Showman/Shaman

We opened last night. It’s a word that Miller uses in a Quaker fashion in the play: “I want to open myself!” screams Abigail when begins to “confess” to seeing the devil. “Proctor, let you open with me now” I say to him in 2.1. The Quakers speak of openings a great deal, as a kind of spiritual peeling open, when God rushes in and revelation abounds.

Someone in the Crucible cast has approached me to talk about recovery from alcoholism. Last night I gave him a manual of sorts, wrapped in brown paper, as an opening night gift. Is it a sign that, in good Quaker fashion, I am letting my life speak? Our opening went well. I was a bit too careful through some sections, marking it so as to be sure I didn’t screw anything up. Susan has taken young Claire under her wing, and is teaching her how to warm up before each show. I am reminded of me and Mark in Jason. I had an interesting talk about crying with Julianna who plays Abigail. She is fresh in the revelation that it’s okay not to cry, and that we make way too big a deal about “drying up”. I have gone through a great journey with this. My inability to cry in a scene I selected to work on from The Seagull sent me into therapy in drama school.

I find myself crying occasionally at the end of the courtroom scene, when utter chaos has broken out, and the girls led by Abigail have succeeded in using hysteria to hijack the proceedings. Here was my small opening the other night: my reaction to this moment is somehow connected to a desperate woman I never knew, my grandmother Lillian Lehman Lloyd. She was my father’s mother, and was a deeply frustrated actress and, though there was no language for such a diagnosis at the time, she was also probably manic depressive at least, bi-polar at worst. Beginning when my father was in high school, she began to behave self-destructively and attempted suicide several times, finally succeeding while my father and mother were on their honeymoon. She put all of her dramatic aspiration into my Dad, who while not an actor, nevertheless translated her desires into a deep interest in stage management and production. I have always felt that my life as an actor is in some mysterious, D.N.A. kind of way connected to her thwarted dreams. As the girls whip around the courtroom in screaming possession, I feel Lillian’s insanity, born of her crushed creativity the world had no home for in the mid twentieth century.

I find myself crying more regularly at the end of the play, usually prompted by Proctor yelling “Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life!” It is a moment of great pathos which Chris delivers painfully. As in Quaker meeting, I am moved not only by Chris’s ministry, but also by my being surrounded by those I love: Ceal as Rebecca Nurse and of course Susan as Elizabeth, tears dripping down their faces. I am responding as much to the collective feeling around me as I am to anything I may be generating inside. My friends open me up and God rushes in.

Peering out into the audience through my tears last night, I noticed the grey hairs filling the first several rows of the theatre. The thought flitted through my mind: it looks like a Quaker meeting, all those grey hairs. The two gatherings I love the most, the theatre and meeting for worship, are populated mostly by the elderly. I must do something about that.

We have our first audience tonight, and my wig will finally arrive. It has been waylaid in some currier purgatory in Baltimore, so I have been one of two crew-cut men in a cast of Puritan long hair. I’m finally digging myself out of the grip of this dreadful cold I have had for a week, and which has spread through the cast. Mark, who plays Cheever and was the Dame in the Panto, listened to the hacking coughs from the dressing rooms and shouted “Jesus! We should do Long Day’s Journey while we’ve got the plague! It sounds like a TB ward back here!” Graham, who plays Danforth, has been hit hard by it. He and I have had an intense interaction, as we and David try to untangle the degree of animosity that develops between Hale and Danforth. David feels that making it too personal diminishes the play, making it somehow about a fight between two men. Playing the lines Miller gives Hale in the last scene, and experiencing the near contempt with which Hale is treated in the courtroom in the previous scene, I have a very hard time seeing it as anything but personal. Add to this the reality that Hale feels he is directly responsible for the deaths of people he knows are innocent, and it makes for a high-octane encounter.

You see, I think Miller meant to condemn Danforth, and meant to give Hale some lines of righteous indignation. But in an effort to “complicate” things, David is trying strenuously to work against Danforth being the “bad guy”. But he is the fucking bad guy, I want to shout. Because of him and his attachment to his own authority and the rigid principles it rests on, good people are being murdered! Of course, Graham doesn’t see it that way, nor should he, nor would I playing him. So we have two, smart, stubborn, forceful actors running full tilt at each other. Then it occurs to me that Danforth resembles the Full Professor I ranted about in these pages previously: full of himself and feeding his own ego by obliterating any point of view but his own. No wonder I want to leap at him in the jail. The smug asshole denied me tenure.

Graham is a good enough actor to meet me in that weird nether world actors work in sometimes, in which the fight on stage colors the relationship off stage. We both bring that much of ourselves to what we do. I worry that it’s affecting our friendship. We have taken to making choices on stage that we both know will incense the other – Graham apologized recently for imitating me to my face in the courtroom scene, and then seeing the blind fury pass like a shadow across my countenance. I delight in excoriating him in the jail and making him wait as I squeeze every bit of derision I can out some choice words. I tried once, in response to a note from David, to go for something more spiritual, more Christ-like, but then got the note that it was playing too slow, and when pace is put back into it, it becomes antagonistic again. We have been looking for the proper balance since we began working on it nearly a month ago. Recently, David has counseled me to invest more in Hale’s heart, in his genuine desire to help people, in his intuitive sense of the character of others. This is where we began, I think, but sometimes rehearsal is a journey with its own mysteries, ones we can’t divine until three weeks into the run.

David has spent a lot of time directing me with big ideas, ones that I have engaged in. But sometimes I wonder: is it good directing to have these kinds of soul-searching conversations with actors about their characters. Many directors have been taught not to “ask for results”, like “make it angrier/softer/more grief-stricken/more heart-felt”. But sometimes this is all the actor wants. David has a wonderful phrase, that goes something like “here’s what I’m looking for, you can organize it any way you like”. I love that – it makes his goals clear and respects the inner territory of the actor. To me it is the essence of the actor/director relationship: here’s what I’m looking for, you organize it any way you want. It needs clear and articulate directors and skillful, flexible actors to make it work.

I have had a lot of time to witness the way actors work. This is a sizable cast, and I have been struck by how different our methods, habits and processes are from each other. Basically, I discern two processes: the stop and go process, and the barge ahead process. I am of the latter. Some of us are inveterate cut-ups, and there is a hallowed place for fooling around in rehearsal. And yet, I have felt frustrated by the way such behavior wastes time, an especially sharp pain for me given the way I am missing my kids and all the other things I cannot get to in my life. Some actors are like creative surgeons, and proceed at a slow and thoughtful pace, pausing a great deal to consider the next move, asking the director a question which leads to million others. Here too, I grow impatient. And then I began to see in my reactions to others my own way: I am drawn to live in the moments uninterrupted, and explore in great swaths, before pausing to reflect on what has just transpired. I find it very hard to explore half-way.¬ I need to be in the thing as fully as I can. I feel my way through moments, as opposed to think my way through them, and I need to experience the kind of collective energy Mary Warren speaks of in order to sort it out creatively. I have also become aware of what a liability my impatience is, although I am getting better at masking it in rehearsal, so that I don’t groan and roll my eyes quite as much when something grinds to a halt.

I have been startled by Susan’s extraordinary work as Elizabeth. From the very beginning, she cannot play certain scenes and moments without the tears streaming down her face. She confided that she feels embarrassed by this, and I told her she has gift that many actors would give their eye-teeth for. She is like a solar flare when her feelings erupt out of her, and I have watched other actors shrink away from her in intimidation, or drop out of the scene because the emotion she brings to it is too much for them handle. It is one of the play’s great strengths that, in the midst of this historical drama set the 17th century, there is this strikingly modern marital relationship. In an exquisite bit of casting, Susan is working opposite the actor who just played her comic love interest in the Panto – Chris. Chris works very technically at first and is a born jester, but he brings a odd darkness to Proctor. Susan works more like me: instinctually, feeling her way through things and wanting to work uninterrupted. They have been a study in contrasts in rehearsal, but are making beautiful music together anyway.

Being in this play with Susan has been wonderful for us. Despite the financial uncertainty in our lives, we have returned to the life we were living when we first fell in love: two local actors making a go of it. The difference is that now, we have two kids, two cars and a mortgage. But traveling to the theatre together, talking about the play, about moments or people that frustrate us, all of it has been fulfilling. And sharing the stage and a couple of wonderful scenes together has been mutually inspiring. It’s remarkable how little I feel of my deep connection to her when I am Hale and she Elizabeth. It’s not that I ever “forget” I’m looking at my wife, but rather that Elizabeth Proctor and John Hale are so much more interesting then and there. She worried once about how I would feel watching her and Chris kiss. But far from feeling jealous, I remember a moment when they weren’t kissing and I thought they should have been. I almost shouted “Kiss her, you big dolt!”

The mentoring continues. Susan was intentionally put next to a young actress in the women’s dressing room to be a calming influence. Kristy wants to have dinner with me and Susan, and find out “how we do it”. It reminds me of Jenny saying she wants to be like me. The girls in the play have all bonded, and within this young group there is kind sisterhood occurring, in which older ones like Kristy frequently embrace the littler ones like Claire, who at 14 is playing Betty Parris. All of this multi-generational leading and following has made me feel the ancient form of the family companies, like the commedia companies of 16th century Italy. It’s no wonder so many actors make the theatre their surrogate family. For Citizen Actors who stay in one place, the bonds between artists are almost as deep (and depending on one’s family of origin, sometimes deeper).

The Crucible is also a play about acting. As the girls refine their performance of possession, we witness the horror of a community which cannot distance itself from what it sees, a community which has no category for great acting (“They’re all marvelous pretenders” Proctor says of the girls), a community which, perhaps, believes too blindly. In the first scene of the second act, there is a sequence in which Mary Warren is asked to prove she has been faking these routines in the court by pretending to feint. “Feint. Feint!” Rev. Parris commands her.

MARY: I . . . cannot feint now sir.
PROCTOR: Can you not pretend it?
MARY: I . . . I have no sense of it now, I . . .
DANFORTH: Why? What is lacking now?
MARY: I cannot tell sir, I . . .
DANFORTH: Might it be that we have no afflicting spirits loose, but in the court there were some?
MARY I never saw no spirits.
PARRIS: Then see no spirits now, and prove to us that you can feint by your own will, as you claim.
MARY (searches for the emotion of it): I . . . cannot do it.
PARRIS: Then you will confess, will you not? Attacking spirits made you feint!
MARY: No, sir, I . . .
PARRIS: Your Excellency, this is a trick to blind the court.
MARY: It’s not a trick! I . . . I used to feint because . . . I . . . I thought I saw spirits.
DANFORTH: Thought you saw them!
HATHORNE: How could you think you saw them unless you saw them?
MARY: I . . .I cannot tell how, but I did. I . . . heard the other girls screaming, and you Your Honor, you seemed to believe them and I . . . it were only sport in the beginning sir, but then he whole world cried spirits, spirits and I . . . I promise you, Mr. Danforth, I only thought I saw them but I did not.

Here is on of the most simple an eloquent descriptions of what happens during moments of powerful performance that I have ever read. I love the way it acknowledges the role the belief of the observers has in the geometric progression of force with which the thing proceeds. Miller reveals himself as a consummate student of the actor’s process. Absent any category for what the girls do, it is simple for the Puritans to ascribe the immense power the girls unleash to demonic forces. This is an old story for actors. Religious types through history and across cultures have condemned actors and acting out of the fear they feel in the face of it when it is done with courage and commitment, as the girls do it in The Crucible.

I am also brought to mind of the maenads, Dionysus’s maiden revelers who worked themselves into ecstatic trances in worship of the theatre God. The results of those adventures are documented in Euripides’s The Bacchae. It seems to me, Miller is also commenting on the furious energy of repressed female sexuality, released into a world which deeply fears it.