How would you define fearlessness onstage/in the theater?
I hate to say it, but I’ve immediately got a semantic objection. I think by “fearlessness,” you mean “fortitude.” I don’t believe in fearlessness. I don’t believe there is anyone who is able to quit the experience of fear: fear of embarrassment, fear of reprisal, fear of death, fear of something. Fortitude is acting in spite of fear, pain, doubt, adversity, etc. Call it what you like. Pluck. Mettle. Grit. Guts.
Rubén Polendo, a great teacher, director, and mentor of mine for many years, does this really simple and elegant illustration of what fortitude means in the pursuit of art. He’ll say to his congregated students something like (NB: these aren’t the questions he uses; I’m totally making these up), “I’m taking a survey. Who here can play the piano?” and all the kids who feel comfortable with their musical training will raise their hands. “Okay, who can speak French?” Different hands; less, but confident. “Great. Who can juggle?” Probably one excited hand in a sea of averted eyes. “Ah, but who can say the Periodic Table backwards in Cantonese?” Obviously, nobody budges. Coughs. Shuffling feet. “All of your hands should be in the air,” he will reply incredulously, “why aren’t all of your hands in the air? They should be raised for every question I ask.” This is because in art (especially theater), we’re not performing delicate brain surgery and we’re not conducting geopolitical summits (tell that to Seth Rogen & James Franco). No one dies because of our actions (usually; talk to the staff at Charlie Hebdo). We do our work, instead, on the planes of imagination, fiction, misdirection, coincidence and possibility.
Possibility: that’s our medium. We in the theater paint with possibility. When Rubén Polendo asks an actor (or a designer, or a director, or a writer, or a musician), “can you play the piano?” the answer is always “yes.” Nothing is stopping you from generating some kind of tune with the available ebony and ivory. Choose some keys and press them down. Who knows what we’ll discover once you do? “Can you speak French?” “Yes.” Make it up. Purse your lips. Form syllables with your mouth. Nobody knows who or what it might inform. What dots can be connected in some aspect of the work by some talented gibberish? Juggling? Yes. Periodic tables? Yes. Transubstantiation? Yes, yes, yes. The more impossible the task — the greater the gap between the imagined goal and an artist’s ability to realize it, the more potential there is for something interesting and unexpected to manifest when the artist attempts to bridge that gap. Possibility is paint. The unexpected is a brush stroke. Rubén often asks his students and collaborators to “remain in the attempt.” Therein lies conflict, tension, a story, a soul.
Fortitude in the theater is being willing to unshackle oneself from the chains of the everyday, the rules of polite society. This is inherently scary and uncomfortable. To counteract this, improv troupes use a phrase (a mantra, really) that I think is beautiful and perfect, though folks often make fun of it these days. It goes: “yes, and…” That is to say: accept the impossible as truth and add to that truth. If we don’t ask the impossible of ourselves, then we are not stretching the (highly malleable, nigh unbreakable) canvas of our craft to its limit. If we don’t, if we succumb to our fears and expectations, how can we ask American society to take theater as seriously as brain surgery? (I am asking society to take theater as seriously as brain surgery.) Artists in the theater often talk about creating “safe spaces” in rehearsal rooms. Throw that idea out as often as possible; I imagine it used to function as a common sense warning against physical injury but, all too often, it is repurposed as a oversensitive shield for delicate emotions and stockpiled insecurities. A rehearsal room should seem intense, electrified, challenging… positively dangerous. Anything but “safe.” Fear dampens this. “Yes” dampens fear.
How is theatrical fearlessness different as an actor and a creator?
It isn’t. Though you’ve written “actor” and “creator,” my brain is reading the same word twice. I think it’s all too easy to imagine a theatrical Venn diagram in which the Actor circle only partially coincides with the Creator circle (or, in some people’s minds, maybe doesn’t touch at all). This seems ridiculous to me. The Actor circle, to my understanding, resides completely within the boundaries of the Creator circle. Now, I already hear the semiotic rebuttal: “that still leaves a very fat edge on the outer circle comprising a great many folks who are distinctly not actors — designers, directors, writers, etc.” My response: it doesn’t matter. Theatrical (read: artistic) fortitude (as it owes no allegiance to any particular artistic practice or technique) is applied using great feats of mental and emotional control and it is my contention that these feats are the same across all disciplines. It is only the various crafts, themselves, that are different.
I think fortitude begins with a series of beliefs — artists who act courageously have often figured out a method for building a shrine in their heads (instead of a physical shrine to a Buddha or a Shiva or a Jesus, say) — a mental shrine to mindfulness (“be here now”) populated by the qualities and behaviors, actions and axioms in which they believe. On the occasions when I am fulfilling my potential and behaving courageously: I believe in practice. I believe in preparedness. I believe in my ability to identify cognitive distortions and thus dispel them. I believe in patience. I believe in the cultivation of good taste. I believe in experimentation. I believe in listening (with all one’s senses). I believe in embracing the dichotomy of givens and variables. I believe in joy. I believe in the allowance of coincidence. I believe in the Socratic method. I believe in instincts. I believe in mentorship and books. I believe in the ever-increasing capacity of consciousness.
One might disagree with items on my list, or maybe see them as offensive or unimportant. Fine. But you can’t read the list of the things I use to construct my fortitude and say they don’t apply as appropriately to a painter as they do a songwriter, a dramaturg, or an actor. What’s your list? What do you believe in?
Do you consider yourself a fearless artist? Why?
No. I experience fear constantly. I am most likely going to spend the rest of my life in a struggle against my own fears. They range from the banal: I’m terrified I’ll forget the lyrics to a song or trip on a shoelace and break my face on the stage; to the existential: I suspect I have nothing interesting to say/write before I die. I am willing to accept the fact that, in the past, my own fears have hampered choices onstage and choices in my career at large. They probably will in the future, too. Such is life. But accepting that my fear is a permanent fixture has allowed me to begin learning to regard it less as a ferocious monster in the house of my mind and more as a dreadfully ugly lamp I can’t get rid of because it’s a family heirloom. When the monster comes out of the broom closet, I’m getting increasingly better at turning it into Lladro (poof!) and putting it back next to the mops and dustpans where it belongs. I think we all arrive as cowards; some of us just choose to do everything we can not to leave that way.
What allows you to be fearless?
When I do manage to conquer my fears, a great many things are working in concert; my beliefs are winning the war against my doubts (see my list of beliefs in answer #2). But some other practical things help. Therapy: for a little over a year, I’ve been seeing a psychologist who specializes in Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), which is a type of psychotherapy developed in the late 1980s to deal with borderline personality disorder (which I don’t have) — I’ve found the conservative use of these techniques to be incredibly helpful. I’m learning to identify the bad mental habits I’ve formed, the ways I cognitively distort the world around me. It’s incredibly hard to do. You really have to start questioning and examining some of your deepest-held beliefs and superstitions but, through this, you start to learn that we truly do create a lot of our own pain, sometimes simply by magnifying pain that already exists. It’s a scientific road that very quickly and uncannily begins to resemble what I understand to be the tenets of some gorgeous eastern religions and ideologies. My therapist is awesome; I think everybody should do it. The most difficult things are the sometimes prohibitive cost when you find somebody great and the realization that not all therapists are created equal. I had to go through two or three before I found someone who really, truly helps me.
I’m also fascinated with this idea of creative “flow.” Apparently, this word comes from athletes who use it to describe the feeling they get when they’re performing at the top of their game. They’ve practiced and practiced and, in this moment, the feeling of employing technique melts away. Muscle memory kicks in. Maybe inspiration, too. The ball seems to simply float into the basket… or the net… or the wicket or whatever. I don’t have much of a love affair with sports. But I have experienced this a great number of times in myriad artistic settings and the most striking characteristic of these moments is that fear — miraculously — seems washed away in total. I feel like human beings who perform (although I’ve also experienced this in solitary exploits like songwriting or drawing) become these discerning, twitching alchemists over time: how did I get there? How did that happen? What combination of elements allowed me to glimpse the soma of perfection for that instant? Those twenty minutes? Those two hours? We’re addicts. Part of it, I’m sure, must be adrenaline. But that’s easy. A “gimme” of the human physiology and the autonomic nervous system.
I think “flow” and the resulting absence of fear is achieved at an intersection of opposites (which is why it can be very hard to expect or recreate). On the one hand, I think there needs to have been discipline and practice. On the other, there must be improvisation and almost reckless abandon. To complicate it further, during the prior stage of practice/discipline, there must have been a willingness to embrace the unknown; to make a primordial mess. And then, in the later stage, as one summons their immediacy and abandon, one must simultaneously engage a discriminating eye and an organizational impulse. Right-and-left-brain. Double hemisphere shit. Difficult to write about. More difficult to make happen.
Stanley Kubrick, an artist of immense fortitude — seemingly fearless, I’d say — had a lifelong obsession with chess. He said it helped him develop “patience and discipline” in making decisions. He would do an incredible amount of research, generate a huge mess of wonderful ideas (read: potential moves to make) and ultimately discern the immediately attractive from the truly outstanding. This was reportedly true on and off the film set and I think proof is in the proverbial pudding. But I also think performers are tasked with the challenge of synthesizing this process into individual moments.
What’s the bravest thing you’ve ever done onstage? In the theater in general?
That’s a great question. I think that I’ve done lots of things onstage that folks might call “brave,” for example: stuffing my body into various tight spaces (e.g. suitcases, trash cans), improvising hour-long musicals in front of drunk Scotsmen, performing drag in the Middle East, playing multiple instruments at once (e.g. piano, drums, and kazoo), having my lines fed to me through an earpiece, jumping backwards off an eight-foot platform, wearing a costume covered with sharp glass, performing in an abandoned mansion in Beirut on power we were siphoning from a nearby construction site, or for an audience full of armed bodyguards in Juárez — haha — but I think these mostly just make for great stories and a bizarre resume.
I think the times I’ve been bravest onstage are the times I’ve allowed myself to embrace the possibility that the moment won’t go the way I want it to. I’m such a raging control freak that it’s incredibly hard for me to let go of the steering wheel, as it were, and just… be. The best performers in the world, in my opinion, are by definition the bravest. Instead of wringing the life out of every moment of their performances, they imbue them with sheer possibility — there’s that word again — and relax into that possibility. That’s where truth is. That’s where the soul is.
I get there eventually in most shows I do. Sometimes it’s every night. Sometimes it’s for a few seconds of the whole run.
Was there ever something that kept you from being fearless onstage?
Yes. To harken to Mr. FDR — fear, itself. Cognitive distortions; my mind is highly prone to harsh judgment, quick assumption of the worst, and the conviction that it can read everyone else’s mind. (It can’t.) Thinking like this kills moments… and gives me highly unnecessary panic attacks.
How do you define the line between being a fearless, in-the-moment artist, and reckless or dangerous? How do you walk that line?
Common sense. It’s easy: if it puts someone else’s life, limbs, heart or reputation at risk, don’t do it. Similarly, if it causes someone else to experience physical or mental pain, don’t do it. It’s also about knowing your limits: if you can’t sing a high C without shredding your voice before your audition-of-the-century tomorrow, don’t do it. If you can’t get at the heart of a dramatic role without generating a deep and unnecessary sense of hatred for your grandmother in real life, don’t do it. If you’re not trained to perform six backflips and you think the attempt might break your legs, don’t do it.
Courtesy dictates that you place a tremendous value on your collaborators’ happiness and well being. Self-respect dictates that you place a tremendous value on your own. After you make that clear for yourself, anything else is just an excuse. If something is scary, try to find a way to say yes to it.
Do you have a personal boundary of lines you won’t cross as an artist?
Nothing that doesn’t sound ridiculous and obvious when you type it out. I don’t want to be part of work that promotes sociopolitical agendas I don’t agree with. I don’t want to be injured, literally or figuratively. Maybe I’m not thinking hard enough about this one?
Do you ever get scared or uncomfortable onstage? How do you react to/deal with it?
All the time. Although, for me, it’s a much bigger issue in auditions. I have two problems: anxiety… and anxiety. The first kind hits me as a version of stage fright. It has to do with anticipation. Waiting for the potentially unknown drives me absolutely crazy. I was the kid who would get sweaty in class while the teacher called attendance. All I had to say was the word “here” but the imminency of the event would open an entire mental inquiry, complete with judge and jury, into what the outcome may be: on what pitch will I say the word?; what if I jump the gun and interrupt the teacher or respond to the wrong name?; what if my voice cracks?; what if I space out and neglect to respond at all?; am I spacing out now? Holy shit! Every time I’m about to enter onto a stage, I go through a version of this to varying degrees of severity. In long performances, I’ll have something like a full two hours to adjust. So, after ten minutes or so, I can vanquish most of the anxiety — after all, anticipation no longer makes sense if the anticipated event is safely underway! In auditions, however, I get a few minutes. Tops. So I freak out before, freak out during, and probably continue freaking out afterwards. It’s a big problem for me.
This is compounded by anxiety number two, which has to do with memory. I am absolutely loathsome at remembering words. I’ve been known to forget the lyrics to my own songs. The best way for me to achieve the memorization of a text is to spend a lot of time with it. That is, I need to work on it, forget the damn thing completely, and come back later to discover that I have, in fact, absorbed it by some kind of silly time-release osmosis of the brain. Again, in performance, not such an issue! In an audition, though, it’s almost always an issue.
So, combine my general anticipative anxiety with my additional anxiety about my hampered ability to quickly learn text and it’s often a bloodbath. Or at least, I perceive that it is. See, it turns out there’s actually a third anxiety and this one gets me in any kind of performance. I become irretrievably convinced that everyone’s bodies and faces in the room have transmogrified into books written with a very cruel pen. Open to the most immediate chapter of their thoughts, it turns out I can read these books (or so I believe) and, in so doing, gain access to the audience’s most intimate and biting criticisms. You know, the scathing remarks they reserve for loved ones, private company, and their diaries. This is an example of what I’ve been referring to as a cognitive distortion. It’s not that I actually believe I possess these powers of a psychic. I don’t. But the way my mind tells itself deceitful tales about the collective experience in the room is like being under the influence of a very potent drug. My distortions are like thick fogs that roll in off the bay of my subconscious. And I have peered out through this fog on stages big and small, famous and unheard of, domestic and across the world.
You’re probably going to laugh when I tell you what I’ve started doing to deal with this fog of distortion and anxiety. I’ve started imagining a big, firetruck-red, hexagonal stop sign. And as it appears in the fog, I’ve begun saying (or thinking): “not now.” (Wondering if I arrived at this technique by way of therapy? You betcha.) Simple though it seems, the image and its accompanying mantra have proven powerful. They’re not a sure-fire solution, but the success rate has been highly encouraging, from behind the curtain of The Old Globe in San Diego to a blackbox stage in Abu Dhabi. I think the genius of the suggestion lies first in the icon of the stop sign: solid, sharp-edged, brightly colored, tangible, two-dimensional. It’s everything that an imperceptible fog isn’t: it’s bold, it’s material, it’s simple and (bonus points) it’s even linked with a literal reflex. When I see this shape, I literally hit the brakes in real life. But it’s combined with a gentler assertion: “not now.” No pressure to kill this line of thinking entirely or push it deep down, repressing and invalidating my feelings. It’s simply an invitation to indulge in my bad habit at a later moment. You know, one when I’m not standing in front of at least a hundred people, trying my damndest to be present.
The "Kenneth Branagh" one: This is an important one, as it's the only film version that leaves in every line of text from the first folio. It's not cut in any way. The downside of this is that it's like 3-4 hours long...but you will get "Hamlet" in its entirety. My favorite part of this version is the amazing casting of the "cameo" roles - these side characters have never been played better.
The "David Tennant" one: I may get some flack for this, but personally this is my favorite filmed version of "Hamlet." It is literally a filmed version (on a set, not a theater) of the RSC production from a couple years back. Tennant is lovely as Hamlet, and Patrick Stewart plays both King Hamlet, and Claudius - and is tremendous! Because this is based on the stage play it has much more of the feel the play was meant to have - being performed intimately on one set in a theater. They also make some beautiful, bold choices regarding surveillance in this world, and I think a lot of things are very very clear that can sometimes get muddied in other versions.
Though it of course doesn’t tell the full story, you MUST watch “Stage Beauty." Though they only do a couple scenes – it’s the best “Othello” I’ve seen on film.
