`Hey,” Gary Sinise shouts from a balcony overlooking Steppenwolf Theatre’s wide auditorium, while cameras are being set up for a television interview. “Shut up. We’re trying to talk business here.”
“Oh, yeah?” a mock-skeptical Ethan Hawke shouts back. “Then tell them how many lines you’ve got in this play. None. Zip.”
“No, but I control the number you get, don’t I?” Sinise replies.
Director and star thus engage in a bit of playful gotcha during media day at Steppenwolf. They are a match made in heaven–both boyishly handsome, likable, mildly tough on screen, both quirky and broodingly intelligent off. The day of the interview is dark and cold, and Hawke fits the gray, drizzling weather.
If anything, he seems more a pale imitation of the sanguine, self-confident movie characters he plays; Hawke is a slightly nerdy, confused young artist with a sincere interest in theater despite his movie background.
Both actors are on highs at the moment, especially Sinise, with his Midas movie touch, lately in evidence not only in “Forrest Gump” and “Apollo 13” but on TV with HBO’s celebrated biopic of Harry Truman.
Sinise has come a long way since the nervous, self-conscious young man who a dozen years ago brought attention to himself and his Chicago theater troupe by boldly (some would say foolhardily) taking his production of Sam Shepard’s “True West” to New York. Now Sinise is the veteran, reviving another Shepard work, “Buried Child,” and employing a nervous, self-conscious Hawke, whose career until recently had eclipsed that of the older Sinise.
Hawke is no slacker when it comes to success. His “Before Sunrise” was the latest in a line of gently admired, smallish movie hits (“Reality Bites” and “Alive” came earlier) and is a hot item at the moment in video stores. Earlier this year, he made history of sort earning a reported $300,000 advance for his first novel, “The Hottest State,” to be published next year by Little Brown and Company. (The novel–with strong hints of autobiography–features a 21-year-old narrator living in New York and dealing with young love.)
Hawke and Sinise are in Chicago working together on a 16-year-old classic in which Hawke is merely one of a seven-member ensemble. As Vince, he isn’t in the first act at all and is missing from much of the third. Sinise, as director, of course, is never on stage. Theirs is a rare affinity: Hollywood successes drawn inexorably to the theater.
“Ethan’s special that way,” says Sinise. “He’s the kind of young actor who is not just interested in being a movie star. He could be doing a lot bigger, more expensive movies than he does, but that’s not him. He wants to do things he hasn’t done before, and work with people he likes. That’s to be admired. He started in movies as a teenager, but he hasn’t let that get the best of him. He’s a very bright, hardworking young actor.”
“When you start making movies when you’re really young, it loses its thrill,” Hawke says. “It starts not to be enough. There are a lot of hard things about movie acting, but the hardest is that it’s not the best you can do. Moviemaking is only the best you can do each day.
“On this show, I can screw up a couple of days a week and come back the next day and make it right. In movies, if I don’t get it right that day, I never get it. That’s frustrating. That said, theater acting is much more difficult and more demanding. It’s not just figuring out how to do it well, but figuring it out so you can do it again. It’s a whole other world.”
The Sinise-Hawke partnership
Sinise and Hawke met while co-starring in the 1992 movie “A Midnight Clear,” Keith Gordon’s stark, insightful elegy on the insanity of war as experienced by a handful of World War II GIs. In the movie, Sinise, as Mother, is emotionally needy, on the brink of a breakdown, and Hawke is tentatively in charge. But offstage the roles seemed somewhat reversed, though not nearly so melodramatic. “We all got pretty close on that set,” Hawke says. “We all stayed in touch. Every now and then I’d call Gary and ask for advice when working on a play.”
For Sinise, “Buried Child” is the next step in a journey with Shepard that began with a part in “Curse of the Starving Class” when Sinise was only 24–Hawke’s age today.
“The first time I actually talked to Sam Shepard I was a kid, babbling,” Sinise recalls of their meeting during “True West.” “John (Malkovich) and I had added a few lines of our own over the course of our run, and public television wanted to tape it. I wanted to keep the lines, but I figured if I was going to monkey with his play on television, I’d better get permission.”
Shepard was on a roll of his own at the time, what with the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for “Child,” an Oscar nomination (for his role in the 1983 “The Right Stuff”) and even a Newsweek cover story. He readily agreed to Sinise’s changes, though the two didn’t become more friendly until this revival came up.
“This was the first time we sat down in a room together and had drinks and talked about stuff,” Sinise puts it. “He had mentioned that if we did this play, he was interested in working on it. I was surprised, because he’s actually notorious for leaving things behind and not looking at them again.”
Instead, in another coup for Steppenwolf, Shepard is unveiling a new version of “Buried Child,” which will henceforth serve as the new published version of the script. Sinise prefers not to go into details about the changes until after the official opening on Sunday, but he says the revisions are thorough. “He said he’d changed a few things, but when we sat down, the whole script was marked in red,” Sinise says. “He made some cuts, changed rhythms, added lines all the way through. I think he’s having a real good time doing it, and I think it’s an even better play.”
A killer monologue
“Buried Child” is a graphic, horrific, grunge-drenched look at a prototypical dysfunctional family. Dodge, the patriarch, lies wasted and out of it most of the drama, uttering foul curses and not always recognizing the family he oversees. His death, it’s hinted, is imminent. His wife, Halie, seemingly the character most in charge, opens the drama with a long monologue offstage, comes on only to later disappear for a time and return in the end with a pastor, both noticeably tipsy.
Hawke, as Vince, is this troubled couple’s grandson, returning after a long absence, emissary from the land beyond and no longer recognized by the family he has until now rejected. Polite and in charge at first, by play’s end, he succumbs to their pathology, delivering an explosive, drunken monologue that will test Hawke’s mettle as a stage actor.
“When Gary called and asked me about it, I remembered that monologue from reading the play five or six years ago,” Hawke says. “That’s one reason I said yes. I’d never done a play by Sam Shepard, except for scenes from `True West’ at a benefit, but I’m a tremendous fan. This is a bizarre play, but the more you work on it, the more you realize why it’s so good. A lot of what the play is about has to do with Vince. Your family is a visceral part of who you are and will suck you into themselves no matter what. There are other metaphors in the play, but that’s a major one.”
No one can accuse Hawke of going Hollywood or taking the easy way out. For “Alive,” based on the true story of survivors of an andean plane crash who took to eating the flesh of dead fellow passengers, Hawke spent six months on an icy mountain glacier.
He picks projects carefully. Though “Sunrise” is a recent video store arrival, Hawke in fact finished work on the movie more than a year ago and hasn’t done any film work since. He suggests he has no film scheduled at the moment, either. “I’ve become incredibly finicky,” Hawke said.
He needs to be interested
He has been working in his home, New York City, with his own stage troupe there, Malaparte Theatre, which he co-founded with chums who include Robert Sean Leonard, co-actor on Hawke’s first and still best-earning movie, “Dead Poets Society,” in 1989–his virtual entry into show business.
Since starting the company a few years ago, Hawke has performed in four New York productions and directed two. In conversation, he struggles with his fame and with the challenges of a young man trying to articulate ideas in a very adult world.
“I look for things that interest me,” he says. ” `Sunrise’ interested me because it was a film about just two people–that’s experimental. Lovely is a funny word to use, but that’s what the film is to me and that’s what makes it one of the favorite things I’ve been involved with. A lot of the movies that are really popular don’t really interest me, as things I’d want to dedicate my time to creating.”
He stops and laughs at himself: “God,” he says, “I can sound so incredibly pretentious.” But he has his own thoughts on commercialism: “I try not to think about box office, but it’s such a part of our national consciousness now. My theory is this is America’s way of turning everything it possibly can into a competition. `This is a good movie–it’s No. 1. This is a bad movie–it failed at the box office.’ “
Theater, instead, he says, offers minimal financial risk-anand unlimited creative possibility. He points happily to a giant window screen on stage that he rips and comes crashing through each night as part of the play’s sensational climax. Recalling the early rock-and-roll energy of the troupe he is for the moment joining, he boasts, “You should see what we do to this stage before it’s all over.”
