Prospero's Staff
We don't talk about stage actors all that much anymore. A conversation about a memorable performance is more likely to be about a film; it's as if we're so involved in the life of Angelina Jolie (and honestly, I've had a subscription to Us Weekly for longer than I care to admit), that we can hardly believe it when she turns into someone else entirely -- let alone Marianne Pearl. There's no shiny veneer on a stage actor -- unless it's a few beads of sweat. When I was a kid, every summer our family would drive up to the Stratford Festival in Canada (which is where, I'm convinced, the best theater in North America is performed), to see an absurd amount of theater in far too few days. The schedule was brutally delightful: two plays a day, with a lot of reading by the river and food and drink sandwiched in between. The problem is, when you see fourteen productions in seven days, you're likely to forget a bunch of them. There are whole performances that have just floated right out of my head. (My mother used to describe the need for a "great big intellectual burp" at the end of each trip.) Sadly, they were most likely wonderful productions, but they didn't move me; and seemed to elicit admiration rather then real empathy. Of the plays that stuck, I would wager that most of them featured actor William Hutt. Hutt died yesterday at the age of 87; he was, I think what you'd call a "grand old man" of the Canadian stage; I had only to see that white-silver head of glinting on stage to become rapt. In a Much Ado About Nothing that eventually traveled to the United States, he wrested humor from a small role, in a scene that owed quite a bit to the screwball comedies of the '30s. (He did a happy drunk better then anyone else.) As James Tyrone in O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night, his performance (among four other extraordinary performances) gave me the feeling that I had somehow gained entry into the broken Tyrone house. I utterly forgot I was watching a play at all, and almost tiptoed out at the end. The first time I was ever moved to tears in the theater was watching Hutt become King Lear, in a spare, but deep performance. As he wandered the moors, he balanced the terrified, angry, and yet still dear old man -- eminently recognizable to anyone who's confronted the specter of dementia -- with the carriage of a man who had once been a king. It was high drama, real tragedy, and entirely intimate at the same time.
His final curtain call at Stratford was as Prospero in Shakespeare's Tempest. My mother heard a replay of the final speech on the CBC early this morning, where Prospero pledges to give up magic forever. She described it as "straight-forward, astonishing, without histrionics, right to the bone and full of meaning." Hutt was an actor who knew how to perform, he spoke the classics with a baritone that could shake walls, but more often chose to simply become a character -- a complicated and generous spell that enchanted all of us who were lucky enough to watch it happen.
But this rough magic
I here abjure, and when I have required
heavenly music, which even now I do,
To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I'll drown my book.
Prospero, The Tempest, Act V, scene i
10:14 AM ET | 06-28-2007 | permalink
