An Improvised Life (3 page)

Around this time, while I was still in high school, I went to see a film that had won its star an Academy Award. The work was a theater classic, translated into a film for the star, and like millions of other people I came out of the theater enormously impressed by his performance. But along with being impressed, I left the theater also feeling jealous and inept, and then hating myself for those feelings, and then hating the actor for piling on more feelings of inadequacy and depression. “What the hell was wrong with me?” I wondered. “Why couldn’t I simply enjoy the man’s work?” Here was obviously a great actor doing the part of his life, giving a performance that had gotten him enormous attention, awards, accolades, and all I could do was grouse about it and hate him for it. I stayed feeling depressed and inadequate for days.

A month later I saw Walter Huston in
The Devil and Daniel Webster
. This time I left the theater walking on air, filled with a sense of delight and joy and possibility. I stopped in my tracks. “What was the difference?” Two performances,
seen weeks apart, both considered great. One fills me with gloom, jealousy, and despair; the other makes me feel alive and buoyant.

I thought about it for weeks. I compared the two actors endlessly and finally came up with this realization. In the first instance, the actor who’d won the Academy Award was trying to impress me. He was demonstrating how beautifully he spoke, how well he articulated the lines, how beautifully he phrased them, how rich was the musical tone in his voice, how well he moved. And what I came to realize was that in spite of all the attention he received, the audiences had not been given a genuine experience. They were applauding their own intelligence at recognizing the actor’s technical prowess. The actor was congratulating himself, and the audiences were also congratulating themselves. But in his performance I couldn’t find that injection of experience that I needed so badly, that hypodermic connection that bonded me to the actor and would make his experience mine. I wasn’t allowed to
be
the character, and I started to wonder whether anyone had actually been affected by his work or whether that sense of narcissism was all anyone wanted from an actor. It slightly revolted me. I finally decided that his Academy Award had been given as an act of self-congratulation by the Academy, people applauding their own perceptions. Walter Huston on the other hand presented me with the gift of a whole person, fully articulated and realized, un-self-conscious and completely filled with his own joy at doing the work. I wanted to be like Walter Huston.

CHAPTER THREE

All of my performances in the plays throughout high school were successful. I got laughs, I got applause, I got very good comments after the shows, and in this one arena I started to have some small stature in a school completely dominated by its athletic program. But after each performance—no matter how well my work seemed to go, no matter how much applause or how many laughs, no matter how well I was able to manipulate the audience into feeling things and focusing on me—afterward, in the dressing room, I would inevitably feel depressed. Cheated out of something. I didn’t know what it was until in my senior year of high school, when I began studying with Benjamin Zemach.

Benjamin taught small classes in Hollywood, a two-hour streetcar ride from where we had moved to in Highland Park. Benjamin was a tiny giant of a man who lived and breathed theater, and his classes were warm and supportive and serious. He had studied with Stanislavski, and I heard from someone that his personality was very similar
to Stanislavski’s. Benjamin possessed a fierce focus and a burning devotion to conveying truth onstage. I don’t remember how I found my way to his classes; they were small and for the most part not attended by aspiring professionals, but he treated his students with great respect and he demanded a lot from them. When I started to work with him I expected that I would get singled out and praised. I felt comfortable and at ease on the stage; I knew my work had humor, that I could command attention.

It didn’t happen. He was unimpressed. I’d do a scene and expect laughter, applause, a nod, some kind of recognition that I was a thinking actor and knew my way around the stage. Instead I found myself ignored. It began eating at me. We began scene study, and scene after scene he remained disapproving. At one point he said to me, “Where are you coming from?”

“What do mean?” I answered.

“Where did you come from just then?”

“I came from offstage,” I said. Where else would I be coming from?

“That’s what’s wrong,” he said. “Your character has no past. I see an actor walking onto a stage. I don’t see a human being coming in from the cold outdoors. Coming home from a job that is a disappointment to him. Coming back to a family that only partially nourishes him.”

It took some time for his words to sink in, many months, but slowly it became clear to me that there was more to acting than being clever and being able to get a lot of attention,
and that in spite of the lip service I’d been paying to creating life onstage, in spite of my intense examination of other actors’ performances and the lives of people around me, my own work had no real reference to that truth and that reality. I began to realize that the depression I’d consistently felt after my own performances was an unconscious signal that I had been telling lies onstage, that my work was shallow and manipulative. Benjamin never actually said it, but I could tell that this criticism was behind his silence. I began analyzing my own performances, using Benjamin’s eyes and ears, and I came up short month after month. I started to write long biographies of the characters I was playing, hoping to please him, to get some sense from him that I was on the right track. Nothing worked. The biographies of my characters got longer, my research got more and more extensive, and my temper grew worse. Something was not happening. I didn’t know what it was; I didn’t know why I was so miserable, so unable to get even a smile from him, a nod, some sense of encouragement.

Then, one day, after working with Benjamin for about a year and a half, during the first performance of a play we’d been rehearsing, something happened. I had done the research, the endless biographical work, the meticulous thinking, obsessing about the part day and night, and probably because of this—my sweat, my devotion, my need—a small miracle took place. I was playing the part of a soldier returning home from a war, coming back to his wife and family after having been wounded on the front. I was about
eighteen at the time and had never been anywhere near a war, nor did I have the vaguest idea of how to be a husband or a father. But when I walked onto that stage I became the character. No, that’s the wrong way of describing it. When I walked onto the stage it was as if the character told me to get out of the way and mind my own business. The character took on a life of his own, with an immediacy and a purpose that had little to do with any of the preparation I had done. My voice changed. My posture changed. The line readings that I’d become used to went out the window, my timing became different, and my relationships onstage with the other actors were more real than anything in my own life. The woman playing my wife was truly my own beloved wife; I understood her better than I understood myself. And the war I was returning from was real, and oppressive, and frightening. And more importantly, these details all took care of themselves in one sweep, without my attending to any of them. For years afterward I described this event by saying, “It was as if I were outside of my body, watching the play from perhaps forty feet above the stage. I could see the entire event playing below, and I was gleefully calling out to the part of me that was on the stage doing the play: ‘Go! Go! Keep it up!’” The experience lasted perhaps twenty minutes, but it changed my life forever. For those few minutes I was living in a state of grace. It was a place where nothing could go wrong. There was no possibility of criticism, of evaluation, of discussion, because I was simply witnessing an event. It was the most important, the most
significant and wonderful moment of my life, and I was barely present to experience it.

Benjamin beamed at me afterward and his approval was warming, but oddly not crucial. The experience had a depth and reality to it that went past any need for approval from him or anyone. And as much as I had loved,
needed
acting before that event, from that moment on I became an acting junkie. I now lived not just for acting, for being in front of an audience, but for the possibility of that exalted experience returning. I lived for those moments when the part played me and I was completely out of the way. These moments began happening with some frequency because of the fervor with which I attacked each part, but there was no knowing when they would happen or for how long. I found that I could do the work leading up to these moments, but I could not summon them at will.

At this point I began to feel that when one of these events was
not
taking place I was cheating the audience. When I found myself present, when the character refused to take me over, when I was acting with technique and no inspiration, I became embarrassed to be in front of the audience, and I’d steal away from the theater as if I were a thief. But no matter how hard I worked, I couldn’t control when these experiences would take hold of me.

Years later I began to see that others shared this experience of flow, of knowing things they had no way of knowing, of being witness to events from some high vantage point when the “self” is completely out of the way and they
are flying somehow, and another part of them, a better part of them, is the vehicle.

It is when you
are
the music.

Athletes experience it; they call it being in the zone. They say that when it happens time slows down. They know the positions of each player on the field, they can’t miss the ball, and they can’t make mistakes.

Doctors can have it; they too can be in the zone. I’ve heard doctors say on occasion, “Yes, there have been times when a patient comes in and I’ll immediately know what they’re suffering from. Sometimes it will be an illness I’ve barely heard of, or never dealt with, but I know what they’ve got and how to treat it.”

Teacher’s can have this experience, too. I’ve heard them say, “I knew there was something going on with Tommy at home. He said nothing about it, I didn’t even particularly see a change in him, but something told me there was a problem, and I knew instinctively what it was.”

As time went on I became aware that people in all walks of life have this experience, with this in common: that it only seems to take place with those who are deeply devoted to the art or sport or work in which it is occurring.

In the early days, when these experiences happened to me, I was so engrossed in acting that I didn’t take the time to explore the other arenas in which these “zone” experiences grabbed hold of people’s lives, so in my naïveté I allowed it to be a magical property, belonging only to the craft of acting. I worshipped at the altar of my profession, and as a
result made an interesting mistake. What I allowed myself to believe was that the craft of acting had given me a great gift—that there was a magical aspect inherent in my craft and in no other, that I had tapped into it and that this magic made the craft of acting worthy of worship. What I didn’t realize at the time was that there is nothing special whatsoever in the craft of acting. Acting can be anything one wants it to be, from the most crass, dead, ego-driven activity, used as a way of earning an easy living or finding women, on the one end, to something sublime, magical, and transforming on the other. And the difference, the only difference, is the investment made by the person who’s engaged in the process. In other words, it wasn’t a gift that the craft of acting had bestowed on me, it was a gift that I had bestowed on the craft of acting. My diligence and devotion allowed me to experience this wonderful and transforming place.

One of the saddest things I’ve ever heard anyone say was at a dinner party a few years ago. A friend of mine was there, he’s a pretty decent musician and composer, and I found myself talking about this place, this “zone,” which was for me as close to having a direct connection to the universe as I could imagine, and I asked him if he’d ever experienced being in that place. He said yes, that a few times while playing Bach in symphony orchestras he’d felt that sense of being played by the music, as if Bach were in control and not he. Then he went on to say that it was the most frightening experience he’d ever had, and hoped it would never happen again. I felt terribly sorry for my friend, for his fear of losing
control, and for his anxiety that without a tight rein on himself he would fly off into some dangerous and unknown place. I suppose for some people it is a risk, but I would not want to live without having the possibility of these flights in my life. They remain the best places I have ever been. The only real change that has taken place in me, in regard to these magical experiences, is that through the years I have come to worship the place itself and not the craft that has brought me to it. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

One night in class, Benjamin told us of a production he’d seen in Moscow, decades earlier, perhaps it was in the 1920s, a production of the opera
Prince Igor
. He described a scene in which the Czar was sitting on his throne in the middle of the stage. At some point, into the scene trooped an enormous crowd of peasants who were being allowed a rare audience with their Czar. In Russia, in those days, the productions were often enormous, and Benjamin estimated that the extras numbered a hundred, perhaps even more. Benjamin went on to describe a moment when the Czar imperiously looked around the stage and caught the eye of one of the peasants. The peasants had been instructed to look down, not to dare look the Czar in the face. But this one serf raised his eyes and looked directly at the monarch. For a peasant to be even in the presence of the Czar was a miracle, a life-transforming experience. But to have locked eyes with the Czar? Unthinkable! Benjamin mimed the moment as he spoke. As he related the story, he demonstrated the expression on the Czar’s face—regal, haughty,
and superior—and then he showed us the look on the face of the peasant. At first the peasant’s look was one of shock and wonder. He was being looked on by the Czar! Fear crept into his eyes. Would he be able to survive this experience? It was almost too much for him to take in. He was staring into the sun. And then when the Czar broke his gaze from the peasant and looked away, the peasant turned slowly toward the audience and his face showed a mixture of awe, wonder, and joy past all imagining, as if he had seen the face of God. And we could see from Benjamin’s imitation of the peasant, the look on his face, that the peasant’s life was transformed for all time.