NEWS FASO SEES VACUUM IN LEADERSHIP OF STATE ... - …

08/21/2006 09:58 PMThe New York Sun

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08/21/2006 09:58 PMAge on Stage - August 21, 2006 - The New York Sun

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August 21, 2006 Edition > Section: Arts and Letters

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Age on StageTheater

By DANA GORDONAugust 21, 2006

At age 81, Alvin Epstein is an actor fromwhom one can reliably expect greatthings. Case in point: his performanceearlier this summer in the Actors'Shakespeare Project's production of"King Lear" at La MaMa. What Mr.Epstein brought to the stage was asensibility — culled from a 60-yearcareer in the theater — that gave himfreedom to create what was essentiallya new King Lear. It was truly avant-garde Shakespeare, and it was true toShakespeare.

"The opportunity itself to do King Lear isspecial," Mr. Epstein said. "Aside fromHamlet, and maybe even more so thanHamlet, the biggest hurdle that an actorcan put up in front of himself is to playthe king. An old saw about Lear is thatto play him you have to be old enoughto understand him, and by that timeyou're too old to do it.You haven't thephysical stamina."

Such thinking, however, was thoroughlydisproved at La MaMa. Mr. Epsteincreated the feeling that he did notembody Lear, but he went beyond. In away, he disembodied Lear. Lear asEpstein as Lear.

A performance of this caliber doesn'tcome along often.Which makes it worthasking: What are the advantages of ageonstage? What does an octogenarianbring to the stage that a matinee idolcannot? In part, the answer is easy:Experience. Cast in the premiers of Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" in 1956 and"Endgame" 1958, Mr. Epstein has, simply put, been around. He served as the artisticdirector of the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis. Between the late 1960s and 2004, he acted,directed, and taught at the Yale Repertory Theatre, and then at the American RepertoryTheatre at Harvard, in addition to creating roles on Broadway and off.

But how did that experience manifest itself in Mr. Epstein's Lear? What understandings didhe draw on to yield such a rich, textured treatment of this 400-year-old play? The answersare not to be found in Cliffs Notes.

For many years, Mr. Epstein did not care much for "King Lear." "The play has become likethe hull of a very old ship covered with barnacles," he said. "You don't see the hull anymore— only the barnacles: accumulated, predigested ideas, among them a star turn for a bigego and a bellowing voice. In Shakespeare's time it was a brand new play. No traditionshad grown around it yet."

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[Continued from page 1 of 4]

Mr. Epstein knows from Lear tradition.He has played the Fool opposite OrsonWelles as the king and Gloucesteropposite F. Murray Abraham in the titlerole. He also played the Fool in Hebrewwith Habima, the national theater ofIsrael, in the early 1950s.

In order to break away from thosetraditions, the actor imagined what theplay was like when Shakespeare wroteit. Quick with ferocious action, the workoverflows with meaning on emotional,familial, political, and mythical levels.But, Mr. Epstein argues that "Lear"wasn't written about a monumentalfigure.

"It was written about a real old man.The play is mythological in scopethrough the role's completeness, butdomestic in its constant connection totruth," he said. "Shakespeare had apiercing knowledge of human nature:The play is about real people, withfaults, riddled with doubts. Lear makesa terrible mistake and pays the price."

Describing Shakespeare's language, Mr.Epstein sheds light on whatcharacterizes his own approach totheater: "The intense compression ofideas and emotions into very shapelyand short phrases that travel like music.How can I put this big thought into astight a little box as I can — say the mostwith the least amount of words?"

His approach is akin to what Beckett did in creating his works; he pared away all the extra.Mr. Epstein accomplishes this through an instinct for clarity, in the elicitation of a word, thecrook of one finger, a bend of the neck, the tilt of the upper torso — movement emphasizedand specific but also looking utterly natural; never overdone or underdone.

During his performance, the actor physically showed Lear's deteriorating state of mind in hisgradual languishing of stature throughout the play. From an erect king savoring his lastmoments of power, he becomes a crumpled, exasperated, thwarted father. From that, hedevolves into a physically and mentally failing, but manically agile, figure who darts backand forth clad only in a diaper. He presses on, as a dying Pieta-like wraith and then to thehorizontal stillness of death.

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Age on StageTheater



Mr. Epstein's ability to execute thisapproach comes from a lifetime of work.When he started acting, he had in mindfor himself a "completely different path"from the standard, naturalistic mid-century theater style. Strongly influencedby Edward Gordon Craig, theabstractionist theater innovator of thefirst half of the 20th century, Mr. Epsteinspent a year working with masterchoreographer Martha Graham, whomhe admired for her "theatrical vision."Her new language of movements thatexplored the capability of the body tovisually express psychological statesdrew him to her technique.

His New York debut in 1955 was as amime, with the great Marcel Marceau(who had been Mr. Epstein's classmatein the famed mime school of EtienneDecroux in Paris in the late 1940s). Hewent on to play, in that same season,the Fool in Welles's "Lear," and Lucky,the slave, in "Godot," both roles thatdemanded very physical, visualinterpretations.

But the connections between Mr.Epstein, Beckett, and Shakespeare arenot confined to a stringent attitudetoward physicality. Mr. Epstein added,"the similarity of Shakespeare's view ofhumanity to Beckett's is evident inLear's words when he ends up on theheath in a storm, decrying the humancondition:

Poor naked wretches… That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall yourhouseless heads and unfed sides, …defend you From seasons such as these?"

"And later, ‘Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked Animal,'" Mr.Epstein said, adding that these are "phrases that also bring to mind the emaciated figuressculpted by Alberto Giacometti, Beckett's friend.This scene is where the self-realizationoccurs in Lear. Exposed to the indifferent cruelty of nature, Lear discovers the humanity heshares with other ‘poor naked wretches.' This from a raving, spoiled tyrant. What a change,what a turnaround of character!"

As a further example of this make-or-break moment in the play, he continued to recite, withobvious pleasure and without breaking the momentum in conversation,

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…Oh I have ta'enToo little care of this. Takephysic, pomp,Expose thyself to feel whatwretches feel,That thou may'st shake thesuperflux to themAnd show the heavens more just.

These extraordinary passages duringthe storm on the heath are what Mr.Epstein calls "the most difficult scene foran actor." The words are precise and, inthe way of poetry, sufficient inthemselves, challenging the actor evento utter them. "But very often theapproach to it is stentorian: Just bellowthe words. Again, a culturally approvedmisunderstanding of the play," Mr.Epstein said. "And you can't drown outShakespeare's words with sound effects.The actor is the heart of it. He has tobring it off by invoking both the stormthat is in his head and the terrific delugethat cannot be really happening on thestage."

And how does he accomplish this?"That's the mystery of acting.You can'texplain everything. Lear is not actuallydescribing the storm; he is summoningnature to do nothing less than destroythe world and all the people in it,"

Blow, winds, and crack yourcheeks!Rage, blow….Strike flat the thick rotundity o' th' world,Crack nature's molds…That makes ingrateful man.

With language so magnificent and a character so complicated, the challenge of taking onthis role was transformative."During the run in Boston and New York, I became aware thatthis play had become so meaningful to me that the idea that I was performing actions andspeaking words written by somebody named William Shakespeare seemed absurd," Mr.Epstein said, adding that the words seemed like his own. "My thoughts and my responses.Not that I was going mad, like the king, but the simulating of those things seemed to becoming from me spontaneously."

Is this what convincing acting should be? "Perhaps.The language has begun to feel sonormal to me that it's not Shakespearean speech. It's the language of today, it's thelanguage of what is happening right now."

Mr. Epstein will next perform an experimental program under the title "Who's Your Dada?"with the Wooster Group at the Museum of Modern Art on September 6, 7, and 9.

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NEWS FASO SEES VACUUM IN LEADERSHIP OF STATE ... - …