The first major revival of David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, at New Jersey's McCarter Theater (February 15-March 5, 2000), brings together a praised director-exponent of the Mamet style, and one of the most impressive all-male casts to ever appear at the high-profile, Tony award winning theater. For Scott Zigler, working with a top-notch ensemble is the key to the success of a play like Glengarry. In the cast are Charles Durning, Daniel Benzali (one of the few American actors ever to be a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company and familiar to those who watched the television series "Murder One") and Tony award winner (Seven Guitars) Ruben Santiago-Hudson.
Also among the illustrious cast are Lionel Mark Smith, Sam Coppola, Steven Goldstein and Atlantic Theater Company founding member Jordon Lage. A cast of heavy-hitters like this could not have been brought together had the esteemed playwright and McCarter's artistic director Emily Mann been willing to settle for less than the best.
Glengarry's history is legendary. Mamet had given the script, about which he had some misgivings, to his friend Harold Pinter to read, who in turn gave it to Peter Hall of Britain's National Theater, who lost no time in producing it. Under the direction of Goodman's artistic director Gregory Mosher, the play would have its American premiere in Chicago soon after winning the Best Play award from The Society of West End Theaters, and prior to its New York opening in 1984, winning a Pulitzer Prize en route.
Although a fine 1992 film version starred Al Pacino and Jack Lemmon, you can take it from me that the offbeat gritty talk of a group of Chicago real-estate hustlers has more resonance coming live from the stage. And you can expect Zigler, who formed his strong ties to Mamet in the last two years he spent at NYU, to make the play resonate with the impact a trained director can muster.
Zigler had gone with Mamet to form The New Theater Company at Chicago's Goodman Theater, the troupe who presented the first American production of Glengarry. Zigler would eventually become a participating member of the Mamet-founded Atlantic Theater Company, where he was to remain as its artistic director until 1992.
It isn't surprising that Mann would seek out Zigler to direct Glengarry, after his success directing Mamet's The Old Neighborhood on Broadway. Zigler's praised direction was a major factor in keeping the oblique and controversial play running for a full season in 1997. Zigler has the distinction of also directing the world premiere of The Old Neighborhood at Harvard in 1997, where he serves as Associate Director of the American Repertory Theater Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard, a program run between A.R.T. and MXAT (The Moscow Art Theater School). Acclaimed as one of the directors more passionately dedicated to Mamet's plays, Zigler has also worked with Mamet on the development of The Old Neighborhood, as well as The Cryptogram, and Oleanna. He continues to reinforce his belief in the Mamet school of acting "Practical Aesthetics," at the Institute and in his undergraduate classes.
Zigler has become more than an exponent of the teaching technique that emphasizes the more practical needs of the actor appearing on stage, as opposed to the actor's inner and personal life. Zigler makes it clear that directing and teaching are two different things. "I don't direct from the vocabulary of "practical aesthetics," he says, acknowledging how different actors come from different schools of thought. "I like to think that I have a enough variety of acting training to work in their vocabulary, not in mine." Zigler emphasizes that although he may use the method in his preparation as a director, he may not use it in how he communicates with the actors.
Noting how one of the tenets of "practical aesthetics" is for the "text to remain supreme," I ask Zigler how he reconciles this with a play that may be so loosely structured as to require significant contributions of imagination, improvisation, intuition and invention to come alive? "All acting is improvisation," he answers, "in that we prepare so that we can improvise." In order to be faithful to the story, he has his actors do "a significant amount of textural analysis, so that we can insure that we make choices that are faithful to the story of the play."
To clear up misgivings one may have about the Mamet style, Zigler points out the differences between an actor's technique and a playwright's style. If it goes without saying that a different style is required for a Moliere play than a Mamet play, Zigler explains how "practical aesthetics" works in all cases. "Style has to do with the behavior that is used to be faithful to different worlds, whereas acting technique has to do with the truthfulness of what is being expressed. What is constant in all dramatic texts is that characters are pursuing actions. The emotional life of each character comes out of the success or failure of his accomplishment. Part of the job of an actor is to do the play as it is directed, not in the way he feels it is written.
"The best actors have studied a variety of formulas. No good acting ever comes out of strict adherence to methodology. Every formula needs to be modified by each individual actor to suit his individual needs," says Zigler, who acknowledges that the impressive cast assembled for Glengarry can be expected to be The first major revival of David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, at New Jersey's McCarter Theater (February 15-March 5, 2000), brings together a praised director-exponent of the Mamet style, and one of the most impressive all-male casts to ever appear at the high-profile, Tony award winning theater. For Scott Zigler, working with a top-notch ensemble is the key to the success of a play like Glengarry. In the cast are Charles Durning, Daniel Benzali (one of the few American actors ever to be a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company and familiar to those who watched the television series "Murder One") and Tony award winner (Seven Guitars) Ruben Santiago-Hudson.
Also among the illustrious cast are Lionel Mark Smith, Sam Coppola, Steven Goldstein and Atlantic Theater Company founding member Jordon Lage. A cast of heavy-hitters like this could not have been brought together had the esteemed playwright and McCarter's artistic director Emily Mann been willing to settle for less than the best.
Glengarry's history is legendary. Mamet had given the script, about which he had some misgivings, to his friend Harold Pinter to read, who in turn gave it to Peter Hall of Britain's National Theater, who lost no time in producing it. Under the direction of Goodman's artistic director Gregory Mosher, the play would have its American premiere in Chicago soon after winning the Best Play award from The Society of West End Theaters, and prior to its New York opening in 1984, winning a Pulitzer Prize en route.
Although a fine 1992 film version starred Al Pacino and Jack Lemmon, you can take it from me that the offbeat gritty talk of a group of Chicago real-estate hustlers has more resonance coming live from the stage. And you can expect Zigler, who formed his strong ties to Mamet in the last two years he spent at NYU, to make the play resonate with the impact a trained director can muster.
Zigler had gone with Mamet to form The New Theater Company at Chicago's Goodman Theater, the troupe who presented the first American production of Glengarry. Zigler would eventually become a participating member of the Mamet-founded Atlantic Theater Company, where he was to remain as its artistic director until 1992.
It isn't surprising that Mann would seek out Zigler to direct Glengarry, after his success directing Mamet's The Old Neighborhood on Broadway. Zigler's praised direction was a major factor in keeping the oblique and controversial play running for a full season in 1997. Zigler has the distinction of also directing the world premiere of The Old Neighborhood at Harvard in 1997, where he serves as Associate Director of the American Repertory Theater Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard, a program run between A.R.T. and MXAT (The Moscow Art Theater School). Acclaimed as one of the directors more passionately dedicated to Mamet's plays, Zigler has also worked with Mamet on the development of The Old Neighborhood, as well as The Cryptogram, and Oleanna. He continues to reinforce his belief in the Mamet school of acting "Practical Aesthetics," at the Institute and in his undergraduate classes.
Zigler has become more than an exponent of the teaching technique that emphasizes the more practical needs of the actor appearing on stage, as opposed to the actor's inner and personal life. Zigler makes it clear that directing and teaching are two different things. "I don't direct from the vocabulary of "practical aesthetics," he says, acknowledging how different actors come from different schools of thought. "I like to think that I have a enough variety of acting training to work in their vocabulary, not in mine." Zigler emphasizes that although he may use the method in his preparation as a director, he may not use it in how he communicates with the actors.
Noting how one of the tenets of "practical aesthetics" is for the "text to remain supreme," I ask Zigler how he reconciles this with a play that may be so loosely structured as to require significant contributions of imagination, improvisation, intuition and invention to come alive? "All acting is improvisation," he answers, "in that we prepare so that we can improvise." In order to be faithful to the story, he has his actors do "a significant amount of textural analysis, so that we can insure that we make choices that are faithful to the story of the play."
To clear up misgivings one may have about the Mamet style, Zigler points out the differences between an actor's technique and a playwright's style. If it goes without saying that a different style is required for a Moliere play than a Mamet play, Zigler explains how "practical aesthetics" works in all cases. "Style has to do with the behavior that is used to be faithful to different worlds, whereas acting technique has to do with the truthfulness of what is being expressed. What is constant in all dramatic texts is that characters are pursuing actions. The emotional life of each character comes out of the success or failure of his accomplishment. Part of the job of an actor is to do the play as it is directed, not in the way he feels it is written.
"The best actors have studied a variety of formulas. No good acting ever comes out of strict adherence to methodology. Every formula needs to be modified by each individual actor to suit his individual needs," says Zigler, who acknowledges that the impressive cast assembled for Glengarry can be expected to be "full of spontaneity and surprises." The text, so ripe with the precise, terse speech of the lower middle class, is renowned not only for the repetition of obscenities and the often ferocious encounters of the commission-hungry salesmen, but for the minimalist, almost musical, construction of the dialogue. "Most actors will tell you that Mamet's dialogue is the most difficult to learn," says Zigler, while adding that his cast is not having that problem.
Standing out among these sleazy hungry cheating hotheads, not only because of his girth, but also because of his half-century of grand and lauded performances, is Charles Durning.
"When I walk down the street, people don't call me Mr. Durning," they call out 'Hey, Charlie." So, I guess it can be formally acknowledged that Charlie is in town at the McCarter Theater. At the personal request of Mamet, Durning is playing one of the leading roles in Mamet's 1984 play about a quartet of ruthless, cutthroat, wheeling dealing real estate salesmen. Durning is playing the plum role of Levine, "the machine," the old-timer whose "closings" are getting wider apart. New York-born, Durning's impressive career in the theater, which never paused from the day the multi-decorated soldier returned from his stint with the US Army during World War II, has spanned more than fifty years.
"I quit school at sixteen, never went to college, never mind what some of the bios say, worked as an usher in a burlesque house and never had an acting lesson," says the actor who has won many of the theater's highest acting awards. Durning's awards include two Drama Desk awards for Outstanding Performances (That Championship Season (1972) and a Tony for Cat On a Hot Tin Roof (1990), plus two nominations for an Academy Award, as the governor in "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas" in 1982, and as the Nazi commandant in "To Be Or Not To Be" in 1983.) But they don't begin to tell the story of the actor who has appeared "in over one hundred plays since the middle 1940s.
"I'm an instinctive actor," Durning says, putting out to pasture just about acting technique and dramatic school philosophy either of us could think of, that is except the one that he finds himself immersed in Mamet land. Acting Mamet evidently suits Durning. "I just walk on stage and say my lines." Easy to say for the talented heavy-set actor whose instincts propelled a once slim and trim ballroom dancer weighing in at "one hundred and eleven pounds" into one of the most admired character actors in films, TV and the stage.
If instinct would lead Durning to insert a dance for himself and his co-star Julie Harris in the glorious 1997 Broadway revival of The Gin Game, a scene that the author has now added to the revised script, an instinct is also present for this consummate professional to respect the precision and timing that comes with doing a Mamet play and saying those words. "It's like music," he says about the powerful use of that all purpose four-letter expletive that blends so naturally and humorously into the play's earthy fugue-like lyricism.
Not deterred by a lack of formal training, Durning can boast he played 22 Shakespearean parts for Joseph Papp at the New York Shakespeare Festival. With more than fifty feature films behind him, including memorable parts in "The Sting" (1973), "The Hudsucker Proxy" (1994), and "Home for the Holidays" (1995); Durning may have had his greatest visibility as the dim, blustery small-town doctor Harlan Elldridge in the CBS sitcom "Evening Shade." (1990-1994).
Answers to my questions about an actor's motivation for a role and the use of his own life as a devise are brushed aside as "nonsense." "I spend about five hours a day, besides the rehearsal time, going over and over my lines. One of my first words is fuck. The language is what is important. I don't have to think about whom I am when I'm off-stage. The audience will figure that out when I'm on stage," he says with the unflinching sound of authority he had playing prosecuting attorney Matthew Harrison Brady, opposite the late George C. Scott's defense lawyer Henry Drummond in the 1996 Broadway revival of Inherit the Wind.
"I'll stick with the play if it moves on. I'm in for the duration," says the actor who has, almost been around for a duration, or two. And with any luck, several durations more.
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