The Price of Fame

AH: How many plays have you written?

RB: Three plays and eleven adaptations, not counting Shlemiel the First. After I’d done the Pirandello, Chekhov, and Ibsen adaptations, I tried something different. I started to take more liberties with texts. The first such piece was Demons, based on Doctor Faustus but set in the present and using modern speech while more or less following the scene sequence of Marlowe. I did the same thing with The Alchemist, a piece I’m still working on called Celebrities Anonymous. The phony alchemists of that play who turn metal into gold have been transmogrified into scam artists pretending to be talk-show hosts. They sell fake guest appearances, promising to turn non-entities into stars. It’s a fantasia on the issue of celebrity. Nobody Dies on Friday is my first wholly original play, although it’s based on existing material.

AH: Why does the theme of celebrity interest you? I remember in your production of Pirandello’s Right You Are, celebrity was also a theme with the flash bulbs of the press going off.

RB: I’ve grappled personally with the idea of celebrity. If Jacob were to wrestle with the angel today, the angel’s name would be Celebrity.

AH: Why do you see it as a pitfall?

RB: It takes away your privacy. The prying reporter, the gossip monger, the yellow journalist – all conspire to invade the privacy of individuals and make everything public. Whom the gods would destroy they first make famous.

AH: But when movie stars complain about what moral reprobates the paparazzi are, I don’t take out my handkerchief and weep. Doesn’t it go with the territory? Celebrity brings enormous rewards, too.

RB: It brings money and fame. But Princess Diana is an example of how it can also bring death. So is Marilyn. Both women were to some extent killed as a result of their celebrity, in Diana’s case by trying to outrun the paparazzi. Celebrity also changes your relationships with your children and your parents. Anybody totally public is prevented from enjoying basic human relationships.

AH: Where do you draw the line between the public’s legitimate desire to know about public figures and the right of those public figures to privacy?

RB: It’s an impossible line to negotiate, especially since contemporary Americans substitute celebrities for gods and royalty. Stars are increasingly the sacrificial objects of the American public. Once I was eating in a restaurant with the movie actor Robert Ryan when he had his clothing ripped off by some admiring fan. Ryan was not allowed to enjoy a simple meal in public because this fan felt he owned him. Ultimately, this kind of proprietorship could could result in ritual slaughter, with the flesh of the celebrity scattered to the four winds and taken home by the public as relics.

AH: So the dynamics of celebrity played a part in the genesis of your third play, Nobody Dies on Friday.

RB: Yes. I’d been reading Susan Strasberg’s Marilyn and Me, and I’d been investigating Lee Strasberg for a long time, trying to understand what it was about his Method that made his actors all end up in the movies, why he ended up in movies himself, starting with The Godfather, and how symbolic it was that he died after dancing in the celebrity chorus line of a TV program called “Night of a Thousand Stars.” Then I read John Strasberg’s quite bitter writings about his father. And I started thinking about Strasberg’s acting company and how quickly it disintegrated because of his own ethical blindness. After the disastrous opening of Three Sisters in London, Strasberg blamed the actors. George C. Scott almost punched him. Strasberg interested me as a character who as a youth absorbed the high ideals of the Group Theater, but who was gradually swallowed up by his own ambition and competitiveness. He became very jealous of elia Kazan, another member of the Group, who was the real founder of the Actor’s Studio, and who had become a celebrated movie director. Under Strasberg, the Studio became a celebrity factory, a symbol for me of how people abandon their calling to seek fame in the movies. And Strasberg’s Method was essentially a technique designed for movies, not for the stage.

AH: Is there anything inherently wrong about acting in the movies?

RB: No, there’s nothing morally wrong with acting in the movies. But a true actor’s first allegiance is to the stage.

AH: Why?

RB: The stage is an actor’s medium, the movies, a director’s. The film actor has little control over his or her performance. The director edits it, cuts it, shapes it, lip-synchs it, reworks it. The actor is virtually powerless in that medium. True, he gets paid a lot and has a shot at mass appeal. But the only convincing argument I’ve heard in favor of movies is that you have your evenings to yourself. The theatre is a much more monastic profession than the movies. It demands discipline, stamina, and moral commitment. Stanislavsky wrote eloquently about this. He didn’t just offer a method to actors, like Strasberg; he also spoke of the ethical obligations of the actor to the profession.

AH: What are they?

RB: As Stanislavsky famously said, “to love the art in yourself, not yourself in art.” Talent is a God-given gift. The actor has an obligation to cultivate that talent for the purpose of performing great roles, not for the sake of careerism.

AH: You said that theatre is an actor’s medium, yet many people consider your theatre, the American Repertory Theatre, a director’s theatre.

RB: But it isn’t. We invite directors to push our actors in different directions. The members of our Company are usually delighted with the directors who come, because each one opens up a new avenue for the actor. The director really exists for the actor. And an actor like Jeremy Geidt, for example, is in heaven when someone like Robert Wilson or Andrei Serban or Robert Woodruff pushes him into areas that he hasn’t visited before. So from that point of view, the director is an agency through which the actor advances and grows.

AH: So you were interested in writing a play about Strasberg because you see Strasberg as emblematic of a corruption that has plagued American theatre: sacrificing the ideals of art and theatre to pursue fame and fortune through the movies.

RB: I was looking for the moment when things changed, and everything kept coming back to him. But you know, I wasn’t simply trying to expose Strasberg, though I find him a highly overrated cultural icon. He also struck me as something of a tragic figure, regarding the kind of pulls that were made on him. So I looked at the progress of his life as somewhat tragic.

AH: Tragic because he destroyed what he had of value to contribute to American culture?

RB: Yes.

AH: Do you think he made any contribution to American theatre?

RB: His greatest contribution to American theatre was his intensification of proletarian naturalism, a style best represented by the acting in plays like A Hatful of Rain, movies like On the Waterfront, and a variety of things from that period no one remembers. But the performers in them are remembered. People like Ben Gazzara, Shelley Winters – performers capable of creating a believable reality. Those plays and that kind of acting don’t hold much interest for me. And some of the people he took the most credit for, John Strasberg tells us, had very little to do with the Actor’s Studio. Marlon Brando, for example, who has always been considered a Method creation, spent only a week in the Studio. He was Stella Adler’s student. Elia Kazan was the one who helped develop his talent. Same thing with James Dean, who spent two weeks in the Studio and left after Strasberg criticized his acting. The Studio took credit for the careers of people who were there for a very short time. Paul Newman and Al Pacino are among the good actors who are genuinely devoted to the Studio. But consider Newman’s career. He hasn’t been on stage since Baby Wanna Kiss, the play he did with the Studio in the sixties. He’s a wonderful actor, but he’s stuck in the movies. The stage frightens him. All those lines to learn.

AH: Did you know Strasberg?

RB: No, never met him.

AH: So the appeal of the subject for you was you felt that it’s an important turning point in American theatre history.

RB: Yes. But I think the concept of celebrity has a larger reference that the theatre or the movies. It touches every American.

AH: Every American?

RB: Most of us either are celebrities or worship celebrities.

AH: You see this as a peculiarly American phenomenon?

RB: Yes.

AH: Why are Americans so mesmerized by the cult of celebrity?

RB: The country is essentially rootless. It never really developed its own traditions – no royalty, no church, no heritage. We have to satisfy our hunger for icons through rock singers and movie stars.

AH: But today the icons don’t last. Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, John Wayne and Katherine Hepburn, had careers that spanned over thirty years.

RB: Even the English nobility has less staying power these days. Princess Di, Prince Philip, Fergie, they’re all grist for the tabloid press. This is a brand-new phenomenon. For us, too. Roosevelt’s mistress wasn’t identified until thirty years after the event. Nor was Eisenhower’s. Now we know every motion of Clinton’s private life, even the shape of his private parts.

AH: So this hunger for celebrities is, in fact, destroying celebrities, because you can’t worship icons of people you know too much about.

RB: Exactly. They can’t be icons if we know too much about them, and because they’re icons, we insist on knowing everything about them.

AH: You’re writing about Lee Strasberg, who is now a historical figure. Sometimes the desire to be historically accurate and the desire to create great theatre can clash because theatre demands dramatic power. How do you negotiate these antagonistic demands, trying to tell the truth about somebody’s life, and at the same time, writing a compelling play?

RB: It’s hard. I compressed a lot of events. The play takes place in one day, it observes the Aristotelian unities: place, time, and action. But I’ve had to import some events that took place a few months later and a few months earlier and pretend they all happened on this one day. It’s not quite as crowded a day as in Corneille’s The Cid, where the events of twenty-four years are compressed into twenty-four hours. But I took some liberties with history. For example, Marilyn Monroe’s breakup with Arthur Miller did not happen on New Year’s Eve, 1959. It happened a few months later, though it was already in the works. So I have tinkered with when things happened, though rarely with what things happened. I’ve had to imagine a few scenes in Lee Strasberg’s early life from my own father’s early life, which was probably not too different. They lived in the same neighborhood around the same time.

AH: Why was it important to sketch in Lee Strasberg’s early life?

RB: To see where he came from, what turned him into what he became. Why he felt he had to protect himself as much as he did, why he lost his emotional ties with his family. His son continually accuses him of not being able to feel towards his family, yet he stressed feeling above all things in his acting training. He also stressed believability and truth, but he wasn’t always capable of acknowledging the truth.

AH: One of the first questions playwriting students have to ask themselves is, why is this night different from any other night? Why is this night special? In terms of your play and the destiny of the Strasbergs, why is the day your play takes place different from all other days?

RB: It’s a crisis day. Strasberg’s relationships with his wife and children have reached a crisis as a result of the attention he’s been paying this sex goddess. And there’s doubt regarding just how far this attention went. A crisis occurs in everybody’s life on this particular day. Monroe’s divorce from Arthur Miller. John Strasberg’s decision to leave home. Paula’s recognition that Lee is more devoted to Marilyn than to her or the children. And Susan’s acknowledgement that her father will never love her or nourish her as much as he does Marilyn.

AH: So each character arrives at a moment of recognition. How does your play dramatize the relationship between Paula and her husband?

RB: Such a strange relationship. Both of them are battening on Marilyn for the sake of their careers. Paula is her acting coach – Marilyn can’t say a line without her. Lee is her mentor as to what roles she takes, and he’s teaching her how to act. They’re both exploiting the woman, but at the same time, Paula is recognizing that by participating in this, she’s losing Lee. Lee is getting more and more absorbed into Marilyn’s world. Paula retains her love for her family and her need to protect them. She realizes that Lee is pulling away as a result of this obsession with Marilyn.

AH: You use the word exploit. That’s a very harsh word.

RB: That’s pretty much what they were doing. They were both concerned about Marilyn, but she was their bread and butter.

AH: So you think that Lee Strasberg had no illusions about Monroe’s talent and ability.

RB: I think he talked himself into believing that she was a great actress.

AH: So he was self-deceived.

RB: Yes. That’s part of the interest of the character, that he is believed to be one of the great teachers of acting and one of the great critics of acting. And yet he has deluded himself into thinking that a woman with a modest comic talent could play all the great tragic roles: Grushenka in The Brothers Karamazov, Lady Macbeth, Ophelia. It was a delusion, one that John Strasberg saw through immediately.

AH: How does Marilyn figure into your play?

RB: She’s a presence hovering in the wings. Rather like the Greek concept of Fate. You never see her. She’s just a voice and a bell. She’s a suffering monster similar to Tennessee Williams’ Southern belles. You have great sympathy for her, but part of her capacity to stimulate your sympathy comes from her incredible emotional needs and her incredible lack of self-knowledge.

AH: And self-respect. She had nothing but contempt for herself.

RB: Well, when you consider how she got to the top, you can see why. She was the sex toy of hundreds of powerful men.

AH: She was intelligent, and she wanted serious work.

RB: She may have wanted serious work, but she never did much. The closest she came was a scene she did in the Studio playing Blanche DuBois.

AH: Apparently it was very good, but why did you say you see her as a Tennessee Williams character? That’s an interesting analogy.

RB: Because she’s in a state of disintegration. From the first moment you hear her voice, she’s in a spiral of self-destruction like Blanche DuBois. Blanche drank to escape reality, Marilyn drank and popped pills. She was a walking pharmacy, a perambulating liquor store. Which is what ultimately killed her. So there’s foreboding in the play about her eventual overdose.

AH: Why did you make the decision to have her offstage all the time?

RB: I’ve never seen a persuasive representation of Marilyn on stage. It always seems like an impersonation. So I thought this device would create more tension and suspense than actually showing her in the flesh.

AH: How would you describe the style of the play?

RB: The style is an odd choice for me, because I’m generally assumed to be opposed to realism, but the play is essentially a traditional Jewish family play with roots in Yiddish theatre. The Yiddish audiences loved Shakespeare plays about wronged parents like King Lear and The Merchant of Venice, especially if they ended in reconciliation. Clifford Odets and Arthur Miller come out of that tradition. Remember the ending of Death of a Salesman? Willy realizes that his estranged son Biff actually loves him. And Linda replies, “He always loved you.” That’s a perfect Yiddish theatre moment. My play comes out of the same tradition.

AH: Some critics attack American theatre as never looking outside the living room. But I find in your play and the plays of Miller, Odets, and Mamet a virulent indictment of America. I don’t see them as just family dramas.

RB: Miller works hard to make that family a microcosm for what he considers to be both the strengths and weaknesses of American society. And so does Odets. They always have a social and sometimes a metaphysical dimension to them, beyond the family. But it is typical of American playwrights to work from the family. O’Neill’s great plays are family plays, even The Iceman Cometh. When I created Lee, I heard the voice of my father in my ear. I gave Lee some past events that happened to my father, particularly his involvement with the Yiddish theatre. My father used to tell me those stories over and over. I loved hearing them.

AH: Why?

RB: I felt closer to him when he talked about his childhood.

AH: Why did he want to talk about his childhood?

RB: He had a success story to tell. He grew from a poor East-side immigrant into a successful self-made businessman.

AH: What has surprised you most about the evolution of American theatre?

RB: That it has evolved from a frivolous entertainment into a serious, world-class expression. When I was a kid there was little around but light entertainment. But think of the quality of our theatre over the last forty years!

AH: What is the most difficult thing about writing a play?

RB: The most difficult thing about writing a play is letting the action carry the theme and not the author’s didactic voice. To let what happens happen more through character and action than through reflections and pronouncements about what the audience ought to think. The best playwrights do that. Strindberg does that. Chekhov does that. Ibsen does that. And so does David Mamet. I’m trying to learn that mystery, walking humbly in their lengthening footsteps.

Arthur Holmberg is Literary Director of the American Repertory Theater.