AN ACTOR PERSPIRES

Now available as an Audio Story read by Michael Tucker

(In 1936, Constantine Stanislavsky published his iconic book on acting that changed the world and eventually inspired The Actors’ Studio and what’s been called “The Method.” His book was entitled “An Actor Prepares.” In homage to the great master, I have entitled this essay, “An Actor Perspires” – which is also true.)

My knees wobbled as I edged out onto the catwalk and looked down through the ropes and pulleys and hanging scenery to the stage floor some forty feet below. All I could see were the tops of the actors’ heads as they labored to bring some life to one of the drier parts of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. From my perch they looked like kids dressed in their parents’ old clothes, their voices strained, their gestures overblown. In a minute or two, I would be down there doing very much the same thing. God willing. First I had to survive the trip.

I crept out on the tinkertoy walkway moving like a tightrope walker – a very bad tightrope walker -- until I was out over the center of the stage, miles from any actual safe, structural part of the building. I felt the catwalk swing in the wind, although there was no wind. I inched over to where Maurice, the man in whose hands I was putting my life, waited to hook me up.

“You’re doing great” he whispered.

We both knew I wasn’t doing great. He clipped the safety line to my harness which I wore hidden under my costume. This safety line did not make me feel safe in any way. I carefully lowered myself down to my knees so that I could lay the large, bulky area between my chest and hips -- otherwise known as my stomach -- onto this piece of heavy fabric, a kind of sling or overgrown diaper made of strong canvas that was supported by wires on both ends. The idea was that when we heard the last line of the scene playing below, Maurice would cue his henchman on the side of the stage who would pull a rope that would lift me, suspended in the sling, up over the rail of the catwalk and hang me there, like a stupefied cow, high above the stage. Then the music and lights would create a tempestuous storm effect – the play’s called The Tempest – and then the lights changed to a watery effect -- like underneath the sea – and I was slowly lowered down, pantomiming the breaststroke with my arms and legs as I came into the view of the audience.

Oh, and just before they started to lower me, Maurice would hand me a bottle of water from which I’d take a large swig.

Why was I doing this? Because when I would finally swim down to the stage floor and craftily unhook my safety line, I would lie there on my back for a moment, very still, until the audience was just dying to know what was going to happen next. Then I’d make a few drowned man gestures, pause again, then spit the water like a geyser straight up into the air. And I would get a big laugh. Never failed.

Risk death and dismemberment night after night? Face humiliation in front of eight hundred people? Chance having the sling get caught on a stage curtain so that my body hangs nearly upside down for fifteen minutes while a stagehand climbs up to free me? (Which did happen one matinee.) Risk all this for one, big bang of a laugh to start the scene with? Abso-fuckin-lutely. Which tells you something about actors.

Being an actor is the reason I’d decided to do this play. To remind myself that I was one. You tend to forget that with all the celebrity nonsense and the Hollywood hype and the money. But back at the beginning, it was all about wanting to act. In the old days, acting made me high. It was the adrenaline release that kept me going through the rough times of rejection and frustration. Acting was my escape from the mundane, my revenge against gravity. But eight years on a TV series had dulled my appetite for it. First of all, I’d been playing the same character day after day-- albeit a charming fellow of depth and sensitivity, a character patterned in no small way after my own personality -- but still, playing the same guy for eight years had been a deadening experience. Stuart goes to work; Stuart falls in love; Stuart has a baby; Stuart eats a cookie -- even I got bored with him.

Then there was the pace of shooting a TV show, which has been likened to the thrill of watching paint dry. It’s hard for me to believe that I once thought it was fascinating -- even challenging. But after years on the show and all the TV movies in between, the thought of facing another day in an airless, asbestos-filled sound stage going through the same mind-crushing repetition of movements, phrases, and functions that have been part of shooting film since D.W. Griffith, drained me of any juice that I once had for the job of acting: Get into makeup, then wait an hour. Rehearse the scene for ten minutes, then wait an hour while they light the stage. Do a camera rehearsal, then wait while they readjust the lights. Wait for the sound department to set the microphones. Finally we start to shoot the scene.

“Hold it” says the camera operator, “I’ve got mic shadow.”

Refocus the light, then we’re ready.

“Hold it” says the operator, “We’ve got a strobe on his tie.”

Wardrobe comes in with a new tie. Ready to shoot.

“I’ve got him coming in camera right” says the continuity person, or script girl in the old vernacular. One her many responsibilities is to make sure the traffic patterns make sense from one shot to the next. In this case it means re-blocking the beginning of the scene, which we do. Then the director of photography re-lights again. About a half an hour. Okay, ready to shoot.

“I’ve got a flare” says the operator, “coming right off his bald spot.”

The makeup woman powders down my bald spot. Okay, ready to shoot.

And so it goes as each department signs off on the shot until the frame is perfect. Then, almost as an afterthought, the actors get a chance to act the scene. Blah, blah, blah, and we’re off to the next shot.

I once thought it was the banality of TV that was the problem and that things would be better if I were shooting a feature film. But when I did make a couple of features, I realized the only difference was that the wait between things was even longer. So, instead of waiting an hour for the lighting, it was more like three hours. And so on.

Where was the creativity? The delving into nuance of character and motivation? The subtle shades of emotion that delineated one moment from another, that made each character in each moment in time unique?

The theater, that’s where! With four or five weeks of rehearsal, where I could surgically examine every moment and create, hopefully, what might be construed as a work of art. The theater! Where I could work again with poor people, who were more interested in the subtleties of human behavior than they were in the size and accouterments of their motor home.

I had signed on to play Trinculo in a production of The Tempest that was being produced by the American Conservatory Theater. The production was to reopen the restored and retrofitted Geary Theater that had been damaged in the Loma Prieta earthquake, which made the opening a major cultural event for the city of San Francisco. And rehearsals were to begin within weeks of our moving out of L.A. and up to the Bay area. It was a perfect way for me to land in our new situation with my ego up and running.

Except that I hadn’t been on stage -- except for a few productions of Love Letters -- in almost ten years, and I hadn’t done any Shakespeare since a production of Measure For Measure in Central Park some five years before that. So, with a lot of excitement about returning to my artistic roots, and a little trepidation that I didn’t have my Shakespearean chops in good shape, I set off for my first rehearsal.

It was pouring down rain as I drove over the Golden Gate Bridge -- my first indication that I wasn’t in Hollywood anymore. When I got downtown I couldn’t find a parking lot anywhere near the rehearsal hall, so I drove around in larger and larger circles until I found one about six blocks away. I had no umbrella or raincoat -- still thinking like a Southern Californian, or perhaps I was just getting myself into character -- I was playing a fool. Hugging the buildings as best I could, I made my way to rehearsal. When I got there, I was soaked through.

If this had happened on a film set, I would have been immediately surrounded by a bevy of 2nd assistant directors, all armed with walkie-talkies. One would have notified wardrobe who would bring me a towel and a fresh change of clothing. Another would notify craft services who would rush me some chicken soup. Another would send for my favorite Starbucks coffee, done just the way I like it. Another would take me on a golf cart to my motor home, where the heat would have been turned on, so that I could change in comfort, have my coffee, my soup, and get myself composed so that I could then go to the rehearsal in a calm, dry, warm, alpha-wave state of mind.

I got to the rehearsal hall in San Francisco about ten minutes late. The rest of the cast was assembled around a big, round table with the director and designers in attendance. I apologized when I came through the door; I told them I had gotten drenched on my way from the parking lot. They all looked at me with mild annoyance -- like they thought I was doing some kind of TV star routine to get special attention -- and then went back to their reading of the script.

As quietly as I could, I went over to the assistant stage manager and whispered to her that I was soaked. She squeezed my arm and shot me a look that said she really felt for me and then turned her attention back to the reading. I saw some coffee at a table against the wall and went over to get some. It turned out to be an urn of lukewarm water with some Nescafe instant and a jar of Coffee Mate creamers next to it on the table. As I made my cup of coffee, I noticed a sign on the table demanding thirty-five cents, which I pitched in.

I took my place at the table, freezing in my wet clothes, sipping my ersatz thirty-five cent cup of coffee and thought, “Oh yeah, The Theater! I remember now.”

So, it was a mixed bag -- a lot of hard work for short money on the one hand, and a lot of great people working on a not-too-shabby piece of material on the other. I found out quickly how out of shape I was; I hadn’t had to project my voice any farther than the nearest microphone for ten years, and my body hadn’t been doing anything more strenuous than the occasional round of golf.

So, when the director first described to me my flying, swimming, hanging, feat of derring-do onto the stage from forty feet above, I nodded, agreed that it would make a great entrance, and assumed that she would change her mind by the time we got to the actual performance. I assumed that she would have so many other technical problems at that point that she would be happy to eschew the logistics involved in flying an old Jew on a wire like he was Peter-fucking-Pan. I assumed that at some point she would come to her senses and have me walk onto the stage from the wings like a human being. So much for assumptions, I thought as I hung there in the darkness, my mouth filled with Evian, and my aging brain frantically going over the lines that I was sure to forget once I got down there.

And my mind flashed -- as minds will do in fearful situations -- to other things. To Jill, who was in Sonoma some thirty miles north attending a seminar. An all-women’s seminar; a gathering of goddesses. If I had needed to do a play to establish myself in our new life, Jill felt the need to take a seminar. In fear, I assert my ego; she joins a group. She’d been up there for three days and had called me every night to fill me in on the proceedings. She was quite excited. She told me that the whole idea of the seminar was to help her discover her deepest desires -- the ones she’s never been safe enough to admit to before -- because being in a relationship with a man meant that she had to lie about what she really wanted. Then she quickly pointed out that I needn’t worry, that this wasn’t a man-bashing seminar at all -- that the leaders all had great relationships with their partners. But on the first day, they had screened three movies -- one about our oppressive patriarchal society, another about the death of the goddess culture, and one about burning witches -- films in which, I assume, men did not play particularly sympathetic roles. I didn’t want to get paranoid about this but I thought she and I were in the process of deepening our relationship, to create more trust, not to dwell on how my ancestors burned her ancestors at the stake.

There was a lot about this seminar that was making me crazy -- mostly that I felt I had no control over it. I hated not being there. It was just women encouraging women to behave like women -- with no one around to stop them.

She told me that they’d sit in a circle and, one at a time, share their various plights. And the women would nod and sympathize, and the power of the circle would give them all strength. One might describe an abusive past; another might tell of her frustration in never being able to follow her choice of career; another might tell of the devastation of living with an egomaniacal actor who spent all his free time on the golf course. Things like that.

And if I sound defensive, it’s just that I don’t like our relationship picked apart when I’m not there to set the record straight. I know Jill -- she’s going to be the best one in that circle come hell or high water. Which means if the circle is talking about how men don’t support their women, then you can be sure that I’m going to come out as the least supportive man in history. Trust me, she’ll never let one of these other women trump her.

“Women in alignment” was the phrase that Jill kept quoting to me. In alignment against what?

She said they had guest speakers who would come and talk about alternate lifestyles -- living in community, polyamorous relationships and the like. They had women talk to them about radical changes they’d made in their lives: one quit her job which she finally admitted she’d never wanted to do; one had her husband quit his job so that he could stay around and give her the attention she wanted. These stories were meant to shake them out of their sense of what has to be -- so that they would have the courage to look at new possibilities in their own lives. “Expanding the menu” was the way the leaders put it.

And I wondered -- as I hung there in the dark on my little wire -- whether this menu was going to include a selection called “Mike.” And, if it did, whether I’d be a main course or just an hors d’oeuvre.

Sure I felt threatened by all this! Who were these women giving her all these crazy ideas? What was their agenda? What if she came home with a whole new plan for our lives that I didn’t agree on? What if they talked her into donating all our worldly goods to them so that we could be free of our materialistic obsessions? What if they convinced her to chuck everything and live in a commune with people who only ate cauliflower and brown rice? I’d kill myself. And what was all this about how she could only tell the truth to another woman? I hate that! I want to be the one that she can tell the truth to. No one loves her more, no one understands her more intimately. No one is more worthy of her trust. It’s utter nonsense that she can’t tell me what’s really on her mind.

I tried to calm myself down. After all, I was hanging by a thin wire. Maybe it wouldn’t be that bad. Maybe she’d come home with a new agenda that I actually liked. That was possible. Maybe her deepest desires were things that were my deepest desires, too. Who knows? And yes, okay, maybe I wasn’t the best person in the world for her to confide in. Maybe there were times that I was too interested in myself to really focus on her, listen to her.

Tonight she wouldn’t be calling because there was going to be some kind of goddess ritual that would go on into the night that she couldn’t really describe to me on the telephone. A black, cauldron filled with boiling testicles popped into my mind as I heard my cue from the stage below. The wire was moving. Here we go. What do I say? Oh, yeah, I’ve got it. Here we go.