A Prayer for My Daughter.
© Drawing reproduced by special arrangement with Hirschfeld's
exclusive representative, The margo Feiden Galleries, NY.
LAURENCE
LUCKINBILL
One of this country's
most gifted actors, he is currently touring with a new one show
TEDDY TONIGHT! as Theodore Roosevelt, which premeried in
the Pacific Ocean on the cruise ship Rotterdam VI. He originated
the role of Hank in The Boys In The Band, and appeared on
Broadway in Cabaret, The Shadow Box (Tony nomination), and
Poor Murderer, among others. His NY stage work also
includes The Memory Bank (NY Critics Circle Award), Clarence
Darrow Tonight at EST and his one man show as Lyndon Johnson.
A charter member of 3 prestigious repertory companies: Lincoln Center
Repertory Theatre, APA and ACT, Mr. Luckinbill also starred as Sybok
in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. He joined the State Department
as director, writer, and lecturer on Theatre for the U.S. Foreign
Service; and also wrote and co-produced (with Lucie Arnaz) Lucy
& Desi: A Home Movie for NBC, receiving an Emmy Award.
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Where Should the Theatre Be Now?
by Laurence Luckinbill
It seems fitting, in the pages of this journal, hallowed
by its dedication to Harold Clurman, and by the inclusion in its
masthead of the magnificent and startling word "Soul,"
to dare to suggest that our theatre needs a new dream. It has, for
a long time, suffered from a lack of a cohesive spirit, of social
purpose, political engagement, moral debate and ethical linkage-in
short, any sense of "What's it all for?"
Now, the time may have come again to call for
a renewal of our lives as theatre workers in those terms. But when
was it ever different, someone under 30, or even 40, may ask? Well,
in my lifetime, briefly in the 30's, when the implosion of society
demanded new solutions for survival, The Group Theatre responded.
Its actors, playwrights and directors exploded with an amazing array
of theatrical bombshells that informed and influenced
generations of us. And after World War II, as the upheaval caused
by that war back lit the myriad horror scenes of the way we humans
treat each other not only individually, but in groups, The Actor's
Studio provided the flickering partial light of redemption via
a cleansing expression of the pure depth of individual pain and
joy in response to life. Then, for a time in the mid-sixties, there
was a collective response to a new sense of responsibility - and
of guilt - for what was "happening" in the world, in our
country. Many, for the first time, understood that "happenings"
had causes, and the prevailing feeling in the theatre reflected
Pogo's wisecrack, "We have met the enemy and he is us."
Unlike previous responses, however, this one resembled, in retrospect,
a "wave" at a football game. A swirl of colorful motion,
a rise of sound and emotion, then a subsidence, with really nothing
accomplished. No change to anything, except maybe the atmosphere,
the ambient life of the theatre, which became simply hipper, but
much more polluted with negativity. As Yeats predicted, the center
hadn't held, and we were permanently to the left of it, and as unstable
as we now perceived American institutions also to be.
I was a part of this. In 1964, I was lucky enough
to be invited to be a member of the old original Lincoln Center
Repertory Company. We were downtown in a sort of prefab blue tent
of a theatre on Washington Square meant to last only until the grand
uptown monuments would rise. No one who worked there will ever forget
how great that temporary theatre felt, or the sense of seriousness
or Purpose we felt. We were engaged in a mission of high daring
and artistic singularity. If we succeeded, the foundations for an
American National Theatre would be laid. We were both creative vanguard
and humble paving bricks. I was paid, as I remember, $135.00 a week,
to play Damis in Tartuffe. We were a sort of carpetbagger
production mounted by Bill Ball, and brought in from outside the
original core group, using actors new to the company (me, Paul Shenar,
Michael O'Sullivan, Roy Scheider and others), alongside actors who
had been there from the beginning and who had already spent a couple
of years going through the entire rigorous training cycle.
We were to join an ongoing repertory which already
included among others, After the Fall, Incident at Vichy,
and a production of The Changeling (directed by Elia Kazan
and meant to show off the company's expanded range into Jacobean
drama) which was soon to open. The thinking was definitely "out
of the box." Tartuffe rehearsed for months instead
of weeks. We did exercises and games for hours every day intended
to raise our physical, mental and vocal abilities to cope not only
with Richard Wilbur's rigorous verse adaptation of Moliere's play,
but also with the repertory company we were joining. It was unbelievably
exciting, but also unbelievably painful: Bill insisted that the
men wear French heels to rehearse in every day. But I was so proud
and honored to belong to this family of theatre workers who were
not just "doing a show," but who were actually the nucleus
of a new creative substance. It was to be a way of approaching our
theatre through an American synthesis of the best methods of work
that had informed the previous cultural life of the entire world's
theatre.
Robert Whitehead, Harold Clurman and Elia Kazan
were the leaders of this phenomenon; and had visibly and articulately
committed their lives and careers to this huge altruistic work.
Tartuffe opened and was a huge success, followed by The
Changeling which was the opposite, in spades. The critical reception
was another "Night of the Long Knives." Meant to demonstrate
that American actors could train to match other great world repertories,
to the critics and chatterers the production was an opportunity
to be 'Chicken Littles,' and point out the impossibility of such
hubris. Suddenly, the house which had seemed so strong, came tumbling
down, in spades. Followed by jacks, queens and kings. How could
the structure have been so vulnerable?
This is a subject for serious analysis at another
time. It's complex and its roots stretch back to the very earliest
theatre company in America, the Hallams. But now, simply, all of
a sudden, it seemed, the hidden inner tensions of the edifice made
it impossible to withstand the onslaught, and it crumbled. The critics
(I think of many of them as terrorists, without meaning to trivialize
the term) had so hated and denigrated the abject failure symbolized
(to them) by The Changeling production, that they used it
to point out the absurdity of the idea that there could ever be
an "American Century" of the theatre. This harsh judgment
supplied the final demolition of the fragile egos, and the less
than perfect social purpose of the enterprise, and it fell. And
there arose from it a new smell of fear of "Americanness,"
which had already begun to pervade in other areas (it was the
mid-sixties; we were the world's villain!).
And those of us in Tartuffe who had
previously joked that we had swung on board the mighty vessel as
pirates just in time to enjoy the spoils, now realized the ship
was burning, the decks canting and collapsing, and the original
and purest dream of a national repertory theatre was going down,
sinking fast.
The night they told us was so unutterably sad
(like any undeserved closing, only much more so), so filled with
tired bravado, with actor's japery and unfinished anger, with resignation,
shock and a kind of far-seeing wisdom exhibited by some that I've
never forgotten. We were told to assemble in the house after the
show. Actors freshly wiped of make-up, those who hadn't worked that
night, some scruffy as always, some in jackets and ties, as always,
sat in the front mezzanine rows, lit by bare house lights (but lit,
of course), somberly waiting. I sat next to Joseph Wiseman and David
Wayne. Sada Thompson was behind me and Sally Jens in view. Michael
Strong, and Hal Holbrook next to each other. Jason Robards the center
of friends, Fay Dunaway alone at the end of a row, in a black coat.
All around me, the peers and peerless of the realm-realm-the New
York Theatre! This was not a group of losers or quitters. I was
close to tears and crazy laughter the whole night. I will try to
tell you from the best of my faulty recollection, what it was like.
Robert Whitehead, formal as always, (Rhett Butler and Ashley Wilkes
in a business suit), spoke first. He was in pain, clearly. He said
in effect: "Gadge (Kazan's nickname), Harold and I are no longer
a part of the Lincoln Center Repertory Company. At the end of the
season we will shut down here. The company may continue with some
of you uptown. We can't say. It's been a noble effort and this company
is wonderful. First class. I take full responsibility myself for
the failure to make it work. I'm sorry." He couldn't go on.
His voice cracked and he paused a long time before simply bowing
his head and stepping back. A great and gentle man.
Kazan perched himself on the mezzanine railing,
in sweatshirt and sneakers. He spoke very slowly and still he stumbled
over words. He wavered on the rail. I thought he'd fall backwards
into the orchestra seats behind him, but he stayed upright. Forcefully,
he said only two sentences: "Goddamnit, The Changeling
is not a failure!" .long pause.And I defend to the death my
right to fail!"
Some laughed. Softly. The pain was getting to
everyone now. Kazan had defended only himself. And everyone waited
for something more. Some word of thanks or praise or just good luck.
It didn't come. He untangled himself from the rail and stood down.
Harold walked to the center. Elegant in a black
homburg and opera cape, a flower in his dark suit jacket lapel.
I believe he even carried a cane. If not, he should have. He said,
in effect: "When The Group came to an end, everyone said we
were finished. Kazan, Strasberg, Clurman. But as you can see, we
went on. Lee went on. Gadge. (a pause) .went on. There was a blacklist,
and I went on. Productions failed. The Theatre collapsed. I went
on. Now this. Now my good friends, my dear friends, I will go on.
I will go on, doing what I do. And I imagine, before long, some
of you may be auditioning for me, doing what you do. I hope you
get the part. Because we go on. That's what we do."
Well, as it turned out, almost none of us were
rehired as members of the uptown Lincoln Center Repertory Company.
The new management, Herbert Blau and Jules Irving (whom I knew well
because I had also been for six months, an apprentice floor-sweeper
and bit part player in their Actor's Workshop in San Francisco),
were ideologues of the left, determinedly uncommercial, and with
no taint of Broadway success about them. They naturally brought
their main actors with them from San Francisco, and hired new ones
they felt comfortable with from Hollywood, and even New York. The
actors of the original company who had given up years to the dream
of a national repertory theatre, were now put through some humiliating
interviews in which they were asked to somehow prove themselves
worthy of this new phase, this turn of the screw. Some were asked
to audition. It was truly awful. Truly a measure of our sixties
mentality. It was not business, but politics, as usual. Most of
us chose to cut the ties to the old dream cleanly. I will never
forget Joe Wiseman walking slowly out of that room at the end of
the hall, smiling slightly to himself, a thousand yard stare in
his eyes. He would go on. There was no choice. And definitely in
the American style, all that training trashed. Wasted. Obsolete.
Except of course to us lucky enough to have had it.
The big change to our theatre, in my working lifetime,
thus died aborning. The new management failed quickly, and the one
after that, too. And got less done than we had. In the tumult of
the 60's and 70's, none of it was mourned. We were all now conditioned
to distrust-even hate-America, so why should we deserve a national
theatre? And that fever didn't break until a commercial production
at the Newhouse-
But as it turned out, the long-delayed, but always-expected
something that we longed for, turned out to be a long day's journey
into the inevitability of The Producers and the $480.00 ticket.
The idea of theatre as socially important was scalped repeatedly
by the usual suspects, and the creative blue collar workers of the
theatre-us-were finally, totally marginalized by commerce. "The
Deadly Theatre" (as Peter Brook calls it) was all there was.
Is.
Oh, there were, and are, marvelous surprises all
the time. Every season, some actor takes the art seriously, and
burrows up through the manure to burst into flower before our delighted
eyes. Every year a playwright or two is able to cast a net wider
or deeper than usual and pull in a load of relevance. But there's
no vessel, no bottom, no ship of state, no trend, no movement, nothing
to get lost in, march for, or believe in as greater than career
or success on the insignificant personal level. (How lucky those
now legendary theatre workers were, streaming downtown to find a
theatre to play in!)
Now, in the wake of September 11th, in the midst
of another, stunningly serious war-this time for all the marbles-a
war that has crept upon us over decades of neglect and political
drift (and yes, error, hopefully correctable), and burst upon us
with the fury of "Why do they hate us?" Now, more than
ever, we need a theatre engaged with all of American life and truly
reflective of it, of broad perspective sympathetic to a variety
of points of view, of politics, of human events, and responsibilities.
Also now, world events and inescapable global family connections.
And the drama of any superpower is, first, tragedy.
But any reformation (that's what it will have
to be) has to be led. So far, way out in the vanguard (like a shadowy
special operative dropped into the back country at night) is Tony
Kushner, who is laser-targeting universal human issues. But it may
be that any movement to reengage us with our own real lives has
to be led by a teacher or teachers. The Group Theatre, The Studio,
Bread and Puppet, Open Theatre, The Living Theatre, were all run
by men and women with the taste for analysis, the appetite for engagement,
and talents for organization. (Although all the most recent were
swamped by the tsunami of the "protest movement" and subsided
noisily but inevitably back into the great ocean of commerce).
Maybe what is needed is a Coalition to focus a
kind of wartime energy on globalizing our theatrical concerns. To
invent plays and acting techniques that will perform as powerfully
to engage us with the real world as have the deployment of 19 year
old marines who are sons of recent immigrants from Cambodia and
Afghanistan, to carry the flag to a desert outpost near Kandahar,
or the march upstairs into the jaws of death of supremely ordinary,
heroic firemen and policemen from all of the old boroughs of this
town. Maybe if we look, we can come up with our own Berliner Ensemble,
or Poor Theatre, to express our new realities. Maybe we need to
look above and beyond the voices of our vaginas and the puppetry
of our penises now, and respond to a greater cause than the enhancement
and entitlement of self, to a greater construct of self -the imaginative
projection of ourselves outward to where the vanguard work is being
done, into the affairs of state of our city, country and world.
This is a great moment in history-teeming with heroes, villains,
buffoons, mortal dangers and opportunities. Issues are at clash
everywhere with tragic potential. Irony is as alive as common criminality
in uncommon crises.
There is ferocious anger sweeping the world as
the have-nots (now Islamic) rage against the simple neglect and
habitual venality of the haves. The piper is calling in his chits,
and fraudulent friends abound. Who will be true? From where will
the next blow come? The flawed superpower, like Laocoon, defends
itself against the deadly tide. We must have a theatre equal to
join in this task.
What an opportunity! Here is, indeed, a superpower
moment: the chance, and necessity not simply to crush a horrifying
enemy, but also to raise new nations, theirs and ours, in a caring,
supremely patient and cautious way. This is the only work worthy
of a "superpower," surely, to change the world for the
better-not just to overawe and overpower it with "bunker busters"
and "daisy cutters," but to dare to make the sacrifice-the
inevitable deaths of our young men clad in Kevlar and sent into
someone else's hell fire-to dare to make those sacrifices holy by
finding the real Super Power to raise, to lift, to interdict centuries
of violence and oppression, to curb it and metamorphose it. To parent
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Russia, Columbia, Cuba, Iraq, Iran, and Israel.
And what has stopped us from parenting every miserable ghetto in
our own land? 9/11 must make us acknowledge our own hubris and tragic
flaws.
And for us? We non-civilians who enlisted long
ago in the army of theatre artistes! What stories are here! What
stuff of genius exists here to inspire the spirits of all great
creators-playwrights, actors, directors, teachers of those arts.
I don't mean merely to exhort, but to evangelize. To suggest that
we ought to set up a series of workshops to articulate a philosophy
and create a center from which a thousand new stories will arise-to
be given away like original Internet material to any who will respond
to work on them. A kind of new self-generated WPA theatre may result,
where actors, playwrights and directors coalesce to make and present
material laden with history, humanity, hard facts and wild fiction
(which may, by magic realism, turn to fact as well).
This is a post-post-post modern moment. What is
needed now is heart, but not sentimentality, confrontation with
our culture and all its leaders, with pieties and lies of every
stripe-but confrontation driven by the deeper truth of the inescapable
pride and wild love we must feel for this nation, this civilization,
this American idea, this crazy, magnificent, embattled place of
refuge for Sikhs and saints, for psychos and cynics, for redeemers
of men and food stamps, or crazed conservatives and laughable liberals,
the visionary, the vain, the visaless, the ideologues and the clueless-who
need to be reminded dramatically now that we are truly and must
remain multicultural, but also indivisible, from sea to shining
sea.
The only thing not relative anymore-not up for
grabs-is the goodness of being an American. How humbling it is,
how lucky we are, how astounding, that of us were not born Afghan,
Pakistani, Iraqi, and so on, and that there exists an America, the
sum of which is greater than all its parts: "United We Stand."
and so forth. And we owe this America now. It's not our task to
be ashamed, or to "love it or leave it," but to do our
almighty best as American theatre people to deeply understand, to
deeply express our land. To deeply defend ourselves in the world
court of theatre, and to insure as best we can, that through our
art, by our response to this new world, that we are truly "the
home of the brave and the land of the free." We can still make
that a lie, or the truth.
And as Harold Clurman said, at that embattled
moment: "I will go on. Doing what I do." And of course,
we know that Harold did nothing but the best, no matter what. Can
we now follow his lead? •2001
If you
are interested in joining A Coalition for a New Theatre, contact
Ronald Rand and Laurence Luckinbill at, "The Soul of the American
Actor" re: Coalition for a New Theatre, PO Box 750154 Forest
Hills, NY 11375) or actorsoulnewspaper@myexcel.com. Written exclusively
for "The Soul of the American Actor."
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