I cannot perform in a state of lassitude. Before the cameras, I always find myself tightening up until the floor manager signals that I’m ON. For a moment, I am all tenseness, realizing that people are watching me, but in a few minutes I have forgotten this and am thinking about nothing but the book and the ideas I am talking about. Now I am carried by the mood and direction of thought. If I want to stand, I stand; if I want to sit, I sit; if I want to grimace, I grimace. Nothing is rehearsed or calculated in advance. All I can do is unfold a train of thought springing from the study that has preceded performance, and the toll is heavy. Sometimes after the show, I can barely straighten up, or I may be utterly dejected over my inability to say all I should have said. Then I leave the studio, moody and silent.
I never talk to anyone before a show except my director. He understands me and knows how easily I’m thrown. It can be a slight movement from the boom man or a variation in the countdown signal from the floor manager, something unexpected in the action of a camera man or a slight noise somewhere in the studio, and I react as though someone threw a glass of water in my face. Then I am off the track, floundering like a ship without a rudder. Sometimes I can right myself before the show is ended, sometimes not. Hence the frequent depression, for I feel that every show must be the best show possible, that “off” days are not permitted, and that I can never indulge myself in the attitude of, “Oh well, better one next time.” When people are watching and listening, you must perform, and perform your best.
Often my grammar goes haywire. I know better, but I can become helpless against the monster known as time. I have to fight time. I cannot hesitate or make erasures. So I plunge on, hoping that some one significant thought may emerge clearly—some thought perhaps as vital as that which animates the pages of The Phenomena of Man, calling on us to recognize the eternal core of faith and courage: Courage to rebel and faith in the realization of our own being. Courage that takes the self seriously; faith that is grounded in activity.
I hesitate to make any predictions about the future of television, as a means of communication or as a business. As a business, it must be run for profit. The argument is not about this point, but about the level of operation from which such profit shall be sought. From personal experience, I can say that TV does not have to constitute a blow to life itself. Perhaps many of us are “mindless in motion” and now sit “mindlessly motionless” in front of our TV sets. But I take heart in the certain knowledge that many men and women are not so much concerned with the camera eye as they are in finding a way back to the inward eye.
12
Life in the Theatre
There are even odder ways of life than sitting alone behind a desk in a little room lined with books waiting for someone to come in and talk with you, or delivering sermons on literature to the beady red eyes of a television camera. One of them is the theatre.
You may recall the scene in Kafka’s The Trial in which K meets the Court Painter and goes to this innocuous madman’s room, ostensibly to learn more about the Judge who is to sit at the trial. The room is so tiny, K has to stand on the bed while the Painter pulls picture after picture from beneath this lone article of furniture, blows the dust off them into K’s face, and sells several to him. Although the reader recognizes from the beginning that it is all a tissue of lies and deception, K leaves feeling satisfied that at last he has someone on his side who will put in a “right” word for him. It is evident to what ends K will now go to bribe, cheat, blackmail, be made a total fool of, in the hope of getting someone to intervene in his fate. In addition to its comment upon a culture that would rather surrender identity than face up to its guilt, the scene is terribly funny, as well as terribly humiliating.
It is this scene that always comes to mind when I think of the nightmare of nonsense I lived through in the course of three weeks in the theatre. It happened one summer a few years ago when Hope and I had come down from Bark Point to check on the shop. I was answering a pile of letters when the phone rang. It was a man I had met sometime before who turned out to be business manager of a summer stock theatre operating in a suburb northwest of Chicago. He wondered if I would like to play a lead opposite Linda Darnell in the Kaufmann and Hart comedy, The Royal Family. The role was that of the theatrical agent, Oscar Wolfe, who theoretically functioned as a sane balance to a family of zany, childish, totally mischievous grown-ups (roughly modeled on the Barrymore clan).
Hope, who had grown up in Westchester society, admitted that when she was a girl attending summer theatre it had always been her secret wish to be a part of it. She thought it might be good fun, even though I had never acted in my life. So the business manager came over and I signed the contract, calling for a week of rehearsal and two weeks of performance.
Summer theatre around Chicago cannot be classified as an amateur undertaking, although part of its economics is based on utilizing large numbers of young people who want the “training” and generally avoiding the high costs involved in regular theatrical production. But top stars and personalities are booked, the shows are promoted to the public as professional offerings and are reviewed as such by the theatrical critics, and the whole enterprise is regarded as essential to the vitality of a “living theatre.” The outfit I signed up with was an established enterprise and, as a matter of fact, is still going. I was not entirely confident that I could deliver, but I had no doubt that I was associating myself with people who could.