BACK
STAGE WEST
June
15, 2000
ACTORS'
DIALOGUE: Bob Gunton & Anne Archer
Reporting
by Rob Kendt
What
do you do when you've got to be married for a long time to someone you meet on
the first day of rehearsals? Actually, Anne Archer and Bob Gunton, who
currently appear as a troubled husband and wife in Robert Glaudini's new play The
Poison Tree at the Mark Taper Forum, met during auditions. But even though
they apparently got along famously from the start, and they've had a rehearsal
period to develop the semblance of a believable marriage (longer than they
would on a film set), the question still remains: How do actors make the very
specific imaginary circumstances of a longtime relationship work onstage?
Archer
is best known for her Oscar-nominated role as Michael Douglas' cuckolded but
steadfast wife in Fatal Attraction, her Golden Globe-winning role in Short Cuts, and her recurring part
as Harrison Ford's wife in both Patriot Games and Clear and
Present Danger. Most recently she appears in Rules of Engagement and in Wesley Snipes'
upcoming The Art of War. Theatre credits include the Off-Broadway production of A
Coupla White Chicks Sitting Around Talking, which she reprised in L.A., and Tourvel
in the Williamstown Theatre Festival's Les Liaisons Dangereuses.
Gunton
may be recognizable for his role as the evil prison warden in Shawshank
Redemption or his turn as Nixon in the TV movie Elvis Meets Nixon, but the bulk of his
career has been in plays and musicals: his Tony-nominated lead in the 1990
revival of Sweeney Todd, the King in Big River, James in Passion, Juan Peron in Evita (also Tony nominated),
and a raft of Off-Broadway and regional credits. He also has featured roles in The
Perfect Storm, Patch Adams, and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.
Back
Stage West sat down with these two in the midst of tech rehearsals to discuss
playing house but not taking the work home.
Anne
Archer:
In terms of creating a relationship onstage, life helps you so much. You've
been married for many years, I've been married for many years, so you bring to
this a certain knowledge of how life goes and how relationships go, and that
feeds us--although neither of us has the problems that these characters have,
certainly.
Bob
Gunton:
I don't think we have the same kind of problems in our individual marriages,
but the dynamic of a longterm marriage is certainly something I'm familiar
with. So it gives you a context to see why people could sort of get into the
kind of trouble that this couple is in.
I
also think it's important that we've been supplied with a relationship that
develops and unfolds before the audience: what this relationship is, what it
was, and what it has become-even in the rehearsal process. There's one scene we
played which was rather ardent and affectionate and very sexy in rehearsals; it
has since evolved into something very different. But I think playing it the way
we did in the rehearsal period gave us almost a sense memory of how these
people interacted physically, the ease which they had. So we have almost
developed a nostalgia for what no longer exists.
Anne: Also, I think that
actors are chameleons. They meet and they know they have to play lovers or
adversaries, and they immediately just start doing it.
Bob: It's like being a child
and saying, "OK, you be the good guy and I'll be the bad guy."
Anne: "You're going to
be my husband now, now we get to play." Very rarely does that not work,
unless you have that occasion when somebody has some real problems you have to
deal with, and unfortunately their problems spill over onto everyone else. But
that rarely happens.
Bob: I'm just fortunate to
be working with someone like you. I like working easy and relaxed, from a
relaxed place. And if that relaxed feeling starts before you open your mouth
onstage, for me, I can do dangerous things, embarrassing things, I can be
awkward--as you have to be in the process--because I feel safe. And I feel that
with you.
We
go to some very dark places as the characters-recrimination, guilt, regret,
beration, all of that stuff. And it's fun! To me, I would almost prefer to get
into a real, from-the-gut, from-the-genital argument with someone I desperately
loved--play that scene--than the sexy, affectionate stuff. Because it's really
primal. And that's what the stage is for. For me, the stage is about deep, deep
emotions, not about the comfortable ones. This is Medea and Oedipus. We get to
do those. Several times.
Anne: I agree with you. It is
why you want to be on the stage, because you get to play moments you don't get
to play on film. The whole process is so much better for the actor.
Bob: But you have to do it
publicly--it's never just you, me, and the director and the other cast members.
There's always the stage managers, people wandering in and out. It takes
getting used to. Did it for you? To do this kind of work with people wandering
in and out while you're spilling your guts?
Anne: To me that's like being
on a film set. You've got a whole crew and they're all doing this and that and
you're emoting and carrying on.
Bob: But do they see as much
of the process?
Anne: Yeah, because you don't
have rehearsal. So you're up there and you're running through it a few times,
and shooting it. Sometimes you're on a public street where you're shooting a
very emotional scene and you've got real people walking by and wondering what
the hell you're doing. And there you are--either crying your eyes out or trying
to unzip some guy's pants.
So,
for me, the stage is sort of like we have permission. I was pleased with how
quickly I adjusted to the rehearsal process of being in a room, having people
there, and running through the scenes. It felt nice for me, like I had a space
for myself. On a film set, you're sort of jumping into all these new spaces,
sometimes many in a day. Sometimes they help you and sometimes there's no time
just to make them your own.
Bob: No matter what the time
sequence in a play is, I find that I am playing that character's entire life
from the time they were a child to whenever the play leaves them. In Shawshank
Redemption, I played someone with the arc of nearly 20 years, and that's the
closest I've ever come in film to what I always experience onstage. Even if
it's a real-time thing of two hours out of someone's life, you are playing
their entire life, the entire arc of their life. If it's written well, if the
playwright has plugged in where they have come from, how they developed, and
why they came to this climactic point we're seeing in this play, and suggested
what's going to happen with their lives after that--that to me is the thrill of
stage that I can embrace, to subsume an entire life in me. And I never--or
very, very rarely--have had anything like that in film.
LOVE
AND DEATH
Anne: The stuff from this
play does bubble over. I try not to let it. I say, "I don't have to do
this play at home. Do it in the theatre." And I'll find that my emotional
state is very rocky at times. I'll cry just thinking about it. It's been very
hard.
Bob: In film roles, I play a
lot of heavies and a lot of bad guys, so I tend to be the jokester and the
good-time Charlie on the set. And I think part of it is the human thing of,
"I don't want people to think I'm an asshole all the time." And I
like to let that out, and in a way that gives me permission when I have to blow
somebody's head off or whatever the hell else I've got to do--to really go to
that dark place and then come back and say, "See, we're fine."
So
I don't get a lot of spill-over with film, but with the work process in
theatre, if I'm coming up against something I have to get past, some block in
me--that's where most of my emotional trauma comes from, not so much from the
character. The character's trauma is sort of worked out and I'm riding it and
as it goes through its catharsis, I'm OK. But if I'm coming up against, What
the hell is happening here, why am I dry in this scene? Where am I here? Then I
become emotional and I'm not always so swell to be around at home because I'm
walking around with this knot.
So
I play a lot of tennis, I talk to my kid, I spend time with my wife, and remind
myself that I'm safe and that it's a play and that I will go to bed and wake up
tomorrow and that all the work I've done, with the director and other actors,
is going to help me through this and I'm going to be fine. I'm going to take
the ride of my life. And we've decided that it's better than sex.
Anne: When it's going well.
Otherwise, it's the worst thing that could ever happen to you, worse than
death. It's either better than sex or worse than death. There's no in between.