You can trust my characters. Whatever else they are — and they’re not always nice — at least they’re upfront. They don’t hide anything. They scream, laugh, cry, jump around and get drunk. But our society makes people into hidden people — stiff upper lip, keep quiet, don’t show it. I suppose if there is any revolutionary aspect to my films it’s that I want to say I don’t approve of this.
John Cassavetes
I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who are frightened of life, who are desperate to reach out to another person. But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really.
Tennessee Williams
The mind loops together disparate things, magnetized through personal associations. Sometimes the unconscious does the heavy lifting. Memories aren’t held in the brain. They’re somewhere else.
Art is how I locate myself in time.
John Cassavetes’ Opening Night (1977) and Tennessee Williams’ The Two-Character Play (originally called Out Cry, written in 1966 and published in 1973) aren’t two separate works of art for me. They represent my dawning awareness of what kind of life I wanted to live (indeed, I was already living it), and — in retrospect — both were eerie prophecies of what the years ahead would bring.
The melancholic ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitis wrote, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” I discovered Opening Night and The Two-Character Play in the same year. I have lived with them ever since. I don’t just discover new things in them, I experience them as totally new works of art. It’s “not the same river” and I am “not the same [woman].” Experience brings complications. You learn things you perhaps never wanted to learn. You’re not necessarily wiser. Sometimes you’re just haunted. But you have to go on. What is the alternative?
Opening Night and The Two-Character Play both came at relatively late stages in the careers of Cassavetes and Williams. Both had been “doing it” for a long time, they were hailed as artists bringing in new eras, they both experienced a “falling off” of acceptance. Opening Night and The Two-Character Play were both rejected by the public and the critics. The notices were vicious. To me, though, they lived in the present, messages in a bottle washing up on my shore.
In the early ’90s I extricated myself from my first relationship in what felt like a daring prison break. I was living miserably in Los Angeles at the time, and decided, on impulse, to move to Chicago. I arrived with just a suitcase of clothes. I crashed with a friend. I started auditioning. I got cast in something right away.
Almost immediately I was immersed in the world I always dreamt of: actors, ghost lights on empty stages, rehearsals, cast parties. I had flings with wild guys, I took runs along the lake shore. The sense of freedom went to my head. Into this blasted-open space, like a one-two punch, came Opening Night and The Two-Character Play.
Cassavetes was one of the guiding stars of my life already. His career seemed like a utopia: creating his own projects, working with friends. In the days before streaming, some of his films were hard (or impossible) to see. Love Streams (1984) was the Holy Grail (virtually unseeable, unless you had a VCR and could find a second-hand copy. This changed when Criterion released it on DVD and Blu-Ray in 2014). Opening Night was damn near inaccessible. But then an arthouse theater in Chicago put on a Cassavetes retrospective. My friends and I saw as many of the films as we could. The headliner was Opening Night.
I know now, because there is an Internet, that Opening Night screened out of competition at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival, the film’s re-entry into the industry that rejected it. Opening Night didn’t have a theatrical run back in 1977, and Cassavetes tried (and failed) to distribute it himself. Roger Ebert finally reviewed it in 1991, fourteen years after the movie was made.
John Cassavetes, Ben Gazzara, Gena Rowlands, in Opening Night
The plot description cannot convey the film’s unnerving power, but briefly: Myrtle Gordon (Gena Rowlands) is a famous actress rehearsing a new play. The director (Ben Gazzara) can’t break through Myrtle’s resistance to the play. The playwright (Joan Blondell) is at her wits’ end. Cassavetes is Maurice, the leading man trying to “act” opposite Myrtle. In the opening scene, one of Myrtle’s adoring fans is hit by a car and killed. Myrtle is haunted (literally) by the ghost of this young fan, who keeps showing up with increasingly malevolent intent. Myrtle’s mental state deteriorates. On opening night, Myrtle shows up, falling-down drunk. It takes the entire cast and backstage crew to help her through. She goes off-script, and she and Maurice do a wild improvisation, turning what is a melodrama into a slapstick comedy. The audience loves it.
My friend Mitchell and I were pinned to our seats. Rowlands’ eyes were harrowing, especially on a big screen.Rowlands doesn’t exist in the center of a moment. She ventures out into outer space, risking more. She said once, “Some of the time, when you’re walking out there where the air is thin, you just hope you can walk back again.” I call her a “thin air actress” because of this. There aren’t many: Isabelle Huppert, Judy Garland, Cicely Tyson, Theresa Russell, to name a few. You wonder how they can breathe up there.
Perhaps those who don’t spend their time rehearsing plays find Myrtle’s shenanigans incomprehensible. What is the big deal? Just say the lines. But it is a big deal. Cassavetes said once in an interview, “[The actors’] one goal is to communicate a precise thought in a way that can be clearly understood. It’s a very difficult job.” Actors always understand Opening Night. I didn’t find the film “surreal”. To me, it was like, “Oh yeah, that’s last Thursday night.”
When I first saw the film, I was just a little bit older than the teenage ghost stalking the middle-aged actress. Now I understand Myrtle. I see in her resistance a tough-minded last stand against the limitations placed on women when they reach a certain age. Myrtle worries if she plays the role as written, it will end her career. (There’s also a good possibility the play stinks. Any actor knows what it feels like to be trapped in a bad play. You will do anything to avoid going down with the ship.)
The first time the ghost appears to Myrtle, the dressing room mirror distorts Rowlands’ face for a moment, a sign the “uncanny” has arrived. The back of the ghost’s head fills half the screen, and Myrtle slowly turns to stare head-on at the apparition. Her eyes gleam wildly and she is frozen in terror: the ghost can’t be real and yet she sees it. Rowlands’ face has a frozen “bright” expression, like she’s reaching for the comforting scaffolding of politesse to maneuver this unprecedented moment. In the massive close-up of Rowlands’ face that follows, she cracks open with a bone-chilling smile, mouthing the word, “Hello.”
I felt something. A presentiment. There was poison in me already and it would obliterate the next decade and a half. I believe that somewhere I already knew this. A gong deep inside of me was struck. I felt its reverberations. I thought, “I won’t sleep tonight.” I didn’t. I got a sense of what the road ahead would look like. It took me years to find the courage to see the film again.
Around this time, I made a new friend, a director and acting teacher named Ted Altschuler. He founded a theater company in Milwaukee, and then moved to Chicago, where he co-ran an acting workshop called The Actors Gym which I attended. I think Ted was the one who introduced me to The Two-Character Play. Like most actors, I was intimately familiar with A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Rose Tattoo, and – my favorite – Summer and Smoke. I had never heard of The Two-Character Play.
In this case too: a plot summary elides the film’s unnerving power, but briefly: Siblings Felice and Clare are actors with once-illustrious careers. Now they’re doing glorified summer stock. They show up at a theater to start a run of the new play Felice has written, a play called The Two-Character Play. Their acting troupe deserts them, leaving a note: “You and your sister are INSANE.” Felice and Clare’s father was an astrologer who murdered their mother and then committed suicide when they were children. They never moved past the trauma. In Felice’s new play, they re-enact that terrible day. This will (hopefully) exorcize the hold the event has over them. (One can’t blame the acting company for bowing out of this project.) However, the theater is empty, there is no audience. The crew did not show up with the set. They run through the play anyway. Just like in Opening Night, Clare resists the play as written. She goes rogue, improvising, forcing Felice to react. What will happen if they reach the end? There’s a real fear the prop gun will be used on each other.
Ted and I would get together at his apartment to work on the play, just for ourselves. To this day, I have it memorized. We took notes. We dreamt up our ideal production. One of our ideas was to put it up after-hours at a big theater, preferably during the run of another play, so there’d be a set standing. Felice and Clare would be orphans stranded on the wrong set. The audience would sit in folding chairs on the stage. (I still think this is a great idea.) We talked about what famous actors should play the siblings. John Cassavetes was long dead but we gasped at the thought of Cassavetes and Rowlands playing these roles.
Felice and Clare are siblings, and this adds poignancy when you consider the tragic fate of Williams’ sister Rose, institutionalized and then lobotomized in 1943. On March 24, 1943, Williams wrote in his journal:
A cord breaking.
1000 miles away.
Rose. Her head cut open.
A knife thrust in her brain.
Me. Here. Smoking.
Rose Isabel Williams, Tennessee Williams’ sister, who haunts his work
The Glass Menagerie was obviously a way for Williams to not just assuage his guilt, but to admit it.. As Tom says in the play’s famous final monologue:
Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be! I reach for a cigarette, I cross the street, I run into the movies or a bar, I buy a drink, I speak to the nearest stranger — anything that can blow your candles out! For nowadays the world is lit by lightning! Blow out your candles, Laura — and so goodbye …
Williams was once asked by an interviewer what was the key to happiness? Williams replied, “Insensitivity, I guess.”
An astonishing answer, which, like Opening Night, like The Two-Character Play, has vibrated through me for decades. It shifts like light through a prism. It’s important to remember Williams’ thought: “These seemingly fragile people are the strong ones, really.” He said he had never written a victim.
Ted and I both ended up in New York. In 2013, there was an Off-Broadway production of The Two-Character Play, starring Amanda Plummer and Brad Dourif. I loved seeing it “on its feet,” but there was something missing. The actors, of course, were wonderful, but they “played crazy” a lot of the time, which side-stepped the play’s deeper truths. The same year, we got wind of a production put on by Regina Bartkoff and Charles Schick, in their gallery/theatre space on the Lower East Side. There were about ten seats in the theater. To date, it is one of the most memorable live theatrical experiences I’ve ever witnessed. I will never forget it. Ted and I were incredibly moved. Here, here was the play we dreamt of so many years before.
Regina Bartkoff and Charlie Schick in Two- Character Play
Regina and Charles understood the humor, the mania, but they also felt the “void” out there in the dark, the silence Felice and Clare find so frightening. In the final moment of The Two-Character Play, Felice and Clare decide to “go back into” Felice’s play, to make their way to the end. Plummer and Dourif played it as the characters choosing to avoid reality, choosing madness. There was a pathos in it. But Regina and Charles played the moment gently, lovingly. Felice and Clare would find their way back to reality by going into the play. Art redeems and heals. Their ending was redemptive, instead of tragic.
In Opening Night, the playwright asks the resistant Myrtle: “Tell me what this play doesn’t express?” Myrtle, terrified of the void in the dark, is at a loss. She finally says, “…. Hope?”
It took me a long long time to perceive Opening Night and The Two Character Play as works powered by hope, not fear. It wasn’t just the hope of the characters striving to live authentically, but the hope of the artists — Cassavetes and Williams — who were willing to venture out into thin air, a place where very few survive, and bring back to us the stories of what they learned.
Tennessee Williams