Into the Woods

A supernatural view of theater in L.A.

Comments (0) By Steven Leigh Morris Wednesday, Jul 11 2007

...continued from page 1

Rydell brought with him the ghosts of Lee Strasberg and Sanford Meisner, who were both his teachers. Landau, limber and sprightly at 76, was one of only two actors accepted in 1954. (The other was Steve McQueen.)

The two men bantered about how difficult it is to get in: Dustin Hoffman auditioned nine times, they said; Harvey Keitel, 11; Geraldine Page, six; Jack Nicholson, two. Nicholson’s judging committee consisted of Lee Strasberg, Landau and, yes, Lonny Chapman.

The art and craft of being: Daniel De Weldon and Deborah Dir, playing for real in Danny and the Deep Blue Sea (eyemgphotography.com)

More About

Landau and Rydell had just seen Chapman in the hospital and were upset by his deteriorated condition.

“He was a track star at the University of Oklahoma,” Rydell recalls. “All muscle and virility.” (As a young man, Chapman grabbed a leading role on Broadway as the womanizing track star Turk in William Inge’s Come Back, Little Sheba.)

Rydell and Landau praised Arabian’s production of Danny and the Deep Blue Sea (which has moved from months of work as an Actors Studio project to an independent production) and struggled to articulate what exactly they’re trying to keep alive at the Actors Studio. They repeated words such as “humanity” and “truth” versus “fakery” — with frequent allusions to the dehumanizing influences of technology, commercialism and diminishing attention spans.

I asked to observe one of the acting sessions, and Landau invited me as guest, “but you can’t write about it,” he stipulated.

“How can the public know what you’re doing?” I argued, but he was unmoved.

Meanwhile, I chose to see something I could report on — Danny and the Deep Blue Sea.

The following evening, the studio space of the Elephant Performance Lab Theatre was shrouded in stage fog and a bluish hue. Actors Deborah Dir and Daniel De Weldon sat at separate bar tables on the stage, staring into space, smoking, playing out Shanley’s Apache dance with scrupulous honesty and attention to the details of blackened knuckles and bruised pasts, unfolding in the ebbs and flows of real time. There they were again, the bears in the forest, rattling trees, bellowing and grunting. Both live-wire performances turned out to be indelible manifestations of what Rydell and Landau were struggling to articulate about theater being one of the last stands against a culture that values us more for what we can buy than what we can be. Here was the art and craft of being. It can’t be printed on a T-shirt or posted on MySpace or YouTube. After the lights go down, it’s history, theater history. And, yes, it matters because it’s so rare when they get it so right, the authenticity of it in a world of fakery — a fleeting, sacred moment. After every great performance, the theater burns down, and we’re left with ghosts.

A NICE FAMILY GATHERING | By PHIL OLSON | Presented by LONNY CHAPMAN GROUP REPERTORY THEATRE, 10900 Burbank Blvd., N. Hlywd. | Through July 21 | (818) 700-4878

DANNY AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA | By JOHN PATRICK SHANLEY | Presented by THE ELEPHANT THEATER and VOLITION ENTERTAINMENT PRODUCTIONS, 1076 N. Lillian Way, Hlywd. | Through July 20 | (323) 960-7753