“Talk to Me”

by Ryan Bradley

[Actors are constantly faced with the need to adjust their speech patterns.  This is as true for stage performers as it is for film and television actors.  And it’s no different for actors raised with a strong regional dialect than it is for those who grew up with no recognizable accent: if you want to play a spectrum of roles in plays by a range of playwrights, you have to learn to speak in a variety of patterns. 

[Most decent acting programs include speech classes that focus on both helping student actors lose regional accents and teaching them how to adopt accents and dialects for the stage or screen.  There are also many dialect coaches who train actors privately; some give classes and some hire on to productions to work with casts on specific speech requirements.  If you skim the credits for a film or TV show or the program acknowledgments for a play, you’ll often spot the listing for a dialect coach, especially in productions of scripts by popular writers such as Tennessee Williams (southern accents, including New Orleans), Sam Shepard (southwestern), Horton Foote (Texas), William Inge (midwestern), or Athol Fugard (South African)—not to mention the whole catalogue of British and Irish dramatists.

[Ryan Brady’s “Talk to Me” discusses speech training for television, but the same parameters hold for all acting media, including commercials.  The article reproduced below originally appeared in the New York Times Magazine on 23 July  2017.]

*  *  *  *

Peak TV has brought in a flood of global acting talent. It’s the job of dialect coaches like Samara Bay to help them all sound right.

Why should I trust you?” Dominic Cooper said to Samara Bay, his dialect coach. “Trustya,” she replied, crushing the words together. “Why should I trustya,” Cooper repeated. The actor and coach were standing in the driveway of an old stone mansion in New Orleans’s Garden District, on break from shooting a scene for the AMC series “Preacher.” Cooper, who was born and raised in London, plays the show’s title character, a West Texas preacher possessed by the offspring of an angel and a demon. He tried another line, moving his mouth around the hard twang of the “am” in “vampire,” when the vampire in question — his co-star Joseph Gilgun — interrupted their work.

“This is why yewr all fat, innit,” Gilgun joked, stretching his Os, clipping his Is and waving a very large Smoothie King cup. The crack was directed at Bay, the lone American among the three of them; Bay is not fat at all, but slight and sprightly. Gilgun was born and raised in northern England, but his character is from Ireland. He knew a lot of Irish people growing up, he explained, so Bay often left him to his own devices.

The show’s other lead actor, Ruth Negga, was across the lawn, practicing her lines in solitude. Negga was born in Ethiopia and raised in Ireland. She was also playing a West Texan, but her accent was more flowing, in part because she was relaxing her vowels — Bay described it as a legato to Cooper’s staccato, appropriate for her world-weary character.

None of this was unusual: In the Peak TV era, a growing supply of international acting talent has met the increasing demand for high-quality television, and people like Bay were there to make it all work. Cooper continued running his lines, pausing on his “yas” and “yurs,” drawing out the edges of the deep-throated vowels, making sure he wrapped his mouth around the words when he whispered them, which he’d need to do in the coming scene.

When it was time for a take, Bay followed her actors into the mansion, slipping in her earbuds as she walked upstairs. She took a seat just beyond the spare bedroom where Cooper and Gilgun had begun blocking their scene. As the filming began, she leaned forward in her chair, cupping her ears and staring into a bank of monitors. Occasionally she whispered to the script supervisor about a word that might require rerecording, or “looping,” in postproduction. When a problem was persistent, Bay quietly squeezed her way past the crew to deliver a note directly to an actor — a bold entry onto the director’s turf, but most of the time a welcome one.

Television viewers, exposed to hundreds of different dialects every day, are increasingly aware of the tiniest differences in how people speak, even as the number and degree of distinctions continue to expand. There’s a wide and complex range of Minnesotan on “Fargo,” and Tatiana Maslany, the Canadian star of “Orphan Black,” does a dizzying array of British, American and even Eastern-European-inflected English accents. But the specificity isn’t relegated to stars. Bay says she was recently dispatched to the set of another TV show to work on a bit player’s Haitian Creole. She read the script and character notes and went to YouTube, a miraculous repository (especially under the “accent” tag), then crosschecked her YouTube finds with a Haitian-language specialist at M.I.T.’s linguistics department, who narrowed them down and sent her a few of his own field recordings. All for a few lines uttered briefly by a one-off character in a network drama that has been canceled.

The right dialects can help actors create a sense of authenticity and also quickly transmit a lot of information about their characters. An actor could sound generally as if he were from the South and pronounce “pen” like “pin.” Or he could also speak in African-American Vernacular English (for instance, pronouncing “south” like “souf”) and sound as if he were from Bankhead, a largely African-American Atlanta neighborhood. An actor could speak with all these linguistic specificities, but with a particular quicker and more clipped speech pattern that has to do with his own upbringing, and then he’d sound like Earn Marks, the character portrayed by Donald Glover in “Atlanta.” In other words: exactly like who that character is, and no one else.

This kind of efficiency and precision is pleasing for actors who take pride in their craft. It also sends a powerful signal to viewers: This is a quality production. For most of Hollywood history, accents were a character feature that could reasonably be ignored or drawn from a very limited menu of “Southern” or British or vaguely Eastern-European dialects. Charlton Heston didn’t bother to modulate his theatricalized Middle American accent for the role of a Mexican drug-enforcement officer in the 1958 noir classic “Touch of Evil.” Mickey Rooney’s 1961 turn as the bucktoothed Mr. Yunioshi in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” was straight out of a World War II-era propaganda cartoon. It was not until Meryl Streep took home an Oscar for her perfectly accented portrayal of the title character in the 1982 drama “Sophie’s Choice” that audiences began to understand mastery of dialect as a sign of artistic merit.

With the rise of prestige TV in the United States, the demand for skilled performers from around the world — particularly well-trained British performers — has increased, as has the desire to quickly communicate quality with authentic-sounding accents. Actors have worked hard to deliver. For his role in the HBO series “The Wire,” Idris Elba (raised in London by a Sierra Leonean father and Ghanaian mother) spent long days with cops to improve his Baltimore sound, which is generally regarded as one of the most subtly accurate and astonishing dialect portrayals of all time. His fellow Brit Andrew Lincoln (“The Walking Dead”) set up camp in Georgia for a few months before filming began to immerse himself in the region’s manner of speaking. Gillian Anderson, born in Chicago and raised in North London, is a rare case of an actor who is naturally bi-accented. In interviews on British television, she sounds British; in America, she sounds American. It might seem like an act, but it’s her personal history, which is exactly what an accent is: an ever-changing assemblage of sounds based on where we’ve lived, who we’ve known and our perception of how we should sound based on our surroundings.

All of that said, much of Bay’s day-to-day work involves helping actors learn to eliminate specificity from their speech. Casting directors for most gigs, especially commercials, prefer something called “General American,” a kind of nowhere accent found only on TV. That makes it hard for some actors to get a foot in the door. Olivia J. Holloway, an actor from a small town in South Carolina, told me about the paradox of speaking in dialect at a time when consciousness of dialect is higher than ever in Hollywood. She hired Bay after she realized she’d been put in a box with other black women from the South; agents kept mentioning how well she’d work in a “12 Years a Slave”-type movie or “Queen Sugar”-type show. To break out, she realized, she would need to learn how to sound as if she were from everywhere or nowhere — but “if you’re from nowhere,” she told me, “you’re nobody. And who’s going to believe in you then?”

Attention to dialectical detail is a relatively recent development, not just in Hollywood but also in human history. Sarah Thomason, a professor of linguistics at the University of Michigan, told me a story, probably apocryphal, set around the turn of the 20th century. A French linguist named Jules Gilliéron began charting regional dialects on maps. Lovely and rich with detail, his earliest maps disappeared over time because of the unstable ink he had used to draw them. Thomason says she often began her classes with his story. It perfectly illustrates the slipperiness of dialect, she says, and our inability to capture it as it exists out there, in the wild, where it’s ever-changing, messy and human.

Of course, being human, we’ve tried to tame its wildness. For a long time, especially in an English academy like Oxford or on the BBC, students and broadcasters were taught a standardized, “proper” form of English called Received Pronunciation that tidied up and rounded off diction like a polished stone. Boris Johnson, David Attenborough and Emma Thompson all speak variations of R.P., which is an idealized accent called a sociolect, not a dialect — its entire purpose is to manage sounds, not the regional idiosyncrasies in vocabulary and grammar that make dialects dialects.

American English has always been more unruly. In 1942, Edith Skinner, a drama professor at Carnegie Mellon who coached Broadway actors on the side, codified what were to her the proper-sounding forms of pronunciation and diction in a book called “Speak With Distinction.” Deploying a series of lessons and drills — practice phrases included “or what ought to be taught her” and “a tutor who tooted the flute” — she taught a form of “Standard American English” that doesn’t exist in a natural form anywhere. (Central Indiana is often cited as being the source of a sort of Everyman broadcasterese, but people there in fact speak with an identifiable Midland American, for instance merging words like “cot” and “caught” to sound the same.)

Skinner’s Standard tries to do away with many of the dialectic peccadilloes that make American speech sound so distinctively American. “It’s the choos and joos, mainly,” Bay explains. “And that linking ‘cha’ sound: didya, cantya, wudya, cudya.” Still, American Stage Speech, also called Good Speech, can be useful, Bay says. If you are asked to play the smartest person in the room, for example, or an angry person trying to hold it together, Skinner’s prescription can help you sound rather tight and clipped and proper.

The world of dialect coaches is small — there are only a few dozen working in Hollywood and New York, and nearly all of them share a single manager (a woman named Diane Kamp, who splits her time between the Catskills and a ranch in Montana). There is no union; nearly everyone is freelance, and a few are associated with a university’s theater department. As a result, they are generalists. At 37, Bay is among the youngest. She has a few repeat high-profile clients (she also worked with Negga on the 2016 film “Loving”), and while she now mostly books steady, longer-term gigs like “Preacher,” her reliable fallback is still charging clients for sessions on a sliding scale. (Dialect coaches charge from as little as $100 to $400 or more an hour.) Actors, or their agents or managers, find her because they either have booked a role that demands a certain sound or aren’t booking anything because they don’t sound a certain way. They are often hoping to achieve that general American sound to break in or refashion their career for the Hollywood market.

Bay grew up in Santa Cruz, Calif. She started out wanting to be an actor and was introduced to speech training in San Francisco, at the American Conservatory Theater. She performed in regional theater and eventually Off Broadway, in a Theater for a New Audience production of “Measure for Measure.” When she was 23, she was accepted into the Shakespeare Lab, a six-week program run by the Public Theater in New York. There, she studied under a dialect coach named Kate Wilson, who helped her realize that as great as acting was, she also loved, and was adept at, helping other actors work on their accents. Before long she had individual actors wanting one-on-one sessions.

After 11 years of coaching, Bay has found a consistent approach. Within the first five minutes of the first session, she is likely to tell you to stand up, put away your notebook and run through a set of physical gestures tied to vowels. “Now, we’re going to be like 5-year-olds,” Bay might say. And: “Remember how acting takes your whole body? So does speech.”

She will rub her belly, make her mouth a circle, and go “ooo-ooo-ooo” and nod at you to do the same. This is “oo” as in “do,” but a lot of her clients, Western Europeans and South Americans in particular, misplace this sound into words like “good,” so that the vowels in “do good” sound overly alike, suspiciously foreign: “Doo goood.” This is fine if you’re an Italian chef auditioning for the Food Network and want to keep a bit of your accent intact. It’s not so fine if you’re trying to play a California surfer or a car dealer in Michigan or nearly anyone else, especially someone blandly all-American. You have to drop the “oo” and find the sound in the middle of your mouth.

Bay will show you important variations. She will change her belly-rub into a light stomach punch, and ask you to relax your jaw and feel the sound travel back from midtongue to get the “uh” in “cup.” The understanding of that back-of-the-throat “uh” — a sound so common we throw it in between phrases to give ourselves time to think — will open up the sonic landscape of America to you. Suddenly, “cup” is not “cop” — it’s like “love” and “does” and “what” and “none.”

Yes, Bay will note, these words aren’t all spelled with an O or a U or any single letter or series of letters that would tell you they should sound the same. Spelling is truly, entirely irrelevant to pronunciation. Then, if you’re smart, you’ll pick up your notebook and write that down.

Bay holds most of her sessions in the living area of the three-bedroom apartment she shares with her husband (a writer), their 2-year-old son and their dog in the hills below the Hollywood sign. Bay sits at her dinner table, next to her client, with both their chairs pushed as far out as the small space allows, because they often move their arms, sometimes standing, leaning, positioning their bodies to more ably work through awkward sounds.

One day Bay was working with Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, a British actor who had been cast in a low-budget indie film as a struggling American porn star. He and Bay ran through a whole scene — a fantasy about fame and money — without stopping, then again, slower, more nit-picking, with Bay acting as a sort of referee, pausing on spots that didn’t quite sound right, offering corrections.

“I’ve already got this spot of land picked out,” Stewart-Jarrett said. “I’ve got my mahnsion — ”

“Maaan-shun,” she said, “get rid of that big open ‘ah’!,” The right sound was more like the “aa” in “can”: ugly.

“How ugly?” he said.

“Very,” Bay replied. She moved to Stewart-Jarrett’s next line, which contained an especially tricky phrase that included the words “America and.” Bay says that much of her training involves not just the words themselves but “the liaisons between words.” It is there in the gaps that we make sounds suggesting restive thought or high emotion — and where an actor’s native accent has a tendency to creep in.

“America and” was a liaison minefield: It contained three different “a” sounds, two of them in rapid succession between the words, separate but intimately connected not just in the same sentence but also within the same phrase, thought and breath. Our mouths also have a lot of trouble linking one vowel sound to another. Different English dialects deal with the adjoining-vowel problem differently, Bay said. British English solves it with an R — “Americar and.” American English is, again, closer to the back of the throat, burying the second “a” into a glottal “ungh” — more like “America’and.” Stewart-Jarrett tried this a few times, his eyebrows raised in a look suggesting both mild surprise and deep concentration. “Sorry,” he said, moving on. “I got a little carried away. Carried? Cay-ree-d?”

“It’s a big open ‘care,’ like ‘air’ or ‘Eric,’” Bay said. “The R influences the vowel sound. It’s not exactly right, but a bigger proportion of the country says it that way, says it technically wrong, so that it’s not really wrong anymore.”

Afterward, outside Bay’s apartment, Stewart-Jarrett and I were walking to our cars when he stopped me. “It’s a bit weird,” he said, “letting someone else into this process. A bit naked-feeling.” For the entire session he’d been speaking with an American accent. Now his natural British accent sounded jarring, like a put-on. He sounded like an actor.

[Many acting schools used to teach a “standard American stage dialect,” based on upper-class New England speech.  (Think Katharine Hepburn—though she came by her accent naturally.)  That practice became obsolete in the 1950s because directors, playwrights, and audiences began to demand more natural-sounding speech from the stage—film acting more quickly began to emulate ordinary street speech and television never really copped into the conceit of a mannered way of talking—spurred by the rising popularity of Lee Strasberg’s Method acting as taught at the Actors Studio and practiced on the stage and screen by stars like Marlon Brando, James Dean, Anne Bancroft, Maureen Stapleton, Sidney Poitier, and Montgomery Clift.

[When I started classes at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in the mid-1970s, I was nonplussed to discover that the school was still teaching this form of stage speech.  Not only did no one (outside of New England) speak that way in real life, but no one spoke that way on stage anymore—not even, to my observation, in revivals of plays from the 1930s and ’40s.  (We were actually taught to say TYEWS-dih and DYOOK for “Tuesday” and “duke.”  Who talks like that?)  There’s a big difference, when it comes to gaining employment as a working actor, between being trained to speak clearly and distinctly while projecting to the rear balcony (miking wasn’t common in the ’70s) and sounding like a Boston Brahmin.  I only lasted at AADA for one semester.

[While I was there, however, I attended several appearances by former Academy students—they were required events—such as Robert Redford and Gena Rowlands.  One of these was an actress then appearing on Broadway in a musical hit—she’s now deceased, but I won’t reveal her name here—who hailed from the American South.  I don’t recall much about her presentation—she wasn’t very interesting or informative—but I do remember that she declared, in her conspicuous southern accent, that she never ridded herself of her native speech pattern.  She sort of giggled, like the  stage caricature of a flibbertigibbet, that she was never able to put her natural accent aside, so she didn’t see the point of trying.  Directors would just have to take her as she was, she insisted. 

[Aside from being amused at the actress’s flying in the face of the Academy’s avowed position on speech training for the stage—I didn’t really care about defying the school by this time in my brief tenure at the American Academy—I was aghast that a working stage actress would essentially refuse to remove an obstacle to employment this way.  It didn’t matter if this actress spoke in her native accent off stage or even on stage in roles where speech wasn’t an issue.  But why so cavalierly deny herself the opportunities to work in productions where a southern accent was inappropriate?  Why limit her castabiliy so casually?  Even though the actress and I were about the same age, I was just embarking on a hoped-for career as an actor, and I was determined to be as acceptable for as many types of roles as I could manage, not limit myself at the get-go.  I couldn’t do anything about my looks or my stature—but my speech was something I could learn to control.  I may not have felt I had to talk like Katharine Hepburn, but I could learn to manipulate my speech pattern the same way I was trying to learn to control my body with dance and mime training.  I just didn’t understand this Academy grad’s attitude.

                                                                            

[Ryan Bradley is a writer based in Los Angeles.  He last wrote for the Times Magazine about the Hollywood producer Jason Blum.]

'Calder: Hypermobility' at the Whitney

Among my favorite artists, largely because his work is just so entertaining and . . . well, fun, is Alexander Calder, principally a sculptor—though that title’s too limiting to do him justice—who also worked many other forms.  He’s probably best known for his mobiles, an art form he invented and of which he surely created hundreds over his lifetime, and perhaps the huge public sculptures he dubbed “stabiles,” seen in many public plazas in cities all over the United States—including New York.  (There’s a stabile in front of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, appropriately entitled Le Guichet (The Box Office), 1963, that I love.  I often deliberately walk under this 1965 gift to New York City when going to or from the library, just for the fun of it.) 

I own a Calder lithograph that’s of the same iconography as the sculptor’s mobiles—the same color palette and the same blobby shapes.  It could, in fact, be seen as a study for a possible mobile (though I’m pretty sure that’s not what it was intended for).  The title, Magie Eolin (1972)—the nearest translation for which I can come up with is “magic of the wind”—might suggest that it was inspired by the wind-driven sculptures so beloved by both the artist himself and his fans.  I also have a faux-Calder mobile in my study.  My mother bought it as a gift for my father at one of the Washington museum shops, the National Gallery of Art or one of the Smithsonians, and they passed it on to me sometime after I moved into my present apartment—which has an extra room for my study/guest room.  It’s not an actual Calder, but it was clearly modeled after his work (and could almost pass for one of Calder’s mobiles . . . if you don’t look too closely).

Thus, when I read that the Whitney Museum of American Art, which two years ago opened a new building in the West Village in my cruising range, was planning an Alexander Calder exhibit, I knew I had to go over and see it.  I asked my friend Diana (who’s a Whitney member) if the artist was one in whom she’s interested, and when she said he is, I suggested we meet sometime during the exhibit’s run to view it.  It took us a while to coordinate a date and time, but we finally met on Saturday evening, 12 August, and went to the Whitney to see Calder: Hypermobility, an exhibit of the sculptor’s mobiles, including both the ones run by little motors, which the artist created first and are rarely seen (and even more rarely set in motion) today, and the more familiar wind-activated mobiles.  

The show’s very small—I didn’t realize that from the write-ups: there are only 36 sculptures, all in one gallery.  Nonetheless, it was wonderful.  We actually spent about two hours in the Whitney’s eighth-floor Hurst Family Galleries and twice saw an art handler “activate” some of the mobiles.  (There’s a schedule for the museum staff to come up and make selected pieces move, either by turning on the motors hidden in Calder’s mechanized mobiles—the motors have all been restored and even up-dated so that the handlers can operate them with a remote—or spinning others by gloved hands or with long, padded sticks so visitors who are there at the time can see them move.)   Jay Sanders, Hypermobility’s curator, insisted that “movements and changes are integral to the work,” but the handlers only activate four pieces at a time, though each time they do different mobiles.  On Saturdays, they come once an hour on the hour, so we caught two activations.

Hypermobility, organized by Jay Sanders, Engell Speyer Family Curator and Curator of Performance, with Greta Hartenstein, senior curatorial assistant, and Melinda Lang, curatorial assistant, opened at the Whitney Museum on 9 June 2017 and will continue until 23 October.  The exhibited works cover three decades of Calder’s career, from the 1930s to the 1960s, though the pieces aren’t arranged in any kind of chronological sequence.  The older, motorized mobiles are mixed in among the later, free-floating sculptures.  While there’s a contiguity among many of the sculptures, displaying Calder’s now-famous blobby-shaped elements, painted in his signature colors of black, yellow, red, blue, and white, quite a few stand out as atypical, such as Fish (1944), which not only is representative—it looks like a (stylized) fish—but it’s made of shards of glass rather than Calder’s more common wood, fabric, or metal.  This is a demonstration of what Calder called “disparity,” which the museum defines as “a term the artist used to describe the complex variation and disjuncture of forms, colors, densities, and movements within a single work and across multiple objects.”  

Many of the three dozen works—which include one large (though not monumental) stabile (The Arches, 1959) and at least one non-moving carved wooden figure (Double Cat, 1930)—come from the Calder Foundation and some are part of the permanent collection of the Whitney, which has a long and extensive relationship with Calder and his work.

Alexander Calder (1898-1976) was practically born to be a sculptor.  His father, Alexander Stirling Calder (1870-1945), was a sculptor who created public installations, many of them in Philadelphia (which is 100 miles west of Calder’s birthplace of Lawnton, Pennsylvania, ten miles east of Harrisburg), and his grandfather, Alexander Milne Calder (1846-1923), was also a sculptor, responsible for the statue of William Penn atop Philadelphia City Hall.  (The former Nanette Lederer, 1866-1960, the youngest Calder’s mother, was a portrait painter.)  The Calders moved around the country frequently for Stirling’s health (he was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1905) and his work, and in each home, as young Alexander grew up, his parents established a studio for their artistically precocious son, who began making art, in the form of jewelry for his sister’s dolls, when he was about 8. 

Despite his obvious talent, however, they didn’t want Alexander to live the precarious life of an artist and upon graduating from high school in 1915, Calder enrolled in the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey—almost directly across the Hudson River from the Whitney Museum, which has clear views of the New Jersey shore from the large windows and terraces on the upper floors—to study mechanical engineering.  Graduating from Stevens Tech in 1919, Calder worked in engineering-related jobs for several years.  His artistic proclivities caught up with him, however, and he enrolled in New York City’s  Art Students League and in 1926, moved to Paris, the mecca for all incipient artists.  Living in the bohemian Montparnasse quarter, Calder became friends with a number of avant-garde artists, including surrealist and Dadaist Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), surrealist  Joan Miró (1893-1983), Dada founder and sculptor Hans (Jean) Arp (1887-1966), and abstract painter Piet Mondrian (1872-1944). 

Now married, he returned to the New York area in 1933, settling in Connecticut, and, with respect to this career, he never looked back.  Most famous for the mobiles that are the subject of Hypermobility, Calder worked in many media and forms, some of them quite surprising.  He made mechanical toys, sculpted in wire, created monumental stabiles, made abstract paintings and lithographs (some of which, like my Magie Eolin, bear a striking resemblance to the mobiles), and fashioned jewelry.  In 1972, he contracted with Braniff International Airways to paint a Douglas DC-8-62 jet airliner and in 1975, he painted a BMW 3.0 CSL for the car manufacturer’s Art Car Project. 

Calder’s initial adult art works, starting in the 1920s, were his wire sculptures.  Following his juvenile experiments with doll jewelry, they came before (but overlapped with) the mobiles and the massive stabiles.  Just as Calder’s background in mechanical engineering must have guided his work with the motorized mobiles (which, counterintuitively, predate his floating mobiles by a few years), the wire sculptures led to the wind-activated mobiles.  I saw Focus: Alexander Calder, an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art many years ago (2007-08) of mostly those wire pieces (plus some of the early mobiles) from the ’20s through the ’40s.  The whimsical figures, both generic and famous, are delightfully rendered, almost childlike, except they’re too sophisticated in execution to be by a child.  In MoMA’s view, the wire sculptures show how Calder approached creating works of art with a combination of whimsy, ingenuity, and a sophisticated visual sense.  The mobiles display those qualities, too.  The stabiles are too massive to give that impression.  

It was reportedly a visit in 1930 to the studio of his friend Piet Mondrian, whose starkly geometric paintings were characterized by intersecting vertical and horizontal black lines and planes of bright, primary colors, that inspired the sculptor to commit wholly to abstract art.  In 1932, Calder invented a new form of sculpture that was kinetic, balancing its components to evince an idiosyncratic series of movements.  “Just as one can compose colors, or forms,” contended the artist, “so one can compose motions.”  He gave the innovation the name “mobile,” suggested by his friend Marcel Duchamp as a sort of pun because the French word means not only ‘moving,’ ‘capable of motion,’ or ‘in motion’ but ‘motive’ (as of a crime) or ‘the force behind movement.’  (New York Times art reviewer Jason Farago quipped, “Sly as ever, Duchamp cast Calder’s kinetic art as a kind of sneak attack.”  Calder’s friend Hans Arp coined the name ‘stabile’ off of ‘mobile’ as those sculptures don’t move—but give the impression of motion, as if depicting movement frozen in time.  “You have to walk around a stabile or through it,” said Calder, “—a mobile dances in front of you.”)  The mobiles work in intricate ways, some simply revolving and some making what the museum described as “uncanny gestures.”  From this perspective, Calder: Hypermobility is a display of, as Whitney curator Sanders puts it, “the diverse taxonomy of movements within Calder’s work.”

Some of the moving sculptures are designed so that the little pieces that comprise them collide or bump, so those works not only move, but also make unpredictable percussive sounds as well.  (One mobile hanging from the gallery’s ceiling, Red Disc and Gong, 1940, is an anomaly; one reviewer labeled it “a visceral study in toying with viewers’ anticipation.”  Calder’s intent was for a sort of drum stick, a long pole with a spherical fabric head, to strike a metal disc to make a gong-like clang . . . but as the kinetic sculpture spins slowly above our heads, the striker doesn’t touch the gong—at least not enough to make a sound!)

As I pointed out earlier, the Whitney Museum has had a long association with the work of Alexander Calder.  As a nascent artist, Calder became a member of the Whitney Studio Club and soon after, he participated in the Studio’s Eleventh Annual Exhibition in 1926 (five years before the Whitney Museum of American Art was even founded).  After figuring in a number of Whitney Annuals (the precursors to the Whitney Biennials) in the 1940s, the museum started acquiring large holdings of the artist’s work.  Today, the Whitney’s collection of Calder’s work is the largest of any museum in the world.  In the 1970s, Calder lent the Whitney Cirque Calder (1926-31), a miniature circus sculpted from wire, cloth, string, rubber, cork, and other found objects that’s one of his most popular pieces; it became the subject of Calder’s Circus at the museum in 1972; the Whitney purchased Cirque Calder in 1983 and committed further resources to restoring in the 2000s.  In addition to Calder’s Circus and Calder: Hypermobility, the sculptor’s been the subject of many other exhibitions at the Whitney, including Alexander Calder: Tapestries (1971), Three Sculptors: Calder, Nevelson and Smith (1974), Alexander Calder: Sculpture of the Nineteen Thirties (1987–88), Celebrating Calder (1991), I Think Best In Wire: Alexander Calder (2006), Alexander Calder: The Paris Years, 1926–33 (2008–09), and Collecting Calder (2014).  In 1976, the Whitney mounted Calder’s Universe, a major retrospective of the sculptor’s work, which opened just before the artist’s unexpected death on 11 November at 78.  (For a brief history of the Whitney Museum of American Art, see my report on the Whitney Biennial, posted on ROT on 22 June.)

One of my favorite Calder pieces, by far his largest mobile and the last major art work he created, hangs from the ceiling of the center court of the National Gallery of Art’s East Building in Washington, D.C.  The red-and-black Untitled (1976) is 76 feet long, weighs 920 pounds, and is composed of 12 arms bearing 13 aluminum panels which resemble a stegosaurus’s dorsal plates.  (Calder had planned the non-motorized mobile in steel, but that turned out to be too heavy to function the way the sculptor intended, so his close friend, Paul Matisse, the grandson of artist Henry Matisse, translated the design into aluminum.)  Calder approved the final construction plans a week before his death, while the I. M. Pei-designed East Building was still under construction, and was installed on 18 November 1977, just past the first anniversary of Calder’s death.  I have visited the NGA’s East Building, which opened in 1978, hundreds of times over the years, and Calder’s Untitled and the Joan Miró tapestry Woman (1977) in the same vast, open gallery just beyond the museum’s entry were always my first pleasures, no matter what show I was there to see.  It was like being greeted by old and dear friends; both were removed some years ago for cleaning and maintenance, and I missed them dearly.  (The mobile was returned to its  proper place, but the tapestry was replaced.)

It’s fun to see the pieces in motion.  It’s all very whimsical and delightful!  For some reason I no longer recall, Diana pronounced on the grimness of the world through history.  That prompted me to observe that I didn’t really know anything about Calder’s life outside his art (I’ve now read a little since seeing Hypermobility), but that if that’s any evidence, he wasn’t a melancholy or dour man.  Aside from his mobiles, which are certainly sophisticated playthings that are meant to do little more than provide pleasure to the viewer, his lithos and wire sculptures are also all up-beat and whimsical.  I’ve never seen a Calder piece that’s dark or brooding.  Calder apparently had his serious side—he was so opposed to the war in Vietnam that President Nixon put the artist on the White House “Enemies List”—but his art was for pleasure.  (Could anyone overlook the fact that Calder’s circus is just an art-inspired “set-up,” as my brother and I called such play assemblages when we were little?)  “My fan mail is enormous,” joked the sculptor. “Everyone is under 6.”  And Alexander S. C. Rower, Calder’s grandson, proclaimed that his grandfather’s art isn’t “about anything.  The subject is you—and your experience.”

Though the mobiles are fascinating even when they’re still (which the free-hanging ones really never are since the merest shift in the ambient airflow, even indoors—heating and air-conditioning move the air around in the gallery just as they do in your home—makes them spin a  little) because Calder’s work is often lacy and delicate (like Hanging Spider, c. 1940, and Big Red, 1959) or funny or evocative (such as Sea Scape, 1947, which seems to show some influence of Joan Miró, another artist-friend of Calder’s, in the marine objects the sculptor sets afloat in the air) on its own, seeing them in motion is to see them the way the creator meant them to be.  Calder was intrigued by performing arts, specially dance, and he designed several stage sets that incorporated his mobile techniques.  

Indeed, the mobiles themselves contain a strong element of performativity both in the movements they make, which are seldom simple or straightforward, and their appeal to the . . . well, audience.  The components of many of the mobiles bounce or dip, rise and fall, or rotate as they spin.  A wonderful example of this effect is Blizzard (Roxbury Flurry) (1946), a large hanging mobile of small, white metal discs that, when immobile, evokes a snowstorm in suspended animation—and when activated, is an impressionist’s vision of snow flakes blown about by eccentric atmospheric effects.  The “flakes” seem to dance in the air to Calder’s long-ago choreography, rising and dipping as they circle around the mobile’s axis.

Now, I knew this from having seen some of the mobiles before—not activated, which is a rare experience because of the ages of the pieces and, in some instances, their precarious condition (the art handlers at the Whitney charged with putting the sculptures into motion have been carefully trained by Calder’s grandson Rower, president of the Calder Foundation, for this gig)—but what was new to me were the sound effects some of the pieces are designed to make and the shadow plays.  At least two of the mobiles in Hypermobility, one motorized (Square, c. 1934) and one wind-driven (Red  Panel, c. 1936), are constructed on a background of a large, flat, painted square of wood onto which the moving forms cast shadows that themselves move in patterns and shapes that reflect, but don’t exactly match, the objects.  It depends on the perspective of the viewer and the location of the light source, so while the “live” objects might seem unchanging and fixed, the shadow show is unpredictable.  When I studied Asian theater, I learned about wayang kulit, Indonesian shadow puppetry.  Spectators have a choice to sit in front of the screen and watch the shadow play, or behind the screen and watch the puppeteers manipulate the puppets.  With these Calder mobiles, you get both perspectives at once.  It’s two, two, two shows in one! 

I’ve said many times (regular ROTters will have read it in any of my reports on an art show) that when my mother and I used to go to an exhibit, we’d always assess the overall pleasure level by deciding what we’d come back for on a “midnight shopping trip.”  I’ve seen a few shows where I wouldn’t want any of the art on exhibit (the recent Whitney Biennial was in that category) but most have one or two pieces—three if it’s a big show—I’d love to put in my apartment.  Every once in a while, I go to a show after which I’d have to say I’d need to back a big truck up to the gallery and load in the whole exhibit.  The Whitney’s Calder: Hypermobility was like that!  I’d especially love to have some of his hanging mobiles (there are some that stand on the floor, such as my favorite piece, Aluminum Leaves, Red Post, 1941, or on a surface, like Myrtle Burl, 1941) because I have so many things on my walls, floors, and table tops that hanging from the ceiling is the only space I have where I could accommodate more art!  Besides, they’re such fun!!

The reviews for the Whitney’s Calder: Hypermobility were almost universally laudatory.  David D’Arcy in the New York Observer called Calder “a revolutionary with mass appeal.”  Of the sculptor’s art, D’Arcy said:

He played the materiality of sculpture in three dimensions against the immateriality of weightless objects suspended in the air.  A favorite gambit of his was to take inanimate objects and place them in motion.  The sculptures on view remind us that he kept trying, and kept coming up with new ways of doing this.

Though small, the Whitney exhibit shows “how [Calder] departed from those shared elements [with his peers] toward a greater simplicity or mobility or just a greater leap of the imagination.”  D’Arcy pointed out the persistent reflections of Miró (mentioning specifically Sea Scape) and other contemporaries like Matisse (in his cut-outs) “when the oversized snowflakes in Blizzard (Roxbury Flurry)  spin in two directions on two axes.”  The Observer art reviewer also observed:

When the works in “Hypermobility” are motionless, we get a silent harmony that seems to defy engineering logic.  When the works move, it seems proper to steal the description ballets mecaniques, a title coined for an earlier work by Fernand Leger.

And when the sculptures are “motorized” . . . movement brings enchantment to constructions that seem awkward when they just stand there.

D’Arcy summed up the Hypermobility experience by asserting:

“Calder: Hypermobility” will be a popular show, if not for the sheer imagination on view, then for the activator who moves in a chimney-sweep’s coat to keep the motion going when there’s no motor to do it.

That’s a fun kid-friendly novelty, yet what’s enduring about these inanimate sculptures is the life that Calder placed inside them.  But don’t worry, they won’t follow you down the stairs.

The Economist review affirmed that “no sculptor has incorporated the fourth dimension with Calder’s intelligence, dedication and sly humour.”  Hypermobility “chronicles the artist’s long investigation of form in motion.”   The earlier, motorized pieces, observed the unnamed reviewer, are the “surprises” of the show: they’re “clunky, quirky, infused with a Dadaist irreverence and sense of play.”  The Economist writer explained that “there is a revolution and a revelation lurking in these childlike elements—a demonstration that the immaterial stuff of time can be evoked through the most material of forms.”  Perceiving a link between Calder’s mobiles “and today’s performance and video art,” the Economist review-writer deemed, “Even at their most static, his works are theatrical, transforming the act of seeing into an open-ended choreographed experience.”  In the end, the Economist art reviewer warned:

Over the decades, Calder’s reputation has suffered from over-familiarity.  His works can feel too ingratiating, too crowd-pleasing, too user-friendly—the ubiquitous décor of the corporate lobby and the child’s nursery.  “Calder: Hypermobility” reveals an artist no less delightful than the one of the popular imagination, but also a pioneering sculptor who engineered a profound shift in this ancient practice.

In the Brooklyn Rail, Jason Rosenfeld called Calder: Hypermobility “an exquisite display” of Calder’s mobiles.  He even added that the presentation itself, in a large, open room, “is terrific,” explaining, “The atmosphere is generous, and the sculptures can breathe.”  The Rail art reviewer affirmed, “With his mobiles, he was able to draw or paint in air through the use of lines and colored forms moving in space,” stressing, “In Hypermobility, motion became paramount.”  He warned, however, that “Calder’s is durational, subtle, experiential art, demanding sustained looking” and not to expect “an active, immersive spectacle.”  Rosenfeld began his review by noting that in 20th-century modern art, “Whimsy was not part of the equation.  Neither was pathos, sentiment, affection, nor figuration.  Attractiveness, also, was a kind of neutral zone for many modern artists, not required, nor necessarily encouraged.”  He observed that in contrast, however, “[t]he art of Alexander Calder . . . was so radical because it was all of these and more.”

The Wall Street Journal’s Susan Delson posited, “Thoughts of a Calder work in motion might conjure up a mobile rotating lazily in the breeze.  But the artist intended a far wider range of movements—from furious vibration to random, sometimes violent collisions—that emerge only when the works are activated.”  She added, “An appreciation of randomness and chance underpins much of Calder’s sculpture,” as exemplified by many of the mobiles on display which, even when not activated by a handler, can start to move or produce sounds.  (Earlier I observed that the elements of Red Disc and Gong didn’t come together properly to strike the gong as intended, but several journalists, including Delson, reported that “air currents would occasionally stir it to break the silence with a clang that made visitors ‘jump out of [their] boots.’”)  Delson wondered, “Standing before a Calder mobile, who hasn’t been tempted to nudge it into motion?”  Calder: Hypermobility provides an opportunity to indulge that impulse.  The WSJ writer declared “that, after all, is why he designed them as mobiles.”

Jason Farago labeled the Whitney’s Hypermobility “a high-spirited showcase” in the New York Times.  The show “goes a long way to recapturing the guile and peculiarity of [Calder’s] spinning wires and discs.”  Describing the show as “bewitching and somewhat unexpected,” Farago found Hypermobility “wittier and wilier” than other Whitney exhibits of Calder works.  The Times reviewer reported that “where the suspended mobiles undulate with preternatural elegance, the motorized works can look winningly wobbly.”  He explained that “by treating dynamics itself as a means of expression . . ., Calder negated the possibility of perceiving these sculptures in a single fashion.  Where sculpture had once aspired to monumentality, Calder proposed an art in three dimensions that took infinite forms.”  Farago summed up the exhibit as “a display in perpetual flux.” 

Barbara Hoffman of the New York Post declared, “After years of staying still, Alexander Calder’s mobiles are fluttering back to life.”  She had a caveat, though: “But be warned: They move verrry slowwwly: It takes five minutes for one tiny rotation.”  Furthermore, “Listen closely, and you might even hear some works emit a faint ping.”  And despite Calder’s personal gravitas, the mobiles are “playful,” in Hoffman’s estimation.  Her conclusion?  “Happily, this summer, you’ll have more time to experience it.”

On the Theatre Times, John Tilley proclaimed that the “essence” of the Calder works on exhibit at the Whitney is “the tantalizing sense of anticipation.”  Faced with the “temptation to reach out and touch the sculptures, or perhaps simply blow on them to get them going,” Tilley watched as the spectators awaited the activation of the mobiles “with anticipation, even impatience.”  “In a skeptical, secular world,” the Theatre Times reviewer pronounced, “art objects celebrating temptation are our religious icons.”  He was disappointed that the handlers only activate four pieces each time, but decided that “was a part of the experience.”  The kinetic sculptures “dangle in a purgatorial space between endless anticipation and disappointment, of satisfaction and dissatisfaction—much like life, really.”  Then Tilley concluded: “It’s a testament to Calder’s craft that one cannot help but picture the entire room in motion as an immersive, joyful ballet of bobbing and twirling sculpture—but I suppose for that there’s always the theatre.” 

Artnet’s Julia Halperin called the results of the Whitney’s “ambitious, yearlong effort” to bring together Calder’s mobiles a “surprise,” principally for the display of the motorized pieces.  There are only 44 in existence and when they’re shown, “they are usually shown static.”  Halperin pointed out that “these pioneering works have historically taken a backseat to Calder’s more recognizable mobiles and wire sculptures” and quoted curator Sanders as saying, “You can’t anticipate the movement until” they’re reanimated.  Halperin reported that Rower, Calder’s grandson, observed that kinetic pieces he “thought would twirl at a zippy pace, ‘Josephine Baker-style,’ instead rotate so slowly as to be almost imperceptible.” 

On WNYC radio, a New York City outlet for National Public Radio, Deborah Solomon proclaimed in her very first sentence, “Alexander Calder is, to my mind, America’s greatest-ever sculptor”; but she had a caveat: “he suffers from overfamiliarity.”  “Everyone knows his light-as-air mobile, and his red-painted behemoths in public plazas across the country,” she asserted.  But, Calder: Hypermobility “manages to make the artist new again,” Solomon affirms.  “It is a show about motion that stops you in your tracks.”  The WNYC art reviewer, dubbing the exhibit “a dazzling installation,” observed that it “resembles theater” and that the sculptor is “a legitimate forefather of our current generation of performance artists.”  In the works on display, Solomon found, “Curving lines dominate, and the overall feeling of dreaminess can put you in mind of” Miró.  “You can say that Calder combined Surrealist poetry with American ingenuity.”  But the radio reviewer had a complaint: “My only qualm with the Whitney show is that it spills over into the adjacent café.”

A giant hole has been cut in the wall of the Calder gallery to allow viewers to see into the restaurant and beyond it, to the cityscape rising in the distance.  It’s scenic, yes, but brings unwanted noise and light.  We don’t need the view.  Calder is view enough.

In his New York Times review, Jason Farago quoted part of a passage by French playwright and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre describing Calder’s kinetic sculptures.  To me, it rings true, especially of Calder: Hypermobility.  Here’s the whole impression from “Calder’s Mobiles,” a chapter in the writer’s We Have Only this Life to Live:

One of Calder’s objects is like the sea and equally spellbinding: always beginning over again, always new.  A passing glance is not enough; you must live with it, be fascinated by it.  Then the imagination revels in these pure, interchanging forms, at once free and disciplined.

[It wasn’t all that long ago that I went to another art show where I said I’d need a van in which to haul off the whole collection on my midnight shopping trip.  It was MoMA’s Jackson Pollock: A Collection Survey: 1924-1954, and in that report (4 March 2016), I also wrote about my trepidation about seeing a show that I knew my late mother would have loved and that I probably would have saved to see with her.  More than a year later, I was disturbed to find that I still had that unease—a Calder show was the kind of exhibit we’d have made a point of doing together, like the Pollock—but I was also pleased to see that the hesitation was shorter-lived and less profound.  Mother’d have loved Calder: Hypermobility—but I did, too, in her absence.  At the Pollock, I felt a little guilty having enjoyed the show without her.  I didn’t feel that after the Calder.]

Colley Cibber

by Kirk Woodward

[Kirk Woodward, the most prolific of Rick On Theater’s contributors, is not only a playwright, actor, director, and teacher of acting, but, like me, he’s a perpetual student of theater history.  If ROTters haven’t spotted that already in his slew of previous posts, he demonstrates it once again in his report on Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, the memoir of the 17th- and 18th-century actor-playwright-manager.  Cibber worked the boards during what’s arguably the most—certainly one of the most—tumultuous and confusing period of English theater history, the gap between the restoration of the British monarchy and the reopening of the theaters after the Commonwealth of Oliver Cromwell and the rise of the great writers and actors of the late 18th century, the Enlightenment in Europe, and the surge of creativity in the early and middle 19th century that led ultimately to Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, the beginnings of the modern theatrical era. 

[Kirk demonstrates his knowledge of theater history, as well as general cultural history, as he puts Cibber and his career in context and comments on his accomplishments (or lack thereof) often in contrast not just to Cibber’s contemporary detractors, but to the memoirist himself.  Kirk’s done this before on ROT, most notably with Shaw, of whom Kirk’s a huge fan but not a blind one (see his “Bernard Shaw, Pop Culture Critic,” 5 September 2012; “Eric Bentley On Bernard Shaw,” 3 December 2015; and the “Re-Reading Shaw” series, 3 and 18 July, 8 and 23 August, and 2 September 2016).  At the very least, Kirk’s profile of Colley Cibber is an opportunity to get an introduction to a less-well-known figure in theater history and a less-familiar time in British theater—which, after all, is the foundation for American theater, like it or not.  (We revolted against the British Crown in the 18th century—after Cibber’s death, of course—but not British culture.) 

[The recurrent benefit of Kirk’s contributions as guest blogger is that he always provides an informative and edifying perspective on whatever topic he examines.  I’m always delighted to publish one of his pieces and will always be grateful that my friend lets me do so as often as he does.  I trust that ROTters will agree upon reading “Colley Cibber.”  ~Rick]

                                                                   

Without question my favorite literary genre is theatrical autobiography. The reason couldn’t be simpler: I love theater, and I can’t think of anything more fun than, in person or in books, hanging around with others who love it too. I suppose the most thrilling example of the genre is Act One (1959), an account by Moss Hart (1904-1961) of his life up to his first big theatrical success, Once in a Lifetime (1930), which he wrote with George S. Kaufman (1889-1961). [Kirk has blogged on the Lincoln Center Theater’s stage adaption of Act One; see his article on 25 June 2014.]

An earlier example of theatrical autobiography is the Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber (1740) – a life that more than one person has said he was right to apologize for. We will get to that point shortly.

A brief historical perspective: The English Civil War began in 1642 and the English theaters were closed that same year, breaking the continuous line of production from Elizabethan times. In 1647 the Puritans under Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) actually outlawed dramatic productions.

The restoration of a king (Charles II, 1630-1685) in 1660 led to the re-legalization of theater. Cibber describes in his book two major changes in the new theatrical scene around that time: plays began to feature scenery (as opposed to the relatively bare stage of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater of Shakespeare), incidentally raising the cost of producing a play; and women began to play women’s roles, something unheard of in Shakespeare’s time.

At the time Colley Cibber (1671-1757) began his theatrical career, there was only one authorized theater in London, located in Drury Lane (sometimes called Covent Garden). That situation changed dramatically during his apprenticeship, when a second theater, Lincoln Inn’s Fields, was established.

Cibber today is remembered, when he is remembered, for the following four things:

He was the sixth person to hold the title of Poet Laureate of England, from 1730 to 1757, so his name appears in any list of British Poets Laureate. Poet Laureate is never an easy job, since the title holder is required to create verse for state occasions, a task perhaps seldom congenial to the poetic imagination, which Cibber doesn’t appear to have had in the first place. It was generally assumed that he got the position because of his fervent support for the government in power.

In particular, his exalted position as Poet Laureate was particularly irritating to Alexander Pope (1688-1744), a genuine poet, in fact the greatest of his time. Pope made Cibber the central character – the “King of Dunces” – in his four book version of the Dunciad published in 1743. This mock epic poem pictured Cibber – who is generally recognized as a major factor in the development of the sentimental drama of his time – as the symbol of all that was wrong with British culture of the day.

Cibber is also remembered as one who liberally adapted several of Shakespeare’s plays, cutting and rewriting with abandon. His version of Richard III has received particular scorn in later years. Bernard Shaw, interestingly, defended Cibber a bit, noting that “Off with his head! So much for Buckingham” (Cibber’s invention) isn’t worse than many of the words Shakespeare put in Richard’s mouth. But in general Cibber manhandled Shakespeare’s plays, although Cibber speaks of the Bard practically as an idol.

And Cibber is also remembered today because he wrote his Apology (meaning a defense of, not an expression of sorrow over, his life), which Shaw considered the best account of theater in England during and around the years of Cibber’s theatrical career (1690-1745), an opinion expressed by others as well.

The book is said to have infuriated Pope, partly because of its lack of, well, apology. In the book Cibber takes himself pretty much as he comes. He doesn’t claim extraordinary merit for himself; he recognizes that his talent is limited, but he also recognizes that he has been able to make a living, and in fact a name, in theater, and why should he apologize for that? If all he’s accused of is writing some bad verse, he says, that isn’t worth his getting terribly upset over.

Pope’s Dunciad is brilliant satirical verse, ending with a vision of the triumph of “Dulness” that today still has the power to make us take a second look at mass culture:

Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;

And universal darkness buries all.

But one feels, reading Cibber’s book, that he does not feel responsible for the fall of civilization or anything of the sort. One also feels, perhaps, that Pope spends a lot of time and energy on someone he claims to consider an insignificant artist.

They knew each other and did not get along well; Pope attacks Cibber many times in his writing, Cibber replies several times. Pope would say that Cibber represented the decline of art in his time. Cibber would say that he was just trying to make a living. The two positions are not mutually exclusive.

There are, in fact, other reasons for possible irritation at Cibber. As a staunch Whig party [later the Liberals] man, he wrote a political play, The Non-Juror (1717) that infuriated the Tories [Conservatives], and on the other hand he supported the establishment of the censorship of the drama, originally created in particular to silence Henry Fielding’s anti-Whig plays and not finally abolished until 1968. Cibber devotes pages to a defense of that institution.

He is often an eccentric stylist as a writer. And he seems, even by his own account, to have been, to say the least, an imperfect character. On the other hand, who isn’t? And while Pope might not have approved of Cibber’s memories of the theater of the time, we ought to. Their historical value is huge.

In his Apology it takes Cibber a little while to settle in to the “meat” of his reminiscences, the sections on theater. In early passages, and occasionally later, he sometimes seems to feel he needs to write extensively in order to fill up a book. As he gets going, though, he seems to find he has plenty of material.

He writes his book as though he is speaking it, in an informal tone which one would guess also irritated Pope. Cibber can be droll, which makes sense since tragedy was never his field; comedy was his forte, and we see that, for example, in this glance at audience responses of the time:

To speak critically of an Actress that was extremely good were as hazardous as to be positive in one’s Opinion of the best Opera Singer.

A few samples of his narrative of the theater of his time will hopefully give the flavor of the Apology. For example, Cibber remembers vividly the life of an ordinary working actor. He recounts a squeeze play between management and performers, which the performers finally won, but not before management attempted to correct its mistakes by stiffing the actors:

When it became necessary therefore to lessen the Charge, a Resolution was taken to begin with the Sallaries of the Actors.

However, it turned out that audiences were not as interested in producers as they were in actors, so management had to give in – to an extent:

Powel and Verbruggen [two significant actors], who had then but forty Shillings a Week, were now raised each of them to four Pounds [i.e., 80 shillings] and others in Proportion: As for myself, I was then too insignificant to be taken into their Councils, and consequently stood among those of little Importance, like Cattle in a Market, to be sold to the first Bidder.

Like many another actor (say, off-Off Broadway), Cibber was happy to be poorly paid if he could only have a place on or near the stage:

Pay was the least of my Concern; the Joy and Privilege of every Day seeing Plays for nothing I thought was a sufficient Consideration for the best of my Services.

Management created one theater, many of the leading actors formed another. As the management side lost clout, its productions fell in quality:

Honours of the Theatre! all became at once the Spoil of Ignorance and Self-conceit! Shakespear was defac’d and tortured in every signal Character – Hamlet and Othello lost in one hour all their good Sense, their Dignity and Fame. Brutus and Cassius became noisy Blusterers, with bold unmeaning Eyes, mistaken Sentiments, and turgid Elocution!

Cibber notes that none of these disasters were his fault, since he was at that time such a minor actor that he was unable to have any impact.

Cibber’s entire account of these management/actor “wars” makes riveting and even hilarious reading. The story of two competing performances of Hamlet, and how first one theater and then the other gave up and abandoned Hamlet, both choosing instead the same replacement play, something called The Old Batchelor (by William Congreve, 1693); how at the last minute Cibber’s troupe realized they hadn’t cast an important role in the play, and in desperation let Cibber have it; how he impersonated the original actor of the role to perfection, to great applause; and how he still couldn’t get decent roles afterwards, because the company thought he couldn’t play anything else . . . one can hardly imagine a better theater story.

Cibber, in fact, notes that he was almost never able to get the roles he wanted, unless he wrote them for himself.

This Misfortune, if it were one, you are not to wonder at; for the same Fate attended me, more or less, to the last Days of my remaining on the Stage. What Defect in me this may have been owing to, I have not yet had Sense enough to find out, but I soon found out as good a thing, which was, never to be mortify’d at it.

Cibber wrote Love’s Last Shift (1688), giving himself the supporting role of Sir Novelty Fashion, and his play is the one usually cited in biographies today. John Vanbrugh (1664-1726) wrote a sequel,The Relapse (1696) that is still performed today, although Cibber’s ordinarily is not – an irony in Cibber’s career of ironies.

Cibber went on to write or adapt more than two dozen plays, frequently creating roles for himself. He played numerous villains, such as Othello’s Iago, and he speculates that he owed some of his rather unfortunate popular reputation to his success in playing disgusting characters convincingly. Cibber reports that he simply did not have the vocal qualities appropriate for noble or tragic characters.

His deficiencies, if that’s what they are, do not prevent him from describing a significant number of the actors of his time, with – as far as I can tell – skill and accuracy. He notes what his contemporaries can’t do on stage, but is much more interested in what they can do, and he is generous in appreciating them, even when they weren’t particularly kind to him.

Here is some of his comparison of two actors who were on the stage in the same era:

Booth and [Wilks] were Actors so directly opposite in their Manner, that if either of them could have borrowed a little of the other’s Fault, they would Both have been improv’d by it: If Wilks had sometimes too violent a Vivacity; Booth as often contented himself with too grave a Dignity. The latter seem’d too much to heave up his words, as the other to dart them to the Ear with too quick and sharp a Vehemence: Thus Wilks would too frequently break into the Time and Measure of the Harmony by too many spirited Accents in one Line; and Booth, by too solemn a Regard to Harmony, would as often lose the necessary Spirit of it: So that (as I have observ’d) could we have sometimes rais’d the one and sunk the other, they had both been nearer to the mark. Yet this could not be always objected to them: They had their Intervals of unexceptionable Excellence, that more than balnc’d their Errors.

Cibber ultimately became a successful actor (in certain roles – not in tragedy) and playwright, and one of a trio of theater managers who ran their operation successfully for twenty years – a notable theatrical achievement in any era. He appears to have shown generally good judgment as a theater manager:

I do not remember that ever I made a Promise to any that I did not keep, and therefore was cautious how I made them. This Coldness, tho’ it might not please, at least left the [actors in the company] nothing to reproach me with; and if Temper and fair Words could prevent a Disobligation, I was sure never to give Offence or receive it.

Toward the end of the book, Cibber appears to lose a little interest in his subject, and I found that the book began to wear me out. Theater, it appears, always has been and always will be a messy and exhausting business. It certainly was in Cibber’s time. Still, he loved it, and it has its rewards, including a large stock of terrific anecdotes, something of which the Apology has more than its share.

[As most theater people, both pros and amateurs, can attest, Kirk’s final statement is still true today: we love to tell theater stories culled from our own experiences as well as others’.  In fact, I’ve posted a few of mine on Rick On Theater over the years, most notably in “Short Takes: Theater War Stories,” posted on 6 December 2010.  Next to talking about ourselves, theater folk love to talk shop.  Get a bunch of us together under any excuse, add some food (preferably free) and drink, and you’ll be regaled with all the stage anecdotes you’ll ever want to hear!

[In addition to the books Kirk names in his opening remarks, principally Moss Hart’s Act One, I’d like to mention a few more that I found particularly enjoyable.  The first is Run-Through  (1972) by John Houseman (1902-88), which is more than just a theater memoir, covering, as it does, Houseman’s association with Orson Welles (1915-85) in his stage, radio, and film careers.  For theater people, especially actors, arguably the granddaddy of theater autobiographies is My Life in Art (1935) by Constantin Stanislavsky (1863-1938), the story behind the founding of not only the world-renowned Moscow Art Theater, but the modern art of acting and actor-training in the Western world. 

[If we stretch Kirk’s parameters a little from autobiography to biography, I’d include Lyle Leverich’s Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams (1995), which takes the arc of the playwright’s life up to his first success, The Glass Menagerie in 1944.  Generally deemed one the two best (with Arthur Miller) American theater writers of the second half of the 20th century, Williams (1911-83) lived a real-life soap opera—and his life is clearly reflected in many of his plays.  Finally, I’d add another bio, recounting the astonishing life and career of the first American actor to gain an international reputation, Edwin Booth (1833-93).  I’m referring, of course, to Eleanor Ruggles’s book Prince of Players (1953), turned into a film starring Richard Burton in 1955.  There are, of course, literally hundreds of books by theater men and women, and I daresay each of them has its advocates; I imagine ROTters have their own lists of favorites.

[Kirk observes above that Colley Cibber was known to have “adapted several of Shakespeare’s plays, cutting and rewriting with abandon.”  He wasn’t the only one to have taken such liberties, of course: bowdlerizing the Bard was a going concern in the 18th and 19th centuries.  I’m always reminded, when I hear accounts of this practice, of something my father told me of his own school years.  My dad was a native New Yorker and attended New York City public schools until college.  Because German was one of the languages (among several others of eastern and central Europe) spoken in his family, Dad studied the language in high school (1932-36).  He told me he was amused when he was assigned to read German translations of Shakespeare’s plays, as well as other works of literature, to find the title page of the texts inscribed with the phrase: übersetzt und verbessert.  In English, that means “translated and improved”!  The arrogance! he thought.

[Toward the end of his report on Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, Kirk remarks: “Like many another actor (say, off-Off Broadway), Cibber was happy to be poorly paid if he could only have a place on or near the stage.”  This calls to my mind  a line I repeated in a recent post, “MicroRep” by Kirk Woodward (27 July), so I’ll quote it again:

One of Kirk’s last comments, about the actors having been willing to perform for free, reminds me of a line an actor friend of mine used to like to say: ”Actors are the only people who’ll work for nothing if you let them.”  I suggested we get T-shirts printed up!

[Apparently, this is a sentiment that stretches back much further than the 20th century!]