Drama: An Actor's Education

Lenny in Of Mice and Men? Were they crazy? When I was cast as Lenny at McCarter, I thought the idea was insane. I was still scarecrow thin, and still affected the dandified airs of a fresh-faced LAMDA alumnus. These were hardly the qualities anyone would associate with Lenny, the lumbering, feeble-minded San Joaquin Valley migrant in John Steinbeck’s Depression-era yarn. The role was first played onstage in 1937 by Broderick Crawford, a beefy, beetle-browed character actor who couldn’t possibly have been more different from me. But there were no Broderick Crawfords on hand at McCarter that year, so who else were they going to cast? I was half a foot taller than the next-tallest actor in the resident company, so with height as my only asset, the role of Lenny fell to me.

I’d never dreamed of playing such a part. The notion scared me to death. But I was about to learn a lesson that would echo repeatedly throughout the coming years: the most exciting acting tends to happen in roles you never thought you could play. Writers, directors, and producers tend to picture you differently than you picture yourself. They sometimes have more faith in you, and more imagination. This can be a very good thing. An actor is often much better off as the subject of other people’s brainstorms. When I was cast as Lenny, I was the only person in the building who didn’t think I could handle the part. Surprise! It ended up being my best performance yet.

Of Mice and Men was scheduled to open in tandem and run in repertory with George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. The Shaw was to open first. In that show, I was on more familiar ground: I was cast in the chatterbox role of Henry Higgins. The virtuosic double act of the flighty Higgins and the earthbound Lenny saddled me with a backbreaking workload. But there was more to come. The third offering of the season was to be Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, which I would both design and direct. With a swiftness and confidence that verged on the foolhardy, my father had made me a major player in both the acting ensemble and the directing staff of his company. Barely pausing to look this gift horse in the mouth, I dived right in.

So began the first official chapter of my career in American theater. It might have been titled “The Triumph of Nepotism.” But if Dad had given me the meatiest, most coveted assignments of any member of his company, the other actors didn’t seem to object. With fond memories of my production of As You Like It the year before, they warmly welcomed me back into their midst. Or at least they appeared to. In retrospect, I suspect that this courtesy was merely skin-deep and may have masked a considerable degree of show-me skepticism. I had two enormous parts to learn and a big production to design, so I wasted no time worrying about their envy or doubt. But when I lost my voice and the opening night of Pygmalion was cancelled (an inauspicious start to my professional career), my fellow company members could have been forgiven for feeling a sweet, collective rush of schadenfreude.

Photograph by Jim McDonald. Courtesy Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

Of Mice and Men suffered no such setbacks. It was a remarkable journey from beginning to end, full of startling, revelatory moments. The production was staged by a journeyman actor-director several years my senior named Robert Blackburn. Bob had first known me years before when he was acting for my father at the Antioch Shakespeare Festival. I was seven years old at the time. Directing me in a leading role must have been an odd adjustment for him. But if he still saw me as that skinny kid hanging around rehearsals, he managed to get past it. He rolled up his sleeves and methodically set out to transform me, piece by piece, into the hulking Lenny. He ordered up padding from the costume shop to add heft to my torso. He had me wear elevator insoles inside my heavy work boots to make me loom even larger. He prescribed a regimen of weightlifting to make my upper body ache and to slow my movements. He attached weights to my ankles to hobble my gait. As the rehearsal days passed, my thought processes gradually slowed down. So did my speech. Henry Higgins’ crisp chatter gave way to Lenny’s stammering plainsong drawl. I stepped out of Shaw’s Wimpole Street parlor and into Steinbeck’s dry Dust Bowl world. I felt like Lenny to the life.

The two shows opened within weeks of each other. They were well received by critics and crowds alike, and company morale was high as we began to perform both of them in repertory. For me, alternating between two such different roles was exhilarating, especially since the challenge had seemed so insurmountable when I had begun. Best of all, I keenly sensed that, long after I’d left school behind, I was learning more about acting than ever. Creating a believable Lenny, so distant from me in every conceivable way, had been a thrilling breakthrough, broadly expanding my sense of what I could do. But the biggest lessons I would take from Of Mice and Men were yet to come. And those lessons would come from an extremely unlikely source.

McCarter Theatre, you see, had student matinees. This was a tradition begun by my father a decade before, in his job as McCarter’s education coordinator. The program had expanded considerably over the intervening years. Still booming today, it is now named after him, and a plaque in McCarter’s lobby memorializes his early commitment to it. Then as now, thousands of high school kids from all over New Jersey arrived in bright yellow school buses throughout the season, to attend matinees of all the McCarter productions. Of the theater’s yearly offerings, familiar chestnuts and high school English-class standbys tended to be the plays most heavily scheduled. One of these, of course, was Of Mice and Men. And we were slated to do a dozen performances of it for teenage kids.

By the time we faced our first student audience, we’d already performed the show several times for adults. Puffed up by rave reviews and loud ovations, we were pretty full of ourselves. If grown-ups are so moved by Of Mice and Men, we thought, just imagine the response of sensitive young kids. They will love this! There won’t be a dry eye in the house! We were about to see fresh evidence of just how thoroughly actors are capable of deluding themselves.

The play, of course, is the story of Lenny and George, two itinerant fruit pickers in a work gang on a California truck farm in the bleak 1930s. The two are a symbiotic pair, traveling and working together year-round. Lenny is big, powerful, and retarded, with an infantile weakness for anything soft and furry. Like a child in his parent’s care, Lenny is lost without George. His shy, childlike nature makes him a touching, gently comic creature, but it conceals a scary, almost unconscious capacity for violence. George is constantly alert to this, and has learned to control Lenny by feeding him fantasies of a farm of their own, “with rabbits.” But on a couple of occasions, Lenny’s violence comes out. He kills a puppy when it won’t stop barking. He crushes the hand of a taunting foreman named Curly. And in a horrific scene near the end of the play, he strangles Curly’s wife when she resists his innocent attempts to stroke her soft, golden hair. Knowing that Lenny is doomed once he is apprehended, George administers a nighttime mercy killing in the final seconds of the play. As Lenny kneels in a dry riverbed, dreamily intoning his ritual description of the farm they will someday own, George stands behind him and fires a bullet into his head.

It is a play full of tenderness, melancholy, and horror. The first time we performed it for kids, they thought it was screamingly funny.

And Lenny was the most hilarious thing they’d ever seen. I was literally laughed off the stage. I’d always adored the sound of laughter from an audience, and by that time I’d heard plenty of it. But I’d never heard the jeering, mocking, ear-splitting laughter of those kids. It rained down on me in torrents and drowned out the play. They laughed loudest at the moments I had considered the most delicate, tender, and moving. Rabbits? Hysterical. A dead puppy? A riot. Curly’s wife? A hoot! And at the end, when George held the pistol to Lenny’s head, some class clown out in the darkness shouted, “Go ’head! Shoot ’im!” and a crowd of a thousand teenagers exploded. It was a moment of horror, all right, but not the one we had been looking for.

The shrieks of laughter carried over into the curtain call. After my last grudging bow, I stormed into the wings and stood there in the darkness, shaking with humiliation and rage. As I listened to the happy jabber of the kids clambering out of the theater, I cursed every last one of them at the top of my lungs. Then an appalling thought abruptly silenced me:

I have to do this eleven more times!

I wouldn’t have to wait long. A few days later we performed our second Of Mice and Men matinee for kids. I had been anticipating it with misery and dread. But at the same time a gritty determination had set in. There was no way out. I had to face the screaming mob. But this time, I was determined to avoid another cascade of taunts and guffaws. I decided to challenge the teenage audience to a kind of theatrical chess match. More by instinct than calculation, I set out to make tiny adjustments every time I came to a moment