Daily Book Excerpt: Theatre
Next book on the acting/theatre shelf is Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style
Steve Vineberg makes some pretty broad claims for Method acting in his book, and for that reason it can be rather annoying, if you, say, love Myrna Loy and William Powell and Carole Lombard. I argued a lot with this book. It is a subjective book wrapped in a mantle of objectivity. It is not so much a history of method acting, as analysis of the performances Vineberg finds representative of the style, and if you disagree with his assessments (as I often did), you’ll be up shit’s creek. He also uses “you” too much. “You feel when you’re watching this … ” “Watching the performance, you get the sense …”
Mr. Vineberg, speak for yourself.
The good thing about the book, though, is that it gave me a list of movies a mile long that I had to see. The blank back pages of the book are filled with my handwriting as I wrote down every title I needed to track down.
I have Steve Vineberg to thank for first tracking down John Garfield’s debut in Four Daughters (and this was in the days of VCRs, and that movie was NOT easy to find). Vineberg devotes an entire section to this performance alone, and his words were intriguing enough that I had to go out and see it for myself. I was already a Garfield fan, but I only saw the stuff that was easy to see at that time (much of his stuff is still not available readily). Garfield’s performance in Four Daughters is up there with Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not as one of the most memorable star-making debuts of all time. You can’t even believe what you are seeing. In strolls Garfield, and he obviously lives in the real down-and-dirty world, and the carefully constructed movie set and Hollywood surroundings cannot repress his obvious reality. But is that “Method acting” or just giant raving talent doing what talent does, which is express itself whenever it can?
The Method acting teachers often make broad claims as well, arguing that they were responsible for so-and-sos development, but that’s always the case with acting teachers. You really have to watch out for charlatans and gurus.
Method acting came along at a time when cinema was no longer considered a new medium. It had found its legs. It knew what it was. The pioneers always knew what it was. When D.W. Griffith moved in close to Lillian Gishs face in Birth of a Nation, it was a revolution. That is what the camera can do. That is what movies can do that theatre cannot. It can force you where to look, it can go in close. Eisenstein was also a pioneer in his use of collage, intercutting one image with one another, to bring out the overall story and effect. Cinema is not literal. Theatre, because it is live, has to be more literal. But with cinema, you can alter time, you can force the eye to look where you want it to look, and, most importantly, you can go in close. You can focus in on the eyes of the actor. Cinema is a psychological medium, more than anything else. Of course theatre has psychological elements, but the camera itself is a psychological tool. It picks up THOUGHT. Method acting, then, during its heyday, was a perfect “method” for film actors (although the good ones were always doing it). Lee Strasberg and the others all came out of a theatre tradition (of course: when they were growing up, theatre was where it was at, in terms of where an actor could be expected to get the most work). But, ironically, they developed a method that was perfect for cinema. I am not sure if Strasberg ever fully admitted that. People like Montgomery Clift and James Dean and Brando and Julie Harris all came out of that tradition, although all had started out in the theatre.
The second thing that helped Method acting rise to prominence was the overwhelming popularity of Freudian analysis in the mid-years of the 20th century. EVERYONE was in analysis. This is reflected in the scripts of the time as well, which, when paired with a Method acting approach, brings the style that we all recognize. It’s personal work, yes, but again, you can’t say that William Powell or Buster Keaton werent personal in their work. To be fair, Steve Vineberg doesn’t, but the implication is there.
It is true that you would not have seen a performance like Al Pacino’s in Dog Day Afternoon in 1936. That just wasn’t what acting was all about at that time. That’s one of the reasons why John Garfield’s debut in Four Daughters is so startling. Because it predicts where we would be going with acting, 10 years before anyone had ever even heard of Marlon Brando. In Four Daughters, Garfield, dirty, unshaven, lounging about, not “acting” like he’s from the streets – he actually seems like he just walked off the damn street – is a messenger from the future.
It’s been years since I read this book. I am grateful to it for expanding my movie-watching. But in general, I found it a bit pushy. I may be remembering it wrong.
I guess the whole classification of style thing in acting is pretty much a moot point now. Cinema is where it’s at, and if you work in the movies you have to have some basis in realism. So everyone does it. There are some that are better than others, there are some who consistently go deeper than others, but that has always been the case. Those who are better, go deeper, become stars – regardless of what label you put on their style of acting.
A plus of the book, too, is that Vineberg saw many of the original Broadway productions he discusses, and many of these are productions I ache to have seen myself.
For example, Jason Robards in The Iceman Cometh in 1956, which made him a star.
Here is an excerpt on Jason Robard’s Hickey in The Iceman Cometh on Broadway.
Excerpt from Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style
Jason Robards’s breakthrough as an actor came in 1956, when he played Hickey in Jose Quintero’s legendary revival of The Iceman Cometh at Circle in the Square in May (the production that finally won the play the recognition it deserved) and Jamie in the first American Long Day’s Journey into Night in November. He repeated these two performances, respectively, on television in 1960 and on film in 1962, both under the direction of Sidney Lumet. (When John Frankenheimer brought Iceman to the screen in 1973 he cast Lee Marvin rather than Robards, for reasons that remain elusive: He claimed that Robards had Hickey so much in his blood that directing him in the role would be as futile as directing him to go to the bathroom. Even in the service of stroking Frankenheimer’s ego, this seems like peculiar logic.) Quintero later resurrected the reputation for A Moon for the Misbegotten in much the same way as he had for Iceman when he directed Robards and Colleen Dewhurst in it on Broadway in 1973, and that version was televised in 1975. In addition, Robards starred as the elder James Tyrone in two productions of Journey, the second under Quintero and opposite Dewhurst, in New Haven and New York in 1988; he had a fling at O’Neill’s late one-act, Hughie, as “Erie” Smith, both on stage (in 1964) and on TV; he appeared on Broadway as Con Melody, the pride-blinded hero of A Touch of the Poet (the only one of these roles I haven’t seen him play), in 1977; and – in repertory with the 1988 Long Day’s Journey – he attempted the flip side of James Tyrone, Sr.: the benevolent Nat Miller in O’Neills lone comedy, Ah, Wilderness!
It’s well known that Robards feels a mystical connection to O’Neill, and specifically to Jamie O’Neill, the playwright’s brother (who appears in various forms throughout the plays, and transparently as Jamie in Long Day’s Journey and Jim in A Moon for the Misbegotten). In a New York Times Magazine article called “Jason Jamie Robards Tyrone”, wirtten during the Broadway run of Misbegotten, O’Neill biographer Barbara Gelb lays out the amazing set of coincidences that links the two men:
Like Jamie O’Neill, Robards was the older of two sons born to a popular, handsome, hard-drinking, touring actor; like Jamie, he chose to rival his father in adopting an acting career; also like Jamie, he never recovered from a childhood sense of rejection by an absent mother, and he grew up, like Jamie, with ghosts in his eyes.
Furthermore, Robards joined the navy at seventeen (Eugene was a sailor at a young age), coming across his first O’Neill play – Strange Interlude – in the ship’s library. (The first one he saw performed, appropriately, was Iceman, in its original New York production, when he emerged from the service after the war, set on an acting career). Robards was thirty-four when he played the thirty-three-year-old Jamie Tyrone on Broadway. And though we can dismiss these parallels on mere chance, its obvious that Robards doesn’t; his identification with the O’Neill characters he plays has brought him close to the edge on several occasions. Gelb reports that one night during the New York run of Iceman, he substituted his own wife’s name, “Eleanore”, for “Evelyn” during the confession speech. (Their marriage had run aground.) And when he lost the part of Hickey in the Iceman film to Lee Marvin, Robards embarked upon a “suicidal rage” culminating in a car accident that nearly succeeded in killing him.
In Contour in Time, Bogard explains at great length how the alter-ego relationship of the twin protagonists in O’Neill’s early plays, Beyond the Horizon and The Great God Brown, is another form of the way he split his heroes into the haunted-but-not-yet-doomed young poet (Edmund Tyrone) and the darker-souled brother, already bound on a wheel of fire (Jamie Tyrone). It’s a very complicated, sometimes fascinating psychoanalytic process by which Bogard seeks to prove that O’Neill was really splitting himself into two. What’s helpful in understanding Jason Robards is to see that he identifies with the “dark” O’Neill hero, the one who is clearly lost from the moment he walks on the stage, who arrives with a touch of the grave upon his face. And Hickey (though he isn’t one of Bogard’s examples) is such a figure.
Robards’s Hickey – the performance that put the actor and the play on the map – has astonishing rand and invention. He rides it on a single extended burst of whirling energy, whipping down the coils of a live wire buried deep inside him, and not reaching the bottom of his reserve until the two cops haul him off to jail after his confession in the final act. Robards brings Hickey in (late in Act I) with dollar bills stuck in his boater, singing at the top of his lungs. It’s a phenomenal showman’s entrance that prepares us for the theatricality underscoring everything this Hickey does in the next three acts.
You can’t believe the number of different hats he puts on: life of the party, evangelizing son of a preacher man, hard-sell hardware drummer, compassionate bosom buddy to every man and woman in Harry Hope’s bar. He even plays a nineteenth-century stage villain once or twice, when he thinks he’s got the upper hand – when he’s sure the boys in the saloon are responding to his program to turn their heads around – and that’s when he gets a sly, superior look, one eyebrow raised, a Snidely Whiplash smile slapped across his mug. One of the whores says that despite his tireless hounding, as he struggles to convert everyone to his newly-won philosophy of freedom from illusion, you can’t help liking the bastard. And Robards’s strategy is to center Hickey’s appeal in his bottomless bag of show-biz tricks, his sleight of hand, his clever shifting of masks.
Hickey is a grand master of the old school of salesmanship, all right; and he’s got so many tracks running at once that you don’t know which one you’re responding to at any given moment, or which one he’s really trying to put you on. His initial talk of salvation is tinged with just a hint of mockery, so you can’t be sure he isn’t kidding. Then, when he starts to preach the Gospel According to Hickey to the inmates of Hope’s bar, he falls into a glorious, singsong Elmer Gantry voice, referring to them as “brothers and sisters”. And soon you feel like one of them. At first you resist this evangelical grandstanding, but it catches you up, and at one point you realize that even your resistance is part of HIckey’s scheme (or Robards’s). You’re drawn in and repelled at the same time, as by a carnival sideshow.
Robards’s Hickey is a whizbang drummer with astounding timing and an unerring instinct for spotting the tiniest opening. When Larry (Myron McCormick) sees him go after pathetic little Hugo (Sorrell Booke), the would-be anarchist with aristocratic leanings, and tries to pry him loose, Hickey zooms in on this bit of compassion from a man who styles himself a cynic, and, leaning over, tipping his hat over his forehead, launches into a brand-new sermon especially for Larry’s benefit. He sizes up Don Parritt (the amazingly young, callow-looking Robert Redford) so cannily that we’re as unsettled by his scrutinizing once-over as Parritt is himself. Later, Hickey explains that what makes him such a good salesman is his skill at psyching out a prospective client. That’s exactly what he’s doing with Parritt, and it’s creepy as hell.
This Hickey has such a vivid and volatile presence that when he suddenly trips on a chair and keels over from fatigue before the party even gets going, the play suddenly turns ominous and frightening – you can’t figure out who switched the power off. Hickey grows scared, too; he doesn’t understand how he lost control. What Robards does that’s so amazing here is to set up this complex structure of quasi-religious salesmanship and then double back and slash through it, puncturing it here and there, programming Hickey to hit a sagging pocket where he expected to find a fresh reserve of energy, as he always has before, that would pump him up and keep his brilliantly rehearsed act riding high. That’s when the character begins to fall apart – when he reveals his bewilderment as Harry (Farrell Pelly) fails to return from his bout with the world outside the bar with a happy smile, or as the gentle-voiced one-time journalist Jimmy Tomorrow (Harrison Dowd) flings a drink in his face before heading out the door for his own date with reality, and you catch the fury in Hickey’s eyes for a moment before he gets hold of the reins again. Robards keeps showing us Hickey’s impatience that the show he’s putting on isn’t moving as fast as he’d anticipated. Sometimes he even gets confused or scared, and these emotions translate into sudden, scarlet rage. At one point he turns into a tantrummy kid, bawling the gang out for not responding to him. When they won’t join him in a chorus of “Sweet Adeline,” he pounds on the piano with his fist, and you can feel yourself wondering, like Harry Hope and the others, if he’s actually gone crazy.
Robards’s Hickey is defined by his theatricality. He plays deftly, potently against it in his most grandiloquent moments, and at other times he seems to be possessed by his own dramatic creation – like Michael Redgrave in thrall to his ventriloquist’s dummy in Dead of Night. In the fourth-act, half-hour confessional, all of Hickey’s contradictory impulses and all of Robards’s intricately devised opposing strategies operate simultaneously. This scene is both a mesmerizing stripping-away of facade upon facade and the most stupendous and horrifying show piece of them all, the number where the performer – Hickey the Great – stops being able to control how much of himself he’s drawing on to fuel his act, and ends up at empty by the final curtain (like Laurence Olivier’s Archie Rice at the end of The Entertainer). And since Hickey and Robards cross-reference each other – Robards seems to be dragging Hickey’s emotions up out of his own memory bank – this scene has something of the tightrope walker about it: You can barely stand to look, but you can’t look away; you’re not entirely sure the performer’s going to make it to the end this time.
