Corpsing, and Other Theatrical Catastrophes
I’m seventeen years old, alone on the stage of Phillips Andover Academy’s auditorium, playing Hamlet. The play has gone well so far, and I’ve launched into Shakespeare’s most famous soliloquy. I’m fully immersed in the role, so frustrated and miserable that the thought of suicide has occurred to me. I speak slowly, somberly:
“To be, or not to be. That is the question.
Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing, end them…. “
Long pause. Too long to be just for dramatic effect. The next line has completely evaporated.
In theater jargon, forgetting one’s lines is called “corpsing,” perhaps because when it happens, the ghastly expression on the face of the dumbstruck actor resembles a death rictus. If he is in the middle of a scene with someone else, his scene partner can sometimes raise him from the dead by subtly working the missing words into his or her own next line. No such luck in my case; the stage manager had to prompt me in a loud whisper. Fortunately, the disaster occurred during Friday’s dress rehearsal, with no audience to witness my chagrin. If I had corpsed on Saturday, opening night, when the auditorium was full of my fellow students (almost all of whom had been forced to read Hamlet in English class), several kids might have shouted out the next lines mockingly, or booed me.
For at Andover back then, Hollywood movies were usually shown on Saturday nights, as a relief from the academic grind. A large majority of the student body resented being forced to sit through performances of the kind of hifalutin stuff they had read to read in class. The previous year, when I’d been in T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, which presents the final moments and the death of Thomas à Becket as a Greek tragedy complete with a chorus, the Phillipian, Andover’s student newpaper, had published an angry editorial entitled “Give Us Back Our Movies!”
Even though I had played Becket, I sympathized with my classmates’ resentment, because the production had been godawful. Its director, an Englishman who taught French (go figure), had recited every line in the script to the actors and insisted that we copy his line-readings, inflection for inflection. He also micromanaged our movements, right down to how many steps we should take in various directions, when to turn, and when to raise our hands or lower them. As a result, we all had posh British accents, but the play was a puppet show. Eliot himself, who was at Harvard at the time, delivering one of the Norton Poetry Lectures, was persuaded by the director to come to Andover and attend our closing performance. He was diplomatic, telling the director that the production made him imagine what performances of Elizabethan plays at the all-boys Blackfriars Theatre might have been like. But he did not stay for the cast party, and I don’t blame him.
*******
“Word salads,” are what actors call malapropisms (named after Mrs. Malaprop in Sheridan’s The Rivals): the results of turning your lines into gibberish by reversing their word order or displacing consonants. The most memorable one I can recall was tossed by an actor playing Puck in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Williamstown Summer Theater. The play had been in trouble from the moment the curtain went up. Oberon and Titania were played by a couple whose marriage had gone sour, as evidenced by the offstage squabbles they’d been having since rehearsals began. The Fairy Queen used the genuine rancor between herself and her husband to good effect, railing passionately at her King, but he was no match for her. The guy was nothing but a handsome stick who relied on his good looks to get him roles. He wasn’t a bad actor, he was a non-actor, with a range of emotions that ran from A (anxious) to B (bewildered). Titania might just as well have been talking to a statue, for all the dramatic tension there was in their scenes. Because the play is set in a wood outside Theseus’s Athens, the costume designer had gone all ancient Greek. The older men were decorously wrapped in himations, the mantles that were similar to later Roman togas. The older women wore floor-length gowns which were gathered under their breasts by ribbons, leaving their shoulders bare. The “rude mechanicals,” who later enacted their goofy version of the story of Pyramus and Thisbe to entertain Theseus and his bride Hippolyta at their wedding feast, wore loose woolen jerkins that extended past their knees. But the two young men in the play, Lysander (me) and Demetrius (played by an extremely modest actor with a Southern Baptist background, who was even embarrassed about changing into costume in front of me in the dressing room we shared), wore nothing but thigh-length tunics, as did the two young women who played Hermione and Helena.
I have no idea why the costumer didn’t provide Demetrius and me with jock straps or dance belts. Instead, we wound up wearing women’s cotton panties, dyed to match the color of our tunics. Needless to say, the crotches of women’s undies do not adequately contain men’s naughty bits. That wasn’t a problem until Puck put the two of us to sleep. We had to plan our descents into stupor very carefully, making sure to fall with our legs facing upstage, but the show was presented in three-quarter round, so part of the audience couldn’t help getting a glimpse of our underwear and the stuff it couldn’t conceal. I doubt if our inadvertant exhibitionism contributed to the audience’s enjoyment of the play.
Puck – Robin Goodfellow – had an even worse wardrobe malfuction, and it was built into his costume. In keeping with the production’s Greek theme, he was done up as a satyr, except for the goat’s legs and hooves. He was played by the company’s stage manager, who had to take over the role after the actor originally cast quit over a salary dispute. He knew all the lines, because stage managers keep the prompt book, and he had some acting training. In addition, he was physically right for Puck: lean, compact, and agile. Unfortunately, the costumer gave him nothing to wear but a pair of horns, and briefs covered with synthetic fur that matched his thick black head, chest, and leg hair. For all intents and purposes, he looked naked, with an enormous pubic bush. The audience giggled when he made his entrance, and he never regained his confidence or concentration.
To make matters worse, the set designer had built a cantilevered ramp upstage which the magical creatures – Puck, and Titania’s entourage of fairies – used for their entrances, springing off it so they soared briefly through the air. But the ramp was a tad too springy, and juddered audibly up and down like an enormous diving board as each sprite left it. Nor were all the fairies exactly sprite-like: two of them were hefty girls whose gait was more a gallumph than a glissade. They didn’t exactly nail their dismounts from the board, either, but hit the stage awkwardly and had to stagger forward a few steps to avoid falling flat on their faces.
All bad things come to an end, and finally Puck plodded down to the edge of the thrust stage and began Shakespeare’s envoi. It begins, “If we shadows have offended/Think but this, and all is mended,/That you but have slumbered here/While these visions did appear…” and ends, “We will make amends ere long; Else the Puck a liar call:/ So good night unto you all./Give me your hands, if we be friends,/ and Robin shall restore amends.”
But the stage manager, dispirited and distracted, substituted an F for a P, and vice versa. “Else the Fuck a plier call… “ he said, and stopped, mortified. There was no way he could restore amends for a word salad of that magnitude, so he just shrugged hopelessly and walked offstage without finishing the speech. The audience did not give him – or anyone else in the cast – their hands, except for a few of people who clapped because at least the excruciating evening was over.
*******
Samuel Taylor Coleridge asserted that “willful suspension of disbelief” is required of anyone watching a circus act, a magician, or a play. But the performance has to be entirely convincing, or the audience will not make the effort to abandon its rational certainty that what it is watching is not real. A magician whose sleight-of-hand fails him, a clumsy acrobat, or a bad actor will shred the illusion irreparably. In the theater, what usually kills the magic is either an inept director or a leading actor’s ego.
My wife and I have walked out of a play at intermission only once. Some years back, at the Vivian Beaumont Theater in New York, Ethan Hawke, the well-regarded film and television actor, was cast in the title role of Macbeth. Whether he was badly directed or just being perverse, he played the ruthless king of Scotland as a flamboyant homosexual who was a lot more interested in Macduff than in his queen. He simpered, lisped, and camped to such an extent that we could not believe such a preening sissy could have led any army, least of all a brutal medieval Scottish one. It was left to his wife, played by an excellent British actress named Anne Marie Duff, to play the king, and of course in the play Lady M. is a lot tougher than her husband. But Hawke carried Macbeth’s weakness much too far, and the critics were savage. Despite Duff’s strong performance, the production bombed. Later on, we saw Hawke in several contemporary plays at the Beaumont, and he was excellent. Perhaps he was uncomfortable with Shakespeare’s complex language, and camped around to hide his confusion – in Macbeth, he did seem at times as if he didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. In any case his ridiculous impersonation of the doomed Scottish king wasn’t the fault of the play’s director, Jack O’Brien, who did wonders with the rest of the cast. Hawke must simply have traded on his star status and ignored him.
*******
I’ll end where I began, with a production of Hamlet. This one took place in 1969 at the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut, then run by Michael Kahn. He had taken over the theater from the legendary John Houseman, and he was determined to challenge the preeminence of the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario. That season, Kahn had already directed an extraordinary Henry V, set as a contemporary urban gang war (think West Side Story, which is based, of course, on Romeo and Juliet), the jeans and t-shirts of the actors only giving way to medieval garb after the fighting was over. The critics had smiled on the production, and Kahn then scheduled Shakespeare’s longest play, promising that there would be no cuts in it. He hired the British director John Dexter (who went on to a distinguished career as the stage director of the Metropolitan Opera). Dexter arrived with his leading actor, Brian Bedford, who had established a brilliant reputation as a comic actor in England, and several other members of his cast, including his lover, a pretty little fellow named Riggs O’Hara, who was improbably cast as the fiery Laertes.
Dexter set the play more or less in the 11th century, a plausible choice, since Shakespeare’s own sources for Hamlet mentioned the military rivalry between Denmark and Norway which obtained at the time. So Jane Greenwood, Stratford’s costume designer, duded everyone up in macho Viking drag, all big boots, leather, and fur. In place of Shakespeare’s rapiers, Hamlet and Laertes would fight their duel with broadswords.
I was cast as Rosencrantz, and a gay actor named Danny Davis played Guildenstern. Dexter’s only suggestion to Davis and me about our characters’ back stories was that at Wittenberg University, Rosencrantz had done Hamlet’s homework for him, and Guildenstern had done Hamlet. Accordingly, Danny flirted outrageously with Brian Bedford during the first scene the pair of us had with him, and I stood around feeling like part of the scenery. It’s hadly a secret that the majority of male actors – and directors – are gay, or at least sexually ambidextrous, and Dexter treated me with contempt because I was straight. Rosencrantz has a long speech about the powers of a king which is usually cut, because it brings the play’s action to a halt just when things are getting interesting; at the first run-through, I delivered it as quickly as I could. Dexter stopped me halfway through.
“Toby,” he said icily, “Michael Kahn has promised the subscribers an uncut Hamlet. This theater’s backers are expecting an uncut Hamlet. The critics for The New Haven Register and The New York Times are coming to see an uncut Hamlet. I’d love to fire you, but I can’t, because you don’t have an understudy. So if I have to cut your speech because you are incapable of delivering it with any degree of skill, you will personally apologize to Mr. Kahn, the backers, and the newspapers. Do I make myself clear?
“Very clear, Mr. Dexter,” I said.
“Good. Now get out of my sight, and when you come back tomorrow, show me something! Anything!”
I barely slept that night, feverishly repeating the speech with various inflections and emphases, searching for a motivation powerful enough to put life into it. I was furious at Dexter for humiliating me in front of the cast and crew, and finally I decided that Rosencrantz hated Hamlet as much as I hated John Dexter, because at Wittenberg, Hamlet had preferred Guildenstern’s company. Which would mean that Hamlet was gay – and of course Brian Bedford was, though like all good actors, he didn’t show it unless a character he was playing required a bit of swish.
Sleepless, wrung out, and riding on a wave of rage, I showed up for rehearsal and delivered my pledge of allegiance to King Claudius as if it were a declaration of war against all his enemies. From the back of the house came a loud, prolonged lip-fart. “Do it again!” bawled King John.
I did, and at least Dexter kept quiet. Afterwards, I ran into Brian backstage, and he said, “I’m sorry John is putting you through all this, Toby. He can be an absolute shit sometimes. But he really is a good director. His methods are a bit rough, but you finally gave him what he wanted, or he would have said something. Don’t worry, you’ll be fine.”
Brian Bedford was a very nice guy, and he delivered a good performance as the Melancholy Dane. The only thing that marred the production was the final duel, because Laertes wasn’t strong enough to wield even a prop broadsword convincingly, and Hamlet had to grapple with him and more or less impale himself on the weapon. The opening night audience applauded gamely, but its numbers had dwindled markedly, because many people, exhausted after two hours of Shakespeare, were daunted by the prospect of another two, and escaped during the intermission. Bedford himself got good reviews, as did the actors playing Claudius, Gertrude, and Ophelia. Polonius was played by the veteran Morris Carnovsky, who had cofounded the Group Theater in the 1930s. He’d done Polonius before, many times, but he was in his eighties, and although he still knew all the lines to the character’s major speeches, they didn’t always come out in the right order. So Polonius became even more of a pompous fool than Shakespeare had written him, and because Carnovsky had enormous presence and gravitas, the results were unintentionally hilarious. Out of respect for the grand old man, however, the critics ignored his version of word salad, and simply welcomed him back to Stratford.
They damned Danny and me with faint praise, saying that at least it was possible to distinguish between our characters: Guildenstern was the one who simpered and giggled, and Rosencrantz was the one who was angry, for no discernable reason. I couldn’t blame the critics’s bafflement, for my anger had nothing to do with the play and everything to do with John Dexter’s snarky bullying. But the anger got me through the role; it was a useful adjustment, as one of my acting teachers used to say.
Konstantin Stanislavsky, the great-granddaddy of realistic, or “method” acting, said that there are no small roles, only small actors. True enough, but some small roles aren’t much fun to play. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, or Guildencrantz and Rosenstern, as Gertrude word-saladed during the closing performance (the audience didn’t even notice), are two of them. And I must have offended the theater gods back when I was still in college, because the Stratford Hamlet was my second appearance as Rosencrantz. Several years before, I’d played him at another theater in the midwest. I told Michael Kahn about that when he cast me, and I asked him to let me do Guildenstern, just for the hell of it. He refused, because the program had already been sent to the printer. I’ve brooded about it ever since. Was there something about me that said “Rosencrantz?” Was I a Rosencrantz type? Those are the kinds of absurd questions that might have partly inspired Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and I wish I’d had a chance to appear in it. Because Stoppard’s R. and G. are fun. And funny.