“I’ve got to come to hear you,” Amy said, “whether I like it or not. Mal asked me to work out the first go-round with you and make notes on the script as we go. He’ll be in to hear you and the others in about an hour.”
“Like it or not!” Peggy said in mock indignation. “What makes you think there’s even a chance you won’t like it? I propose to be brilliant!”
Of course she knew better. Brilliance is not in the picture in these early readings. A half hour later, in Studio 3, having gone once through Act Two, Scene Two, she realized wryly just how far from brilliance they were!
The play, which Randy described as a fantasy, or a “modern morality play,” was not an easy one for the actors. The parts could, with too broad a reading, descend into farce or, with not just the right quality of the fantastic, slide off into dullness. The setting was a resort which was, in actuality, a sort of rest home for wealthy people who needed to get away from themselves for a while—or to find themselves. The point of the play, which gradually emerged, was that each of the characters had somehow led at least two distinct kinds of lives and had found both of them unsatisfactory. All the people in the play were trying, in whatever ways they could, to find some third or fourth kind of life that might be more pleasant and satisfying than the last; all of them were getting more confused every day they tried.
Peggy’s part, then, was not easy. She was playing the role of a young girl of twenty-one who had been a very successful child movie star, but who had not made a picture since she was twelve. Realizing that she was through with show business, she had tried to pretend that she was just an ordinary person who could live an ordinary life. She had gone through college and started work as a secretary, keeping secret the fact that she had been a movie star. But shortly before the play opens, she has suddenly come into the fortune which she had earned as a child, but which had been held in trust for her. The money confuses her, and the publicity she gets when the story of the money comes out makes it impossible for her to continue as a secretary.
The difficulty for Peggy was in making this character seem true and alive. This meant that the personalities of an ex-child movie star, a quiet, precise secretary, and a bewildered new heiress must all be combined in one believable whole.
Each of the other actors had a similar problem of dual personality, and they all had great difficulty not only in interpreting each role, but in deciding how any two or more characters were to speak to each other. Part of the point of the play, cleverly conceived and written by Randy, was that each character brought out one special aspect of each other character, so that Peggy had to act quite differently, almost minute by minute, depending on whom she was speaking to.
Their first efforts in this reading were often so wrong as to be hilarious. The scene included Peggy, Greta, the “businessman type” who was an affable, charming man named Alan Douglas, and the comedian, a roly-poly actor named Gil Mulligan. Their attempts at finding a suitable kind of relationship for this scene were not very successful, and they were so intent on establishing character that they often paid very little attention to their lines, and garbled the words. To make matters worse, Mulligan had a knack of taking each “fluff,” which is what actors call a mistake, and carrying it on one step farther toward madness. When Mal finally arrived to see how the group was doing, they were all doubled up in helpless laughter.
When they had caught their breath, Amy tried to explain to Mal. “The characters are so shifting,” she said, “that everybody’s confused about how they’re supposed to act to whom. Or am I confusing it more? Anyway, they’ve all been fluffing lines like mad.”
“Of course,” Mal said matter-of-factly. “Wrong approach, and all of you should have known it. It’s far too early in the game to try to define your characters. You have more than enough work to do in just getting your lines down cold. What I want you to do for a while is just to go over the lines and learn your cues. Read your parts straight. After you’re easy in what you’re doing, we’ll work at establishing character and shifting viewpoint and response. Besides—and pardon me if I sound like a tyrannical director—I’d rather you wouldn’t play around with character development when I’m not here. Now, have you read the scene through yet?”