Some 20 years ago, in a New York hotel suite on a late summer morning, I was raptly observing two fabled theater stars, Julie Harris and Christopher Plummer, in conversation. Both multiple Tony Award winners (five for her, two for him) whose stage appearances were regularly greeted with hosannas, they seemed to my eyes to be eternally haloed in their own natural spotlights.
But they never glowed more brightly or spontaneously that day than when they were discussing performances by other actors from another time — Laurette Taylor in “The Glass Menagerie,” Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, Tallulah Bankhead. When Plummer brought up Ruth Gordon’s appearance as Dolly Levi in Thornton Wilder’s “The Matchmaker” (later reimagined as the musical “Hello, Dolly!”) in 1955, they both lit up like Broadway marquees at sunset.
What about that moment (one would ask the other, glittering with enthusiasm) when Gordon looked out into the audience to deliver Dolly’s monologue about money, when she seemed to be locked in person-to-person confidentiality with every member of the audience? Wasn’t it wonderful? Had there ever been anything else quite like it?
Harris, 72 at the time, and Plummer, 68, had taken on the infatuated giddiness of the co-chairs of a teenage fan club. And a performance that had taken place more than four decades earlier seemed, however briefly, to irradiate the room through their recollection of it.
Though I was too young to have seen “The Matchmaker” with Gordon — whom I knew principally as an eccentric supporting player in films like “Rosemary’s Baby” — I knew how they felt. Because that was pretty much what I experienced when I remembered seeing them in choice roles: Harris as Emily Dickinson in “The Belle of Amherst” or, just that season, in “The Gin Game”; or Plummer morphing into John Barrymore, a matinee idol of a distant time, the role for which he had just won his second Tony.
All us constant theatergoers — and I would imagine, more than a few whose play attendance is only sporadic — have galleries of such performances in the back of our heads, ready to be resurrected for our wonder and delight when times are slow and uninspiring. These are corridors of memory I’ve been wandering through a lot during the months of the coronavirus pandemic.
That means I’ve been spending quality time in my mind’s eye with splendid creatures as different as the infinitely woundable Hamlet of Simon Russell Beale; the gleefully angry Len Cariou and Angela Lansbury, making cannibal pies together in the musical “Sweeney Todd”; or Janet McTeer as Ibsen’s Nora, an overgrown plaything realizing her entire life has been a shabby masquerade in “A Doll’s House.” And Nathan Lane, Mark Rylance, Audra McDonald, Donna Murphy, John Douglas Thompson, S. Epatha Merkerson, Christine Ebersole, Jennifer Holliday, Mandy Patinkin, Cherry Jones, Donal McCann and Bernadette Peters have all been showing up as well.
Of course, the figures from these galleries come to life even more fully when you can take part in the sort of exchange that I witnessed between Plummer and Harris that morning: a sort of passionate ritual recollection with like-minded souls who are also celebrants in the church of great acting.
Make that great acting on the stage, which you saw in real time, in a shared space where you breathed the same air as the performers. In discussing these sacred matters with other members of your tribe, you may find that you have remembered certain aspects of the same performance differently.
That’s as it should be of anything that exists only in memory, which has a way of refining and expanding those elements of an encounter or event with which you connected most personally. And the relationship between a live stage performance and its separate witnesses is deeply, intimately personal. How we remember a stage interpretation that we can never see again — at least not in exactly the same way — is what makes such acting mythic.
This is not to imply that film or television acting, which has is its own exacting discipline, is a lesser art. But for theater addicts — and oh, the withdrawal pains we’ve been going through lately — recorded acting can never fill the same role. We can usually revisit cherished screen performances, which will always remain the same, and assess how we’ve changed and grown since we last saw them.
But we the spectators never invest ourselves as completely in a filmed performance as we do in a live one, because there is nothing hermetic about stage acting. The chemistry that flows during a theater production isn’t just among those onstage; it embraces the audience as well. Our own responsive energy helps create each separate, singular evening.
When I edited a book of New York Times theater reviews in the 20th century, I was struck by the visceral heat of much of the writing. Common frames of reference and turns of phrases might change as the years moved on, but the excitability quotient — more evocative of live sports announcing or war reporting than literary criticism — remained at the same high level, with a “you are there” urgency throughout.
This was equally true of John Corbin writing on John Barrymore’s 1922 appearance as Hamlet (“The atmosphere of historic happening surrounded John Barrymore’s appearance as the Prince of Denmark”), and Frank Rich on Holliday bringing down the house as a spurned soul singer in “Dreamgirls.” (“When Broadway history is being made, you can feel it. What you feel is a seismic emotional jolt that sends the audience, as one, right out of its wits.”)
Often, there was the feeling that what the reviewer had seen defied description. An unsigned critic on Sarah Bernhardt in “La Dame aux Camelias” in 1905 wrote, “The ordinary superlatives of appreciation fall short.” And here is Brooks Atkinson on an ingénue named Carol Channing incarnating Miss Lorelei Lee in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” in 1949: “There has never been anything like this before in human society.”
If you were lucky enough to have seen one of those performances, you had bragging rights for the ages. Your vision of that particular triumph might grow larger, a tad unrealistically, as the distance from the night you saw it widened with the years. And there was always the danger that you would wind up like one of the elderly, myth-hugging dinner guests in James Joyce’s great short story “The Dead,” shedding tears over incomparable, now vanished singers they may not even have heard.
The temptation to assume such a purely nostalgic perspective has never been greater than now, when theaters all over the world have been shuttered. At the same time, it’s important, I think, not to let the luster of live performances fade from our minds.
I’ve been comforted by and grateful for the digitally recorded performances made by theater artists that I’ve watched on my computer since I began sheltering in place. These include the poignant, starry series of monologues created by the 24 Hour Plays team, and Richard Nelson’s inspired presentation of the characters from his serial Apple family plays, forced to communicate by Zoom in “What Do We Need to Talk About?”
I was also pleased to have the chance to be reminded of one of the most blissful comic theater performances I ever saw, that of Michael Urie in “Buyer and Cellar,” Jonathan Tolins’s (fictional) one-man play about an unemployed actor who goes to work on Barbra Streisand’s Malibu estate. Urie recreated that sustained soliloquy, word for word, last month in a performance streamed from his living room, as a fund-raiser for Broadway Cares.
Virtuosic pro that he is, Urie landed most of the jokes in Tolins’s script, and he certainly held your attention. But the seductiveness that had imbued the live performance, as one man directly enlisted our complicity in a subversive act of make-believe, wasn’t there. The essential, pulsing human link between him and us had gone.
In the early 20th century two rather directionless young American men separately saw a now scarcely remembered actress named Alla Nazimova in plays by Henrik Ibsen. One of them later wrote, “The first time I wanted to become a playwright was when I saw Nazimova in ‘Ghosts.’” The other said that seeing Nazimova as Hedda Gabler gave him his “first conception of a modern theater.” He wound up seeing her in the part 10 times.
Those astonished young men would grow up to become Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill. They in turn would create the immortal roles Williams’s Amanda in “Glass Menagerie” and Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski in “A Streetcar Named Desire”; and Mary and James Tyrone in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night”
These parts would be embodied — transcendently and for the ages — by Laurette Taylor (and, in my theatergoing lifetime Cherry Jones) in “Menagerie”; Jessica Tandy (and later, Cate Blanchett) in “Streetcar”; and Florence Eldridge and Fredric March (and Vanessa Redgrave and Brian Dennehy) in “Journey.” And so the procession continues — of performances that briefly and brilliantly set nights ablaze, and become immortal for having lived but a moment. Reading about and remembering them is, for me, helping to take the chill off this very lonely spring.
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May 28, 2020 at 07:23PM
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The Mythic Performances That Are Keeping Me Company - The New York Times
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