Imaginary Invalid

Invalid has come and gone, I have begun teaching at UArts, co-teaching at Arcadia and running “The Barbara Lewis Acting Teacher’s Workshop” at the Wilma Theatre. Susan has begun rehearsing this year’s panto, Robin Hood, after having taken three trips up to Chatham to see her Dad during the run of Invalid. He is holding on in his new, fragile plateau, ensconced in his living room with his books, music and TV. He told Sooz he was going to try and make to Christmas, and then “take it from there”. People’s Light has taken the unusual step of having MB understudy Sooz, a sign that we all understand how unpredictable Dick’s future is.

Invalid was a romp, and though it didn’t get great notices we delivered the laughs at all the right places. t was an exhausting journey for me, being a combination of physical exertion and psychic focus, made all the more challenging by the fact that I smoked throughout the entire run. This I blame partially on Jud, who became my “smoking buddy”, and MB, who also smoked through the run. We would gather for a nightly cig outside the theatre after the shows, they sipping beers or whiskey, me sipping diet root beer. What a shitty example I am, I thought, puffing away, I hope none of my students surprise me after show.

Apparently, I stole the show. This is what trickled back to me through friends who paid me lavish compliments about Thomas and Louise. Louise frequently got a hand at the end of one or both her short scenes in act II, and I was astonished to occasionally receive a hand at the end of Thomas’s absurd speech after his entrance in act I.

I fell in love with Thomas, who adored playing with his red string, and was gleefully happy to hear the “Insolent Modern Opera” Jud and Joey performed hilariously towards the end of act 1. Blanka paid me the compliment I was looking for when she told me that she had to look in the program to figure out who was playing him. Louise was an exercise in pure comic precision and commitment. I was especially proud of my first two minutes on stage as Louise: I entered skipping rope, delivered my first line, turned around while skipping and doubled back to Steve, sat and executed a sequence of comic takes with him with lines while tying a noose out of the skipping rope hidden from the audience’s view, then displayed the noose on a punch line. I am clear that I was able to accomplish this in part because Lillian was demanding yet affirming, and because she made me and Steve drill it backwards and forwards.

Of course, I didn’t steal the show. But I got some wonderful feedback. And my success in Invalid was also connected to something that transpired with Fava. I had internalized something about the nature of comedy that both rooted and propelled me. I wish I could put into words what it was.

I was talking to Deb about a compliment paid to me recently, and acknowledged that something tectonic has shifted since being denied tenure.

“What do you think that was?” she asked.

“I think I’ve given myself permission” I replied.

“To do . . . ?”

“To do whatever I want.”

An enduring image from Imaginary Invalid is from the finale, when Steve as Argan puts the Pantalone mask on. This was Lillian’s invention, an attempt to link Argan finally with his company of actors (us behind him in faux commedia masks), and also with the commedia tradition which gave birth to the character Argan through Pantalone. It muddied the whole “Argan becomes a doctor” joke a bit, but never mind. Steve put the mask on and spoke a couplet, which ended with the words, “May my feelings last for centuries”. And several times I was overwhelmed with the sense that Moliere himself was with us onstage: Moliere, the young French actor brought up in the remnants of the commedia tradition, transplanted in the 17th century Parisian suburbs; Moliere, who was desperately ill when he wrote his last play, this comedy about a hypochondriac; Moliere, who died hours after his fourth performance of Argan. And there was Steve, a chain smoker, associate artistic director of our company, donning the Pantalone mask in Moliere’s play, the audience’s laughter still ringing off the walls. And a little prayer filled my heart: yes, may your feelings last for centuries, they already have and they will continue, feelings that lift and lighten a darkened world.

And this: around my neck now is small silver cross which I found at my dressing room table when I arrived there at the beginning of tech. I pinned it up above my mirror so it was obvious and visible to anyone who might have come looking for it. But no one did. So at the last performance I knew it was for me. It hangs around my neck on a silver chain next to another spiritual symbol: a small triangle inside a circle, the symbol of The Rooms.

The cross is the third spiritual symbol I have acquired through acting. The first was during my first show in Philadelphia – Travesties directed by Blanka. Sitting on stage as Lenin, I opened a prop book and a prayer card with the Blessed Virgin bathed in golden light dropped in my lap. As Lenin, I engaged in some Soviet heresy: I surreptitiously stuck it in my jacket pocket and took it home. Six years later, on opening night of Picasso at the Lapin Agile at the Arden Theatre, a cast member gave me a small portrait of Jesus in a little oval, gold metal frame. This was a joke, you see, because I played the Sagot the art dealer, who has a comic monologue about how he can never sell pictures of Jesus because they creep people out. This little Jesus, who shyly pulls open his gown to reveal a passionate heart on fire, sits on the bookcase next to my bed now. The prayer card has been lost. But six years after I acquired the portrait, I acquired the cross.

Tech is tense. Lillian has invented an elaborate comic dumb show as a prologue, in which we make the obligatory cell phone announcement, sponsor thanks and subscription beg entirely without words. She keeps using “commedia” as a stylistic guide: “Do the commedia bow!”, “Can you make the dance more commedia?” And I hear the lusty roar of Antonio Fava from across the ocean: “There is no such thiiiing!” He has made me a commedia purist, and I have been cringing a bit as I execute what I consider faux commedia, precisely the kind of generalized performance that will remind American audiences of something that seems vaguely European and “classical”, but actually refers to nothing specific. Still, what Lillian has invented is energetic, colorful and fun and a great improvement over the monotonous announcements that precede all plays in the regions these days. The problem is that it’s very complicated and we only began rehearsing it when we got to tech, and nobody on the technical staff had a clue it was coming. Consequently, this prologue which, when executed well, should last barely five minutes, has eaten up large swaths of time the tech staff thought we would be using for the bulk of the play. And we haven’t added costumes yet.

Lillian also gave me a big adjustment late in the game for Thomas, the lummox suitor. I had developed a series of comic gestures to over-illustrate these two speeches Thomas gives when he arrives, which are clearly meant to sound like something he learned from a manual. I got hoots of laughter throughout rehearsal with these speeches, and was proud of my comic invention. “Try it without the gestures” said Lillian to me abruptly on the second day of tech. You can’t be serious I thought, but bit my tongue. So I did, and the speeches fell over like blocks of granite. “So, add back in only the gestures which are the really good ones” she said later. Arg.

But I know she’s right. The speeches had become about my little comic inventions, and Thomas has to be plausibly human as well as a nearly retarded clown. He is also someone who is fond of “quoting the ancients”, so it’s important that we hear him deliver these speeches, deliver them badly, but intelligibly. So I employed some comic pruning late in the game and reminded myself of The Four Fold Way: be open to outcome, not attached to outcome. I am now wearing fake teeth which are a combination of the dentist’s and Griffen’s. I have glued Griffen’s on the piece the dentist made for me, so they read from the audience. They are appropriately ghastly, and don’t fall out of my mouth.

I have been reflecting on my own need to be included: in plays, in discussions, in meetings. I have seen that the drama of my life has influenced the drama of my art, and I believe this is true of all artists. Our lives and histories shape us, and the designs we make will always bear some hint of the original mold. Part of my essential shape is a deep fear of being forgotten, abandoned, left out, overlooked. This makes me drawn to inclusion, and to seek ways to make sure I am noticed.

It’s the Tuesday before tech week, and we’ve had our first taste of the “bad cop”. I’ve been noticing the way Lillian lavishes praise on her actors. She’s been thoroughly “good cop”. With high-risk comedy like this it’s important that actors feel supported and affirmed. “It was brilliant!” or “You’re a genius!” go a long way towards helping an actor commit to a scary choice, and go even further. It’s not that it’s phony either. I think she is genuinely enthusiastic about the works she’s seeing us do. But she’s experienced, and she knows that it’s a way to cement the choices she thinks are working.

She has developed an unusually overt mother/son relationship with Jud, the young guest actor playing Cleante. They’ve worked together several times, and watching his comic gifts, it’s clear to see why. But it’s their relationship off-script that fascinates me. Lillian can be intimidating, but Jud teases her and she teases him back in away that softens the atmosphere in the room. In a way, their relationship offers a template for how best to work with her: playful, brave and intimate. It’s a perfect example of the “family paradigm” I describe in The Actor’s Way at play. Jud sings a comic operetta in the play, and I watched her softly lecture him during a break about how good his voice is, what a fool he is for not getting singing lessons and how far he’d go if he did.

But today after a run, the bad cop scolded us. She said we had taken a step backwards from the run last Saturday, but I couldn’t see any great difference, and neither could the other actors I checked in with. She seemed to think we were all dropping a lot of lines and made a crack about not caring how busy the rest of our lives were “with whatever else you’re doing, the kids or whatever. Make adjustments in your life to learn the lines so you can be in a play!” That stung, me being the only actor in the room with kids at home. But I bit my tongue. I know my lines and I sensed there was something else going on with her. Today was my first run with my dentist-created fake teeth, which fit great but aren’t nasty enough. No one beyond the fifth row will notice there’s anything particularly wrong with them. Lillian was peeved, and outraged that they cost $200. “I had a dentist in Berkeley make a set for $15!” I thought, how many years ago was that, and anyway, it was Berkeley. Maybe he wasn’t really a dentist, maybe he was just a guy with some good drugs who liked to mess around with teeth.

But the scolding continued. And we sat and took it. And I realized that I had been through this before. Something tends to happen to directors the week before tech which makes the bad cop come out. Part of it is dealing with the “sag” that Lillian warned us about, which is so obvious in comedy. None of it is particularly funny anymore, and she sensed it and it freaked her out. Not that it isn’t funny. It’s just that we’ve seen the bits a hundred times now. I think this probably did make us droop a bit as an ensemble, so the scold had its just cause.

But I’ve noticed that directors will take the cast down a notch or two before tech, in order to prepare for the inevitable lift into tech and previews. The scold gives us something to refer back to later: “look at how far you’ve come!” It’s also a way to galvanize attention in a moment in rehearsal when attention can slip quietly out the door like a cat. There’s no doubt that she got our attention, and no doubt that each of us squirmed a bit, and thought, is she talking about me? Did I truly suck just now? The scold raises hackles in an effective way, and makes actors acquire an “I’ll show her” determination which can really send a production into a new plane.

An hour after the scold, we were back to jokes, laughter and shouts of “brilliant!”. There was great relief, and I thought to myself, let’s keep it up here so we don’t get scolded again. Good directors are master manipulators, and that sounds like a horrible thing to say, but I mean it with the utmost respect. What else do you call it when you’re trying to get a room full of artists to do it the way think it should be done? When I am convinced you admire my skills, respect me as an artist and are an artist yourself, manipulate me for all I’m worth baby.

Lillian is also adept at seeing and pointing out her own mistakes. She will often begin a critical note with “It’s probably my fault darling, but . . .” She will axe routines she was drilling the day before when she sees that it’s getting in the way. And she accepts suggestions well. I apologized before offering a point of view on a scene I’m not in and she leapt in, “Don’t apologize. The play is everybody’s business. Actors are artists. I leave my ego for other things. The whole play is your business and my business. We’re in this together.”

What a love/hate relationship we have the audience. Lillian began a rehearsal recently by talking about “the kelp”.

“The what?” I said.

“You know – in the audience, “ and she made the seaweed waving under water gesture, both arms extended over head, swaying softly from side to side. And yet, all we are doing, we are doing for the kelp.

Griffen has again been the source of an important costume piece. First it was Inos’s hair, and now it is Thomas’s teeth. Thomas, the dolt Argan wants his daughter to marry, needs to have an instantly comic effect. It should be clear that this is a match made in hell for Angelique. So I have been experimenting with an over-bite (think of the Monty Python “Twit Of The Year” sketch). But Lillian pointed out that without anyone else screwing up their faces like that it make me look like an actor doing a gag. “If you can find some fake teeth, then fine” she said. So, after rummaging around in the toy bins downstairs, I came across some gag teeth Griff had received as a stocking stuffer a couple of Christmases ago. When I tried them in rehearsal, we could hardly get a line out, people were laughing so much. So now I’m going to my dentist to be fitted for a well-made set of ghastly teeth. But Griff’s are in use in rehearsal, stuck to my teeth with chewing gum.

Lillian understands the “mechanical” quality of rehearsing comedy, what Fava might call the “scientific” nature of it. The modern term is formulaic, and it is usually pejorative but it shouldn’t be. She drills us in the routines we invent that she likes. It feels like rehearsing a dance, or learning a football play. It can drive some actors crazy, but I enjoy it. I love digging into the precision of a moment, breaking it down into its component parts and really learning it. In the ethereal world of acting – so dominated by realism - it feels solid and concrete to me. It’s an aspect of my art I can hang onto.

And it helps that so far, what I’m doing has been met with laugher. After going through a series of voices, looking for Thomas, Lillian smiled at me and said, “You’re one of those fearless actors, aren’t you Benjamin?” How is a person supposed to respond to that? I mumbled something and stared at my feet. But it’s clear that – so far – she and I are on the same wave-length. To some extent, Lillian’s right. I have the most over the top roles to play, and the task with roles like these is to go as far out on a comic limb as you can and still be in the world of the play. There is huge courage in it, but I don’t feel it as such. It feels like joyful release to me, a wonderful emptying of my perverse humor, and my fear is greatly tempered by working in a room full of people who love me.

Lillian is all about what I call “robust collaboration”. “Don’t get fragile on me” she said during a trying note session. What she meant is, bring me your objections, your questions, your ideas, but don’t wilt, because it’s hard work what we’re up to. Comedy like this hangs us up because of our need to understand what we’re doing before we do it. But this is impossible. Comedy brings home the reality that we only make worthwhile discoveries in the playing of it, swinging further out on the limb and knowing that when it snaps (which it does frequently in rehearsal), we will drop on to something forgiving, at least we will in a rehearsal guided by a good director. This need to know before doing is related to the pernicious effects of judgment, in that this need is driven by our obsession with the “good” or “right” choice. But it is in our willingness to be “bad” and “wrong” that our comic genius lies. When we throw off the constraints of judgment, we begin to manifest the quality that Lillian calls “fearlessness”, and we open ourselves up to choices which may be transgressive, eccentric, impolite, obscene and very, very funny.

I was taught a pedagogical sequence some time ago that I have thought of rehearsing Invalid. It describes how we learn. We go from unconscious incompetence, to conscious incompetence, to conscious competence, to unconscious competence. In realism, we can hide our incompetence, since mostly what we are doing is behaving like ourselves. So our mistakes are camouflaged. But our incompetence is on full display in comedy, in which the distance between my choice and the laugh is sometimes huge when I start, but my task is to close it up in rehearsal. “Lear is not hard compared to this” says Lillian.

The formulaic aspect of comedy is intentional in commedia dell’Arte. Fava would say, the plots are all the same, the set-ups don’t change very much, everyone knows what’s coming. This is why it was so easy for Moliere to take commedia and adapt it. Once you’ve seen a few commedia plays, you get it. There is a critical culture which regards formulaic comedies as bad plays – but they’re not. They are plays which rely on other theatrical virtues besides great writing in order to succeed. They rely on the virtues of the fearless comic actor: boundless energy, physical and vocal expressiveness, comic ingenuity, skilful collaboration and great audience sensitivity. Fava regards the dominance of the written play as the end of the pre-eminence of the comic actor in the commedia tradition, who, he writes, would regard memorizing lines as akin to lip-synching pop songs.

And in keeping with the commedia tradition, we are playing fast and loose with the Invalid script. At the read-through, James told us not to be precious with his lines. So we have been changing them, adding new ones, cutting things, all based on the virtues of the comic actor. When the actor invents something funny while rehearsing, Lillian usually keeps it. “We may throw it out later, but let’s hold on to it now”.

I have left Susan and the kids in Chatham and am back home alone to begin rehearsing The Imaginary Invalid at People's Light. Being alone is very tricky for me. I hate it. Lots of old buttons get pushed and it’s just me and my shadow. I am working very consciously to make affirming choices. It’s like my friend Jack said in The Rooms on the Cape: “I don’t love no one inna wohld mowah den me. An if you awl felt a same way, theyad be no mowah whoa-ah.” So I’m trying to love myself . . . a lot. No more cigarettes. Going to the gym. Eating right and getting some rest. And telling my shadow to fuck off.

KP, who played my wife in July 7th, 1994 will take over for Sooz as Beline. Peter, from both Jason and Crucible will play Bonnefoi and Beralde. Also from Crucible are Steve (Argan) and Tom (Diafoirus and Purgon). From Jason, MB as Toinette and Joey as Angelique. A newcomer named Jud is playing Cleante. That leaves Thomas, Louise (a nine year old girl), Fleaurant and The President for me. I call a job like this Screaming Cameos - a series of small outrageous roles - I love it. My task will be to convince the audience that more than one actor is playing my four roles. The truth is Thomas and Louise are more than cameos – they are over-the top comic supporting roles. Combined with Katherine in Shrew next spring, it will be the year of cross-gender classical roles for me. What next? Medea?

Lillian, our director, was born and raised in Argentina with German-Italian parents . . . I think. In any case, she is quintessentially European and has a bit of the grande dame about her. But she’s also goofy, and reminds me of the commedia Signora: lusty, authoritative and experienced, but able to execute a Lucy pratfall at a moment’s notice. She’s like your smarty-pants older sister, who got straight As without trying, but taught you how to roll a joint and told you the filthiest jokes. She has a reputation as a task-master (Sooz had the lead in Lillian’s play Midons a few years ago which Lillian directed herself, and was telling me affectionate and descriptive stories on the Cape), but after two days of rehearsal, I suspect we will get on just fine. I had to write her a difficult email, almost begging her to allow me to be excused to teach in the afternoons at UArts Tuesday and Friday of preview week. Abbey said she’d have a fit, but she wrote back the sweetest email saying she’d work around it, and by the way, would you please play Louise because you were too funny in auditions.

She has suffered a real pratfall of late, and arrived a half an hour into the design presentation with stitches in her upper lip and soft cast on her right leg. It seems she fell while returning home from caring for her mother. So we have that in common too – care for our frail elders. The set for the play is a two story, enclosed semi-circle with a balcony that runs around the wall half way up. There are doors above and below, giving it the feel of an enclosed, interior piazza. Marla presented her zany-but-beautiful period sketches, and I realized how important her sketches are to me as I begin a play. Her drawings are my first solid visual building-block for the characters I am playing.

Lillian began by saying that there is great truth in comedy, even when it is absurd as it is in Invalid. She said she was excited to do this play at People’s Light because we have a great company of clowns, and she meant it as a high compliment, which was how I took it. We are losing respect for the art of clowning, she said, and in the USA humor is being poisoned by TV. A great deal of her work on the play will be informed by commedia dell’Arte, which, of course, was Moliere’s chief source of inspiration. There will be masks (briefly), music, choreography and lazzi, lazzi, lazzi. She pointed out that Argan is a direct descendent of Pantalone. I thought of Fava, his book, the workshop and felt both the recognition of the divine sequence at work in my life, working with someone who shares the name of my suicidal grandmother, the frustrated actress. But I also fret about Fava’s admonition that we never “dilute” commedia.

Later, we read through and laughed and laughed, Lillian having to hold her upper lip in place so she didn’t pull her stitches out. Our translator is my Yale Drama School classmate James who has done a great job at creating a script which sounds American but holds on to just enough classicism so that the play stays in its period.

On the second day, Lillian led us in a discussion about “attitude”. She spoke about how she loathes the American tendency to play “attitude”, rather than getting right to the thing at hand, what she calls “coming from zero.” She said it is especially prevalent in youthful movie and TV acting, and I offered that it is a kind of detachment born of fear of the vulnerability one feels when living genuinely in a real moment with another human being. Again I was reminded of Fava, who writes about the comic actor’s tendency to resort to parody or satire when he can’t commit to the comic moment on its own terms.

“It’s tough rehearsing a comedy.” Lillian said. “We discover something and laugh, then the laughter wears off because we know the joke, but we have to keep rehearsing it, keep refining it, keep discovering it as if it’s new, but without the payoff of laughter. Then we have our first preview and we begin to learn a few things.”