I had just got out of Harvard, I was overweight, and she would come around every once in a while, and she said to me, ‘You know, darling, you have no talent at all-but one day you may be a great artist, because you have a huge heart.’ Grotowski once said there’s no such thing as talent. When I was at the Neighborhood Playhouse as a young actor, Martha Graham was the movement person. “You know,” he added, finishing a macchiato with extra milk, “it’s odd to be a subject of explication, even your wife’s. I said, ‘Why go on? We don’t have it yet.’ And Louis said, ‘I can’t ask Wally to explode like that all afternoon.’ I said, ‘All afternoon? Are you kidding? He could go on all night!’ You know, when we were shooting ‘Vanya,’ and Vanya has that moment when he explodes, Louis had done three takes and was going on to something else. Grotowski had Cieslak as his great actor, and I think Wally is my Cieslak, because he has such easy access to rage in his acting, and outrage in his work, which is something I don’t have easy access to.” (In the documentary, Shawn, troubled by the omnipresent camera crew, explodes-politely-on behalf of the lost ideal of privacy.) “If I were a playwright, I would want to be either Samuel Beckett or Wally Shawn. It’s America’s comic actors who are truly tragic-and I think it’s Wally’s combination of death, pain, and incredible humor that makes him a great actor. “Grotowski once said that American actors, when they try to be tragic, often turn out to be ridiculous.
The documentary also highlights Andre’s forty-year artistic partnership with Shawn, about which he once said, “We’re becoming the Abbott and Costello of the avant-garde.” Andre was the first to see in Shawn the lineaments of a tragic actor. The fact that an actor working with me can be boring, can be lost, even for months, is just very appealing, because it’s safe.” He went on, “Someone from the Actors Studio saw some of our work and said the next day, ‘It was great. You do a play on Broadway, and by the second day everyone’s giving you the eye-wondering if you’re going to be fired.
“They can come and do stuff they would never get to do in commercial theatres. “I call our rehearsals a workout gym for actors,” he said, his eyes creased with delight. Much of the time, Andre’s method is simply to smile and to approve, a constant wringing motion of his hands the only sign of directorial temperament. (This happened to Julianne Moore, in “Vanya,” and promises to happen to the extraordinary Lisa Joyce, in “The Master Builder.”) The documentary covers much of the ten-plus-year development of “The Master Builder” and Andre’s patient, shamanlike working method with his actors, some of whom begin as young unknowns and, by the time the piece is ready to be shown, are on their way to becoming famous. (An earlier Gregory-Shawn production, of “Uncle Vanya,” was similarly preserved, by Malle, in “Vanya on 42nd Street.”)Ī new documentary about Andre, “Before and After Dinner,” opens this week it focusses on his knotty relationship with his Russian father (the “before”) and is directed by his wife, Cindy Kleine (the “after”). In the legendary Gregory-Shawn manner, the production was rehearsed and reworked for more than a decade, and finally, in the past few years, was witnessed by several boutique-size audiences in a Village living room.
#Wally shawn movie#
He’s just finishing a cut, with the director Jonathan Demme, of a movie adaptation of Ibsen’s “The Master Builder,” with Wallace Shawn in the title role. Andre, as he has been known, even to people who don’t know him, ever since Louis Malle’s 1981 film “My Dinner with Andre” made him into a kind of New Age guru, is a year from turning eighty, and, after a brush with cancer, is in the midst of a mad campaign of new creation. The director, avant-garde icon, and born raconteur Andre Gregory was having breakfast in the Village the other morning, and-as is his wont-was talking at length about the current state of his life, his art, and his soul.
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