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The Actors Center Journal Vol. 2, No. 4, November 2010
The Actor’s Voice
My favorite characterization of FRANK WOOD was in a bio on the internet which described him as most often portraying a “(frequently beleaguered) everyman.” I think that’s fair, though to me, Frank Wood is a completely transformative actor. There is always that high domed forehead and the eyes that seem frantically to be trying to make patient sense out of whatever is going on around him but, somehow, in the manner of all our finest actors, he seems to remake his soul each time out. He has appeared in various film, television and theatre roles. He is perhaps best known for playing Greg in the HBO series “Flight of the Conchords.” He won a Tony Award in 1999 for Best Featured Actor in a Play for “Side Man.” He is a graduate of Wesleyan University in 1984. He recently played Bill in “August: Osage County” on Broadway. He is currently playing Roy Cohn in the revival of “Angels in America” at the Signature Theatre.
A few months ago, after he had just closed in “Clybourne Park” at Playwrights Horizons, Frank spent some time sharing thoughts with Michael Miller and Philip Carlson in Michael’s living room. Actually, a week prior to that afternoon, Frank and Michael had met to solve the world’s theatrical problems and had successfully done so only to discover that a very recalcitrant tape recorder had refused to be turned on and there was no evidence of Michael and Frank’s conversation. Thus, the three of us met a second time hoping to recapture some highlights. I feel we succeeded. Here are some excerpts from that highly enjoyable encounter.
For those of you who would like to listen to the complete interview with Frank (it takes about an hour and a half), just click here and enjoy.
JMM: Last week you said to me that working in theatre’s always a compromise.
FW: We were talking kind of about regional theatre and Broadway. Every venue, or every genre, has its set of compromises particular to it. Because you know, we were talking about you feeling that a lot of regional theatre had a lot of limited acting resources and I went on to say that, yeah, Broadway…they all sort of make their peace with something that makes them particular but also maybe makes them less than the very best they could be.
JMM: And have you been thinking about this since we last talked?
FW: There are places I’ve been in the last few years like a production of “Waiting for Godot” at ACT and of “The Rainmaker” at Arena Stage where I felt like we really were doing something theatrically satisfying and in some ways I felt like the audience was weak. You know, like the collective sensibility of the audience seemed a mixed bag.
JMM: What was so satisfying in “The Rainmaker” for example. You were Starbuck?
FW: No, I played File. Michael Lawrence played Starbuck. And File’s a more—you know, he is laconic. Starbuck is not. I really enjoyed that laconic quality, you know the repressed—I enjoy repressed emotions, and having some way for them to come out. I enjoy finding when they are exposed, the cracks they get exposed through. I like putting the lid on, because then if you’ve got something going on, then you really feel it get full and I enjoy when you find the release valves.
PC: Why do you think the audience wasn’t interested. Or not as interested as you hoped?
FW: I don’t normally find myself feeling self-righteous or indignant about the audience, to be honest—I don’t think that I expect them to come and love the things I’m in, or a play just on the face of it. I think that I over time sense just that regional theatre isn’t state-of-the-art entertainment, in a way, and people go to it out of a sense of obligation, but not out of a sense of really expecting treasure—
JMM: –expecting something to happen to them.
FW: Yeah! I mean, people often assume about subscriber audiences that they bought a package of things, so they consume it as a product they’ve already paid for rather than something they’re excited or interested to go find out about, and so, to some degree I felt that was true. That we prepared something unusual. I mean, “The Rainmaker,” didn’t seem loved, people didn’t seem particularly excited about it, and maybe “Waiting for Godot,” too, which was really thrilling to do, and I don’t know how ready an audience was to enjoy it, I think that people take [theatre] sometimes like medicine. Instead of like fun. Or beautiful. I’m excited to go to regional theatre and do “Waiting for Godot.” Really excited, but I remember thinking, “I don’t know if I can go to San Francisco, because I’m going to leave my girlfriend for two months,” and you know, all that.
PC: How often do you go out of town?
FW: In the last years I’ve been to four or five regional theatres, so I haven’t been living my life in the regional theatre. Hartford Stage, the Goodman, ACT, Arena Stage, the Cincinnati Playhouse just recently, and I’m probably leaving something out, but that’s been it I think in the past ten years for regional theatre. And Cincinnati Playhouse we lost 20% of the audience every night at intermission.
There’s an audience that wants to be able to compare notes. The conversations you hear are like, “Oh yeah I liked that. That was funny,” and not things inside the plays, what’s inside “Three Sisters.” I don’t know that I hear many people talking about, “Why do these people behave this way? Why do they keep talking about Moscow? Why do they want to go back to Moscow?” except in a slightly sarcastic way, you know, “why don’t they go already?”
JMM: Well your recent experience has been just the opposite.
FW: This audience at “Clybourne Park” in New York was exciting for all the audiences I saw. There were a lot of theatre people at those shows, I got a lot of response from actors, BUT also non-actors, people who were really moved by it, and enjoyed it. It still didn’t get a producer to take it to Broadway or to another off-Broadway theatre, you know, it was really well-reviewed, audiences really liked it, they didn’t fill the house until the last week.
PC: That is shocking, with those reviews. They were raves.
FW: And what somebody told me—somebody who was on the producing end, trying to get it produced—said, it was funny, he said the review by Ben Brantley wasn’t quite a rave enough to move producers. I don’t know what—he said it didn’t name enough performers and kvel enough over individual performers for producers to feel safe with it. Now, that guy was an agent, a director’s agent, and he told me he worked hard on finding producers for it, but that was his interpretation of it.
JMM: Let’s go back for just a second. You brought up, how did you put it, you’re interested in and energized and involved in characters that are—
FW: Yeah, that are sort of tamped down, or they’re repressed in a sense, but that there is an emotional life, especially in the context of that play, there’s a lot to be emotional about, and they’re working hard to keep it in. I do find that those have been my most satisfying—
JMM: Well, that was “Side Man.”
FW: Absolutely. And “Side Man” and “Clybourne Park” were definitely in a range of possible roles, they definitely shared the same 10% area. And Lucky was who I played in “Waiting for Godot,” who’s mute except for one incredibly long speech. I mean, he’s abused horribly for most of the play, and then has one long, seemingly senseless monologue—
JMM: But it’s an aria of all the frustrations that any one human being can harbor in his subconscious—
FW: Right, right, right.
JMM: Now, is this proclivity or naturalness in you, do you find that growing more and more to be you as an actor, or are you looking for ways to get through that into something else?
FW: I’m definitely looking for ways to get through that into something else, and I think I get it from time to time. I don’t feel like I’ve been stuck exactly, but yeah, I definitely look for other ways. You know, in fact, the second act of “Cylbourne Park,” that contractor was an unlooked for example—when I saw the role, I didn’t think, here’s this great second act character, I really thought about the first act character—but that was an example of a role that I can do, but I kind of didn’t know that I was going to be this funny, irrepressible, loudmouth guy. You know, I didn’t know that precisely. And there were things—he had a mustache, and he chewed gum, and he wore the tool belt and the hat. So in a sense there was an actual disguise that was satisfying and made it easier.
JMM: Well it made it easier, except you made it—it was a real character, it was a real person, and I was kinda shocked, almost.
FW: Well, it’s true, being shocked makes sense, because I’m a somewhat, in my own way, timid actor. I mean I think that I look for—my fantasies are characters with arias: they’re Hamlet and Iago and Angelo—I mean, Angelo’s another repressed—you know, I see the sexual hypocrisy in “Measure for Measure” as a deeply satisfying dramatic opportunity.
JMM: Coming back to the idea of company, and I know you haven’t really been in a specific company—
FW: Yeah, I mean Richard Schechner, you know—I did that—and for a while, when I was at People’s Light & Theatre I was—for one year, we were actually a salaried company of actors, and then for another year, we weren’t contracted to work there, but we were treated as if we were, and then—no more. So there was a two year period of my life where I was a member, in a way, of a sort of traditional repertory regional theatre company.
JMM: Now where was that?
FW: That was in Malvern, Pennsylvania. And you know, I would go out there because of Abigail Adams. Abigail tried but it didn’t, I don’t know, in some ways it didn’t live close enough to the center of the universe. In some ways, its regional qualities kept it in a way that was insular.
PC: Do you mean it seems insular from the community, or—
FW: I don’t know what I mean, it’s a good question. What do I mean? They raise money, they build a season, and they produce a product, and my experience of People’s Light—what I’m saying by insular is, that actually was a group of people who produced a lot of plays over and over again with each other. So that was both an opportunity for them to be cohesive, but also a way that they began to live with certain expectations of each other, and they didn’t demand as much from each other, partly because they don’t do that anymore. There aren’t resident companies.
JMM: There just aren’t.
FW: So that dynamic isn’t the issue, unless it’s at the management level, and the management level might be insular, but I don’t know. I mean, the lack of continuity in New York is sometimes made up for the dynamic energy of people looking for work, and finding new people to work with, and being excited about something that will be better than the last thing they did. But sometimes that lack of continuity just means that you’re happy to have any job. And that you are only counting the days until your next job. I don’t know. So, I don’t really have a cohesive idea about what would make regional theatre or commercial theatre better. I just know that they both share, in different ways, a need to survive that may be bigger than the need to create.
PC: That’s interesting, that’s really interesting.
JMM: That’s a beautiful way to put that.
PC: Because what seems to me, just looking at—when I lived in Seattle, there were three important houses, and they were all, it seemed to me, saying, “Do you like this? What about this?” instead of somebody saying, “You’re gonna love this!” Nobody was leading, they were supplicants looking for an audience. But nobody said, “Well I’m gonna do this, damn it! And you’re gonna like it.”
FW: Right, right, right. I feel like the theatre itself has a lot of political battles and internecine battles…I mean, these are institutions, so they’re going to be like that.
JMM: And history tells us all kinds of things. Most histories you read are god-only-knows how honest they are. If you read the Moscow Art Theatre’s, the internecine battles were ongoing, colossal, ground-shaking, and yet it wasn’t about survival. Maybe in some cases a little bit of individual survival, but—
PC: It was about vision.
JMM: It was about vision, and trying to change something, and it was changing, even though within the company there was a lot of resistance and so on. In the end, there was passion and a place for it to go. I think when the RSC was founded, there was a great deal of passion and looking forward and trying new things and working together. That doesn’t exist anymore.
FW: I think you have to give Steppenwolf some credit for being a place that is—
JMM: Steppenwolf was amazing. It seems to me that somewhere it’s about the spine of what they wanted to do and what happened with places like Steppenwolf is like the old Group Theatre, I think in the very early days, most of those tales…Steppenwolf had a vision from the beginning. It was just raw guts acting, and it was terribly intense and terribly personal and terribly in-your-face and as far as you could go, every night.
FW: And it seems to me, what you described last week, was you get a few actors that realize they have their moment. This next 6 months or this next year is my moment to make Hamlet sing, or work, or, you know. And a year is certainly—I don’t know quite what the plan is—but I mean, you give an actor a chance to look down the road 6 months or a year a role or at a couple of roles, and you can—because it’s not like the rest of their life is going to be this way, so the complacency is taken away, and instead this sort of sense of this something at the end of a certain rainbow is really possible. And I would think that would be a good recipe for making somebody invest all their energy.
JMM: These are three roles. One Hamlet and two others that Frank was made to play, and sometime in these three years he’s gonna play those roles, with all of these other committed people who are there to do it. And wouldn’t that be something that you could really look forward to?
FW: Yeah. That would be something I could really look forward to.
JMM: And something any audience would look forward to, I would hope. I certainly would.
FW: Exactly! And there’s just so much beauty in the moments where people are caught off guard, where a character says something they didn’t know they were going to say, or when somebody says I love you and the other person is distracted and misses it. And that, then that takes 12 actors and a director and designers who are invested over a long period of time in letting something live and that’s what, in spite of all the innovation and even the sensitivity of directors—of John Doyle and his “Three Sisters” and the interesting observations of the directors of the other “Three Sisters” I was in—the letting something live was never quite…well, what we did get to do at ART was he [director Krystian Lupa] did insist on our on-stage life being moment to moment, so I credit him with making us live not hiding from the audience. You know, we couldn’t hide behind a good rhythm, or a great affect as a character, or even the repetition of our blocking, because he wouldn’t nail down the blocking very specifically. So when we walked on stage, we really had to bring sort of 360 degrees of awareness with us.
JMM: You had to act in that moment.
FW: Yeah. And that he was brave about, and made us be braver about. It was just too bad that he didn’t care about the architecture of the play, or how the characters would—how a great result would come from letting these relationships build. I felt like that was the weakness. The strength was that he said, “You are on stage, there’s no one there but you. You can’t make up a little character, an impression of a person. And John Doyle, similarly, invited us to live as many lives as we could in the course of rehearsal period to find something that was also in the moment. And Richard [Schnechner] threw us into this sort of series of games that threw our expectations off, certainly.
And he certainly threw so many curve balls at us that we were never complacent. And they were fun. Some of his ideas were really fun to implement. So there was, in all of them, there was interest and joy and play-making, but in none of them was there a really deep respect for what the play would render if you invested in the play.
JMM: That’s the most important thing you’ve said. I mean, to me, revealing where our theatre is now, and it seems to me the case, for a number of reasons. One, being that Anne Cattaneo shook my bridge a couple years ago. She was doing a little workshop and she said, “You know, one of the things that I’ve discovered is that I think we’re too professional in the theatre.” I said, “What are you talking about? How can you get too professional in the theatre? How can you get too good?” But she meant too professional, and she meant that now everybody who works in the theatre is an absolute specialist. And their own territory has to be carved out, and their own territory has to take up a certain amount of space, which doesn’t give real room for collaboration where some things have to give and some things have to go if we’re going to what is really supposed to happen up there. If that play is really supposed to live there. And in one way, that’s speaking to your original thing about how everything is compromised in the theatre. But another way of looking at that is you give it up so that the real stuff can happen, and that’s not compromise. That’s just all pitching in for what the whole thing is really about, and there’s no set roles that anybody has—hierarchy or whatever.
FW: Do you mean that literally, like in the craftsmanship, do you mean like the stage manager, the designer, the director, the actor, or do you also mean, like, a director of a certain intellectual style?
JMM: No, I was meaning just the first one. I don’t remember growing up in the theatre where the designer was so fucking important. And there were fantastic, great designers, and it was so important to the production, but in terms of where you were getting into what the play was about and what was going to happen on the stage, it wasn’t the designer being the second most important or the third most important person in the whole thing two and a half years before it started. It wasn’t the sound man having two days of work in the theatre so that nothing else could happen to get the sound just right. Those are things that came—they were much more process. And now it’s so departmentalized, and now when you have a company, you’ve got to have 1,000 people to get 5 people on the stage.
FW: At some point you want to say, why are you in theatre?
JMM: I want to pick up on you and what my guess is really involved with a company: you would join that company for the opportunity to work with fellow artists of a certain stature—public stature and artistic stature. And that you would have some say. You go there to do a certain kind of work that you can only achieve by working with that company and those people and you helping them and them helping you. And I’m not sure that that’s of interest to you in terms of some of the things you’ve said before.
FW: Caring about the product, talking, having phone calls and meetings and things about we’re actually going to do, seems great to me. That side of me—I am responsibility-phobic in some ways, because I’ve found an executive function is either through choice or nurture, whatever, is really limited. But showing up to the meeting and telling other people what I think and taking some responsibility for what I think sounds like it would make my life better rather than worse.
JMM: Well, that’s the part we’re interested in. What are those things that would make it better? Just in your own work now, if you could change anything?
FW: One of the things that I learned from John Doyle that was really fun is you put a lot of stuff out and you take a lot of things away. I mean, you throw everything including the kitchen sink into your production, and then you divest your production of anything it doesn’t need, and find a balance between all the possibilities and the economy of a really lean expression. And so, getting everybody to be involved in that, to come to the theatre ready to both literally play theatre games and play with all the design ideas and be part of what the set’s going to be like, bring their lives there, bring objects of their lives—that would be exciting to me. I like being asked, but it also makes me feel self-important.
JMM: Makes you feel self-important in what way?
FW: Well, that I would entertain big questions about theatre.
