Director shares view of 2 giants of theater
Former ACT leader Perloff reflects on playwrights Pinter, Stoppard in book
In March 2020, when the ramifications of COVID-19’s spread were becoming alarmingly clear to the world and San Franciscans were told to shelter in place, Carey Perloff was home with her husband in the Inner Richmond. The former artistic director of the city’s American Conservatory Theater, which she led for 26 years until her retirement in 2018, couldn’t help noting the parallels between the disquieting mood in her community and the air of stifling menace in the fictional worlds of one of her favorite playwrights, Harold Pinter.
“A kind of heightened silence, an inchoate dread … pervaded the collective psyche. I began thinking about Pinter,” Perloff writes in the introduction to her new book, “Pinter and Stoppard: A Director’s View,” which she completed during the lockdown. It’s both a personal examination of the two writers who have most deeply influenced Perloff, with whom she has worked closely, and a guide for other theater artists to unlock the mysteries of both playwrights’ complex, dramatic worlds.
Perloff had been introduced to the “queasy terror” of Pinter’s work as a Stanford undergraduate and had directed his plays numerous times, beginning with “The Birthday Party”
at the Classic Stage Company in New York in 1989. She calls the Nobel Prize winner, who was famous (until his death in 2008) for his work’s ominous pauses, one of her artistic and aesthetic “lodestars.”
The other is Tom Stoppard. In his cerebral, linguistically adventurous writing, Perloff found a kindred spirit.
“I like to say that it was Harold Pinter who first got me into the
theater and Tom Stoppard who kept me there,” Perloff writes.
She directed 10 acclaimed Stoppard productions while at ACT, including his masterpiece “Arcadia” twice, collaborating with him personally on nearly all of them.
Perloff spoke to The Chronicle by phone ahead of a virtual event with local author Michael Chabon on Monday, May 9. She discussed making surprising connections between Stoppard and Pinter, two of the finest playwrights of their generation, including their Jewish backgrounds and shared wartime traumas as young boys. She also reflected on the concrete lessons she has
gleaned from a career directing their work for American audiences and the ways, she says, their plays have “given structure to the architecture of my life.”
Q: What drew you to Pinter’s plays early in the pandemic?
A: Truly, the day the lockdown began, it made me think about Pinter, about this inchoate dread in his work and how you don’t really know where the danger is, but it’s coming from somewhere. That’s what the (COVID) atmosphere felt like to me, some dread outside that you must ward off or hide away from. So I pulled Pinter off the shelf. I started rereading “The Homecoming” and “The Birthday Party” and thought about why those plays have meant so much to me. Q: They’ve both had reputations as irascible men with huge egos, yet you experienced them both as mostly warm, supportive, collaborative? A: I did. My publisher thought I was being slightly Pollyannaish and so did (Stoppard’s biographer) Hermione Lee. And I said, “Look, all I can write about is my own personal experience.” Not to say in my years as a woman director I didn’t have really difficult experiences with men I did not name in the book, but boy, could I name them. But I never had that experience with either (Pinter or Stoppard).
When Pinter first walked in the door at CSC, I was a very young woman and untested, and he never patronized me. I think he realized that a happy rehearsal room was a rehearsal room in which the director was respected and that he was not going to upend that.
And I felt a total kinship with Stoppard from the moment I met him.
Q: You describe having a feeling of “recognition” with each of them that you only understood later was in part about being Jewish. A:
That’s right. And it’s not only the Jewish* connection. I realized (while working on “Arcadia”) that one of the things that Stoppard really cares about and mourns is lost culture, things that were beautiful or important and have disappeared, and how painful that is. He’s a man who fled Czechoslovakia, grew up in India during the war, ends up in England at age 8, passionately adopts English culture as his own, but later in life realizes that he’d lost his whole self-narrative. And he’s only begun to even try to find that in his 70s and 80s.
Q: Are you still in touch? Do you stay connected?
A: Yes. I adore him. I saw him in London in November, and we spent the day together and I went to see “Leopoldstadt,” his Jewish play, which was very moving to me. He writes very, very, very funny, wonderful handwritten letters.
Q: You write about the challenges these playwrights’ work can present to psychologically trained American actors. Why is that? A:
If American actors have been trained in the Method, they’ve been trained to prepare a (character) biography. But Pinter wouldn’t find that useful. And with Stoppard, his language is so extraordinary and it’s not useful, as American actors are often taught, to create an arc of experience for a character, to plant seeds in the first scene that are going to pay off. Tom said that he thinks what’s thrilling about human beings and life is the reversals — you think you know what’s going to happen and it absolutely stands on its head.
Q: While writing your book, did you realize Pinter and Stoppard had more in common than you realized, or were you more interested in highlighting their differences? A:
In the beginning, I thought, “How am I going to justify writing about these two writers who people think of as polar opposites?”
Pinter is a minimalist, Stoppard is a maximalist. With Pinter, everything is in one room. With Stoppard, it’s all over the world. Pinter plays are short and taut. Stoppard’s are long. But I thought linking them through my own experience has to be worth something. And then I realized the (significance) of the Jewish connection as well as fascinating aspects of their biographies. They’re both total autodidacts who never went to school past age 17.
That is incredible when they are both totally cerebral, incredible intellectuals. They’ve read everything. Tom carries a library with him. Pinter could recite Kafka and Beckett by heart. I thought the richness of their plays comes from their shared appetite for self-learning
Also the experience of childhood trauma. We can never really understand what it was like for Pinter to live through the Blitz and be sent away from his family completely alone, and the antisemitism he faced. And for Stoppard to leave home at 2, end up in a foreign country in India, not know for two years that he’s lost his father.
Q: You did 10 Stoppard productions at ACT. What struck you about how much San Francisco audiences connect with his plays? A:
I really have to credit (ACT founder) Bill Ball and Ed Hastings for bringing Stoppard to
ACT before I came. That thrilled me. The first one I did was “Arcadia” (in 1995), and what a great way to start. It’s one of his best plays. I hadn’t been at ACT long, and we were out of the Geary, bankrupt and trying to raise $35 million to rebuild the building after the (Loma Prieta) earthquake. It was a very difficult time. It was amazing to watch that audience. They came into that play and fell in love.