise, serene” direction “can't do much to compensate for that.”  Murray concluded that the passage of time since the play’s début hasn’t “dulled the intellectually absorbing way with which Hwang dissects a culture at the crossroads, but they also haven't deepened it,” either. 

As I said earlier, I have no basis for the comparisons on which so many of the reviewers have drawn, but I can say that I found the STC revival of Golden Child a satisfying experience both theatrically and intellectually.  I’m more than looking forward to the rest of the Hwang season at Signature, which I intend to catch (and on which I’ll report) as it unfolds.

Eric Bentley – An Appreciation

by Kirk Woodward

[Last September, Kirk Woodward contributed a profile of George Bernard Shaw (published on ROT on 5 September).  One of the greatest fans of the Anglo-Irish playwright in this country is Eric Bentley, arguably one of our most prominent public intellectuals and theater authorities.  Kirk acknowledges that Bentley is one of his strongest influences, going back to his teen years, and in “Eric Bentley – An Appreciation,” Kirk presents a view of the American writer and critic that's tinged not a little with his personal attraction. 

[Kirk mentions in passing that he had a brief encounter with Bentley in a Manhattan theater bookstore sometime back before 2000.  I had my own brief meeting with Bentley at another theater bookstore in Manhattan.  Somehow I’d been invited to a 70th birthday party for Bentley hosted by Applause Books on the Upper West Side in 1986.  I’m ashamed to report that I have no recollection of what we said to one another on that occasion; obviously it wasn’t especially significant.  Of course, it was a social occasion, so maybe that’s an excuse.]

 
As I write this piece, Eric Bentley is living in New York City at the age of ninety-six. This means that at this moment, at least, we still have among us possibly the greatest writer about theater who has ever lived, and I include Aristotle in that estimate, particularly since we’re not certain that what we have of Aristotle’s comments on theater – and on drama, a distinction I will return to – isn’t some student’s lecture notes.

Being – let’s say it again for argument’s sake – the greatest theater critic in the world doesn’t necessarily make one well-known. I met Bentley once, in the Drama Book Shop at its former location on Seventh Avenue in Manhattan. I had seen a notice that said he would be signing books at the “DBS” one evening, so I went, bought a book, and took it over to him so he could autograph it.

He was standing by himself on one side of the room, gamely waiting for someone to come along. I remember him as looking rather small, and quite dapper. I told him about his influence on me (a story I will recount below), and he listened politely, said thank you, and signed my book. That was that. My major emotion was mortification that he wasn’t surrounded by a crowd of eager listeners, but then New York can be a blasé town.

My experience with Bentley begins with my parents’ purchase, through the old Literary Book Club, of a book by Bentley called In Search Of Theatre that, perhaps wrongfully, I assume my parents never read. But I did. I devoured the book, which is made up of about seven years’ worth of essays written about theater all over the world, between 1947 and 1953. When I read the book I must have been in my early teens. My ideas about theater were heavily influenced by the book, and I still return to it often.

A few biographical details: Eric Bentley was born in Great Britain in 1916, studied at Oxford (under C. S. Lewis, professor of literature, popular theologian, and author of the Tales of Narnia stories) and then, moving to the United States, at Yale. He taught at Columbia University and reviewed drama for the New Republic for four years. He has forged a number of careers for himself in addition to teaching, criticism, and reviewing; he has also been a director, a translator, a playwright, an editor of a number of important collections of plays, and a noted musical artist, performing and recording the songs of Bertolt Brecht, whose works he more or less introduced to the United States.

His doctoral thesis for Yale was published as A Century Of Hero Worship (1944), a book I have never warmed to. The book that followed, The Playwright As Thinker, has been credited with helping make the study of playwriting a respectable academic field in the United States. The next year he published Bernard Shaw, which he said was the first book written about Shaw by someone who hadn’t met him. In Search Of Theatre followed in 1953; then The Dramatic Event and What Is Theatre?, his collections of New Republic reviews, in 1954 and 1956; his Brecht Commentaries in 1981; and Thinking About The Playwright in 1987.

Bentley’s best known book, however, is The Life Of The Drama (1964). Bentley has complained about the book’s notoriety, saying that it’s drawn attention away from the rest of his work. It is certainly his most teachable book, because it contains a systematic approach to drama, while much of his criticism is contained in collections of short pieces. With this exception, his books do not appear to be staples of the academic world. How then can I claim his superiority as a critic of theater? Much of the answer has to do with the natures of theater, of drama, and, of course, of academia.

As I’m using the word, theater is an immediate, present-moment activity, and each moment of a theatrical performance is unique. One might object that plays are rehearsed with the object of making them the same every time. However, that goal, if it is a goal (not all directors feel it is), of making every live performance the same, simply cannot be achieved, because for the experience to be exactly the same at each performance is impossible, whether for audience member or for actor. Moods, knowledge, relationships, all undergo modification each day, even each minute. As T. S. Eliot writes in The Four Quartets:

Fare forward, you who think that you are voyaging;
You are not those who saw the harbour
Receding, or those who will disembark.

(The Dry Salvages)

As a result, almost any actor will testify that, like snowflakes, no two nights’ performances in theater are ever exactly alike. (Even in film, directors demand numerous takes of scenes because each take, for whatever reason, is different.) We may ignore this fact because typically we may see only one performance of a play, making it seem that the one performance is the performance. Also, performances can be filmed, taped, or digitally recorded, freezing them in time. Live performances of the play itself, however, are not frozen; they move forward in time, picking up subtle or not-so-subtle alterations as they go.

On the other hand, as opposed to theater, drama, as I’m using the word, means, in practice, the reading and understanding of scripts and the theory that can be derived from them, and drama can be taught in schools. Theater, however, is never a fixed point. So in general Bentley, to the extent that he writes about theater rather than drama, is not and cannot be a systematic writer, a fact that makes it difficult for the academic world to take full advantage of his work, despite the years he spent as a teacher. It is much easier to gain academic recognition for subjects that aren’t moving targets.

However, I believe that without imposing an arbitrary structure on Bentley’s writing on theater, we can find teachable principles there, and as for drama, the success of The Life Of The Drama in the academic world is clear. I want to lay out an approach to Bentley’s writing on theater using primarily In Search Of Theatre, the book that introduced me to Bentley in the first place, and then look at the theory of drama presented in The Life Of The Drama. (Since the words “theater” and “drama” are often used interchangeably, I am grateful to Bentley that he titled his books in the way I’m using the words!)

The title In Search Of Theater illustrates in itself the difficulty of teaching theater: if you want to see it, you have to go out and look for it. In Search Of Theater is written, much of it, on the road, between 1947 and 1953. It begins with a series of reports on theater in New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Dublin . . . the geographic range of the book is dazzling. Nor is that all. It also contains detailed looks at, among others, Strindberg, Ibsen, Pirandello, Yeats (his plays), O’Neill, and at a number of the greatest performers of the time, including, among others, Jean-Louis Barrault, Martha Graham, and Charlie Chaplin.

If only because of how much it describes, the book would be a treasure, but the quality of the description is just as important. When I first read the book I knew almost nothing about any of the people Bentley writes about, but subsequent experience has validated his observations time after time. But what I learned from the book, even more than a remarkable amount of reporting, was a first principle that I would cite in making a case for Bentley’s importance: the distinction, which I will put in the italics he loves, between the spurious and the genuine.

An example occurs in the essay “Trying To Like O’Neill” where Bentley describes his experience directing a production (in Switzerland) of The Iceman Cometh:

There seemed to [Bentley and his co-director] to be in The Iceman Cometh a genuine and a non-genuine element, the former, which we regarded as the core, being realistic, the latter, which we took as inessential excrescence, being expressionistic. . . . To get to the core of reality in The Iceman – which is also its artistic, its dramatic core – you have to cut away the rotten fruit of unreality around it. More plainly stated: you have to cut.

There are, Bentley suggests, genuine and spurious elements in the play, and the task – in this case, the director’s task – is to separate the one from the other.

One might make a case that there is no distinction between “genuine” and “spurious” in theater – that all theater is artifice. That might be so if theater were not, as Bentley continually insists, a part of life, not to mention a reflection of it.

Bentley is at base a moral writer. Like Shaw, he believes that theater matters, and that what it shows as it “holds the mirror up to nature” makes a difference. So there is truth and falsity, he insists, in theater. How can we tell which is which?

It is not enough, Bentley says, to be on “the right side” of issues about life. That too can be spurious, even if the impulse is itself moral. “The road to good theater,” Bentley writes, “is not paved with good intentions.” Looking at Broadway plays of the time, he writes:

A “serious play” is one with a message or at least with modern – preferably liberal – ideas in it. You can easily change any non-serious play into a serious play by changing the color of the heroine and inserting a speech or two against race hatred. The formula for serious drama is: non-serious drama plus a small dose of “modern ideas.”

Nor must we think that the spurious is necessarily harmless. A report from 1949 finds Bentley in Italy, only five years after the end of World War II and the apparent demise of the Fascist regime:

They have removed the statue of Mussolini from the Teatro delle Arti in Rome. Behind the statue, however, there were Fascist inscriptions inlaid in the wall. These, I am told, have not been removed; they are simply hidden, for the time being, by a curtain. . . . You don’t see anything as candid as a piece of Fascist propaganda in the Italian theater. The statue of the Duce is gone and the inscriptions are curtained off. It is the special aestheticism of the Fascist era that persists.

In some ways the distinction between the genuine and the spurious is almost the same as between the generalized and the specific. There is a general idea, for example, he says, that Pirandello’s subject matter is “illusion and reality.” That’s too general, Bentley says, and he goes on to demonstrate how Pirandello’s plays are rooted in the real suffering that people endure. “Real” – another possible opposition of words in Bentley’s work is realism and – what? Vagueness? Generality? Non-specificity?

I haven’t found a useful antonym in Bentley’s writing, but realism is central to his writing, not in the sense of a kind of theater that uses store-bought kitchen sinks and actual running water, but in the sense of a theater that is in touch with the truths of life. In his introduction Bentley quotes Shaw: “When an art becomes effete, it is realism that comes to the rescue.” Art, Bentley suggests, is always becoming effete; realism is always needed.

I would not have to search for an antonym to “real” if I were writing about Shaw; a word would be at hand, the ideal. Bentley, I have already mentioned, wrote a book about Shaw, and although hardly uncritical of Shaw (particularly Shaw’s later turn toward dictators and the use of force to bring about change), is significantly influenced by him.

Shaw’s antonym for “realism” is idealism. In “ideals” – I am putting this concept in my own terms – Shaw sees generalities that take the place of understanding the real – that word again – the real nature of the world. What sort of ideals? Love . . . patriotism . . . nationalism . . . fatherhood . . . motherhood . . . any high-sounding, well-meaning generality can conceal an ideal that takes the place of serious analysis and comprehension.

Bentley’s reviews abound in illustrations of this phenomenon. Here, for example, is his comment on the works of Jean Cocteau, the French playwright, filmmaker, and poet:

There is brilliant writing in Les Parents. There are lovely visual images in the more romantic films. What is disturbing is the awful vacuity of all these pieces, a deliberate but in no way justified meaninglessness. Or are we supposed to find significance in some of the nice things that are said to us? The film of The Eagle ends, if I recall, with a narrator’s voice assuring us that love is more powerful than politics. Tell it to Molotov [who was at that time the foreign minister of Stalin’s Soviet Union].

I could cite numerous passages in Bentley’s writing that make this same point. Just as interesting is what he sees as the remedy: no magic formula, no “silver bullet,” but the firm intention to get down to the real core of the theatrical moment, using what he describes as a “humble, yet deliberate and determined approach,” as in this passage on staging the plays of Shakespeare:

As for realism, I am not offering it as a panacea, but only a timely banner – modern, without quotation marks – under which Shakespeare might be more seriously interpreted. It appropriately suggests that one should start with the simplest, solidest rudiments . . . . [T]oday is a time to go back to the beginnings and realize that, in taking another look, we are seeing things for the first time. We must be content to rediscover the Shakespearean A B C. Let the director ask himself the naïvest questions of each scene. … And to the degree that he answers them in action, forthrightly, clearly, he will find himself a path-breaker.

And what will that director find as he breaks that new path? To discover Bentley’s answer, or part of it, we turn to the much more systematic The Life Of The Drama. Before we do, however, in fairness to Bentley I must acknowledge again that he is not happy that this book is all that many people know about him, and he’s right to feel that way.

For example, his work as a translator is well known, and so is his commentary on what the work of a translator is and how it is done (see in particular “How Translate A Play?” [sic] in Thinking About The Playwright). One comes away from his essays on the subject awed by the difficulty of the translator’s task, and energized by the examples.

Bentley’s career as a playwright, which he began fairly late in his life, is also substantial. Interestingly, the play for which he is best known, Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been, is literally realistic, being based on the transcripts of hearings before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the 1950s. I have no experience with his singing and recording career, but it has been widely acknowledged.

Still, The Life Of The Drama is an exceptional book, a landmark, and it deserves the attention it has received. The book is divided into two sections. The first looks at plays in terms of plot, character, dialogue, thought, and “enactment.” The second looks at genres of drama: melodrama, farce, tragedy, comedy, and what Bentley, at a loss for a better word (I don’t have one either), calls “tragi-comedy,” a category that includes plays by writers as different as Chekhov and Beckett, Goethe and Brecht.

One might suppose from an outline of the book that it presents reasoned descriptions and comments on the areas and genres listed. In a way this is true, but what the book really does is more surprising: it looks at the emotional, rather than just the intellectual, foundations on which drama is built. Bentley’s comment on the book, in an interview with the Voice of America, is significant:

My friends had said it would be an elaboration of Brecht’s ideas. I myself thought it might be Aristotle’s Poetics as rephrased by a Freudian – I was being “analyzed” in those years. What surprised me was that the philosophy of theatre in the book wasn’t either Brecht (my father) or Freud (my guru at the time) but Pirandello, one of a number of Europeans I had translated. He saw life as role playing.

Bentley’s friends, one may assume, thought he would write a restatement of Brecht’s ideas because Bentley is so closely identified with Brecht, whom he knew and with whom he directed, and whose plays and poems he translated. But Bentley is clear that Brecht has his faults and limitations, telling the Voice of America that what interested him was Brecht’s “savvy, his talent, his genius, anything but his theories.” Bentley is forthright about the elements in Brecht that he finds genuine, and those that he finds spurious.

With the reference to Freud, we come closer to the heart of the book, because in its pages Bentley looks at the “subterranean” life of the drama, the emotions and impulses and instincts that emerge, masked by the veneer of civilization, in the way we behave in our everyday activities. We put on a civilized face in our day to day life, but beneath that face – that role playing – boils an emotional brew that begins to be created in our first moments as infants, that develops particularly in our formative years, and that never goes away, and that in moments of greatest conflict emerges in behavior worthy to be captured in a play, sometimes as comedy or tragedy, and often, perhaps more appropriately, as melodrama or farce.

I don’t mean to suggest that Bentley reduces drama to psychology. For one thing, “psychology” is too timid a word for the forces that surge and roar in the subconscious. As the Bible says, our minds (“the wicked,” the verse says) are “like the sea when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt. There is no rest…” (Isaiah 57:20-21 edited). We see these forces at work in our dreams, and in a sense drama is a projection of those dreams onto the stage.

A good actor will look at a character role on several levels. There is the level of meaning, of interpretation and significance. There is the level of behavior, of our attempts to remain civilized in the face of all the obstacles that threaten to drag us down. And there is the subterranean level, the dream level, the level where great forces struggle for mastery within us.

Macbeth, for example, gives us the interpretive level of questions of fate and inevitability, of individual responsibility and of helplessness in the face of circumstances, including those of our own nature. It also gives us the behavioral level, as Macbeth and his wife move within their social circles in an ever-accelerating cycle of violence. And it gives us the subterranean level that surfaces in the presence of the Weird Sisters, and that provides the forces that make a man capable of murdering father figures, children, people who might conceivably oppose him . . . powerful forces indeed.

Bentley refuses to consider these emotional tsunamis as any less important to the drama than the civilized behavior that both embodies them and covers them up. This refusal makes it possible for him to see with remarkable clarity the importance of elements of drama that might at first glance seem random or trivial, as in this discussion of a “bit” in a Charlie Chaplin movie:

Suppose you saw one man force the head of another through the glass of a street lamp so that the latter will be gassed by the fumes. It sounds like some Nazi atrocity, and Plato would no doubt be indignant at the notion of re-enacting the incident in a work of art. Nevertheless it was re-enacted in Charlie Chaplin’s film Easy Street, and in all the years no one has protested. . . . The villain is a giant whose strength passes the limits of nature. He can bend lamp posts with his bare hands. Since the “little man’s” revenges have to be more than proportionate to the provocation . . . he can drop a cast-iron stove on the villain’s head and ram that head inside a street lamp with the gas turned on.

This vivid set of images – including the giant, a figure out of a dream world – shocks by its violence, and yet it only represents moments in a funny and popular film. But all three of the levels of living that we have described here – the interpretive, the social, and what I’m calling the subterranean – are at work in those moments. The strength of Bentley’s book is that he is able to make us understand that the more fearsome aspects of ourselves are not factors to be ignored, but to be embraced and understood, in any discussion of drama.

As a result, the book, in my experience at any rate, takes on extraordinary interest. No matter how many times I read it, I find passage after passage that is startling and nourishing. Not least of the great things in it is its continual common sense. For example, my recollection is that in his book Tragedy And Comedy, Walter Kerr disparages the popular idea that the difference between the two is that tragedy ends sadly and comedy ends happily. Bentley, on the contrary, writes:

The popular definition of a word, like the popular understanding of a subject, always irritates the expert, but is always of great interest in itself, and usually provides an ideal starting point for study. The popular understanding of tragedy and comedy is simply that one has an unhappy, the other a happy, ending: that one ends in death, the other in marriage, which will lead to birth: that, by consequence, the one is represented by a mourning and weeping mask, the other by a rejoicing and laughing mask. All these propositions are full of sap and substance.

Kerr accused Bentley of an over-intellectual approach to drama, but who is the intellectual here? It is Bentley who sees truth in the popular understanding of tragedy and comedy. He can do so because he understands that we all share the psychological makeup that turns some of us into neurotics, some into playwrights…

I could continue to write at length about Bentley’s work, but I hope what I have said gives a glimpse of how interesting a writer he is. He is startlingly intelligent and well-read; he irritates, provokes, stimulates. He can be belligerent or eccentric – the price, perhaps, that one pays for caring about art in a sometimes unfriendly climate. He is like some marvelous conversationalist, rattling on about one’s favorite subject, raising the status of a chatterbox to high art, providing startling insights on nearly every page.

Criticism, Bentley writes in Thinking About The Playwright, “is good talk committed to the printed page. Even a critic is a person. No: especially a critic is a person, and the voice of a person must be heard in all his work. Conversely, all criticism in which a human voice is not heard is bad criticism.” Words to live by!

I am so grateful for all that his writing has done for me, and for the theater, and for our understanding of the mystery and complexity of our lives, and of how they are reflected in art.

[I said above that I’d met Bentley briefly at a reception for his 70th birthday.  I don’t know for certain why my name was on the invitation list, but I had been in contact with Bentley earlier that year—we’d never met; it was correspondence only—and that might have accounted for my invitation.  In the mid-’80s, I edited two theatrical newsletters, one for the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of America (now  “. . . of the Americas”) and the other for the now-defunct American Directors Institute.  ADI organized panel discussions and conferences to promote a better understanding, both among the public and among theater professionals, of what stage directors and artistic directors actually do. (You might be surprised how little most people understand that.)  In November 1986, ADI held its second conference, Symposium II: The Director’s Vision, and had invited Eric Bentley to give the keynote address.  Bentley turned us down and in two letters to ADI’s artistic director, Geoffrey Shlaes, explained his attitude toward the profession of stage director.  In the Winter 1986 issue of Directors Notes, I ran excerpts from those letters, dated 20 June and 12 July, to share some of Bentley’s provocative thoughts with ADI’s members.  Among his statements, Bentley wrote: “I don’t believe in a Director’s Theatre. . . .  No director is needed: the function is properly performed by either the playwright (Molière, Brecht) or the leading actor (Booth, Irving)” and “A constant irritant is the Nutty Production.  You set a story in another time and another place—the more inappropriate, the better.  That is how to make your name as a brilliant young director.”  He also declared that “while in technology there is progress, in the arts there is not; otherwise Arthur Miller would be a better playwright than Aeschylus.”  (By the way, amidst his disparagement of directors, Bentley also called dramaturgs “Ph.D. gofers” and warned that he’d “remove [dramaturgs] one day before removing [directors].”)]

“Don’t Sing With Your Mouth Full”

by Daniel J. Wakin

[In the article below, Daniel Wakin, classical music reporter for the New York Times, describes some of the issues opera companies and singers cope with when there are scenes on stage that feature food and eating or drinking.  I’ve never been much of an opera fan, but we in theater do encounter some of the same problems, even when singing doesn’t enter into the mix.  Handling and eating or drinking food or beverages can offer unique challenges for both the performers and the stage crews, as you’ll read.

[Wakin’s article appeared in the “Dining” section of the Times on Wednesday, 9 May 2012.  The on-line edition of the article was revised to correct earlier versions which incorrectly identified the composer of the opera Tosca as Giacomo Puccini; it is Giuseppe Verdi.]

Hansel and Gretel stuff pastries into their mouths, topping them off with toasted gingerbread witch. Leporello pours out a fine Marzemino wine from northern Italy for Don Giovanni, then nibbles at a piece of pheasant. Schaunard calls for Rhine wine, roast venison and dressed lobster for his fellow Puccinian Bohemians at the Café Momus in Paris.

And that’s just a sample of this season’s menu at the Metropolitan Opera.

Opera, of all the art forms, is singularly associated with food, whether because of the appetites of well-girthed singers or the sensual pleasures celebrated in its rich ragout of music, emotion and stagecraft.

 

Just a few nights at any opera house will drive this home. Hardly a performance goes by without some reference to a meal, enough so that cookbooks and even scholarly articles have been devoted to the subject. Opera luminaries have dishes named after them, like peach Melba and Melba toast, inspired by the Australian soprano Nellie Melba. The Met even has a backstage kitchen for meeting the culinary demands of librettos, and singers regularly face the challenge of timing bites between musical phrases.

“Every single opera, at least if it doesn’t refer to food, it refers to some sort of passion, and that’s one of the things people relate to,” the soprano Carol Vaness said. “For even Wagner, it’s got that ‘food of the gods’ feeling to it.”

 

David Anchel, a former opera singer, thinks there may be an element of oral fixation to the phenomenon: food goes in the mouth, and song comes out of it. But opera’s foodiness, he believes, comes mainly from something more basic. “Opera is about life,” he said. “How could you describe people’s lives without having them eat? It’s a very passionate thing, often.”

Mr. Anchel is well qualified to explain the connection. A frequent opera-going companion of mine and one of the best nonprofessional cooks I know, he sang with many small companies, briefly ran a catering business and found a ready supply of cookbooks in the bookstores where he used to work. Years ago he even proposed (unsuccessfully) a PBS series based on opera meals, in which he would sing scenes and cook dishes that might have been served in them. “I could be the operatic chef,” he said.

That fascination with the crossroads of food and music began 30 years ago when he and his wife, Julia Heyer, were young singers and would invite colleagues for parties that started with opera readings. “After we sang through the opera I would cook a meal” in its style, Mr. Anchel said. “I really thought this was a way to understand better what the characters were all about, if I knew exactly what they were eating.”

Food is so central to the operas of Giuseppe Verdi that the University of Notre Dame musicologist Pierpaolo Polzonetti has written papers on the subject. He has come up with what he calls the laws of “gastromusicology” to explain what food can signify in opera.

“The first law is that no meal can be sad,” Mr. Polzonetti said. “No matter what, when people eat, people seem to be happy, even if something bad is going to happen.” Other laws hold that meals show social cohesion, and that the presence of food or drink “excludes immediate catastrophe” (except, as in operas like “Simon Boccanegra,” when poison is involved).

The title character of Verdi’s “Falstaff” is one of the great operatic eaters. His bill at the Garter Inn, as he recounts at the opera’s opening, is for 6 chickens, 3 turkeys, 2 pheasants, 1 anchovy and 30 bottles of sherry. In “Macbeth,” Verdi prescribes a “sumptuously prepared feast” for the banquet scene in which Banquo’s ghost appears.

Another Italian, Puccini, larded his operas with meals—particularly “La Bohème,” a story of starving artists in 19th-century Paris.

In their chilly garret on Christmas Eve, Rodolfo, Schaunard, Colline and Marcello dine on a cold roast, Bordeaux and pastry. Later, outside the Café Momus in the Latin Quarter, vendors hawk an effusion of Parisian street food: oranges, dates, hot chestnuts, nougat, whipped cream, candies, fruit tarts, coconut milk, carrots, trout and plums from Tours. At a table, the bohemians order sausage, roast venison, turkey, Rhine wine and lobster. They also eat “a poem” of a chicken, as Colline sings, and stew—a sumptuous evening in contrast to their friend Mimi’s consumptive and tragic death.

Opera companies have to deal with these meals and often provide real food. The Met’s has a fully functional kitchen inside its room for small props, equipped with a Kenmore refrigerator, Corian countertops and a pot of rosemary that Mime uses for his potion in the current production of Wagner’s “Siegfried.” (Hanging in the prop room are two unappetizing fake severed heads belonging to John the Baptist in Strauss’s “Salome.”)

Grocery shopping is done at the Fairway Market several blocks away on Broadway. Michael Albergo, a prop man, prepares much of the food, taking heed of gluten or dairy intolerance among the chorus and singers. He cooks chickens in a convection microwave, and cuts them up ahead of time to make it easier for a singer to rip off a drumstick.

“If there is going to be the ubiquitous opera chicken, I would prefer it to have been cooked in the last 45 minutes rather than the last 45 days,” said Thomas Hampson, the baritone. As Don Giovanni, “I remember once getting a piece of chicken that really was roadkill,” he said. “I finally found a handkerchief and relieved myself of it.”

Sometimes prop managers prefer precooked food. For “Bohème” the Met used to order chicken from its cafeteria, but discovered that KFC was much cheaper.

Yes, much of this food gets eaten. While the practices of singers differ widely, a surprising number chow down on the props. Some do so for dramatic reasons. “When you’re faking your way through it,” said Kate Lindsey, a mezzo-soprano, “people can see through that action.”

Others are simply hungry. Singers generally eat lightly before a performance, and stage food is a handy snack, especially three hours into an opera.

Eating onstage has its perils. Singers have to worry about slipping on fallen food or sullying expensive costumes, and must make sure they have swallowed before opening their mouths to sing. “You always have to time yourself as far as ‘What can I consume between lines?’ ” said Richard Paul Fink, a baritone. “Can I have a full drink and a swallow? Can I consume this apple?”

It is standard for singers to make requests, especially for wine stand-ins. Favorites are flat soda (to prevent burping while singing), iced tea, Snapple and apple juice. The soprano Patricia Racette says she prefers watered-down lemon-lime Gatorade because it delivers a boost of sugar and electrolytes, and keeps her mouth moist.

The bass-baritone Luca Pisaroni, playing Leporello in the Met’s recent “Don Giovanni,” asked for vegetable sausage, said James Blumenfeld, the Met property master. “It was the most disgusting thing I ever smelled,” Mr. Blumenfeld said. He added that the bass-baritone James Morris is known for preferring bananas when he is playing Scarpia in the fatal meal scene of Verdi’s “Tosca.” One of Mr. Albergo’s biggest jobs is Humperdinck’s “Hansel and Gretel.” The witch in the tale has invited the unsuspecting and hungry siblings into her house for a good fattening up before consumption. She tempts them with apple tarts, meringues, chocolate mousse, Black Forest cake, rice pudding, creamy Swiss rolls and mountains of profiteroles. Mr. Albergo helps lay out a spread of real pastry, provided by Rockland Bakery of Nanuet, N.Y.

Ms. Lindsey, who played Hansel this season, said she avoided swallowing a lot of the pastry because dairy products create phlegm and can make it difficult to sing. “I developed a technique where I looked like I was eating, but smeared a lot of it all over my face,” she said. While pretending to drink milk, she learned to breathe out through her nose to avoid inhaling it.

And it is not just leading singers who indulge onstage. At a 2010 production of Benjamin Britten’s “Albert Herring” at the Santa Fe Opera, Ms. Lindsey, who was singing the role of Nancy, said she was amazed at how many extras and cast members were grabbing the food, not all of it real. “You had to watch out because there was fake ham,” she said. “You could end up eating plastic.”

“Herring,” set in a Suffolk market town in 1900, provides a fairly specific menu of English cuisine before its broad upgrade of recent decades. Children sing with glee in Act 2 about the May Day feast:

Jelly!

Pink blancmange!
Seedy cake! Seedy cake! (with icing on)
Treacle tart!
Sausagey rolls!
Trifle in a great big bowl!
Chicken and ham!
Cheesy straws!
Marzipan!

No such specifics are found in John Adams’s “Nixon in China,” which features one of the best-known feasts of modern opera, the banquet scene in which the character Chou En-lai and the American president toast each other during Richard Nixon’s groundbreaking visit in 1972.

But the historical nature of the subject would have made the details easy to provide. The Nixon Foundation has the official menu, which includes “spongy bamboo shoots and egg-white consommé, shark’s fin in three shreds, fried and stewed prawns, mushrooms and mustard green and steamed chicken with coconut, almond junket, pastries, fruits.”

Maybe all that was too hard to sing.

[I never had to contend with eating and singing as the performers about whom Wakin writes have, but I have had to work with food on stage as an actor.  Sometimes it’s just a matter of cleanliness rather than performance issues.  I was doing a contemporary play about a group of college and post-college friends living together in a large house.  In one scene, I came into the living room with a cup and a coffee pot and I was supposed to pour myself a cup of coffee and drink it during the scene.  Simple enough.  Now, the play was part of a three-play rep, and we’d had a couple of days off while the other plays performed, so we had a run-through rehearsal before our performances picked up again.  During the regular rehearsal period, my coffee pot was filled with plain water, which was fine, and that’s what I expected this afternoon.  But when I poured the liquid from the pot into the cup, what I got was days-old brown liquid with thick green mold growing in it!  Well, of course, I wasn’t about to drink any of that, but what was worse was that it was gross enough looking to stop me in mid line.  Thank goodness it wasn’t a performance, of course—though I hope I’d have managed to do something in that case to have covered the glitch.  (It probably shouldn’t have been necessary to make the note, but from then on, one of the prop runner’s routine tasks was to check the coffee pot at preset to be sure it was clean and filled with fresh cold coffee.)

[Speaking of covering, one performance I was in required a collaborative effort during a meal scene to cover a missed entrance.  (I may have told this story before once or twice.  See, for instance, “Short Takes: Theater War Stories,” 6 December 2010 on ROT.)  I was acting in a production of Jean Anouilh’s Romeo and Jeannette, a family play in which one scene is dinner.  Part way into the scene one character has an entrance but the actress missed her cue, leaving us all stranded on stage.  The rest of the cast  just improvised an entire little domestic scene about preparing to sit down to dinner that Anouilh never wrote.   I recall it lasting several minutes, but it actually must have been much shorter.  No one in the audience, it seemed, had any idea we were making up a scene as we went along. 

[One food scene taught me a great lesson about my own acting.  I was in graduate school and my MFA class was doing a production of The Wood Demon, Chekhov’s early version of Uncle Vanya.  It was one of the first plays I did after starting to study acting seriously, having performed in college and in community theater as an amateur for several years.  Wood Demon starts with a long scene of a large banquet meal served outdoors with nearly the whole cast—Wood Demon has more characters than Uncle Vanya—around a huge table.  We’d carefully selected foods we could easily eat while speaking lines, with an eye also to food that wouldn’t congeal or go bad under the hot stage lights.  But what we couldn’t predict was where some of the place settings would end up once the scene got underway and actors moved glasses and plates around some as the action progressed.  Now, when I was an amateur, I could be flustered if things weren’t almost exactly the way we’d rehearsed them.  I was always afraid that I’d upset something or attract undue attention if I had to step out of the prescribed blocking.  At almost every performance or rehearsal of Wood Demon, though, something I was supposed to handle  was farther away than it was supposed to be, often in front of another actor.  I had learned to be confident enough in my own work—and to trust my fellow actors enough—simply to reach over, even stand up if necessary, and get what I needed . . . just as if I were a guy eating at a long table among friends and family!  No one noticed this little change in my stage work except my acting teacher, but I knew that I’d made a small but hugely significant breakthrough in acting technique.  For me, it was a little like an agoraphobe taking a step outside his apartment.

[Finally, I was working as a teacher and director in a middle school where the theater program was immensely important (I had many students whose parents were pros in the business, from soaps to the Yiddish stage).  I was directing my first full-length play at the school and we were doing Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth.  (I know—who does that deeply philosophical play with 5th-, 6th-, 7th-, and 8th-graders?  Well, I didn’t select the script; it had been chosen before I was hired.  While many of the kids didn’t really understand the play—neither did some of the parents, I learned later—they did a terrific job anyway.)  My Henry, the central family’s son, was an 8th-grader and in one scene at the end of the play, he comes back home from war and digs a potato out of the fireplace coals and eats it ravenously.  Now, I’d very explicitly instructed the stage manager and prop crew—all students, of course—to be sure the potato every night was well-cooked, fresh, and cold.  Nonetheless, one night, the young actor bit into a raw potato that had been placed on the set—and he chewed it noisily and ate it.  Of course, I scolded the stage manager after the show to impress on her that this shouldn’t happen to the actor again—but Henry liked to play the tough guy and insisted it was perfectly cool, no problem at all!  (I insisted the student stage manager prepare the props the way she was supposed to anyway, irrespective of the actor’s bravado.  I had to teach her to do her job, didn’t I?—that was my job, after all.)]