Harold Clurman: A Film In 8 Parts

[Music] what a rogue and pilgrim slave is it not monstrous that this player here but in a fish in a dream of passion could floss his soul so to his own conceit and all [ __ ] silver what heck you better him or he the heck you but he should wait for a what would he do had he the motive and the cue for passion that i am he would drown the stage with tears and cleave the general ear with horrid speech make magic guilty i have heard that guilty creatures sitting at a play by the very coming of the scene been struck so to the soul that presently they have proclaimed their male affections the play is the thing wherein i'll catch the conscience of the king [Music] i'd like to begin with a great generalization and say that the theater is the way is a communication like all the arts it's a communication it's the way of saying something and it's a way that the community speaks to itself now what does that mean the actors are members of the community they before they were actors they were citizens they lived in a certain environment they lived in the environment for which they play in the german state uh stages of the development of theater the theater was a ritual that is to say people who were hunters uh performed it was always in a huntsman's tribe so to speak where place about hunts hunting took place if it was a agricultural community and rain was necessary then they prayed for rain or they danced for a rain they made some expression of their needs and from that kind of primitive beginning which at the beginning was never thought of as at heart it was thought i was the very very way the community lived where you talk to each other way that understood its problems where this house the enthusiasm they did it collectively easily when they all knew each other uh and when i know all uh like so to speak one family but the truth of the matter is that every person who's a professional theater realizes that despite the diversity of people despite the diversity of craft white diversity of discipline they are basically one because without that unity which was the original unity of the primitive theater no play can be articulated uh as we see in any rehearsal such as i attended the other day at the actor's studio played by michael gatso the man who wrote the hat full of rain and the director was working with the actors and sometimes the actors made suggestions on lines even i hate it and i need a woman yelling at us the director's work with the playwright is to work in collaboration with him so that he really understands what the playwright wants and try and find ways to do it frank i want you to get up on uh what are you holding up for i want you to go here the leading character comes from a criminal society's just those guys and he and as he says i need to stay here where are you sam sam stay here andrew says when i need a woman in other words the actor was beginning to get the rhythm of that character and uh he didn't have it yet but if it pops out it would tend to show his violent nature i need a woman and i need that three holy yelling is us for he's hiding with jesus i'm afraid to go home she's hiding under the porch under the porches this fella is lower east side you know the play would seem if you read it to be poetry uh but the poetry doesn't work unless he speaks that i'll tell you the truth the truth scares the hell out of me i don't go run up and throw my arms around the truth i walk a little slow around the truth what is she doing under the porch huh you when you're afraid to go home what do you do what time is it oh yeah all right you're up here here's to i don't need a doctor no no baby you don't you don't need a doctor honey what you need i'll tell you what you need as soon as i get this thing put on here i don't need a doctor no no baby no you don't need a doctor honey what you need baby there's a man who goes around hiding the razor blades or sniffing for gas you wonder where you died you could never believe in love and hate lying in the same bed side by side most plays are written where man wants to remember he wants to tell you a story but mike says in life when we're telling something painful or thinking about something that we don't want to remember that's an interesting concept and it's very difficult to do though so we tried to do that to have the man be talking to somebody and somebody says something over there and he answers her and uh see you don't know how happy i am this brain down i'm happy what we did was to mesh it in terms of going in and out of that scene so that the man was always in the bar so to speak uh that was the experiment as it was that's what we chose that part of a play to show to clurement to see if that was the right way to do this play maybe he would tell us there was another way to do never knew it i saw it see time and memory can be juggled i mean years and days shifted belief believe me i mean that's not no meaning to me those are dirty words you know men have murdered for much less and i would too but my memory's gonna die good or bad they're mine mine forever truth will never kill love if it is love on it oh yes all those years i never knew her well i'm going home good night [Applause] it's a double set obviously there's one side is the home where he lives nearby and the other side is the bars right and i mean what she was indicated here suggests that yes a bar i think becomes a home to a bar as a family depending on a bar uh it becomes a substitute so he's in the bar we're constantly in and out of that bar and he keeps going back uh i never knew that i was in the periphery of the play or the center of the play i was at the end of the play or toward the beginning of the play in other words there was to me a certain formlessness in the scene there are three ways where you make a climax in a play there is the ordinary way for a realistic play you build the information to a slight crisis you get the thing more and more into a conflict you get into a greater tension you have an explosion right i've not talked about his play i'm talking about a certain kind of play which i don't think he should write at the present time these people who are the rough ducks who are destroyed who are the alienated who are disseminated who are the decimated all of these people we are beginning to see more and more plays like that and uh and and if you don't write them with a great skill at the present time they seems like something already seen the movies are taking them up they've become b movies they come see movies i can see this play written in poetic prose if you will to call it that way i can see it done in verse but you don't have to take my advice i'm just trying to explain the thing from the bar members all of it was written in chorus it was written of course he said written in chorus then i started to reduce the chorus to characters or tried to try to reduce the characters and perhaps what you're saying is that in a peculiar kind of way i think that these lines can be it doesn't really matter who says these lines in other words it doesn't matter whether the owner says the lines or what the jack says they were what and there was those lines that they're pretty malleable implied that is true but it's not true altogether at the present time that's the way it says but there shouldn't be that way uh i'll tell you an example by the way i didn't talk about a chorus or a band or anything else uh i'm not telling you how it should be done yeah you see but it has to have a form at least you must seek it you must seek it and there is another way because to create form and that is to make it a progression in eloquence that is to say as the play as the situation of whatever the situation may be that the the playwrights choose those things which are more and more pointed in speech in in lyricism in environments in declaration in the results of his epic confusion but i wish to have an accumulation of form an arrow of meaning of emotional uh power and of psychological clarity or philosophic uh mystic even intuition which satisfies me but right now i'm in the various worlds and not satisfied with either uh i don't know whether i agree with you or disagree with it i'll have to munch that over you'll give me till 6 30. i'm going to figure that out [Applause] the trouble with most of the plays at the studio i found is that they have no metaphor so what else do you mean that any good work of art uh goes beyond its um specific impulses and becomes metaphor you know the majority of the plays there and the majority of plays we read for the playwrights union doesn't matter if i don't have any metaphor attached to them no no no resonance no overtime that's true but there must be resonance and there must be overtone there must be implication that goes beyond the specific event has no window on the world in other words it's an enclosure and i see nothing beyond what you're showing me it's the same idea well that's true that's my feeling has always been and you forgive me because i've told you this before but i'll tell you again and perhaps you come close to grieving but your plays are too realistically done uh but you know what i'm talking about it seems to me that if you are attempting something that is meant to move off of a familiar level into something else you've got to start off on a familiar level that is true but that is very true uh well but i do have one fear which is maybe why i allow the sets in the direction to be a little too realistic is that i've noticed that audiences in the united states want to be led off the hook and we use almost any chance they can not to be not to have to relate themselves to the experience that they're watching and so maybe i lean too far over backwards and enforcing them to relate themselves and maybe that's why they seem too realistic what about the uh relationship of the younger folk uh to the theater today those who seem to be uh the college kids and i do go around to a number of colleges and have conversations with the kids they do seem terribly involved in the theater i agree with you and they do go to the off off broadway they go to the cafe theaters uh they know the names of the young playwrights we've been talking about shepherd and wilson and paul foster and the others they do assume of course that the commercial theater on broadway is as it usually is the home of claptrap and uh they don't want to sit around with 160 year old people who are sleeping through everything except one of david merrick's noisiest musicals but i don't think they are alienated from the theater they're alienated from the condition that the theater gives off the odor that the theater gives off when it gets into big business it's still true that what happens on broadway it still still does set the standard of excellence around the country maybe when there are enough repertory theaters and if the university theater has enough effect then broadway won't be the uh factor determinator that it is now the quality of the terminator i would say that i will go to even to broadway to see good play well i've gotta earn a living too so i go to broadway [Music] [Music] [Applause] a wonderful form of entertainment we work very hard we come here to relax and we don't want to be preached i think what's wrong with the theater today is they give the community to commercial purposes thinking of the almighty dollar rather than the things that they should be talking about no that's not necessarily true at all i think they have great deal of shows that i thought that are very relevant and timely there's a certain intimacy sitting in the theater you feel them so you can get up and tell them what you think go to at a fast enough pace i i do think however there's been a stellification on broadway a repetition of the same kinds of forms and the same kind of uh same kind of the theme and uh uh also there is in our leading playwrights uh uh a repetitiveness i find the great fallacy is to think that broadway necessarily represents the american people or the american audience or americans at all it does not it's a very special audience and don't have to denigrate it i'm not against broadway because i'm not against east 9th street either and although much of the stuff is still very crude and amateurish off-broadway it interests people because they deal with things uh that are not set on broadway with a vitality and an enthusiasm and sincerity which is uh absolutely essential for a living theater so all these minority things and these radical things are not radical in sense of left or right or anything like that but they are well they do say they are left they said they say we don't like the way things are there must be a change right away and there's an awful lot that's not uh that's not acceptable about the way our society is now obviously on the campus and uh thank god that thank god everybody's yelling about it but we try to do that in the 30s uh uh too to do that but i think there's more of it now and i think a lot of the a lot of the uh off-broadway people who feel issues especially uh left issues very strongly are making increasing efforts to go direct to make direct statements or direct dramatizations about them it's counter to the theater of the absurd uh certainly where it's directly countered in that sense it's a it's an opposition wave and i think a damn welcome one as far as i'm concerned [Music] oh [Music] [Applause] [Music] let us pray [Music] o lord our father our young patriots idols of our hearts go forth to battle be thou near them with them in spirit we also go forth from our beloved firesides to smite the foe oh lord god help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded writhing in pain we ask it in the spirit of love and seek his aid with humble and contrite hearts amen [Music] good people during my recent visit to the vietnamese front i had an opportunity to meet a sergeant who operated the jeep with a 50 caliber machine gun on it similar to the type of vehicle you see on rat patrol [Music] he was a good-looking man and i was very impressed with him as one who was really doing his job i asked him if his flak vest was effective he said yes but i have a better one i have a bible he pulled a pretty well beaten bible from his left pocket over his heart a bullet had hit that bible and had penetrated as far as the 83rd sound [Music] that sound says in parts keep not thou silence o god for lo thine enemies make a tumult they have said come and let us cut them off from being a nation i think now a few moments of silent meditation would serve to help us find the answer that we all seek there is specifically a satire having to do with the church and war uh i think it would be naive to say that we wanted to uh uh change the president or to any specific thing i don't really think that's in the uh in the field for theater to do i think it's to see into our own kind of uh complicity with things that we don't like so we are trying to find a sort of direct expression the way we can find it whatever way that is for things that are baffling us and turning us off and deadening us and making us mute and it's that it's an impulse to make noise in a kind of silence and to uh uh shake up things i guess in a way [Music] [Applause] don't you think we experienced uh the sensation of living differently now than we did 30 even 30 years ago yeah you experienced it less verbally i i'm we do experience we do experience uh even society differently we see its manifestations differently we learn differently we we become acquainted with each other differently it's uh it's the whole lot is true the fear is going into the streets it's going into churches is going into lofts it's obvious that they're trying to do things uh that are never done on broadway they're trying to make uh make their visual images which are acrobatic which are choreographic which are not verbal which are not the literary but which are physical and uh very uh total total now birth ritual and opening ceremony are both parts of a work in progress so what we're doing now is moving from the opening ceremony to the birth ritual good evening the birth ritual was directly taken from a similar ritual performed by the asmat indians in new guinea it struck me as really a universal image rather than one that just belongs to the azmat tribe in new guinea and so we tried it at the workshop and it struck me that it was extraordinarily moving some of the kind of work i'm trying to work out in the workshop is to develop our own particular kind of vocabulary a new set of tools which are very very traditional they relate to an oral tradition rather than a written tradition they relate to what goes on in the the chiwee of north australia or some of the papuans in in the uh in new guinea we're talking about somehow reshaping the whole theatrical experience so that it doesn't imitate life but it's really an exchange of living things the theater's moving back to the oral tradition where if there is a writer at all he's there he doesn't come in with a play but he comes in with his talent and with the performers the the text evolves if there is a text it'll be a new thing it's about time too because the theater has has long been a 19th century and 18th century art forms about time it gets into the 20th century i hope it gets them since 20th century before the 20th century gets into the 21st now the birth ritual is from dionysus in 69 and it comes near the beginning of the play it works out of our exercises and it is augmented by dialogue from euripides we have taken that dialogue and adapted it to our own uses for example pentheus is speaking euripides lines but william finley who plays dionysus is speaking his own lines he wrote them good evening my name is william finley i have come here tonight for three reasons to tell you that i am god to establish my rightful rituals and to be born if you'll excuse me [Music] the birth ritual epitomizes our work in this way the sound is the sound that you cannot deny making it has to be forced out of you by the experience as they go through each of them the experience of giving birth i am princess [Applause] i've been away out of the city but reports have reached me of strange disorders here her stories allow women leaving the home season on the tickets dancing in honor of the latest [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] oh [Applause] girls [Applause] [Music] i've been away out of the city but reports have reached me of strange disorders here stories of our women leading home to can mock ecstasies among the thickets on the mountain dancing in honor of the latest divinity a certain dionysus whoever that may be in their midst and bowls brimming with wine while one by one they wander off the secret nooks to satisfy the lust of men and the american theater today is really spreading uh far more than anybody suspects that it's over the country and into places where you don't expect fear and these plays and places are a seed bed for some future creator to make of them a director or a director plus an author to make a new expression i think the hardest part of any work of art is is uh the art of the authors of the artist's relationship to himself to get to a point where you can look at yourself and your experiences and your past and your desires now absolutely truthfully in in to look at them candidly to look at yourself candidly it's the hardest part of it people say well what problems did you have with the this or that that i've done i would say only to only with myself the the high moment of drama the high moment of the contact between the audience and the actor or the actors among each other is embrace and it's embraced on the highest level and on the physical level it's the most direct art because there are living people in front of other living people and it happens at that moment by the way what is love and what is art and what is religion and what are all these things but the effort or the possibility or the experience of going out of your own little self no matter how much you think of yourself into the whole world to join in the love and grace of the sky of people of the other things because no matter how big we are we are all human beings with a short span of life in a short capacity compared to the all total human capacity and so we always feel alone and that's why we need art to make us feel that connection between ourselves and in myself and we only get greater people than we are as we enhance ourself and take in more in baseball of the whole world tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this pitty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the weight to dusty death out out brief candles but a walking shadow a poor player that struts and threatens our from the stage full of sound and joy shake the light [Applause] save the light save the light [Music] you