SYNOPSIS OF THE COUNTRY GIRL: The title character of this backstage story is Georgie, married to the once-great theater star Frank Elgin, who is now down on his luck. She is a faithful, loving, forgiving woman whose years of devotion to her husband have almost obliterated her own personality. In their New York flat and his dressing rooms, most of her time and energy is spent bolstering the morale of an actor whose long periods of idleness are filled with drink and despair.
Suddenly, the proverbial Big Break materializes: Frank gets a major comeback chance from hotshot young Broadway director Bernie Dodd, who picks him for the lead of an important new play. But only Georgie knows how hard it will be to pull Frank together, constantly reassure him, and keep him from slipping at the inevitable moments of discouragement.
Act II’s action takes place backstage of the Boston theater, where Georgie continues trying to perform her morale-building job on Frank under the watchful eyes of nervous director Bernie, whose reputation depends on this production. During the stress of rehearsals, he doubts her good influence, and comes to believe Frank’s alcoholic lies: that Georgie and her lack of confidence in him are responsible for his decline. The pressures created by a high-stakes out-of-town tryout bring the complicated relationship between husband and wife to a crisis point. Life backstage becomes the ultimate emotional and psychological battleground for all three characters.
On opening night in Boston, the strain proves too great. In the dark light of Frank’s relapse, Bernie finally recognizes the country girl for what she is—a magnificent woman whose self-sacrifice wasn’t appreciated until too late.
—B.P.1
PUT A BLANK PAGE in front of every script you approach, to write down the essential things: What is the theme of the play? What does it say? What is the style? What is the time when it was written? What is the music of the period? The dancing? The books and paintings typical of its time? That is the culture of the period that you need to know.
Once you have that, then draw a line and ask: What is my character? What class do I come from? You are responsible for knowing that—or finding it out. Put down the clothes, the manners, the kind of rooms you live in. Most of all, you must ask, “How do I think?” And then contrast your own thinking with that of the character. In politics, sex, money, ethics, morality, religion—how do you think differently from the character?
As you steer away from yourself, you’ll get closer to the way the character thinks. Unless all this goes through your imagination and you create it, you are not an artist. That’s the difference between photography and art. The tendency of the photographer is to capture the personality of the tree. The tendency of the artist is to also capture what the tree is saying.
There is no one single Truth. But there are a couple of truths in every play. The conflict is about one person’s truth vs. the other person’s truth. You must think your way and the other character’s way. Both are true. You may not personally believe in abortion, but there are an awful lot of people who do. If you play a character that believes in abortion, you have to get all the reasons why that character believes—and why the other character doesn’t. Gradually, you will feel, “I know the other side of my thinking.”
I remember once meeting a multimillionaire in English political life, and I thought how clever he was, because he knew all about communism and how the Communist system worked. That’s what made him capable of being on his own side—the fact that he also knew the other side.
Begin to create your character from the outside. Does he have an accent? How does he dress, how does he wear his hair? See and observe him in different situations, under various circumstances. Watch him walk down the street, buy a paper. Watch him eat. Only then can you begin to get a sense of the particular character you are playing.
What are the circumstances he lives in? If my play takes place in a New York rooming house, then New York is the larger circumstance. Read more of the playwright’s work, not just the one play you’re working on. First you get impressions, and from the impressions you get the plot. How does the play develop? From that you get the character and the ideas. You have to work on the play from the past. And you have to figure out how to use the stage. Don’t wait for somebody to say, “Now, walk over here.” It’s not a good idea.
Bernie’s large action in The Country Girl is to control the difficult machinery of the theater. That means first he has to control the front office, which is Cook, the producer. Go through all the rest of the machinery he is in charge of: the directing, the scenery, the stagehands, the company, the costumes, the lighting, the various actors’ problems, and the playwright’s concerns. You see that Bernie’s mind has to go in many directions. He also has to manage the dressing rooms and all those things the actors bring in from outside of the stage. Controlling the complex mechanics and problems of putting on a play is his job.
I’m going to take you to what I think is the pivotal moment in the play, a few minutes into the first scene of Act II, in Frank’s dressing room in Boston. The opening is getting closer. It’s two o’clock in the morning, everyone is fatigued, and the mood is intense. Bernie’s problems are mounting. He’s got a script problem and a wife problem. He and the playwright have been rewriting the last scene yet again. That’s an actor’s worst nightmare—even a secure actor, let alone an insecure one: they keep changing his lines. Frank has already been drinking a lot and having trouble with the old lines. Getting new ones at the last minute could put him over the edge.
Georgie has been trying to keep him under control, coddling and reassuring him and trying to keep the alcohol out of reach. Frank’s not there—he’s out shooting publicity photographs on the stage—but other people keep coming in and out of his dressing room with their own problems, and she’s got a splitting headache. Finally, they all clear out and she gets a breather for a minute, flips on the radio, and starts waltzing to some soft music, Odets tells you in the script, “as if it were possible to waltz herself back to a better time.”
She doesn’t notice that Bernie is standing in the dressing-room doorway, watching her. When she sees him, she stops dancing abruptly, embarrassed. Bernie says, “Excuse me, the both of you.” It’s sarcastic. She’s been waltzing alone, with an invisible partner.
That’s very typical of the theater today. I don’t mean the sarcasm; I mean that you don’t knock on a dressing-room door, you just walk in, and if you see someone there who’s not an actor, you say, “Excuse me,” meaning “What are you doing here?” In the dressing room, there is no rapport between somebody from the outside and somebody who belongs there.
So you get the attitude, as Bernie comes in, that there are two very different people in this room. You get the sense that they are not together, that they don’t really want to speak to each other. She’s in the middle of a reverie, maybe looking in the mirror, turning around, reaching for something … He’s barging in on a mission, looking for Frank, but Frank is not to be seen—just Georgie with her headache. Bernie reaches in his pocket, hands her a little tin, and says: “It’s the Age of Aspirin.”
He says that because he is very philosophical, and critical—he’s saying, “Everybody takes too many aspirin these days.” She’s struggling: “A splitting headache … too much stuffy dressing-room … ”
He’s moving again, always moving, and he says, “I have to get Frank. Where’s Frank?” She says, “On stage.” He’s up and down to the dressing-room entrance and back. He can’t find Frank, he has things to do in the office. His whole action is to find Frank. Georgie’s whole action is to struggle with this mess. It’s not do-able, but she’s trying. This man, Bernie, is against her; the office is against her; Frank has a cold and has already polished off one bottle of cough medicine and is looking for the other one, which Georgie hid. He smashed the empty bottle and threw things down on the floor because she took the other bottle of cough mixture away. She swept up the pieces when he went off—she constantly picks up the pieces for him.
The mess is not something she has just visualized when the curtain goes up. She has it from deep in her past. “I can’t take it anymore, I have to get out. I can’t take another outburst, I don’t want him to break another bottle, I don’t want to be here when he breaks things again. I have to get out.” She is tense as well as intense.
Get her intensity. Get her realization that it’s all too much for her. When he says “Where’s Frank?” she turns and faces him. It’s the first time she is actually “with” him, and she needs a cigarette to do it. In this particular theatrical style, you don’t just “use” props, you let the props clarify you and the text. It is not for you to be busy with irrelevant things. The things you do must help create your character, create the style and help the text. If it doesn’t help the text, don’t do it.
So where are her cigarettes? She glances around, looks at the table. She locates her pocketbook and picks it up, but doesn’t open it yet. She is maybe near the washstand or near a chair and table with a lamp and a pitcher of water on it. She turns to him and says, “His cold is getting worse, Mr. Dodd. He shouldn’t be kept up this late. It’s more than flesh and blood can stand.”
With that, maybe she opens her pocketbook, takes out her handkerchief and wets it, to get some cool water on it. She dabs her face a little. He watches her do this. We see she’s in a state—she has a headache, she is not well, she is with her own body. He takes this in. He feels she can be of no help to him or her husband—taking aspirin, drinking water, wetting her face. He sees a very womanly woman, doing feminine things.
His disrespect for her is not only in his mind but is made visible by what she does. You can’t imagine him ever needing aspirin or cold water for his head. His attitude toward her as a man is, “For chrissakes, what are you doing here? We don’t need you, we don’t need sick little wives around.” It has to be established right away that his attitude is superficially tolerant—he doesn’t throw her out—but he’s not with her.
So after taking the aspirin and the water, she could notice there’s a new script on the table—that’s trouble. She goes over and picks it up, looks at it, puts it down. Dodd doesn’t know what Georgie knows: that when there’s a new script, Frank can’t handle it. Only Georgie knows that. The thing that has to be in her mind—and your mind, if you’re the actress—is “He can’t study and learn this! It’s no good!”
In this style, you have to invent a lot from offstage to feed yourself onstage. It is important that you feed off the props, feed off the business, feed off the ideas to agitate yourself. She would get extremely agitated by realizing that Bernie has brought in a new script. She might look at it, see how marked up it is, put it back down on the table, thinking, “He won’t be able to do it, there’ll be a scandal.” The handkerchief, the scripts give her some way to show him what a mess the situation is—why “it’s more than flesh and blood can stand.”
“Them’s melodramatic words,” he says, patronizing her. “Look, we need production pictures … How’s his spirit?” She looks over at where Frank threw the empty bottle of cough syrup, lying there in the garbage can. She knows he’s getting drunk. She walks around her table, knowing he threw everything off it that she had arranged so nice and clean. Bernie sees only the clean table. She looks at this man, who knows nothing about what is happening, and then answers: “Low.” Her attitude toward Bernie is, “You’re a boy, you really don’t know what’s going on here—you only know what you’re told happened.” Nobody knows a drunk except his wife.
Frank’s “low” spirit means “You can’t possibly reach this man except through the things that I’m going to tell you.” He says, “Why is he low? The play’s in good shape.” He is only judging from the outside, not from her experience. They are in complete conflict, which is what you need in staging a realistic play. It’s not in the text. The play takes on many dimensions if you do it this way. That is what every realistic play needs. It needs not to be spoken like Shakespeare.
Bernie leans on the edge of the dressing-room table and says, “The show’s in fair shape.” She takes that in, looks at him, and sees that he’s with the show and the new text, while she is with the fact that Frank has had cough mixture with liquor in it and wants more liquor. She goes for her pocketbook, takes out her cigarettes, and says, “Ask the Boston critics. Everyone doesn’t have your confidence.” She has a cigarette in her hand but no matches. He sees that, and throws her the matches.
Now, the throwing of the matches reveals two things: one, his basic disrespect for women, and two, his class. He throws her the matches instead of lighting her cigarette. You know everything about this man in that one gesture. She lights her cigarette, looks for the ashtray, picks it up from somewhere, and puts it down. “And while I’m on the subject . . .” she says—now that she has the cigarette, she is more pulled together. Smoking, she looks at him: “While we’re on the subject, let’s talk about you.” On that she is quite direct: “On the subject of confidence, I’m going to say that you have a lot of it, which makes you push.” Give him back the matches. “It makes you into a bully.” He gets it.
The cigarette and the play of the matches will give you a lot of drama that is not in the text. It will give you character and a sense that they shouldn’t be in the same room together. If any man threw matches at me, I’d kill him.
“That makes you a bully.” He takes the matches back, lights his own cigarette, goes back to a chair, and says, “That’s true, too”—meaning, “How clever you are! My God, when did you discover that? When did you find out that I’m aggressive and like to take charge?” She says, “Don’t minimize what I say by agreeing with me.” It’s the first time she really makes up her mind to tell him the ugly truth—that Frank has lost his confidence.
Bernie can walk upstage, open the door to see how the photo shoot is going and, from the back of the stage, say, “What else is bothering friend Frank?”
While the pictures are being taken Georgie says, “You didn’t come back after the show tonight. Neither did Mr. Cook.” He can grab the script and shake it practically in her face when he says, “Look, this last month I’ve spent ten, twelve, fifteen hours a day with Frank—fifteen hours a day!—and nothing bothers him except through your mouth. Why?”
This is the first outbreak.
His action, again, is to keep things going—to keep the rehearsal going and make sure everything there is straight. He has the script and the rewrites on his mind. He’s spent an endless amount of time with Frank, and the way he sees it, nothing’s upsetting Frank except Georgie. It’s the first time they move closer together in their confrontation. She wants a way out of this mess, and he wants to keep it all going. They have two different ambitions.
Georgie tries to warn him about a few things, tries to give him an insight or two into Frank. “He thinks it’s a crime to lack a sense of humor. He doesn’t want to be disliked. He hides when he’s nervous” about the script. She picks it up, puts it down. “No humor, so he drinks.” Maybe she picks up the cough-syrup bottle and shows it to him. Find elements on the stage that show what she’s saying. Find things she can use.
There’s no humor in the script—new or old. She picks one or the other one up. “He doesn’t want to fail, to be disliked. So he hides and jabbers away, or he sits in silence and rots away inside.” She’s trying to make it clear he is headed for a bender.
Georgie goes back to her chair. Bernie, now, decides to get rid of her because he thinks she is belittling Frank. She is dealing with Frank physically, with his body, and she’s talking about this artist in personal ways. But there is something about a director in the theater that doesn’t want to know those things. “I don’t want to know what happens when you go home, Stella. I just want to know that you know the text!” That is absolutely true of people in the profession. They don’t want to hear that you have rheumatism. “Don’t bother me about that.”
So Bernie gets very angry. “I have to get rid of this bitch. I loathe her!” Getting rid of her becomes his main action. He says, “Women always think they understand their men. What women know, my God, what great theoreticians they are, aren’t they?”
She gets it. “I won’t fight with you, Mr. Dodd. He expected you after the show last night.” She’s right at him with the facts. “He wanted you backstage. He doesn’t want you to tell him he’s great, but he wanted you backstage. I’ll tell you what he really wants: he wants little compliments from you, Mr. Dodd. That’s what he needs.” This is very upsetting to Bernie, and his anger increases.
She sees that he doesn’t understand and says, “Do you know anything about drinkers?” She gets more and more direct. Maybe stuff out the cigarette, move away, walk around the room. She has got to get to him—to make him see that this is a patient, not an actor.
So her action changes, too. The second step in her action was to warn him. Her third step, now, is to try to get him to understand the patient—to penetrate his infernal difficulty in understanding the problem. She gets more intense. “Have you ever had a drunk on your hands? I’m diagnosing this patient for you.” How can she get through to him? She tries one thing after another. “He’s got a bad cold,” she says. “That’s a respectable reason for any drinker to jump down the well. If you’re not careful, you’ll have him full of whiskey before he goes to bed tonight.”
She’s really an expert doctor. He watches her intensity in trying to explain the anatomy of this drunk, but he only sees her trying to be a mother or a nursemaid. He says, “Why do you work so hard at this marriage? Why not take a rest? You wear your husband down! You make him tense, uneasy—you don’t stop ‘handling’ him. You try to ‘handle’ me, too … You called your own husband a cunning drunkard!”
Because it’s true, she says—because “it is necessary for you to know it!” The impasse is complete. They both think they know what’s best for him. She’s at her wit’s end. “In God’s name, what exactly do you want me to do for Frank?”
He finally hits her with it: “Get out of town!”
Georgie is sick. Her headache is just a symptom of the deeper sickness of not knowing whether she can handle another opening and another drunken brawl with Frank. “I can’t take it anymore. I don’t have the right to go, but I can’t stay.” Right from the start, look for her deeper problem. It’s not a headache; it’s whether to go or stay. This is the spine of her action.
Isn’t that the spine of the dilemma of most modern women who haven’t accomplished what they want in their lives? Isn’t that what most modern women talk about? “If I’m not fully aware of where I am going, how can I keep going there?” This is what she is worried about. After ten years, does she have the right to think about that? If you play her, build that up.
Does Bernie understand a thing about her? All he knows is that stage life is tense and she’s in the way. All she knows is that she’s in a place that is killing her. She is in a room without air—a place where everybody’s on a first-name basis. This is modern. It is absolutely a new way of life. But she is somebody who has not made that transition. She calls him “Mr. Dodd,” and from that one phrase alone you see that she is traditional. She is still called “Mrs. Elgin.” She is not called “Becky” or “Sadie” or “Jenny” or “Georgie” by anyone except her husband. She is a Mrs. The fact that she is a Mrs. gives her a certain standing in the society. That’s part of what “Mrs.” is—it establishes you, gives you a base. But she has nothing to show for it. The “Mrs.” is empty for her.
Bernie knows this. He knows she has no home life, no kids—and he knows Frank’s temperament. “What the hell are you calling yourself Mrs. for?” he wants to know. “Why don’t you just get the hell out of town, for christsakes. You’re a misfit here!”
She’s saying, “No, I am not a misfit. I’ve weathered this storm for ten years. I am what stays when you go. I am the permanency—the permanent center—of this man’s life. He will die without me.” It’s the attitude of the committed “Mrs.” toward the world then. The world changed in the sixties, not in 1950. But it was starting to.
She is saying, “I have been the wife of a drunkard.” Bernie is saying, “He’s only a drunkard to you with your small, boring, middle-class values. To me, he’s a great actor. If you keep calling him a drunkard, I’ll break your neck.”
He is talking about Frank’s soul. “That’s what he gives you,” she says, “but he gives me his body—his colds and coughs, his vomiting, his taking pills at night, his not sleeping, his nervous tension, his sneaking away and drinking. This is what he gives me; this is what I’m reporting on. It’s more than he can stand. I’m talking about his body, Mr. Dodd! I tell you, unless he brings you his body, you won’t have his soul.”
Can she leave? No. She is a Mrs.—Mrs. Suffering—understanding her role in life biblically, for better or worse. I don’t blame her for having a headache. Bernie says, “Them’s melodramatic words.” A melodrama is a cheap form of theater—a false play with a false plot and false characters. When he says, “Them’s melodramatic words,” he means, “I think you’re a fake. You’re not a liar, but your class lies. You exaggerate. You have an exaggerated sense of your value in the society. Whereas I’m a left-winger. I’m the one in the marches. I’m against you and your stockings and your alligator bag. I’m against your white gloves and your way of slandering this great man!”
I would say the same thing Bernie is saying. I’d tell you that a paralyzed actor will get through, that people around him know he will get through, and that there is no such thing as “I have a headache” or “I’m sick”—for God’s sake, shut up about that! There is no time for an actor to say “I’m tired.” I can’t stand it whenever any actor says he’s tired, because I don’t get tired. No fatigue, no toothaches, no headaches, no “My feet are tired” or “My back hurts.” I’m not hungry, I’m not thirsty. I am working. This is a play about the theater—take it from the horse’s mouth. It’s about discipline. If someody comes in from the outside and starts meddling, you want to kill them.
Georgie is bringing in her own kind of discipline as the Wife of All Time, saying, “I don’t trust you and your art. I’m the wife, and I know when he will give in and give up.” And Bernie’s response is, “You don’t know a goddamn thing. You are a cheap slut who is intruding.” From the first, he views her with suppressed or unsuppressed anger. “Get out of the dressing room!”
She says, “Yes, he is an aristocrat and an artist. He won’t show you he is angry. He will joke with you. He will never reveal any weakness except to me, because with me he is a man, not an artist. With you, or on the stage, he does this whole shtick because you demand it from him. But with me, he is sick in body and spirit. He knows he is defeated. He hears through the door—hears you talking about him and needing him to be a success. But he is not going to be a success. He’s a man as well as an artist, and he has a right to fail.”
Once I went to see Gielgud.2 It was his last attempt in King Lear at Stratford. He was very good in the last scene, but he never really had the power for the “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!” monologue in Act III. I went backstage, and he was very charming. “This is the third time round,” he said. “You see, I fail when I do this play.”
The great actor is never supposed to fail. He simply puts the role aside. After my father failed as Othello, he played Iago. He gave Othello to another actor, and his Iago was a great success. Great actors know when they fail. But even then, they don’t fail their audiences. If you play twenty or thirty great parts, some of them will succeed and be remembered historically, and some of them will have to be given up.
This thing of telling an actor, “If you fail, the play is finished, the show and the theater will close down”—this is something new. The theater used to be open year-round. You didn’t go into a theater for a few days. You were engaged for thirty-eight weeks, and the rest of the time you filled in with concerts or stock company and things. You were always engaged for the season, and you still are—in every other country.
An actor’s spirit is deeply affected by what Strindberg called “the rumor”—by threatening his performance with failure. Georgie says, “His cold is getting worse, he shouldn’t be kept up late, he needs rest and quiet and peace of mind. You’re asking about his spirit? It’s low!” “Low” doesn’t mean he isn’t feeling good. It means he is on the verge of cracking up. She is taking his part from a middle-class point of view that understands he has a right to fail.
But Bernie says, “If he’s low, it’s because you’re making him low.” Bernie is in trouble too, and he knows it. When he says “The show is in fair shape,” it means “We’re in trouble, but I will pull it out and make it work somehow.” As a director, he owns the actor in a real sense. “Give me Frank’s body, because I can inspire him. He may fail, his way, by drinking himself to death or collapsing onstage, but not your way, by taking him home and nursing him, you bitch! Get out. Leave him alone. Give him to me!”
You cannot play a big play from the words—you have to play it from the conflicts. The Country Girl is a very well-written play about an actor who’s in trouble because other people need him to be a success. He is thinking, “Leave me alone and I’ll give you the performance, but don’t whisper about me, don’t tell me Mr. Cook is out there depending on me to cook up his money. I don’t care—and I can’t deal with it.”
An epic struggle is going on for possession of this man’s body and soul—the struggle of two classes for the artist. Odets deeply understands that the American artist is going down, that he is being killed by commercialism. What’s left of courage and fairness in American life is personified by the country girl, facing the new element that says, “I will save the theater, even if it means killing my star actor and myself.”
Bernie tells Georgie, “Don’t weaken him, don’t do what women do. Don’t give him the sense that he needs you. Leave him. Let him be with the part. Let him be with me.”
There is enormous tension there.
Do you understand the anger between them?
1 The Country Girl premiered at the Lyceum Theatre in New York City on November 10, 1950, directed by Odets, with Uta Hagen (Georgie), Paul Kelly (Frank), and Steven Hill (Bernie). The 1954 film version, directed by George Seaton, won Seaton an Oscar for Best Screenplay Adaptation and a Best Actress award for Grace Kelly as Georgie. Bing Crosby played Frank and William Holden was Bernie.
2 John Gielgud (1904–2000): the great English Shakespearean stage and film actor and director, renowned for his Hamlet (performed more than five hundred times), Richard II, and Prospero in The Tempest, and an Oscar winner for his sardonic butler in Arthur (1981).