As the Crow Flies Blog - Page 12 of 14 - The Upstart Crow Theatre Company

August 12, 2015September 3, 2015

Marat/Sade

Right now, as I write this, we are in rehearsal for Shaw’s Misalliance. There is a wonderful little meta-theatrical moment in the play when one of the characters, a well-read philosophical type, who habitually calls upon those he is arguing with to read this or that author. He talks of evolution and says, “Read Darwin.” At one point he talks about The Superman and says “Read”—no, not Nietzsche—. He says “Read What’s-his-name.” What’s-his-name is, of course, Shaw, who wrote Man and Superman about six years before Misalliance. Man and Superman is about a writer, John Tanner, who has written an important essay called “The Revolutionist’s Handbook.” And Shaw wrote just such an essay and it is appended to copies of Man and Superman and it is as good as the play says it is.

Now, that’s unique. I know of no other playwright who has written about a great writer—a fictional great writer—and quoted his work or printed it. You can write about second-raters, and quote their work, but you cannot quote a fictional writer who is a better writer than you are.

The same thing is true about writing about playwrights or actors. As an actor I have played a playwright twice. I played Shaw in Dear Liar, a play about his affair with Mrs. Patrick Campbell, and guess what? The character, Shaw, was as good a playwright as the real Shaw when I spoke his lines. And I have played Peter Quince, a writer, director, and actor in the Pyramus and Thisbe episode in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. And guess what: he was not as good an actor as me. How could he be? If I could portray an actor better than me I would do it all the time.

And that brings us to the most interesting play of our fourth season: Marat/Sade by Peter Weiss. That’s not the real title. The real title is The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade. I played Marat.

Marat (Richard Bell) and Others in **Marat/Sade** (1984)

Actually, I played an inmate of an asylum who had been cast as Marat in a play that Marquis de Sade had written and directed. The actors playing de Sade and the staff of the asylum were actually playing those roles. The rest of us were playing lunatics who were playing roles. We were actors acting actors acting. In our fifth season we did Dream and again we had actors playing very bad actors. But that was easy; it was all for laughs.

This was different. We were not going for laughs. We were going for pity and terror. And we were trying to evoke pity and terror by doing it inadequately. We couldn’t just over-act, and forget lines and props, and fall on our prats. (There’s a little of that written into the play, but very little.) We had to portray our lunatic actors as realistically and sympathetically as we could. We had to dramatize and make our audience understand the great questions the play deals with, but never resolves: de Sade’s desperate striving for an ascetic self-awareness and self-fulfillment that ultimately led to the sadism named for him; Marat’s desperate striving for liberty, equality, and a just government, a striving that ultimately led to a reign of terror. And we had to play unsympathetic, unattractive, deluded characters accurately, but in a way that made them sympathetic, attractive, and understandable.

There is very little in our training that prepares us for this sort of thing. The long shadows of Constantin Stanislavsky and Lee Strasburg have fallen upon us and every American actor today is, at least partially, a ‘Method’ actor. When we prepare a role we explore the emotional life of the character by summoning up our own emotional life. We teach ourselves to use our sense memory to understand the feelings of the character. We read the lines and ask ourselves: what are they really saying. We read through the text into the ‘sub-text’ and let the secret, unspoken dialogue control how we act and react. We discover the ‘spine,’ the ‘through-line’ of the character. We come as close as we can (we tell ourselves) to becoming the characters, and let what they feel control what we do. And so we create, or try to create, authentic, realistic, consistent characters.

None of that works in this play. The two characters the Marat/Sade actor must play—the historical figure in the French revolution and the mad actor who portrays him—cannot be consistent. They are two different people. The historical figure may have really lived, and therefore is authentic and real, but he exists in the play only as the imaginary creation of a lunatic. The lunatics are purely fictional, but they are the characters the actor must portray truthfully.

But how? The actor cannot trust his sense memory, because he is playing someone whose emotional life does not find a counterpart in the actor. The actor would feel and respond in that way if this happened to him, but the point of the character is that he doesn’t respond that way: he is deranged.

And there is no way we can discover a sub-text because we really have no text. With a few exceptions the characters never speak for themselves; they recite lines they have memorized that de Sade has written for them.

So, a play like Marat/Sade—(Is there another play like Marat/Sade?)—asks a lot of the actor: great challenges and great rewards. The actors found their own ways of meeting the challenge. In some cases the nature of the mental illness that afflicted them is specified by the playwright—Peter Weiss, not de Sade—paranoia, sleeping sickness, melancholia, but in most cases the actors diagnosed themselves and diagnosed the severity of their condition. Some found they could pretend to immerse themselves in the character they played, and use the play as a way of escaping from whatever private horror they had. (Yes, there really are actors who do that—über-method actors—but our actors who made that choice were actually technical actors playing method actors.) Some decided the play was a lark and what they liked best about it was that they could misbehave and annoy their keepers. Some were patients who were unable to participate fully, but who heard the political messages of the play as statements about their own incarceration, and so they repeatedly lost control. Some were not mad at all, but were confined because they were an embarrassment to the state and to their well-placed families who managed to get them committed, rather than jailed. (Historically, this was de Sade’s case.) Each of us made our own choice, and the result, we hoped, would be a coherent production made out of incoherence and a single statement made out of contradiction.

Did it work? This is from the closing speech:

This evening may have seemed confusing

But our hope is you found our play amusing

And we are sure that you will understand

If now and then a scene got out of hand.

August 6, 2015September 3, 2015

A Child of the Theatre Part II: Blackout

I learned the importance of knowing your cue, at a young age.

The show was Howard Richardson & William Berney’s Dark of the Moon. My mother was the stage manager, and as the show got close to opening, I would watch rehearsals with her every night. At the end of the first half she would call out, “Blackout!” to signal the actors that in a performance the lights would go out. Being a kid, I thought this was great fun, and I started shouting it with her every night.

Cast members (Richard Bell and others) in **Dark of the Moon** (1983)

Opening night I was in the audience, and when the first act ended, I yelled “Blackout!”

Barbara Allen (Katherine Dubois Reed) and others in **Dark of the Moon** (1983)

The lights were late.

August 4, 2015September 3, 2015

Wayfaring Actors

The Servant (Katherine Dubois Reed) in **Blood Wedding** (1981)

Blood Wedding was our last production at the Free School. It was not just the sky-blue walls and the baptismal font on the stage that were hard to work into a set design. (The building had been built as a church.) It was not just the lack of parking at the corner of Broadway and Balsam. It was mostly the fact that the Free School—to its credit—hosted all sorts of community events, all valuable in themselves, but difficult to share the building with. It was hard performing a poetic medieval tragedy with a drum concert in the next room, for instance. The final blow was a cooking demonstration, during a performance of Blood Wedding, in the basement just below our theatre that filled the building with the delectable odor of various kinds of seafood: it was strong.

Caligula (Bill), Caesonia (Mary Bell) in **Caligula** (1982)

So, we became a traveling company. We performed wherever we could find space. Caligula was our next production and we did it in Theatre 300 in the University Theatre. It was a wonderful space but, unfortunately, only available to us for two weeks during Christmas vacation. That’s a good time to do The Nutcracker or A Christmas Carol, but Caligula lacks some of the wholesome, sentimental quality of most Christmas plays. It was not our best attended show.
Next was Shaw’s Arms and the Man, and we did that at St. Ambrose Episcopal Church in East Boulder.

Raina Petkoff & Captain Bluntschli in **Arms and the Man** (1982)

Next: The Winter’s Tale and we found a great performance space for that: the Chautauqua Community House. That was our last show of our second season. We loved the space: theatre in the round with great acoustics and a full balcony. We opened season three in the same place with The Imaginary Invalid. We would happily have stayed there forever if we could, except for one small problem: The building was unheated. That was fine for Winter’s Tale performed in May and Invalid performed in September (actually not quite OK: we returned to Chautauqua for Heartbreak House in September of 1984 and once had to rent a propane heater to warm the room up before the performance. It didn’t.)

Toinette & Argan in **The Imaginary Invalid** (1982)

Next: A special event: We did a single performance of The Monkey’s Paw for a Halloween show at the Boulder Theatre.

Next: Our third church. We did Ibsen’s The Master Builder in the church hall at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Boulder. And our fourth church. We closed the show after three weekends at St. John’s and packed it up and took it to Denver for a weekend at the First Unitarian Church. That makes seven different theatres by the middle of our third season.

Halvard Solness (Richard Bell), Hilda Wangel (Joan Kuder Bell) in **The Master Builder** (1982)

Next: The Rivals, and another church: The Unitarian Church in East Boulder.

Next: Back to Denver again. We entered a festival contest and performed a one-act: The Golden Fleece at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. We didn’t win.

Then, back to St. John’s. We finished our third season with two more shows there: Macbett by Ionesco and Dark of the Moon, the American Appalachian classic. St. John’s became our home for the next couple of seasons.

Lady Macbett (Joan Kuder Bell) in **Macbett (**1983)

Three seasons: Twenty productions; nine theatres. Some of us were younger then.