Mainly on Directing by Arthur Laurents (read more books .TXT) 📕

shade and let light in the room. Up, down, up, down—until an exhausted, exasperated Mike ran up the aisle of the Belasco Theatre and went screaming into the night. Who was to take over? Jimmy suggested me. The play was a war play, I wasn't long out of the army, I was still in my twenties and this was Broadway, but no one else offered. I had been troubled by Mike treating what I called “GI dialogue” as heavily Stanislavsky via the Group Theatre—so why not? I went to work to turn the actors into GIs who use words as a casual cover for unwanted emotion in an extreme situation. The actors took to the approach, we were humming along; then came the first preview and the Anti-Defamation League, which issued a proclamation that the play was anti-Semitic because the central character, a Jew, was neurotic. The author, believing he had written a play against anti-Semitism, refused to change his work. The second preview was cancelled and Mike Gordon returned, unsure though he was which side he was on, and got the curtain raised. The play opened to mixed reviews.

My second play, Heartsong, about a marriage that was ruined by an abortion (in 1947!), was produced by a woman who was David O. (Gone With the Wind) Selznick's ex-wife and Louis B. (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) Mayer's daughter. The play had two directors: Olivia de Havilland's acting coach followed by Audrey Hepburn's husband-to-be Mel Ferrer. It played three cities but never—there is a God—got to Broadway. I began to think about directing.

My next two plays were directed by Harold Clurman, who had been one of the leaders of the Group Theatre, expounding theory to actors like Mike Gordon, my future director. The first play, The Bird Cage, starred Melvyn Douglas and featured Maureen Staple-ton. In Philadelphia—cursed Philadelphia!—Harold said to Maureen, “Sweetheart, I don't think you know what you're doing in this scene.” Maureen answered, “Harold, I don't know what I'm doing in the whole fucking play.” The second play, The Time of the Cuckoo, was a hit—at last!—starring Shirley Booth. The third day of rehearsal, Shirley walked off the stage, refusing to take direction from Harold. She never changed her mind. I thought more about directing.

Elia Kazan once said Harold Clurman should direct the first three days of any play because no one could explain the socioeconomic-psychological background of the play and the characters more eloquently. After three days, however, Harold should go home. Kazan had begun as an actor in the Group Theatre under Clurman's tutelage. By the time he made that pronouncement, he was the director most in demand, and Clurman was grateful to direct the road company of a play like A Streetcar Named Desire which had originally been directed by Kazan.

As a director of plays—not musicals; Love Life revealed the musical was decidedly not in his bones—Kazan was arguably the greatest in American theatre history and the creator of the American style of acting—a combination of the Method as practiced by the Group Theatre, technique as practiced by the Theatre Guild, the best of Broadway, and a passion all his own. As a man, he was ruthless and immoral, not above taking out an ad to urge his peers to betray one another to the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy era. Late in his life, there was an outcry against the proposal that he be given an “honorary” Oscar. Protesters pointed out he had already won two Oscars—one for a film of dubious quality, Gentlemen's Agreement, the other for a film of dubious morality and acting that reads as over the top today, On the Waterfront. To award another, honoring a man who had destroyed the careers, if not the lives, of peers and friends, was an insult not merely to them and their families but to directors like Alfred Hitchcock who had never even received one Oscar.

There is a long list of artists of distinguished professional achievement and repellent personal behavior. Probably at the top of the list, Wagner and his ardent anti-Semitism. Does behavior lessen achievement? Kazan got his honorary Oscar, but is forever tainted.

Perhaps if, immoral or not, he had directed one of my plays, I would not have begun to think seriously about directing. It was originally more in self-protection of my plays than anything else. I felt I couldn't do worse than the directors I'd had.

I went to every acting class in the city I could and attended the Actors Studio and the Neighborhood Playhouse. I learned most about acting and actors from Stella Adler and Sandy Meisner. Stella was famous for returning from Paris, where she had been studying the Stanislavsky Method with Stanislavsky himself, and announcing to every Method practitioner in the Group, including Clurman, Lee Strasberg, and Kazan: “We're all wrong!”

She was also, and rightly, famous for her courses in Ibsen and Chekhov. The acting method she taught was very similar to Sandy Meisner's, the most practical teacher of all. His emphasis was on playing an action that shows what the actor wants in the scene. Their influence is apparent today, even in musical theatre.

Why do directors direct? To be in control? To achieve the success they couldn't as actors? To produce theatre that gives the audience an experience only theatre can—moves them, excites and entertains, illuminates, and always makes them want to see more theatre, that's the desired answer. For the director who takes that kind of theatre for granted as his goal, it's imperative to know the answer for everyone, not just his actors, to that most important question in the theatre: why? Why every moment? Why every piece of scenery, every light, every prop, every costume? Why?

It's the most important question in life, too, but who asks it? Not everyone, or at least not everyone expecting an answer. I ask, knowing I don't and won't know all the answers. Some, I guess at; others, I choose to answer my way for myself. Why am I