There’s a chilling moment in “Death of a Salesman” when Willy Loman’s wife, Linda, tries to explain to her sons why their father’s life is falling apart. “A small man,” she says, summing up the pathetic collapse of this loud but ultimately quite ordinary citizen, “can be just as exhausted as a great man.”
In one of those magnificent ironies of art, small-time Willy is anything but small for the actor. Like Hamlet and Lear, two characters who are royalty, Willy is a role fit for a king, a gigantic undertaking by any definition.
A handful of such parts for men (and, alas, fewer for women) ask actors to test their mettle, rise to great heights and even put their reputations on the line. Hamlet, Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, Lear and villains Richard III and Iago in Shakespeare head the list; in American drama, the top roles include Loman, James and Mary Tyrone from “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” and Stanley Kowalski and Blanche Dubois from “A Streetcar Named Desire.” For the actor today, these parts are both challenging and familiar, inviting criticism at the same time they make overwhelming demands. Surely any cool-headed thespian is tempted, at first, to just say no.
“Oh, sure, I always have that instinct, usually about two weeks into a rehearsal,” says Brian Dennehy, who plays Willy in the Goodman Theatre’s current, acclaimed revival, which runs through Nov. 7. “The thing is, though, as an actor who works a lot in movies, this process of coming back to the Goodman and working with (director Robert Falls) on these roles reminds me of why I became an actor. There’s a tendency when you’re making money to forget what it was you set out to do. This brings me back to that passion and enthusiasm.
“And then after the run, I always say, `Boy, I’ll never do that again.’ “
“I got sick the first time I did Iago, literally,” recalls Steve Pickering, who has performed the great Shakespearean villain in “Othello” twice and who incidentally also has a role in the Goodman’s “Death of a Salesman.” “I ended up on opening night at Court Theatre with double pneumonia and 104-degree temperature. I wasn’t physically ready to take a part of that scope at that time. I hadn’t trained my body or my mind for it. It’s as if you need the training of a marathon runner. When I played Iago again, I worked out, and I made sure, every day, I drank a lot of water. For me, sweating is a big problem. When I played Macbeth, I lost 32 pounds, and I swear it was in sweat weight.”
But the fatigue, amazingly, works both ways. “It’s interesting how many times when you’re tired you have no defenses, and the part really grabs and shakes you,” Dennehy says. “Acting is a process of getting rid of your natural defenses, so that your emotional response can be allowed to come close to the surface. Most of us go through life trying to keep emotions down below, trying to protect ourselves. Acting is unprotecting yourself, and, in that sense, fatigue can really help.”
The actors in “Long Day’s Journey” take a remarkable trip, their characters slowly disintegrating in a four-hour marathon of fighting, yelling, boozing and even morphine-shooting. Martha Henry, who played Mary Tyrone in a celebrated 1994 revival at the Stratford Festival in Canada (slated to air in a film version on public television later this season) says the physical experience is actually cathartic.
“Audience members would come backstage after our performances, and they’d be drained,” she remembers. “There’s so much that goes on in that story. And yet we’d be just fine. When you play something that huge and monumental, it’s almost like an exorcism. You’ve purged your devils, and the audience has taken them on, if it works well. The joke was, someone would come backstage and say how remarkably cheery and full of energy I seemed. And I’d answer, `Of course. I’ve been on morphine for several hours.’ “
Henry agrees with Pickering that physical shape is key. She says, “Actors are like athletes. They’re always in training. In Stratford, where programming is in rotating repertory, we sometimes do three large parts in a season. You have to be fit.
“I don’t go to the gym and work out a lot,” admits Henry, who is in her late 50s. “But I do a series of stretching exercises, a kind of yogalike preparation for shows, and a lot of mental preparation.
“And I make sure I take my vitamins every day.”
Perhaps a much larger challenge is the aesthetic hurdle. Play a big role and you’ll find yourself compared, probably unfavorably, to a legendary actor — Marlon Brando’s Stanley Kowalski, Lee J. Cobb’s Willy Loman, Laurence Olivier’s Richard III, Katharine Hepburn’s Mary Tyrone. Or you’ll simply suffer the slings and arrows of a public always ready to cut the ambitious down to size.
“There was a feeling of panic after the first run-through,” says Henry Godinez, who played Hamlet at the Oak Park Festival Theatre in 1996. “I realized how much movement and blocking was involved, and it’s hard not to be intimidated by a role like that. My Latin Catholic humbleness took over and said to me, `I’m not worthy.’ I just tried to forget it and move on.
“And then the first time in front of an audience, there was a different kind of panic,” he adds. “I thought, `Oh, no, they think I stink.’ But one trick I learned from another actor who played the part was to explore the humor. These large parts are not really remembered for their wit, and focusing on that helps win the audience over.”
Dennehy, an actor whose offstage and onstage persona radiates one-of-the-guys machismo, prefers an approach of level-headed craftsmanship. “I regard the process as essentially one of making a piece of furniture,” he says. “You saw the wood, you assemble the parts and you paint, all as part of an effort to make a cabinet. At some point, you hope, it turns out to be a work of art. But 80 percent of the work is always craft.
“During the run, the audience tells you if it’s working or not,” he adds. “Maybe one night out of 8 or 10 is incandescent. Most of the time, you depend on your craft and a little jolt of inspiration. There have been great actors who come out and blow down the walls every time they’re on stage. That’s not typical. An actor is like a painter or musician. You work hard in order to deliver a good, basic performance and, from time to time, more than that.
“Willy is exhausting because he’s going through so much; he’s torturing himself, and he’s tortured by outside influences. You have to make that torture real. That’s hard to play without feeling it at the same time. It’s not the most pleasant of experiences. Lee J. Cobb enjoyed an enormous and deserved triumph in the original run, but people forget that he only stayed for three or four months (short for a Broadway smash). I love Chicago audiences, I love the Goodman and I love working with Falls. But one reason I come back is the short runs.”
Dennehy has already forged an unofficial partnership with the Goodman in a series of larger-than-life roles in “Galileo,” “The Iceman Cometh” and “A Touch of the Poet.” “The theater is not a place I come to just to get a job,” he says. “If I’m going to take the time and energy to do a play, it has to be something difficult, something that if I do it right will be enormously satisfying.”
Dennehy’s four Goodman outings have been spaced over the past decade. In contrast, Henry and her Stratford colleague William Hutt, who played James Tyrone opposite her Mary in “Long Day’s Journey,” are accustomed to playing such roles repeatedly in their careers in classical repertory theater. They both find that these roles never grow stale, never become mechanical and age in the actor’s consciousness like fine wine.
“The first time I played Lear was in the early 1960s, and I was just over 40 and clearly too young,” Hutt recalls. “I remember during rehearsal one day turning to the director and saying, `I can’t do this part.’ Only the crestfallen looks of the other actors, who knew that meant they’d lose their jobs, kept me going. I played Lear three more times, once in a smaller theater, and the performances were so different. By 1996, I played the part when I was 76 years old, and age seemed a great benefit.”
Because women have fewer grand showcases, you might expect they can’t enjoy that kind of reverberation and evolution throughout their careers. Not so, says Henry: “I’ve been aware that men in the theater have these mountains to go toward, and that women have fewer, but I’ve never felt slighted. I’ve played both Cordelia and Goneril in `King Lear,’ Titania and Helena in `A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ Viola and Olivia in `Twelfth Night’ in different productions. This has been an incredibly rewarding life skill. You learn to see roles from such different points of view.
“I played Beatrice in `Much Ado’ 20 years ago, and I’m playing her again, and she seems to me a different woman now,” she continues. “You think the play has changed, but it hasn’t. It’s just that the part is so wealthy, you find all kinds of things in it you didn’t realize were there when you were younger.”
In the end, that artistic affluence is too great a prize to turn down. “Aidan Quinn was asked by a reporter when he was doing `Streetcar’ in New York why he would want to risk being compared to Marlon Brando,” says Dennehy. “Aidan just smiled and said, `Because Stanley’s a great part.’ “
