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The history of a theater is usually told by the people who come in the front door, and it usually centers on the greatest hits, the star performances, and the artistic mission as defined by the founders and sustained by their successors. But actors have a different perspective on the life of a theater. They walk in a different door than the paying customers do, and just as the workers know things the bosses don't know, actors know things about the theater that audiences, critics, even the theater owners can't possibly know. They have their own personal history of the theater based on their interactions with the buildings, the staff, backstage, the audience, the rehearsal rooms, and the day-to-day run-of-the-show.
For this actor's-eye capsule history of Lincoln Center Theater, 13 prominent actors share their memories of appearing in Lincoln Center productions throughout the course of its existence.
FIRST TIME
Audra McDonald: During my final callback for Carousel, singing “When I Marry Mr. Snow” on the stage of the Mitzi Newhouse Theater, I got so nervous because there was a possibility that I might actually get this that I just passed out. For my first big audition for my first big role to basically end with me unconscious on the floor was kind of a good way to enter that building. I have a condition which causes me to pass out from time to time. I’m completely fine when I come to. I have a hard time convincing people of that when I come to. Bernie and Andre and Nick Hytner and Mary Rodgers were all there. When I came to, I heard Mary saying, “Someone get her some orange juice!”
Amy Irving: My dad was the artistic director of the San Francisco Actors Workshop, and my mother was the leading actress in the company there. In 1965, he and his partner Herb Blau were invited to take over Lincoln Center. They had their first production in October,
Danton’s Death. I was a real backstage kid. I had two best friends whose parents also moved to New York with the company. We’d play backstage and watch the guillotine
scene at the end of Danton every night. We could do everybody’s part, whether it was James Earl Jones or Roscoe Lee Browne. I still remember lines from that show! In their second production,
The Country Wife, I had a walk-on role. That was my professional stage debut. I was in a crowd scene in a booth. I sold a guinea pig to Stacy Keach. I’ve seen pictures. I look really inappropriate to the period. I had a flip coming out of my maids-type cap. I had a great time.
Leleti Khumalo: When we came to Lincoln Center to do Sarafina!, we were supposed to be there for three weeks or something and then go home to South Africa. I was 16 years old. I knew nothing about New York. I was just having fun. Then the show got extended, and they moved it to Broadway. We didn’t know what Broadway was. They had to sit us down and say, “Listen, guys, this is serious. Broadway is the end. You can’t go beyond that. If you are on Broadway, you’ve made it.” Still, it got under the ear and went out the other ear. It was my first time playing in such a huge theater. When you’re at the backstage preparing for the show, you have somebody who’s taking care of you and making sure you’re on time, calling “Five minutes…places, please….” I remember those days very well. It was unbelievable. That memory will stay with me forever.
Kelli O’Hara: I didn’t come to New York even to visit until I was 21. It wasn’t an option. I’m not from an artistic place – I’m from a little town in Oklahoma called Elk City. At the time I was studying opera, so the Met and Lincoln Center were huge for me. The earliest memory I have of this city, and it’s not that long ago, was when I walked up the steps and stood in front of the fountain looking at the Met and the ballet and Avery Fisher. When you step into that plaza, you really can get that feeling of grandeur, larger than life. When I got the job to do
The Light in the Piazza, I’d already done five Broadway shows. But working at Lincoln Center was a huge deal for me. It is what I dreamed of as a singer, what I wanted my life to be.
Billy Crudup: The first time you walk into the Vivian Beaumont, knowing that you’ve been given the chance to play such an exquisite venue, it’s a grand feeling. When you come to work, you walk through the fountains and the opera and the symphony…you feel like you’re at the cultural heart of New York. What better place to be as an up-and-coming creative artist!
Kevin Kline: My first job at Lincoln Center was standing by for Raul Julia in
Threepenny Opera. When you’re an understudy, at least you’re onstage. The standby just sits around and waits. Raul never missed a performance. When Raul was leaving, Phil Bosco took over, and one day he came down with the flu. I got a call at 10 am on Sunday saying “You’re doing the matinee.” That was my first time onstage at the Beaumont. It was terrifying because Macheath came out of the pit, walking in this stylized toe-heel animal-like prowl in slow motion, with his cane and derby hat. And as he walked upstage with his back to the audience, this huge wall of the proscenium started backing up from the sheer power of this prowling predator while Roy Brocksmith sang “Mack the Knife.” It was a great entrance…except if you’re not sure if you’re going to faint or vomit or shit yourself. By the second act I started to have fun.
Meryl Streep: My first professional job out of Yale Drama School as an actor in New York was as the aging ingenue in
Trelawney of the “Wells" for Joseph Papp and the Public Theatre. Marybeth Hurt, John Lithgow, Jerry Dempsey, Mandy Patinkin, Sascha von Scherler, Michael Tucker, Aline McMahon and Walter Abel -- a wonderful cast in an adorable old play about a theatrical troupe at the turn of the (previous) century. I learned how to be in a theatrical troupe in that play, how backstage was just as much fun as being on.
COMPANY
Hal Holbrook: I was thrilled to be asked to join the first company of the Repertory Theater at Lincoln Center. They were still building it, so we were working down in Washington Square in a wonderful theater they’d built for
Man of La Mancha. The first year down there it was a very cold place. You’d walk down that long cement corridor past door after door. Nobody said hello. Starting what’s supposed to be the great repertory company of the American theater was a heavy load to dump on the shoulders of these people. But the second year, Bill Ball came in and brought with him all these terrific actors who were friendly and fun: Larry Gates, Sada Thompson, Michael O’Sullivan. I had three great roles that season. I took over the lead in
After the Fall from Jason Robards, I played the major in
Incident at Vichy and then I had this wonderful little five-minute routine in
Tartuffe. We had spirit, and the company started coming together, and they axed us. The corporate heads fired Bob Whitehead. Elia Kazan was either fired or left. There was considerable disappointment on the part of the people running and creating Lincoln Center over the failure of this new company to catch on and become instantly the American treasure that it was designed to be. Well, people who know anything about the theater do not ever expect a company born one year to become any kind of a treasure inside of quite a few years, if it’s a repertory company doing a number of different plays.
Blau and Irving ran a very fine theater in San Francisco. They wanted to bring their own company in. So they forced everybody out. I kept hanging on and saying I’ll play anything, I’ll do walk-ons, I don’t care. As long as I had one role in the whole season, just a role that had enough to it that I could make some kind of impression. I had three meetings with them, and the last time we met I said, “I know you’re considering doing
Hamlet – what’s the best role I could get in that cast?” They hemmed and hawed and finally one of them said “Rosencrantz or Guildenstern.” At that point I knew that I had lost the battle with these people. I gave up and quit. It’s a sad memory for me because it was something that I poured my heart and soul into. I wanted really bad to be a part of it and stay a part of it. And they wouldn’t let me.
Philip Bosco: I was originally the only one who was not in the group that was brought from San Francisco to replace the company that Elia Kazan and Robert Whitehead were in charge of for two years. Jules Irving and Herbert Blau brought in a self-contained resident company. The following season, a wonderful elderly actress named Eileen McMahon joined. We were the only strangers in the group. I had a grand time there. I soon got over the feeling of being an outsider. I admired Jules Irving as an administrator and Herb Blau as a real man of the theater. I had seven very happy years doing four or five shows a season there. Prior to that, I was working all the time but not making any kind of money. At Lincoln Center I was getting $500 a week, which to me was a fortune. They upped it to $600 or $650. That was a lot of
money… $30,000 a year. I used to live on $10,000 a year. Working constantly at the American Shakespeare Festival, we were getting $300 a week and felt lucky. So to work for Lincoln Center was financially a windfall. It was a boon for my family and I to have a regular salary, pay the bills and break out of the penury we were under. But it also took me out of the scene in regards to Broadway. After the company closed, it was 18 months before I worked again. I finally got a job in a Shaw play,
Mrs. Warren’s Profession with Ruth Gordon and Lynn Redgrave. Joe Papp took over Lincoln Center and started to do his type of shows up there. They were non-traditional theater. The subscription rates fell off 40 percent. So they returned to the traditional fare -- Shaw, Shakespeare -- and they got the subscribers back. The subscribers were mostly Jewish people from the Upper West Side. They didn’t want to see that crazy crap Joe Papp was doing on the Lower East Side.
I never did anything I was terribly happy with. Threeenny Opera under Joe Papp -- that was very significant. They opened it with Raul Julia, a huge success. For some reason they came to me. I’m not a singer, I don’t have a trained singing voice. They invited me to see the production. It was directed by that wacko from Off-Broadway, Richard Foreman. He did a beautiful job with that one. I was absolutely hounded into doing that, to replace Raul, against my better judgment. The day I left the house to do my first public performance, I felt as if I were going to a public execution. Having said that, I got through it and had a ball for the next five-six months. I also just adored doing
The Heiress. It was beautifully directed. The cast was exemplary. I had a glorious time doing it. I was happy to play that role. I thought I was brilliant, very comfortable in that part. It was a huge success, Cherry Jones got a nomination, everyone in the company got awards, I was the only one who didn’t get a nomination, and it was one of my best performances. I finally decided they don’t vote for people who aren’t pleasant in the roles.
Stockard Channing: I was in San Diego at the Old Globe doing a Neil Simon play,
Jake’s Women. The marquee was up, the pictures had been taken, there were daily rewrites, people had rented apartments, children enrolled in school. Suddenly one day it was announced that it was not coming to New York, it was closing out-of-town. It was Easter weekend. I got a call from Bernie Gersten saying John Guare had written this play,
Six Degrees of Separation, the leading lady had decided she wasn’t going to do the play, they had a subscription situation… I said, “You don’t understand -- I feel like I never want to do a play again. I have to make some money.” I didn’t want to go back to the Mitzi. I was in a quandary. My friend Paul Benedict, whom I’d known from Theater Company of Boston, was staying in my apartment. He read the play and said, “It’s great, you should do it.” I agreed to get on a plane and fly back and read the play with the company. There was this room full of actors staring at me. I felt like Wendy in
Peter Pan – “Come be our mother!” They’d been rehearsing the one scene Ouisa Kittredge was not in. I sat down and read through it with everybody. There was this silence. I thought, “Oh, what the hell, it’s only going to be six weeks at the Mitzi. It turned out to be four years of my life.
Cherry Jones: Pride’s Crossing was wildly physically demanding. I knew it was going to be one of the last roles that I ever played that would require that kind of athleticism. I was already mourning it as I was doing it. That last dive into the arms of that cast … it does not get any better than that. There’s no greater way of ending a night of theater than being caught in the arms of your fellow actors and then being thrust heavenward.
Amy Irving: I was so spoiled. I grew up in a repertory theater where the same actors were together doing show after show after show. We went to Searsville Lake in Marin County for company picnics. There was a real sense of family.
The Coast of Utopia was the closest thing to that I’ve experienced in the theater. It was a thrilling group of people to live with for a year.
JULLIARD
Kevin Kline: At Julliard we saw pretty much everything at Lincoln Center as students. That was part of the training. I saw Blythe Danner as Viola in Ellis Rabb’s production of
Twelfth Night with Rene Aubornjois as Malvolio. I saw Merchant of Venice that Ellis Rabb did with Rosemary Harris and Chris Walken. I used to see Dan Sullivan in all those shows, back when he was actor, before he became one of the great directors on Broadway. We’re talking 1970-72. We got to see great classical plays being done very well.
Patti LuPone: I went to Julliard in the first class of the drama division. We used to stare out of the windows of the Julliard School and gaze across the road to Lincoln Center. It took me 20 yrs after I graduated to actually work there. It was thrilling. I always thought it was the place where I belonged since I went to Julliard.
Audra McDonald: The whole Lincoln Center complex has truly been my home since I came to New York. I lived in the Julliard dorms and I did my first, third, and fourth Broadway shows there.
VISITORS
Amy Irving: When I went to the opening night of Camino Real
starring Al Pacino, my date was Michael Dunne, the dwarf actor who was in
Ship of Fools. I walked into the VIP area off the lobby and there was Tennessee Williams. I was too young to have a real conversation with him, of course. But I was the boss’s daughter, and I got to go around hanging out with everybody. I remember going backstage to tell Anthony Quayle how much I loved him in
Galileo. Getting to know Blythe Danner when she did Summerfolk. When they did Sam Shepard’s play
Operation Sidewinder, I got to sit and listen to the Holy Modal Rounders. I got to listen to Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy do Beckett and watch Diana Sands
do St. Joan. Mike Nichols directed The Little Foxes
with Anne Bancroft, E.G. Marshall and George C. Scott. Lee J. Cobb scared me so much – I told him I loved him in
Lear, he wanted to know why. I couldn’t say, I just shook in my boots. But I was brave enough to go back stage and compliment him on his performance.
Leleti Khumalo: I was very fortunate to perform at Lincoln Center when I was young. I rubbed shoulders with every star you can think of – everybody came to see the show. Stevie Wonder was there, Danny Devito was there. Eddie Murphy.
Stockard Channing: I love that when you’re in a show there, when you open the door, you never know who’s going to be in the hallway. You’d open the door and there’d be Julie Andrews, Paul Newman, Robert Redford. People just march right down there.
SITZPROBE
Kelli O’Hara: The sitzprobe has always been my favorite day, the first time they put the orchestra together with the cast. For
South Pacific, I’ll say that I was really excited and also looking forward to it, but Loretta Sayre, who plays Bloody Mary, got up in front of the orchestra and she started to bawl – like, audibly weep, she couldn’t go on. Ted [Sperling, the conductor] had to stop. She sat there for a minute to compose herself. It was silent for a while. Then she said, “I’ve never sung with an orchestra before.” She’s 50, she’s Hawaiian, she did local shows and concerts with people coming through like Kenny Rogers. But she’s never worked anywhere else. I’ve had the luck and pleasure of singing with orchestras. This is what Broadway and dreaming and all that stuff is about. You can get cynical -- too cool for school -- it can become old and tired. But when someone who’s so incredibly genuine and grateful gets to have this chance at that age in her life…that was a special moment.
Audra McDonald: We did the sitzprobe for Carousel in the lobby of the Beaumont during a late winter’s snowstorm. They had the orchestra and the cast all set up in the lobby. The sound was incredible. And we all sang and played Rodgers and Hammerstein facing the gorgeous ceiling-high windows, looking out onto the Lincoln Center plaza and the gorgeous snow. That was 1994, and that moment is still completely burned in my brain.
ACOUSTICS
Meryl Streep: During Trelawney, John Lithgow, Mandy Patinkin, and I joined some of the others in forming a madrigal group. (We all had smaller parts and found ourselves backstage a lot!) The stairwells and dressing rooms of the Beaumont have magical acoustics, and we sang together every night. Ooooh, we made gorgeous sounds! Scratch most actors and you'll find people that want to sing their little hearts out.
Stockard Channing: There was a time when the Beaumont was dark for a while. The main thing I remember hearing is that the acoustics weren’t any good. Fabulous for Peter Brook’s
Carmen, but not for legit straight plays. So we did a production of
House of Blue Leaves at the Mitzi Newhouse that was hugely successful, and they decided to move it up to the Beaumont, which is a considerably larger theater (1000 seats instead of 450). We had four or five days of tech just to get us in there. I had the first words that had to be spoken out loud in the play. I had to come in upstage with galoshes and newspapers wrapped around my feet, playing Bunny Flingus, and I had to enter furious at John Mahoney, soaking wet coming in from the rain, and say in a loud Queens accent: “You know what your problem is? You got no sense of history!”
We finished the run at the Mitzi and I promptly got laryngitis and wasn’t permitted to speak. So all through tech, I could not open my mouth and had to gesture, under doctor’s orders. And we couldn’t postpone the opening. So I literally had to come out blind at the top of the show. I had no idea what was going to come out of my mouth or if I was going to be heard, in a theater that has the reputation for the worst acoustics. I barreled through the door and said my line, and when I heard the laugh, I knew that problem could be solved.
Billy Crudup: When we did Arcadia, the set itself served as kind of acoustic impediment. Unbeknownst to the designers and crew building it, there was something about that semicircular shape and where it sat that created dead spaces all over the stage. And the louder you spoke, the more difficult it became to understand what you were saying. In a play like Arcadia, where the language is so intricate and ornate and every sentence contains a whole scene, that becomes problematic. In the end, we were miked in an attempt to correct the problem. Not because we couldn’t fill the space. It was Victor Garber, for God’s sake, he could fill the borough of Queens! But somehow our voices were not reaching enough of the audience with enough clarity to go unsupported acoustically. The production, successful as it was, would have been much more so under different acoustic conditions. I think the people who saw the show in the last quarter of the run got the most authentic experience of what we had to offer. Because of our production, they undertook a serious renovation. By the time I went back to do
The Coast of Utopia, they’d done such a good job of trying to protect against dead spots and echoes.
ACCIDENTS
Meryl Streep: The second play I was in at the Beaumont was as the maid in Andrei Serban's production of
The Cherry Orchard. The perennially youthful Marybeth Hurt was again the ingenue, the glorious Irene Worth Ranevshaya, the divine Raul Julia her nemesis, and I was the maid. They were all so wonderful and moving, so I decided, just for laughs, to fall down, at some point, in every scene, either coming in or going out. I loved setting up an expectation, and the delicious drawing out of the moment when the inadvertent inevitably occurred. Yum. And hearing the laughs roll up from the back of the house like surround sound, double yum. I found out that Bob DeNiro saw me in this perfectly shameless performance and recommended I play the modest Linda in
The Deer Hunter. That shows both the breadth of his imagination and his forgiveness.
Patti LuPone: At the end of Anything Goes a net full of silk rose petals was released and the whole stage was showered with them. One night I was beginning to do “Blow, Gabriel, Blow.” I had taken off the gospel gown, and there I was in this diaphanous red gown Tony Walton designed. The top piece was two panels, held together from breast to breast by a string of four bugle beads. As I was singing, something caught my eye in the light, and I looked up. The audience followed my eyes to see what I was looking at. A single rose petal was wafting down from the ceiling and we followed it as it went right between my breasts. It was a while before we had control of the audience again. I had to turn my back and pull it out.
Amy Irving: The Coast of Utopia was a very large show with a lot of technical stuff going, like a musical. With that many people and that much stuff going on, you have to trust a lot of the people backstage to take care of you. One night I was doing Maria Ogarev in
Shipwreck, part two of the trilogy -- when the scene ends, my chaise longue drops down in a little elevator offstage. I finished the scene and I was laughing and smoking my cigarette, I’m supposed to sink down and exit. I’m laughing, but nothing’s happening. I’m in the dark, I don’t know what to do. I’m sitting there, and all of a sudden a stage manager comes and leads me off. I felt like Blanche DuBois being taken away at the end of
Streetcar. Turns out, the stage manager could see from the booth that my chaise was not aligned on the elevator floor, and if it had descended as usual I would have been tipped out. Luckily, I was saved.
MANAGEMENT
Cherry Jones: Most actors in New York consider Lincoln Center the pinnacle of pinnacles. The reason the productions are so extraordinary is because Bernie Gersten and Andre Bishop almost literally cradle each artist in their arms. You’re taken such good care of. They know what is required to produce good work. It’s the common refrain you hear from all actors who work there. You feel spoiled rotten. It’s difficult to contemplate working anywhere else. When you first go to work for Lincoln Center, you walk through the door slightly intimidated. I’ll never forget the first reading of
The Heiress. There were a million people in the room, a large cast, the Goetz family members were there. I remember Andre coming in, all of us being nervous in his presence. He turned bright red and said, “I’m having a terrible hair day.” Of course we were all completely disarmed.
Patti LuPone: I’d known Bernie Gersten since I worked with him and Joe Papp at the Public back in the ‘70s. How do I say this? You start out in the business, and you grow up in the business, and there are certain people who are a constant. Gerry Schoenfeld was one of those people for me, Clive Barnes was, and Bernie Gersten still is. People that you are influenced by, that you look up to, that are your bosses, that are instrumental in the development of your career. So when Bernie became an integral part of Lincoln Center Theater, and there I was doing
Anything Goes, I felt there was continuity in my career.
Billy Crudup: Bernie Gersten and Andre Bishop convey tremendous warmth and inclusiveness. They make a point of coming together on the first day to let you know that you’re part of a very fundamentally sound support team. There is an engine behind you that you can trust, and that wants to give you agency to take over the space and create.
Sam Waterston: The current management of Lincoln Center Theater has a well-deserved reputation for running a tight, comfortable ship that is very hospitable and appreciative of actors. For me there was a continuity because of Bernie. Because the new management for me was also the old management in a way. When I did
Hamlet there, it was under the management of the New York Shakespeare Festival, and Bernie was there then. Our personal lives have been intertwined all that time, really. We’ve been great friends for four decades now. Practically the first job I had in New York was doing
As You Like It in Central Park. Then when the New York Shakespeare Festival expanded into Lincoln Center, I went with them. And our friendship just grew over those years. We had children around the same time. Those children have grown up and remained friends to this day. I think that both these institutions owe a tremendous debt to Bernie’s caring, attentive, careful oversight and involvement with them. I don’t think either institution would have been anything like what it was or now is if he had been absent. Bernie was there when
Much Ado was opening, doing its first previews in the park. He was there backstage in the middle of the previews of
The Tempest with encouraging words and a lot of personal understanding, which he gave to lots and lots of people, not just to me. Really living over the store. Always there, always interested, always involved, always watchful. Doing adventurous things.
NEW YORK
Leleti Khumalo: When we came to America, we only had each other. We would kiss each other. Somebody told us, “Guys, this is never done in America. People will think you are lesbians.” It was kind of difficult for us.
Cherry Jones: For those of us who don’t have famous film careers, to know that you’re going to be on a poster by the great artist Jim McMullan is as good as it gets. You really feel special when a Lincoln Center poster of you comes out. And you start to feel like part of the landscape of New York City when you’re on a McMullan poster, because they’re everywhere. You think of the
Carousel one, the Anything Goes, the Two Shakespearean
Actors. There’s not one that isn’t a thrill.
CURTAIN CALLS
Amy Irving: The Coast of Utopia was exactly like doing repertory theater. Rep keeps the performance alive. You get nervous all over. I love the excitement of being nervous. You never got into a rut. Then suddenly the marathon would happen. It would jazz us up. The back-and-forth energy was unbelievable. By the time we came out at the end, it felt like we’d been at a rock concert. Billy Crudup and I were the only two not in the third play, but we’d show up for the curtain call. I’d go out and have a break. I even went to a wedding once on marathon day. I had to go back and put the wig and false eyelashes on. In a way, it was great to go out, in a way I felt left out. I got over it, though.
Billy Crudup: The marathons were quite interesting for me, because I wasn’t in the third play. When I died in the second play, I’d go home and have a nap, put my son to sleep, and then go back for the curtain call with 1200 people. That was pretty exotic. It’s one thing to be in front of 1200 people for 12 hours, they clap, you kinda get it. But get out of that environment for six hours, walk into Lincoln Center, put on yr costume, walk out to 1200 people cheering…it’s a very perverse feeling. I used to tell people, “I have to run uptown for a minute to get people to clap for me. I’ll be right back.”
Audra McDonald: Even though Marie Christine wasn’t the commercial or critical success we wanted it to be, I remember as I was bowing at the end of that last performance, I was so emotional and so proud of the work we had done, and grateful there was a place like Lincoln Center Theater that would allow ambitious new works like that to be done, give them a home, let them run their course, and support them. I remember being very filled at that moment.
THE AUDIENCE
Kevin Kline: When we did Ivanov, I remember coming up against the flu season. Jayne Atkinson played my wife, who was tubercular. She said, “I can’t hear myself coughing above the coughing.” I once sent out a bowl of cough drops to the audience. Then I remember after the climactic moment when my wife comes in and sees me kissing Sasha -- Hope Davis – there was a very melodramatic light and sound cue, then Hope and I had to clear off stage left in the darkness. She said, “Did you hear what that man in the third row said? ‘That guy looks like Kevin Kline.’” People just talk like they’re in front of a television screen. There was something in the program notes about the character of Ivanov being a narcissist, and right after I said some hateful, horrible line to my dying wife, there was a blackout, and the set slid slowly upstage, and as I was going back into the recesses of darkness, I heard this woman in the front row say, “My god, he IS a narcissist.”
Cherry Jones: I had a very difficult time in the Mitzi Newhouse initially. I’d never played a steep mini-amphitheater like that before. When you play proscenium, you’ve got that wonderful no man’s land, above the orchestra’s head and below the balcony. That’s your own safety zone, no one gets in your way, you can drift off into that zone. At the Mitzi, there are very few sightlines that are clear of humanity. You look out and see busts, busts, busts. Plus, I’m old fashioned -- I want the audience looking up at me. Not me looking up at them, except the balcony. And it’s so close. They’re right on top of you. But once you make peace with it, it’s heaven. You can get away with bloody murder. You can whisper. You can get so small and still be seen and heard.
LESSONS
Hal Holbrook: I had an experience with Kazan that I’ll never forget. I played a little walk-on in the original
After the Fall, so when I took over for Jason [Robards], I had to learn all the lines and work on the role by myself. I was going through a very bad time in my life, my marriage was breaking up, and in some ways this role saved me from falling apart. I had two rehearsals with the cast and they were not happy that I was playing the role as far as I could see. Zohra Lampert would sit in the front row and look at me with cold eyes while I was running through this. No help, no encouragement. Kazan showed up for the last rehearsal before I took over and sat out there, six or seven rows back. At the end of the second act, Quentin comes down these long stairs in this enormous soliloquy, which I had interpreted as a realization of his guilt. I started the speech, Kazan is out there. Suddenly I get hit with this tremendous emotion, and I started to cry but I kept stopping myself. I could hardly get through the speech. I didn’t intend to cry. I felt so ashamed. I just sat down at the end and stopped. There was a long silence. I felt like an idiot. Kazan walked down to the stage and sat down beside me on the steps and he said, “Why are you afraid to cry?” I said, “Christ, I don’t know what happened. It’s ridiculous!” He said, “It’s OK to cry.” He put his hand on my knee and got up and left. That was a wonderful moment for me as an actor to be given that encouragement by such a great director.
Meryl Streep: I remember the opening night of Trelawney of the “Wells” vividly, because in those days all the critics actually came to opening night. I was so wildly nervous that in the first scene of the play, Michael Tucker and I had an exchange, and my upper lip was twitching and moving uncontrollably, even when I wasn't talking. Michael made a grand gesture and knocked a candy dish onto the floor. Suddenly we were both completely focused and in the world and things felt real and happening and not phony and self-aware. It was a great lesson, and since then, when I've been nervous on stage, or thinking "GOD all these people are looking at me!" I've tried to hold onto that memory: when something crashed to the floor, and Michael and I found each other in the real moment of picking it up and carrying on as if it were life.
Cherry Jones: For me to get to watch Jane Greenwood in the fittings for
The Heiress was a master class in costume design. It was one of the most thrilling experiences professionally, in terms of watching a consummate artist at work. I had a lot of fittings. Jane would always be fighting for more fitting time because, she’d say, “She has SIX gowns!” I couldn’t believe the fabric. I don’t know if this would go on everywhere, but she went to England and returned with these Victorian silk reproductions of patterned silk from the Victorian era. Everything was so gorgeous. She had the choice of going with hoop skirts or languid, languid petticoats. It was right at the cusp, 1851. Jane being Jane, she knew that for The Heiress we would need languid, languid, romantic petticoats -- not aggressive hoopskirts. She had all sorts of folderol all over my bodice when we began. But then she realized that I don’t do well with folderol. My mother used to say, “You’re not peaches and cream, you’re West Point in terms of what you can get away with wearing.” Jane came to the same conclusion. As I stood there with her tearing off my epaulets, I felt like Chuck Connors on
Branded.
Amy Irving: The first six weeks of rehearsal for The Coast of Utopia
was a master class with Jack O’Brien and Tom Stoppard spoon-feeding us Russian history. We all discussed stuff backstage, and pennies kept dropping throughout the run as we came to understand more and more who these people were. That was thrilling.
Leleti Khumalo: They said we must attend classes at the Martin Luther King school. Some of us tried, but it was difficult. When you’re doing a show on Broadway, you don’t really feel like being a high school student.
PASSAGES
Patti LuPone: I was performing Anything Goes and my husband proposed to me. One day during the show, I was in the stage manager’s office at intermission, and Matt said, “If you don’t set a date, we’re never going to get married.” I said, “Okay, December 12.” Then there was the question of where – Long Island where I grew up, New York where I’m performing, or Connecticut where we live? Bernie Gersten and Cora Cahan came to me, and he said “You have to get married on the stage of the Vivian Beaumont. Cora and I got married on the stage of the Anspacher Theater at the Public Theater and we’ve been together 30 years.” We got married on our day off. I asked him, “Who’s going to pay for the overtime?” He said, “Lincoln Center will cover it.”
Kevin Kline: I remember Bernie Gersten coming to my dressing room an hour before curtain for Henry IV to say Gerry Gutierrez had died. I’d just talked to him a week before. Then I had to go on. Michael Hayden’s sister was killed in a freak car accident the day of the first preview. He’d just heard that a couple of hours before the show and he went on. No understudy was ready to go on. Only a few of us knew.
Billy Crudup: My dressing room partner dying onstage, then making a return 3 ½ weeks later -- that was unbelievable. Unbelievable! Of course, we immediately all ran to the wings, not knowing what was happening. That was a terrifying moment.
Kevin Kline: My wife’s sister was in the audience for
The Coast of Utopia the night Richard Easton collapsed. She said it was terrifying to watch. Ethan Hawke or Martha Plimpton said is there a doctor…Ten guys came running, one guy had unbuckled his pants, and they slipped down as he was running down the aisle. One of the stagehands knew CPR and saved Richard’s life.
Audra McDonald: It meant a lot to have the memorial service at the Mitzi Newhouse for Lovette George, who passed away way too early at age 44. She was an actress who’d performed there in
A New Brain; we became best friends during Carousel. It’s a beautiful theater, so intimate. We all felt safe to grieve openly there, because it was home for us. We couldn’t have picked a more sacred place.
Sam Waterston: The biggest thing that happened with Abe Lincoln in Illinois was that both Gerry Guttierez’s and my mother died during the run of the show, which was a gigantic event in both of our lives. It gave the play a lot of personal moments for both of us. Our feelings went into the play and made it richer. It’s not too surprising that the theater would have been understanding and concerned, but it was also typical of the theater the way they cared for us in that period. My mother died just before the opening. Gerry and Andre and Bernie were unanimous in saying that we didn’t need to go on, and they were unanimous in helping me through it. I went home, and my father met me at the door. He said, “What are you doing here? Don’t you have a performance tonight?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “Hadn’t we better go?” His attitude was that my mother never liked missing opening nights, and since she’d been bedridden this was the only way she would be able to get to go.
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