SYNOPSIS OF THE LADY OF LARKSPUR LOTION: In a roach-infested boardinghouse in New Orleans’s French Quarter, Mrs. Hardwick-Moore—a bleach-blonde in her forties—sits alone on the edge of her bed in a squalid rented room. She seems lost in thought—or, perhaps, no thought at all.
Her reverie—or stupor—is interrupted by the noisy arrival of Mrs. Wire, a no-nonsense landlady come to demand her overdue rent. Mrs. H-M’s response invokes the fantasy that she’s related to the Hapsburgs and has inherited a rubber plantation in Brazil, from which she receives steady income. Those daydreams help her cope with her squalid circumstances, but in fact, what meager income she has is derived from entertaining gentlemen in her room at night.
Mrs. Wire knows there’s no Brazilian rubber plantation. She has been putting up with the story and the deadbeat tenant—until now. As Mrs. H-M protests the cockroaches and the outrage of living in such conditions, the landlady’s demands for money get increasingly shrill. She ridicules the plantation illusion and declares that the use of her boardinghouse as a brothel must stop. Mrs. H-M insists there IS a rubber plantation, and she’ll be getting her check from there shortly.
Mrs. Wire spies a bottle of Larkspur Lotion on the dresser, which Mrs. H-M says she uses to remove nail polish. Mrs. Wire knows better. Her merciless badgering of Mrs. H-M is interrupted by the entry of another boozy boarder, the Writer, who claims to have a 780-page manuscript tucked away in his own fetid room—the Great American Novel he’s been working on for twenty years.
In a stirring, wild-eyed defense of dreamers like Mrs. Hardwick-Moore and himself, the Writer orders Mrs. Wire to lay off the Larkspur Lotion lady: so she has invented a plantation fantasy to endure her bleak existence—so who has the right to deprive her of that?
—B.P.1
I WANT YOU to be aware that I won’t let you get away with anything. I’m very happy that you’re here, and that I’m here, but I’m very frightened that you may think of the history of acting as being related to television. You must realize that television is primarily visual—it does very well if it has four ducks on a pond and a sunset. But you can’t play a duck or the sunset. So they don’t really need you. What they really need are the ducks and the sunset. They only need you for a couple of words to be heard—not necessarily to be seen at all.
The stage is the most important form of writing and self-expression because it is the best way to reach people emotionally and intellectually. There’s nothing that comes closer. You can read a great novel all day and night, but however absorbing it is, you will still remain in a certain more or less neutral, abstract state. A great work of theater, on the other hand, keeps you absolutely gripped—or should.
I want you to do a lot more work than you are inclined to do. Most of all, I want you to know about using your imagination—that you absolutely, desperately need your imagination in studying and working in the theater, and that you must get yourself more involved with working on the play than with showing yourself. What you must show, and what you must do, is called interpretation.
No playwright can really give you background. Shaw tried and failed. He rarely failed at anything, but he failed at that. He failed to give his character Candida anything except the valise she walks in with. Candida has a whole life inside her, and much of it is gradually revealed in the play. The author can tell you when it is, where it is, to some extent the social situation—but that’s all he can do. The rest is your responsibility.
In this case, with The Lady of Larkspur Lotion, it’s 1941. The Depression is still dragging on. If you don’t know about that, spend some money—steal it, if you have to!—and go buy some books that tell you about it. There are plenty of them. Every art form evolves. It took a long time for music to get to the sonata. It took a long time for the drama to get to Tennessee Williams. Don’t try to understand him “by instinct.” Instinct is not imagination. Imagination requires that you know something first. I don’t know what you know, and I never will—because you’re quiet. I see this is a very educated group, but none of you speak forcefully. You’re not like eastern actors—they ask a lot of loud, obnoxious questions.2
Anyway, you see why you need the author. Now, why does the author need you? Because an awful lot of Candida’s character or the Larkspur Lady’s character belongs to her background, which the actress playing her must bring in on her own—as an embellishment or gift to the author—to realize the part.
The first thing you have to do is read the play over and over. I reread Streetcar a dozen times before I realized two key things about Stanley Kowalski: that he’s the head of his little family, and that he doesn’t lie. He’s rough, he’s rude, he’s macho, he says, “I’m not educated—but I don’t lie.” Blanche lies. Stanley can say, “I tell the truth, and what you are is a liar.” You are inclined to think that she’s a fine, frail victim and that he’s just a bum. But he is not. He represents a lot of things—including the working class and the men who fought World War II.
The Lady of Larkspur Lotion is a one-act play with just three characters—all symbols: the artist, the businesswoman, and the one who can’t make it. I’ve talked to you about the South and its different classes around this time: the upper class is going down and has to make a transition to the middle or working class. In the ones who don’t make that transition, you get the whole of Tennessee Williams: if the women can’t be southern belles, they go down. And when they go down, they go so far down that they reach insanity. They substitute fantasy for the reality. That’s when you can’t be saved.
The moment one of Tennessee’s characters fantasizes—“I’ll get the money, I have to wait until my friend Charley sends it, he has a plantation!”—you know he or she is in deep trouble. As soon as the fantasy gets over the border of reality, there is no hope for that character. Nobody can get them back to reality.
Larkspur Lotion was a drugstore remedy used for lice and body vermin. You put it on your skin for bugs—it’s a lotion to take away the ugliness and corruption of what has happened to your body.
Mrs. Hardwick is beyond communicating. She’s on the lowest level. She’s someone who thinks she’s going to call some guy with some estate and that he’s going to send her money and save her life. She’s way beyond what you are, Ilse.3 You are able to talk about real things, but the thing she’s talking about isn’t real. But you don’t need to scream or run around and go crazy. Just stay center stage. Don’t go too far away from there, not even once. Go deeper. You are not going to survive the night. You are going to die.
There’s a lot of acting going on here—an awful lot. I mean, you could supply the entire United States with this acting. Take it deeper, not broader. I don’t know exactly what bag ladies do out here, but in New York the bag ladies on the curbs never look up—they never see you, they never really see anything.
Once when I was having trouble with a character I said to Stanislavsky, “You don’t understand! It’s different with you. You’re handsome, you’re distinguished, you’re gorgeous—no wonder everybody looks at you and loves you! If you looked like other actors do, you’d understand why they have problems. You don’t have any problems.”
He said: “I’ll tell you something. When I walk down the street, however good-looking I am, if there’s another man with a crutch, all bent over with rags around his feet—everybody looks at that man, not me. There’s something about a cripple that immediately draws attention away from what’s more good-looking.”
So in that sense, you are that bag lady. And we’re not getting it. We get that you’re secretly all right and that you’re just acting. You can scream if you like, but I would like you not to exist when you’re that lady.
Sandra, you are acting a whole lot, too. Throw it all out! Every bit of it. Don’t use the stage to act up a riot. There is such a thing as acting the truth—and that’s what Tennessee’s writing about. He’s not writing about a bad landlady; he’s writing about a person who deals with the reality of money, the reality of living, eating. You come in with a ready-made character. Instead of hiding it, you show it. If she’s a landlady, why does she dress worse than the scum people on the street? You’re dressed worse than your boarder is. Why don’t you wear a skirt with a waist and a girdle?
[“I’m run-down,” replies Sandra Tucker.]
No, you’re not. You have money—you manage the place. She’s acting run-down, she’s not really run-down. Anybody with money isn’t rundown. Don’t act evil. Simply come in with “Listen, I’m sorry you’re so pathetic, but I need you to get out.” Look around, see what the room is like—pick up a shoe, maybe, throw it in a box—but take the bandanna off your head, and don’t be a mess. If the landlady is a mess and the Larkspur Lady is a mess, too, we haven’t got a play.
Something else Stanislavsky told me. When they were playing The Lower Depths by Gorky, the entire Moscow Art Theater company went to see where the bums lived. They went there and went there and kept going there until they understood what it really was like to be in those lower depths. I saw the play in Moscow, and you would never have thought such distinguished actors could be so completely buried in dirt and aloneness and despair.
Understand that Tennessee is talking about the lower depths, too—the lowest of the low. Which is why there’s something about a white, clean nightgown that’s not right, Ilse. You’re not costumed correctly. I keep telling you, the costume will awaken the part. It will give you a clue or maybe even a key to the part. This play is about you—the Lady of Larkspur Lotion. Theatrically speaking, you are the leading lady, so be center stage—always if you’re the leading lady. Center stage, and center yourself. Take it from an old pro. When you’re alone for months and years at a time, you feel like a stray dog, lost and abandoned. Nothing exists for a dog when it’s lost. It just wanders around alone. Get more of that sense of aloneness. Really talk about those cockroaches. You’ve been living with roaches and lice! Don’t be so logical with the prose, so pedestrian.
Sandra, don’t just come on stage and start talking to her. Enter, walk around, look over the place, check things out, check her out, before you start talking. Continue talking, maybe wander offstage and come in again, go over to the washbasin, come back—you don’t always have to be up front “communicating” the way you do. I don’t want you to compete with her. You have a small part. You’re a landlady—everybody knows what a landlady is. Talk—don’t act up a storm. You’re acting, but what’s your action? You don’t know what you’re doing. Have an action. Walk in to do something, darling. You came for the rent. You came to see if she has whiskey—did she get it from that man you heard her with last night? Look around, see if she has anything worthwhile to pay you with. Maybe look in the bureau, in the trunk—go off and come back again. But don’t compete. We won’t hear the character who’s speaking if the other character is so busy moving that we watch her instead. Please be busy only on your own lines. Don’t be busy when somebody else is talking.
I was working with another class on a scene from Orpheus Descending the other day, and the actor playing Val kept picking up his guitar during Lady’s big speech—the leading lady in Orpheus is called Lady. It’s confusing, but never mind. I said, “Don’t pick up the guitar while she’s telling you these things. After she’s told you, go get your guitar, take all the pauses you want, walk across with it or strum it, look through the window at the moonlight, do whatever you want to do as the character. But don’t walk around and make us watch you while she has important things to say. You can’t do that to an actress—if you did it to me, you would be dead! It’s the rules of the game.” He said, “Why would they be watching me instead of her just because I’m—” and I said, “Listen, will you shut up? I don’t want to go into any more explanations. Trust me. It’s just bad technique and bad theatrical manners!”
So let’s try the scene again.
[The actresses do so.]
There’s too much voice, Ilse—too much projection, too much awareness of an audience. Hide from life, hide from Mrs. Wire. She’s your tormentor—cover yourself against her. Maybe put part of the nightgown over your face. Try to protect yourself a little. Then talk about the cockroaches. You have to do something to show us, to reveal your character through something that you choose to do. The writer doesn’t tell you that. The writer tells you she’s talking about the plantation, but he can’t create the character for you. Your job is to find a way to do it.
I don’t believe a thing either one of you is doing. It’s a shame. You have talent, but you keep going to those goddamned clichés. Don’t handle a prop unless you know the prop and need the prop. The scene on the page is one thing—it’s dead. The other kind of a scene is when you act what’s on the page, which makes it live. But act the character, not the lines. We’ve got to get two different characters here. We have to get the person who’s chosen to live with money and the person who has chosen to drink herself to death and get thrown out. A woman needs to be cared about, that’s the center of Tennessee; and if nobody cares, she goes down. She’s down and abandoned and cannot lift herself up. He has a central character like that in almost every play.
Know your author. Your author does not like rich people. He does not admire people who don’t have pain or psychological inner problems. He understands them better than any playwright in the world, because that’s what he was himself. Once they put Tennessee in a good hotel and gave him a steak and chocolate sauce, and he took the chocolate sauce and put it on the steak. He was by nature an innocent man, and he went toward the people who needed him. He writes about the people who fail.
How is the Larkspur Lady failing, Ilse? Show us. Maybe cover one eye at the end. Now that we know she’s done, put your head into your bosom—down, in. And quiet—draw into yourself, I don’t want so much voice. It’s not the text, it’s the character we want. She hates that word “roaches”—every time you say it, close your mouth against it afterward. When something frightens you, it should be physical. Run around the room. Run! Never mind the language. Too much goddamned logic! Sandra, why don’t you just pick up the bottle of Larkspur Lotion and simply read the label—just say it out loud with some disdain, and then go off?
Separate the language to make the ideas clear. It’s not clear to us when you run all the words together. Stop acting—that’s an indulgence for yourself. Instead, try just going back, just reminiscing. Do the wonderful thing that Chekhov allows you to do: he lets you talk without having to look at your partner or relate to your partner or even have a partner. Anybody and everybody else can be there in the scene, but you can still just talk to yourself or about yourself. You don’t have to look around for someone else to bounce it off. The secret of Chekhov’s characters is that while one’s talking, another is drinking tea, the other one is crying, the fourth one is smoking a cigarette … Nobody else on stage is listening, necessarily—but the audience is! Tennessee gives you that same privilege, that freedom of not always needing a partner. You can be thinking and talking about all these profound things, but you don’t have to aim them at somebody opposite you. Sometimes they’re better when spoken utterly alone.
Keep in mind that The Lady of Larkspur Lotion takes place in the lowest kind of gutter. You can’t go any further down than this, not even on the Bowery. It’s brutal. The landlady says, “I want money! I don’t want to hear ‘She’s sick.’ ” She attacks this victim—this “Blanche”—who’s lying there, completely down and out, with her insanity of having plantations. You don’t talk about your plantation to a landlady demanding the rent.
“I never spy and I never listen at doors!” Mrs. Wire says. “The first thing a landlady in the French Quarter learns is not to see and not to hear, but only collect your money. As long as that comes in—okay, I’m blind, I’m deaf, I’m dumb! But as soon it stops, I recover my hearing and my sight and my voice. If necessary, I go to the phone and call up the chief of police, who happens to be an in-law of my sister’s”—and he’ll come and kick you out on your behind, you deadbeat!
And, then suddenly, at that point—when this mismatched heavyweight fight between the two women reaches its peak—the Writer from the next room shows up, saying Mrs. Wire’s “demon howling” was so loud it woke him up from his sound sleep. She lets him have it: Your sleep? Hah! You mean your drunken stupor! Don’t try to pull the wool over my eyes, you lousy alcoholic!
It’s really Tennessee who shows up, in the form of the Writer. It’s really just a two-scene play, and this is where the second scene begins. The conflict suddenly goes from Mrs. Wire and the Larkspur Lady to Mrs. Wire and the Writer. He comes in to deliver the ending and the message that gives over and over. Lady of Larkspur Lotion clarifies that character of the Writer, who shows up in all of Tennessee’s plays. In Glass Menagerie, it’s Tom, who says, “I wrote a poem on the lid of a shoebox.” Here, it’s a guy who thinks he has a great 780-page manuscript in a drawer—a writer who’s trying to be creative in a house full of roaches. Tennessee does that. He found he was sparked to be creative in places where most people are destroyed. He understands that if you are destroyed—really destroyed—you can find another life and live there. It’s not real, but you will be able to live there. Or at least you’ll try to. You’ll fight. You fight to get yourself out of that gutter.
The Writer says to this landlady: “What do you care if I write and it fails? What difference does it make to you? Why do you have to take my dream away?”
Many of you—most of you, I’d say—have experienced your parents or your friends or your husband or somebody trying to dissuade you from becoming an actor. They can’t do that. You can’t take a dream away from somebody. I don’t care what else you do, but don’t take a person’s dream away. And don’t let anybody take away yours. If you want to act, tell your mother or father or husband to go make a lot of money to support you! That’s really the brilliant answer to anybody who says, “An actor doesn’t make any money.”
Is this something that has meaning to you? Is it happening to you? What Tennessee says in a play like this has some social or political value that speaks to the audience, because it’s still happening in the world, right now. Artists and dreamers and other people are still becoming alcoholics—there are lots of Larkspur Ladies and Writers and Blanches. There are institutions all over the world for them, because they don’t know how to stop, or take care of themselves. I think it’s brilliant of Tennessee, as an outcast of society himself, to say something like that.
I think The Lady of Larkspur Lotion is brilliant, too. Tennessee is at his best here, in a miniature form that’s going to lead to something big, something much bigger. This is a kind of preview or run-up exercise to Streetcar and Blanche. It’s important. Tennessee is as important to us as Sophocles was to the Greeks.
The Greeks wrote plays—they didn’t write novels—to teach people that Oedipus shouldn’t sleep with his mother. We’re still working on that one. But that’s what they wanted to tell their people then, so they found a play for it—and other plays to say other important things. The play form is that old. The crucial thing is for the audience to understand it, and the only way they can do that is through the actors interpreting it.
If you’re tense, it won’t work. If you try to fool us, it won’t work. Try to relax and really go to what you’re seeing or describing—if you see the rubber plantation, we see it. If you see the cockroaches, we’ll see them. If you don’t see them and just talk about them, you will see no plantations or roaches and we won’t see them, either, because you don’t. When you talk about something, it has to be in you, and it can’t be if your body is tense. How many of you have tension on the stage? Everybody? Of course you do. Wherever the tension is, let go of it from there and put it somewhere else. Transfer it to another place. If one foot is very tense, let go of that and tense your arm instead. If you don’t and you go on working while you’re tense in that certain crucial spot, it alters your voice, your movements—you’re not free.
Do what I’ve taught myself to do about nervousness: Talk to your tension, put it in its place. “Look, I know you’re in me. But you’re not all of me, you’re just a part of me. I’ll live with you, you son of a bitch, but don’t try to dominate me.” That’s a good rule for all actors.
Here’s another one: You have every right to make a mistake, any mistake. You’re not on this or another stage to “win” something. Write this down: “If I feel I have to succeed every time I get up, I am sure to fail.” Put that down and keep it in your memory. You must be able to say, “It didn’t go well—I’ll try it again.” You must not try always to give the great performance. The harder you try, the worse it will be. If it doesn’t win the first time, you’ll do it another.
Why I felt it didn’t win before is that you used the “real” reality. Which means nothing at all. Realism, theatrically speaking, doesn’t mean being real. It means being truthful. That’s what an actor is for, to bring out the truth of the play and make it mean something for the audience. They might not get everything, but they’ll get something as long as you don’t bring all the lines down. If you want to say something really big, don’t pull it down and make it ordinary, the way you’d say it in television. The play won’t get anywhere then.
Now, let’s do it again—the whole thing, from the top.
[The transcript lamentably lacks audio, as well as visual, but reports “loud applause” at the end of this final run-through. All present—including Stella—are evidently enthralled by it.]
It was a beautiful performance. Ilse, wonderful. Bill, brilliant, it’s the best thing I’ve seen you do. Let’s give them an applause for being actors. Did you see how much the play came alive in them this time? It’s a big undertaking to act a play by one of the greatest playwrights in the world. I’d rather act than go to the bank—wouldn’t you?
1 The Lady of Larkspur Lotion never had a professional Broadway or Off Broadway premiere in Tennessee Williams’s lifetime.
2 This lecture takes place at Adler’s Los Angeles studio on June 22, 1988.
3 The actresses with whom Stella is working here are Ilse Taurins and Sandra Tucker. The actor is Bill Lithgow, who later taught at the Stella Adler Acting Conservatory in Los Angeles for many years. Part of the exercise, on this occasion, was the advance instruction to choose and wear their own costumes.