Today was the first day of Theatre Puget Sound auditions. We saw Equity (union) actors today, non-union the next two days. This year we had fewer Equity actors, and less solid ones, than in the last five years. Dunno why.
I want to do a lab project in summer or fall. I have been leaning toward working with Equity actors, but I'll wait to see who else auditions. Today I got inspired to put together an all-black cast. Sitting in the Centerhouse Theatre for auditions made me think of my friend, Anthony Lee, a black actor who was shot at a Halloween party in 2000, by the LA police.
Eight months later I was directing Medea here. In a back room of the theatre, I found a small trunk of Anthony's, full of his stage mementos -- programs, first-night notes. I left it there. Every theatre has a ghost. This one has Anthony's.
Here's how good he was.
We were doing Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. Leonid Anisimov was directing for Art Theatre of Puget Sound. Anthony had flown up from LA -- where he moved when his movie career took off -- to play Astrov. He hadn't worked yet, but had come to all the rehearsals. This was the first time on his feet. His scene partner, Nanny, was being played by a heavy, relatively inexperienced actor. She was surly, snappish, nervous, and disapproving of the Russian rehearsal process.
Anthony had the lines, "There is no one I love, except you perhaps. I had a nurse like you when I was a child." He did the first line from across the room, gazing at a picture of flowers. Then he walked around the big dining-room table, came up behind her, laid his arms on her shoulders, and rested his cheek on her head as he said the second line.
And then -- he inhaled. A big breath, deep in her hair, just to know what she smelled like. And there he stayed, for a long unhurried time.
Her shoulders relaxed... her face softened... and for the first time, we could see her. Really see her, the kind one we'd never glimpsed before. And rarely glimpsed again -- she came out only for Anthony.
Leonid would say, THAT is an ethical actor -- someone who makes his scene partner more Talented.
Anyway, that's my cloudy impulse toward a piece -- my dead friend, his trunk left behind when he went to seek his fortune, auditioning in his theatre.
"I'm going to write a play for you someday, Anthony," I said once as we walked along a lake filled with screaming splashing kids. "That'd be great," he said, scratching his stomach, speaking in that perfectly polite tone that meant he knew it was a lie. He would laugh at me writing it after he's dead. "Like they're gonna cast me NOW." And then that slow laugh, huh huh huh huh.
Tuesday, June 22, 2004
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ONE DEGREE OF SEPARATION: I remember the news articles about Anthony Lee, and thinking if the victim had not been a minority person, but a white male (like myself) holding a toy gun on Halloween, the review board would not have judged it to be a justified shooting. I probably wouldn't have been shot in the back numerous times without warning either. I had no idea he was a friend of a good friend. I think of my black friends and acquaintences with admiration, woe, and humility when I read or am reminded of these kind of incidents. I wonder how I would deal with living on the other end of that kind of double standard. It makes me want to be a better person, risking more to stand up for what is right in the world.
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