I HAVE BORROWED Kazan’s director’s notes for Sweet Bird of Youth, from its first rehearsal to opening night. When I think back now to those five or six weeks of steadily mounting chaos, those desolate, work-lit stages, the makeshift props, the cardboard-tasting coffee, knocking steam pipes, the New York and, subsequently, the Philadelphia chill, I think of Gerry Page. In my mind’s eye, she is standing perfectly still, upstage left, under the gloom and glare of the work light, intently watching Kazan mime a bit of business for the other actors. And she always seemed to me to be like that—terribly quiet and shy, but always watching.
The first days of rehearsal are always an utter shambles, at least in the memory; so, for that matter, are the last days; but, luckily for the theater, one’s memory of intolerable nervous strain ends almost as soon as the strain does. I watched Kazan, who presumably knew what he was going to do with this improbable and disparate collection of actors. I certainly could tell nothing from the actors. They slouched or lurched or strode about, holding on to their books as though they were infants and looking as though they wondered what the hell they were doing here in this tiny, drafty theater, of all places. I was much too terrified of them all, of the mystic forces almost visibly clashing above their poor, doomed heads, to do more than mutter the briefest of “good morning”s and “good night”s—which, in those first days, was probably just as well. I was especially afraid of Gerry because, to tell the truth, I was afraid for her. I simply could not imagine her as the aging, desperately predatory, and somehow majestic ex–movie queen that Tennessee Williams had created. And he had written it, as always, somewhat larger and more livid than life. How was this open-faced, quiet midwestern-type girl going to make herself believe in this creation? Or make us believe it? My sense of doom was strengthened when I overheard someone whisper one day, “She’s much too young for the part.” I thought so, too—and insufficiently elegant.
As we all now know, I could not possibly have been more wrong. But now I find it nearly impossible to re-create my view of the steps which led to this transformation. The most crucial steps, of course, did not take place in my view at all, and I suppose that all I really saw were the results of a process which had begun long before rehearsals started. She must have had a very definite sense of the part and how to play it, for, as I now reconstruct those first days, she seemed watchfully and patiently waiting to put her conception to the test.
But her preternatural coolness, in this forest of knitted brows, left me stupefied then. It was almost as though, with her wedding day upon her and the bridegroom drawing nearer by the second, she yet lingered, in some hideously compromising position, with another boy. “Oh,” she said to me one afternoon, “so-and-so is such a worry bird.” So-and-so had vanished, as did nearly all the actors when they were not needed, gloomily, to study his part. Her book was closed, in her lap. “Perhaps I ought to study,” she said, with a smile—a smile meant, probably, to wipe the bewildered and reproving look off my face—“but…” and her voice tinkled helplessly into silence. I felt that she had put me down as another worry bird.
On the other hand, she was watching everything Kazan was doing up there on the stage with the other actors. During the entire blocking-out period, she impressed me tremendously with her speed and concentration, but I got no hint of what she would do with the part; and whereas Kazan gave me increasingly precise notes for the other actors, the clipboard is strikingly sparse when it comes to instructions for Gerry Page. Moreover, most of the notes for Gerry are extremely laconic. For instance, “Tell Gerry she’s inaudible” or “Tell Gerry I can’t see her face.” There is scarcely ever on the clipboard any suggestion of what she should be thinking or feeling on this or that movement, on this or that line; and the reason is that her role was worked out in an extremely direct, knock-down-and-drag-out way, and she never needed to be told anything twice. There was very little left for the clipboard by the time she and Kazan got through hammering away at a scene until it began to take the shape they wanted. Tiny little explosions occurred all along the way, illuminating, at first, not so much what Gerry was doing with the part as the treacherous difficulty of the part itself. It is difficult because this grotesque creature, the Princess, is always standing a little outside herself and commenting, with extreme distaste, on whatever she is doing. It is on this affliction that her precarious dignity depends. The first hint I caught of this was when Gerry, preparing, rather wearily, to listen to her beach-boy lover’s* discourse, sits down at her wardrobe trunk, picks up her mirror, looks into it, and puts it down again. It was electrifying. It was terribly funny. It was terribly sad. And I also remember her achievement of that moment when the boy finishes his monologue and turns to her, saying, “Princess, will you help me?” And she holds out her arms, incurably predatory even as she is incurably lonely, but, also, at that moment, very beautiful and moving, because for that moment, if only in her own mind, she is both wife and mother and has again a human value for someone in the world.
Acting is (for me, anyway) one of the most mysterious of all the arts—mysterious because the instrument, the actor himself, without changing at all, undergoes such inexplicable transformations before one’s eyes. I think that this sustained and steady tension between the real and the make-believe is healthy for the soul: it forces one to examine reality again. Seeing Gerry around the studio, or on television, had never caused me, really, to look at her, to wonder about her—and by “wonder” I don’t mean the currently prevalent zoological sniffing which lacks even the primary virtue of curiosity—or, for that matter, to listen to her. I saw a girl who was enormously sympathique, not strikingly pretty, with a rather light, agreeable voice. That’s all I saw. How in the world, then, did this girl manage to turn herself into a ruined and desperate harridan, with a voice that made one jump and with a face into which had somehow been burned the defeats, indignities, and agonies of a long and intolerable lifetime? I know that, technically and theatrically speaking, there are a great many answers to this question, although I also know that no one has ever really answered it. And when the same question confronts us, in life, in time, the answers are even more desperately makeshift. My point, anyway, is that all I saw of Gerry is all that most of us, wandering in our grisly isolation through this world, ever see of any other person. Whoever forces this terrible truth once more on our attention has also helped us to bear it and to that extent, at least, has lessened it. It is a small light brought into a vast darkness—but a small light, considering, especially, what everyone is searching for, may be quite enough. As for the light which Gerry holds, may it burn long.
(1962)
*The role of her lover was played by Paul Newman.