Notes on a Cowardly Lion (51 page)

Lahr interpreted Shakespeare as an Elizabethan Billy K. Wells. “My idea of Mr. Shakespeare is this: when he wrote for comedians—he wrote for low, low comedians. He wrote for dialecticians from different parts of England, the way a writer today would caricature a Southern or a Brooklyn accent.” As if Shakespeare's bawdy good humor were not enough, Lahr sometimes suspected Shakespeare of supporting the same star system that spawned the twentieth-century clowns. “I wonder if there was a star system in those days? Was there? Shakespeare had a stock company, and he used to write for the different personalities. The reason there seems to have been something like a star system is that, if you read his plays, there are a lot of parts in them that are very important: he took care of his people. Autolycus, for instance, isn't important to the story-telling, but is brought in around the edges. It seems to me that Shakespeare's construction indicates that he was saying to himself, ‘We've got this Will Kemp under contract—we've got to write something for him.'”

Lahr had his troubles with Shakespeare. The language confused him; and the songs were even more difficult. After the first day of rehearsal, he confided to a reporter, “I'm not worried. But those songs! Well, this is the first time I've done them on my feet and the damn lyrics. I'll get them. They don't make sense. ‘Doxie in the dale,' ‘the pug in the teeth' or whatever it is. I don't even know the words yet.”

Lahr loved playing Bottom, especially the hilarious performance the dim-witted weaver gives in his role as Pyramus. (Later, Lahr would draft a scenario for a musical comedy based on Bottom, allowing him to improvise Shakespeare and play the comedy scenes as written but under commercial conditions.) Bottom's self-importance and his blundering had their equivalent in Lahr's burlesque drunken cop. Lahr understood the character immediately, playing the part as if he never knew the joke. He had learned from
Godot
and
Paradiso
that legitimacy
added to the fun. “I played it serious. I was bumbling through it all. I was overdramatic. I did it as legitimate as I knew how. I don't think there was anything
different
in playing Bottom.” He had a personal idea of Bottom's predicament.

Bottom is a—a layman, an artisan. He's a weaver who portrays
ninety per cent of the people of the world, with an ego, an exhibitionistic complex—we all have. You talk to anybody, they'll either say I've wanted to be an actor, my daughter is gonna be an actress. I think that's a natural trait, and it must have been in that time too, they had amateur groups that were bumblers … And that's the main comedy vein of this thing, but I think it's basically a story of love. Even the laymen, the artisans, they have a love for the Duke and they want to do something for him. But it's travesty, it's burlesque …

Actors Talk About Acting

Lahr was conscious of Bottom's responses toward others as much as his faux pas. “The laughter was mostly an attitude, a reaction to Thisbe, to the court audience when they were making fun of me. They'd laugh at me. I'd get angry. I always wanted to get off, leave the stage. Some of them would hold me back. I'd always complain to Quince in pantomime what they were doing to me, that they were so bad …”

Lahr proudly claimed that he never changed a word of Shakespeare's text (“there are a lot of people out front, devotees, who know the play better than you do, and if you change the text they resent it”). But he added his own touches to Bottom's disastrous denouement as Pyramus. He was able to move the role from travesty to something more human and complex—a situation approaching satire.

When a wardrobe mistress offered to taper Bottom's outfit for him, Lahr got an idea, from which he fashioned the rest of his performance. “I had them make a special belt which I had fixed so that the dagger I wore in the scene really held up the belt. When I took the dagger and stabbed myself, I did a death scene with my pants falling down.” He added an extra fillip by trying to wriggle back into the pants like a child catching up with a hula hoop. Lahr also managed to get sufficiently annoyed at Thisbe as they spoke through the wall that he stuck his fingers in her eyes. “It was one of the biggest laughing scenes I've ever done.”

Lahr's buffoonery shared much with the Shakespearean wildness. As a clown he had always carried his exploration of sounds and gestures beyond the demands of ordinary speech. These flights of spontaneity
related to Shakespearean tradition, and made it easy for him to adapt to Bottom's style, even if it sometimes was incomprehensible to drama critics.

Interviewer:
You say that you put gnong, gnong, gnong here in the role of Bottom because you felt it fitted. Yet you may change it—why?

Lahr:
You see, the reason I may change it is this. I don't think that Shakespeare, when he wrote this, ever figured a fella would do that. I understand that whoever played Bottom made noises like a donkey or some sound that conveyed that it was braying.… I will let the audience decide … They're liable to say what the hell is he putting that in here for.

Interviewer:
Have you made a study of all sounds of animals?

Lahr:
No, no. I've made a study of nothing.

Interviewer:
You just neighed like a horse.

Lahr:
Well, you hear a horse, you hear a horse! I did it one day, and it sounded all right. I never neighed like a horse before.

Actors Talk About Acting

Even though repertory added prestige to his career, he was not anxious to carry on work in the classics. “They've asked me to do Falstaff and the gravedigger in
Hamlet
at Stratford. I thought Falstaff was too much of a departure at my age, too much of a challenge. I just didn't want to work that hard. I'm a perfectionist, when I go into a thing, I work hard. Falstaff would be a tremendous job.”

But the reviews from his Shakespeare tour are mounted on a placard in his bedroom; and his success made him something of a Shakespearean scholar at the Lambs Club. Complaining about material, yet spurning the classics; fretting over money, but looking upon repertory work as the last resort (“I guess if I needed to eat, I'd do it”), Lahr's intentions are contradicted by his instincts for theatrical excellence.

Why does he balk? His comedy has awed critics and been catered to by America's theatrical talent—but he refuses to see himself as a creator. In his eyes, he is a craftsman, in as mundane an enterprise as his father's upholstery business. Repertory theater raises an idea of work for which he has neither the social conscience nor the youthful zest. Can comedy be taught? Can actors learn from something as private as Lahr's personal movements? People have told him “yes”; he is flattered by their confidence, but cynical of the outcome. In his experience,
theatrical history is made by individuals. His theater training conceived the stage as an individual vehicle, not a group sport. He resists anything that hints at idealism. “Will you stop this artistic stuff!” he says, in one of his many final statements on the subject. “I know my business. Okay, so maybe it would be more satisfying to do
Waiting for Godot
off-Broadway or join the APA. But you can't pay your rent with a bag of satisfaction, can you?” His infuriating materialism is contradicted by another insecurity. “You've already sold me to the repertory. What makes you think they'd want me? They haven't asked me.”

Repertory theater may offer the possibility for change in the performing arts, but Lahr cannot understand the necessity for it. His eyes can only see the last testaments of old-world “quality.” Mansions have given way to skyscrapers; theater people are now “intellectuals.” Comedy, as he knew it, has gone out of vogue, its present practitioners self-conscious and limited; actors are overpraised and undertrained. Even the nature of entertainment has taken a turn for the worse in his eyes. Where once songs had sheen and polish, they are now jagged with social protest and statement that offend his sense of simple diversion. Movies (mostly foreign) astound him with their frankness. (“Why, I've seen everything there is to see on the screen. Nothing's left to the imagination.”) He sees decadence in the present without understanding the injustices of the past. “Once, when I was up in Poole's buying shoes (I think they were seventy dollars then, now they're a hundred and thirty) an old lady said something I'll never forget. She told me, ‘Young man, the one thing this generation has lost is a sense of
quality.'
And you know, she was right.”

Lahr cannot see the quality in repertory or the importance of his participation in it. Sitting in front of his television, shaking his head in disgust at the headlines, he moves away from the world. He dreams of getting away from the city he can never leave, of learning Spanish in order to live cheaply in Majorca or getting a cottage on an inland Florida waterway so he can fish and breathe “good air,” returning to New York when jobs come up. His voice rises when he contemplates his vision. He points, without looking into anyone's eyes, toward the world he fears. “Filth! Rape! Beatniks!… That's what we have today in everything. In our movies, on our stages, in our society. What is it? Can you tell me? It can't be a reaction to the War, that's been over nearly twenty years.”

Lahr's final bout with the classics was in 1966, when he played Pisthetairos in Aristophanes'
The Birds
in the first (and last) Ypsilanti Greek Theater Festival in Michigan, a curious repertory venture that spent a half million dollars to revive ancient literature and to lure stars to participate in the event. For Lahr, the part (as well as the price) was right. He was receiving thirty-five hundred dollars a week for four performances, a car, and free hotel accommodations. A similar contract had been arranged for Dame Judith Anderson (Lahr refers to her ambiguously as “The Dame”), who was starring in Aeschylus'
Oresteia
. The repertory intention reflected the usual regional confusion between cultural excellence and booster spirit. By committing itself to the star system necessary to attract tourists to the region, the Festival unwittingly initiated the economics of inevitable destruction. Before the plays even opened, the Festival had run out of funds; it was forced to solicit its operating costs of thirty-nine thousand dollars each week during its four-month engagement.

When
The New York Times
announced Lahr's adventure, it was not hard to see the proximity of Aristophanes' intention to Lahr's obsessions.

The character Mr. Lahr will play is sick of bureaucracy, high prices, and taxes. He wants to leave a war-exhausted country to live in Cloud-Cuckoo Land (a sort of Utopia situation between gods and men), where he can live in peace
.

If the impulse of Greek comedy was to thumb one's nose at authority, Lahr had an instinctive sympathy with the political anarchy Aristophanes was suggesting to Athens in the fifth century B.C.The Greek comic theater had resembled a musical revue, with songs and dancing. Its comedians had been given free rein in the festivities, with the ultimate effect being more theatrical than literary. Lahr responded to Aristophanes' free-wheeling format; Aristophanic humor, like Lahr's, came from a conservative impulse that was skeptical of change. As he admitted to
Newsweek:
“I never knew Aristophanes was a writer of comedy … I did this stuff in burlesque. His stuff is all such fun and satire—of religion, legislators, avarice, war. He was a reformer, even more than Dickens—that's what I think in my unerudite way.”

Lahr was in for more surprises. The director, Alexis Solomos, who had made his reputation directing Greek comedy, sent assistants to block Lahr's show, a Greek custom that confounded the American star. The score to
The Birds
was not available until two weeks before
opening. But most ludicrous of all, the translation on which Lahr had accepted the job (Walter Kerr's) was changed on arrival because the director, heeding the advice of a Michigan classics professor, had chosen the William Arrowsmith version. In all this confusion, the American star system and the repertory idea locked horns.

Lahr found the translation unactable, hollow instead of sensuous, antique where it should have been current. “It was stilted and dull. It wasn't funny; there weren't any jokes in it. I understand that in Greek comedy the comedian was supposed to take charge and do anything he wanted in the play.” With this vague historical mandate, Lahr instituted his own changes. In one speech Pisthetairos bemoans the many degradations to the bird kingdom, one of which is being served as food. Arrowsmith translated the Greek:

And then you're taken, they sell you as tiny hors d'oeuvres for a lunch And you're not even sold alone but lumped and bought by the bunch.

Lahr cut out everything in the stanza but the most visceral response—to eating. His rewrites are more playful and vivid:

They hunt and kill you when they can. And if that isn't enough, they fling you in a dish, throw sauce in your face, and call you a casserole, a fricassee, a la cacciatore …

In Lahr's mouth, the word “fricassee” becomes as scurrilous a blasphemy as “zounds.”

The impulse to make the classics contemporary has become fashionable over the years. If Lahr rewrote in order to perform the work, he ran into conflicts with Aristophanes' outspokenness. Lahr, who loved the vulgar, balked at blatant use of it. “Some of the lines in the translation are salacious; and I thought they would offend the audience. There's such a thing as doing double entendre cleverly. You couldn't say ‘shit' or ‘fart' and do it subtly, could you? I had to say other things. Ruby Dee played the goddess Iris, and one of my lines to her was, ‘You sail my way again and I'll lay my course up your beautiful legs; and believe me, you'll be one flabbergasted goddess when you feel the triple ram of this old hulk.' Having a following of children through
The Wizard of Oz
and the commercials, I thought it would hurt my career,
so I refused to do it. The director insisted that I speak the lines. Well, I did it for one performance in our first preview. Every time I said these words, you could feel a natural tenseness and absolute silence in the audience. No laughter—nothing. The next day, the Ypsilanti paper came out and said the play was not only vulgar but totally unacceptable to the audience in Ypsilanti, which I knew it would be. It was a church-going community, and I was almost sure that, if these words weren't deleted, the ministers would go to their pulpits and preach against it. I had no recourse but to call Equity.”