Al Pacino's reputation as a film actor definitely precedes him. But it is his work in the theatre that sparked his love for acting. And not surprisingly, the Academy Award-winning actor returns to his roots on the stage as often as his film career allows.
Luckily for Angelenos, Pacino will be soon be "allowed" to star in and direct Eugene O'Neill's rarely performed Hughie, June 19-July 25 at the Mark Taper Forum. Pacino cited its short running time-the play lasts only one hour-as a reason for its scarce appearances onstage. That's not to say that Hughie is a West Coast premiere, of course: East West Players presented a staging in 1986, and elsewhere Jason Robards appeared in the play at the Huntington Hartford Theatre, as well as in a filmed version. O'Neill's short character study finds a failed gambler (played by Pacino, who also directs) coming off a five-day drinking binge talking to a night clerk (Paul Benedict) at a seedy hotel in the early morning hours in midtown Manhattan.
Pacino made his Broadway debut in Don Peterson's Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie? in 1969, which garnered him a Tony Award. His other Broadway credits include lead roles in The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, for which he earned another Tony, and Richard III, which became the subject of his documentary, Looking for Richard, in which he starred and directed. He received honors for this directing effort from the Director's Guild of America.
Off-Broadway, Pacino has appeared in Israel Horovitz's The Indian Wants the Bronx; The Connection; Tiger at the Gates; Hello, Out There; The Local Stigmati; Camino Real, and Mamet's American Buffalo.
Pacino previously appeared in and directed Hughie at the Circle in the Square theatre in NYC in 1996. He and his co-star, Paul Benedict, recently spoke with the local press about the upcoming performance of Hughie and how they brought the play to life.
Question: What are your expectations of Los Angeles theatre audiences compared to New York audiences?
Al Pacino: I've traveled a lot doing live theatre in my life. Audiences vary in New York, too. It is sort of provincial in a way. When you go to different spots in New York, you get a whole other reaction to a play. I remember doing theatre after I had become successful in movies, and the live audiences changed a little for a time. They'd talk to the stage; they'd talk to me. They'd call me Al. One time [doing a play] I remember seeing in the first row there were a lot of teenage girls with my picture on their sweaters. This was many years ago, of course.
Q: To say that Hughie has not been done often is an understatement. How did you come to this play? Had you seen a production of it?
Pacino: No, I haven't. I never saw a production. I've been aware of the play for many years because my friend, Charlie Laughton, liked it a lot. We read it together when I was really young. When you're in acting school you read a lot of plays. I read all of O'Neill's plays. I hadn't decided to do it, except that I thought it was a beautiful piece of writing.
There was always the question of the hotel clerk's thoughts, which O'Neill wrote in italics in the play, and that is, How to translate that and turn it into a viable stage dialogue? That was the idea here. We often thought of presenting it as a reading so that we could read the entire play to an audience, but that would miss an aspect of the play that was very important to it. The audience wouldn't hear what was going on inside the hotel clerk's mind. So we came up with this way of doing it, as a dialogue, that tries to accommodate that.
I would imagine that if it were performed without those parts, the thoughts, it would become a kind of monologue. The result would be different. It wouldn't be what O'Neill wrote.
Q: Why did you decide to do this play again after two years?
Pacino: I think there's a tradition in the theatre, before movies and television, when actors had repertoires, and they did throughout their careers the same plays over again, and it was a part of their thing. What I find interesting is when you come back to a role, it does change. You're in the process of change. The world is changing, our way of looking at things. That's the whole thing of theatre-that it changes every night.
Q: What draws you to a particular character, and how do you go about developing a character?
Pacino: That's such a large question for me, for some reason. In the theatre, you have the advantage of getting more rehearsal. You also, if you're doing a revival, have the advantage of having immediate [audience] approval that the play does communicate things. In a play, you're getting a lot of it from the material itself.
In a movie, for example, I just played a football coach, so I knew one of the first things I had to do was really get to know about football, what it's like to be a coach. Some actors don't do that. I've found it helps me, so it's kind of a personal research. But in the theatre, I find that just doing the play and reading the play over and over again, because we have the luxury of time, is really helpful.
Q: What was the challenge of being both actor and director?
Pacino: When you're working as the actor, you usually don't want the director around anyway. But the reason I directed this is because I had this idea of how to present it. I thought at the time, Why should I go through the process of finding a director and then having to put my vision on to him or her? This way, I didn't have to go through that. So I decided to take it on. I knew I had the support and help of the people around me.
Paul Benedict: With Al as a director, he had this vision of the play that was so strong. The play is only an hour long. He said, "Every time we pick up the script, we'll go all the way through it and we won't stop. We'll never dissect scenes and moments, we'll just get to know the characters by reading the script." And we would do that. Once we were off the script, we'd do the same thing. When we started the first words of the play, we went all the way through. It was a very brave thing to do. Most directors will say, "Wait, stop, I want you to do this." But Al gave us the chance to breathe into the characters, to let them live.
Pacino: And no one was there to watch us and be bored. I had a director once fall asleep on us during rehearsal. It's a process where you just try to inhabit [the characters] and just live through it. It maybe does help not having anyone there. On the other hand, having a director there is an advantage, too, because they try to talk to you about different moments, and it's always helpful. But there's something to just living through it.
Benedict: But Al didn't vacate his job as director to make this easy. Al's vision was stunning. He said something to me once which means a great deal. He said this incident, these two men in a hotel lobby, at four o'clock in the morning on the West Side of New York, happened in 1928, but we're not bringing it up to date and we're not going back then. The audience is not looking at it that way. What happened is, it took place, and the way energy goes out into the universe, the way it spirals out into the universe, we are now sitting here in present day and watching the echo of these passing thoughts. It's a very subtle difference. And it's why our production is somewhat surreal. It's like an echo of something that happened on a night many years ago just passing in front of you now. I think that's a wonderful vision.
Q: Would you like to see more of your colleagues in Hollywood take the plunge and do some stage work?
Pacino: I think whoever does stage work, it's really a personal thing. I like it because I'm at home there. It's where I started, so I feel comfortable in that environment. As far as my colleagues, I think if it works for you, if it's your kind of thing, that's great.
To me, movies are a wonderful thing. They're great and I love seeing them. But they're not as fun to do as the stage for a lot of reasons. One mainly is that with film, it's a very fragmented existence. You go in and you might do a minute a day. It's a wearing kind of thing. You have to approach it in a different way. Some film artists can do that and do it so damn beautifully. It's always been difficult for me.
There's another thing, and I speak for certain people when I say this: We're tightrope walkers. When you walk the wire in a movie, the wire is painted on the floor, but when you walk it on the stage, it's a hundred feet high without a net. So what that does to you-it asks your body, the chemicals in your body, to become a certain way and take you to a certain state. And your whole life is determined by that state. You've got to do it, because you're on the wire and there's no going back again like you can in the movies. That does a whole different thing to you psychologically. It's with you all the time-you know you've gotta walk that wire. BSW