12 Life in the Theatre
There are even odder ways of life than sitting alone behind a desk in a little room lined with books waiting for someone to come in and talk with you, or delivering sermons on literature to the beady red eyes of a television camera. One of them is the theatre.
You may recall the scene in Kafka’s The Trial in which K meets the Court Painter and goes to this innocuous madman’s room, ostensibly to learn more about the Judge who is to sit at the trial. The room is so tiny, K has to stand on the bed while the Painter pulls picture after picture from beneath this lone article of furniture, blows the dust off them into K’s face, and sells several to him. Although the reader recognizes from the beginning that it is all a tissue of lies and deception, K leaves feeling satisfied that at last he has someone on his side who will put in a “right” word for him. It is evident to what ends K will now go to bribe, cheat, blackmail, be made a total fool of, in the hope of getting someone to intervene in his fate. In addition to its comment upon a culture that would rather surrender identity than face up to its guilt, the scene is terribly funny, as well as terribly humiliating.
It is this scene that always comes to mind when I think of the nightmare of nonsense I lived through in the course of three weeks in the theatre. It happened one summer a few years ago when Hope and I had come down from Bark Point to check on the shop. I was answering a pile of letters when the phone rang. It was a man I had met sometime before who turned out to be business manager of a summer stock theatre operating in a suburb northwest of Chicago. He wondered if I would like to play a lead opposite Linda Darnell in the Kaufmann and Hart comedy, The Royal Family. The role was that of the theatrical agent, Oscar Wolfe, who theoretically functioned as a sane balance to a family of zany, childish, totally mischievous grown-ups (roughly modeled on the Barrymore clan).
Hope, who had grown up in Westchester society, admitted that when she was a girl attending summer theatre it had always been her secret wish to be a part of it. She thought it might be good fun, even though I had never acted in my life. So the business manager came over and I signed the contract, calling for a week of rehearsal and two weeks of performance.
Summer theatre around Chicago cannot be classified as an amateur undertaking, although part of its economics is based on utilizing large numbers of young people who want the “training” and generally avoiding the high costs involved in regular theatrical production. But top stars and personalities are booked, the shows are promoted to the public as professional offerings and are reviewed as such by the theatrical critics, and the whole enterprise is regarded as essential to the vitality of a “living theatre.” The outfit I signed up with was an established enterprise and, as a matter of fact, is still going. I was not entirely confident that I could deliver, but I had no doubt that I was associating myself with people who could.
The theatre itself was not a refashioned barn or circus tent set-up, but an actual theatre building, restored from previous incarnations as a movie and vaudeville house. I arrived on a lovely August morning but inside the theatre was in total darkness except for some lights on the stage. I made my way timidly down front where a number of people were sitting. Several nodded to me, and I nodded back. Presently a tall man got up on the stage and announced that he was going to direct the play. He said, however, that Miss Darnell had not yet arrived and, also, that there were not enough scripts to go around. We would begin with those who had their parts.
For the next three days, I sat in the darkness from nine in the morning until five in the afternoon. No one asked me to read, no one asked me to rehearse, practically no one talked to me at all. I managed a few words with Miss Darnell, who was gracious and charming, but I was beginning to wonder when I would be asked to act. Hope had been working with me on my lines, but it is one thing to know lines sitting down and quite another to remember them while trying to act and give them meaning before an audience.
I began to suspect that something was haywire. A friend who taught drama at a nearby college and often took character roles in stock confirmed my fears by assuring me that this play would never get off the ground. “It will never open,” he said.
We were to open on a Monday. It was already Friday and I had been on stage exactly once and nobody yet knew his part—I least of all. In addition to my fears, I was beginning to feel slighted. I wondered what I was doing in this dark, dank place, and what the rest thought they were doing, including the innumerable young men and women between sixteen and twenty years of age who were ostensibly developing their knowledge of the theatre through odd jobs such as wardrobe manager, program manager, etc. There didn’t seem much to manage and I wasn’t sure it was really a very healthy environment. By this time, a fair number of the cast had taken to screaming, which is something I am not used to among grown-ups for any extended period. I also had my doubts about a young man who spent most of his offstage moments sweet-talking a bulldog. I wondered if acting necessarily precluded any kind of emotional responsibility.
Saturday night the play preceding us closed. We rehearsed all that night. Sunday the theatre would be dark, and Monday The Royal Family was to go on. The Saturday night rehearsal was initially delayed because one of the principals could not be found. Finally he was located, dead drunk, in a local tavern. It was now almost one a.m. and not even a walk-through with script in hand had yet been attempted. Instead the company was engaged in a welter of screeching, shouting, confusion, and recriminations. This was sheer, silly nonsense I decided, and went to see the business manager. I told him I’d be pleased to quit and offered to pay double my salary to any experienced actor he could get to replace me. I was at once threatened with a lawsuit.
At two in the morning, everyone was called on stage by the director, who made a little speech saying that he was just no longer able to direct the play, he couldn’t pull it together! At this, Miss Darnell walked off the stage, saying, “This play will not open on Monday or Tuesday or ever, unless something is done immediately.” After all, she had a reputation to uphold.
Thereupon, the director returned with a further announcement. It so happened, he said, that a brilliantly gifted young New York director was “visiting here between important plays” and he had consented to pull the play together for us! Our gift of Providence then stepped forward and we began to rehearse.
When my cue came and I offered my lines, the new director said: “The Oscar Wolfe part is really just an afterthought. The show will play just as well without the Wolfe character appearing at all.”
“Fine,” I said, but pandemonium had already broken loose as the former director and some of the actors took issue with this new twist. We were already missing one actor and now this new director wanted to sack me. Well, I had asked for it, but Miss Darnell and the others persuaded me to stick with it. The rehearsal continued.
At five a.m. a halt was called and the treasurer of the theatre asked to say a few words. Under Equity rules, he reminded us, we were entitled to overtime for extra rehearsal. He asked us to waive this for the sake of the play. I waited silently to see what the general reaction would be. It didn’t take long to find out: Nothing doing, play or no play! I went along with them on that. What I couldn’t understand was why they put up with all they did: the filthy little cubicles that served as dressing rooms, the rats and cockroaches that scudded across the floor, the lack of any backstage source of drinking water—the whole atmosphere seemed deliberately designed to make an actor’s life completely insupportable. And now the management was sulking because the actors didn’t have enough “love for the theatre” to forgo their pay for overtime.
At six a.m. it was decided that rehearsal would resume at one o’clock in the afternoon. As we were about to leave, too tired to care any longer about anything, the director came up and said he was sure I must have misunderstood him. He would indeed be sorry if I left the show or if he had hurt my feelings. What he had really meant to say was that the Oscar Wolfe part lends credence to the movement and meaning of the play. I was glad to leave it at that.
The following afternoon, before evening rehearsals, Hope and I stopped at a drugstore a few steps from the theatre. There we found Miss Darnell sitting in a booth sipping a coke. She motioned us over.
“The play won’t open Monday,” she said. “I’ve made my decision.”
We agreed wholeheartedly.
“But have you heard the latest?”
“No,” we said.
“The play that follows us in is falling apart, too. An old-time actor in it, pretty well known for his paranoia, slugged a young actress for a remark she made and someone else jumped in and put him in the hospital.”
“What’s next with our show?” I said. “Has a replacement been found for our drunken friend?”
“Yes. He’s busy now rehearsing his lines.”
“This is a world such as I’ve never been in,” I said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Neither have I. Not like this one,” said Linda Darnell.
On stage, we again worked all night. It was a mess. The director was in a rage. He scowled, threatened, exhorted. Everybody was going to pieces. No one talked to anyone.
On Monday morning, we started at ten, planning to rehearse up to curtain time. But at five in the afternoon, Miss Darnell told the management she would not appear, and under her contract they could do nothing but accept her decision. We went back to work that night and rehearsed until five in the morning.
Came Tuesday afternoon and we were back again in our black hole of Calcutta. By now we were all more than a little hysterical and the language would have been coarse for a smoker party. Some of the players were so exhausted they slept standing up. But now the play was finally getting under way. Zero hour was approaching. The curtain went up and the show began.
Opening night was incredible. In scene after scene, lines were dropped, cues forgotten, and ad libs interjected to a point that it was almost impossible to stay in character. The actress who claimed she had played her part as an ancient dowager for the last twenty years (“Everywhere—I even played it in Australia”) forgot her lines and was utterly beside herself. She said never had she been subjected to such humiliation. One actor tripped over her long morning coat and fell on his face. A bit of a nut anyway, he got up gracefully, muttered some inanities, and tickled the old dowager under the chin. She reared back, nostrils flaring. All this time, I was sitting at a piano observing the scene, feeling like a somnambulist.
But the play went on, and although it certainly improved during its run, the relations of the cast did not. Every evening we came in, put on our make-up, and dressed for our parts without saying a word. One night I lost a shirt. Another night an actress had her purse stolen. On another occasion a fist fight broke out between an actor and an actress. Backstage life went on either in utter silence or in bursts of yelling, screaming, and hair-pulling. The atmosphere was thick with hostility. But on stage it was as though nothing outside the world of the play had ever happened, unless you were close enough to hear names still being called under the breath. It was crazy.
Many of us in the cast were asked to appear on television interviews to promote the show. A good friend of mine, Marty Faye, who has had one of the longest continuous runs on Chicago TV, asked me to appear on his late evening broadcast. Since the gossip columnists in the city were already having a field day over the strife at this well-known summer playhouse, I told Marty (and his viewing audience) my reaction to the affair and to what I had seen of the theatre in general. I had no idea I was exploding such a bombshell. From right and left, I was attacked by everyone (including the lady who had had such a horrible experience playing the dowager) as a traitor to the theatre and its great traditions. By everyone, that is, except Miss Darnell and her leading man, who agreed that something might be done for actors if the public knew of the conditions under which they so often work and of the wretched, tragic life they so frequently have to lead. What a terrible waste this amounts to! No wonder you have to be virtually insane to pursue a career in the theatre!
Herb Lyons, the Tribune columnist, couldn’t stop laughing over lunch the day I told him my experiences. Irv Kupcinet, the Sun-Times columnist, however, whose talented daughter was among our struggling players, failed to see any humor in the situation. But the real payoff came when checks were distributed after the first week of our engagement. For the week of rehearsals, I had received the munificent sum of thirty-five dollars, but my salary for actual performance was to be two hundred and fifty dollars per week. My check for the first week’s work was $18.53! What happened to the rest of the money? Well, in the first place, I had to join the union and pay six months dues. Then I had to pay the full price for any seats I reserved for friends or relatives and even for a seat for Hope. Then I paid for the daily pressing of my suit and the laundering of my shirts and even a hidden fee for the use of the dressing room. Finally, there was the usual social security and withholding tax deduction.
But the whole Kafka nightmare was well worth it. In spite of acquiring at least one enemy for life and no monetary profit at all, I gained some friends who take the theatre seriously and in a treacherous business, are determinedly making headway. In addition, Linda Darnell, a person of great sweetness, has become a cherished acquaintance. It is not often one comes out of a nightmare so well.