Sitting down with Samantha Mathis and Linda Lavin to discuss their respective L.A. stage debuts in Donald Margulies' two-hander Collected Stories at Geffen Playhouse, it's immediately apparent this show has been well cast.
Lavin, like her character Ruth Steiner, a successful no-nonsense short story author, is a veteran of the arts who's seen it all-or at least most of it. Mathis, like the eager mentee Lisa she plays onstage, is a novice to the craft, in this case the theatre, and admits she appreciates the chance to work with a master.
However, the similarities end there. In Margulies' play, Ruth's mentorship of Lisa leads to betrayal, All About Eve-fashion, as Lisa turns Ruth's private memories over to public consumption and literary acclaim. On the other hand, the relationship between Lavin and Mathis is purely positive and supportive on both ends. These are two performers at different stages in their careers who clearly convey great respect for each other.
Also, while Lavin's performance accolades (a Tony for her turn as Kate Jerome in Broadway Bound, a recent Tony nom for The Diary of Anne Frank, and two Golden Globes for her career-defining title role in Alice) correspond with the success of her fictional counterpart, Mathis is by no means the knock-kneed novice who enters the stage in scene one of Collected Stories. Mathis began her professional acting career at 16 and has appeared in such films as Pump Up the Volume, Little Women, Jack and Sarah, and Broken Arrow. New to the stage, she nonetheless has as many solid on-screen credits as some working actresses twice her age.
Collected Stories is the first play at the Geffen to be helmed by producing director Gil Cates. He kindly allowed his two actresses a brief rehearsal break during previews to discuss their work on the play, the differences between acting onstage and on-screen, and the waning privacy of off-camera life in today's scandal-obsessed society.
Samantha: It's a very intense working relationship when you are doing a two-character piece.
Linda: That's right. "Bring on the dancing boys." That's what I always say. "Where are they?"
Samantha: We just need a slide show in between scenes. Something.
Linda: It's tough in terms of the quantity of the material. Just learning it in the short amount of time-three weeks, which is what we had until we started tech-ing. It's only the two of you and it's a real yakkety-yak piece. There's not a lot of mime in it. These are two very verbal people, so there's a lot to learn.
There's a famous story-apocryphal or not, it's a wonderful story: Tallulah Bankhead was in the audience of a two-character play many years ago and two-character plays do have the potential to be boring, since it's just a dialogue. If it's not really good material, which this is, it can be really boring. And this particular play was evidently one of those. Well into the evening, she couldn't wait to leave the theatre, and one of the characters went to the window and said, "There's somebody downstairs standing against the lamplight." And she yelled out from the audience, "Invite him in!" I sometimes feel like that.
Samantha: We almost couldn't get the onstage window closed the first night of tech and I said, "Well, you could get the super." If only one of the guys from backstage would have entered, we suddenly would have had a different play.
I've never really done theatre before, so to be starting with something that's so intense is a challenge. We really are reliant on each other for the energy and the relationship. We're all we have out there.
Linda: It's just us chickens. And on a daily basis in rehearsal, there's no release from each other. I've done a few two-character plays, mainly John Guare plays-two characters or two actors playing many characters-and you can't work eight hours a day on it. You'll either kill yourself or the other person, because it's a long time to be in the room with just one other person. (Plus the director who gets to stand outside and enjoy watching you for whatever reasons-voyeuristic, I think.)
I think that there's always a sloppy or blurred boundary, especially in the exploration process, between the characters and the people playing them. Especially when you connect as deeply as I do with this character. She's a mentor, a mother, a teacher, a controller; she's older, wiser, less trusting, more jaded, full of fury, opinions, and experience. And all those things are true of me. So it's impossible for me not to examine my character through my own perspective and bring my life to the character. Where one stops and one begins is for me to know. And of course there are things about Ruth that are not like me.
There are directors out there who will not let actors go to dinner together after rehearsal, because what's happening in the piece is so essential to keep separate from palling around and talking about it. And my work, the more I do it the more I want it to be private. I really don't like sitting around and talking about how I'm approaching this character or project and how it relates to my family. It just has to be my secret and my private work.
We've been affectionate with each other in ways that might bring some of that light into the relationship onstage and might not. It might be wrong for the relationship onstage. We've been ourselves. Of course, we haven't spent a lot of time together, because we're so tired at the end of the day.
Samantha: It's been such a consuming process. The level of dialogue alone that we've had to learn...
Linda: I'll never do another two-person show. I'll let everyone know that right now. Slap me if I say I'm interested. I can't imagine wanting to do this again.
Samantha: My acting coach said to me, "What were you thinking? You couldn't just get into a nice ensemble cast? You had to throw yourself straight into the mouth of the lion. You've got to go for the gusto." And I said, "Well, that's me."
I came into this wanting to do the best that I could do and put my best foot forward. I was very eager to kind of figure things out right away. And I tend to be very impatient. But watching your process... you're very patient with yourself. You let yourself figure things out, and let things happen organically.
Linda: That's learned.
Samantha: I've admired watching that, watching you work. You figure things out. You let behavior arise out of that. For me, I was so nervous. I wanted to be off-book the first day, ready to go, the eager beaver. Which is very much like my character in many ways, so that certainly lends itself to the process.
Linda: When I am onstage, it's about need and obstacle, the who, the what, and the where. And of course, when I find myself forgetting that and just going for the result, I'm alarmed that I've jumped those steps, because that's so important to me when I'm viewing someone else doing it. So it helps me enormously to watch other actors and to watch young actors. To watch all actors-theatre and film actors-is inspirational to me. I love to see work while I'm in the process of developing work. When I'm in the run of a play, I love to go to movies, to go to the theatre and get inspired by something outstanding. It gives me a real surge of optimism.
For me, it's all the same. There is no different process for me-film, television or theatre. I don't believe they are different processes. As Ruth would say, "I think it's sheer and utter bullshit" to separate film and TV acting from theatre acting. The truth is the truth and phony is phony. You're either in the moment or you're not. You have an action and you're playing an action or you're not. You're relating to whatever the people or the circumstances are in that moment in that scene or you're not.
If there's a camera in front of you, that's just the closest an audience could ever get in a theatre. So it has to do with a level of volume, but not a level of intensity, not in terms of the way a want becomes a need. I've never understood why there is such a big deal made between acting on film and acting onstage.
Of course, Restoration comedy is a different style. But I'm not talking about styles or eras. When you're talking about contemporary work, I think that great actors translate and do the work onstage as well as they do on film. It's not, for me, a different process. I have learned a lot from doing film, in fact, where stagework is concerned. I am affected by the work in the different venues in terms of really trying to get to the simple truth. And not the projected truth. Not the need to show the audience what I'm feeling, but to feel what I'm feeling. And to tell the story through the behavior of the character in accordance with what she's feeling and what she needs.
Samantha: I'm learning as I go, and I think that everything you said is the truth. Although, for me in my personal process, what I'm finding is there is a difference in how the work is structured. Because when you're doing your film work, you've got maybe six or eight pages a day. So you're really focused on that scene and you want to nail that scene. And one thing that Gil has said to me is, "Look, you're not going to nail it every day. It's not going to happen."
So what I'm realizing is that this is a tremendous opportunity for me to be completely satisfied and fulfilled by the exploration, to be as present as I can be every night and know that every night will be different. That is the joy and I'm learning not to be frustrated by that. One night I may get something right and the next night I may not. Because when you do a film, ultimately your goal is to get it on film that day. You can't go back and say, "Guess what? I was brushing my teeth last night and I figured it all out." You can't do that.
Linda: You feel that, though. You just can't shoot it again. You've never really nailed it in terms of your potential as an artist and as a human being. You nailed it that day as far as you got it.
Samantha: As far as you got it. It's a process.
Linda: That's the good thing about the theatre. I'm not a fan of long runs, but the great thing about the theatre is that it can get better.
Samantha: Yes.
Linda: And so you do have a chance, as you've said, to correct it or change it or make up for what you felt you lost the day before, or what you didn't get. And learn from that. I know in the last two previews we've learned a lot. We've not made the same mistakes, we've just made new mistakes.
Samantha: Definitely.
Linda: And a film is a memory forever. You make it at a specific time and the director or editor helps you out with the choices that are made. And they're not necessarily your choices as an actor ultimately. But you contributed to them, because you did perform them. How somebody assembles them is something else.
I think that's all very interesting and part of the differences of the mediums, but for me the technique is the same.
Keeping Private Lives Private
Linda: When Alice was on every week, and then on in re-runs and I traveled back and forth from the East to the West Coast and the show was in syndication, it was astonishing for me. For instance, during that time I visited Verona, Italy. And the bellman in the hotel recognized me from "the diner." He knew the word "diner," though he didn't speak much English.
But even with that kind of widespread exposure, I've kept myself very private. I've lived a very quiet life. I've never been all that provocative. It's been a pretty simple life, a work-filled life, and a family-oriented life. But this play is about more than the need for privacy. There's something that's going on right now that parallels it. It was in The New York Times recently. J. D. Salinger was involved with a very young woman many years ago. She's written a book about it and now she's selling maybe seven to a dozen letters that he had written to her over the years of their relationship. He is beyond private, reclusive, and now she's auctioning these letters off at Sotheby's because she has children and says they need to go to school and she needs money for that. I don't fault her for this. I just keep thinking of my mother saying, "Don't write anything down if you don't want anybody to see it." Because those letters belong to her.
I'm not trying to get inside her skin, but what is interesting is the heartbreak that occurs when the sadness of what happened to two people becomes so public, as we've seen happen time and again this past year. In these last few years, we've seen domestic dramas played out beyond anything we ever wanted to or deserved to observe. A lot of it is none of our business. But a lot of it is valuable because there is a dialogue going on about abuse, sexual and emotional, psychological, the abuse of women. Those areas of life-the abuse of children-that weren't even in the lexicon, that certainly weren't written about, years ago, are now common to us as individuals and families. We are enlightened, hopefully, by what is going on around us.
And I think that's healthy. That people are moved to examine themselves through watching other people. So this play is about the privacy of a woman who is enormously mistrusting from a lifetime of solitude and finally allows herself to trust somebody-what I play are her feelings of betrayal, and J.D. Salinger may have those feelings, too.
Samantha: Although it's a positive step that we're talking about these issues that 20 or 30 years ago no one was discussing, on another level, the media has taken these issues and trivialized them. People's search for fame and their 15 minutes has grown to such a degree that they will air their dirty laundry on television just to be on television. Lisa's opinion of what is private is: It's no longer private if you tell it to me because it's out there.
Everything is out there now in this mass media society. I'm on the Internet naked. It's not me. My head is on some woman's body. My brother sees this. He says, You're on the Internet naked. That's not me, but I have no recourse. There's nothing I can do, because it's out there. I guess the main argument that Lisa makes in justifying her behavior is that once you put it out there, it's not yours anymore. And I guess that is reflective of the state of things today. And in that regard in my private life I've been completely abused. And there's very little I can do about it. That's frustrating.
I've had great difficulty coming to believe in and support my character in some ways. I much more identify with Ruth's opinions.
Linda: The important thing to remember in all this is that no permission was asked. No permission of J.D. Salinger, as far as we know. If he could at least have been included in that decision. In Collected Stories, Ruth's position is that if you'd only asked me my advice, let alone my permission, it would be different. But it's the lack of that that really pains her.
F. Scott Fitzgerald said, "Writers are whores," and we all know, if we've ever been involved with writers, that you'd better watch out what you say, because they will put it in their next play if it's interesting enough. Then, guess what, you hope that you'll be interesting enough. I've always felt that about certain writers that I've been close to: My God, I hope I'm smart enough to come up in the next movie or play.
Whether it's the media or whether it's our own egotistic, narcissistic need to be published, to be made immortal, to be quoted, to be revered in the press or in photographs or in paintings or in architecture or in film, to be remembered, to make a difference. We all want that. And unfortunately the psychopathology of certain people is to be remembered in ways that are devastatingly futile and fatal. But I don't know if today is any different from the way it's always been, except we know a lot more about what's going on than we ever did before. BSW