  Peggy was at stage center, under a bright bank of floodlights. Amy entered from stage right, crossed down center and turned her back to the house to look upstage. She paused a moment before speaking. Her position, back to the audience, would have been unforgivable if there had been an audience, and her lines, when she spoke them, were scarcely dramatic. “You have paint on the side of your nose,” she said, “and there’s a rip in the seat of your jeans. Now where I come from, no lady....” “The same to you,” Peggy grinned, looking around from the flat she was painting. “At least, the same to you as regards the paint on your nose. I can’t see the seat of your jeans from here!” Amy put down the bucket of paint that she had brought with her and stepped back to the apron of the stage to get a better look at Peggy’s handiwork. It was a small wing flat that was to represent the corner of a frame house. A window frame had already been installed in it, and later the suggestion of a back porch would be added. Peggy was busy with the somewhat tedious work of painting clapboards on the flat canvas. Each was made with two lines of gray paint drawn across the white-painted surface; first a dark line, then a somewhat broader light-gray line. From working distance, it looked like nothing but striped canvas, but from a few feet away, the dimensional effect was surprisingly real. Peggy joined Amy at the edge of the stage to get a look at what she had been doing. “It looks pretty good, doesn’t it?” she asked. Amy nodded. “Keep it up, honey child, and you may find a real niche for yourself in the theater!” Laughing, the two friends worked together on the flat, each using one of the shades of gray. The work went much faster now, which pleased Peggy, because she didn’t want to leave the flat half-finished when it was time for her to stop and go to her section of the readings. In the early part of working on a play, the stage is seldom used. First readings usually take place in small groups gathered in any convenient spot, and it is not until the actors are fairly familiar with their lines and with the way the director wants them read that the play begins to take form on the stage. Come Closer was in the earliest days of rehearsal, and Mal was still in the first stages of familiarizing himself with his cast and them with the play. The Penthouse Theater was ideally suited for the work they were doing. It was actually a very old theater which Peggy and Amy had discovered, under exciting and mysterious circumstances, when they had first come to New York and met Randy and Mal. The theater itself occupied the top floor of an old loft building, and when Randy and Mal had leased it, they had rented the whole building. Both the theater and the other floors below it had seen much alteration since, and it was now a unique actors’ workshop from top to bottom. The boys had converted part of the loft space into compact apartments for themselves, and other rooms into living quarters for young actors whose rent, although low by city standards, was still enough to pay most of the costs of operating the building. The ground floor had been turned into a series of rehearsal studios, which, when not being used by Randy and Mal for a current play of their own, were rented to other groups. In its short time of operation, the Penthouse Theater had already become an off-Broadway institution. For Randy and Mal it had proved to be the best thing that had ever happened to them. It not only gave them a theater in which they could stage their productions, but it gave them enough income so that they no longer had to work at other jobs while trying to pursue their careers in the theater world. Before, Randy had worked in small night clubs as a song-and-dance man—a way of life for which he had the deepest contempt. Mal had been an actor in movies and television where, because of his tough face, he had been type-cast as a gangster. He not only didn’t like gangster roles, he found it hard to get them because of the cultured English accent that issued so surprisingly from that face. For both boys, the Penthouse Theater meant a new life and new opportunity, doing Randy’s plays, directed by Mal. Peggy and Amy put the last touches on the clapboard wall, stepped back to review the work, and smiled with satisfaction. “It looks perfect,” Peggy said. “Now I just hope that we stretched the canvas tight enough on the frame in the first place, so that it doesn’t flutter if somebody bumps into it. If anything looks terrible, it’s a clapboard wall that flutters!” “I think it’s tight enough,” Amy said, “and besides, if it isn’t, it’s too late to think about it now.” “You’re right,” Peggy agreed. “Not only that, but I think it’s too late to think about anything right now but my part. I’ve got to clean up and be downstairs for a reading in five minutes. Do you want to keep working here, or will you come down to hear us?” “I’ve got to come to hear you,” Amy said, “whether I like it or not. Mal asked me to work out the first go-round with you and make notes on the script as we go. He’ll be in to hear you and the others in about an hour.” “Like it or not!” Peggy said in mock indignation. “What makes you think there’s even a chance you won’t like it? I propose to be brilliant!” Of course she knew better. Brilliance is not in the picture in these early readings. A half hour later, in Studio 3, having gone once through Act Two, Scene Two, she realized wryly just how far from brilliance they were! The play, which Randy described as a fantasy, or a “modern morality play,” was not an easy one for the actors. The parts could, with too broad a reading, descend into farce or, with not just the right quality of the fantastic, slide off into dullness. The setting was a resort which was, in actuality, a sort of rest home for wealthy people who needed to get away from themselves for a while—or to find themselves. The point of the play, which gradually emerged, was that each of the characters had somehow led at least two distinct kinds of lives and had found both of them unsatisfactory. All the people in the play were trying, in whatever ways they could, to find some third or fourth kind of life that might be more pleasant and satisfying than the last; all of them were getting more confused every day they tried. Peggy’s part, then, was not easy. She was playing the role of a young girl of twenty-one who had been a very successful child movie star, but who had not made a picture since she was twelve. Realizing that she was through with show business, she had tried to pretend that she was just an ordinary person who could live an ordinary life. She had gone through college and started work as a secretary, keeping secret the fact that she had been a movie star. But shortly before the play opens, she has suddenly come into the fortune which she had earned as a child, but which had been held in trust for her. The money confuses her, and the publicity she gets when the story of the money comes out makes it impossible for her to continue as a secretary. The difficulty for Peggy was in making this character seem true and alive. This meant that the personalities of an ex-child movie star, a quiet, precise secretary, and a bewildered new heiress must all be combined in one believable whole. Each of the other actors had a similar problem of dual personality, and they all had great difficulty not only in interpreting each role, but in deciding how any two or more characters were to speak to each other. Part of the point of the play, cleverly conceived and written by Randy, was that each character brought out one special aspect of each other character, so that Peggy had to act quite differently, almost minute by minute, depending on whom she was speaking to. Their first efforts in this reading were often so wrong as to be hilarious. The scene included Peggy, Greta, the “businessman type” who was an affable, charming man named Alan Douglas, and the comedian, a roly-poly actor named Gil Mulligan. Their attempts at finding a suitable kind of relationship for this scene were not very successful, and they were so intent on establishing character that they often paid very little attention to their lines, and garbled the words. To make matters worse, Mulligan had a knack of taking each “fluff,” which is what actors call a mistake, and carrying it on one step farther toward madness. When Mal finally arrived to see how the group was doing, they were all doubled up in helpless laughter. When they had caught their breath, Amy tried to explain to Mal. “The characters are so shifting,” she said, “that everybody’s confused about how they’re supposed to act to whom. Or am I confusing it more? Anyway, they’ve all been fluffing lines like mad.” “Of course,” Mal said matter-of-factly. “Wrong approach, and all of you should have known it. It’s far too early in the game to try to define your characters. You have more than enough work to do in just getting your lines down cold. What I want you to do for a while is just to go over the lines and learn your cues. Read your parts straight. After you’re easy in what you’re doing, we’ll work at establishing character and shifting viewpoint and response. Besides—and pardon me if I sound like a tyrannical director—I’d rather you wouldn’t play around with character development when I’m not here. Now, have you read the scene through yet?” “Nearly,” Peggy answered, “if you can call what we’ve been doing a reading. I don’t think any of us benefited much by it, though.” “All right,” Mal answered. “Don’t worry about it. Why don’t you start it again from the top? I think we have time to go through it at least one time, just to get the feel of it. Then you can all go off by yourselves to learn your own sides.” This time, with no worrying about character, the scene went smoothly. Almost mechanically, Peggy thought. At first she could not understand the point of having them all just sit around and read the words of the scene to each other without any attempt at acting, but gradually she began to appreciate the value of the method. As each one read in turn, she discovered that every actor had his own personal style or rhythm of reading, a rhythm which, by the end of the scene, she was beginning to catch and anticipate. By the time they were done, she thought that she could tell fairly accurately in advance how each would read his next line. Now that they weren’t trying to make themselves fit the parts, they fell easily into their own natural patterns of speech. Things went much more quickly in this fashion, and they were able to run through the scene twice before it was time to call a halt. The second time around was much smoother, Peggy noticed, and as they worked, the pattern of the scene and the interplay of the characters began to emerge. When it was done, all the actors agreed that they now had a much clearer idea of what they were doing, and would be better able to go home and study their lines. As they were on their way out, Peggy fell into step alongside Mal. “I noticed that you didn’t say a word about how we should read,” she said, “and I also noticed that the individual reading styles of the people were pretty clear this time. Is that what you were after?” “Exactly,” Mal said. “You’re catching on to the tricks pretty quickly, Peggy. You see, a director has to work with actors, as well as with a play. I can’t force anyone to fit precisely into my own preconceived notions of a character, because if I tried, the performance would be stiff and unnatural. What I have to do first is get to understand the actors as they are, and then start building from there. That’s why a Broadway play has a much better chance than an off-Broadway venture. When you’re working with stars, you have known quantities—and qualities—and you cast people who already correspond to your own vision of the part. But when you have to work with unknown actors, you must remember that they’re unknown to the director as well as to the audience. Because of this, my first job is to get to know them as they are, and to get the feel of each one’s natural way of reading a line. Then I can build on that.” “My, there sure are a lot of hidden problems in directing a play,” Amy said. “I used to think of a director as a kind of wild-animal tamer, standing in the middle of a ring of snarling actors with a whip and a chair, and making them jump through hoops, but it’s more complicated than that, isn’t it?” Mal laughed. “The wild-animal trainer’s life isn’t so simple, either,” he said with a mischievous grin. “After all, they have to understand the psychology of lions and tigers, and that must be nearly as difficult as understanding actors!” |
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