Reawakening in theater
Tony Hale, veteran TV actor, takes on challenge of first live performance in 17 years in ACT comedy
Tony Hale says he habitually turns off browsing on his phone, to help keep him from getting distracted. But he has a quote saved in his notes that he wants to share, with apologies for the break in focus that comes from looking at a screen.
“Do everything as if it were the only thing that mattered,” he reads, “while all the time knowing that it doesn’t matter at all.”
The passage comes from author Carlos Castaneda, he says, and it works as a description for Hale’s manner. In person, the TV star (of “Veep,” for which he won two Emmys, and “Arrested Development”) treats conversation almost like it’s a physical exercise, where he keeps striving toward connection over and over, in each new second. Yet, he’s receptive and generous toward whatever energy you might give to him, equally ready to dive for a spike or match you volley for volley.
Being present, for him, is active, and the heightened presence demanded by theater is what’s drawn him back to the stage for the first time in about 17 years. Even in his live performance days, when he lived in
New York, he estimates that he did more sketch comedy, especially with his group King Baby, than he did plays. He will star in Will Eno’s “Wakey, Wakey,” which begins previews Thursday, Jan. 23, at American Conservatory Theater’s Geary Theater, under the direction of Anne Kauffman.
Hale plays Guy, who’s on the cusp of a momentous but mysterious transition, one that might involve life and death, but Hale stresses that it’s open to interpretation. Eno’s gnomic yet everyday language is somewhere between a nudge and a shrug, all misdirect and anticlimax, finding redolence in the seemingly ordinary. Sample text: “It’s funny how sometimes you think you know what you’re looking at, and then, surprise surprise, you turn out to be right.”
During a publicity visit in September, Hale says working in TV for so long — first as mama’s boy Buster on “Arrested Development,” then as the worshipful Gary to Julia LouisDreyfus’ dismissive Selena on “Veep,” has made him miss some of theater’s unique virtues.
“With theater, in one time frame, you get a beginning, a middle, an end,” he says. As an actor, “you’re able to ride that arc the way it was written and the way it was intended,” instead of chopped up according to a production schedule’s needs. He also misses the energy and intimacy of a live audience.
“Every actor has that hunger for an audience’s response,” he says, “and even doing singlecamera, like ‘Veep,’ you could feel when the crew liked something or when it wasn’t working. Your ear got so tuned in to maybe hearing a little chuckle, even though they had to be quiet. You could hear little murmurs. That became our audience.”
If something felt mechanical, he remembers, LouisDreyfus might say they had to “zhuzh it up, meaning we kind of have to mess it up,” to give a scene that spark of spontaneity.
When we talked in September, “Veep” had recently finished its sevenseason run on HBO. Hale attributed its longevity to both the quality of the writing and the leadership of its star.
“Whoever is No. 1 on the call sheet sets the tone for the entire experience,” he says. If the star “happens to be entitled or not a team player, all of a sudden, it creates kind of this eggshell environment ... and the entitlement and the arrogance, in my opinion, just sucks creative energy out of a space. Thankfully, with both ‘Arrested’ and ‘Veep,’ I’ve had two No. 1’s on the call sheet, with Jason Bateman and Julia, who were incredibly gracious, kind. Julia, she was just such a team player. You never felt afraid to pitch an idea, even if it was bad . ... Because with comedy you really have to have that trust, where if you throw the ball, someone’s going to throw it back.”
With “Wakey, Wakey,” Hale knows he’ll have to get his theater muscles back into shape. “This sounds weird, but there’s kind of a powerlessness to (theater). With TV and film, you can always redo a take. You can always say, ‘Cut.’ There’s a surrender that happens with stage that is both terrifying and incredibly exciting, where you give yourself over, and you’re just like, ‘Here we go.’ ... On paper, that looks horrifying. But then when you’re up there ... it’s the most present I think I can be. There’s nowhere else in my mind I can be except right there, and there’s an excuse to be that present for that hour and a half.”
Hale says he’s often struggled with anxiety, and that “my default is not to be checked in. My default is to be checked out,” partly because of a wild imagination. Two major life events made him want to work harder to connect with his surroundings. One was the birth of his daughter, Loy, in 2006. “One thing you have to do when you have a baby is be present — because you have to keep them alive,” he deadpans.
The other was booking “Arrested Development,” in 2002. Before then, for the longest time, “my big thing was getting a sitcom. That’s all I ever wanted. When I got that sitcom, it didn’t satisfy me the way I thought it was going to satisfy me. It’s because I had given it too much weight for most of my life, too much power.”
He wrote a children’s story about that, called “Archibald’s Next Big Thing,” which is also now an animated series on Netflix, with Hale voicing Archibald. “It’s about a little chicken who gets a card in the mail that says, ‘Your big thing is here,’ ” Hale says. Searching for it, Archibald misses all the adventures happening all around him, until he eventually learns to see everything in his life as a “big thing.”
Hale says he’s the sort of person who thinks about life’s big questions a lot, and to illustrate why, he remembers a time on a set with a crew member he won’t name. This person had “a real arrogance to them, was not kind, and there was a part of me that just wanted to be like, ‘OK, FYI, I was just driving by a graveyard, and we’re all going there. Just so you know, your legacy is that you were not kind and you were difficult. And what a bummer. What a bummer for that to be your legacy. Just so you know, you can change that. You can make a different choice and start seeing people and treating people and caring for people, and you can actually work toward a different legacy that you can leave here.’
“I know for myself, I very much think of it often, how fleeting this life is. My business I’m in is incredibly cyclical. It’s just like, you’re hot one day; you’re not the other. It’s a hustle.
“But the thing I always have to remind myself is, a lot of stuff I’m giving power to just does not matter.”
What matters, he says, is “how I treat people.”
“In any business, actually, not just Hollywood, people will throw words out and don’t realize the power of them. But then when you meet someone who really backs up what they say, it stands out. That integrity stands out.”