Joy and Gratitude

BY WILLIAM HURT, TUFTS STUDENT, ACTOR, LOS ANGELES, CA
"The Viper of Seville" was production of a Don Juan themed play Tony directed at Tufts in, roughly, 1970 or '71. I was playing Don Miguel, son of the great General Don Gonzago (I think) who has been killed in a duel with Don Juan. Miguel is kind of a wimp but is forced by his mother and sister to swear revenge on Don Juan, which he does.

Tony always seemed to manage to throw me off my game, and nothing teaches you more than humiliation. Nothing in my forty years of acting has ever embarrassed me more or been a funnier memory than two occasions that took place during that particular production. And one other that wasn't so funny, but that's for another time.

During the revenge swearing scene, I was directed to hoist the dead general's own great broadsword to the heavens and scream "REVENGE!!", at which exact point the undiluted flood of hard pure white light streaming down from the ceiling would dramatically crash into darkness and we, the actors, were to exit one of the tiny vomitoriae off stage. But ... I was completely blinded by all that light resonating in my retinae. The fear aspect of the scene always worked because I was always terrified I would walk not into narrow chasm of the exit but into the audience, which, one night, I did. There was a lady in an impossible-to-miss red satin, almost floor length, gown. She happened to be in the seat right next to the prescribed sortie. I would always, at that point in the scene, the instant the lights went out, carefully turn the great hefty sword to point downward and clasp it next to my chest so that if ever I fell it would most likely go into the floor and not into any person, including myself. The night in question, I missed my mark entirely and found myself stumbling and falling to my knees there on the eight inch raised audience floor, just, well ... I found myself kneeling between the legs of that poor woman in the red dress, the sword tip having pierced her gown, tearing a neat hole through it, leaning forward in complete surprise and imbalance. By this time my eyes could just barely see and, being a few inches from her face, I whispered frantically, "I'm so, SO sorry!" She didn't miss a beat, whispered back, "that's perfectly all right" and helped me to my feet and off into the exit passage getting back to her seat, I could see over my shoulder, just in time for the lights to come up on the next scene. The rest of the performance the rip in her red dress was clear to see and I resolved to ask her hand in marriage but did not find her after the show. Tony came up to me after curtain and did not say a word, just lowered his head and gave me one of those very long stares of levied fury that showed his wary forgiveness.

Tony intimidated me. Our relationship was not a cozy one. I, as a young actor, was very anxious to do things right and, with him, somehow didn't seem ever to be able to. I learned ... a lot from him, about ... trying not to screw up while still owning up to the givens. Second illustration:

During second dress rehearsal of that same production there was, thank heavens, no audience sitting down in the main lower section of the audiece. Everyone, department head, etc., were up in the balcony. Don Miguel has his challenge scene, sitting at a long table in a dark spooky dining hall with Don Juan. Miguel has dressed in his father's full armor, pretending to be his father's ghost in order to throw Don Juan into a panic. Again lit theatrically, with only one huge candelabra ablaze with naked flame (very audacious theatrical stroke - that), the scene was staged beautifully. Don Miguel is trying to scare Don Juan so badly that he will not fight well, also trying to tilt the scales in his own favor by a "shock and awe" tactic: challenging his father's broadsword to Don Juan's meagre epe. The night in question there began to develop a "costume problem": the plastic helmet that capped the floor-to-follicle array of armor in which I was torridly encased developed a peculiarity ... each time I turned my head to the right, the helmet would obligingly turn with my head movement to the right, but when I turned my head back ... toward the left, the helmet would not follow. Thus, during the course of the great Gothic scene, progressively ,the actor inside the armor was trying to figure out a way to get the helmet to come back around to face in the direction faced by the face. But nothing was working: no angle or tilt of head, no fulling extended sticking out of the tongue trying to catch some part of the inner helmet and tug it back around would perform even a minor correction to the continually exacerbating problem. The efforts to fix it only made it worse. As an actor, I was obligated to continue, of course, especially in a "Tony Cornish Production", and try to make things at least look as if they were all right. The only way to do that was, after many vain attempts to swivel the helmet back around, to leave my head turned completely jammed to the left while the helmet which was, to the audience, anyway, facing reasonably ... forward, faced ... forward. The idea of raising my arms to adjust the helmet, a mundane gesture such as that, at that time in a young actor's life, was unthinkable, as it would, under the conditions, have destroyed the pomp and ceremony, the ... 'stylistic verisimilitude.' I naturally 'soldiered' on.

The last two lines of that scene, after an arrangement to fight the following night at the site of the General's grave is finally made with Don Juan suitably terrified, were: Don Juan (politely picking up the enormous table mounted candelabra and gesturing toward the exit) "Can I light your way out?" to which the prescribed ghostly and deeply voiced Don Miguel thunderously replies, "I ... Have ... Nooo ... Neeeeed ... of ... Light!" By that time the actor in the plastic suit of armor was completely and utterly blind, however, with only a tiny portion of vague visual impressions available in the darkness of a stage lit only from afar by a few candles arriving to of the corner of his right eye peaking with all its might out of the tip of the corner of the left eye hole of the helmet but with no idea whatsoever of where he was headed. The show, as they say, must go on and ... I figured what-the-heck-might-as-well-go-for-it and aimed myself with my best vague guess at the area of the stage where I hoped and prayed the exit might possibly be. Next thing I know I am toppling like a tree into the first three rows of the miraculously empty seats. I do suppose if they had been occupied I would have called off the attempt and admitted the problem, but you never know. A nervous actor is a nervous actor. At any rate, I realized I was experiencing no life-shattering pain but also that I was completely and irrevocably jammed between and among the seats, spraweld out completely, arms, legs, head all pinned, but ... it struck me as so completely funny that I could not keep myself from howling with helpless laughter. And ... over that sound I heard, seeming from far away inside my fiberglass helmet, soaked with my sweat and now, of course, straightened, the sound of Tony's voice as he rushed, no, I was told later, ran off the balcony headed, I guess, for his office to, ... oh, I dunno ... put his own head under some sort of cushion to suffocate his own cries of frustration and despair, at the top of his voice up there on the balcony he was yelling, "He's RUINing my play! He's RUINing my play!"

It seems that this story is about me but it's about Tony: he would not speak to me after that for a while, but I was told he was glad I had lived. He didn't have to say much, though he was an eloquent man. He scared me, yes, but charmingly. He loved the theater and that was enough.

His demands were pretty stringent, and he gave us strength by that. High standards. His productions were magnificently orchestrated and portrayed. In those days he wore a goatee and dressed and spoke with a panache which goaded and delighted. He was a completely gifted and enlivened artist of theater, and a great teacher.

He forgave me in the end. We spoke of the past and laughed. He'd not forgotten it. I will only ever remember him with joy and gratitude and glad happy laughter. What a great, great character, what a vivacious display of the value of a life of guts and intelligence in the theatre!

God is very happy to have him.

Best Regards to all.