Neither Susan Egan nor Anthony Rapp really needed another project to keep them busy two years ago. She had just opened in the Broadway musical Triumph of Love, with Betty Buckley; he was winding up a lengthy run as the filmmaker Mark in the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical Rent.
But, concurrent with their theatre commitments, Egan and Rapp were enticed to spend part of November and December trying to stay warm on the streets of New York as they shot Man of the Century, a romp of an independent film which won the Audience Award at this year's Slamdance Film Festival. The hero, reporter Johnny Twennies, is stuck blindly in the 1920s while everyone around him carries on in present-day New York. Produced and written by Gibson Frazier (a college pal of Egan's) and Adam Abraham, the film stars Frazier and was directed by Abraham. Egan plays Johnny's frustrated girlfriend, Samantha Winter, a Soho art dealer, and Rapp plays Timothy Burns, an unsuccessful artist who becomes Johnny's sidekick when he takes a job at his newspaper.
A California native, Egan, 29, received a Tony and a Drama Desk nomination for her Broadway bow as Belle in Beauty and the Beast. She also appeared on Broadway in State Fair and in L.A. in Hello Again and last year's Putting It Together at the Mark Taper Forum. Her movie credits include the Disney animated film Hercules.
Rapp, 27, who hails from Joliet, Ill., won an Obie Award for Rent and also has been on Broadway in Six Degrees of Separation and Precious Sons, which earned him an Outer Critics Circle Award and a Drama Desk nomination when he was a teenager. He appeared in the Six Degrees movie, as well as Dazed and Confused and Twister.
Recently, these two busy actors met with Back Stage West at Puleo's, a Theatre District haunt in New York. The ebullient Egan, whose auburn hair is now jet black, currently stars as Sally Bowles in the much-heralded Broadway revival of Cabaret, and the laid-back Rapp recently wrapped up a stint as the title character in Broadway's You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown.
Susan Egan: I had read the script of Man of the Century in a really early incarnation in L.A. and loved it, but I thought, They're gonna find Parker Posey or somebody. At the same time, they thought, Susan keeps saying how busy she is, so she won't be able to do it.
Anthony Rapp: For me, I was walking down the street in my neighborhood and this young guy with skates rolls up to me and says, "We've been looking for you." And he hands me this script. Then I went out to dinner with Gibson and Adam, and I just really liked them and the script.
Susan: The thing about independent films is that everybody's there for the right reasons. It's like doing regional theatre-you're not doing it for the money, so you have to really love what you do.
Anthony: I've done a couple of other little movies, and this was really one of the best experiences. The morale was always really high. Gibson was producing and starring and co-wrote it-some people under that kind of pressure would crack and freak out, and he wasn't doing any of that.
Susan: Adam, too. Adam's an actor's director. I think they cast people they liked and sort of let us go. A really great film actor will give a director 10 different choices of takes and then, in editing, he can choose. But in independent film, when there's no budget, when you only have two takes and it's one master and one close-up, I think theatre actors who are used to recreating something eight shows a week and still making it look spontaneous and fresh are great because they can match continuity.
Anthony: I did The X-Files with Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny, and one day Gillian had this speech. The camera was rolling and she'd either flub her lines or she'd just not like the way it was going, so she'd just put her head down, the camera would keep rolling and then she'd start again. You get your motor running and then if you can just get in the groove maybe once out of the five times, that's enough.
Opposites' Attraction
Susan: I dropped out of the theatre major in college almost immediately and went into anthropology. I've never taken classes with one acting teacher for any length of time. So I've sort of been learning by doing and by watching. I did a national tour when I was 21 with Tommy Tune-Bye Bye Birdie. He's the one who told me to move to New York. He's the one who said, "Do you know that you're making a scene that's not funny funny? You're putting this twist on an ingenue that no one else I've seen is doing, and I think that's going to work to your advantage." I honestly think I got Belle because I cracked them up at the audition-not that I ended up playing the role that way.
Anthony: I've been studying with Sande Shurin for nine and a half years. Now that we're in such a groove, she just continues to lead me into new areas. Just the other day I was working on the material for an audition. I did the material once through, and then she asked me a question. When I answered, it's like the floodgates opened and I suddenly felt completely connected to it on a deeper level.
One of the descriptions of the character is that he's wearing this T-shirt that says "Pray. It's Good for You." So everything he does he feels completely confident and justified in because he's plugged into God. The scene has nothing to do directly with God, but that color informed everything. Whereas before, I think what I was doing was just a little more general and not quite as specific and probably not as interesting.
Susan: Gene Saks, who directed Birdie, once said to me, "You've been doing the show for four months and you're so consistent. That's really rare and great. My only direction for you now is take something out of it every single night and the moment it stops working put that last thing back in, and there's your show." It was all about working less. I feel the need to work hard or a lot, and sometimes really acting is not acting.
It's actually something I admire in your acting in this movie, because most of his scenes are with Gibson, who is so crazy and so out there that the tendency for an insecure actor would be to try and match the zaniness of Gibson. You stand perfectly still and utter two words that will throw you onto the floor after a monologue of Gibson's.
Anthony: You do the same thing
Susan: Both of us knew we couldn't keep up with Gib. Michael Caine was asked when he did Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, "What's it like to be the straight man?" He said, "There's no such thing as a straight man." There are two polar ends to comedy, and he got just as many laughs as Steve Martin by doing the exact opposite.
No Pushing, Please
Anthony: There's nothing more painful than when a show has gotten big laughs and then you have an audience that's just not laughing. It's the most painful thing, because it feels like a vacuum cleaner sucking away your energy.
Susan: Time slows down. The tendency is to push but the answer is actually to relax.
Anthony: And to go back to the truth of the situation.
Susan: Friday nights are usually not good audiences because [after] the whole week of work... they're exhausted. Tuesdays are usually lousy. Saturdays are hard on actors 'cause it's a two-show day. Thursdays are my favorite night.
Anthony: With Rent, we were exhausted so much of the time, but I don't think our performances suffered. We found that like athletes who are exhausted and still break the world record, you get into a zone; it's just that the inner experience is different than when you feel really on top. But sometimes the more exhausted performances are actually the more interesting-it brings out a vulnerability or a rawness.
Susan: If you're not pushing. I recently blew out my voice, which I'd never done before, and missed a week and a half. I wanted to sound like a really horrible non-singer as Sally Bowles, and the way I was achieving that was by singing incorrectly, which is so stupid. When I came back I wasn't a hundred percent healthy yet, so I felt like I wasn't giving this great show.
My co-star Michael Hayden told me that when he was doing Carousel, he threw his back out in the middle of the show and he still had to do "Soliloquy," which is the hardest song in musical theatre. He said what he did was stand perfectly still, and that was the best performance he said he'd ever done. He realized how much energy he had been wasting in that number, how superfluous all that was and how the number meant so much more without him doing antics. So he said, "Just relax into it; you don't have to do a lot." BSW