Musings on a Life in Theater
By Carey Harrison - Artistic Director to the Woodstock Players
By Carey Harrison - Artistic Director to the Woodstock Players
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At the time my wife Claire and I founded the Woodstock Players, I never expected to do any more theater directing - I had for many years been focused on writing novels and it was a series of accidents (as described in the "About Us" page) that have brought me full circle to where I started, at the age of 17, when I directed Shaw's 'Passion, Poison and Petrifaction,' at boarding school. The play opens with a breakfast-table conversation, and I immediately hit upon a far from original trick, but one that gave me so much pleasure that I was immediately hooked. A husband and wife are at breakfast, and I hid the actor playing the wife behind a large newspaper until her first line arrived. She then lowered the newspaper and spoke, or rather 'she' did, since this was a boys-only boarding school, and my audience's delight at discovering my friend Robert Stilwell in the guise of a middle-aged wife temporarily stopped the show. I couldn't wait to tell my celebrated actress mother about my coup (my celebrated actor father was, as always, more elusive), and I can still see her smile of fond indulgence as I described the stage scene to her. Mama's approval! No wonder I was hooked.
I spent my college years at
Cambridge (UK) directing one play after another with a dedication verging on
the manic: sometimes rehearsing twelve to fourteen hours a day. (The
undergraduate actors came and went, scene by scene; I alone was there
all day, in the rehearsal room adjoining the undergraduate theater. It
was a curiously devoted generation of youthful actors, perhaps an
unparalleled generation - close to one hundred of them, from the three
years of my time there, entered the profession, and many have made a
good life in it.) Once, while preparing to direct a Harold Pinter play
the following semester, I shut myself in my room at my Aunt Irene's row
house in London - she was an actress too, as were both my mother's
sisters - and spent the entire vacation writing out the play as a novel,
so that I would have traced (or invented) every motivation, every
unstated link between lines. In time, when I graduated and found work in
the professional theater, I was shocked at the casualness of the
directors under whom I worked as an assistant, including eminences like
Peter Brook, Tyrone Guthrie, Laurence Olivier and Clifford Williams. They
were largely reactive, waiting to see what actors brought, and nudging
them in one direction or another. Guthrie and Olivier were masters of
the stage picture, deploying actors in surprising moves that altered the
tone of a scene. (I've worked since, though not often, with actors
whose stage genius includes a full picture of the scene they are in, and
expresses itself in unexpected and highly original moves; Olivier was
one such.) Brook was a master of avant-garde improvisatory techniques,
and frightened his cast by preferring these, even at a late stage of
rehearsal, to conventional rehearsal. I was present during the final
stages of his Oedipus rehearsals at the National
Theater, featuring Sir John Gielgud as Oedipus, when Brook asked the
cast to climb onto the stage one by one and do, he said, 'something to
frighten me.' Anything; some people undid their pants. Others, more
histrionic or just panic-stricken, screamed. Gielgud's turn was last. He
clambered onto the stage, drew himself up, looking out over the stalls
at Brook's tiny figure, and said, 'We open in two weeks.'
Clifford Williams was a master of indecision.
(I've worked with directors who cultivated terror in their cast, finding
that it shakes up complacency. No-one sufficiently terrified will stoop
to merely 'phoning in' a performance.) During the weeks before the
opening of his once-notorious all-male As You Like It (with Anthony Hopkins as Phoebe, of all unlikely casting), the
set and costume design morphed in the final days from a decadent Roman
apartment (supposedly 'Franco Zefferelli's latest party' - typically all
male) to a World War II prisoner-of-war camp (all men - and the flight
to the forest was the prisoners' wish-fulfilment) to its final
incarnation as a vision of 'swinging London' (this was 1966), set on
steep gleaming raked stage of white plastic. Kenneth Tynan, the National
Theater's august literary manager, had argued for cutting the 'rustic'
characters from the play because 'it made no sense that they spoke
verse.' As assistant to the director I was present at the ensuing
discussion, in Olivier's office, and was struck dumb by its inanity.
This was the summit of the professional theater? Apparently so. Olivier,
who adored drag shows, wandered around our dress rehearsals, looking up
the skirts of the actors who were playing women. Yes, this was
professional theater: vaudeville, at heart. What had I thought? That it
was a temple for highbrows? It was fun - I remember Olivier at the final
dress rehearsal for Othello, standing in the middle of the
curtain call line-up and letting his dressing gown slip open to reveal
his nakedness. 'How,' he cried to the empty stalls and the circle above
them, 'can the greatest actor in the world have such a small cock?' It
was fun, but it was also silly, and directors largely traded on the
magical skills of the actors they employed.
I was 22. I had already begun to write plays
as well as direct them, and this new direction consumed me for many
years to come. Now that I'm back doing both once more, writing and
directing, after many years writing scripts, screenplays and novels, I'm
still haunted not by the very many professional directors I've watched
at work on the scenes I've written or on others' scenes, but by some
briliantly talented would-be theater directors I worked alongside at
college. Some, like Stephen Frears, went on to be noted movie-makers.
Others sank from sight, as is the way in life. One old friend, who
recently resurfaced to 'friend' me on Facebook, had a gift so
astonishing that it has left me, as a director, forever cautious (not
always a bad thing) and conscious of lagging behind my former pal: he
could see into an actor's mind. Like me, his mother was an actress; but
he could read her, as I never could read mine. In speaking to his actors
after they had tried a section of a scene, he could reflect back to
them precisely how lost or how assured they felt, deep inside - the very
thing they had been trying to hide. Alarming, perhaps, for his actors,
you might think; yet not so - it was reassuring, rather. (He too, like
me, turned to writing; then let this fall by the wayside, lacking the
encouragement he most signally deserved.) I implore my actors to keep
talking to me, to tell me where they feel on sure and where on shaky
ground. It's a lovely, collaborative process, and I'm as much in awe of
actors as I was when first seeing my parents on a stage. Just today I
read the words of the great novelist, William Gass: actors are our
enemies, he wrote, meaning the writer's enemies. How wrong he was to
write this! Actors are the best friends a writer has, and a director
too, and to bask in their generous gifts as they give their spirit to a
role, is the height of human dignity - if the role's any good. Actors
deserve nothing but good roles. They are our dreamers, our sleepwalkers,
showing the way to a world more enticingly human than our own.
~Carey
~Carey
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In addition to his projects for The Woodstock Players, Carey Harrison has collaborated with composer Nolan Gasser in writing the Libretto for an opera of The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett for the San Francisco Opera house - this opera will premiere on March 1, 2013. For more on that, go to the San Francisco Opera website.
Carey's novel Justice and a selection of his stage plays will be published by Dr. Cicero Books in late Spring 2013. To learn more about Carey Harrison's writing projects and to read (and download) Carey Harrison's plays including Midget In A Catsuit Reciting Spinoza, go to Carey's website and scroll down - click HERE
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To read about Carey's thoughts, written for Roll Magazine, on the business of being a writer - also includes the script of Midget... - click HERE - scoll down for our contact details.
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Video interview on Midget... HERE
- Promo Video on Midget...
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And visit our Facebook page and "Like" us, do:)
E-mail us HERE
Carey Harrison: Artistic Director, 845 417 8251
Claire Lambe: Company Manager, 845 901 2893
