First Responsibilities
BERMEL, ALBERT
ON STAGE By Albert ?ermel First Responsibilities The Actors Studio has been the only theatrical training center of any consequence in the United States. By founding its "Method" on what...
...Mumbling delivery, stumbling gait, stooped shoulders, earlobe-tugging and groinscratching have been blamed on the Method, rather than on the personal tics of certain performers...
...You can't eat because none of your sad-assed chicks can cook...
...You worried about it...
...Miss Woodward arrives wearing a helmet of blonde hair, hard green eyelids and a lilac-colored gown...
...Why are you always trying to cut off my cock...
...Ultimately, however, it is not the author's intentions which let the play down but his language, which resembles the sexual psychologizing and fluffy rhetoric of William Inge...
...one actor is the playwright himself, the others are Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, who are not exactly hard up for work...
...In the meantime, the Studio's presentations have inhabited various playhouses about town...
...And I know your women, don't you think I don't—better than you...
...You can't dance because you've got nobody to dance with—don't you know I've watched you all my life...
...In the second act she in tum leaves the scene "to powder my nose" and gives herself time to blanket her entire body in talcum, while Newman comes around to telling the author that there is no harm in an innocent love affair between men and begs him for "just one little kiss...
...Why can't you leave me alone...
...Dynamite Tonight made the Studio look like a grasping producer...
...Is the target Hollywood or the pointlessness of material concerns or the collective tedium of American life...
...a leading role in this dance contest went to Lee Allen, who is not a member of the Studio but a nightclub comic and probably a good one...
...I don't want nothing from you...
...Its next promised play is The Three Sisters...
...Yet his most faithful and famous band of disciples outside Moscow has suffered a mixed press here and abroad...
...I think its mistakes revert to that program note of Lee Strasberg's...
...Well, it is at least a promise...
...but he is not, to be precise, an actor...
...And they pound their tender young palms together after a line that goes something like this: "We're the greatest thing in the world in bed together, the greatest, which is amazing because basically we don't like each other...
...Last year the Actors Studio went into production, and rightly so...
...in a time of tyrannical directing it could have affirmed the loyalty of the player to the play...
...1953), whose Strange Interlude (1928) was followed by the fruits of June Havoc, an actress, James Costigan, a television writer, James Baldwin, an essayist and (less convincingly) a novelist, and Arnold Weinstein—all of them, happily, alive...
...All my life...
...You can't talk because won't nobody talk to you...
...Miss Woodward's arms rise and fall like wings and Newman's jawbone careers about all over his face...
...You might get to like it, too...
...By way of expressiveness...
...Certainly one hoped the Studio would have the discernment to find superior plays...
...But surely "the reality" is that Negroes are slain in the South on much flimsier pretexts than having jeered at a white man's virility and insulted his wife, as the hero does in Blues...
...Okay...
...Lyle shoots again...
...Juanita...
...The first act begins innocently enough as a skit on a couple of movie stars who have come to visit their author friend in the country...
...The first one laid was Marathon '33 by Miss Havoc, and from then on the Studio seemed to go out of its way to prove that it was not a school with an integral policy, and that it could be nearly everything to nearly everybody...
...By founding its "Method" on what Constantin Stanislavski called his "System," it picked the best available model, for Stanislavski was the complete teacher: His instruction explored virtually every corner of stagecraft from diction and word-accentuation to motion, tempo, dress, "characterbuilding," conscious and unconscious motives—across the acting spectrum, in fact, from the body to the mind, without neglecting the soul...
...the logical outcome of an acting school is an acting company...
...Mama...
...White man...
...Richard falls...
...She might get to like it...
...indeed, this scene is reminiscent of nothing so much as a showdown in a Western...
...In taking itself very seriously the Actors Studio needs to take itself even more seriously to bring out its meaning—to reach with a whole arm instead of merely spreading its fingers—by giving all its efforts to one courageous, slapup production each season...
...In the preface to Blues for Mister Charlie (published by Dial Press), James Baldwin states that his play "is based, very distantly indeed, on the case of Emmett Till—the Negro youth who was murdered in Mississippi in 1955...
...Perhaps the talk and the raising are still under way...
...Bernard Shaw once advised a young director that if a scene seems too slow "the remedy in nine cases out of 10 is for the actors to go slower and bring out the meaning...
...A Studio playwriting unit already existed...
...Don't let her near no nigger...
...Newman, as her consort, sports a blazer, a silk scarf tucked into his shirt, and narrow pants...
...And Baldwin's Blues for Mister Charlie (ANTA Theatre) is a streak of gab that gives the cast little opportunity to show off their Method learning, unless that includes declaiming at a high decibel count...
...The Studio therefore put on Dynamite Tonight, his opera...
...Okay...
...Did the Studio have no more confidence in its taste than to withdraw so cravenly...
...What has gone wrong with the Studio so far...
...Paradoxically, the only well made role in the play is that of the white murderer...
...Find them...
...Latent homosexuality, the unending struggles for youth and trimness, the curse of money, the surrender of art to commerce, fake humanitarianism (sipped from Schweitzer, Camus and Einstein), exurban preoccupation with cars and status, fears about the Bomb and about conformist behavior, and similar matters for debate keep taking shape like 40-foot waves only to break into light surf...
...It raises many issues and then skirts them gracefully, which is just as well because most of them have come in for unnecessarily grave attention on Broadway in recent years...
...Marathon '33 made it look like an offshoot of Fred Astaire...
...Perhaps at the deliberate instance of the director, Frank Corsaro, they have loud voices and artificial movements, in contrast with those of James Costigan, who looks like a young Nigel Bruce and behaves with all the naturalness and reticence one expects of an unsuccessful author...
...We are walking in terrible darkness here," Baldwin writes, "and this is one man's attempt to bear witness to the reality and the power of light...
...Of its current attractions, Costigan's Baby Want a Kiss (Little Theatre) gives employment to only three actors and a dog...
...The play will enjoy a solid run if the schoolgirl contingent that comes to worship Paul Newman keeps up its support...
...As it is written, this play is almost a call to revolt, but the call goes unspoken and the light is infused with a lot of sweetness...
...The story, thanks to several deft switches in the point of view, ends up nowhere...
...My own considered conclusion is that it does not make much difference...
...The Studio's first "living playwright" was Eugene O'Neill (d...
...In a time of shrunken casts its production unit could have demonstrated the virtues of coherent training...
...Okay...
...Are Newman and Woodward really the freaks they appear to be (he with his wooden leg that he has willed to become flesh, she with her wrinkled skin puffed out by parafin injections...
...There was some talk about raising two million dollars for a theater...
...The "first responsibility" of an acting school is to the actor, not to the playwright...
...The kids scream at the erotic jokes and gasp at expressions like "bare ass...
...Keep your old lady home, you hear...
...this hatchery must perforce be tapped, and never mind the quality of the eggs...
...Teach us," Baldwin writes, "to trust the great gift of life and learn to love one another and dare to walk the earth like men...
...Stepping off briskly on the wrong foot, artistic director Lee Strasberg wrote a program note for the first production explaining that this was not an actors' theater, otherwise "it would be doomed to failure...
...A large theme demands dialogue to match it, something more than repetition, italics, exclamation points, and wandering speeches like this one in the course of which the hero Richard is shot by the segregationist Lyle: "You sick mother...
...Daddy...
...You ain't got nothing to give me...
...Baby Want a Kiss is a two-hour diversion that does not flag but does not accelerate or come into focus either...
...Why have you spent so much time trying to kill me...
...Weinstein, as his entertaining Red Eye of Love indicated several years ago, is a true playwright...
...The first responsibility of our theater is therefore to the playwright—the living playwright...
...And after the killer is acquitted, Baldwin's "power of light" ought, if he is going to invoke it, to illuminate some course of action, some drive toward justice more forceful than a prayer meeting...
...Lyle shoots, once...
...It is handled by Rip Torn (one of the Studio's directors and best actors) with a dignity that just about contains violence...
...Or are they two gods descending on a mortal...
...It would go one better and breed them...
...Only when the actors serve the play do we possess the proper environment for a theater...
...Newman conveniently goes out for firewood and stays away long enough to chop down a forest, while Miss Woodward confides that all is not well with the marriage and lets the author kiss her green eyelids...
...The show ran into hostile reviews and was suspended after one performance that presumably failed to ignite...
Vol. 47 • May 1964 • No. 10
