Short Takes: Theater War Stories

Anyone who’s been in the theater for any length of time has “war stories,” those tales of mishaps, odd occurrences, or touching moments that happen while a show is in rehearsals or performance. Some are familiar—because they happen in some form or another to so many actors—and some are unique, even incredible. 

I didn’t have a long or successful career on the stage, but between my amateur days and the short professional period I managed, I gathered a baker’s dozen or so tales of the weird and bizarre. I hope you find them amusing, or at least interesting. So, here goes . . . .

MARAT/SADE AND HOW THE ASYLUM TOOK OVER THE INMATES

When I was in college, the Washington and Lee University theater staged a production of Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade. I believe there are many stories from actors who performed in this play around the world, especially those of us who played the asylum inmates and had to feign mental illnesses for the length of the rehearsals and the run. I know that castmates of mine recounted some difficulties adjusting to the real world; I had two.

It was tradition at W&L to have the cast party opening night after the performance. Usually, the director of the university theater, who also staged most of the plays, hosted the party at his house, but the cast party for Marat/Sade was at the apartment of the student actor who had designed the set. 

Now, a little personal background is necessary here, so bear with me. This play was produced in my junior year, as I recall. I had finished high school in Switzerland where we’d spoken mostly French outside our classes themselves, so when I arrived at college back in the states, I was fairly fluent in French. 

Though there wasn’t much need for this skill, I discovered that when I got really drunk, I started speaking French. (I can only assume that this was so; I didn’t remember it afterwards, but friends, roommates, and frat brothers all told me that that’s what happened. They could never tell me what I had said, however, because I was speaking colloquial French!) 

Now, at the cast party, I had had several drinks, of course—isn’t that what a college theater party’s for?—and I decided that I’d reached my limit. I would finish the drink I had in my hand and that would be it for the night, I told myself. 

What I hadn’t realized apparently was that the drink on which I was sucking put me over the edge, and the last thing I remember is putting on my coat to leave. According to accounts from others, I never got out the door. I stayed around and recited the entire play in French! 

Now, the second factoid you need to understand is that the previous year, I’d read the play for a class, in anticipation of the staging which had been announced. The class was German, however, so we read the text in Weiss’s original version. (Okay, yes, I studied French, German, and even Russian in college. I also took a non-credit course in Italian one of my profs offered on the side.) 

I’d never read nor even seen the French translation of the play, so I must have just translated it on the spot, though how I knew all the lines, not just my own, is beyond me. People at the party were apparently impressed, though.

As amusing as that tale is in retrospect, the other residual problem I had from working on Marat/Sade was less funny. 

The play had already closed by this time and our lives had all gone back to our usual college routines. A week or so after the show closed, I was eating breakfast in the fraternity dining room and I was pouring myself a glass of milk from a half-gallon carton on the table. My roommate was sitting next to me and he decided it would be funny to put his finger on the bottom edge of the carton to keep me from tipping it up far enough to pour the milk. 

He was being playful, just kidding around, but I flew into a rage and went absolutely nuts. I quickly realized what I was doing, going off on my friend for no reason, and stopped myself, but everyone there, including me, was shaken at my almost-violent response to such a minuscule provocation. 

It never happened again, thank goodness, but I decided that the exaggerated response was some delayed reaction to the weeks and weeks of work I’d done on a character who went apoplectic whenever someone touched me. 

One exercise in rehearsal involved each of us alone on stage while the director triggered our chosen phobia. I was crawling around on the set, cringing and writhing as the director shouted “Touch! Touch! Touch!” from the house. 

That’s how I was supposed to respond whenever another cast member came into physical contact with me, even by accident, during rehearsal or performance. Of course, it was all supposed to be acting, artificial behavior . . . but shit happens. You know?

THE EMPEROR’S NEW CLOTHES AND THE CHINESE INVASION

I took part in a lot of theater at college, and in the spring of my senior year, the wife of the university theater director and another faculty wife put together a performance for children that was to tour Rockbridge County, performing in elementary schools and local libraries. 

The production, The Emperor's New Clothes, was sponsored by Washington and Lee and our neighboring school, the Virginia Military Institute. Aside from the two directors, W&L’s contribution was the use of the theater and its facilities (shop, make-up, costumes); VMI principally donated the use of an army deuce-and-a-half with driver to transport our set and props around the rural county. The cast and crew were open to anyone from the Lexington community, students and townies alike, and we got a lot of support, moral and material, from the town. 

Among these were some truly gorgeous authentic Chinese robes and gowns provided by a local minister who’d done some missionary work in China. You see, our version of ENC was set in China (and yes, I admit we did do yellowface—we were still naïve about political correctness back in the ‘60s), so the costumes were most appreciated—and truly stupendous to see!

Once we started touring the show, our routine was pretty regular. We changed into and out of our performance kit at the W&L theater as there were usually no facilities at the schools and libraries where we performed. We then drove to our bookings in a convoy of cars behind the VMI army truck. 

After one gig, I was driving back with our stage manager in his car, following the army truck with our sets and props, and the car broke down on the road. 

The convoy stopped and we all got out along the side of the road, still dressed in our Chinese costumes and wearing our yellowface make-up. The truck driver, who by regulation had to be dressed in uniform, was also on the roadside. 

A few cars on their way to Lexington passed us as we were standing around, and one had apparently rushed back into town and reported that the Chinese had invaded Rockbridge County. It must be "official," the messenger insisted, because there was an army truck and a soldier in the invading forces! 

We found out about this when we finally got back to Lexington an hour or so after the story started to spread around. What a hoot! (This being the late ’60s, some Lexingtonians never did believe it wasn’t so.)

KIDS SAY THE DARNEDEST THINGS!

After I graduated from college, I had several months to wait before reporting for active military duty. The university theater director offered me a short-time job working in the theater shop until I had to leave, so I was back in Lexington for most of the fall term the next year. 

When the two women who’d produced ENC the previous spring proposed a children’s acting workshop, I asked my boss (whose wife was one of the project’s initiators) if I could be relieved of some of my hours to participate. He readily agreed, not surprisingly, and I took over a third-grade class. 

Among my students were the sons of two professors I knew, one was one of my German profs and the other an English prof who was a supporter of the theater (and whose wife was the other instigator of the children’s workshop). 

The program lasted several weeks and though I’d never taught any theater or acting before this, much less a class for children, I figured out a pretty successful scheme of games and exercises, culminating in a final project for the last day. 

I had to experiment a little with my nascent teaching method, and the nine-year-olds and I got to know each other a little along the way. They all knew, for instance, that I was going into the army soon after the workshop was over and they were old enough to be aware of the Vietnam war looming beyond the cocoon of the college town. Some, I recall, had older brothers who were either in the service or waiting to get their draft notices. 

On the last day of the workshop, when we were all saying goodbye, the English prof’s boy came to me and, in all sincerity and well-meaningness, said, “I hope you don’t have to go to Vietnam and get killed.” At the time, of course, I had no idea where my impending military service might take me, but I’ve never forgotten those words from a little nine-year-old boy. 

(I didn’t go to ’Nam. As readers of ROT will know, I fought the Cold War in Berlin, not the hot one in Southeast Asia. Maybe a little boy’s wishes were heard somewhere where fate is determined.)

AMATEURS!

I didn’t do any theater in the army until I reached Berlin. A group of GI’s eventually started our own theater troupe, but the official outfit, run by the the Special Services section, was the American Community Theatre on the headquarters compound. 

I did several productions with the ACT, including the Stephen Sondheim musical Company (30 May-3 June 1973), but the first show I did there was Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth (5-7 May 1972). I was originally cast as the doctor, but for reasons irrelevant here, I ended up playing Chance Wayne. (It wasn’t often that I got to play parts originated by the likes of Paul Newman, so believe me, I was thrilled, even in an army amateur production!) 

We weren’t very far into rehearsals when I noticed that the actress doing Princess Kosmonopolis didn’t seem to like her lines because she began dropping them a few at a time. Why the director didn’t notice this or, if she did, put a stop to it, I don’t know; I never thought to ask at the time. 

I didn’t say anything, either, and because so many of the Princess’s early lines have important exposition in them—between her and Chance, most of the backstory is revealed in the first scene, for instance—I started picking up her lines and adding them to my own. By the time we got to opening, I was practically doing a monologue with the Princess as an audience—and, as far as I know, no one noticed.

One night shortly after we opened, I got word through the backstage grapevine that the assistant director had decided to go on as an unannounced extra in the bar scene in Act II. I was livid. You just don’t do something like that! I said that if I found the guy on stage, I’d kill him with my bare hands. 

The word had apparently gotten back to the AD and someone told me he was hiding from me upstairs in the Special Services offices. I went to look for him between the acts to warn him not to pull a stunt like he planned. Well, I found him on the second floor and I think he would have shit his pants if I hadn’t calmed him down. 

Remember, I was a military intelligence officer and a lot of people had an inflated idea what we could and might do—James Bond, Derek Flynt, and Napoleon Solo were all still popular heroes at the time—and I never disabused any of my acquaintances of their fantasies. I just allowed the guy to believe that he might very well die if he appeared on stage that night. As Bill Cosby once said, “A lie’s as good as the truth if you can get somebody to believe it.”

[I recently found the program from this production among some mementos my father stashed away.  (My parents had come to Berlin during the run of Sweet Bird in 1972 and saw the show.)  This man was billed as “Executive Director” and he was a PFC listed as an Entertainment Specialist in AG Special Services.  (“AG” stands for Adjutant General [Corps], the administrative branch of the Army.)]

On another evening, the first scene was ending. It’s a two-hander with the Princess and me in the hotel bedroom and it ends with the lights coming down as we’re returning to bed after smoking a little hash. The curtain falls as we get back in bed. 

But that night, it didn’t. The scene was coming to an end, we’re making our way to the bed, the lights are dimming, dimming, dimming . . . and there’s no curtain! The Princess and I, by now in bed and under the covers, are whispering to each other, “What should we do?” “Should we wait until someone notices the problem?” “Should we just get up and walk off stage in the dark?” 

But no one seemed to notice that the curtain hadn’t closed and that two actors were stuck on stage. Finally, we had no choice. We got up and quietly walked off stage in the semi-darkness with as much dignity as we could muster . . . and I exploded as soon as we were clear of the wings! 

Where was the curtain-puller? How could no one see that she hadn’t shown up? How could the stage manager not notice that the curtain stayed open? 

I eventually calmed down, of course, and the show went on (doesn’t it always?) and finished without further incident. No one from the audience ever said anything to me about the strange way the first scene ended that night.

In a later play at the ACT, I served as production manager for Allen Boretz and John Murray’s Room Service (6-9, 14-16 July 1972), a farce about theater itself. One night, the actor who played the doctor wandered back onto the stage after he’d exited to the off-stage “bathroom,” staring at his finger, because he said he’d gotten a splinter! 

We were dumbstruck. Even if he had gotten a splinter, why in hell come back on stage? Go backstage and get first aid if necessary—what were we going to do for him? 

Amateurs!

A HATFUL OF RAIN AND THE DISASTERS THAT ALMOST WERE

After Room Service, a small group of us decided we’d like some continuity of contact from show to show, so we formed a theater group independent of the Berlin Entertainment Center (the new name for the ACT). 

One of our members was an air force tech sergeant and he got the Tempelhof NCO club to sponsor us. We got a large meeting room for our home, both for getting together between productions for exercises, discussion, or scenes and monologues, and as a performance space, with the addition of a portable stage platform (intended really for lectures and recitals). 

The tech sergeant’s wife was a former Brit, so we formed a sibling relationship with the British military theater group, the British Amateur Theatre Society. (‘Amateur’ doesn’t have the same derogatory connotation in England as it does here. It just means people who do something purely for the love if it.) 

Taking BATS as our model, we decided to call ourselves the Tempelhof American Theatre, or TAT (21 October 1972), and set about selecting and mounting our first production. 

We chose a children’s play (The Wonderful Tang by Beaumont Bruestle, 21-22 December 1972) and it was a great success with audiences from the U.S. military community in Berlin, even landing us on a local AFRTS children’s show to tape a cutting from the play for broadcast. 

After a 1967 adult farce (Peter Ustinov’s Halfway Up the Tree, 29-31 March 1973) and a bill of one-acts (19-22 July 1973), we were ready to take on heavier fare and we selected Michael V. Gazzo’s A Hatful of Rain (1-4 November 1973). 

The 1955 script is about the effects of the drug addiction of a young man on his family and it’s a pretty rough, naturalistic melodrama. (Think The Man with the Golden Arm without Sinatra and the horn.) I played Mother, the dealer who supplied Johnny with his drugs, a very nasty guy. 

One afternoon during the run of the show I was out on my usual gig, doing background interviews or other rounds in the military community. In my job, we wore civvies, so unless you knew us or were part of our unit, there was no way to know that I was an officer. 

I had just gotten out of my car, an unmarked station vehicle with the green license plates of a private automobile rather than yellow staff-car plates, and was approaching a building not far from the headquarters compound. An air force NCO who’d obviously seen Hatful stepped between me and the entrance. 

He told me in very precise terms that if he met me in a dark alley, he’d kill me because I was such a bastard in the show. He was neither joking nor being ironic—he really thought I was Mother, the dope dealer who kept Johnny hooked. 

The guy was bigger than I am, so I didn’t want to tangle with him even if I thought that would be a good idea, so I did the only thing I could do. “I’m a lieutenant, sergeant,” I said in my most authoritative voice. “You don’t want to be held for threatening an officer, so back off!” 

He did . . . but I decided then wasn’t the time to give him a lesson in suspending disbelief and stage fiction versus reality. (I did take it as a compliment to my acting, though. I’ve always been pretty good at playing pricks.)

Hatful was also TAT’s entry in the annual USAFE play contest; the CO of Tempelhof had specifically requested we represent the air base in the competition. We won the best play award and had to take the production to Ramstein Air Base to perform before the chief of staff of USAFE (15 December 1973). 

Now, we hadn’t planned the show to travel, so the sets weren’t designed for transport. Instead of muslin flats, for instance, we had made our walls of homosote. Nonetheless, we disassembled everything and prepared it for shipment by plane from Tempelhof to Ramstein—a benefit, we thought, of being an air force group. 

At the very last minute, our set was bumped for a helicopter tail section and we had to scramble to find other means to get the set to Ramstein. We were traveling on the military train to Frankfurt, and we got the set on the train, too, and arranged for a truck to meet us to drive the set to Ramstein, about an hour away from Frankfurt. 

Everything was fine, we figured—except that when we got to Frankfurt, it was drizzling and the truck was open with only a tarp to cover the set pieces. We got to Ramstein in the afternoon, examined the set, and found that it had survived intact, except for some missing paint here and there on the pea-green walls. 

By the time we got the set reassembled for that evening’s performance—we needed a quick rehearsal on the new stage—most BX facilities were closed and we couldn’t get any paint to touch up the marred walls. 

I pointed out that the color was awfully close to pea soup, and that the deli, the small convenience store on a military base, was still open. So that’s what we did—repaired the damaged paint with Campbell’s condensed green pea soup! As the TD at my college used to like to say, “Necessity is a mother . . . .”

We didn’t get our full run-through, but we tested the new stage with a few spot scenes just for the sake of movement, crosses, entrances, and exits. What we—or, more precisely, I—didn’t realize was that the actor playing Johnny, the junkie hero, had caught a stomach flu sometime before we arrived and he was ill. 

He wasn’t sick enough that he couldn’t perform one show, so he went on like a trouper, but he was so weak (and we hadn’t rehearsed the move earlier) that when I shoved him during our confrontation scene, he reeled downstage and nearly fell off the set! Guess who was sitting right down front center. Yup—the event’s host, the USAFE chief of staff, right in whose lap Johnny would have landed had he not managed to stop himself in time!

It didn’t help matters that the stage at the Ramstein theater was steeply raked, something we were in no way used to or prepared for. I’d never played on a raked stage (and never have since, either), and they look deceptively easy if you’ve never encountered one before. 

So the stage sloped down to the proscenium—what real difference does that make? Well, Johnny’s near mishap was one thing that could have happened—and here’s another unanticipated consequence of a raked stage. 

In one scene, after I’d been smoking a cigarette in Johnny’s apartment, I toss the butt on his floor and stomp it out as a show of disrespect and power. Well, I did all that—and, before I could step on it, the cigarette rolled down the raked stage, which was covered with a rope-like carpet I assume was potentially flammable. 

The butt simply got away from me and rolled toward the apron and the front row where the one-star general was seated. And I’m “casually” trying to reach my foot farther and farther down the stage to stop it and put it out. I know that lit butt is going to set the floor cover on fire and the performance and the theater will go up in flames and smoke, sending the general fleeing out into the late-December night. 

I think we all—or at least I—froze and watched for what seemed like minutes as the glowing cigarette made its way toward the general, his aide, and his staff. That’s the closest I’d ever come at that point in my life to a heart attack.

ROMEO AND JEANNETTE AND THE SCENE ANOUILH NEVER WROTE

When I returned to the states, I had decided to go to grad school in theater. I got into an MFA program in acting and I was cast in one of my directing classmates’ thesis production, Jean Anouilh’s Romeo and Jeannette. This is a family play, and one scene is getting ready for a meal and then sitting down to eat it. Part way into the scene one of the characters is supposed to enter. 

The problem was that there are two very similar moments—the character has two exits but only returns from one of them—and the actress got them confused and missed her entrance, leaving us all stranded on stage; she wasn't even in the wings. So the rest of us just improvised an entire little domestic scene about preparing to sit down to dinner that Anouilh never wrote—until the stage manger could find the actress and get her on stage and we simply picked up the scripted dialogue. 

Apparently, except for the director (who had conniptions—a director friend says that's why they die young), no one had any idea we were making up a scene as we went along. I recall it being several minutes, but it must have been much less in reality. 

In any case, the audience—some of whom were our acting and directing classmates—just thought it was a slow moment in the script until after the show and we copped to the improv. (One of my castmates was one of my own undergrad acting students, and others were in the audience; they were mightily impressed!)

DEVIL TAKE THE HINDMOST AND THE SPECTATOR WHO WASN’T RUDE

Over the years, I’ve witnessed a few occasions when an actor had to address someone in the audience outside the performance. I was at a performance of Little Foxes on Broadway (1981) when Elizabeth Taylor stopped in mid-speech to admonish someone up in the balcony who was taking flash photos. (Taylor said she wouldn’t continue until the photographer stopped or left the theater.) 

In another instance, in Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea at Circle in the Square uptown with Vanessa Redgrave (1976), John Heffernan, on stage right by the railing that separated the audience from the performance area in that peculiarly shaped theater, paused in a line and looked at a couple of women right down front and said to them, "Are you through?" Clearly they’d been chatting while he was acting! 

Well, when I was doing my own thesis performance (in Bill Mastrosimone’s thesis play, Devil Take the Hindmost), I had one scene right down front in a tavern set. I was at a table with a camp-follower character I had picked up. 

At one point, I heard snoring. It persisted, and I thought it was someone in the front of the house who'd fallen asleep and was being rude and inattentive. I was just about to say something, remembering Heffernan's actions . . . when I realized it was my camp follower, who was acting having gotten drunk and passing out at the table next to me! 

I almost embarrassed myself. (I’d never noticed her doing that before—I think the actress had embellished the bit without telling me.)

OOOoops!

MISALLIANCE: BLACKOUTS AND HEATWAVES

After my second year in grad school, the theater department mounted a summer rep season with imported pros from New York City mixed in with the graduate actors. I was cast as Gunner in Shaw’s Misalliance so I continued to commute out to New Jersey every day for rehearsals and performances.  

This was the summer of 1977 and while we were in rehearsal on the evening of Wednesday, 13 July, we got the word that there’d been a massive power outage in the city. 

I drove back into Manhattan afterwards—I was also chauffeuring some of the New York actors—and the streets were in chaos, without street lights or traffic signals. It was also eerily dark in a city where you can ordinarily read a newspaper on a street corner at midnight. 

The next morning, I packed up my dog and moved in with two classmates who had an apartment in town. The power began to be restored in New York the next day, but my dog and I camped with my classmates—I think I bought food as rent—for a few additional days because it was easier at the end of the rehearsal period; I went to rehearsals and performances (which started a week later) as before, but for a brief time, I was a local. 

One benefit: since I wasn't home to open and close the fridge door all the time, everything in it, including the freezer, survived.

Misalliance was just at the mercy of the elements that summer (which, irrelevant to this tale of woe, was also the Summer of Sam). Right after the blackout, caused by a lightning strike, we went through one of those periodic heat waves we used to get here regularly once or twice a summer—90+/100° temperatures. 

It was bad enough under stage lights with just the normal heat of summer, even though the theater was air-conditioned; I tend to sweat easily and profusely anyway, but Gunner starts out the play hiding in a "Turkish bath," which was a wooden box on our set. Then that heat wave hit, and the a/c went out. 

I wore a gray Glen-plaid suit in the play, but when I came off stage at the end of the first act, it looked black! (The professional actor playing John Tarleton had the same problem I did. We'd compare costumes backstage to see how bad it was going to be out there for us.) 

I stood on stage (after climbing out of the Turkish bath) with sweat literally dripping off my face. Besides the fact that it stung if it dripped into my eyes—that's distracting—I also knew how disgusting it must look to the spectators near the front, all that sweat flowing off of me. 

I think that was one of the most physically uncomfortable performances I ever had to endure. The severe heat lasted from 13 to 21 July—nine days.

My college theater director used to tell us, "Suffer for your art." Do you suppose this is what he had in mind?

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST AND THE BIG BLUFF

When I first started studying theater, which was in college where I took a single semester each of acting and directing (the only offerings then available at W&L), I thought I’d decided pretty definitively that I’d never again direct a play. 

The directing class required a one-act as the final exam and I told myself (and anyone else who wanted to know) that I didn’t think I was smart enough or stupid enough to do that again. I wasn’t smart enough to be able to coordinate all the things that a director has to do and know to be good, and I wasn’t stupid enough to get myself into that situation again, having experienced it once. 

In grad school, I was required to direct one-acts each of my first two semesters and I chose plays that were as easy to stage as I could find. I was determined that those would be my last directorial efforts.

Well, the best laid plans and all . . . . After I finished the MFA and set about to find work as an actor on New York stages, I found myself accumulating stage experiences I wanted to apply on the other side of the footlights. 

I’d been directed, for good and ill, by so many different kinds of directors, I was formulating ideas about how to work with actors and I wanted to try them. I’d been working for an Off-Off-Broadway company for about a year or so, doing mostly classics and a few original scripts, and I eventually asked the artistic director to let me direct something there. He agreed in principal; it was just a matter of finding an appropriate script and a slot. 

One evening when I was at home, however, he called me. The cast of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, a couple of weeks into rehearsals, had fired its own director! They’d become frustrated with his work because he hadn’t blocked the show, hadn’t given them any character notes, and, despite fervent requests, hadn’t made any cuts in the script. 

The artistic director asked if I would consider taking over the production. I watched a rehearsal—the cast was working on its own for the time being—and agreed to accept the job. So, except for three school one-acts, this was my first directing gig, and my first ever with a professional cast. 

In addition to not wanting to upset the cast any more—they were floundering and had acknowledged that to me when I watched the rehearsal—and not wanting them to see that I didn’t know what I was doing, I consciously chose actions to appear more secure and authoritative than I really was. It was a deliberate strategy, because I didn't want the cast to feel they had just jumped from the frying pan into the fire, so to speak. 

I decided, first, not to tell them that I'd never directed pros before, then to make very specific decisions about text cuts (that was the straw that caused the rebellion) and tell them exactly what was in, what was out, and what we could discuss. 

I made some specific directing notes, mostly blocking, and worked out some physical business to insert, and I made some very specific character notes—all pretty arbitrary and basic stuff, but I deliberately selected these actions so that I'd seem to be in charge and on top of the situation (even though I wasn't—I was just SWAGging). It was all a choreographed act I figured would carry us into the rehearsals far enough until the work itself became a focus. 

One thing that worked in my favor, of course, that I couldn't have known about was that the cast was so desperate for some guidance and real direction that they glommed onto my efforts like Velcro! The bluff worked, but mostly because the cast was really ready for it. 

(After the play opened, and we had our opening night party, several of the cast, drunk by then, very forcefully said they'd work with me anytime again and that I was a real "actors' director." That's when I told them that this had been my first professional gig. They were shocked—and I was delighted!)

ALADDIN AND THE REALLY UN-MAGIC MOMENT

Not all theater war stories are amusing; some are quite frightening. 

Shortly after I began working in New York as an actor, I joined a group that was working out of the historic Provincetown Playhouse near Washington Square. An actor with whom I’d worked at the theater where I directed my first play asked me to join the American Theatre Arts Project, which he’d helped start. 

The opportunity to work in the theater where Eugene O’Neill had gotten his New York start (there was still a permanent cyc on the stage which he’d helped build and which bore his initials!) was nearly irresistible, so I joined the company. 

I talked to some of the ATAP leaders about starting a children’s theater program and they were receptive. It was almost Halloween, so we decided to test the idea, to see if there was enough interest and audience for a regular program, by staging a Halloween show. 

The performances were a success (aside from having scared the crap out of some poor little boy sitting down center), so we went ahead with a full-length children’s play. I chose Aladdin, a version of the famous fantasy by my friend Kirk Woodward, and, because the shows were in the daytime, the company’s actors weren’t all available; I had to break one of my own rules and take a part in the play as well as directing the production. As a result, I was on stage when a near-disaster struck during one performance. 

In the middle of a scene, when one actress, an older woman, was supposed to make an entrance and carry on an important prop, she went up. She went up so badly that she not only couldn’t remember her lines, but she couldn’t remember anything about the play or the story. 

The stage manager threw on a few costume bits and made a quick (and unexplained) entrance on the fly to bring on the necessary prop, and as soon as I got off stage, I went downstairs to find the actress and see what had happened. She was understandably distressed, and we were all anxious, too, not knowing what was happening to her. 

We managed to finish the performance and, as far as I ever knew, no one in the audience felt anything was amiss. But the actress went right to her doctor as soon as she could and learned that she’d suffered a mini-stroke in the middle of performance. 

The memory loss was temporary, thank God, but she was advised to quit the business because the emotional pressure that goes with acting could trigger a more severe stroke and endanger her life. She was a lovely woman, very nice and even-tempered at all times, but her stage career was over, she said. 

As relieved as we all were that she’d gotten through the episode, we were all still shaken by the experience. (This was over 30 years ago now, and considering her age at the time, I’m sure the actress has died since then. I don’t know if she ever went back on the stage; I assume she didn’t.)

ROMEO AND JULIET ARE LOVERS: SOMETIMES, YOU JUST DON’T SEE THE FUNNY

While I was trying to make a career as an actor, I reconnected with a friend from my teens, a young woman who was trying to break into producing. She put together an unstaged reading of a play, Romeo and Juliet Are Lovers by Jules Tasca, so that a composer and his agent could hear it because the composer was considering turning it into a musical. 

My friend asked me to take a part in the one-night event and, of course, I agreed. (We always supported each other’s work, but besides wanting to help her out, a reading for a playwright, a composer, and their agents might mean other pros would attend, too, and it was a chance to be seen by people who influenced casting and hiring. Enlightened self-interest, as it were.) 

I picked up a copy of the script and decided to take a long weekend at my parents’ vacation home on Cape Cod with just me and my dog in the late-fall off-season. I hung around the house, sat on the deck wrapped in a blanket like old scenes aboard ocean liners, and walked along the beach with the dog. And read the play. 

Romeo and Juliet Are Lovers is a farce that posits that the two Shakespearean lovers didn’t die at the end of the original play, but married and lived on into middle age. Tasca’s play is about Romeo and Juliet’s life as Romeo experiences his mid-life crisis and the two see their son fall into the pattern of young love that had so dramatically affected their lives as teenagers. 

I read through the play several times, and the faux-Elizabethan speech and the silly situations and jokes just didn’t seem funny to me. I was sure the whole thing would lay an egg at the reading; I couldn’t see why the composer (I never learned his name) would want to musicalize it. But, I’d made a commitment to my friend, and it was only for one evening.  

We were supposed to get together at the Vandam Theatre (now the SoHo Theatre) in SoHo for an hour or so before the reading and run through the script, get any necessary pointers from my friend, the director, and Tasca—not really a rehearsal, just a familiarization. 

Well, we met as scheduled, and started to read the play. It was absolutely hilarious. We were almost literally rolling on the floor! We couldn’t get through more than a sentence or two without breaking up and interrupting the dialogue. The parody of Shakespearean language was so outrageous when spoken that it transcended the silliness I thought I’d seen when I read the text to myself.

Of course, we calmed down by the time we had to read the play in front of the invited audience. (They did the laughing then.) Unfortunately, the composer decided not to do the musicalization and the collaboration never happened. (The play’s been published since then—1984, Aran Press—but I’ve never heard of a production anywhere.) 

I learned a powerful lesson that evening.  Plays, especially comedies, can often play far better with live actors than they read on the page.  (The play’s been published since then—1984, Aran Press—but I’ve never heard of a production anywhere.) 

THERE ARE AGENTS . . . AND AGENTS

A funny exchange took place on an episode of the late TV series Numb3rs (2005-10, CBS), the show with the math genius and his FBI-agent brother. The crime under investigation had taken place at the house of a movie star where a lot of hangers-on and wannabes are always hanging out. The FBI agents arrive and encounter a couple of would-be actors out front. 

The G-men introduce themselves as Agent So-and-So and Agent So-and-So, and the actors immediately try to give them their headshots and flyers for a showcase. The actors ask them what agency they’re with, and even when the agents tell them, “The FBI,” the actors continue to think they're talent agents. 

The same thing happened to me years ago, but in reverse. When I was doing showcases and OOB productions in New York, I had an acquaintance and castmate in a 1981 production of Much Ado About Nothing who was a retired FBI agent. 

I knew that, and, of course, he knew I’d been an MI Special Agent myself in the army only a few years earlier at this time (I’d gotten out of the army in 1974). (We're all "Special Agents," regardless of the federal agency—except the Marshals Service, who are . . . well, “Marshals.”) 

So one day when my actor-friend introduced me to a companion who'd come to see Much Ado, he called him "My friend, the agent." I assumed he was also a former fed, and I asked him if he and my castmate had worked together somewhere—and other agent-type insider chit-chat. 

He wasn't that kind of agent, though. He was a talent agent doing his due diligence by seeing his friend in a showcase. When I saw this scenario playing out backwards on Numb3rs, I couldn't help chuckling all through the scene. I'm sure no one else in the entire country thought it was that funny! Humor, like beauty, is in the eye (or, perhaps, psyche) of the beholder.

BELL, BOOK, AND CANDLE AND THE MOTHER OF ALL SNOWSTORMS

Weather once again raised its beady, little head in 1983. I was directing John van Druten’s Bell, Book, and Candle in Jersey City for a March run and I traveled by PATH train from New York City and then local bus to the church where the theater company had its home. 

It was a Friday, 11 February, and we were rehearsing in the daytime, all day. It began to snow that morning sometime, but I arrived in Jersey City before the snow started accumulating, so everything was okay getting to the church. We worked all afternoon, uninterrupted and without paying any attention to what was happening elsewhere in the world. 

By the time we finished in the evening, however, it had been snowing all day long, a major blizzard, and the streets were calf-deep in fresh snow and the busses either weren't running or were all jammed up somewhere down the line. (Later, the average snowfall for Jersey City that day was recorded at 18 and 21 inches.)  

I had to walk all the way back to Journal Square, the PATH station, down the middle of the street because that was the only area that was packed enough to traverse.  I don't know how long the walk was—one-and-a-half or two miles, I'd guess—but it was a loooong, cold walk! 

I was fortunate that the PATH trains were running without serious problems or I'd have been stuck in New Jersey with no way to get home and nowhere to stay the night.

“Dante update neither divine nor comedy”

by Kyle Smith

[After the Johnny Knoxville movie Jackass 3D hit theaters on Friday, 15 October, my friend Kirk Woodward alerted me to Kyle Smith’s review in the New York Post. As I don’t read the Post regularly, I’d never have caught this review, particularly since the Jackass movies (this is the third, not counting the TV series) aren’t of much interest to me so I wouldn’t have made a survey of the critical reception the film received in the media. If Kirk hadn’t recommended that I have a look at Smith’s review because “in all our discussion of reviews, here’s something I think we didn’t expect,” I’d have missed something really quite wonderful.

[Readers of ROT will know that Kirk is the author of The Art of Writing Reviews on which I commented at length (“The Art of Writing Reviews by Kirk Woodward, Parts 1-4,” 4, 8, 11, 14 November 2009). In addition to my commentary on Kirk’s book, I, too, have written about reviewing and reviewers, notably in “On Reviewing,” 22 March 2009. Neither Kirk nor I, as he noted, anticipated an approach like Smith’s. I'm just guessing, of course, but I got the sense that Smith didn't really want to review Jackass. It's his job and he was handed the assignment, so he couldn't just blow it off, and writing a "serious" review would have been dull--both to do and to read, I imagine. I mean, what can you say about a movie that plays to the absolute lowest taste and intellect? No one really cares how this movie is reviewed: the people who like the Jackass flicks aren't going to care if some newspaper writer doesn't like it, and the people who share his opinion aren't going to go to it anyway. So what's the point? But Smith found a way to do something interesting while still fulfilling his responsibility: telling us what he thought about the movie. There’s a lesson here for all writers, including students, who are required to write about something in which they find little of interest or value. In that spirit, I’m reprinting Smiths review as it was posted on the New York Post’s website on 14 October (and published in the paper the next day). ~Rick]

When Dante ("Inferno," Canto XXII) wrote that "the captain made a trumpet of his ass," he could not have known how shamelessly he would be ripped off by "Jackass 3D," which shows a guy not only playing a trumpet out of his butt but also deploying his sphincter to blow up a balloon and tootle a party streamer.

Johnny Knoxville is fond of strenuous dumb-dude laughter (each segment features a few seconds of stunts followed by a long interlude of Johnny and his boys standing around whooping it up – the movie comes with its own laugh track). The idiocy is just an act.

Knoxville would never admit to such loser taste, but he and his friends are obviously scholars of "The Divine Comedy," from which they plagiarized all of their ideas and disguised them as silly stunts to infect the minds of American youth with 14th-century epic poetry. It's time someone called him out on this insidious campaign; why can't movies be mindless entertainment free of subversive educational agendas?

Consider: Both Dante and Knoxville are about halfway through life, each starring as narrators playing themselves. "I'm Johnny Knoxville." "I'm Johnny Knoxville. I'm Johnny Knoxville." What kind of film has its main character keep introducing himself? It cannot be that Johnny considers his viewers so deep-fried of brain that they forget who he is every five minutes. No, it's a clear parallel with Dante – who mentions himself even more times than Johnny.

A line from Canto I of "Inferno" could be used as the tagline for "Jackass 3D": "You shall hear the howls of desperation . . . as each of them laments." Dante's " 'Tis true I said to him in jest/that I could rise by flight into the air" (Canto XXIX) leads directly to Knoxville riding a Jet Ski up a ramp and flying into a hedge. Dante is tormented by a leopard, a lion, a she-wolf; Knoxville gets head-butted by a buffalo, a ram, a bull. Dante "entered on the deep and savage way" to get closer to God; Knoxville's journey leads to a climactic scene with a deity from the holy trinity of "The Gong Show" – Rip Taylor.

"The Divine Comedy" deals in poetic justice; in "Jackass 3D," a guy who thinks he is going to prank a friend (the sin of treachery!) is himself pranked by his friends – and subjected to his worst fear, being trapped in a snakepit.

A corpulent man – a human hog, you might say – is victimized by a real hog who gleefully consumes an apple placed in the glutton's ample pink buttocks.

The vainglorious Steve-O, proud of his bare, gym-built, copiously tattoo-decorated torso ("even the French can't match such vanity" – Canto XXIX) will find himself bungee-jumping inside a portable toilet. The outcome? Take it away, Canto XVIII: "I saw souls in the ditch plunged into excrement that might well have been flushed from our latrines . . . I saw somebody's head so smirched with s - - t, you could not tell if he were priest or layman."

Oh, and one more thing the comedy of "Jackass 3D" has in common with "The Divine Comedy": Neither of them is funny.

[What gets me most here is how Smith, even while taking a humorous approach that clearly is meant to make fun of the movie itself, still manages to tell us what he thinks of it (even though, until the last sentence, he doesn’t directly state his opinion). I especially like the part where Smith upbraids Hollywood for sneaking in so much surreptitious education. It’s delicious—and effective—use of irony. I'm not familiar enough with Divine Comedy to be sure Smith got all his refs right, but I'll bet he has, and the parallels he constructs, not entirely tortured, are terrific. So are the parallels he finds between Knoxville and Dante themselves. I think this may be one of the best reviews of a bad movie (in the opinion of the reviewer, of course) I've ever seen. I don’t know Smith’s writing, but I tip my hat to him as a writer and as a reviewer.]

'Wings'

On Wednesday, 17 November, my friend Diana and I saw a performance of Arthur Kopit’s Wings at Second Stage on West 43rd Street. The story of a former aviatrix recovering from a stroke was first produced on Broadway in 1979 (after a run at Yale Rep and then the Kennedy Center in Washington); it was nominated for a best-play Tony and won a best-actress Tony for its star, Constance Cummings. Originally written for Earplay, the radio drama branch of NPR, in 1976, this is the first revival of Wings in New York City (if you don’t count a 1993 musical adaptation at the Public). Shortly before Kopit wrote the play, his father had suffered a stroke and lost his speech. In one of the father’s speech-therapy sessions, Kopit met a woman with aphasia, the inability to express aloud what you think. She’d been a wing-walker in aerial shows in the 1920s, and the playwright turned her into Emily Stilson, the woman in Wings who expresses Kopit’s thoughts about his father’s stroke.

Now, I should make a confession here. Jan Maxwell, the actress who plays Emily at 2ST, is married to an actor I’ve known since my days attempting to be an actor and director in New York. I don’t know Maxwell really, though we met years ago, but I acted with Rob Lunney (he was Rob Emmet back then) twice (Much Ado About Nothing and Macbeth) and I directed him twice (two new plays, Comes the Happy Hour! by Ken Greenberg and Neal Thompson’s The Gift). I haven’t had much contact with Rob now for several years, aside from exchanging holiday cards, but I used to go to his showcases and readings when he told me about them, and I thought he was one of the best undiscovered actors I ever knew; I still do. Not that Maxwell needs my championship—she does quite well on her own, having been tapped twice this year for Tonys (Royal Family and Lend Me a Tenor), as well as several other Broadway and Off-Broadway awards in recent years.

Wings is a short play, running only 65 minutes, but Kopit sees it as an adventure story. In the early days of flying, people like Emily—Saint-Exupéry, Lindbergh, Earhart—were discovering a new life, a new world. It was risky, Kopit saw; they were “leaving land and might never see it again.” The pilots were figuring out how to do this thing while they were doing it—no one had ever done before what they were doing; there were no rules, no instruction manuals. They were all on their own:

The experiences in the early days when you lost radio contact and you didn't know where you were flying. It's about flying blind and loving it. It's the thrill of something terrifying, but doing it anyway.

I think Kopit saw Emily’s (and his father’s) learning how to speak again, to name the things they knew, to express in speech what they thought, as the same kind of discovery. Aphasics know things: their thoughts, though jumbled, work. They just can’t say what they think. (Aphasics can read and write, but they can’t say the words they can think. The speech center of the brain and the thought center have been disconnected.) They have to learn all over again how to talk—to make new pathways between the parts of the brain, a new map. To Kopit, that was like learning to fly, learning to be free of the earth.

As far as the production itself goes, there are two things to talk about as far as I’m concerned. One is Kopit’s script and the other is Jan Maxwell’s performance. Little else is of note, including the design (there’s no set to speak of—what there is was designed by Scott Pask—though there are projections, designed by Peter Nigrini; costumes, designed by Ann Hould-Ward; lighting, by Jane Cox; and sound, by Bray Poor, who also composed the original music—all effective and apt) and even the direction (by John Doyle, who‘s done more interesting and challenging work elsewhere). I’m not sure which element it’s best to start with, or if it makes a difference which I write about first, so I’ll just take a shot in the dark and go with Kopit’s play.

There are two things I spotted right off. First, the play’s roots as a radio drama are clear and unavoidable. Second, it’s also understandable why no theater here has revived the play in 31 years. As for the latter, I raise the three questions dramaturgs are supposed to ask when advising an artistic director on selections for a season: Why this play? Why here? Why now? I don’t have the answers to any of those. There’s nothing in Wings that creates a driving need to restage the play: it says nothing particular about this time or this society as far as I can see. (Though I haven’t seen the current revival of Angels in America yet—I’ll see it next month—I did see the original production and I can see several prominent reasons to bring that play back just now. I’ll save that discussion for my report on Angels, but some points have already been raised in the press when the revival opened at the Signature Theatre earlier this season.) When Diana asked me how I’d justify producing Wings now, I told her that I wouldn’t be able to. My only guess is that someone connected to the production just wanted to do it—maybe Maxwell really wanted to do the role, coming off several very successful comedies, and someone at 2ST indulged her, or the director had wanted to stage it, or someone in the theater’s administration likes it and wanted to produce it; I have no idea, of course, but I can’t come up with any objective reason to do Wings at this time in New York. Even as an allegory for facing unknown challenges—Kopit’s adventure story, as I understand him—it doesn’t really tell us anything about life in these United States (or these five boroughs) that isn’t awfully obvious.

As a play derived from a radio drama, there’s almost no action in Wings. To fill the gap, Doyle uses a lot of projections which often flash frenetically across the set, sometimes leaving a general impression—confusion being the principal one, the most salient emotion Emily Stilson feels, especially at the beginning—often leaving only the sense of incoherently flickering light and blaring sounds in the semidarkness. In the play’s 65 minutes, Emily progresses from almost abject incomprehension as she awakens from her stroke to the ability to remember and imagine a particularly significant, and frightening, incident in her early piloting days. But the progress is played out in such a short span that the struggle we know must have occurred is only sketched in and the small triumph I think she’s supposed to experience at the end is only asserted, not experienced. The two conditions aren’t alike, I know, but I was put in mind of the 2007 film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly in which Jean-Dominique Bauby suffers from locked-in syndrome (also as the result of a stroke) and we experience along with him the fight to gain some ability to express himself to those outside his interior world. Wings works like Julian Schnabel’s movie if you remove all the middle scenes and went from the first few days of discovering the situation to the final moments.

Whatever its merits as a play, the script offers what Variety called “a juicy role for an actress,” and Maxwell does a fine job with the technically challenging part. (There’s a special acknowledgment in the program for the National Aphasia Association, which I presume provided guidance on the symptoms of the condition.) Ben Brantley in his New York Times review and Frank Scheck in the New York Post both objected that Maxwell is—“dare I presume?—too young” to play Emily who, according to the script, is in her late 70s (as she’d have to be in a play written in 1976 to have been a wing-walker in the early days of aviation), but in the end it’s not terribly important. (Neither the program nor the script specify when the play is set, though the nurses’ uniforms put it sometime before the 1990s, I’d estimate—whenever they stopped wearing those little white butterfly caps.) First of all, Maxwell takes control of both the play and the character right away, so there’s little time to find fault with the actress’s age. Further, there’s nothing in the play or the production that would contradict the assumption that it’s set in the ‘50s or early ‘60s—in which case, Emily could be as young as 45 or 50 (which is about where I presume Maxwell is since Rob’s a little younger than I am), so it was of little concern to me.

What did concern me is that, as strong an actress as Maxwell is (and all the reviewers praised her body of work in lavish terms), there’s little she could do apparently to bring more to this part than technical virtuosity. Maybe Doyle held her back or steered her wrong, but I couldn’t find much reason to root for Emily, to empathize with her, to feel her sense of being adrift up in the sky somewhere, flying blind and out of radio contact, as Kopit said. She speaks gibberish (which Marilyn Stasio in Daily Variety said comes close to poetry and which sounded Dickensian to Scott Brown in New York, but which is more like Lewis Carroll to me) and flounders when she can’t connect a thought to a word, and it all seemed quite correct, as the Brits say—but without life, without the emotional extremes that I gather made Constance Cummings’s rendition (which I didn’t see on stage, but only in the 1983 American Playhouse adaptation on PBS) worth the Tony. We’re supposed to be witnessing Emily’s plight through her own eyes, but instead of feeling as if I were there with her as I might be with a loved one, I was in an observation room, watching through a two-way mirror. It’s not that Maxwell doesn’t do a good job—she does; it’s just that, for me anyway, the part doesn’t really connect much on its own, and a “good job” just doesn’t cut it. TV is a cooler medium than the stage, so I can only imagine how hot Cummings’s live performance was—and maybe her age (late 60s) did lend an additional level of credibility and vulnerability to the performance as well—but I just couldn’t get into this play or this production.

I have one final observation to make; I saved it till the end because I’m not sure how relevant it is. Or how universal. It’s something I’ve often felt at plays like Wings, plays drawn from an experience very close to the playwright’s life. Kopit wrote Wings in response to his father’s stroke, which I assume was a devastating occurrence in their lives. Arthur Miller wrote After the Fall in response to the break-up of his marriage to Marilyn Monroe. Carol Burnett’s Hollywood Arms was about the support she got from her beloved grandmother. I always get the feeling that the playwrights had to write those kinds of works to come to terms with whatever it is from their lives with which they needed to contend so they could move on. The problem is, I don’t necessarily need to see that effort. Wings seems to be an example of that situation—Kopit needed to write it, but I’d rather he hadn’t inflicted it on me. I have the same reaction when a news show sticks cameras and mics into the faces of a bereaved family and makes me privy to their intimate grief. I don’t want to be there: it’s none of my business and it should be private. But maybe that’s just me.

[I recommend reading Marilyn Stasio’s Daily Variety review (26 October) for anyone interested in a well-crafted analysis of the play’s structure, which I didn’t attempt here. (Several of the published reviews leaned a little heavy on the aviator diction and the flying puns: “Fliers grounded by reality” from Joe Dziemianowicz in the Daily News was one, and Brown’s “Wings Soars With Jan Maxwell” was especially overwrought.)

[It’s entirely irrelevant to this report, but a fun fact anyway: I have a photo of my mother as a little girl of 11 or 12, standing next to Amelia Earhart. It’s dated 1935, about two years before the famous aviator disappeared, and according to Mom, the picture was taken at some kind of fair in New Jersey, where my mother then lived, and there was an air show—or maybe Earhart just made a celebrity appearance.]

'Throne of Blood' (BAM)

On Saturday evening, 13 November, my friend Diana and I drove over to Brooklyn to see Ping Chong’s staging of Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood. This is the great filmmaker’s 1957 adaptation of Macbeth, starring Toshiro Mifune in a masterful performance as Taketoki Washizu, the ambitious samurai who is the Macbeth character in the film as well as Chong’s stage adaptation. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the Kurosawa flick—college, I think—so I don’t remember many of the details, except that it was black and white and a driving, thrilling movie, a classic in its own right, even without Shakespeare’s poetry. Chong’s version, of course, is in English, but he doesn’t return to the Shakespearean text.

Chong’s stage version, presented at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Howard Gilman Opera House over an hour and 40 minutes without intermission, was commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the cast is drawn from the resident Ashland troupe. (The play ran at OSF’s Angus Bowmer Theatre from 21 July to 31 October this year.) The cast is heterogeneous so, aside from the English dialogue, Chong’s adaptation is already a step or two away from Kurosawa’s vision. Furthermore, the stage obviously can’t accommodate the sweep and visual force of Kurosawa’s film, which was almost wordless.

Chong’s Throne of Blood is a curious, but fascinating, effort. First of all, it’s not Shakespeare and it’s not Kurosawa; Chong, known for his multi-media experimental and avant-garde performances for the past 30 years, isn’t up to that level of artistry in my opinion. The only review I saw before Saturday was Charles Isherwood’s notice in the Times the day before, and he took Chong to task essentially for not doing the movie or the Elizabethan original. But if you look at Chong’s Throne of Blood as an artwork on its own, rather than an attempt to capture the essence of either of its predecessors, that doesn’t matter as much (even though Isherwood’s right in the short run). My companion was unimpressed (to put it mildly): “What do you get out of it?” she asked, after I disagreed with her negative response. A profound theatrical experience, it’s not. This isn’t West Side Story or My Fair Lady set beside Romeo and Juliet or Pygmalion. It’s also not Terrence McNally and Kander and Ebb’s Kiss of the Spider Woman compared to the Hector Babenco film. What’s on show here are the staging techniques and the visual effects Chong devises to accomplish what Kurosawa did with his camera. And while even these aren’t fully satisfying in their execution, there are some ideas it’s intriguing to imagine in their ultimate perfection (as they probably can only be achieved on the mind’s stage).

The outlines of Shakespeare’s story are still here, as they were in Kurosawa’s film, transposed from medieval Scotland to feudal Japan. Chong, I think wisely, doesn’t revert to the playwright’s words (except for a few allusions to phrases from several plays), which would only make the play seem pretentious and more derivative than it already is. The language of Chong’s version, based on the subtitles from the film, is neither poetry nor contemporary prose. What it resembles more than anything else is the English translation of classical Japanese theater, principally Kabuki. Since Chong draws considerably on Kabuki and Noh staging traditions for his presentation, this seems appropriate to me, rather than a draw-back. It comes off as being foreign—sort of like a well-dubbed film—but neither lofty nor pretentious. It also let me remember that I was watching a performance, not a slice of reality or fictionalized history like, say, Lion in Winter or Man for All Seasons. Since there are other elements in the production that are presentational, this fits with the style I believe Chong is after.

Isherwood seemed to complain about the film sequences Chong used (designed by Maya Ciarrocchi) and the suggested scenery (by Christopher Acebo) because the one suggests Kurosawa’s cinematography without realizing its “mood and atmosphere,” and the other doesn’t evoke the “sweep and intensity” of Kurosawa’s outdoor imagery. Again, if you don’t insist on comparing this play with the film, that becomes an academic point, I think, and both work for what Chong is doing. The films, which are projected in a strip above the set, are mostly segments of nature scenery—trees in a forest, cherry blossoms, rain. These serve as fragments of projected scenery, to set the image of the terrain and the landscape the way fragmentary sets do for interiors on a stage. Some of the projections are story-related, like the moving of Spider Web Forest (the stand-in for Birnam Wood). One repeated image is the abstract ink drawing, in a style reminiscent of Japanese painting, of bare branches with two leaves that become a pair of staring eyes in a suggested face at the end of the two Forest Spirit scenes. The fact that the projections resemble film means they unavoidably call cinema to mind, and Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood in particular, but I don’t believe that Chong means for this technique to substitute for Kurosawa’s film work; Chong, after all, is a multi-media artist in his own right. Aside from directing, writing, and choreographing, Chong, whose parents were performers in Chinese opera (a precursor of Kabuki), is also a video installation artist. He got his start as a performer with Meredith Monk, and has worked in such diverse fields as puppetry and oral history.

As for the stage sets, it’s incontrovertible that they can’t compete with the outdoor vistas that made Kurosawa’s film so visually powerful, but since this is a stage play and not a film, no setting could, so why try to compete? The play is episodic, one of its weaknesses, so there are a lot of scene changes. The set fragments, which silently move in electronically on slides or drop down from the flies, accomplish this with alacrity and elegance, giving the impression of a place without depicting it literally. While Kabuki plays use elaborate and often quite realistic sets (Noh uses almost no scenery), this looks more like Japanese interior design—simple, unobtrusive, spare.

The acting, though, is what was interesting to me. Chong obviously wants to incorporate the stylized performance of Noh and Kabuki in his staging of Kurosawa’s semi-realistic screenplay (written by the director with four collaborators). First of all, the whole play is framed as a flashback, with a prologue and an epilogue (in Japanese with English supertitles projected on a photograph of the ruins of Spider Web Castle) that outline the backstory—and, in Brechtian manner, remind us that this is an ancient tale, not a contemporary one. This makes the play an enactment of the history of the place, a very typical Noh structure. (In true Noh, the narrator of the tale, who’s only a voice-over in Throne, transforms into the spirit of the place, often a demon or the ghost of someone connected to the story. This isn’t part of either version of Throne of Blood.) Then the music, composed by Todd Barton (who also did the sound design, which includes such effects as the sounds of weather conditions—very integral to Kurosawa’s film—nature, and horses’ hoofbeats), is recognizably evocative of Kabuki and Noh music (that is, for anyone who has a familiarity with those forms of theater, of course). There are also koken, the black-clad stage assistants of Kabuki and Noh theater, on stage several times.

The Forest Spirit, Throne’s stand-in for the witch (there’s only one instead of three as in Shakespeare), is a Noh demon, all in white with a very long, full white wig. Sitting on a small platform, the spirit turns the wheel of a loom, weaving . . . . what? A spider web? He’s in Spider Web Forest—and a familiar character in Noh and Noh-derived Kabuki is the Demon Spider (who looks a lot like this Forest Spirit). Is this spirit out to ensnare Washizu in his magical web of enticing prophesies? As portrayed by Cristofer Jean, he speaks in a rasping, unreal, stylized (and electronically manipulated) voice that is an approximation of the slow, rhythmic delivery of many Noh characters.

Lady Asaji (the Lady Macbeth character), the most Noh-infused role in the film, wears pasty makeup with stylized facial features so that her face resembles a living Noh mask. The actress (Ako, who is from Japan originally and performed there with an all-female troupe, the Takarazuka Theatre) moves with the deliberate gait of a Noh actor. These and other aspects of the performance demonstrate that Chong wants to evoke traditional Japanese theater in his staging. This is where his experiment fails for me.

Chong can’t improve on Shakespeare and he can’t duplicate Kurosawa’s masterpiece, so what would have worked for me was to see the script interpreted in a hybrid of Western and Japanese staging styles. As I said, I think that’s what Chong is attempting, but while he can get the production artists—the designers and technicians—to approximate Japanese staging techniques, he can’t make Western actors do after a few weeks of rehearsals what Japanese actors do. So, though I can see what Chong probably wants on stage (because, as some of you know, I’ve studied Asian theater, especially Kabuki, for some time), I can also tell that the performers don’t execute it precisely. It’s the difference, I’d say, between learning a language from childhood, with years of study and living among native speakers, and learning some speeches phonetically after a few months of practice and coaching. (Ako, who trained in Kabuki dance, lent her knowledge and expertise in Japanese traditional performance to the task of training the company, along with a movement coach.) I’ll give you one example. There’s limited action in the play; many scenes involve groups of characters sitting, as in the great councils the emperor holds several times. In a Kabuki play, when an actor isn’t the focus of attention on the stage, he’s absolutely still. Having struck the pose he’ll hold during that scene, often kneeling and sitting on his heels, he doesn’t move a muscle until he has lines or business. (This is a very important element of Kabuki performance, and total stillness is a skill all novice Kabuki actors must learn very early.) This stillness makes the slightest movement momentously dramatic and theatrical; but it also makes the merest twitch from an actor not in focus destructively distracting. In Throne, the actors come on stage for those councils, say, and take their positions in semi-darkness, and we can see them strike their poses, usually a wide-legged seated stance, because they do it with a sharp, deliberate movement, all executed at the same instant. But Western actor aren’t expected to be totally still under just about any ordinary stage circumstances—and no actor who’s not been trained in this technique can manage it. So while they’re sitting without moving about or turning their heads, they aren’t really still. What I believe is supposed to be a Kabuki moment just isn’t, which mars what I think Chong is aiming for theatrically.

Stillness is only the most salient of this kind of problem, the easiest to spot and to describe. There are similar issues with walking—both Noh and Kabuki have very distinctive walking styles and it looked like the cast was trying to approximate them here—and the choreographed fight sequences, which seem to be modeled on Kabuki tachimawari battle techniques. Only Ako, trained and experienced in this performance style, executes it well—and her presence on stage makes the slips and lapses of the Western actors that much more obvious. (In my studies of Asian theater, one of my teachers has been James Brandon of the University of Hawaii at Manoa. His department there has a program of presenting Asian theater forms in English with American actors, and I’ve seen taped performances of Kabuki in English. Those actors, who are coached by professionals from the theater they’re emulating, have similar problems because the discipline is different.)

I think I’ve made this all sound much more disastrous than it was. I said that in my mind, I could see the perfect version of what I believe Chong wants, but for an ordinary Western viewer, I suspect none of that is noticeable. Perhaps I’m hypersensitive, or at least hypercritical. Without the execution of the Japanese traditional techniques in Throne, however, we do come back to Diana’s question: “What do you get out of it?” For whatever reason, the Japanese seem taken with Macbeth: aside from Kurosawa’s 1957 treatment, popular Kabuki actor Tamasaburo Bando V became the first onnagata (specialist in female roles in the all-male Kabuki theater) to portray a Western female character when he played Lady Macbeth at Tokyo’s Nissei Theatre in 1976; in the ‘70s and ’80s, director Shozo Sato created a Kabuki Macbeth (and a Kabuki Lady Macbeth); in 1986, New York’s Pan Asian Rep staged Shogun Macbeth; and in 1990, BAM imported the image-dominated, experimental Macbeth by Yukio Ninagawa. The various staging styles aside, what these adaptations all show is the universality of Shakespeare’s play about ambition and treachery, which I believe was Kurosawa’s motivation to make Throne of Blood 53 years ago. (Kurosawa’s been said to have been responding to World War II, which ended just a dozen years before he made the film. Chong has said that he sees the world today as very similarly self-destructive.) But having already demonstrated that (assuming, of course, that the very longevity of Shakespeare’s tragedy hadn’t already made that clear), why translate to the stage what Kurosawa already showed on film? Well, besides making the screenplay accessible in a different medium (not to say, a different language), I contend that it’s the staging style, the theatricality Chong envisioned, that prompts yet another go at the Scottish play à la japonaise. (At the risk of making an unnecessary, and perhaps irrelevant, joke, it begins to sound as if we’re encroaching on the territory of that silly series of ads for Starburst candy where a character calls his son a “contradiction” because he’s “Scotch-Korean.”) If that vision is badly executed, the experiment fails, I’d say. The idea’s not uninteresting, theatrically speaking, but without a much longer training time, and maybe some resident Kabuki or Noh actors in the company, I don’t think it’s viable. Still, the attempt was interesting—even a failed experiment can be worthwhile—and I don’t join my friend Diana in saying it was a painful experience. (I should probably equivocate some here: without my admittedly somewhat rare perspective, other spectators might find far less of interest in the production.)

One thing about which Isherwood was correct is that “most of the actors make little impression.” Except for Ako, as he noted, no one stands out. (Cristofer Jean gets spotlighted as the Forest Spirit, but that’s the role, not so much the performance, that’s prominent. Jean does a fine job of it, however.) Kevin Kenerly as Washizu, much like the other soldiers, has little to do but bluster and strut, He has a couple of choreographed fights with the samurai sword, and he’s convincing enough given the caveat I’ve already issued about the tachimawari, but it even took me a few scenes to be sure which actor was Kenerly as Washizu and which was Danforth Comins as Yoshiako Miki (Banquo) because there’s so little to distinguish one character from another aside from the costumes. (The costumes, which approximate 17th-century Japanese armor and other dress, are beautifully designed by Stefani Mar. They’re modeled more from museum exhibits, I’d say, than from Kabuki or Noh costumes, but they have an air of authenticity. I must add that the battle helmets are wonderfully exotic, with horns, wings, and crescents looming atop the actors’ heads.) Eventually, the plot made the distinction for me, but there’s nothing in the staging that might have approximated, say, a bombastic aragoto (“rough style”) performance from Washizu, as I might have expected in a Kabuki rendition. In fact, in several scenes of great tension with Lady Asaji, while she’s kneeling in stillness, a figure all in white (including her face makeup) except for the blood-red splotches on her kimono, Washizu paces all around her in what looked to me like aimless agitation. That weakens the character (in Kabuki terms, it almost makes him a wagoto, or “soft style,” character), which may align with psychologically realistic Western behavior, but in a traditional Japanese performance, it makes him less than the ruthless protagonist of a Shakespearean tragedy as reflected in a Kabuki mirror. Washizu’s fall is more anticlimactic here than tragic. I can’t entirely blame Kenerly for this; it looked like a directorial choice, not an actor’s; but if Chong had been true to the Kabuki or Noh style in such moments, Washizu would have stood stock still, looking like a giant in an oversized costume, or stridden across the stage in slow, heavy steps.

If Chong doesn’t entirely succeed in translating Kurosawa’s film masterpiece to the stage, he has done some intriguing work in the attempt. Isherwood called the effort “an ill-conceived theatrical enterprise,” and Diana agreed with that. The Backstage reviewer, however, asserted that the production “succeeds and then some” in its ambitious aims. I don’t agree with either estimation, but I ended feeling it was a worthwhile theater experience—although I may have had an inside track.

[For some explanation of the Kabuki terms and techniques I mentioned in this report, see my recent article, “Kabuki: A Trip to a Land of Dreams” (1 November).]

"How I Got My Equity Card: George Spelvin"

[Equity News, the newsletter of Actors Equity Association, includes a regular column called “How I Got My Equity Card,” which is ordinarily a short autobiography of a prominent actor writing about how she or he started on a professional acting career. In the October/November 2007 issue, however, the union ran a light-hearted column by “George Spelvin.” Theater people will recognize this as the name actors use in programs when they don’t want to appear under their true professional names. 15 November has been designated as George Spelvin Day (I don’t know on whose authority), so I reprint the Equity News column for your edification—and amusement. ~Rick]

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The 15th of November is “George Spelvin Day.” In honor of this “unusual holiday,” this issue of Equity News is proud to pay tribute to one of the most versatile names of Broadway.

By George Spelvin
(as told to Equity member Don Stitt)

My first professional job was in 1886, in a little-remembered play called Karl the Peddler. It closed out of town. (Is it any wonder I am, therefore, associated with a pseudonym?) It was a non-Equity production, but I should point out that this was a full 27 years before Equity was founded, so please forgive a youth his theatrical indiscretions.)

I have had a few Broadway shows though (89, according to ibdb.com), and most of them were under the jurisdiction of AEA. A short list follows:

In 1906, a year that made San Francisco shake, rattle and roll, I appeared in the Broadway cast of Brewster's Millions, from the popular book by George Carr McCutcheon (which would subsequently be reinterpreted onscreen by Fatty Arbuckle and, much later, John Candy and Richard Pryor).

In 1909, I supplied “The Voice” for the Broadway cast of a play, A Fool There Was, (which was later recorded for posterity by Theda Bara, but without a voice).

In 1927, I was The Poor Debtor in the Broadway cast of a play based on Mr. Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers. (Oddly enough, at the same time there was a character named George Spelvin appearing in the Gershwins’ Strike Up the Band, just down the street. How strange!)

I assisted the great Bobby Clark and Gypsy Rose Lee with the famous “Gazooka” sketch in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1936.

In 1949, I played A Betting Man in the original cast of High Button Shoes, where my director was George Abbott and my choreographer was Jerome Robbins. (Boy, what a couple of nit-pickers those two were.)

In 1958, I appeared in the Broadway cast of Jane Eyre. I played Colonel Dent. (But the critics left a Major Dent in our box office.)

I played Theophraste Renaudot in the 1973 musical, Cyrano, directed and choreographed by Michael Kidd (but none of us was doing any gymnastics after the reviews came out).

In ‘74, I played the role of John in Sherlock Holmes. Of course you know the books were by Arthur Conan Doyle, but did you remember the script was by Equity member William Gillette? (Elementary, my dear Watson!)

In 1976, I was in a position to aid and abet the great George C. Scott in Larry Gelbart’s Sly Fox, a reworking of Ben Jonson’s Volpone. (Richard Dreyfus didn’t require my assistance in the more recent revival. Pity. His loss.)

And I appeared in It Had to Be You in 1981. This was a two-hander (although, counting me, there were three in the cast) with Renee Taylor and Joseph Bologna. Ms. Taylor’s character, Theda Blau, was named for the aforementioned Theda Bara, thus bringing my career full circle.

In recent years, I have been flattered that columnist Westbrook Pegler wrote under my name, and Christopher Durang named the title character of The Actor’s Nightmare after me. (But I was somewhat less charmed to note that the star of the, ahem, adult film, The Devil in Miss Jones, called herself Georgina Spelvin. If I knew her real name, I’d probably sue her.)

I haven’t appeared on the Broadway stage recently, but I am optimistic that someone on The Great White Way will have use of my services again sometime soon. After all, my resume is quite impressive. Until then, I’m happy to relax and enjoy the life of an older character actor. It’s one of the best things a person who’s 121 years old can do, isn’t it?

(Editor’s Note: George Spelvin is the traditional pseudonym used in theatre programs by actors who don’t want to be credited or whose names would otherwise appear twice because they are playing more than one role in a production. In some plays, this name has appeared in cast lists as the name of an actor portraying a character who is mentioned in the dialogue but never turns up onstage. By crediting the role to “George Spelvin,” the audience is not forewarned that the character never makes an entrance.)

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[George Spelvin’s last Broadway appearance was in 1981, as stated above, but Off-Broadway, he continued to appear: Dick Datchery in The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1985), Amphitryon in Olympus on My Mind (1986), the voice of Time Coach in Runt of the Litter (2002).

[George Spelvin (occasionally in variations) is common in the United States, where women use either Georgette Spelvin or Georgina Spelvin for the same purpose. (Georgina Spelvin, as the article indicates, has fallen out of popularity among actresses since porn actress Michelle Graham (The Devil and Miss Jones, 1973) adopted it as a screen name.) The names have occasionally appeared in popular culture, such as the name of a character in Christopher Durang’s The Actor’s Nightmare, as we’ve heard. Similar fictitious names used in credits by performing artists include Alan (sometimes Allan or Allen) Smithee, the name used by film directors who don’t want to be associated after the fact with a film they made; Walter Plinge, the name used by actors in London theaters; and David Agnew, the name used by BBC writers who wished to remain anonymous.]

A Lawyer and a Life

By Kirk Woodward

[Some years ago, Kirk sent me a copy of his grandfather’s memoir, Obiter Dicta, which turned out to be a fascinating tale of the start of his law career in what was still frontier America. Ernest Woodward became a lawyer in Kentucky at the turn of the 20th century and practiced until the 1960s; his career spanned the first two-thirds of the last century and is not only an example of what a life in the law was like before law schools and 100-lawyer firms became the norm, but of a life on the edge of a still-untamed part of America. When Kirk suggested writing an article based on Obiter Dicta combined with his own recollections of his grandfather, I jumped at the idea. I think readers of ROT will agree, it’s a wonderful peek into a little-known corner of our national history. ~Rick]

It’s hard for us, accustomed as we are to the technological marvels all around us, to realize how recently life in the United States was vastly more primitive and basic. I doubt that human nature itself has ever been any different, but human tools definitely have changed. When I was very young, I used to visit my great-grandmother, who was very old at the time, and she remembered having seen Union troops on the streets of Louisville during the Civil War. Two generations between ourselves and the War Between the States – and one more long lifetime would reach all the way back to the Revolutionary War! And both those events seem buried in the mists of history.

As another example, I offer my grandfather Ernest Woodward (1877-1968), known to our family as Papaw. He was the paterfamilias of our family when I was growing up. He, my grandmother Mamaw (properly Allie or Alice), her sister Auntie, and their daughters Libby (Elizabeth) and Alice (Alice), lived, when I was growing up, in a distinguished old house in Louisville, Kentucky. Late in life Papaw wrote a memoir called Obiter Dicta (a legal term meaning, roughly, an incidental remark or a passing comment), and I’ve drawn much of the material in this article from that work.

Papaw started the law firm that became Woodward, Hobson, and Fulton, one of the largest and most successful firms in Kentucky (it has now merged with another firm), and he trained literally hundreds of lawyers, including his sons Fielden and Ernest, my father. Although I heard people call him “Judge Woodward” (people of distinction in Kentucky used to be called Judge, even if they weren’t one, and one parent was supposed to have given his child the first name of Judge in anticipation), he told me he refused a judgeship because he knew he would get too emotionally involved with one side or the other.

When I read about Samuel Johnson, my grandfather was my mental model, except that Dr. Johnson appears to have been a first-class neurotic, and “neurotic” is the last word I’d apply to Papaw. To me he was, on the contrary, placid, thoughtful, and even-tempered. He talked to us children as though we were adults, telling me once that he didn’t think God was interested in human affairs, and that he thought nuclear war would destroy the world – which I’m sure gave us sweet dreams. He simply didn’t patronize.

With this background in mind, here are some illustrations, drawn from my grandfather’s life, of how different the life in the United States used to be.

Today we know the “Old West” to a great extent through the filter of television and movies. My grandfather experienced it directly. He and his new bride spent their honeymoon on a covered wagon. (I thought this tale was a myth until I saw a photograph.) There is even a connection to a legendary character of the Old West: Papaw’s brother Clayton. I met him only once, when he was very old. He had left home at the earliest possible moment and gone to Texas, where he claimed to have worked with Billy the Kid. I figured out the dates once, and it’s possible. Clayton said Billy was misunderstood.

For years Clayton had a dog that most people referred to, whether accurately or not I don’t know, as a wolf. Dogs, they say, resemble their owners, and I see a resemblance between the dog, if that’s what it was, and Clayton. Basically Clayton was just a son of a bitch. When he was in his nineties he went to a wrestling match and got in a fight after the match with a wrestler, who tried to have Clayton arrested for using brass knuckles. The last I heard of him, he had pulled off the road and fallen asleep in his car; when a Texas Ranger knocked on the window, Clayton, somewhat disoriented, held the trooper at gunpoint for an uncomfortably long time.

Most of the illustrations my grandfather relates about the difference between “then” and “now” have to do with the law. It’s inconceivable these days that a person could be admitted to the bar, not only without a law degree, but without a high school diploma. By my grandfather’s account he went to school for less than fifty months, or about four years, in total, following which – what else? – he taught school, while he prepared to be a lawyer by reading Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England. He memorized the details of the judicial structure that Blackstone describes, only to learn when he began studying with a real lawyer that the court structure he memorized had been repealed centuries before.

All his life he maintained that if a student enjoyed reading Blackstone he would do well at law, and if not, then probably not, and he may have been correct, considering the hundreds of successful lawyers he mentored. He wrote, “Most of them had greater natural ability than I, and all were better educated. The only aid I gave them was the opportunity to demonstrate their ability and worth, and the advice to leave me when they were experienced enough to establish their own law practice.”

Papaw himself “sat” with a lawyer for a few months, passed the exam, and was admitted to the bar with a typed certification from the clerk of the Kentucky State Court of Appeals, which I have seen. Out in Kentucky, where he lived, many of the cases he tried involved the railroad. He was such a thorn in the railroad’s side that eventually it hired him. Today, of course, the railroad is just one of many transportation modes, and not the most important, but around 1900 it played a huge part in people’s lives.

My grandfather liked to tell the story – he may have even said it happened to him, but I’d guess it’s apocryphal – of the railroad lawyer who had to deliver a condolence check to the widow of a man killed in a railroad accident. It was a check for perhaps $1000 – a large amount for the times. A few years later, the lawyer had to deliver another such check, and found himself delivering it to the same woman. He was struck by the nature of the double tragedy and asked the woman what she was going to do now. “I don’t know,” she said, “but if I do marry again, you can be sure it’ll be a railroad man!”

Papaw was representing the railroad on December 20, 1917, when a train belonging to the Louisville and Nashville Railroad crashed through a local wooden train in front of it, killing forty-three people and injuring fifty more. Papaw should have been on the L&N train; he was in a town out in the state to try a case and had no place to stay, and the railroad agent invited him to come home with him. Papaw declined because he thought it would inconvenience the man’s family, who were on the train. The agent was killed in the crash, and his wife was found, injured but alive, on top of the engine. Papaw immediately advised the L&N Railroad that it ought to admit responsibility and pay complete restitution, and it took his advice.

There are certainly shoot-from-the-hip lawyers today, but not many, and I’m pretty sure you find them more on television than in law offices. In my grandfather’s time, shooting from the hip was a literal possibility. Ohio County, Kentucky, where he was from, was pretty rural, and guns weren’t exactly unknown there – Wyatt Earp’s two brothers, Virgil and James, were born there, as a matter of fact.

I know of two stories about Papaw involving guns. The first is simple, and involves a man who was being seriously bullied by the town tough. My grandfather advised him to buy a gun and, if accosted again by the thug, to shoot him dead. It appears that the bully may have gotten the word, because Papaw’s client never had to shoot him.

The second story is more elaborate, and involves a group with the ominous name of the Night Riders. When I first read about them, I assumed that they were somehow connected with the Ku Klux Klan, and perhaps there was some overlap. Basically, though, the Night Riders were the result of actions of the extremely powerful tobacco industry, which wanted to keep prices high by limiting how much tobacco a farmer could grow. Resentment at this policy led to armed groups opposed to the crop limits, and those groups degenerated into crowds of extortionists, devoted, my grandfather said, to “murder, arson and lawlessness.” Papaw was an officer of the state National Guard dispatched to bring some order to Eddyville, Kentucky, where the County Judge (the chief county administrative officer) and his family had been badly beaten by the thugs.

The Guard made the courthouse its headquarters, and the Night Riders announced that they would be holding a rally there. The County Judge, named Crumbacker, stated that if they did, there would be more deaths than there had been at the battle of Eddyville in the Civil War, and that he might have been beaten up once, but there was no way he’d let it happen again. My grandfather stationed soldiers throughout the meeting that took place that night, and told them to expect to have to try to arrest the main rabble-rouser when he started to speak. Preceding that man, however, was a former Confederate soldier who was supposed to introduce him. This gentleman began to speak and didn’t stop. He talked about his childhood and his youth and his service in the Civil War and his family, and eventually the crowd got bored, gave up, and went home. My grandfather always felt that this man had saved his life.

However, the Night Riders later moved into Ohio County, in a “reign of terror . . . during which property was destroyed and innocent men and women were cruelly beaten.” My grandfather was County Attorney at the time, and after about two years, at the end of his term, the Night Riders were largely defeated. About a hundred of them were arrested, and they went to my grandfather, of all people, to defend them. He told them he would – if they were innocent – and the room slowly emptied until they had all left.

Surprisingly, though, as a private attorney he did represent them later, and what’s more he persuaded them to plead guilty, in a neat bit of legal maneuvering. He followed their guilty pleas with motions for new trials for all the men, and the judge agreed not to rule on the motions as long as the presumably reformed men stayed out of trouble, so the effect was that the judge suspended their convictions. None of the hundred or so ever violated the court’s order, and so the Night Riders effectively dissolved.

Speaking of violent people in court, Papaw once had to cross-examine a man named Long John Wright whose record, my grandfather calculated, was that Wright had murdered somebody on an average of once every two years. “Needless to say,” Papaw wrote, “my cross-examination of him was both short and respectful!” (There’s no record whether Mr. Wright was ever convicted of anything.) The practice of law no doubt sharpened Papaw’s perception of people’s characters. He wrote that although it might be true that “all lawyers are liars,” he had also learned that “all liars are not lawyers!”

In his memoir Papaw expanded on his impressions of the differences between the way the law used to be practiced in his early years, and the way it was when he wrote down his recollections in the early 1960s. I could paraphrase his observations, but it’s better to let him speak. Some of the changes he reports are matters of the way things are done: “In the old days we wrote our briefs in long hand, and folded them tight to fit into the pigeon holes of roll top desks then in universal use, not only as desks but as filing cabinets. . . .“

Many changes, on the other hand, are changes of substance, like “the gradual disappearance of the one man law office, and the vast enlargement of the lawyer’s library. Sixty years ago, the average Kentucky lawyer neither possessed nor needed more than a Statute, Code and about 125 volumes of Kentucky Reports. He was a complete stranger in the Federal Courts. Today federal law questions require constant attention in every Kentucky law office, and a broadened field of local practice has resulted in ever growing law libraries in rural offices, until all important texts and cases can usually be found in any County seat in Kentucky.” He wrote those words, of course, before computers again revolutionized legal documentation.

He also noted that “In 1900, outside of Louisville and Lexington [the two largest cities in Kentucky], practically every lawyer was a trial lawyer, whose practice consisted in large part of boundary or land title disputes, criminal cases and divorce cases. The Court House was not only a temple of justice, but it was an amphitheatre in which the citizens flocked for instruction or amusement. . . . Now, many lawyers rarely go into the Court Room, and probably a third of them do not accept criminal cases, and many will not accept jury cases.”

My own father, Papaw’s son, is an example of this point. Dad did a fair amount of trial work in his early years as a lawyer, just before and after World War II, but by the time I was aware of what he did for a living, in the 1950s, his entire practice was tax and insurance law, and I never heard about his participating in a trial, except when he was recruited as part of the team defending the then Cassius Clay on draft evasion charges, and Dad didn’t speak at that trial.

“The entry of women into law offices,” Papaw writes, “has revolutionized the size, appearance and work product of law offices, and such changes have all resulted in vast improvement of law office appearance and product.” The perfect gentleman! “Some lawyers have betrayed their clients or proven unfaithful to the trust imposed, but never in my long experience as a lawyer has any woman associate betrayed the trust imposed in her.” High praise indeed, considering how many lawyers he knew over the years. I imagine he would be delighted to see a Supreme Court with three women on it. I know I am.

Speaking of my father’s specialty, tax law, my grandfather wrote, “I refused to read tax cases, because the amount involved in that field was so small, but I concentrated on studying the law applicable to railroads, because employment as railroad counsel was the best paid and most highly regarded. Now, the attorneys’ fees paid by Kentucky taxpayers is tenfold the amount paid by railroads.” That ratio, needless to say, has widened enormously since he wrote those words.

I have sampled my grandfather’s writing and experiences here to suggest that the distance between, say, 1900 and today is much greater than simply the distance between two sets of years. I will give just two more examples of that great distance, the first from Papaw’s writings and the second from my own experience. Here is the written example:

“At common law and in most jurisdictions before 1900, the family relationship was a matter for private decision by the head of the family, or by litigation, but now the juvenile courts, the domestic relations courts, and the child welfare movement have made most family controversies a problem for the psychiatrists and trained social service experts whose numbers exceed the number of Judges, and who are dealing with such problems, not as personal disputes or problems to be determined by a court in private litigation, but as matters of public welfare to be corrected at public expense and in the public interest.”

And here is the personal example: my grandfather smoked a pipe. He smoked it continually, and he enjoyed the rich aromas derived from various brands of tobacco. (As children, we did too.) His clothes, his house, everything were suffused by the smell of pipe smoke. Today a number of men smoke cigars because they like the smell, or the way they look when they hold them, or both, and cigar bars and cigar magazines are popular, but to my knowledge I don’t know a single person today who smokes a pipe. Times have changed.

I can still recall the smell of Papaw’s pipe.

Grand Kabuki (July 1985)

[Twenty-five years ago, the Grand Kabuki of Japan launched a tour of the United States, which also included stops in Washington and Los Angeles, with performances at the Metropolitan Opera House, 8-20 July 1985. The company included two Living National Treasures: Onoe Shoroku II, a principal actor and the Grand Kabuki’s artistic director, and musician Kiyomoto Shizutayu (1898-1999). The performances were divided into two nights and I went to both evenings as a reviewer for Stages, a New York theater monthly. As a companion article to “Kabuki: A Trip to a Land of Dreams,” ROT, 1 November, I’m publishing here my original review (which was longer than the version that appeared in the September 1985 issue of Stages).]

During the Kojo, or “name-taking” ceremony, for Danjuro XII, one of the participants admonishes the audience, “You call us ‘Kabuki dancers’; we are Kabuki actors.” Make no mistake: they are. And Kabuki is an actors’ theatre, music and effects notwithstanding. The latest visit by Japan’s Grand Kabuki leaves no doubt of this.

In two programs combining selections from the Tokyo-based company’s varied repertoire, and, for the first time outside Japan, the celebration of a great actor’s rise to a new name, the troupe demonstrates not only the actors’ virtuosity, but also their primacy in the world of Kabuki.

Note, for instance, that the program lists no credit for director, lighting, sets, or costumes. These, of course, are traditional for each play, so there are few changes from production to production. But someone must be responsible for attending to the faithful execution of the traditions. Doubtless, someone is; but he is anonymous. Not so the actors. Every member of the company is listed by name in the front of the program, no matter how small his role.

Consider, also, who was chosen to make the current tour. Onoe Shoroku II is a Living National Treasure; Bando Tamasaburo V and Kataoka Takao are the most popular young actors in Kabuki and Danjuro is the most honored actor of the year, akin to having been awarded the best-acting Oscar, Emmy, and Tony, and being knighted all in the same season. This is not only an acting company, but a star company. [Shoroku died in 1989 at 76; Takao became Nizaemon XV in 1998.]

The current center of attention is Ichikawa Danjuro XII. Having been elevated to his family’s most illustrious name, vacant since his father’s death in 1962, Danjuro has been celebrated in a daily Kojo since April. Undoubtedly an actor’s ceremony, the Kojo has but one purpose: to spotlight the honored performer while his colleagues praise and congratulate him. The culmination of the ceremony is Danjuro’s demonstration of a fierce mie, a glaring pose, that is an exclusive specialty of Danjuros. The fact that this ceremony has never before been performed outside Japan further emphasizes the specialness of the actor in this tour.

Because of Danjuro’s special status, the Grand Kabuki is devoting its season to traditional plays of Danjuro actors. Scores of leading actors appear in plays mounted in his honor, such as the heroic comedy Shibaraku, which was first presented by Danjuro I in 1697. It is a prime example of aragoto, or “rough style,” acting—the province of the Ichikawa family, invented by Danjuro I.

The play tells of an evil courtier, Takehira (Shoroku), who usurped the prime ministership by disgracing his rival. As Takehira is about to have his rival’s sons beheaded, the fierce Kagemasa shouts from offstage, “Shibaraku!” which literally means ”Wait a moment!” Kagemasa (Danjuro) lumbers into view on the hanamichi, the runway through the auditorium, still shouting “Shibaraku!” terrifying Takehira and his warriors. Indeed, he is a terrifying sight: immensely tall, dressed in an oversized costume, brandishing a six-foot sword, and wearing bold, red-and-black (kumadori) make-up that signifies his ferocity and rage.

After a speech praising his and other company members’ past performances, Kagemasa takes on all comers, including a dozen of Takehira’s soldiers whom he beheads with one swing of his giant sword. All this is performed with the bombast and bravura that is the essence of aragoto acting.

Showcasing another actor, and another acting style, Kasane is a two-character shosagoto play, or dance piece, starring the Kabuki “matinee idols” Bando Tamasaburo V and Kataoka Takao. Kasane, a beautiful court lady, is played by Tamasaburo, an onnagata, or specialist in female roles in the all-male Kabuki. One of the most popular actors on the Kabuki stage, he has a following to make a Western rock star jealous.

In a lyrical pas-de-deux, Tamasaburo and Takao dance the story of the love of Kasane and the dashing Yoemon, a disgraced samurai. Years ago, Yoemon had an affair with Kasane’s mother and killed her father. Now Kasane becomes possessed by her father’s spirit, which disfigures her face with a hideous scar. As Tamasaburo changes from lovely, gentle Kasane into a fierce, vengeful demon, it is hard to remember that both are played by a man. Yoemon kills Kasane and tries to flee, but cannot escape her spirit’s grasp. The choreographed struggles between Tamasaburo and Takao make clear why they are such popular stagemates.

Sakura-hime Azuma Bunsho (The Scarlet Princess of Edo) provides another opportunity to see Tamasaburo and Takao together, this time in dual roles. (In its complete version, which is no longer performed, Sakura-hime is an all-day Kabuki play. We saw the Prologue, two scenes of Act I, and Act V of the six-act melodrama which has been described as “The Duchess of Malfi as rewritten by Eugene O’Neill or Tennessee Williams.”) In this nineteenth-century play, Tamasaburo appears first as a young acolyte, one of his rare male roles, then as beautiful Princess Sakura, who sinks from an exalted position to degradation as a prostitute. Takao, in a series of quick changes, plays both the priest Seigen, who loves the acolyte and then struggles to save the princess’s soul, and the murderous thief Gonsuke, who seduces her and to whom she is drawn.

The play is powerful and action-packed, covering everything from love and mystery, through rape, murder, and suicide, to satire and high comedy. The Prologue is the most visually striking scene of the tour. In a beautifully lighted, fantastically atmospheric set resembling a Japanese painted woodblock, Seigen and the boy climb a cliff overlooking the sea. Planning a double suicide, the boy jumps—but Seigen is unable to follow. An eerie blue-green flame—the boy’s spirit—rises from the sea and hovers over the weeping Seigen. It is, however, the combination of Tamasaburo and Takao, and their double impersonations, that is the attraction. The princess’s fall from grace is heart-wrenchingly believable, and Takao’s instantaneous shifts from haunted Seigen to villainous Gonsuke are absolute marvels.

The other two plays, drawn from the Noh repertoire, both require virtuosic acting. Another shosagoto, Tsuchigumo (The Earth Spider), adapted from a Noh classic, stars Shoroku as both an evil magician and a goblin spider. The play is about a young nobleman (Onoe Tatsunosuke, Shoroku’s son) overcome by a strange sickness while under the malevolent magician’s power. Attempting to escape in the guise of a great spider by ensnaring his would-be captors in his web, Shoroku shoots streamers of white ribbon from his fingertips as if he were, indeed, magical. [Tatsunosuke died suddenly at 40 in 1987 and was posthumously elevated to his father’s name as Shoroku III in 2002.]

The spider is pursued to his lair, where a superbly choreographed battle is danced, pitting the enchanted webs of Shoroku against the sword of Danjuro, as the nobleman’s loyal retainer. Throughout the battle, several koken, ubiquitous but “invisible” stage assistants, run about raveling up discarded webs with quick twirls of their hands, like human forks twirling spaghetti.

In Tachi Nusu-Bito (The Sword Thief), the Kabuki version of a Noh Kyogen, or comic interlude, a sly thief (Tatsunosuke) steals a drunken country samurai’s sword. When he is caught, the thief tries to convince the magistrate that the sword is his by mimicking everything the samurai says and does. It is a complex and hilarious mirror exercise, performed in stylized high comedy and dance requiring extraordinary comic timing.

Kabuki is unquestionably an actors’ theater and Kabuki performers are unquestionably actors; they just happen to be actors who sing and dance as well. It is a nearly impossible to separate the performing arts into categories in Asia the way we do in the West. Singing, ballet, acting, storytelling, music, poetry—even worship—are integral parts of most Eastern performances. Kabuki is an example, as the current tour of the Grand Kabuki demonstrates to incomparable pleasure.

[At the time I reviewed these performance, I had studied Asian theater some and had become especially taken with Kabuki. Three years after this tour, The Grand Kabuki visited western North America and made a special stop in Honolulu where it was in residence at the University of Hawaii-Manoa for three weeks. The university offered a course in conjunction with the stay that included backstage access and lectures and demonstrations by the master artists of costume, make-up, music, and acting. I attended the course but unhappily, I never documented the experience in writing. This review, too short by half to provide an inkling of the truly magnificent event it was, is the only record I have of the extraordinary performance form that Kabuki is.]