An Improvised Life Page 2

  I enrolled in junior high and found that miraculously there was a course called acting in the curriculum. It was taught by a warm, wonderful woman named Mrs. Lewis, who enjoyed her students and loved the process of putting on plays. We felt safe with her, and we all took chances, and had a terrific time. I felt nurtured and cared for and appreciated in school for perhaps the first time in my life. Her class was virtually the only thing I remember from junior high.

  In high school things weren’t as promising. The drama teacher was a failed actor with a lantern jaw and long grey hair. He looked like a cliché from a third-rate Shakespearean touring company, which is exactly what he’d been. His primary activity was telling us endless stories of his triumphs in little theaters around the country. Back then, we were properly impressed. The one comment I can remember his making about my work, probably casual on his part, seared me like a branding iron. “You might end up being a comedian,” he said, “but you’ll never be an actor.” His remark was tossed off, something he probably forgot the minute he said it, but now fifty years later it still lives with me. Without his help or encouragement I auditioned for all the school plays and got leads in every one. There was also a course in radio broadcasting taught by a wonderful woman named Lucy Assadorian. She was a tiny, immaculately dressed, beautiful woman who was worshipped by every boy in the class. With her encouragement, along with the radio plays we put on in her class and the stage plays I was cast in, I managed to survive high school.

  Throughout the entire four years, I don’t believe I ever opened a work of nonfiction. I cut every possible class to hang out in the theater, forging the names of teachers and my parents whenever I had to. The teachers used to say to me on a regular basis, “Alan, you could do so much for this school if you put your mind to it.” I didn’t want to put my mind to it. I didn’t want to do anything for the school. It wasn’t doing much for me and I thought it only fair to reciprocate. How I graduated remains a mystery.

  Chorus was of some interest to me. So was a class in ceramics run by a Miss Beatty, a wonderfully imaginative, eccentric, and completely unappreciated woman who at one point literally chased me around her studio with a glaze pot in an attempt to have me at least try to work with the stuff. I refused. All of my ceramics remained rough terra cotta. I also remember one history teacher, Mr. Engles, a thoroughly decent man with a passion for history so great that he allowed us to approach the subject from any vantage point that made sense to us, and in any form that we could identify with. In his classroom I wrote my first play. It was on the topic of slavery in the United States. I think I got an A. Probably the only grade above a C I received in my four years there.

  High school consistently made me feel as if I were in prison, but being in plays sustained me. I lived for the rehearsals and performances. It was the only arena in which I felt that I had any identity and any purpose. As I write this it seems strange to think that for so many years my sense of comfort and identity was secured only when I was being someone else, but I think this is true of many actors. My own unformed personality found grounding and shape in the words and actions of the characters in the scripts, and I would turn into the characters during rehearsals and stay within them until long after the plays had finished their runs.

  It was around this time that I began to study guitar. Like most of my hobbies, playing the guitar began as an attempt to keep my mind off acting, and gave me something to occupy my mind when I didn’t have a part in a play. I worked hard at the guitar, and soon got good enough to perform at functions around L.A. I masqueraded as a folk singer, but I was a maverick within the folk scene because folk music wasn’t a particular passion of mine. I was more interested in jazz, but wasn’t disciplined enough to learn jazz guitar.

  At that time there was a singer who’d become very popular in folk circles, a big, impressive black woman with a huge voice and commanding presence who wowed audiences throughout Los Angeles. We’d often be on the same bill together and I was never comfortable listening to her. I could never understand her success. She sang the music of her people, spirituals and blues, and some gospel, but what she was doing never worked for me. There was something about her that I found annoying, and I couldn’t figure out what it was until a couple of years later when I heard Mahalia Jackson and it all clicked. This woman on the folk circuit was singing the pain of her people, the pain of being black, the pain of her life, and I suppose she struck the same false note in me that was struck by my mother’s friend in the living room, when I was eight. Mahalia Jackson on the other hand made me cry. “What was the difference between this woman on the circuit and Mahalia Jackson?” I asked myself, and I struggled with this question for weeks until I finally realized that Mahalia Jackson’s singing was a joyful release from the pain of her life. Her pain and suffering were present in her singing, there was no way for her to escape; in every note she sang it was clear that she’d had a huge burden to carry, but she was singing to rise above it. Singing to liberate herself from her pain and to share the joy of the music with anyone who cared to listen. The woman on the folk circuit was simply singing her pain. In doing so she was inflicting it on me, making me feel as if I owed her something, and that it was somehow my job to alleviate her suffering. I wanted to be like Mahalia Jackson.

  In those days I thought that my feelings about other people’s performances were objective. I felt there was a component to an actor’s work that went beyond taste and personal preference. I still feel that way in part, although I also recognize that there is a time when people are ready for certain emotional experiences and not for others. There have been times in my life when I’ve dismissed certain works of art as being stupid or boring, only to find a couple of decades later that I was not mature enough at the time to appreciate them. It’s hard to admit we don’t understand something. I am still amazed, for example, at someone’s being afraid of Beethoven. I’ve known people who can’t listen to his music because it’s too emotionally arousing or overwhelming for them. But for me, Beethoven’s music was for decades almost as crucial as eating or drinking. His work was a prod into a life of courage, a life embraced totally with all its pain and all its challenges, and for many years I felt that I almost couldn’t live without his music. Had I been afraid of what Beethoven’s music evoked in me I think that fact alone would have given me reason to listen to it, to try and decipher my fears and attempt to understand and get beyond them.

  Around this time, while I was still in high school, I went to see a film that had won its star an Academy Award. The work was a theater classic, translated into a film for the star, and like millions of other people I came out of the theater enormously impressed by his performance. But along with being impressed, I left the theater also feeling jealous and inept, and then hating myself for those feelings, and then hating the actor for piling on more feelings of inadequacy and depression. “What the hell was wrong with me?” I wondered. “Why couldn’t I simply enjoy the man’s work?” Here was obviously a great actor doing the part of his life, giving a performance that had gotten him enormous attention, awards, accolades, and all I could do was grouse about it and hate him for it. I stayed feeling depressed and inadequate for days.

  A month later I saw Walter Huston in The Devil and Daniel Webster. This time I left the theater walking on air, filled with a sense of delight and joy and possibility. I stopped in my tracks. “What was the difference?” Two performances, seen weeks apart, both considered great. One fills me with gloom, jealousy, and despair; the other makes me feel alive and buoyant.

  I thought about it for weeks. I compared the two actors endlessly and finally came up with this realization. In the first instance, the actor who’d won the Academy Award was trying to impress me. He was demonstrating how beautifully he spoke, how well he articulated the lines, how beautifully he phrased them, how rich was the musical tone in his voice, how well he moved. And what I came to realize was that in spite of all the attention he received, the audiences had not been given a g
enuine experience. They were applauding their own intelligence at recognizing the actor’s technical prowess. The actor was congratulating himself, and the audiences were also congratulating themselves. But in his performance I couldn’t find that injection of experience that I needed so badly, that hypodermic connection that bonded me to the actor and would make his experience mine. I wasn’t allowed to be the character, and I started to wonder whether anyone had actually been affected by his work or whether that sense of narcissism was all anyone wanted from an actor. It slightly revolted me. I finally decided that his Academy Award had been given as an act of self-congratulation by the Academy, people applauding their own perceptions. Walter Huston on the other hand presented me with the gift of a whole person, fully articulated and realized, un-self-conscious and completely filled with his own joy at doing the work. I wanted to be like Walter Huston.

  CHAPTER THREE

  All of my performances in the plays throughout high school were successful. I got laughs, I got applause, I got very good comments after the shows, and in this one arena I started to have some small stature in a school completely dominated by its athletic program. But after each performance—no matter how well my work seemed to go, no matter how much applause or how many laughs, no matter how well I was able to manipulate the audience into feeling things and focusing on me—afterward, in the dressing room, I would inevitably feel depressed. Cheated out of something. I didn’t know what it was until in my senior year of high school, when I began studying with Benjamin Zemach.

  Benjamin taught small classes in Hollywood, a two-hour streetcar ride from where we had moved to in Highland Park. Benjamin was a tiny giant of a man who lived and breathed theater, and his classes were warm and supportive and serious. He had studied with Stanislavski, and I heard from someone that his personality was very similar to Stanislavski’s. Benjamin possessed a fierce focus and a burning devotion to conveying truth onstage. I don’t remember how I found my way to his classes; they were small and for the most part not attended by aspiring professionals, but he treated his students with great respect and he demanded a lot from them. When I started to work with him I expected that I would get singled out and praised. I felt comfortable and at ease on the stage; I knew my work had humor, that I could command attention.

  It didn’t happen. He was unimpressed. I’d do a scene and expect laughter, applause, a nod, some kind of recognition that I was a thinking actor and knew my way around the stage. Instead I found myself ignored. It began eating at me. We began scene study, and scene after scene he remained disapproving. At one point he said to me, “Where are you coming from?”

  “What do mean?” I answered.

  “Where did you come from just then?”

  “I came from offstage,” I said. Where else would I be coming from?

  “That’s what’s wrong,” he said. “Your character has no past. I see an actor walking onto a stage. I don’t see a human being coming in from the cold outdoors. Coming home from a job that is a disappointment to him. Coming back to a family that only partially nourishes him.”

  It took some time for his words to sink in, many months, but slowly it became clear to me that there was more to acting than being clever and being able to get a lot of attention, and that in spite of the lip service I’d been paying to creating life onstage, in spite of my intense examination of other actors’ performances and the lives of people around me, my own work had no real reference to that truth and that reality. I began to realize that the depression I’d consistently felt after my own performances was an unconscious signal that I had been telling lies onstage, that my work was shallow and manipulative. Benjamin never actually said it, but I could tell that this criticism was behind his silence. I began analyzing my own performances, using Benjamin’s eyes and ears, and I came up short month after month. I started to write long biographies of the characters I was playing, hoping to please him, to get some sense from him that I was on the right track. Nothing worked. The biographies of my characters got longer, my research got more and more extensive, and my temper grew worse. Something was not happening. I didn’t know what it was; I didn’t know why I was so miserable, so unable to get even a smile from him, a nod, some sense of encouragement.

  Then, one day, after working with Benjamin for about a year and a half, during the first performance of a play we’d been rehearsing, something happened. I had done the research, the endless biographical work, the meticulous thinking, obsessing about the part day and night, and probably because of this—my sweat, my devotion, my need—a small miracle took place. I was playing the part of a soldier returning home from a war, coming back to his wife and family after having been wounded on the front. I was about eighteen at the time and had never been anywhere near a war, nor did I have the vaguest idea of how to be a husband or a father. But when I walked onto that stage I became the character. No, that’s the wrong way of describing it. When I walked onto the stage it was as if the character told me to get out of the way and mind my own business. The character took on a life of his own, with an immediacy and a purpose that had little to do with any of the preparation I had done. My voice changed. My posture changed. The line readings that I’d become used to went out the window, my timing became different, and my relationships onstage with the other actors were more real than anything in my own life. The woman playing my wife was truly my own beloved wife; I understood her better than I understood myself. And the war I was returning from was real, and oppressive, and frightening. And more importantly, these details all took care of themselves in one sweep, without my attending to any of them. For years afterward I described this event by saying, “It was as if I were outside of my body, watching the play from perhaps forty feet above the stage. I could see the entire event playing below, and I was gleefully calling out to the part of me that was on the stage doing the play: ‘Go! Go! Keep it up!’” The experience lasted perhaps twenty minutes, but it changed my life forever. For those few minutes I was living in a state of grace. It was a place where nothing could go wrong. There was no possibility of criticism, of evaluation, of discussion, because I was simply witnessing an event. It was the most important, the most significant and wonderful moment of my life, and I was barely present to experience it.

  Benjamin beamed at me afterward and his approval was warming, but oddly not crucial. The experience had a depth and reality to it that went past any need for approval from him or anyone. And as much as I had loved, needed acting before that event, from that moment on I became an acting junkie. I now lived not just for acting, for being in front of an audience, but for the possibility of that exalted experience returning. I lived for those moments when the part played me and I was completely out of the way. These moments began happening with some frequency because of the fervor with which I attacked each part, but there was no knowing when they would happen or for how long. I found that I could do the work leading up to these moments, but I could not summon them at will.

  At this point I began to feel that when one of these events was not taking place I was cheating the audience. When I found myself present, when the character refused to take me over, when I was acting with technique and no inspiration, I became embarrassed to be in front of the audience, and I’d steal away from the theater as if I were a thief. But no matter how hard I worked, I couldn’t control when these experiences would take hold of me.

  Years later I began to see that others shared this experience of flow, of knowing things they had no way of knowing, of being witness to events from some high vantage point when the “self” is completely out of the way and they are flying somehow, and another part of them, a better part of them, is the vehicle.

  It is when you are the music.

  Athletes experience it; they call it being in the zone. They say that when it happens time slows down. They know the positions of each player on the field, they can’t miss the ball, and they can’t make mistakes.

  Doctors can have it; they too can be in the zone. I’ve
heard doctors say on occasion, “Yes, there have been times when a patient comes in and I’ll immediately know what they’re suffering from. Sometimes it will be an illness I’ve barely heard of, or never dealt with, but I know what they’ve got and how to treat it.”

  Teacher’s can have this experience, too. I’ve heard them say, “I knew there was something going on with Tommy at home. He said nothing about it, I didn’t even particularly see a change in him, but something told me there was a problem, and I knew instinctively what it was.”

  As time went on I became aware that people in all walks of life have this experience, with this in common: that it only seems to take place with those who are deeply devoted to the art or sport or work in which it is occurring.

  In the early days, when these experiences happened to me, I was so engrossed in acting that I didn’t take the time to explore the other arenas in which these “zone” experiences grabbed hold of people’s lives, so in my naïveté I allowed it to be a magical property, belonging only to the craft of acting. I worshipped at the altar of my profession, and as a result made an interesting mistake. What I allowed myself to believe was that the craft of acting had given me a great gift—that there was a magical aspect inherent in my craft and in no other, that I had tapped into it and that this magic made the craft of acting worthy of worship. What I didn’t realize at the time was that there is nothing special whatsoever in the craft of acting. Acting can be anything one wants it to be, from the most crass, dead, ego-driven activity, used as a way of earning an easy living or finding women, on the one end, to something sublime, magical, and transforming on the other. And the difference, the only difference, is the investment made by the person who’s engaged in the process. In other words, it wasn’t a gift that the craft of acting had bestowed on me, it was a gift that I had bestowed on the craft of acting. My diligence and devotion allowed me to experience this wonderful and transforming place.