McPhillamy Blog

October

Question: when is a play not a play?

Answer: when it’s Hamlet.

It’s always the Tuesday evening after the final Sunday performance that it hits you that it’s over. In the States, that is. In England and Australia other timetables apply.

In American regional theatre when Tuesday showtime comes, the company has dispersed and is many miles away from the stage where they lately were a performing unit. And that’s when the muscle memory kicks in. If you did a vocal warm up (as I did on this one), there’s no reason to do one today. The identity that you checked at the stage door on a daily basis for the past six weeks makes a pale attempt to repossess your psyche, while the identity that you crafted in the work is now as surplus to requirements as the costume you donned.

I’ve been at large in American regional theatre for over seven years now and I’d just like to put it on record that it’s a falsity to think or to say that theatre in this country is not subsidized. On the contrary, it is heavily subsidized by all who work in it. I find it moving that actors driven by vocational passion will travel far from home on the chance of a good production and live their dream for a few brief weeks, knowing that they’ll likely return to selling pizza when it’s over.

A return to Little Rock Arkansas, my second time there but my first ever in Hamlet. If anyone had told me back in college – yes, you will be in a production of Hamlet one day… in Little Rock… well I wouldn’t have thunk it.

And why is Hamlet not a play? Not an ordinary play at least?

Because it is so well known that some audiences could sing along with the text. In Little Rock we performed in more or less ideal conditions for a production of this play in the modern age. Fewer people around here have seen the play than in say New York where film star Jude Law recently played it. What does this mean? It means that the audience actually follows the story (it’s a good one), rather than evaluating the production/acting/design as they go.

Personally I’ve always found Hamlet to be a tough one. Long, confusing, hard to follow. I speak as one who knows the text well. As a young actor I listened to Sir John Gielgud (surely the greatest exponent of Shakespearean verse speaking) on more or less endless loop. I’ve seen a couple of dozen Hamlets, admired actors, but seldom if ever been moved by a production – Anton Lessor in Jonathan Miller’s was an exception.

George Hall, who ran the acting course at Central in London where I trained, said “On the first night of Hamlet, the questions were the same: “Will they get it? Will the fights work? And will the old fool playing the king remember his lines?”

Now that I am that old fool I know what he meant.

George was full of wise saws and modern instances, and in those days I thought he knew just about everything there was to know about acting – still think that, actually.

Of Robert Newton, he said: “His final consonants were a matter of chance, he had a body that was held together by tension, but when he came on as the button moulder in act four of Peer Gynt, he was coming from a place that most of us have never been to.’

We had an actor like that in Little Rock. His name is Harris Berlinsky and the world is a better place because he is in it. Harris played Polonius with easy grace. His portrayal of the character was accessible and fascinating, yet his backstage confusions were legendary. It was never certain which of the four entrances he would use to get on stage. Occasionally he made a guest entrance in a scene in which Polonius does not usually appear, wandering off about half way through. It was a great pleasure and a privilege to work with him.

A theatrical company away from home is a meeting of intimate strangers who become friends. Replicating behaviors together for the public view, binds you as a group. The character of such groups varies hugely. In the larger theatrical centres the group is vulnerable to the follies of status, ambition, and competition. But usually, regionally, those pressures are less. This particular collection of abstracts and brief chronicles was multi-national, multi ethnic, and multi talented. We included a sharpshooter, indie film makers, linguists (portuguese, japanese, mandarin, spanish), fabulous amateur bakers, corporate consultants, and sundry entrepreneurs.

Even to someone familiar with the play, hearing a performance from backstage is an experience full of small and new recognitions of text. “Ah that’s where that comes from.” So much of the text has passed into everyday usuage. To name but a few:

In my mind’s eye

The primrose path of dalliance

Brevity is the soul of wit

Caviar to the general

The lady doth protest too much

Assume a virtue if you have it not

A hit, a very palpable hit

For quotability Hamlet stands alone. From: “… neither a borrower nor a lender be…” through “… there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow…” to “… and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”

And what about titles derived?

The play’s the thing (Molnar & P. G. Wodehouse)

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Stoppard)

Single Spies (Alan Bennet)

Summer’s Lease (John Mortimer)

And a casual search turned up this amazing anagram:

To be or not to be: that is the question. Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune…

becomes:

In one of the Bard’s best thought of tragedies, our insistent hero, Hamlet, queries on two fronts about how life turns rotten.

Or to quote another Shakespearean epilogue: “The King’s a beggar now the play is done…”

The blogger could still be said to be on holiday.

Southern California is southern Florida for grown ups.

The same crowded north/south highways, temperate winters, long beaches. But south Florida allowed rampant development on the sand right next to the water’s edge and now some of the shoreline over there looks like a bad case of gingivitis with the waves lapping at the foundations of the endless condominiums. Sure California has the impending Big One which will turn western Utah into beachfront property.

I like it in San Diego. The place has it all; a year round friendly climate, the Dr. Seuzzical landscape, and of course The Old Globe Theatre, this season including the esteemed Trish Conolly appearing in a play called The Last Romance. And now me – affiliated to the aforementioned actress of note – enjoying a holiday here.

It’s particularly satisfying when a play speaks directly to its audience. The Last Romance is a gentle little piece set in a park. Its three principal characters are all in their senior years. Although in this production its three actors are all more vital than any couch potato half their physical ages. It’s no overstatement to say that Marion Ross is a television icon, she played Mrs. Cunningham in Happy Days and was known for decades in that role throughout the English speaking world. Her partner in life, Paul Michael plays her would be suitor, and Trish plays his sister. There’s a fourth character, an opera singer who plays the younger version of the old man, here played and sung by Joshua Jeremiah in terrific voice. Theatres the world over are tending to attract older patrons. Are they the only ones who can afford the tickets? Or are they the only ones with time? In this case it was a happy meeting of play and audience. I saw the play three times and each time there was the special silence that comes when the audience leans forward not wanting to miss a word. It’s a touching play that surely will reach a wide audience in many future productions.

When The Old Globe was established in the 1930s as a (temporary) Shakespeare Festival – attendance in the first season was equal to twice the then population of San Diego, its native city – back then there were three such festivals in the continental USA. Today there are more than a hundred and fifty three. So the Shakespeare Festival has been immensely successful as a brand.

The Old Globe has, over the past two generations of artistic leadership established itself as one of the major American regional theatrical centers, and now also feeds high end product to Broadway with such hits as The Full Monty, Hairspray, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and a string of others – this policy, brokered under Jack O’ Brien’s leadership – for which he collected several Tony awards, raised the profile of The Old Globe as an institution and in the process further tamped the path of Broadway supply which many regional theaters now wish to tread.

All that hotbed of theatrical activity aside; the San Diego environment with all its Eucalyptus trees on the improbable hills, the theatre itself sited in the heart of Balboa Park lulls one into a dreamy comfort.

So I’m impressed that I’ve got it together enough to announce a firm commitment to 21st century life by buying a smartphone. Not the very sleekest latest wafer, but one that was the cutting edge way back in the distant past of tech-time – like three months ago, and now heavily discounted to clear the stock as the new generation customers queuing round the block. Just in time to get one of these gadgets it seems, because from San Diego we spent a couple of weeks working the town in Los Angeles, where the phone as accessory is noted.

Los Angeles is industrial strength San Diego.

And then a quick trip to Portland Oregon, where the landscape and the fauna are so different from southern California it’s hard to believe they’re the same country. We came here to see my friend, the extraordinary Joe Graves, perform a one man version of the Iliad.

Yes, that’s right, the epic narrative poem by Homer telling the story of the Trojan war and the struggles of the Gods and Heros for possession of the human soul.

Doesn’t sound like a natural for a theatre piece does it? And yet… here the story was framed by the rather brilliant device of the poet (Homer, apparently is a generic name given to poets and story tellers) being touched by alcoholic divine madness and impelled to tell the story. The verse juxtaposed with modern invention – particularly effective when dealing with the inevitable lists of names you get in epics. And one stunning section where the narrator lists some of the endless wars humanity has engaged in over the centuries and you wonder what the hell we are doing with our lives.

There is something cathartic about stories of large scale slaughter. If well told, they can give you a homeopathic dose of the same emotional journey as the characters you are hearing about, but save you the bother of having to live through those experiences. Result: you feel more peaceable. That’s the theory anyway.

I am by nature a lefty liberal type, but there is one issue on which I feel we could employ extreme sanctions. For people who don’t switch their smart phones off in theatres. How about a mandatory app that would melt the phone’s interior?

The blogger was on holiday.

At the beginning of the year I told myself I would write 1,000 actorblog words a month just for the hell of it. So this is a missed deadline. Why? Well I closed a show and I made a film, and I did a rough cut and talked with an editor, and I wondered how and why people ever become and stay writers anyway, and I re-read Stephen King’s best book, the one called On Writing. All this within the past few weeks. Feeble excuses I know, and not even close to the real reason why my July copy is being posted in August.

I’ve worked at the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival twice before and each time done the reverse commute to and from New York City for the entire run. This time I stayed out there, living in a house with actors, stage managers, designers, and the odd director. It was a regressive and very fun experience.

In my earlier acting days – like twenty years ago – any time I was on tour, I would find myself undertaking heroic feats of alcoholic consumption. There is something about touring that encourages this. It’s a known fact. Example: at the Europa Hotel in Athens when a group of post show actors gathered to party, Nick Sampson emptied and distributed the contents of the mini bar with the words, “Oh darlings, it’s going to cost a fortune – but somehow I don’t care!” Even these days when I’m on the road, and even though the liver can’t handle what it once could, the alcoholometer registers higher numbers than when I’m home.

But the theatre house at the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival summer 2010 was a special case.

For the months of June and July, the house had two core casts living there. Some dozen to eighteen people, sometimes fewer, sometimes more, though it always felt like more. Finishing work at 11pm, it’s almost impossible to go straight to bed and sleep. A drink, a snack or a meal, a little time…

Most of the time it was hot, too damned hot, so we’d collect our beers or wines, and sit out on the front porch and talk about life, art, and truth. Sometimes we’d go down to Poor Herbie’s where the barman made basil Mohitos – sounds weird, right? – and then, after a few of those we’d sit on the porch… I find there’s a sweet spot in the post show wind down, somewhere around 90 minutes after curtain, when I can say goodbye to the world. It’s easy to miss this window. In five weeks of residence I don’t think I got to bed before 2 or 3 in the morning more than three times.

And I wake early these days. The very early morning is my favorite time anyway, and the sun came into my room when it rose. When I got my keys, the then company manager asked me if the room was okay. “Fine.” I said, “I wonder if I could have some curtains?”

‘What?!” she said.

The astonished tone of her reply was as much to say, “these ceaseless demands have got to stop.”

I explained that there were transparent net curtains in my room. But the idea that a grown man might quite like to have curtains that block the view from the outside world and give him darkness to sleep in until the hour of his choosing was, I’m guessing, a challenging hypothesis. Curtains never materialized. I rigged a table cloth and some fabric loaned by a fellow actor. Even so, I seldom slept passed 7.30 or 8, and sometimes not so long.

If you’re a stage actor at the beginning of the 21st century working regional theatre, they pay you in fun. Not something that any seasoned professional in a sensible job would think of as ‘pay’. But the fun goes a long way. One time at a dinner years ago I went to pour an actor a glass of wine. He stopped me with the words, “No, no. I used to drink for England… And I won a gold… so they retired me.”

The theatre house nestles a Methodist church, a Montessori school and a regular home. Sometimes we would shush each other after midnight when there was a loud song or story on the porch. But if the neighbors didn’t know at night that theatrical folk were living close by, they knew in the morning by the giant plastic tub out the back, full of bottles to be re-cycled.

Staying on campus (the theatre lives inside the Drew University grounds), one was part of the hotbed of theatrical activity that is the NJ Shakes in the summer when Interns and Apprentices come from all over to act, direct, and (new this year) take photographs. In our last week it went like this: Wednesday: cabaret. Thursday: poker night. Friday: directed scenes. Saturday: wrap party & midseason party at the bowling lanes. Sunday: closing night party.

Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) lived a turbulent life, and may have also been a party animal, but she wrote some exquisite short stories. One of them, a piece called ‘Psychology’ tells of the early stages of a repressed and fumbling courtship between two intellectuals. I’ve wanted to make a short film of it for years. I discussed the idea with a friend also active in the shallows of zero budget indie film and his brilliant suggestion was to set it backstage, thus avoiding the (expensive) necessity for period authenticity.

I wrote a behind the scenes scenario which initially I thought could frame the adaptation, and generously, the Artistic Director allowed me to use the Festival Theatre as a location. The story was set in and around The Dialogue Theatre waaay downtown in New York City. As more actors became involved with the shoot, the party activity transferred from the porch after midnight to the backstage story which became sillier and took over. Fine with me.

Edit deadline: December 31st.

The Servant of two Masters at the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival took the stage in the manner of a melting parfait during last week’s mini heat wave.

Miserly fathers called Pantalone, pompous latin-spouting medics, a quartet of lovers – one silly pair and one romantic – the inn-keeper Brighella, the crafty servant Trufaldino and his female counterpart Smeraldina, lots of Lazzis, sequences of bits, takes, asides, and one-two-three gags, and there you have the crazy zany world of Commedia Dell’Arte.

Commedia took its rise from the Italian street theatre of the late 16th and early 17th century, by the time Carlo Goldini was writing in the mid 18th century the form had got a lot more, well, formal. Which is perhaps why in this show, I’m wearing a wig which is first cousin to a dead sheep. Or maybe it’s because whenever they need a rotund character man with dead-sheep-wearing abilities McPhillamy’s name rises first in the rolodex, second time round in garb like this here at the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival (first time was two years ago in Amadeus). It’s wigs like these that give us the phrase: pull the wool over one’s eyes.

But my first time ever on an out door stage. We are playing at the Greek amphitheatre in the grounds of the Convent of St. Elizabeth. I’m delighted to report that it’s been a hugely pleasant experience. And I can say that in spite of the sun, the heat, the bugs which safely graze, and the aeroplanes which fly over from the nearby flying school about every ten minutes.

How so pleasant in spite of the inconveniences listed above? The theatre sits on the side of a high slope looking across a wide wooded valley. During production week when endless technical rehearsals involving sets and props, lights and sound, intersperse with director’s minutiae regarding staging, text, and timing, I bought an inflatable kiddie pool and filled it with water. Pink faced cast members would appear and dunk head or whole body. That helped in the heat management. The possibility of summer rain adds excitement. Don’t get me wrong I still enjoy the job, but there’s nothing as interesting as free money, as in, in this case getting paid for not acting if the show gets rained off.

This amphitheatre was built in the 1930s. The risers on the three aisle stairways are concrete. And the steps where the audience sits are turf with a concrete lip (not all that comfortable). The semi-circular shape of the auditorium and the rise in it means that if you stand upstage centre, you can whisper and be heard. A happy acoustic rarely found in indoor performing spaces outside the classic Victorian horseshoe shapes that still grace most of London’s West End.

My guy, Il Dottore to give him his traditional Commedia name, is a pompous spouter of ersatz classical language, usually getting the latin wrong and never knowing what he’s talking about. As a sometime dabbler in Sanskrit and a current student of contemporary Chinese, and traveling that road from the total knowledge one had in youth to the growing uncertainty of middle age, I feel I can relate to this archetype. Il Dottore has also stayed too long at fair like Sir Toby Belch, but his faux classical erudition also makes him a close relation to the latin scholar Holofernes in Loves Labour’s Lost.

To say to a company of contemporary actors: ‘right, Commedia Dell’Arte. Begin now, go.’ would be on a par with requiring them to emulate a troupe of Kabuki or Noh players. Folk study for years to reproduce the traditional comic physicalities of these characters, and there is a strong box of traditional gags and tricks some of which require equally long and diligent study. We spent a morning’s rehearsal adjusting our pelvic tilt, turning feet in and out, looking left while walking right, and playing strong simple intentions based on universal human needs: food, money, sex.

Fascinating though this exploration was, we were never going to achieve anything more than a received reproduction of forms that none of us had ever experienced first hand, nor understood from the inside. The first weeks of our production went in the direction of say Saturday Night Live and sketch comedy. But right in the middle of the rehearsal process, the production took a turn toward the style comedies of the Restoration.

One of my early theatre going experiences was when I saw She Stoops to Conquer at the Young Vic Theatre in London. A young Nicky Henson in his virile prime played Marlowe and it was a revelation to me that an actor could be so juicy while spouting formal text. It was one of the performances that made me want to become an actor – another was Tom Courteney in Brandon Thomas’s stand alone late 19th century smash hit, Charley’s Aunt. Congreve’s masterpiece, and say Sheridan’s, The Rivals, and many other plays of the late 18th century live at a higher level of verbal dexterity than Goldoni’s plays – at least as far as scholars can tell. Goldoni wrote in 18th century Venetian dialect and what certain lines mean is a subject of academic treatise.

So our production is a hybrid. But the story works, and if the weather doesn’t deliver wilting heat, and if there are sufficient numbers (audiences need the confidence of other people’s amusement) then it’s a very enjoyable evening under the stars.

Il Dottore is the alter-ego of Pantalone, played brilliantly in our production by Bill Metzo. During rehearsals our double act argument scenes were referred to as: the ‘old men’, I remonstrated with our young director over this title, and we settled on a comprise where these scenes and the actors playing went by the name ‘Living National Treasure’. However, I still wonder in Commedia fashion, whether enough diet and exercise could recapture the vigour of my earlier youth and change the casting to some other archetype… watch this space.