Playwright Harold Pinter famously inserts pauses and silences into his stage directions, and actors find ways to fill those speechless moments with subtext. But what if the silence in a script calls for the seemingly passive behavior of waiting?
All too often I see actors standing awkwardly, self-consciously, arms dangling at unnatural angles, all too obviously waiting—usually for their turn to talk—with nothing tangible to do, sometimes not even a place to sit or a set piece to lean against. Uta Hagen wrote (in A Challenge for the Actor) about the necessity of waiting actively, not passively—which doesn't mean inventing arbitrary movements or actions. By way of a "waiting" exercise, her book shows how to create an organic, detailed, and specific subtext that arises from knowing exactly where you are physically, where you have come from and what happened there, your specific purpose in waiting, and where you're going and what might happen when you arrive. "Establish your bodily adjustment to the specified distances," she adds.
Elsewhere, she mentions the importance, if you're blocked, of looking out into the darkened house (which you're very likely to do if you're, say, waiting for a bus), of connecting with something specific over the heads of the audience. It could be a rear exit sign, or the rim of the balcony—anything, or any series of things, to prevent your gaze from being all wavery and unfocused.
When I saw Ken Albers' fine adaptation of Friedrich Dürrenmatt's The Visit at Oregon Shakespeare Festival recently, there was a long, crucial scene in Act Two that provided a brilliant illustration of how to wait. The central figure, a middle-aged everyman named Josef Schell, arrives at a train station with the clear intention of taking a train to escape what he knows will be a hideous fate if he remains: The townspeople will force him to pay for a bad deed he committed as a young man and for which he has, up to this point, not admitted guilt. In Dürrenmatt's original text, the accusatory townspeople gather at the train station and verbally threaten Schell as he waits for the train.
But Albers (who also directed) removed all Dürrenmatt's dialogue from those pages. The result is a completely nonverbal, 16-minute scene that is one of the most suspenseful I've ever seen onstage. During that time, Schell arrives with suitcase and sits down nervously awaiting the train. One by one the townspeople wander in as though for a silent tailgate party, each involved in a habitual, mundane activity. The teacher grades papers, the pastor reads his Bible, the mayor suns himself, the policeman naps, the artist set up his canvas, the girl puts on makeup, two women share a picnic. Three trains pass by without stopping. Schell waits and watches. The fourth stops. For a good two minutes, Schell struggles internally with whether or not to board the train and escape his fate. Finally, he—well, never mind.
"We went into rehearsal with a basic outline of the scene," Albers explains. He was inspired by a particularly harrowing moment in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, in which Tippi Hedren sits on a bench outside a schoolhouse, smoking and waiting for a friend. Unbeknownst to her, birds begin to gather at her back. Finally she turns around to face wall-to-wall birds. Albers wanted to create that sense of menace, with the townspeople as the birds amassing slowly behind Schell as he sits downstage looking out into the audience at the railroad track.
Richard Elmore, who plays Schell, says that when he first enters, his adjustment is that this is a safe situation. But even though he can't see the other characters as they enter upstage of and behind him, he's highly aware of them invading his space, intruding upon his world, and he gives that anxiety free reign internally. Fueled entirely by other characters entering, that anxiety builds as the first three trains clatter by. "I wonder why the people are there," he says. "I'm reacting to what I [imagine] each of those characters is giving me. For example, the policeman enters carrying a gun. That in itself is threatening. He pulled a gun on me in the previous scene." He is aware, too, that his co-actors may be in different moods on different nights—director Albers encourages following impulses as long as they don't detract from the story—and he tracks those moods.
Necessarily, and especially because this is early in the run, Elmore's mind is also filled with technical requirements. "I'm worrying about finding my light, hitting my marks, finding coins in my pocket, worrying about cue lights that I have to track in order to get up and look for the train." He is also very conscious, in the silence, of the audience. "Last night was deathly quiet," he says. "I got almost nothing from them. A student audience gives you back a lot—gasping, vocalization—which lets you know you're achieving something."
In the final two minutes, as the fourth train waits and the townsfolk halt their activities to watch Schell intently, Elmore has been directed to stand up, make a halting move toward his suitcase, stand next to it for about 20 seconds, halfway pick it up, spot a movement in the crowd, look at the crowd fully, pick up the suitcase all the way, decide to get on the train, decide not to get on the train, then…. "That's where the whole play turns for me as an actor," says Elmore. That's where the character first begins to face his guilt. Each night, finding that moment of truth is slightly different. Some nights he arrives at it sooner, other times later. If the audience seems restless, he works faster. "It's all very technical," he explains.
In rehearsal, Albers presented a parallel scenario to give the cast a sense of the atmosphere: "It's like when you've done something wrong, and Dad walks into the room and just sits there waiting for you to decide to confess, and finally you do because you can't stand it anymore."
Elmore was able to conjure for himself the sense of horror and fear by re-creating some of the terror he experienced as a soldier in Vietnam. "Terror is terror no matter what the situation," he says.
We've strayed from the subject of silent waiting while acting, but it's interesting to note how Elmore juggles several elements during the long, tense scene: technical cues, acute awareness of and response to the other actors even though he can't see them, awareness of audience, and inner thoughts and images chosen to enhance a sense of anxiety. Although he did very little, never did I see him indicate.
I asked Albers how the cast reacted when he informed them they'd have no lines for 16 minutes or so. "It's a fascinating acting exercise for them," he says. "Actors without dialogue are very often uncomfortable in the theatre. It's tricky. There were times in rehearsal when an actor would say, 'Is the audience going to think it's a mistake?' and my response was always, 'I don't care. The point is, you have nothing to say. You're filling the silences with whatever actions you're playing, with your relationships.'" He adds, "As an actor myself, I have a great fear of those pauses looking like something other than what's intended…. It's always a problem when the objective is to wait. The act of waiting is unpredictable because one never knows what will occur during a wait. It's uncomfortable in real life and onstage."
In The Visit, of course, the stakes during that waiting scene are incredibly high. Actors often find themselves waiting in less heightened, more mundane situations, which is where Hagen's exercise comes in handy.
Hagen concludes that when you understand how to find an "occupation" while waiting, "you will be able to find an existence on a bare stage to sustain you for a minute or two without any need to perform little 'entertaining' tasks, without actor's tension or anxiety about being boring. You will be as interesting and as interested as a cat who waits for its playmate to move…."
Her metaphor nicely captures the waiting scene in The Visit, in which Schell appears to be the mouse and the watchful crowd the cat. Although Elmore performs no "entertaining tasks," as Hagen puts it—and, with technical concerns, is not 100 percent in the moment