'Greatness Thrust Upon Them'

by Kirk Woodward

[James F. Broderick (b. 1963), who lives in Glen Ridge, New Jersey. is a writer and a professor of English. (Glen Ridge, in Essex County in northern New Jersey, is a little over 15 miles east of New York City and two miles south of Montclair, in the environs of which much of the theater work of Kirk Woodward, the author of this report, is staged.  Kirk lives in Little Falls, 3½ miles north of Montclair in neighboring Passaic County.) 

[A former journalist and editor, Broderick has performed in a few Shakespeare plays (and has directed twice) with The Saint James Players of the Saint James Episcopal Church in Upper Montclair, a troupe with which Kirk has also worked.  (At least once, Kirk and Broderick worked together at SJP—on a production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, which Kirk directed in September 2017, and which I saw.)

[Broderick has published a few books, but his first play, The Hamlet Experience, was staged Off-Off-Broadway at the New York Theater Festival in November 2021.  The play was described in NYTF publicity as “a 75-minute contortion of Shakespeare’s masterpiece treated as a comedy that doesn’t know it’s a tragedy. . . .  [W]hat’s it all mean?  The director has no idea, the actors have lost their place, the writer expects the plot to be clear.”

[According to a post by the Jersey City-based Hudson Shakespeare Company, Greatness Thrust Upon Them had its origins eleven years ago:

In 2012, James Broderick . . . encountered a new experience for him but not new to many parents – driving his daughter to participate in a community theater production.

 

James’ daughter was playing Miranda in a production of “The Tempest” at the St. James Players in [Upper] Montclair and one day the director of the production asked James if he would be interested in playing a part. . . .  While he taught English and Journalism for years and spoke in front of crowds of students all the time, James had no acting experience and even less experience with Shakespeare’s language.  Swallowing his fear, he proceeded to learn the small, but pivotal role of Gonzalo.  Fear soon turned to sheer enjoyment as he discovered the play and the Bard with his daughter.

 

As James learned his part, he got to speak with the other adults in the cast and to his amazement found that many were like him, day professionals who also took time for a side career in theater.  An author of several books, he thought about exploring the subject of people with day jobs doing Shakespeare in their spare time.  What he found was a different animal.

 

These people didn’t just do this in their spare time but was at times a lifelong vocation supplemented by day jobs.  Very often, the same “community theater” actors were doing small roles in local film and television.  A community of often unsung, non-union professionals who were more than willing to share what theater and what Shakespeare meant to them. 

[Broderick took the opportunity to speak with actors about their experiences on stage with William Shakespeare.  “The result,” concluded the HSC post, “was the basis for ‘Greatness Thrust Upon Them: Non-professional Actors and Directors Discuss Their Encounters With Shakespeare,’ a new book that interviews . . . several actors from around the country about their insights, sacrifices, and delights in performing the Bard.” 

[A note about the book’s title—a popular and seemingly ubiquitous quotation from Act II, Scene 5 of the Shakespearean comedy Twelfth Night.  The fuller quotation is: “In my stars I am above thee, but be not afraid of greatness.  Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ’em.”

[The lines are part of a letter supposedly written by Countess Olivia to Malvolio, her steward.  The pompous, egotistical, and self-important Malvolio reads the letter thinking that it suggests Olivia’s in love with him and is encouraging him to better himself.  What the duped steward doesn’t know is that the letter was, in fact, written by his fellow servants in an effort to play a cruel joke on him by advising him to do things that actually annoy the countess.

[While today, those who use Shakespeare’s famous lines, especially the last clause, do so in all seriousness, the poet’s original sense is to make Malvolio, the target of the words, a figure of ridicule as he’s mocked for his very pomposity, egotism, and self-importance.

[Broderick’s Greatness is available on Amazon in Kindle and Paperback versions and appeals not only to the Shakespeare or theater enthusiast, but presents inspirational accounts of everyday people pursing their dreams even if a full-time day job pays the bills.]

My friend David Semonin (1941-2010), about whom I’ve written in this blog (see “Saints of the Theater” on Rick On Theater, 30 December 2011), had a way of asking questions that stick in the mind. One day, probably after he had seen one too many local theater productions, he asked, “What’s the justification for community theater?”

At the time and place he asked that question (decades ago in Louisville, Kentucky), admittedly there wasn’t a lot of outstanding non-professional theater (or professional for that matter – Actors Theater of Louisville was barely on the horizon at that time). Theater has its skilled professionals. What do amateurs bring to the table?

There’s an historical answer to David’s question, or rather several connected answers. Theater in the United States in the nineteenth century was dominated by European dramatic models and by melodrama (not necessarily bad in itself, but at that time presented in heavily stereotyped ways). Few American plays from that period hold much interest today.

As the twentieth century began, another negative factor presented itself: powerful theatrical producers created what basically were cartels, severely limiting what could be presented on the professional stage and by whom. One response was the Little Theatre movement, usually said to have begun around 1910 (with antecedents), in which local non-professional groups created theaters of their own, outside the reach of the producers’ control.

Meanwhile playwriting began to stir, and in the early twentieth century the plays of Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953), among others, led to an increase of interest in theatrical experimentation and to a wider exposure of significant drama to the public. Some independent theaters spearheaded innovations; others replicated them.

Community theater, as many of these efforts were called, served as a sort of “declaration of independence” from economic and artistic restrictions. Theater was not to be produced just by an elite; anyone could do it.

Nowadays the picture is more complex and we can visualize it as a sort of sliding scale between completely amateur productions at one end and Broadway products at the other. “Community theater” today usually refers to the most amateur end of the scale, and that’s what David was talking about.

The word “amateur” unquestionably provides the basis for one answer to David. It doesn’t mean second-rate (or worse), it doesn’t mean less good than something else, it doesn’t mean naïve or shoddy. It comes from the Latin word “amator” or “lover,” from the verb “amare” meaning “to love” – a strong, passionate word.

An amateur, then, is a person who’s fallen in love with an activity, and that’s what so often happens in theater – one is “stage struck,” overwhelmed by a powerful attraction. This was certainly the case for me. I was fifteen when my friend Perry Baer invited me to a Saturday morning work call at Louisville Children’s Theatre (now Stage One, a very fine professional operation).

I found everything there that I needed in order to survive high school and find a direction for my life, and I couldn’t be happier about it. That same feeling – that passionate love for theater – finds expression in a book called Greatness Thrust Upon Them (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014; available on Amazon) by a friend of mine, James F. (Jim) Broderick, with whom I’ve recently worked on a directing project.

Jim had the idea of talking to non-professionals (27 of them) across the country about their experiences acting in plays by William Shakespeare (1564-1616). (I know two of the people interviewed, John Bylancik and Lisa Stoeffel.) Although Shakespeare’s plays are performed at all levels of theater, they are by no means simple to produce and perform for anyone, so they provide plenty of material for discussion.

Jim’s book suggests a kind of answer to David’s question above. Basically, David was looking at the result of the process of producing plays, the productions themselves, which are of variable quality (as is all theater, as a matter of fact) and can on occasion be awful – and, of course, sometimes not.

Jim’s book, on the other hand, emphasizes more the values of the process itself. Community theater, his book suggests, enriches and sometimes even transforms the people involved in it. (If the result is worthwhile productions, of course, that is a welcome plus.)

One factor David may not have considered when he challenged the value of community theater is the range of experience one can find in a given cast. When he asked his question, decades ago, I suspect there were not many people in the local theater scene with formal training in drama.

I have no numbers to prove that the situation is different today, but I suspect it would be a rare community theater production today that doesn’t have one or more persons in the cast or the theater staff who has had formal theater training, or at least substantial experience in professional-quality shows.

There are gems throughout Jim’s book which leave me with an expanded understanding of what acting at the local level can be like, and what people there can achieve. The interviewees in Greatness are thoughtful, committed, and perceptive, with a generosity of spirit that is heartening – exactly the kind of people we need in our world. Here are a few observations the book suggests.

Obviously, everyone interviewed had a first encounter with Shakespeare; no one is born knowing his plays. The stories in Greatness tend to follow a generally shared trajectory. There’s an introduction to Shakespeare, maybe from parents, maybe at school. At that point what we might call “the Shakespeare experience” “takes” or it doesn’t.

Then there’s some kind of opportunity actually to perform one of the plays, reading it aloud or even being recruited into performing it. Then the person, typically, is hooked. As Michael Callahan, who actually didn’t have his first experience with Shakespeare until he was retired, says, “People often get sort of drafted into the theater.”

Then, frequently (and fortunately), there’s often some reinforcing experience, typically at the hands of an inspiring teacher or an understanding director. Seth Meriweather gives one example:

I remember the director said “Let’s be professional about this [production of Richard III] and help these people watching this play” – that stuck with me, the value of performing, and what you can bring to an audience, how important it was to perform as well as you can for the audience.

Greatness demonstrates how strong the impulse can be to create theater. Dennis Brestensky, a teacher, tells how in 1997

half a dozen students came into my office, closed the door, and said rather forcefully, “We want to do a Shakespeare play. We want to form a Shakespeare club called the Lion Players. We want to do a full-length play every spring, and we want you to be behind us. Not as director, but as advisor, supporter, and cheerleader.”

In Greatness there’s plenty of evidence that the right director can make an enormous difference. For me stories of this kind are interesting and suggestive. Jay Tilley for example says that “The way Bob [Smith] liked to direct, when one scene was ending, another was already beginning – a very brisk pace.”

Noelle Fair, working on a speech from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “got so overwhelmed with it that I think I broke down during one of our final rehearsals. . . . My director came to me and said ‘I know why you’re having problems with it. It was written to be bad. Play it like a bad actor.’” The advice was exactly appropriate for the speech.

Meredith Zahn says, “I remembered one thing my acting coach told me – just pick an objective and stick to it.” Whole acting classes boil down to exactly that.

Sometimes it’s not a person but a film or video that helps someone persevere in their efforts to perform Shakespeare’s plays. The name that comes up frequently in this regard in Greatness is Kenneth Branagh (b. 1960), who has made six movies from Shakespeare’s plays, as well as one film about a troupe performing Hamlet, the marvelous A Midwinter’s Tale (1995), which by itself might be enough to convince anyone to try their hand with the Bard.

Seeing films of the play you’re in, actually, is a fraught subject. Several actors in the book mention how helpful it was for them to see videos of other performances of the plays they were doing. As a director I urge actors not to do this, so their performances can be their own rather than a copy of someone else’s.

Is Shakespeare a special case? I still don’t think so, but I’m giving the question thought. I will add that David Neal, in the book, vehemently agrees with me, and Tony Pisculli says:

I think it’s a distraction. If you are playing Richard II, and you go see Ian McKellen’s production, you’re not going to be doing yourself any favors. It’s an impossible measuring stick. Plus, that was that production, and this is our production.

Sometimes it’s other actors who provide needed support, through their encouragement or through observation, and sometimes through the advice they give. Many interviewees cited as an asset something that as a director I always resist in a show, which is for actors to coach each other. John Bylancik says:

I actually sought out a lot of help from anybody in the cast who had done any other show before. I cornered anybody, backstage and in-between rehearsals. Every line I think I ran by somebody who clearly knew a lot more than I do.

I’m not about to abandon my policy that actors should never coach each other, but I might need to be more sensitive to the amount of help actors might need, either from me or from other (hopefully authorized) people.

Inspiration from others doesn’t have to come in the form of advice. Susan Nelle says:

You know what I love? I didn’t understand this until recently. I really love the rehearsal process – even more than performing. That’s the creative process, that’s where the learning comes in. . . . Learning to play with those people, working out the things you need to tell the story, that’s the hard work of rehearsal. In a good rehearsal process, you’re exploring what makes it come alive, what moves it. If it’s not alive, it’s just someone standing up there reading from a textbook.

Help can come from many other sources, some unlikely, as Michael Callahan illustrates:

One of the other things that helped was, we were rehearsing in a local high school, and the drama teacher had a comic book of [Twelfth Night] . . . . [S]he said “This might help you,” and she handed me a comic book of the play. They have the lines, and then they have an explanation of what they mean. She said “Here’s what I give my students. This might help.” And it did.

We don’t use words in the identical way that people did in, say, 1600. Add to that the fact that Shakespeare is a supreme poet, both lyric and dramatic, and then add the problems involved in getting an audience both to hear the words and to understand them, and we have quite a mix.

John Kuhn says that

it was hard as heck to figure out what was being discussed, given the use of a lot of different poetic elements that I was unfamiliar with. It was extremely challenging figuring out the meaning. On the other side, there were those pearls of expression that have become well known, and which are almost too poetic to be expressed. So I went back and forth between thinking “Oh my gosh, what does that mean?” to “Oh my gosh, that’s beautiful!” I remember just being daunted. I was intimidated by the language even as I was being overwhelmed by the power and beauty of language. Both extremes.

Susan Nelle says:

One of the first things you have to do if you want to honor the language is to break it down, really try to understand it. In the language, Shakespeare gives you the emotions. You don’t have to manufacture the emotions, the language will tell you the state of mind that the speaker is in, as well as the facts of the story. It made me appreciate even more good writing – even good American writing. . . . That’s the thing about Shakespeare’s language – you have to learn to trust it. It is everything. Everything will fit in and around it if you are true to the language.

John Bylancik recounts:

I felt really compelled to try to get the language right. The memorization, the learning of the lines was something I never had to do before. My daughter actually helped me out the most, giving me mnemonic help in terms of memorizing, chunking the text, tying it to emotion, tying it to reaction – just real acting skills.

Many stress how important it is to understand what a line means – something I find has to be the first step in rehearsals for a Shakespeare play. Nate Pain says he learned that

the biggest thing is getting an understanding of what you’re saying. The language he was writing in is so far removed from the language we use today. It’s not so much the words you are speaking, it’s how you are saying it, your actions, your body language. That’s what can make or kill a Shakespeare production, in my opinion – creating an understanding, an understanding for the audience so they can know what’s happening.

The results is well worth the effort. Interviewees attested that acting in a Shakespeare play can bring about a level of understanding the plays that just reading them can’t. Meredith Zahn says,

I went to that first rehearsal and we did a cold read – Shakespeare plays are meant to be performed. As soon as I read with the other actors, it all made sense to me. And I was like, “I get what I’m saying now! Oh my gosh, it makes sense!

Participating in productions can pay off, of course, in insight about specific plays. John Bylancik says of The Tempest:

I think for me there’s a definite forgiveness and a “second chance” theme that kind of runs through it. Everything from Ariel being released from the tree to the young lovers at the end being discovered, the play moves from worst-case to best-case.

That’s solid observation. Dennis Brestensky says,

The thing I really liked about Shakespeare – he had a rounded view of life. Some of the literature we were reading [at his school] was negative, but even though Shakespeare wrote tragedies, he had a great vision of the world, of the comedy and joy of life. You’d cry when you read his works, but you’d also laugh.

Angela Laio, whose ethnicity is Asian, pointed out a surprising benefit of doing Shakespeare plays – that it’s easier to achieve non-traditional casting in them:

I think my ethnicity hasn’t been a barrier when it comes to being cast in Shakespeare plays. Since his work has been around for so long, there have been countless examples of directors taking risks with his work, and casting non-traditionally in terms of race and gender. People are not as surprised when they see “ethnic” actors playing traditionally “Caucasian” roles in Shakespeare’s plays.

Actors cite the freedom Shakespeare gives actors to explore ways of doing their roles since he gives relatively few stage directions. As Angela Liao says, “You say to yourself, why not try it this way?”

One major answer to David Semonin’s question, “Why community theater at all?” may be the way theater enriches the lives of the people who participate it. Many interviewees in Greatness saw benefits in their lives outside theater as a result of performing Shakespeare.

Sometimes the results are surprising. Meredith Zahn sees performing Shakespeare as strengthening her religious faith; Lisa Stoeffel sees it as a part of her church’s outreach. Colin Goode, an Anglican priest, says:

When I played Friar Lawrence [in Romeo and Juliet], a friend of mine came to me after the show and said “That was really good – you missed your vocation!” My head began to swell. I thought he was going to say “You should have been an actor.” Instead, he said “You should have been a Franciscan friar!”

More generally Peter Howell says:

Well, the performing and literary arts have enriched my life immeasurably, partially by offering insights into the human condition, and partially by offering escape into other people’s stories, which are generally more interesting and more revealing of the human condition than my own. To say nothing of having given me the opportunity to have gotten friendly with a number of creative and really wonderful people.

Rick Kenney studied drama at Catholic University (Washington, D.C.), where Susan Sarandon (b. 1946) was in his class. She went on to become a fine and notable professional actor, but what Kenney says has a wider application. His teachers, he says,

took the approach that the way to become a good performer, actor, theater person, is to learn a lot about life, the world, everything that matters to human beings. The technical stuff you can learn on the job. The emphasis wasn’t on the craft, but absorbing as much as you can about life. It was the liberal arts approach – drama for its own sake, not to prepare for a career, but to enrich your life. We were told to be a true “amateur” – do it for the love of it.

In a society in which the liberal arts as a whole are being increasingly devalued as a part of education, community theater may not need more justification than that.

[Many ROTters may know this, but the British don’t use ‘amateur’ with the same negative connotation that we do in the U.S.  A case in point: when I was stationed in Berlin with the army and helped start a theater group at the air base, we sort of modeled it after a similar group the British forces had.  Their troupe was called BATS, which was an acronym for the British Amateur Theatre Society. 

[One of our founding members was the British wife of a U.S. Air Force NCO, and she wanted to name our group TAT to emulate the British group—but we went with the Tempelhof American Theatre because of the derogatory sense of ‘amateur’ in American usage. (See “Berlin Memoir,” Part 8, 13 April 2017.)

[Kirk’s etymology of the word as derived from Latin is certainly correct, but readers might note that the word itself is French and means simply “a lover of something.”  (A romantic or sexual lover, by the way, is amant/amante.)

[Now, here are some personal responses I had while reading Kirk’s report on Greatness Thrust Upon Them:

•  When Kirk raises the likelihood that some participants in a community theater today will have had some professional training or experience, I wonder if that wouldn’t be especially true in communities in or near large cities with a professional theater scene or a college with a strong arts program. 

Montclair, New Jersey—the community in which Kirk lives and in whose vibrant theater scene he participates—is an excellent example, I’d think.  It’s about a half hour from New York City by car and less than three-quarters of an hour by train.  Montclair State University has a theater and dance department and offers bachelor’s and master’s degrees in theater; Montclair High School has an active theater and performing arts program as well.  There are probably dozens of small theater groups, plus theater troupes at many local churches, all around the Montclair area.

(When Kirk and I were at college in the mid- and late 1960s, our rural college town didn’t have a community theater as far as I knew—and the university also didn’t have much of a theater program.  When I got to the State University College at Oneonta, New York, in the late ’80s—Oneonta is a similarly isolated town—where the college had a large theater department, the town had a very active community theater.)

•  Kirk asserts: “Greatness demonstrates how strong the impulse can be to create theater.”  This statement reminds me of a remark I made in my report on documentary theater (“Performing Fact: The Documentary Drama,” 9 October 2009): “The drive to perform . . .—to teach or explain events of import to the community—is as old as performance itself.  The first . . . performance, the precursor of the . . . drama, must have occurred the first time a Neanderthal hunting party danced around the campfire to replay the day’s success.” 

Leonardo Shapiro, the director on whom I’ve blogged often, frequently spoke of the theater as our descendent of the tribal campfire, around which the community gathered to tell its stories and recount its history.  “Culture is a story told around a fire,” Leo declared in a 1991 essay in the Performing Arts Journal.  “It is the conversation between the young and old.  It is the fire on your face and the cold on your back.  The link between your experience and mine”

•  When Kirk wrote about actors getting advice from other actors or members of the company, and then added that he discourages this practice, I was prompted to add “especially unsolicited advice/coaching.”  Even solicited help from someone other than the director is a problem, I think.  It’s a matter of too many cooks—and too many voices giving (potentially contradictory) notes and instruction to the actors. 

This can be an awful temptation in a college-theater setting when a cast member might find him- or herself acting with one of his or her teachers or students.  I had both experiences as an MFA student at Rutgers: I was in one production with my longtime acting teacher and one with a student of my own.  My teacher never coached me or gave me advice—she had her own role to work on, after all—and I didn’t advise my student on her work, either.

•  Kirk’s quoting one of the interviewees about learning to work with the other actors reminded me of the late Aaron Frankel, a teacher I studied with at HB Studio, “quoting” Martha Graham (I imagine it was really a paraphrase): “Don’t come on stage to give; come on stage to take” (i.e., from the other performers, to respond to what they “send”).

•  The anecdote about the Shakespeare comic book brought to mind my earliest encounter with The Bard.  I read one of his plays—I’m pretty sure it was Romeo and Juliet—in 8th-grade English class, but I think I must have tried to read some of the plays before that on my own.  (Around that time, my mother had given me her high school volume of collected works of Shakespeare—still with her bookplate in it bearing, of course, her maiden name.)

Sometime when I was in middle school, the mother of one of my friends was an amateur actor, and she was in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Twelfth Night at the Carter Barron Amphitheater in Washington, D.C.’s Rock Creek Park.  I’m pretty sure that was my first Shakespearean performance, and I took the Shakespeare volume and followed along with the performance. 

After that, I may have read other Shakespeare plays, probably the comedies, but the unfamiliar language, the complex structure, and the poetry made it hard for me to follow the stories.  Someone suggested—I can’t imagine I came upon this on my own—I read Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, and that was a lot easier to read, even in the 18th-century prose in which the Lambs wrote, and I could then read the 16th-century texts of the originals more easily because I knew the plot.  It’s not a comic book, but I think the point’s the same. 

•  The next quotation, about another actor’s difficulty following the poetry, reminded me of something from back in Kirk’s and my college days.  Our college director used to say, before every first rehearsal of a Shakespeare play—or maybe at the auditions: “Shakespeare was just a hack!”  When I mentioned this response to Kirk, he suggested that it was: “He needed to feel Shakespeare was something he could handle – maybe?”  I think he said it so that The Bard would seem something we could handle without being intimidated by his iconic stature. 

•  The comments by the Asian-American actress about her ethnicity enhancing the production harked back to comments I made on a few Shakespeare productions with racially mixed casts, such as Andre Braugher’s Iago and Franchelle Stewart Dorn’s Cleopatra—both at the Folger in D.C. (see “Othello” in “Some Out-Of-Town Plays from the Archive,” 22 December 2020, and “Antony and Cleopatra” in “Three Plays from the Shakespeare Theatre from the Archives,” 26 April 2020, respectively).

Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead isn’t Shakespeare, but it’s Shakespeare-derived and the characters are Shakespeare’s, so the black-white Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Jon Jory’s production at the Actors Theatre of Louisville in 1970 qualifies, and it said, among other things—when other characters mixed the two courtiers up—that they’re so interchangeable that even race isn’t enough to distinguish them.

•  The interviewee who said that actors should learn about all aspects of life, not just theater, echoes my advice to a high school student in Maplewood, New Jersey, who gave up a trip to Paris for a chorus role in a community theater production.  I told her that there’d always be another production—she was a pretty talented young actress and would have had no trouble getting cast in local shows—but a trip to Paris (especially her first one!) could be life-altering and would benefit her forever.  (Mine was: see “An American Teen in Germany,” Part 1, on Rick On Theater, 9 March 2013).   

I’ve also taken a stand against being an undergraduate theater major (see “Liberal Arts in the Real World,” 24 July 2010).  Many young actors with whom I studied and worked had been theater majors in college—some even as early as high school.  I invariably found these actors limited not only in their artistic abilities, but, more importantly, in their general knowledge of literature, history, philosophy, and science.

This had two repercussions in their work.  First, they had less factual knowledge on which to draw when studying a role and, second, they had a narrower basis for their experience of life—an experience that is indispensable for any artist, particularly an actor. The best actors with whom I worked had all had the most eclectic intellectual backgrounds, though not all got them from college. (Many of the actors I met, especially the older ones, were self-educated. Others had studied diverse fields in school, including chemistry, law, and history—and one or two former divinity students.)

My own work as an actor and director is riddled with incidents where I drew on the most improbable knowledge.  In the referenced post, I proceed to describe some diverse instances of this phenomenon.]

Berlin Memoir, Part 8

[This is the final installment of my “Berlin Memoir,” my account of the quarter-decade I spent as an intelligence officer in West Berlin in the early ’70s.  (Parts 1 through 7 were published on 16 and 31 December 2016, 20 January 2017, 9 and 19 February 2017, and 6 and 29 March 2017.)  In this segment, I’ll mostly be covering the theater activities in which I participated, including an amateur theater troupe I helped launch, and some experiences that grew out of those.  As always, I recommend that new readers of “Berlin Memoir” go back and catch up with the earlier parts because the background informs much of what I recount here, plus a lot of the terms, abbreviations, and events I use and allude to have been explained and defined in the preceding sections.]

I said earlier (see Part 6, posted on 11 March) that some of the amateur actors in Berlin Brigade decided to form a theater group so we could do stuff together on a more continuous basis—workshops, little classes, camaraderie with the British group, and such.  (The wife of one of our founders, an Air Force sergeant, was a Brit herself and she knew some of those folks.  Their group was called BATS: the British Amateur Theatrical Society.)  We formed our group sometime in September or early October 1972 and the Air Force guy got us sponsored by the Skyrider Service Club, Tempelhof’s NCO club, of which he was a member.  We called ourselves TAT: the Tempelhof American Theatre.  (Some had wanted to model our name after the Brits’ group, but amateur has a more derogatory connotation in American than it does in British.)  We even designed a logo in which the two T’s in TAT were stylized Greek masks, one of comedy and one of tragedy.  We put ads and announcements on AFRTS—I was the publicity director—and got stories planted in Stars and Stripes. 

That last had an odd consequence for me: I ended up the “model” for a posed photo to illustrate an article—me standing by a lighting instrument on a floor stand.  (It wasn’t even really a stage instrument.)  When the article came out in July ’73—and I still have a copy somewhere—it appeared in the S&S all over the world, including Asmara, Ethiopia.  One of my W&L roommates, who had enlisted in the Air Force after we graduated, was stationed there and he saw the photo and article and called me!  (Remember, all USAREUR and USAFE facilities are interconnected by the same telephone system.)

TAT’s first show (21-22 December 1972) was a children’s play, The Wonderful Tang by Beaumont Bruestle, which was a fairy tale set in China.  It had a character, The Chorus, who's like a children’s version of Our Town’s Stage Manager, and I did that role in yellow-face.  (Today, no one would dare do that—but what did we know?)  I channeled Mickey Rooney from Breakfast at Tiffany’s (yes, I know—his character was Japanese; again: what did we know?)  As un-PC as it would be today, it was a big hit then.  We were invited to do a cut-down version of the play—maybe it was the whole thing; it wasn’t very long—on a children’s show on AFTV. 

Well, I’d never done anything like that before, so this was an experience.  First off, AFTV was still black and white in the ’70s, so all our fancy make-up had to be redesigned for the gray-scale.  (Yellow-face didn’t read on b&w TV, so I didn’t need that, but everything else had to be rethought.)  No one knew anything about this, so we just experimented in front of the cameras during rehearsal until we got something acceptable.  Then, in one scene, one of us—maybe it was me, I don’t remember anymore—was supposed to appear out of nowhere.  On stage, we just did it conventionally—the actor just jumped out from behind curtains to the accompaniment of a lot of Oooh’s and Aaah’s from the other characters—but I suggested, Why not try to do it with some trick photography?  Again, no one knew how to do this—the AFRTS staff were just airmen and -women with some basic TV training, not pros—so we winged it.  It came out a little jumpy, but it worked—at least for “local” TV.  (We did this all on tape, of course—not live.  I think they aired it a couple of times.  The AFTV show, a local children’s program, also included some interviews—children’s style—if I recall, about who we were and what TAT did and what the play was about and so on.) 

Then we mounted A Hatful of Rain by Michael V. Gazzo (1-4 November 1973).  I was the dope dealer, Mother—played on stage and in the movie by Henry Silva, one of the all-time great screen villains—and I was one nasty sum’bitch.  One day, out near the commissary or something, some Air Force NCO stopped me, and in really angry tones, explained that I was a real bastard and he’d like to take care of me some night in a dark alley—or something like that.  Talk about suspending disbelief!  I had to point out I was a commissioned officer—I wore civvies, remember—and he needed to back off.  (Aaahh, stardom.  Has its burdens, don’t it?) 

Well, Hatful was a big success, too.  (Remember, we had a very culturally deprived audience.  Many GI’s didn’t get out much!)  So the NCO club invited us to do the play for a dinner theater.  Our usual performance space was a large room at Tempelhof with a moveable, blue-carpeted platform that had a red curtain backdrop—intended for lectures, small concerts, and meetings—for our stage (unless we built something more elaborate; one of our actors discovered a talent for scene design and set building after I gave him some pointers—from my vast experience in that field!).  But the NCO club got an actual auditorium (at the Harnack House, Berlin Brigade's officers' club) with a proscenium stage for their dinner-theater event, and we moved in there for one night (11 December 1973).  Now, what no one really considered was that Hatful is not really dinner-theater fare—it’s pretty grotty and stomach-churning melodrama, what with all the shooting up, drug withdrawal, and thuggery.  Not terribly conducive to digesting food.  Nevertheless, we were a hit.

Hatful was also entered in 1973’s Third Annual USAFE Play Contest and we actually won for Best Play.  That prize included a command performance at Ramstein AB, the USAFE HQ in Germany, on 15 December 1973.  So we had to dismantle our set—the first really elaborate one we’d done, with walls and everything, not really designed for touring—and get it and us to Ramstein.  We got the set booked on an Air Force cargo flight, and we would take the Duty Train to Frankfurt where someone from Ramstein would meet us and drive us to the AB, about 85 miles away.  But guess what.  At the very last minute, the set was bumped for a helicopter tail section.  Well, we scrambled and made dozens of phone calls and somehow managed to get the set onto the train with us and arranged for a truck to meet us in Frankfurt to haul it to Ramstein.  

Of course, it was raining, and the set got to the theater banged up and scarred from the train ride and the open deuce-and-a-half.  We were able to fix most things by ingenuity and luck—it was now maybe 7 or 8 p.m. the day before the contest festival (which included presentation of the awards for Best Actor and Best Actress, and so on—a big megillah)—but parts of the walls had been marred so that the paint had come off.  (The flats weren’t muslin-covered frames, but solid constructions of something like homosote.)  We didn’t have any of the paint, and no one could locate any at that hour—even if we could match the wall color.  Then someone—me, I think—noted that the walls were pea-green.  Why not run to the commissary or deli—something was actually still open—and get some pea soup?  By God, that’s what we did, and it worked!  We touched up the damaged set with Campbell’s condensed pea soup!  (As Ken Barnes, the TD at W&L’s Troubs, said: Necessity is a mother.)

So, we finished repairing and mounting the set, and I guess we must have done a quick run-through or something for the cues—but we had no time for a full rehearsal.  So we went on the next day in an unfamiliar theater, not exactly cold, but luke warm.  Everything was going well enough—Dave Hickey, our Johnny Pope, had caught a little cold or stomach flu or something and he was a bit weak so when I pushed him in one scene, he kind of went flying a little, but no harm and no one but us noticed.  However, in one scene I smoke a cigarette which I drop on the floor and stamp out with my shoe.  Except that this theater had a raked stage with some kind of woven-rope floor covering.  Not having rehearsed here, it never occurred to me, and certainly not in the heat of the scene, that when I dropped the butt on the floor, it was going to roll down toward the proscenium.  And that’s what it did—heading straight for the front row of seats.  And I’m trying to “casually” reach my foot farther and farther down the stage to stop it and put it out.  I know that lit butt is going to start the rope floor cover ablaze and the performance and the theater will go up in flames and smoke, sending Brig. Gen. Robert Thompson, the USAFE Chief of Staff who hosted the ceremony, fleeing out into the late-December night (and I’d have a new senior officer with my name on his shit list!).  In the end, I just had to let the butt roll, and nothing happened—except I had a small heart attack up there that night.

(I posted a version of the Hatful anecdote on ROT as “Short Takes: Theater War Stories” on 6 December 2010, and on 20 November 2014, the AF NCO who designed the set, David Rogers, stumbled on it.  He wrote me and filled in some information which I either hadn’t known or had forgotten.  So, here’s more of the story:

(When Dave met the train on which the set came back to Berlin. he said he knew something was wrong when they opened the boxcar door.  He could smell it!   The set had stayed in Ramstein about three days after we left and Dave figured they’d left it outside the theater.  When he arrived to pick it up at the train station in Berlin, there was stuff growing out of it.  My suggestion to paint it with green pea soup did the trick for the performance, but it also was organic enough to sprout mold and mildew over the entire set.  Dave told the folks at the station just to throw the whole set out.

(Dave told me that the reason the actor playing Johnny was so sick—and so was most of the cast and crew—was that Ramstein’s troops recently had gotten their flu shots.  The bugs, Dave said, were everywhere.  During the command performance, Mike, the young man who played Mother’s henchman, Apples, got terribly ill, and the director, Bruce Limpus, tapped Dave to play the part. So he spent a while in the afternoon going through Apple’s lines with me and the cast.  As it turned out, Mike was the real trouper and he went on in his role.  Meanwhile, Dave was up in the light booth, almost falling asleep, running lights for the show.

(Back stage, the green room was a mess, Dave recalled.  Many of the cast members were so sick with the flu that, between stage entrances, they’d go back to the green room and lie down on coats and clothes and anything that would afford a comfortable sick bed.  It looked like a wartime hospital back there, Dave said.

(Then there was the Technical Director for the theater who insisted we put green foliage on the set above the “street entrance” (where Apples and I entered) because it was stark and unappealing.  It was supposed to be stark and unappealing, Dave observed.  It was a seedy part of New York City!  The set dressing  made the set look like a garden apartment that was below ground.   Dave recalled that the TD outranked him, because he didn’t fight her on this.)

By the way—one of the judges for the USAFE contest was Dennis Cole, that renowned actor of refinement and distinction.  Well, Cole arrived in Berlin without enough warm clothing, so they had to take him off to the ’X to shop.  I don’t know what else he bought—he sported a black leather jacket, but I think that came with him—but he did purchase a pair of Corcoran paratroop boots.  Man, he thought those were cool!  He wore them everywhere the whole time he was in Berlin.  What a honcho!

TAT was mostly fun—we had meetings and did scenes and improvs, the Brits came over and did some light pieces, we went to their shop and schmoozed, we mounted a bill of one-acts (19-22 July 1973; I did the father in Chekhov’s Marriage Proposal; the other shows on the bill were Edward Albee’s The American Dream and The Feast by Dan Wright) and Peter Ustinov’s Halfway Up the Tree (29-31 March 1973; I assistant-directed).  But one thing was not fun.  One of our actresses was the daughter of an Army colonel, a medical officer at the hospital.  Her name was Nancy and she was married at the time we started TAT.  It was already her second marriage—she was the same age as I or a little younger—and she had a 7- or 8-year-old daughter from her first; within a month or so, her second marriage broke up. 

The word at the time was that her husband, whom I met once or twice, just up and left, but after I got to know Nancy, I had to wonder.  She and I became friendly and then started to move toward romance.  I got to know her father some; Nancy and her daughter were living with him in the senior-officer housing, and he seemed to approve.  I admit, her track record bothered me a little and the fact that she came with instant family worried me, too—I wasn’t at all sure I was ready at around 27 to become a father to an 8-year-old all of a sudden.  Then, little by little, Nancy started to get possessive and slightly obsessive.  She’d call me at all times of the day and often wouldn’t get off the phone.  She’d call and ask if we could go somewhere right then—and I started to see that she was always leaving her daughter at home, even blowing off things like parent-teacher meetings and such.  I decided to back off any relationship—she was scaring me, frankly—but she kept calling and “running into me” as if she had been waiting for me.  (The term stalking didn’t really exist yet, but looking back, that’s what it was.) 

One time Nancy disappeared from home—her father called to see if she was with me—and was later found walking along the railroad tracks in Berlin.  That’s when I learned that Nancy was a paranoid schizophrenic and had been hospitalized at least once before and had been on medication which she’d apparently stopped taking.  (This is when my original judgment of her husband began to alter.)  Her behavior was all manifestations of her illness, I learned—especially the tendency to latch onto someone about whom the paranoid schizophrenic forms a fantasy relationship based on the flimsiest evidence.  (Believe it or not, this happened to me once again, when I was at the American Academy a few years later.)  Later the day she disappeared, Nancy called me from the hospital.  (I was home on comp time for some extended duty.)  She’d walked off the psych ward and was calling from the ER; she wanted me to come and get her.  I told her I couldn’t do that, trying to be as calm and supportive as I could (acting again), and tried to hang up the phone so I could call her father.  But Nancy wouldn’t hang up and the peculiarity of the German phone system was that if the calling party keeps the line open, you can’t break the connection.  I finally ran down the hall to a neighbor—thank goodness it was the temporary quarters of a married officer and his wife was home—and used that phone to get through to Nancy's father at his clinic in the hospital.  He thanked me for informing him—he was always strangely calm during all this—and sent someone to retrieve Nancy from the ER. 

I don’t remember how long Nancy stayed in the hospital, but she was eventually remedicated and released.  She was supposed to be an outpatient, of course, but basically she went back to her previous life, including TAT.  I tried not to be cruel, but I did everything I could to separate from her—I stayed away from TAT stuff a lot—and Nancy started to latch onto another member of the group.  (I never understood why the guy, an EM and a little younger than Nancy, would get involved with her after all that had happened—none of this had been secret—but I figured it was none of my business.)  Then one evening, I came home from work and Nancy was waiting for me outside my BOQ with a bag of groceries.  It turned out that the bag was all stuff she’d liberated from home; she said she wanted to come up to my apartment so we could “taste things.”  I told her to go home and that I wasn’t going to let her in.  I was both scared and angry, and I didn’t want to get involved in this.  There was no lock on the outside door of the building, so Nancy followed me up to my apartment on the second floor, but I wouldn’t let her in.  I figured she’d go home soon, but she stayed outside my apartment, sitting on the corridor floor and talking to me through the closed door.  I stopped telling her to go and didn’t respond, hoping that she’d give up and go home.  I suppose it was stupid, but I’d never encountered anything like this and I had no idea what to do.  I don’t know why I didn’t just call her father, and I’m ashamed now that I didn’t.  I finally called him and he sent someone to bring her home or back to the hospital.

I can’t say I handled any of this well; I was all of 27 or so and had never met a crazy person before, so what did I know?  I know I was scared, though, and I was angry at Nancy’s parents because they never even hinted that there had been anything wrong until it all exploded more or less in my face.  Not only didn’t her father ever tell me anything about his daughter’s illness, he was a doctor and didn’t give me any instructions on how to handle situations once her condition was revealed.  This time, of course, Nancy stayed hospitalized for some time, but she stayed in Berlin and when she was released, she returned to TAT.  I thought that was a bad idea, since it seemed to me that this was the environment that either triggered her schizophrenia or exacerbated it.  Why she would be encouraged to go back into it was a mystery to me.  Nancy and I remained apart after this, though, so I don’t know what happened later.  She eventually went back to the States, I think, and, of course, I never had much to do with her father anymore so I was out of the loop.  Less than a year later, I left Berlin and the army.  It’s not one of my pleasanter life experiences—and, as I hinted, it repeated itself on a much smaller scale a few years later.  (Some guys are babe magnets?  I was a kook magnet.)

When I was visiting D.C. in April 2004, I went to “my” museum—the International Spy Museum (see “Spook Museum,” 25 March 2010).  Now, that was really a walk down memory lane.  I had expected something of a joke—all James Bond and Maxwell Smart or something—or a superficial whitewash, full of gimmicks and mock-ups.  It’s not.  It’s actually a serious museum—entertainment more than edification, to be sure, but not a joke and not all that superficial.  I mean, it’s cleaned up a bit for general consumption—the biggest group of visitors, at least when I was there, is teen and pre-teen boys—but it’s only romanticized a little, and it covers pretty much the whole business.  It was skewed toward the Cold War era when I visited, perhaps understandably; this was before the global terror campaign had really taken hold.  The museum also doesn’t show much of the philosophically nastier, morally compromising aspects of the field—as I’ve noted, we used to remind each other that what spies do is fundamentally illegal—but it’s pretty accurate in what it does show.  There were James Bond and the Avengers about—a replica of one of the Bond cars was on display—but for the most part, these were just what we used to call “eyewash”—dressing to keep things lively.  On the other hand, there was a mock-up of a car showing how several people could be hidden in it—just like the exfiltrators used to do.  The real exhibits are actual artifacts of spycraft (including an Enigma machine).  The museum is something of a rabbit warren inside and when we left one exhibit area and followed a corridor to another, we emerged into a space with a large sign on the opposite wall that read: “BERLIN – City of Spies”!  It was a little stage set—a café table, walls with maps of Berlin, photos of street scenes with Soviet soldiers, and things of that sort—all from the ‘60s.  That’s only a few years before my time there, and little had changed in appearance between then and my day.  Talk about déjà vu!!

The advertising slogan for Berlin tourism used to be “Berlin ist eine Reise wert”—Berlin is worth a trip.  Has it been?

[Well, that concludes my reminiscences about  Cold War Berlin and my days as a Military Intelligence special agent.  I hope you found it interesting.  I’ve published some of these recollections on ROT before and I may yet again.  Past posts concerning this period of my life include: “Der Illegale” (5 July 2009), “Berlin Station” (19 and 22 July 2009), “The Berlin Wall” (29 November 2009), “Short Takes III” (8 February 2012), and “Berlin Stories: Three SNAFU’s” (18 August 2012).  I also posted a prequel about my early days in Germany as a teenager in the ’60s, “An American Teen In Germany” (9 and 12 March 2013) and a commentary on the U.S. intelligence industry, “Top Secret America” (17 September 2010), based on my experience in a tiny segment of that field.]

Memoirs of a Desperate Actor

by Kirk Woodward

[My friend Kirk Woodward has come through with another terrific contribution to ROT.  This time, he’s dug into his own archives and brought out a series of entries from a journal from the early 1970s when Kirk was an amateur actor (and, coincidentally, an active-duty army officer).  Here Kirk’s recounting his “memoir of one of my most awful experiences in theater” while working on a performance on an army post, contending with rehearsals at a time before he gained any training or practical experience in acting technique.  Let’s look back along with Kirk.  ~Rick]

*  *  *  *

(I discussed on this blog on 27 October 2010 the process by which a wonderful acting teacher named Elizabeth Dillon helped me become at least an adequate actor [“Making A Movie”]. The following memoir, written day by day at the time the events occurred, shows me in an earlier state – with no acting technique at all and enough bad theatrical habits to fill a Betty Ford Center of the Arts. Fortunately, as Monty Python would say, “I got better.”  What happens in this memoir, though, can give an actor nightmares. You’ve been warned. Children: don’t try this at home! Or not this way. Time: the early 1970’s. Place: a US Army post.)

TUESDAY, 17 AUGUST

A week ago I tried out for a scene (a cutting, not the whole play) from Black Comedy [by Peter Shaffer, 1965, about a disastrous meet-the-parents evening when the power and the lights go out], to be done in September. The director, a soldier here, is young, serious, and nervous. I suspect he’s more serious than he is confident. He heard me and a girl read – off just one script – alone, in an office. I read badly – nervous, no sign of physical control. Voice dropping at ends of sentences, swallowing words. The girl who read with me gave a poised, “theatrical” reading. The director wrote some notes; mine said only “Physical,” I noticed. A shortage of actors; I was cast. Now, apprehension; what about my lack of vocal technique? What about my lack of physical technique? What else is there?

WEDNESDAY, 18 AUGUST

Rehearsal in the living room of Katina, a woman with some theatrical experience. I’m Brimsley; a nice-looking girl named Sue is Carol. The other two haven’t shown up yet. The director has a long thin face and blue eyes. When making a point he leans forward, staring earnestly.

He explains the set – standard living room – sketchily. He says, “The first time we’ll just read through. Next time I’ll start commenting on characterization. We’ll read through it about four times.” Then we begin to discuss rehearsal times; they’re necessarily a little vague, but we arrange some times and places, cordially.

We begin to read. On the second page he stops us and does something which turns out to be a pattern for the evening. He makes a comment on the scene, on how it should be characterized and paced. Then he reads the lines in question himself, asking, “Do you see? Understand?” looking earnestly. This is directed at Sue twice in the evening and at me many times. Sometimes he asks character questions. “How do you feel about Carol? Do you really love her?” “I don’t know,” I say, and we all laugh at the confusion between my “I” and the character’s. But I’m slightly pissed at being asked questions about a person that, so to speak, I just met. This time Katina (referred to sometimes as the assistant director by the director) asks the director if we’d read the whole play, and he sees that we haven’t. He arranges for us to read the whole play. But we keep doing detail work, trying to get the right line readings on the first night while sitting on the sofa, for scenes demanding interplay while moving about on a stage.

He says: “Remember this is a conversation. You’re talking to each other.” “The most important thing is to be convincing to the audience about your relation to each other. It’s just like being in this room, only it’s up there, on stage, in another world.” “This whole play depends on the pacing. Without pacing there wouldn’t be any comedy at all.” (To Sue: ) “Have fun with this scene. You’ve got to enjoy it.” He gives specific line readings – “put a pause there and then an ‘uh’ before you say the line.” I find myself doing the line the way he says to.

His interpretations of portions of the play are sound: ”He’s the richest man in the world! Think how you feel about that!” “You’re lying in your teeth. You’ve got to be more nervous.” My objection to that is that it comes too early – I don’t even know what I’m reading. On the other hand, I could be using my incipient-director point of view to cover my fear of what I’ll be able to do (or not do) when I do know the lines. Actors are such sensitive people. Katina says at one point, after both the director and I had read a speech: “The difference between your reading and Kirk’s is that you stress the verbs, he stresses the pronouns.” God’s truth. I often sound to myself like an imitator of Noel Coward.

At the end: “You’ll both be good. You’ve both got what it takes. You’ll both be very good. I may be pushing you hard right now, but it’s because we’ve got so little time [a dozen rehearsals]. I may do things in a way that’s a little unorthodox.”

Later: I read the whole play. (We’re doing a cutting.) I’d like our scene better if I hadn’t. Shaffer despises people. The ends of his plays find his characters on stage, broken and humiliated. Our scene must be light and fast and not dwell too much on any one thing.

THURSDAY, 19 AUGUST

Rehearsal in Sue’s living room. The director worked with her for an hour before I arrived. I didn’t notice any difference (except for the first speech she read, which was more punched and suburban-bitchy than the rest). He told her, “I see we’ll have some problems with your projection.” We read straight through the first section. He went back to a particular bit, trying to get me to project, and I hope I did justice to his criticism of my overall readings of passages. Basically, I was trying to give the humor and sense of nervousness by reading all the lines fast and tensely, as though about to become hysterical. Part of the reason for this, I think, is a need I feel to loosen up on stage in every way. This feeling comes out by my being louder.

The director had us stand up and read “as an exercise.” He gave us starting positions and then let us move. We made tiny, nervous steps – mostly facing each other, rustling our scripts and looking vaguely around. He stopped us and pointed out some ways characters would move – away on lines of confidence, sitting during emotional scenes, etc. So we started to read again and I moved on her line. He stopped me and said you never move on someone else’s line, and I said never? And he said never, and I got pissed and snapped at him about the difficulty of making up our own blocking as we went along. Then he had to say conciliatory things to calm me down.

The next time we read he gave us some simple blocking which worked all right and shaped the scene, in a primitive way. A better rehearsal than the first; he seemed fairly certain it’ll end up all right. We’re becoming more familiar with the text. . . . Perhaps it’s best to have a definite idea about how long rehearsals will last each night?

FRIDAY, 20 AUGUST

Rehearsal at Sue’s again. Everyone slightly tired. The director begins by urging us to “be very funny.” We read; I start slowly, with pauses between sentences of my speeches; Sue picks up that tempo, and we do a painful, mechanical reading of the first section. The director doesn’t stop us. Afterward I say how dull I thought it was. The director says not to worry, that it was an improvement over last night, that he knows we’re tired of sitting and reading. He’s learning about actors’ temperaments.

We do blindfold work. First we try to do a scene blindfolded, but we don’t know enough lines and it’s just stumbling around anyway. So we take turns watching each other work in the dark – crossing the room, becoming disoriented, trying to identify objects, opening doors, dialing phones, climbing steps. We do some practice walking as though in the dark, without blindfolds, and learn that without constant concentration we’re not convincing.

A fun evening. The director is exuberant, confident about prospects for the show. “I thought it would be much harder.” I think he may not have confronted yet how different a living room is from a stage; but that may hit him over the weekend. The director tells us we’ll be all right because we both care about the show. He tells me: “You know what you want, but you haven’t broken through. You haven’t broken the ice.”

MONDAY, 23 AUGUST

Rehearsal at Katina’s house. One other character, the Colonel, is due tonight for the first time. We chat a long time, led by Katina, on non-theatrical subjects. The director looks over the rehearsal schedule; he has a self-conscious nervous habit of raising topics disconnectedly. “Thursday? I don’t know” in the middle of a discussion of life in the Philippines. He sounds slightly world-weary.

Memorized lines are due tonight. Sue and I begin without scripts, improvising some fumbling blocking. Line memorizations not too bad, contact between characters nil. Halfway along we stop because the Colonel comes in. We never try that scene again, so we don’t know if we know our lines or not.

Reading begins again – the last part of the show, with the Colonel. He’s a large man with a marvelous big slightly-Southern voice.  He’ll be very funny without too much effort. He’s done a lot of acting and approaches this scene relaxed.

The director works on my readings in several passages. “I want you to be more nervous on the phone.” “We need a lot of giggling in this scene. You’re humoring him along, trying to smooth things over. You’re badly embarrassed.” Once he tells me to do a speech a way I’d done it last week and gotten criticized for it (I think). He does some line readings again as examples, but not too many. When making corrections, he doesn’t ask the actor what’s happening here, how his character feels; he tells. When he does ask, it’s so he can answer himself.

He tells me – several times – “You’re still too self-conscious… You need to break out”

Now more blindfold work, one blindfolded or two, the others watching; then without, being watched and critiqued. Once again I get mad; the first time I act as though I couldn’t see, it’s not good, so next time he says, solemnly, “Do you think you can do it this time? Remember what it was like to be in the dark. Remember,” etc. “I’ll try,” I mutter. I’m not concentrating.

“The most important thing about this show is its believability. You’ve got to convince the audience.”

“Be as creative as you can. The more creative you are, the funnier you’ll be, in this case.”

During the blindfold work he refers to us as “the Artists” – “let the Artist have room.”

The Colonel picks up the blindfold work quickly. Sue’s good, too. An issue which surfaces briefly tonight: if we do realistic mimes of people who can’t see, will we correspond to what the audience imagines people who can’t see are like?

“I feel better about the show than I did when we started tonight. It’ll be good.”

Some discussion of costumes. The director isn’t prepared, but his ideas sound good.

The rehearsal was called for 8:00; it’s over at 11:30. Needless.

TUESDAY, 24 AUGUST

Rehearsals in a mess-hall-sized room. Furniture arranged for the set, but compressed somewhat. We begin the scene – jerkily – grind to a quick halt. (The first section of the play is done in darkness in the play, so the audience couldn’t see much of it.) “I see I’ll have to give you blocking,” the director says. “I made a few notes on my script here.”

Well, about time! He improvises the blocking through the scene, and it’s good – instinctively, I think. Places I like: where the direction that a person is moving, or the fact that he’s sitting, gives the line a meaning, a feeling of appropriateness. That’s how it should be – as though the line had sprung from thee action rather than the other way around. He sketches the blocking for long stretches and then we do it immediately. For me it’s not easy to remember. “It’s mostly common sense.”

While we’re learning these movements, the director starts to get after me for the way I stand. “Don’t just cross over there and stand. It’s not as though your shoes are nailed to the floor.” This said, not sarcastically, but solemnly and a shade patronizing. “Turn on that line. … You’re too stiff. I want you to relax. Come over here on your line and stand like this” (does a pose, hands in front of his pants). Now I’m angry. All right, so I look stiff; and I really don’t know how my character moves or looks; in fact, I know embarrassingly little about what he thinks. What good is it to copy somebody else’s pose? What if my Brindsley doesn’t stand like that? How should the director get me to see what I should do? Not by saying, “Relax more,” which he repeats several times. So I’m pissed.

We go on with readings. In the romance scenes, he gets after both Sue and me about our obvious embarrassment and coldness, focused in two lines I just can’t say well: (after an embrace) “I like you in yellow. It brings out your hair” and (after a kiss) “Nobody in the world kisses like you.” Sue and I begin to break character to giggle or make remarks – she doesn’t do it much, just breaking up occasionally, and she wouldn’t do it at all if I didn’t. The director is amazingly patient: “You’re breaking character a lot, too. If you don’t stop that, pretty soon I’m going to start being very upset about it.” Back to work. I get stuck on one speech and feel so obviously nasty about it that, after comments (“All I hear is commas. It’s doing da-da-da-da-DA-da, da-da-da-da–DA-da, da-da-da-da-DA-da”), he lets me alone on it, telling me to take it home and work on it. By now my readings are all impersonal and flat. I feel ghastly. Four or five people – experienced theater people – are standing around, too, watching.

A break, because of something. Sue and I do our lines to each other, trying to see if we really know them. The third actor, the Colonel, comes in. We resume, starting now where the lights go out for the characters and on for the audience. The director talks about pacing – the nerve! Our blind bits are bad. When I have my speeches with the Colonel, I at least feel as though it’s fun, although I’m no more with the character than ever. The truth is, I don’t give Sue much to play against and she doesn’t give me much. Although the director corrects me five times to each time he corrects her, I really believe we are in about the same shape, only I’m loud and she’s soft. (He keeps talking about her projection.) The theater people have left. We do the last part twice and go home.

Oh – earlier, he told me, “Try different line readings.” I’d thought about some before rehearsal tonight anyway, so I try. When he doesn’t like one, though, he corrects it – it’s wrong – and I stop that pretty soon.

Well, awful. How do I get out of this? Who is my character? I can’t have another night like this; but rehearsals are over so late, there’s no time to work by myself; and I suspect I’ll have to pull myself out. Besides, getting up at 6:00 each day, I’m perpetually tired. No point in this.

WEDNESDAY, 25 AUGUST

Rehearsal in the same room as last night. The before-rehearsal atmosphere is, thank heaven, nonrecriminative. The director makes another glancing remark about breaking character (but I do it again several times anyway. Those errors stand for something!) Before rehearsal I’d read to myself trying out different line readings and characterizations; there’s still no Brindsley there, but I liked some of my ideas. Didn’t do five speeches before he stopped me, said it sounded lifeless, wanted the pace picked up. I objected – not now! – but Sue backed him up and I went along. Turned out he was probably right. He’s trying to get me to be fuller; trying to get a more confident character; trying to break several vocal habits of mine – rising and falling words within a sentence; breaks in a sentence or speech, stopping the flow; a tendency to start too low and stay there. How to be big and not just be loud? …

Went through the rest of that scene. Physically both of us – Sue and I – are dreadfully restrained. We did the scene again, blindfolded now, and the combination of having to listen to the other person’s speech, and not being conscious of how one is standing, helped enormously. I began to be able – just faintly - to hear how I sound. The director made me do several of my speeches much faster, in one breath, and bigger and more climactic.

Break. The Colonel was here. We did the scene with him blindfolded. Again, the director kept building me up, and did the same with Sue. Pretty good for an early rehearsal.

A visitor was there. “It got much better the twenty minutes I watched,” he said. “When do you do the show?” “The seventh,” the director said. “Of November?” “No, of September.” “Really?” said the guest.

I drove the director home. “You’ve got to be able to relax,” he said. “How do you get an actor to relax – as a director?” I asked him. “Oh, you do exercises, if you’ve got enough time. Touching and looking – there’s a whole course on that at some drama schools . . . .”

FRIDAY, 27 AUGUST

After one night off, rehearsal at the Colonel’s house. We did the whole thing through once (except for one whole section involving Sue and the fourth person, who’s recovering from a wisdom tooth operation and won’t be back until Monday). The director only stopped us at patently inadequate line readings. We did the thing with the lights roughly as they will be for the show – out and then on. Not too bad. Sue was up some, and I had more strength, although there were huge dead patches in my dialogue. We took a break and then did the play again. Between halves this time the director gave us a talk. It was down this time, he said, because we weren’t concentrating. Correct. We finished up – slightly ho-hum – and went home. The best atmosphere our rehearsals have had so far. After this weekend, rehearsal on the stage!

MONDAY, 30 AUGUST

On the stage indeed. First run-through slow, but Sue and I look at each other more. A lot of embarrassment in the affectionate scenes, as the director is quick to point out. He gets after Sue for her projection three or four times. Our Miss Furnival is here for the first time – a jolly gal who’s uninhibited and funny. We block the scenes with Miss F. for the first time. The director tells us every little movement, although he keeps urging us to create more as we see how. My walking-in-the-dark is bad. I watched the part I’m not in, sitting in the auditorium. It’s terribly unshaped. The actors move fairly well. We run through again completely, trying to keep the pace up. A shade better, but formless. Afterwards, the director says, “I have some exercises, but you’re too tired for them now. We’ll start with them tomorrow night.” So there!

One thing he does which upsets me is to give us notes which are actually a complete description of what acting is at its best. “I want you to listen to each other, and make your lines come off the preceding lines. Don’t stop acting while the other character is speaking. Don’t be tense on stage, but move just like your character . . . .”  “I know what’s wrong,” he said, “it’s Monday.”

TUESDAY, 31 AUGUST

Rehearsal cancelled.

WEDNESDAY, 1 SEPTEMBER

Rehearsal on stage. The technical things are starting. The director’s blocking, which he had to change a lot last night (“It’s like a first rehearsal,” the Colonel complained), got changed a lot more tonight. Move the bar upstage, put the piece of sculpture on the other side, move the coffee table out…  Sue and I did our first scene twice. It went all right; surprisingly, she seemed rattled about something and bobbled many of her lines. The director said we did all right at first and then dropped off. “Concentration!”  That definitely is the key. Then the scene with Miss F., who didn’t entirely know her lines yet (only her second night) and the Colonel. Many missed lines, and raggedy movement. Timing ’way off. We did the whole scene again with blindfolds on; partly all right; I nearly walked off the stage, and Miss  F. and Sue broke up a lot.

An exercise with just Sue and me: standing with eyes closed, facing each other, imagine the end of the world has come, you’ve been living for months thinking you were the only person in the world and now you find this other person. Embrace. We did – very cold. Now, with just hands touching, eyes closed – show sorrow. Fear. Anger. Loneliness. Happiness. Now embrace again. Better, but still cold. I was astonished at how inexpressive our hands were. Then we did the sitting-on-the-couch scene again. We seemed friendlier, this time, but the line readings weren’t much better.

TUESDAY, 2 SEPTEMBER

First a run-through of the scene in the dark with Sue. Good pacing until halfway through, where it starts breathing hard. The director gives different readings on speeches – a longer pause to indicate the kiss, for example. Another run-through. To myself I sound somewhat impersonal, and my words sound unnatural – exaggerated consonants, etc. Now a practice of the scenes in the light. It starts slowly, as the director has us make sure we know our lines. A new piece of business is invented at Miss F.’s entrance. It’s funny but could be funnier. Why isn’t it funnier? I think because the director is embarrassed at doing exploratory work at this late stage of rehearsals . . . . I have no idea what’s funny to see. I have a spectacular fall over a phone wire; it knocks me out – really – but is it funny? Does it look staged?

The scene in the light is muddy. Miss F.’s tempo is good; Sue’s is erratic – the Colonel’s – surprisingly – very slow.

Then we do something I’ve always wanted to do – a speed rehearsal, where all lines and business are done at three times the normal speed. It’s not always appropriate, but when it is, it builds confidence and it relaxes. It also breaks everybody up. The director has to keep shouting, “Don’t break character!” We did anyway. Miss F.’s not secure in her lines yet.

Then a complete run-through. Pace better; still massive dull or amateurish spots. Dunno about the comic business.

In the earlier run-through, I watched while the director gave Sue instructions on her readings for specific lines, acting out whole pieces of script. She looked on passively.

WEDNESDAY, 3 SEPTEMBER

Last rehearsal before dress rehearsal. A relaxed mood, though Sue seems somber. The director urges us to be “as funny as you can, relax, have a lot of fun with the show.” We run it through with lights on the whole time. Same situation with pace as before. The director gets after us for looking at objects while we’re in the “dark.” I feel more relaxed not wearing my glasses.

Another speed rehearsal. Atmosphere among the group generally jolly now. Another complete run-through, this time better. I bobble some lines, though. The show has “jelled” as much as it’s going to. Later the director tells me I did well the second time through. I felt more aware at odd moments on the stage.

MONDAY, 6 SEPTEMBER

Dress rehearsal. The acts preceding us are: three song-and-dance numbers from Cabaret and George M; and a mime, wonderful, done by somebody who studied under somebody who studied under Marceau. We have makeup and costumes for the first time and lights for the second time. In the dressing room beforehand, a run rough of lines; the director doesn’t listen to it, and it’s not concentrated on as much as it should be. On stage, we take our places and go into the play without preamble. I sound choppy to myself. Sue misses a line and isn’t as energetic as she was last time – I think she’s nervous. I feel as though I could break through something somehow, but I can’t. A laugh from the audience (of two) somewhere – encouraging. The pacing of the part after I leave the stage is good, but the spirit isn’t. Last section seems very slow.

Notes from the director: “Sue, we need more whininess. All I saw was Sue Bailey up there. Brindsley: more exasperation in your phone conversation with the power company. Miss Furnival: all your movements need to be more exaggerated. . . . As a whole it was really down tonight, I won’t try to disguise that.” He repeats that idea several times – he’s depressed. Finally Miss F. exclaims, “It’ll be better with an audience!” and that shuts down the notes-session.

Later, the director tells me my putting down the phone in the dark needs to be more exaggerated – “the way you’re doing it, it could be in the light.” Also, he wants to work with me and the Colonel tomorrow night on the last section – “It may feel a lot better for you if it goes real fast.” (As it turned out, we didn’t do that work.)

He’s glum, walking slowly from person to person, listening moodily and not saying anything. This show means a lot to him – he told me the other day, “It’s the first time the staff will be seeing what I can do.”

TUESDAY, 7 SEPTEMBER

Performance night. The director has us arrive at 6:30; Miss F. and I are early. After makeup, Sue and I are instructed to wait in the office (the occasion for the show is an open house where people are shown through the theater from 7:30 through 8:30). I’m not nervous, just curious. Sue is nervous. We go to the stage at 8:25. Bad backstage manners on my part: I make noise walking around. Others do, too; one flushes a toilet. In front of the curtain, three welcoming speeches. The two acts preceding us seem to go well; a warm audience (about 75?). Our set is to be set up with the curtain open. We cast members had been told other people would do the job, but we look around and there are no other people. (The group’s President: “Now you can see, the actors are setting their own set . . . . You don’t often see that . . . .”)

I had tried concentrating and loosening up my face in the dark backstage. Now in performance, the first scene, in the dark, goes well. With the lights on, we go all right until a late cue for the telephone to ring – always an embarrassing kind of pause. Then Sue forgets, “Perhaps we can call Mr. Bamburger” or whatever the line is. Laughs from the audience at the two women groping for each other in the dark, and for my fall. The scene between the two women starts well, then falls apart, the catalyst for the collapse being a couple of slow cues. The Colonel doesn’t strike the audience as hilarious – are they beginning to become caught up in the plot? I don’t know. Cues very slow. The Colonel bobbles a line (about the Buddha) he’d always gotten right before. I didn’t realize before tonight that he’s never felt as though he were really into the show. The last part of the show, which I’m in, seems to me to go all right, but gets small laughs. (Recently I’d wondered whether the way I did it was funny.) Curtain call – one – never rehearsed before; clumsy, of course. Applause.

Offstage, some praise. Miss F. is satisfied. Sue – finished with it. The colonel uncomfortable over some standard of his own. I try to discuss the performance with one of the staff members but sound so silly, even to myself, that I give it up as a bad job. Later I ask the director, “What did you think of the job you did?” “I was satisfied, that’s all I want to say.” “What did you think you did well?” “I couldn’t say.” “– bad?” “I couldn’t say that either.” He continues briefly: “I learned to know some people. When I came here I hardly knew anybody. I didn’t know what kind of actors to expect on an Army post. I’ve learned some things . . . .”

[When I read Kirk’s journal entries, I remarked to him that this “really is an ‘Actor's Nightmare #2’—#1 always being appearing on stage in the play you don't know, of course.”  Anyone who’s ever done any acting—school plays, amateur performances, professional productions—has experiences like this in one way or another!  My own version of this kind of experience goes all the way back to second grade—and I won’t tell that story now: it’s still too embarrassing to share!  (I did recount some experiences—both horrific and amusing—in “Short Takes: Theater War Stories,” 6 December 2010.)]