|
|
| |
Program Notes
|
|
"You Can't Take It With You" 6/29/07: As Grandpa says: "Well, you should have been there." I didn't see it coming. You could have knocked me over with a feather. The show closed on Sunday, June 24th, and by any standards it was a very big hit. As far as I know, it received 7 reviews, 2 from magazines (New York and Back Stage), 2 from OOB/Indie Theatre websites, and 3 from bloggers previously unknown to me. The most interesting (and, yes, the most positive) were these: PICK OF THE WEEK: Off-off Online.com http://www.offoffonline.com/archives.php?id=1036 PICK: Back Stage magazine http://www.backstage.com/bso/news_reviews/nyc/review_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003594375 NY Theatre.com http://www.nytheatre.com/nytheatre/you5346.htm New Theater Corps http://newtheatercorps.blogspot.com/2007/06/you-cant-take-it-with-you.html We were extremely fortunate in having George S. Kaufman's daughter, Anne Kaufman Schneider, attend an early performance which she apparently enjoyed very much. She used the subsequent occasion of remarks she delivered at the memorial service for her father's co-author's widow, Kitty Carlisle Hart, to tout our show shamelessly. The confluence of good notices and good word-of-mouth insured us good houses throughout and helped us sell out the later part of our run. It was the first time since I've been associated with T. Schreiber Studio that we've had to turn away theatre-goers at many performances. There were a lot of keys to the success. Among them was the terrific direction of Peter Jensen who kept the traffic flowing, no mean feat with 19 players sharing the tiny stage with apparent comfort, within the stylistic mix of the 1930's madcap comedy demi-farce in which it was written and the theatrical naturalism in which we were all trained. His casting proved felicitous, and he made a terrific decision in entrusting his assistant, Myvonwynn Hopton, a brilliant dancer and choreographer, with staging the two scene changes and the curtain calls. They looked fantastic and belied the fact that they were being executed by a cast with very mixed skills as dancers. The result was deliciously whacky and kept the audience in the show and in the period throughout the performance. The actors largely eschewed the opportunities for bravura moments in favor of establishing the reality of their lives with each other. The ensemble was cited by audience members and critics as one of the most successful elements. None of the other keys were nearly as important as the text of the play itself. This script played so much better than it had read. The lines are structured so that what turned out, in many cases unexpectedly to me, to be the big laugh lines were followed by little throw-aways so that actors didn't have to do that stagey thing holding for the laugh to die down. We could just keep the play bouncing from laugh to laugh. As such it was an incredible joy to perform "You Can't Take It With You". I have been in greater plays, more important plays, but very few that were more fun to be in. I'd have to go back to Christopher Martin's production of Shaw's "Man and Superman" in 1970 to find a competitor for the title. That's saying something.
|
|
5/22/07: A bad case of pre-opening jitters A friend recently asked If I were prepared to recommend wholeheartedly the upcoming T. Schreiber Studio production of Kaufman & Hart's 1936 play "You Can't Take It With You" (5/24 - 6/24 at The Gloria Maddox Theatre, 151 W. 26th Street) in which I play the role of the émigré Russian ballet teacher, Boris Kolenkhov. It is a fair question. The short answer is "YES!"; short, but not very helpful. If it works for you, save yourself a lot of reading and get tickets. If not, read on. "You Can't Take It With You" is a fabulous time-machine, a warm, witty, loving and insane look at a world in which one extended family lives life according to no lights but their own sense of what makes them happy. To its contemporary audiences in 1936 it was a reminder of the trait that Americans had trusted above all others before the Great Depression and its aftermath swept away so much of America's self-confidence in its wake: Individualism -- not the twisted, introverted Rugged Individualism of the Hoover Administration which was essentially an excuse for doing nothing while your friends and neighbors went down the tubes, but a view that one is in competition with no one else for the thing that matters most, a sense of fulfillment from having lived and loved according to your own understanding of what you need and what is right. in a world increasingly menaced by ever larger and more powerful institutions of commerce and government coercing conformity, it was a reminder of a simpler time, which may or may not have ever existed, when people felt free to be themselves. The nature of time machines is that they drop us back into an age with which we are unfamiliar without a guidebook. There are jokes in the play for which a contemporary audience might well want one. A reference to First lady Eleanor Roosevelt's homeliness may confuse modern audiences who only recall her as a revered elder activist for peace and social justice, if they recall her at all. References to Britain's Queen Mary (the monarch and the luxury liner) and to the failed Stalinist attempts at economic reform called the Five Year Plans will similarly leave them perplexed. George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart were quintessential new Yorkers in the first half of the last century. Kaufman was a member in good standing of the Algonquin circle, a collection of writers and editors for the fledgling New York magazine and some of their friends. Together they constituted the most glittering tribe of highly literate wits that America has ever known and their lunches at the Round Table were the greatest concentration of that brand of genius in a room at one time, or (to paraphrase a wit greater than my own) at least since the last time Oscar Wilde dined alone. They were both troubled and troubling people. Kaufman, the older and generally-conceded senior partner, was far and away the most successful Broadway playwright in New York in the twenties and thirties. Check him out on http://www.IBDB.com; you'll be astounded by the number of shows he wrote and the lengthy runs they enjoyed. Neil Simon won't live long enough to have that many. Hart was manically insecure and latched onto Kaufman as a father figure. Many friends of his maintained that the pairing was unhealthy for him and his own work. They tried to enlist Kaufman's help in breaking up the team. He reported back that Hart resisted the idea on the grounds that he was overcome by "Gelt by association". Hart did eventually go off on his own and enjoyed some success, capping his career with the direction of My Fair Lady, but neither ever enjoyed the success of their partnership years as solo acts. The unsettling aspect for me of this time travel is the change in social norms, specifically in what constitutes humor. Kaufman wrote for the films as well as the stage, most famously the great Marx Brothers films which he adapted from his hit plays with them. I recall that one of them ("A Day at the Races", perhaps?) ends with a chorus of little black children singing and dancing off into the sunset. The inherent racism in the New York and Hollywood humor of the day was not apparent or abhorrent to Kaufman's audience. Partly based on a fascination with African Americans owing to their relatively recent migration in large numbers to the cities of the North, mostly based on the institutionalized racism of American society, few things tickled the white northern funny bone more than putting the words of a fool into the mouth of a black character. Kaufman goes that route in "You Can't Take It With You" with the character of Donald, played in the famous film by Eddie Anderson, jack Benny's Rochester. The director of our production made a strong and, I think, brave choice in casting the role with a white actor. The result is very arresting. in some ways, it gives the time-traveler all the guidebook that is needed. "You Can't Take it With You" had 20 performances at The Gloria Maddox Theatre at T. Schreiber Studio from the twenty-fourth of May to the twenty-fourth of June, 2007. For more information on the production, please visit http://www.tschreiber.org/theatre/index.htm.
|
|
Playing Boris Kolenkhov I recently heard an interview between Uta Hagen, the revered teacher who taught Peter Jensen, the director of this play and my first teacher at T. Schreiber Studio and also one of my two current teachers, Austin Pendleton, who still teaches at her temple, HB Studio. The interviewer, Terry Gross, had done her homework and closely read both of Hagen's books on acting. But when she started asking their author to explain bits of the text, Hagen impatiently interrupted and said "Are you an actor? No? Then the answer is none of your business. The technique of a great actor is such that it enables one to live on stage so profoundly and so simply that the audience is encouraged to think it is simple and that they can do it, too. But it is not at all simple and without the proper background and training discussion of the technique would be beyond mystifying and boring to the average listener. It would be destructive." To her credit, Gross stood up to Hagen and said that she wants artists to explore the process and their techniques for her not so that she can do it herself but to make her a better audience, to point out to her what she should watch for and be aware of. I understand both points of view. A university director of mine once said that a trained actor could never experience theatre as a member of the audience because his awareness of technique renders him incapable of suspending disbelief. Somewhere in there lies the truth; perhaps as Pinter says a thing can be both true and untrue. With some trepidation, I want to record here a little about the process I used in preparing this role. It is an axiom that casting is some huge percentage of the contribution of the director. When I mentioned to Pinter that Terry Schreiber had said it was 80% of the whole, he cocked an eyebrow and asked "only 80%?" From the first, I was astounded that Peter had cast me as Kolenkhov. In a program note, Peter tells us that he had been cast as Grandpa in college although he wanted to play Kolenkhov. For me it was quite the other way. The text, at least in stage directions likely written by the authors, tells us that if you like Russians you may well like Kolenkhov. He is big, hairy and loud. He is a dance master. I, on the other hand, am only loud and then, I hope, not always. I am not big, my body is not hairy. I don't move like a dancer, indeed I've never danced. I am not even Russian although my father's family did emigrate from that part of the world. The beginning of the work is to see only confluence, not contradiction. To find within part of myself the man who would say and do these things in this manner when faced with these people and this situation. It doesn't involve pretending or negating anything. It requires finding in my own experience and memories and imagination all the specific "me-bits" that can explain why I, the character, am the way I am and behave as I do. Although there is an artistic fault line among the great acting teachers between working from memory versus from the imagination, I have always felt the gulf was more apparent than real. The nature of memory is such that it always involves some imagination and the realm of the imaginary is always informed by experience. If memory and the experience and details of my real life as I have come to view them serve the needs of text I will almost always lean in that direction and provide as little from my imagination per se as is required. One of the things I try to do with every role I play is to create a document which I start working on from day 1 and "complete" before the final dress rehearsal. It contains my autobiography up to the moment the play begins and contains my objective as a character (the "I must ___ or I can't live"), my obstacles, all the circumstances which led me to walk on stage, and all of the aspects of the relationships I have developed with the other characters before the play begins. The purpose of the document (which I have always called The Document and always begin "I am ________") is to get me on stage. All the things that happen after that moment are an accident to which I must react as myself. It should be noted that every character has secrets which he alone knows and I never share them with anyone or anything including The Document. If you have any interest, before or after seeing "You Can't Take It With You", in reading The Document for Kolenkhov, please email me at laurence@laurencecantor.com and I'd be delighted to share it with you.
|
|
THE OLD ORDER CHANGETH To make room on this page, I’ve been forced to archive the older items. If anyone cares to catch up on my comments on performing Goldberg in Terry Schreiber's production of Pinter's “The Birthday Party” (February, 2005), reactions to the Birmingham Rep performance of “The Birthday Party” in Cambridge, England and my visit with Sir Harold Pinter (April, 2005), my comments about Sam Shepard’s "Fool for Love” (December, 2005), appearing in new plays by newer playwrights (September, 2006), appearing in Austin Pendleton's production of Arthur Miller's "The American Clock" (November, 2006), or On Playing Major Roles in Feature Films (February, 2007), please
Click here to Email me a request.
|
|
|
