Part One: Bury The Dead

My recent post on this site entitled “Robert De Niro’s Ugly Mug: A Roundabout Review of Righteous Kill by Way of a Long-Forgotten Horror Flick CalledThe Flesh Eaters,” prompted a number of complaints (the number, to be precise, was one) that I had no right to mock a once-great actor like De Niro — an Oscar-winner, no less — when I myself had never personally experienced the challenges of creating a character, the terrors of facing a live audience, or the trauma of encountering witheringly negative reviews.

All of this is utterly untrue.  I have known terror.  I have felt trauma.  And not only have I experienced the challenges of embodying an onstage character, I have failed in every conceivable respect to meet those challenges. 

In short, I do indeed have a background in acting, and one that is not without an interesting parallel to De Niro himself.  Just as De Niro, in the years between Mean Streets and Meet the Parents, once was widely considered to be the Greatest Actor of His Generation, I once was regarded in certain very narrow circles as the Worst Actor of His Time.

To be fair, I never had any ambitions to become the next John Turturro or Jeff Goldblum or even Harold Ramis (the actors I physically most resembled in the years before the years, er, plumped out my features a bit.)  When I was in my early twenties, I got into acting for only two reasons:  First, to gain a better understanding of how plays were constructed from the inside out, because I wanted to write a play myself (and indeed, if my goal were to write several obscure and unproduced plays, one could say that this purpose was manifestly and gloriously fulfilled.) 

And, second, to meet girls.  More on that goal, and its ultimate success or unsuccess, in Part Two of this post, a few days from now.

I was cast in my first professional play, a satirical revue called Saturday Night Special Edition, because a young woman in one of my acting classes recommended me to the director, and he, in turn, hired me on the spot.  At the time, I thought this was because he immediately recognized that I was perfect for the role, that of an eccentric scientist, but later realized that he was one of those low-energy people who tends to select the first thing placed in front of him — in this case, me. 

There’s not much to say about this play, which was amateurishly written and directed, except that I transcended the production in every respect, specifically as regards the amateurishness.  I was asked, for example, to create my character as a German émigré, but unable to even distantly approximate a German accent, nor for that matter any other known variation on standard English, I eventually declaimed my lines in a Chicago accent because that was the only one I could credibly carry off, having been born with it.

My second — and, as it turns out, last — professional play was entitled Bury the Dead, and while I probably should take the advice of the title (as the critics at the time didn’t hesitate to do), a brief post-mortem on this infamous production would not be out of order. 

First, the director was a terribly nice and well-meaning young woman who didn’t believe in preparation.  The play, by the well-known novelist Irwin Shaw, was set in World War I, and at various points in the proceedings most of the characters were called upon to whistle the tune to the song “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby.” 

But there were two problems:  First, the song was written after the end of the First World War. 

Second, and more substantially, the director neglected, at any point during rehearsals, to bring in a recording of said melody, and so (as one of the reviews acidly noted) every character ended up whistling a different tune, some of them not only non-existent but musicologically impossible, and all of them, without exception, anything but “Love, Baby.” 

As far as the play’s storyline, without going into too many gruesome dramatic details, it concerned a troupe of slain soldiers who refuse to be buried, arising instead from the dead to declaim upon the horrors of war. 

Fair enough; but there were seven or eight reanimated soldiers in the script, each of whom was dragged one at a time, slowly and awkwardly and with many painful-sounding thumps as their elbows and heads banged against the stage, into the burial “trench” at the foot of the stage as they succumbed; each of whom came back to life individually and arose out of the trench, with more slow and painful banging that echoed in the profound silence of the auditorium; each of whom was examined one by one by a doctor (the character I played) both before and after their deaths; each of whom delivered a bitter soliloquy about the war; each of whom was implored by a hometown honey to just stay dead so she could marry someone else; and each of whom slowly shuffled off the stage at the end of the play, one by one, like the wise and gentle zombies they were. 

And each of these actions were peformed in the same order, from stage right to stage left, every time; these soldiers might have been pacifists, but they were practically fascistic about maintaining a strict sense of order in life and in death.  The effect of all this on the audience was a sense of overwhelming doom and dread; as Soldier Number Two, for example, was dragged, thumpingly, into the the trench, or clambered stiffly out again, or launched into his anti-war soliloquy, all the audience could think was “oh dear god, there are six more to go.”  And, with every such action, and for nearly two hours, this mind-numbingly predictable countdown, and the dread it engendered, was repeated.    

Though the play was intended as an anti-war treatise, it functioned instead as a sort of anti-theatre statement; it actually drained from the audience any desire to ever see another play ever again. 

Perhaps it would be an overstatement to say it drained them of the will to live as well, but if an audience member had happened to pass away during the performance, I don’t think he would have, as the stubborn soldiers did, made any kind of special effort to return to this vale of tears.    

The acting wasn’t all bad, and in fact there were a couple of performers in the huge cast (18 or so) who went on to some well-deserved success in the business.  I was easily the worst actor in the production, despite the fact that I studied my lines and rehearsed diligently; though my role was to examine the stiffs, I was in fact the biggest stiff of all.

Exactly what was the nature of my bad acting?  Though well-spoken, and not particularly prone to stage fright, I was worse than wooden; I was utterly unable to access my inner emotions or to call upon them in service to the lines that Shaw had written.  When asked by the director to scream in unalloyed horror at the sight of a soldier, grievous wounds still gaping, who had just clawed his way out of a shallow grave, my throat and my emotions were so constricted that the best I could manage was the wheezy caw of a melancholy crow. 

My fellow actors knew from the first rehearsal that I wasn’t one of them, and made sure I knew it as well.  But being ambitious actors mired in an atrocious production, they were just as nasty to their more-talented colleagues, specifically for the crime of being talented. 

Talented or not, every actor in the cast except for me was counting on bigger and better things.  All during the production, there were rumors that the great Chicago radio personality and author Studs Terkel would show up, because many years ago he had reputedly acted in the American premiere of Bury the Dead.  All of us hoped against hope and reason that he would say something positive about our production on his radio show or in the newspaper. 

Every night from backstage, we scanned the audience for his crusty visage, but — as in a real-life version of Waiting for Guffman — he never arrived.  Why we imagined that it would be a good thing for this discerning and intelligent man to show up and excoriate our desecration of a once-respectable play is hard to understand at this juncture. But the expectations of success, whether by way of Terkel or the critics, and then the inevitable disappointments that they engendered, only served to make the actors nastier. 

There were only two actors in the entire production, in fact, that were genuinely warm people, and one of them went on to substantial success. I’ll mention his name here — Michael Rooker, who co-starred with Sylvester Stallone in one movie, and has had large roles in any number of other prominent films, including Mississippi Burning, Sea of Love, and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer — only because I don’t think he would mind being held up as an example of how nice guys sometimes do finish first. 

Nor would he mind, I don’t think, being reminded of just how far he has come in his career. 

How far?  The play was held in a small upstairs room at a ramshackle rock club on North Clark Street in Chicago that was reached by a rickety set of stairs. The plumbing was bad, and everything else was worse.  One night there was a gas leak, and some of the members of the cast got sick to their stomachs; though I felt okay, I lobbied fervently for that evening’s production to be canceled so I could escape from my self-imposed hell for one night.  But as we had already sold three tickets, my request was ignored.  My final memory of Rooker, in fact, is of him leaning out one of the upper windows of the club, moments before the curtain would rise, and barfing into the filthy alley below.  A few minutes later, the show, and Rooker, went on.

My girlfriend at the time came all the way from Michigan to watch me in one of my performances (on a night when our audience was unusually large, i.e., more than six) and aftewards, she told me, bluntly but not unkindly, to “stick to writing.”  I took her advice, and never acted — if, indeed, acting was what I was doing — in another play.

I did achieve three small triumphs in this second and final production in my acting career.  First, and most notably, as I was walking home one night down Clark Street after a typically poor performance, a car with a couple of audience members in it drove past and someone yelled out the window at me, “Hey, Doc!” 

Not, bear in mind, “Hey, Doc, you suck!”

Or, “Hey Doc, you’re the worst actor of your generation!” 

Or, “Hey Doc, we’d better not catch you pontificating some time in the future on something called the ‘Internet’ about Robert De Niro and the craft of acting when it is quite obvious to us that you, yourself, cannot act a lick.”

Merely, and thrillingly, “Hey, Doc!” 

I waved back to my fans as the car sped off, and reveled in my success for weeks to come.

My second victory?  Though one of the reviews made reference to the “large, and largely amateurish, cast,” I wasn’t mentioned by name, so that no one outside the handful of audience members would ever know of my utter failure as an actor, at least until this blog post.

(Further, the non-specific reference allowed me to surmise, or pretend to surmise, that I was not among that majority of the cast that had been evaluated as amateurish.)

My final triumph concerned another bad actor in the cast — second, perhaps, only to me in that regard — who had taken it upon himself to harass me throughout the rehearsal period;  we nearly came to blows on a couple of occasions.  What, exactly, was the source of his enmity?  I was never quite sure — especially because it never seemed to have anything to do with the production or our respective performances — but as a writer, I have trained myself to never settle for approximation and speculation, instead attempting always to locate the one word that fits precisely, so let me attempt to do so here.

He was a dick. 

This bad actor and very nasty man played one of the un-dead (though clearly the “peace-loving” part of his character was harder to pull off than the “zombie” part.)  Just before intermission at every performance, after I had laboriously examined the last of the zombies and feigned in my inimitable fashion shock at their revivification, I was to slowly remove my stethescope and, as the light dimmed, toss it offstage.  At the last performance, however, I flung the stethoscope, hard, towards where I guessed the previously-dead dick was standing, and, even though the lights were almost completely down, managed to hit him with the metal part square on his nose.  

As an acting success, it doesn’t quite measure up to an Oscar or an Emmy, but all things considered, I’ll take my triumphs where I can find them. 

 

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