ARTicles vol. 5 i.4c: Still Cracking Away!

RM: This is your fourteenth production of a play by Harold Pinter, and your third production of one of his plays at the A.R.T. What is it that attracts you to Pinter’s plays?

DW: His language – and his insight. Pinter writes language that accomplishes a great deal, giving tremendous depth, complexity, and human richness with just a few lines. I’ve always felt that if I approached his plays humanely, I could find out what he was after. Pinter is a hugely intuitive writer. The image that led to No Man’s Land came to him when he was sitting in a cab. Suddenly he envisioned two men, one serving a drink to the other. One man says, “As it is?” And the other replies, “As it is, yes please, absolutely as it is.” That’s all he had when he started writing the play – that image and those two lines.

RM: What else attract you to his writing?

DW: His use of ‘pause’ and silence. Pinter said that even if he didn’t mark a single pause in his scripts, good actors would discover every one of them, which means that each actor has to find what he’s doing in the pauses. Silence occurs when the breath is taken out of everyone in the group and nobody has a comeback for what’s just happened. Nobody knows how to retaliate. What charms me is to discover what each character is thinking in that moment – the notion of working with what’s in a person’s head. I’ll often go up to an actor and ask, “What are you thinking?” I believe that’s what’s required of a director. I majored in English at Harvard, but took premed as well, expecting to be a psychiatrist. After becoming Jose Quintero’s assistant in New York, I realized that I could use everything I’d learned from reading psychology in my directing.

RM: Pinter won the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature. Besides his use of language, what do you think has made Pinter one of the most important twentieth century playwrights?

DW: He put another dimension into dramatic writing by making the moment sing of the whole life. No other playwright took what I call “the unfolding moment” so seriously. Other playwrights recognized the importance of memory, but no one else managed to fuse past and present in the manner of Proust. A few years before he finished No Man’s Land, Pinter wrote The Proust Screenplay – his adaptation of Remembrance of Things Past. He worked on it for a year, and called adapting Proust “the best working year of my life,” and termed it a kind of “homecoming.”

RM: What made you want to stage No Man’s Land now?

DW: My age, for one thing. What I find in the play is a search for the value of life in the face of death. I think we all try on our deaths, and that’s what I feel Pinter is doing in No Man’s Land. And I also wanted to stage it because I knew I could work with two great older actors, Max Wright and Paul Benedict.

RM: Why did you cast them in the two leading roles?

DW: With No Man’s Land you’re always looking for two actors who can take the place of John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson, who originated the roles of Spooner and Hirst. And I needed actors who really wanted to explore possibilities, and who could keep all the ambiguities of the play alive. I’ve known Max Wright since he was twenty-three, when I recruited him to play the lead in a production of Arturo Ui at the Loeb Drama Center. He’s a great comic actor, which is important for No Man’s Land because despite the play’s bleak subject, it’s also an incredibly funny play. If you’ve ever seen Max on stage or screen you’ve found yourself laughing constantly. He’s idiosyncratic and spontaneous, he’s got terrific control over his body, and he thinks fast – he’s got a mercurial mind. Paul, whom I’ve been working with since 1963, is the perfect actor for a Pinter play because he’s got such a good mind and never stops thinking – he’s always looking for the next level. Paul is a wonderful listener, always responsive to the moment, and never stopping the process of discovery. He was a terrific Stanley in my production of The Birthday Party years ago at the Theatre Company of Boston. I’m putting a piano on the stage because both Paul and Max are musicians. We hope to find a place for some piano music in the production.

RM: This play was written more than three decades ago. Has anything struck you as you’ve gone back and revisited the script?

DW: In an early draft of No Man’s Land, Pinter had Spooner say, “Experience is a paltry thing. The crucial fact to understand is the essential and thank goodness irresistible damnation of no man’s land which never moves, which never grows older and which remains forever icy and silent.” When I read this at my age today, I was completely taken by that phrase “thank goodness irresistible.” That’s the one phrase to celebrate no man’s land — all the rest seems bleak. In the play it’s clear that Hirst is dying and needs a helper, and Spooner offers to be his boatman. That’s the key metaphor of the play: Spooner will ferry Hirst across into the other world. I was delighted to see that word “irresistible” in the early draft because that’s the way I felt — that this icy no man’s land holds great release. And the fact that Spooner champions it, or at least serves Hirst to get him there, is life-giving. That’s finally Spooner’s offer in the play: let me become your friend. You are slogging up this impossible way by yourself, you need a friend. I’ve also been rereading T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets,” realizing that Eliot was writing great poetry when Pinter and Hirst and Spooner were reading literature, and that Eliot was still the master poet when Pinter wrote No Man’s Land in 1974. Eliot ends the second quartet, East Coker: “Old men ought to be explorers Here or there does not matter We must be still and still moving Into another intensity. …” Possibly Eliot’s imagery for man’s pilgrimage into death may have fed Pinter’s unconscious with metaphors guiding Hirst’s voyage.

RM: You’ve met Pinter a number of times over the past three decades, and he toasted you after seeing a private screening of your film The Local Stigmatic, which featured Al Pacino. Have you had any contact with him recently?

DW: I did get an email back from him after we wrote to let him know we’re staging No Man’s Land. Pinter responded, “I’m delighted you’ll be doing No Man’s Land … I’m very glad to know that you’re still cracking away.” Harold Pinter has said it! I’m still cracking away!

Ryan McKittrick is the A.R.T.’s Associate Dramaturg.