An Improvised Life (11 page)

In the early part of 1997 my then wife, Barbara Dana, who is a fine novelist, called to tell me she was going to try to write a play. She’d bought a script-formatting computer program and didn’t know how to use it. Could I help? I tend to like computers, so I told her that if she gave me the program for a while I’d fool with it and see if I could dope it out.

I played with it for a few days until it started to feel comfortable. Just before giving it back, I went over what I had written, looking for formatting problems, and I found to my amazement that I’d written a one-act play, or at least most of one. I had no intention of writing a play. In my life I had no intention of
ever
writing a play, but my unconscious had other ideas.

I spent the next few days trying to decipher what the hell I had written, what the underlying ideas were, and then I spent the next couple of weeks trying to make it coherent, bringing the unconscious ideas into what’s left of the organizational side of my brain. When I was pretty satisfied with it I asked my son Tony if, just for fun, he’d come to the house and read it with me. He came over, we ran through it, and it felt good—good enough to give me the confidence to call a producer friend of mine, Julian Schlossberg, and ask if he’d like to see a reading of the play. He said yes, and he arranged for it to take place at a small theater in midtown Manhattan.

We did the reading for about fifty invited friends and got a really positive reaction, after which Julian came running over
with Elaine May, whom he’d invited to the reading without telling me.

“I loved it,” Elaine said. “I’m going to write a companion piece for me and my daughter Jeannie, and the four of us will do it as an evening.” Julian said, “I’ll produce it.”

Tony and I stammered for a while. I had no specific expectations from the reading; my fantasy was that someone might like it enough to include it in a collection of oneacts, somewhere, sometime, but this train had already left the station. Tony was at a time in his life when he wasn’t particularly interested in acting, and I had sworn thirty years earlier that I’d never again set foot on a stage, but we were instantly caught up in the whirlwind and the thing took off almost without our being able to stop it.

Elaine wrote a play for herself and Jeannie. She showed it to Julian, who was very enthusiastic about it but said that the evening also demanded something with Elaine and me. Our names would be in front of the theater, and the audience would be expecting to see us work together. Julian also said that I should direct the evening. No one objected, so I said yes. It seemed daunting, the whole undertaking had a dreamlike quality, but I figured what the hell. Elaine wrote a third one-act play, one that included the four of us, and we were off and running.

The evening, called Power Plays, got terrific reviews, and we settled into The Promenade Theater for a long run, which allowed me to re-examine all of my negative feelings about being onstage from thirty years earlier. I found before
terribly long that my feelings hadn’t changed a bit, but I bit the bullet and tried to find as much joy in the experience as I could. I was deeply proud of Tony’s work, Jeannie’s performance was also excellent, but we were all braced for a backlash from the critics over the obvious nepotism. To our immense relief, the critics not only accepted it but applauded it. All four of us got terrific reviews, and the family aspect of the evening became a selling point instead of a liability.

About three months into the run, something happened that began gnawing at me. In the piece I’d written,
Virtual Reality
, Tony started taking longer and longer pauses, slowing down the play, causing the energy to drop, and we were losing laughs. One night after getting offstage I talked to Elaine about it. Elaine watched our play every evening for the entire ten months’ run. She has a penetrating analytical mind and a deep investment in everything she’s involved in. I asked her if my assessment of what was happening was correct. She said yes, agreeing that Tony was letting a lot of air into the play. “You know what he’s doing, don’t you?” she asked. I said no. She said, “He’s trying to regain some control of the event.” That was all she said, but it caused me to take a closer look at what Tony was up against in doing this play.

In the first place he was working with his father, difficult enough for anyone under the best of circumstances. In addition, I had written the play, I had directed it, and to make matters worse, although the play is a comedy, my
character browbeats and torments Tony’s character. He was carrying a huge load and in my respect for his prodigious craft it never occurred to me, particularly since the reviews were so favorable, that he would be feeling this burden. I immediately felt badly for him and had a new respect for what he was capable of taking on. Still and all, I felt I had to say something. My reticence at dealing with the issue was compounded by the fact that Tony takes criticism almost too much to heart. In all the years from his birth on, I think I’ve criticized him twice. The first time was when he was about two years old and tried to put a nail in a light socket. I told him as gently as I could that I didn’t think it was a good idea. His reaction was so dramatic that I knew I’d better be careful about giving him criticism in the future. He’s always been admirably self-governing, so criticism was rarely needed. But I’ve had a difficult time giving him any kind of correction.

I spent several days trying to find a way of broaching the subject without upsetting him. He’d have to face me—father, author, and director—for every damned performance afterward, and I didn’t want to create an additional burden for him. Finally, one night as we were putting on our makeup, I started talking generally about actors who took long pauses. Tony joined me in the discussion, and about five minutes into it he said, “What are you trying to tell me, Dad?” Tony knows me too well for me to waffle, and there was no way out, so I took a deep breath and jumped into it.

“I guess I’m taking a roundabout way of saying you’re starting to take longer and longer pauses and I think they’re hurting the rhythm of the play. I think it’s causing us to lose some laughs.” And then I said something I’d never said before, something I’d never even thought about before; I suppose for a second I was in the zone. “But more importantly,” I went on, “it’s keeping you from the possibility of any self-discovery, which is the greatest joy you can have being onstage—the joy of your own surprise. You’ll be a lot happier if you try to throw away the tight control.”

Tony sat quietly for a couple of minutes, dabbing on his makeup, while I watched our relationship fly out the window. “That’s the end of that,” I thought. “He’ll give his notice tomorrow and I’ll see him again in about five years.” He left the dressing room and I didn’t see him again until we were both onstage. I waited for his entrance to see what I’d be faced with, and as he came through the door there was instantly a drive to his work that was new. He jumped into the play with a burst of electric energy and kept it up for the full forty minutes of the play. I was forced to hang on to his coattails and keep up with the endless flow of inventive things that were coming through him. It felt like an entirely new experience, as if we’d never done the play before. When the lights went out and we got offstage, we stood there looking at each other and laughed like lunatics. I grabbed him, we hugged, then I held him at arm’s length and said, “If anyone told you that you stank tonight, what would you say?” “I’d tell them to go to hell,” Tony said,
laughing. When you’re on, when it’s working, when you’re in the zone, you don’t need anyone to give you accolades. His breakthrough lasted for the rest of the run.

I love working with people with whom I’ve had some previous experience. But for me, it takes an entire project to completely trust the people I’m working with. I need to experience co-workers throughout the arc of an experience from beginning to end before I can relax, and then the second time it becomes easy. I want to feel that I can touch my scene-partners physically, interrupt them, step on a line if it feels right, or suggest an idea without it becoming personal, and I want them to feel the same way toward me.

For this reason, working with my wife, Suzanne, or any one of my three sons has always been a complete joy. Always. With all the possible problems that could arise, I have never, ever had a problem working with my family. Hard to believe, but true. In a lot of ways, I suppose, this has been a cornerstone of my relationship with my sons, who are all actors, among other things, and it’s a source of pride for me that they’ve never taken issue with my giving them ideas, notes, or suggestions, whether I’m involved in their projects or not. Happily, whatever my faults as a father, this has not been one of them. And I never have difficulty in recommending them for a job if I am absolutely sure that they are right for it.

When I direct, I often sense the tension that arises in producers when they hear me say I want to hire one of my sons. They usually don’t know me well enough to realize I
would never do that unless I was certain that Adam or Matt or Tony would be absolutely right for the part. But after the fact, producers have always been grateful. Not only because of my sons’ talent, but because my working with them saves valuable time. For example, if I’m in a scene with Matt and it isn’t gelling, I can say, “Matt, it’s Grampa doing one of his lectures,” and Matt will immediately know what I’m talking about, the problem is solved, and it’s saved a half-hour with an actor who was looking for a way to play a scene.

One of the most poignant moments I’ve had with any of my sons happened years ago when Adam was at a theater in upstate New York in previews for a play that was headed to Broadway. He called me late one night, after one of the shows, in a mild panic. He said, “Dad, is there any chance you can come up and take a look at this? I think I’m stinking this up and it feels like the play is in serious trouble.” Nothing in the world makes me happier than putting on my “Dad suit,” so I told him I’d be there the next night to see what was going on.

The next day I drove up to see the play and I sat through an absolutely delightful evening watching Adam fly. He was consistently terrific, funny as hell, and the play worked beautifully. I went backstage with a sense of great pride but also feeling a considerable loss. The person I saw in the play was a fully mature actor with a commanding stage presence, doing really first-rate work. I had no notes, no ideas, no criticism. I just told him he was nuts for feeling insecure, he
was terrific in the part, and that the play was great fun. And as I spoke I watched one of my favorite roles of fatherhood fly out the window. In just a couple of hours I had lost my place as a mentor in Adam’s life; I was now a colleague. It was a bittersweet moment. The show was called
I Hate Hamlet
, it ran for months, and Adam went on to get a Tony nomination for his performance.

CHAPTER TWELVE

When directing, I learn things about actors that I never notice while I’m acting. For example, in every play I’ve ever cast I have found myself saying to auditioning actors, “That was very interesting, very good, now try it again without the acting.” In every case where I’ve said this, and there have been literally hundreds of occasions, there has never been an actor who didn’t know exactly what I was talking about. When I say it to them, when I tell them to read again and take out the acting, it invariably makes the actor breathe a sigh of relief and smile as if they’re saying, “You mean you actually want me to do what I was
trained
to do? What I
enjoy
doing? I can just
play
the part? I don’t have to
sell
the part?” I have them go back and do the scene again, and it is invariably looser, more personal, and infinitely more interesting.

We live in a culture where everything is selling. I watch TV and I don’t see events, I see people selling me events. The newscasters are not reporting the news, they are
dramatizing it, selling it, selling themselves as good reporters. They’re making the news “interesting.” They pretend they’re looking at us when in fact they’re watching words on a teleprompter, acting as if they’re intimately involved with the stories they’re reporting, emoting like crazy, performing as though they were actually feeling what they were reading, trying to look as if they were anywhere but in the studio.

In interviews, talk show hosts rev us up with hype and personality, offering little or no content, pretending deep concern and intimacy with complete strangers, but meanwhile they are busy reading the chalkboard behind the heads of their guests, which is showing them the next question. Actors are selling products they have no feeling for; the political forums are all jazzed up and contain endless faked fights. We keep watching hundreds of channels waiting for something to actually happen, for someone to be really present. Almost no one ever is. We’re so imbued with this onslaught of selling, selling, selling—products and personalities—so bombarded with hype and false excitement that I think we forget what a real experience feels like. When we’re constantly assaulted in this way we start assuming that what we’re seeing is truth. That “this is the way things are.” It’s the frog-in-hot-water syndrome. We get used to anything, no matter how highly it’s ratcheted up, and we begin to believe that since we are
expected
to have an experience we are actually having one. I see it in a great many performances in what are considered our finest
movies. I’m not watching living breathing characters; I’m mostly seeing people avoiding real contact with their partners, going for important moments, reaching for awards.

When I directed the film version of
Little Murders
, I was fortunate enough to work with Gordon Willis, one of our greatest cinematographers. In discussing how we were going to put the film together, when something didn’t feel right Gordon would say, “No, that’s a piece out of the ball.” I finally asked him what he meant by that. He said, “When a sequence is working right it should roll in any direction, straight on like a bowling ball with no dents in it.” I knew what he meant. We both wanted seamlessness. When I go to a film and come out talking about a performance, or a lighting effect, or the music, or a fancy shot, the movie doesn’t work. It works when I don’t see any of that. When I’m caught up in the event. When I’m moved. When I’m affected by the entirety. My life has been changed by films I’ve seen, and I don’t want a trip to the theater to be two mindless hours out of my life.