Stapleton, Scott, Simon, and Nichols.
"Here’s something I always thought I knew, but really didn’t. Every play gives you the chance to examine a human being and become a better actress and to connect with an audience."
That day in 1991, when I was in Lenox, Massachusetts, and I asked Maureen Stapleton what it was like to work in Neil Simon’s Plaza Suite.
Now, I don’t know if you know this, but I’m crazy about dancing. I would always like to be dancing. I’m good at it. I lose myself in it. So, don’t get bored or mad with me when I keep saying that the best things in life are like dancing. I believe that. Acting is certainly like dancing. It can be bad dancing, and I’ve got those examples, but when it really works, it’s the most wonderful sort of dancing.
Now, Neil Simon. About him. He’s got an almost mathematical genius about him. He might hate that, or I hate that, because I hate math, but what I mean is that sentences and paragraphs and scenes are so perfectly constructed, and you have to follow the blueprint or the chart or whatever so that you get the right response, the right answer. All that chalk on the blackboard to get x=3 or whatever. I’m talking about precision, and you get his words and rhythms right or it’s all flat. It’s shit. George used to say that he found Neil’s work like architecture, and he could locate the foundation and work his way up to what the scene was going to be or should be. George called it the pinnacle.
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Then you get Mike [Nichols, the director] and he’s a genius, too. He knew how to precisely orchestrate what Neil had written, but then he would stop and suggest something that made it even better. George loved this sort of direction—until he didn’t. Now you know that George would threaten to quit or to walk off or to hit me or Mike or anybody, but on the good days, he liked the order and control of doing that play. George didn’t like stupid plays, and he would talk about how dumb so many things are. He loved to be challenged, and he used to say that Neil challenged him like O’Neill. He didn’t like that people were snobbish and thought Neil was mindless. I’m telling you Neil is not mindless.
Harold Clurman used to jump on me if I “did” something. You know what I mean? If I played at sadness or fear or wonder. No, you don’t “do” wonder: You experience wonder. You replicate the wonder you once felt. Mike said to me once that I should take my sense of rejection and pain—the very moment that my delusions had left me—and tie it up with a thin cord to what I was doing in the play. I had lost a man; I had been cheated on; I had seen, or thought I had seen, my life dribbling away. So I tied a thin cord of what happened to me to what happens to Muriel [in the first act, who finally realizes that her husband has been unfaithful and is leaving her], and I wasn’t “doing” anything. I was just feeling and reacting and being.
Mike asked me once, When you were a kid, would you sneak up on the cookies or the cake, and really think that if you were slow and quiet, your mother—right over there, in the same room—would not notice you? Hell, yes, I said. I do that now! I’m always going to the cookie jar that I need like a hole in the head. Mike said, Did your mother make a sound, a sort of ‘I see you! Don’t think about it!’ I said, yes. Mike said, when I see you or George sneaking up on a scene or a word or a moment and you know what you’re reaching for, I’m going to make a sound that a mother might make if she saw her child sneaking toward the cookie jar. And he did. The bastard made that sound when I “tried” to be something or “do” something.
George thought he was brilliant. Diabolical. Of course, what Mike did for us in Plaza Suite applies to everything. And I’m here to tell you that when I’m tired or lazy or both, I “try,” I “do,” and it’s bad. The girl in the second act [Muriel] is not a bubble-head. She’s silly, she’s naive, she’s gullible, she wants more than anything to matter, to be included. Mike told me this was human behavior. It wasn’t shtick. What made that gal silly came from her head, not from adjusting her bra or playing with her hair, or looking off and giggling. What made the situation silly is how obvious the bullshit was from the guy and how eager she was to fall for it. How much she needed it. When a guy looks at you a certain way, and you think, I’ve gotten fat, that’s when you adjust your bra or suddenly suck in your stomach. Not just for the effect. A cheap effect. But you can get away with it. There are productions of that play going on right now, and I’m sure people still laugh if someone is going for the cheap shots, but they’re missing what’s going on in Neil’s play.
Barbara Baxley took over from me at one point. Barbara is a remarkable actress, and her comic timing is great, but she wasn’t getting laughs. Mike had directed her, and Mike loved her, but he wasn’t around at the time, and Barbara called me in a panic, one of her Rob Roys at the ready, and was wondering why the laughs weren’t coming. I asked her, Which scene? And she described the scene. What other scene? And she described the other scene. Then I stopped her. I know what you’re doing: I did it myself a few times. You are committing one of the worst of Mike Nichols sins: You, the actress, are letting the audience know that you’ve read the script. You know the outcome, and you’re playing toward it. You don’t know if your husband is in a heap of guts outside Trader Vic’s after walking outside on the ledge of the hotel to get to his daughter in the bathroom. Barbara knows, but the character doesn’t. So you killed your laugh because you let the audience know it was just a line, not a real situation.
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Barbara thanked me, and Barbara started getting the laughs.
Here’s something I always thought I knew, but really didn’t. Every play gives you the chance to examine a human being and become a better actress and to connect with an audience. Those thin cords that Mike had me using to connect my life experience to experiences in the play—well, that audience has similar cords. They’ve been through the same things, the same feelings. So you can shit on Neil Simon and say it’s just a silly comedy, but the foundation on which his plays rest—in my opinion—is authentic human experience in extreme circumstances. And just as in life, that can be very moving and also very funny. I think what Karen goes through in that first act is terribly moving. I found it more moving than when I played Georgie [in Clifford Odets’ The Country Girl]. A woman fully aware of what’s happening, but not ready to admit it. Ready to fight. Ready to seduce in her way. You know, Mike always talks about seducing. I’m trying to seduce George, as my husband, to see me as he once did, as I would like to think I still am, and George? He’s seducing the woman who will show up later and look at his hair, his slim body, his grooming. She’ll tell him how great he is; how smart. That’s what he’s seeing, hoping for, and then his fat, needy wife keeps getting in his line of vision. That’s very moving to me, to a lot of people. It’s also funny at times.
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Mike said that everyone in the audience would identify with the women I played. One who desperately is trying to save her marriage, her life. Another who is willing to get fucked in an afternoon for something she won’t get, but she’s a little bit closer to it. Glitter through fucking. And the last woman is every mother who wants to smack the shit out of her child for being ungrateful, bratty. The shrimp is going bad, the guests are pissed, your clothes are ruined, but you show up for the wedding—and for life—and you smile. Mike said, Everyone in this play will turn their experience into a great story. It’s what we do. The audience will do the same.