Transcripts

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INTERVIEWER: When did you discover that you had acting talent, stage talent? Were you a class clown in school.

SUBJECT: Well, I was a good comic when I acted. But no, I wasn't ever that. I was more that person in the black beret.

[LAUGHING]

I was the genius who smoked too much. And genius is my word. No one else is. No, I had a slightly more eccentric personality.

INTERVIEWER: I have to say that it doesn't sound like you're from Texas.

SUBJECT: Well, I'm doing an English play at the moment. And in rehearsal, we say, we will only speak in British today so that we'll get used to talking that way. And so I realized that I'm carrying around a lot of it with me.

But in fact-- in fact, I worked very hard even while I was in Midland. I didn't want to sound that way. I hated the sound. It was offensive to my ears even when I was 12.

INTERVIEWER: How does it sound?

SUBJECT: Oh, I was-- well, if I had four drinks, I could do the authentic. But I mean, my sister still talks like this. And my father talks like that and my mom. And it's a very dead, sort of uninflected and very flat, unexpressive means of speaking.

Oddly enough, now, 25 years later, I can hear it. And I hear it quite musically and poetically. And I find it lovely. And I find all its charm.

But when you're growing, wherever you grow up-- if you're growing up in Brooklyn or-- there is something in the child that wants to say, I'm not of this. I'm more special than this. I'm different. And I think that's what it was. I actually worked very hard to rid myself of it. And obviously, if you're thinking of acting on a stage, you have to go-- you have to find a neutral, at least speech, so that you can do it when you want to but not be victimized by it when you don't.

INTERVIEWER: You went to SMU, Southern Methodist University. And there, you met Tyrone Guthrie. What were your impressions of the man?

SUBJECT: My memories of him are-- I had to do-- in acting class, I had to-- I had to be Marchbanks in a scene from Candida. He directed us over a period of three days in a little 30-minute sections.

And I remember him being terrifying, highly intimidating. I remember largely just the size of his nostrils because he was so tall above me that that's all you looked into was some vast open void that was hawkishly standing above you, excoriating you over your lack of talent. And I remember him as a perfectionist. I remember him as being very impatient.

And I'm not quite sure he was much interested in the master classes. But when you heard him speak, when he delivered a lecture or something, his passions were infectious and contagious. And his logic was irrefutable.

He had just at that time, really-- I think shortly before that opens, the Guthrie-- and I recall he had either just completed or he was working on the greeks, The House of Atreus, that he did. And I remember him speaking a lot about theaters as works of architecture, a as community fixtures in the sense of every community needing one in the same way. It needed sewers and a library.

And I remember his passion on those subjects. I remember the man as being sort of horrifying to a 20-year-old, 19-year-old. But the figure he represented and the ideas he embodied were so attractive to someone who was actually dreaming of entering into that world.

And I think particularly at that time, which was 1966 or so, the theater he was making was the theater we were all dreaming about. It was a very different world. And it was the birth of this huge movement of theaters across the country rather than now, it's 30 years later. And we're in some sort of post-adolescent period of our movement. And so there was an exhilaration about the future when he spoke of it.

INTERVIEWER: You were in Stratford for a time. And right out of college, you became rather immersed as actors in Stratford are in Shakespeare. What was that experience like? Had you had much experience with Shakespeare before that?

SUBJECT: Well, I masqueraded as though I had. But in fact, Shakespeare is one of those things like most people admit way too late in their life that they actually never did read Proust or Moby-Dick and get around to reading it when they're in their 30s. But in fact, I had been through an entire four years of college without really knowing Shakespeare or studying Shakespeare.

And certainly, I didn't have much experience at Shakespeare. But I certainly pretended as though I had when I entered there because one felt quite foolish in the face of all these people who did if one didn't at least pretend. And as a matter of fact, I considered those four years at Stratford my education, my college about Shakespeare. And it was a great learning experience.

And I actually think in retrospect, that's the best way to learn the great writers, is in the laboratory, not in the classroom. It's the only way to discover what's still living in them as opposed to dealing in homilies about their brilliance, which is basically all you can do with a textbook in front of you and a lecturer behind a podium.

INTERVIEWER: At that point, you're professionally in a pretty significant phase of your development. And I'm wondering, What did Shakespeare do to your outlook on life? How did those plays affect you that way just as a person?

SUBJECT: Well, in two ways. This was the time when Hair had come to Broadway and we were going to change things. And it wasn't going to be all that tired, old stuff anymore.

So the first thing I learned was that Shakespeare invited my work into him and the engagement of what I felt theater was and what he had written 400 years prior was, in fact, delicious, was juicy and invigorated what I thought of as my work, that my work was made far more fascinating and energetic by engaging with the writing of this caliber.

On the other hand, a year after I left Stratford, I was rereading a play that we had actually done, Antony and Cleopatra. And I got to the end of it. And I was reading that speech that Cleopatra says as she's killing herself. I am fire and air, my baser elements. I commit into the Earth or whatever she says.

And I started shaking. And I got frightened. And I had this image of this guy with a pen at a desk and the baby crying in the kitchen and his wife Anne saying, we'll get in here, I need you. And he was saying to himself, Well, what should she say?

And he wrote it down. And I got so scared of someone that smart, someone that brilliant, who was an actual real person, that, in fact, I didn't do Shakespeare for six years after that. So I had both experiences of him. I had the experience of the invitation that he offers. And I also had the horror of knowing you could never be that good.