| VISIT HUGH HART ONLINE Los Angeles Times By: HUGH HART | SPECIAL TO THE TIMES Imagine Bruce Willis and Jeremy Irons sitting politely on a sofa, and you'll have a rough picture of the talented odd couple from Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre who are now calling the shots at the Geffen Playhouse. Managing director Steve Eich, the one with the shaved pate, was hired in September to run the business side of the Westwood operation. Picking the plays is artistic director Randall Arney, a lanky, lupine, boyishly enthusiastic actor and director who joined the Geffen just over a year ago. Mounted on the wall behind them: a poster for "The Grapes of Wrath," their Steppenwolf production that won a 1990 Tony Award for best play. But they're here to talk about Conor McPherson's "The Weir." The play will mark Arney's directorial debut at the Geffen when it opens Wednesday. The five-person cast includes two members of the Steppenwolf company, John Mahoney and Francis Guinan. Arney says that's just coincidence. In fact, Eich and Arney insist that any attempt to re-create a Steppenwolf-style vibe in Los Angeles would be wrongheaded. "The work we did in Chicago gave us an amazing background and a whole bunch of ammunition in terms of running a theater, both artistically and as a business," says Arney. "But for us to try and impose something else from the past on this time and this place would be backward-looking. A theater should serve the community that it's in and the community should feed back to the theater what it wants and what it needs." Some of those needs, Eich says, may sound elementary but are key to maintaining the theater's 12,000-plus subscription base. "You have to address what the patrons think about. Parking. Where is it? How far do I have to drive? How long is the show? People out here--it's not that they're busier than in Chicago, but there's a sense that if they're going to venture to someplace, you want that experience to be rewarding." * * * Eich and Arney both started working at Steppenwolf in 1980. In 1987, Arney became artistic director. Over the next eight years, Arney saw his role as "the care and feeding of this group of artists." It was some group. During Steppenwolf's first few years, John Malkovich, Gary Sinise, Laurie Metcalf, Glenne Headly, Jeff Perry and Terry Kinney provided the theater's creative pulse. As his troupe launched film and TV careers, Arney recruited new company members and guest artists, while Eich, as managing director, oversaw the creation of a $9-million theater complex in 1990. In 1994, Arney transferred his Steppenwolf-originated production of "Picasso at the Lapin Agile" to Los Angeles during the final days of the Westwood Playhouse, where he first met Geffen founder and current producing director Gil Cates. Arney checked in five years later to see if the Geffen wanted to stage "The Beauty Queen of Leenane," in which he directed Laurie Metcalf. Cates passed on the offer but made one of his own: He needed an artistic director--would Arney be interested? A few months later, Cates recruited Eich to take charge of the theater's annual $5-million budget. "I like their energy and like their enthusiasm," says Cates, taking a break from his producing duties for the Academy Awards. "Randy agrees fundamentally with our mission--quality, excellence, not doing something just to get an audience. We're not using stars if they're not good actors." For his part, Eich was captivated by Cates' industry savvy and the chance to re-team with Arney. "I wouldn't be here unless Randy was doing this," says Eich, who co-produced Paul Simon's "Capeman" on Broadway after leaving Steppenwolf in 1995. "I took this job because I knew I would be working with somebody that I already had a shorthand with." What about that shorthand? You might think Arney would hanker for the sense of community that comes from putting on one play after another with the same colleagues. "A group of actors working together over time does create a bond," notes Arney. "But what I've found is, there are tenets of ensemble [acting] that have to do with the way you work in a rehearsal room. It starts with contracts, and it starts with the fact that all actors know they are equally important to a project. So whether you have the same personalities play after play or not--and that hasn't even happened at Steppenwolf over the past 10 years--what you do is take some of those lessons about trust, about acting as a cooperative, about the way to approach the work, and a way to rehearse a play, and what's important to keep our eye on and what's not, and that I can apply to every single cast we assemble here at the Geffen." Still, a little shared history can work wonders. Mahoney and Arney had acted in several plays together, and Arney had directed the "Frasier" co-star in "Death and the Maiden." When they bumped into each other at Paramount last year, Mahoney told Arney he'd be interested in doing "The Weir." Mahoney, speaking from his dressing room on the set of "Frasier," says the play's allure was obvious. "To any actor picking up that script for the first time, to listen to five people really talking, really listening to each other, and speaking this gorgeous language--it's a real luxury. You're watching people peel off layers of themselves." * * * Which makes "The Weir" well-suited to Arney's strengths. Says Mahoney, "Randy would create a true ensemble no matter who was involved. He has no compunction about allowing others to partake and share, and that probably is what ensemble is all about." Arney had plenty of chances to cultivate his people skills while riding herd on Steppenwolf's legendarily opinionated bunch. "It was literally kind of refereeing," he recalls. "We used to choose our plays based on 'What do you want to be in?' And if each actor had one idea, that's 30 ideas, and we can only do five a year. We'd decide to do nothing but new plays, and then get sick of that and want to do a period piece. Ultimately it fell to me to build a season that would give our subscriber a wide range of things, which is not unlike what I'm helping Gil do here. "Los Angeles is an industry town, and sometimes theater here can be perceived as some kind of second art form," he continues. "But I've been struck with how much theater is going on here, how many resources there are in Los Angeles." A repertory company may be out of the question, but Arney and Eich both sound like they wouldn't mind injecting their Geffen productions with a shot of their old company's go-for-the-throat performing style. "At Steppenwolf," Arney says, "the idea was always, if you've brought 500 people out of their houses, if you've asked them to get their baby-sitters and come and sit in the dark and watch it, then the character had better be engaged. There's a real attack that comes with that. There's a certain directness, an audacity and always, an attempt . . . to keep the stakes really high." * * * Arney leaves Eich's office and lopes down the hall to rehearse "The Weir." In the courtyard downstairs, a man in a plaid shirt sits on a bench, gesturing fervently into thin air. It's Guinan, rehearsing his lines. A bespectacled Mahoney, wearing jeans and plaid shirt, shambles in, sits down on a chair on the makeshift set and silently mouths his dialogue. Lindsay Crouse, surprisingly playful, bounds into the room and gives Arney a hug. Then rehearsals begin. Stories are told. Blocking is tweaked. Lines are muffed. Yards away, a procession of diesel-bleating buses rumble down Westwood Boulevard. Inside these four walls, the actors inhabit a world 3,000 miles away, telling tales on a dank night in a country pub in Ireland. A scene ends. Guinan's character has just related an elaborate ghost story. Arney tells Guinan, "If you can get all those things wrapped into a focal thing"--Arney reaches out and wrings his hands around an invisible rope--"the Ouija board, the fit the girl was having, the dog--if dominoes can fall over in our heads, so that all these things somehow in hindsight make sense once we hear from the brother, and if you can cause it all to land on"--Arney drops his voice to a hush, then speaks the line "And the woman died at the foot of the stairs"--"that'll be the thing that causes the hair on the back of our neck to stand up." While the actors take a break, Arney is reminded of one of Steppenwolf's breakthrough productions. " 'The Weir' is a bar play, like 'Balm in Gilead' was a diner play," he says. "There's just something about a bar, as a place where things are aired, where conflicts are resolved. It's a really neat piece that way, in the same way that in 'Balm,' there's that speech Darlene has that's five pages long, where she spills her guts to her community." Spilling guts, sharing secrets and telling tall tales: the very stuff of acting. But for Crouse, a stage-trained actress who has focused on film and TV roles since moving to Los Angeles in 1992, doing "The Weir" is a rare treat. For one thing, she gets to really rehearse. "What is required of you in a film is a very tiny piece of who you are," she says, "but when you work in a theater, you really work, You make discoveries, and you're turning the soil over and over and watching something appear and grow." Referring to her second-act monologue, a five-page tour de force, she says, "I've thought of a new way to approach that speech, which I'm going to now try. And even though you have this feeling of, 'God, I'm so ashamed of myself, of the bad acting I did last week,' there's always a reason for it, and you get thoroughly sick of it. You sense there's something wrong there and then come to another level of understanding about what's going on in that human being, and it's very exciting to do that, because you feel as if you've put a piece of yourself into it." But that process takes time, she says. "You can't microwave a great meal. It's all about going back to the piece and trying it again, and going back and trying some more." One of Crouse's discoveries was not about her character, but about two of her cast members. During the third day of rehearsal, she recalls watching Mahoney and Guinan meticulously block a piece of stage business. "It was the funniest thing, because I hadn't played with a group from Steppenwolf before and there's Francis and John working out how to set up a gag--and I said, 'I can't believe this, I thought you Steppenwolf guys were really organic, experimental theater. I thought we'd all be, you know, burping and coughing and, you know, letting it all hang out.' " Arney's low-key approach provokes the kinds of experiments that lead to fresh performance, says Crouse. "Randy gives us a good deal of breathing room. He allows you to play and then he'll go, 'I love this; try this too.' So you never feel like he's yanking you around or restricting what you can do." As for that whole ensemble chemistry thing, well, Crouse says it can happen pretty fast. "What's amazing about a bunch of real actors is how quickly you bond, how quickly you get to know each other. It's because you feel you can be yourself. Real, working actors are very open, very communicative. I always say, when I get with a group of actors, I breathe a big sigh--I'd rather be here than anyplace else in the world." * * * "The Weir," Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood. Opens Wednesday. Regular schedule: Tuesday-Thursday, 7:30 p.m.; Friday, 8 p.m.; Saturday, 4 and 8:30 p.m.; Sunday, 2 and 7 p.m. Ends March 11. $21-$43. (310) 208-5454. - - - Los Angeles Writer Hugh Hart Is a Frequent Contributor to Calendar Copyright 2000 Los Angeles Times Search the archives of the Los Angeles Times for similar stories about: Guy Ritchie, Motion Picture Directors. You will not be charged to look for stories, only to retrieve one. |