While rummaging through old memories of life in amateur and semi-pro theatre, I stumbled upon a collection of half-forgotten moments when the actions on stage didn’t follow the script:
During a performance of “Of Mice and Men” and playing the role of George: in the first scene, Lenny and I are camped by the river sharing a can of cold beans. First, I had to learn how to open a can with a pocketknife, which was tricky enough to do in real life, let alone in front of an audience. But one night, one of us knocked over the beans as we laid out our blankets and Lenny had to lie in it until the lights went down. The picture of passive, simple-minded Lenny glowering at me in the wings is still priceless.
Later on in that same run: the final scene is one of the most shocking moments in modern drama, when George, out of a skewed sense of mercy, shoots Lenny in the back of the head. Lenny’s on his knees looking out over the audience toward the land of milk and honey and rabbits and I stand behind him, pointing the gun at the back of his head. The lights cut out and the shot is immediately heard, followed by a slump of a body. I was using a starter’s pistol as the prop. But one performance, the pistol either wasn’t loaded with caps or it misfired. The lights cut out only to be followed by a “click” of the gun. The stage manager realized what was happening and quickly yelled “Bang!” from the wings. The horrified Lenny slumped, probably wishing he could stay there and not get up for the curtain call. I, of course, wished I could blow my own brains out. There’s nothing like actor’s humiliation as a leveling force.
One performance during a dramatic interpretation of Franz Kafka’s “The Trial” I was in the role of eccentric artist Titorelli that the character Joseph K visits to get insight on his dilemma and ordeal of false accusation. We were in a black box theatre composed of metal Unistrut and wooden planks and had constructed a small cubicle raised 10 feet off the ground to simulate Titorelli’s tiny atelier. I was playing him as sort of a crazed Dali, very physical and a bit clownish. I had conceived of a bit that had me flying backwards onto a high stool next to an easel as I answered one of his questions, plopping perfectly on its seat. The stool was right at the edge of the platform and one night I misjudged the leap and felt the stool leaning backwards. I screamed and grabbed onto one of the Unistruts, saving me from tumbling down to the floor. I’m still not sure if the audience realized what was going on, as the actor playing K didn’t have time to react and just stood there. Or did he? We finished the scene undeterred, working the fall into our dialogue, but I decided to cut that bit out of the rest of the performances. The director agreed.
In a scene from “Winter Chicken” at a dinner theatre in Slidell, LA, I played the young romantic interest to the daughter of the protagonist, and again, being a physical actor, had conceived of a pratfall over the sofa on an entrance. I think I was “Kramer” before there was a Kramer. The director loved the bit and it was as well rehearsed as any scene in amateur dinner theatre (meaning not very much). One performance, I tripped before the fall and instead of the controlled tumble that always got a laugh, I produced a body slam off the sofa onto the stage. I saw 2 people get up from their tables to check if I was alright. The director decided to cut the fall out, I disagreed.
During the same run, my romantic interest and I had a scene where we’re making out on the sofa (in dinner theatre, there’s always a sofa) right when her father walks in and glowers at us for a laugh. We had conceived of some stage bits while we’re kissing, a bit of physical wrangling to break up a long stage kiss. Since I’m lip-to-lip with her, I’m too close to see that her breast had popped out of her blouse right when her father walks in so I had no idea why this scene was eliciting screams of laughter when most of the nights it was just a little titter. I pulled away just in time to see her push the errant flesh back into her blouse and was too shocked to say my next line. Maybe I was waiting for the stage manager to yell “Bang!” from the wings.
In college, I played the title character in the play “When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder”. Red was a young, ineffectual loser trapped in a dead end job in a money-losing diner in the desert on Rt. 66 after the interstate opened. One of the subplots concerned a tourist couple on their way to Baton Rouge and the woman, Clarise, was a concert violinist carrying a very expensive violin with her. 
Its a time for families, but something I saw yesterday filled me with sadness and dread. Walking down 7th avenue in the middle of a rush, the sun has set and its that dusky kind of dark at rush hour. A man and woman pushing a baby carriage toward me, I notice a light inside the carriage illuminating the baby. As I get closer, I see they suspended a digital tablet near the opening for the baby to watch, its small head bathed in its weird translucent glow. Right before this, I was leaving an eatery passing a table of a young family as the father pushed his cell phone toward his toddler to play with. This was no one time thing, the child knew exactly how to manipulate the device once it got into its tiny, pudgy hands.
Because it has now reached epidemic stages, I feel its important to re-iterate a truth: if someone became interested in whiskey in the 2000s and started a distillery as a result, they are NOT a master distiller. It doesn’t matter what type of success or failure they have, who their distributor is or how many markets they’re in, they are not a master…of anything.
During my 2-year stint, I was not allowed to pursue any work in the industry: no films, plays, commercials, voice overs, nothing. It was harsh but they demanded the commitment from you. Robert Duvall called his time learning the technique “worse than my time in the Korean War” because it is emotionally brutal. It is brutal in that it does not allow the bullshit tricks and shortcuts that actors fall into during their career, things that got them work in the past; things they’re known for in the industry; little bits of business they use over and over again: the eyebrow raise, the cocked smile, the walk or strut. It had one goal, emotional truth, played truthfully in the moment from your own imagination. You learn to listen actively, be in the moment and serve the script and your fellow players.
aled: that when you get stripped of the layers of sophistication that you adopt to hide your insecurities, you get angry, very, very angry, sometimes a rage. Its the first line of defense, the first impulse, its very primal, the engagement of fight/flight at a higher level. I’ve seen nuclear bursts of rage coming from the tiniest of people that made me frightened in that moment: it was real, it was enormous and it was locked inside them their entire lives before this exercise released it. Its why there is a mattress hanging on the wall of every Meisner studio in the country, because in the course of the exercises when that anger got so big and had to be exorcised, the teacher would yell, “go to the mattress” and you would leap at it flailing, crying, screaming, pounding and kicking until the anger was purged like a toxin from your blood. Then you would return to your partner and continue the exercise. And what happened in that moment, over and over, with each person in their own unique way, was why I was committed to being an actor, to pursuing art in this form for what I thought would be the rest of my life. You saw an almost transcendent human transformation happen in front of your eyes. With the anger purged, the emotional truth of that person was revealed, and I’m not kidding, as if it came down from heaven. You saw into that person’s soul, in the context of this repetitive dialogue, and you could not believe it transpired in front of you. It was scary, sexy and huge, it attracted us like flies to sugar in that we all wanted it, we all wanted what we saw to happen to us. So we came back day after day, week after week, filled with the homework assigned to us, ready to go to the mattress for our art. I did not go to war like Duvall did, but I have a sense of what he was talking about. At the end of 2 years, I was forever changed as an artist. And not surprisingly, its when I began to actually make a living at it.
There’s a rush of righteous verdicts around an absolutely horrendous idea, concocted by 2 Google-twits, to replace real neighborhood bodegas around the country with automated kiosks filled with limited and generic items. Its a bad idea from every angle, not least of which is that bodegas are the heart of the neighborhoods they find themselves in, filled with stories like this:
I was trying to quit smoking cigarettes so I decided to go the “loosies” route, hoping that the trouble and time it took me to get dressed, go downstairs and around the corner to buy a single Newport for a dime apiece (they were always Newports and I hated menthols) would be enough to deter me and break the habit. Consequently, I visited my neighborhood bodega 5 or 6 times a day in my futile quest.
When we’re all assembled, we walk into some narrow little room with only enough room for us to sit on small stools like we’re taking a crap (“what, we’re not standing? and where’s the lines on the back wall?”) and for fuck’s sake, I could be sitting next to “the guy” and I don’t see handcuffs on anyone and what the fuck is going on here? But there’s the glass panel in front of us (with Jerry Orbach or Richard Belzer or Dennis Franz behind it) and we stare dumbly at it like we don’t really know what’s going on, but in the tradition of all lineups, no smiling, please. And then we get up and leave.
Bile 