INTRODUCTION
Hal Landon was raised in Tucson, Arizona, and studied Theatre at the University of Arizona. In 1966, after living in San Francisco, he joined the theatre troupe South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, California. There, he has been performing as Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carolsince 1980.
GETTING ORIENTED
JW: To recap the nature of this project: the term is supernormal functioning in actors…but it’s really about where spiritual practice or transformative practice overlaps with acting technique training and especially in working actors. But the term supernormal functioning is specifically about experiences that are transpersonal in nature, or extraordinary or peak experiences. And many of these experiences tend to be suggestive of spiritual realities or tend to be the profound or significant moments in people’s lives. For example, in the Golf in the Kingdom book, Michael Murphy found that a lot of people were having these spiritual or supernormal experiences on the golf course but people weren’t talking about them. There was no language for what they were experiencing. It wasn’t being articulated and so he found that when he asked people these questions they started to come forward with stories and so a lot of interest developed for these books.
HL: Was he talking about when they are on the golf course, every shot goes where they want it to go.
JW: Like, alterations in time and space – things slow down, they feel they are an inch away from the whole even though it’s four hundred yards, sometimes they see things… see the path of the ball before it happens.
HL: Yeah.
JW: So, what I’m interested in is, especially in a commercial world, evidence of what is sacred or deeper meaning in the work we do. And some of these experiences tend to open up the Mystery to people. Their sense of what’s possible or what they’re capable of, and their sense of life expands.
HL: Right.
JW: So that’s the basic exploration. And what I’m doing is I’m talking to actors with three qualities: they’ve received training, have been working professionally for some period of time, and have some sort of long term transformative practice. Long Term Transformative practice I am defining as three to five years of meditation or prayer or yoga or therapy or 12 step recovery…it can be any number of things that do the inner transformation.
HL: Yeah. No, it does. I’ve heard other meditators talk about supernormal some kind of experience like that…but I can’t say that I’ve actually ever had one…
JW: Right.
HW: I mean in performing, you have those moments where that effortless flow of emotion or whatever it is…where you’re as close to being lost in the character but I don’t think that’s what you’re talking about.
JW: I don’t really know. Some of it is exploration. It may be that as a result of what I’m searching for, that I find that people aren’t really having these experiences. Or maybe they’re not using the language that I’m using, or maybe they’ve never slowed down enough to try to articulate what they are experiencing. But what I have found is that the literature is full of these kinds of experiences. Like if you look at Stanislavski and Michael Chekhov, who I know you were influenced by, he was all very into Rudolf Steiner who was all into Theosophy. So, my experience is that the energy body, the imaginary body that Chekhov was working with…some of these things are quite exceptional or we are tapping into capacities that maybe everyone has that people aren’t using. Or something like that… you know.
HL: Was he talking about when they are on the golf course, every shot goes where they want it to go.
JW: Like, alterations in time and space – things slow down, they feel they are an inch away from the whole even though it’s four hundred yards, sometimes they see things… see the path of the ball before it happens.
HL: Yeah.
JW: So, what I’m interested in is, especially in a commercial world, evidence of what is sacred or deeper meaning in the work we do. And some of these experiences tend to open up the Mystery to people. Their sense of what’s possible or what they’re capable of, and their sense of life expands.
HL: Right.
JW: So that’s the basic exploration. And what I’m doing is I’m talking to actors with three qualities: they’ve received training, have been working professionally for some period of time, and have some sort of long term transformative practice. Long Term Transformative practice I am defining as three to five years of meditation or prayer or yoga or therapy or 12 step recovery…it can be any number of things that do the inner transformation.
HL: Yeah. No, it does. I’ve heard other meditators talk about supernormal some kind of experience like that…but I can’t say that I’ve actually ever had one…
JW: Right.
HW: I mean in performing, you have those moments where that effortless flow of emotion or whatever it is…where you’re as close to being lost in the character but I don’t think that’s what you’re talking about.
JW: I don’t really know. Some of it is exploration. It may be that as a result of what I’m searching for, that I find that people aren’t really having these experiences. Or maybe they’re not using the language that I’m using, or maybe they’ve never slowed down enough to try to articulate what they are experiencing. But what I have found is that the literature is full of these kinds of experiences. Like if you look at Stanislavski and Michael Chekhov, who I know you were influenced by, he was all very into Rudolf Steiner who was all into Theosophy. So, my experience is that the energy body, the imaginary body that Chekhov was working with…some of these things are quite exceptional or we are tapping into capacities that maybe everyone has that people aren’t using. Or something like that… you know.
T H E I N D I R E C T W A Y
HL: So, yeah…maybe, because I know that a lot of the work I do and a lot of what I get out of Chekhov and using those techniques are that kind of indirect way to get at the heart of a character or even a moment. You know, as soon as you try to intellectualize it or figure something out, at least for me, that’s just a big block. You know, so, it’s trying to find the subjective root to the essence. And it’s that indirect way of using the imaginary body, or imaginary center, or imaginary tempo…or something like that…usually you get something from that. And sometimes it’s not what you were specifically looking for. But because you’ve gotten rid of the trying to figure it out part, it emerges on its own.
And the whole thing about it being an indirect approach…I guess that every actor has had this moment…you know that thing where you have a peak moment on stage and you go back the next night and try to repeat it exactly. You know… it’s just not there. It’s always a surprise. When the peak moments come, “Oh, where did that come from.” And then “oh maybe it will happen tomorrow night”. And what I’ve found is that it won’t happen in exactly the same way at exactly the same time…but if you just forget about it and try not to… sometimes it will happen before or after that; as long as you’re not expecting and that is very hard.
So a lot of what I do is trying to circumvent that anticipation or trying things. And it’s interesting that in Transcendental Meditation, we repeat the mantra, you know, in our imagination. But the more effortlessly you do that, the better your meditation. If you try to hammer away; you know, repeat the mantra repeat the mantra…generally not much will happen. But if it’s as effortless as letting a thought arrive…you know, not something you’re consciously thinking, but you know, thoughts float through you mind and the mantras happening. So, I was thinking about what you’ve written down and sort of reviewing was how important that is.
And the whole thing about it being an indirect approach…I guess that every actor has had this moment…you know that thing where you have a peak moment on stage and you go back the next night and try to repeat it exactly. You know… it’s just not there. It’s always a surprise. When the peak moments come, “Oh, where did that come from.” And then “oh maybe it will happen tomorrow night”. And what I’ve found is that it won’t happen in exactly the same way at exactly the same time…but if you just forget about it and try not to… sometimes it will happen before or after that; as long as you’re not expecting and that is very hard.
So a lot of what I do is trying to circumvent that anticipation or trying things. And it’s interesting that in Transcendental Meditation, we repeat the mantra, you know, in our imagination. But the more effortlessly you do that, the better your meditation. If you try to hammer away; you know, repeat the mantra repeat the mantra…generally not much will happen. But if it’s as effortless as letting a thought arrive…you know, not something you’re consciously thinking, but you know, thoughts float through you mind and the mantras happening. So, I was thinking about what you’ve written down and sort of reviewing was how important that is.
A D D
HL: But I don’t know if I… Well, let me share this journey with you, see if it helps you at all. I learned a number of years ago…I guess it was 12 or 15…that I have ADD. Adult ADD, I guess they call it. It’s not the hyperactivity ADD, but where your brain function is slow. So, I kind of dealt with that all through my life. It doesn’t affect your intelligence, apparently you can still have a high IQ and so forth, but it manifested in me, in not being very articulate. I mean, you can maybe tell that I’m sort of searching around even now… but if I tried to do this kind of interview before I started taking medication it would be a total mess; more so than it is now.
So I struggled with that… and I think that was part of why meditation was attractive. Even though I didn’t know what it was at the time, I must have thought “well, maybe this will help with this cognitive thing,” and it maybe did a little bit, but it wasn’t until I started taking the medication (a sort of adult version of Ritalin), that all of a sudden a new world was opened up to me. And in performing it was…well, before I started taking medication people would talk about acting being a dual consciousness experience. The character on one hand and your still there…and you can think the characters thoughts to a fairly consistent degree, of course it would come in and out. But I had no idea what they were talking about. Because I couldn’t hold that many thoughts at one time until I started taking this medication…and then all of sudden I was able to do that. I wish I could do it even better. So it was maybe that even more than the meditation.
I don’t know…I’ve been meditating for 40 years and I think meditation has done a lot for me, but I can’t tell you I’d be any different than I am now. Who knows. But I will say that one thing I definitely got from meditation, in regards to the meditation work, is my relationship with other actors. A number of times people have said, “You’re so steady. There is a calm that you radiate,” that is settling to them. I very seldom get nervous. Of course, we have previews at SCR, so it’s not like everything lays on opening night. But, yeah…And it’s interesting that you mention Michael Chekhov. That was early on, even before I started taking the medication for the ADD. But his more spiritual approach to acting…use of the combination of the imagination and the physical body is what attracted me to that.
So I struggled with that… and I think that was part of why meditation was attractive. Even though I didn’t know what it was at the time, I must have thought “well, maybe this will help with this cognitive thing,” and it maybe did a little bit, but it wasn’t until I started taking the medication (a sort of adult version of Ritalin), that all of a sudden a new world was opened up to me. And in performing it was…well, before I started taking medication people would talk about acting being a dual consciousness experience. The character on one hand and your still there…and you can think the characters thoughts to a fairly consistent degree, of course it would come in and out. But I had no idea what they were talking about. Because I couldn’t hold that many thoughts at one time until I started taking this medication…and then all of sudden I was able to do that. I wish I could do it even better. So it was maybe that even more than the meditation.
I don’t know…I’ve been meditating for 40 years and I think meditation has done a lot for me, but I can’t tell you I’d be any different than I am now. Who knows. But I will say that one thing I definitely got from meditation, in regards to the meditation work, is my relationship with other actors. A number of times people have said, “You’re so steady. There is a calm that you radiate,” that is settling to them. I very seldom get nervous. Of course, we have previews at SCR, so it’s not like everything lays on opening night. But, yeah…And it’s interesting that you mention Michael Chekhov. That was early on, even before I started taking the medication for the ADD. But his more spiritual approach to acting…use of the combination of the imagination and the physical body is what attracted me to that.
R E L E V A N T E A R L Y L I F E E X P E R I E N C E
JW: So just backing up a bit I’d love to get some biography and then we can loop around back to this stuff. Can you give me a short biography and what get you into acting and what that journey was?
HL: Yeah, my dad was an actor and so was my mother though she never acted professionally. But they in fact met at the Pasadena playhouse back in that late thirties. And he acted in movies in the forties, mostly in war films and westerns and things like that. And then television came along, and he wasn’t getting as much work, and he kind of panicked, I’ve always thought in retrospect, and so he quit, and we moved to Tucson Arizona. And they did a lot of community theatre there. They were kind of the stars of the community theatre. So I always went and saw the plays although I never did any acting. I was more into sports…and I thought I was going to be a professional (laugh)…all I had to do was take one objective look to see that was not going happen. But who’s objective at that age.
HL: Yeah, my dad was an actor and so was my mother though she never acted professionally. But they in fact met at the Pasadena playhouse back in that late thirties. And he acted in movies in the forties, mostly in war films and westerns and things like that. And then television came along, and he wasn’t getting as much work, and he kind of panicked, I’ve always thought in retrospect, and so he quit, and we moved to Tucson Arizona. And they did a lot of community theatre there. They were kind of the stars of the community theatre. So I always went and saw the plays although I never did any acting. I was more into sports…and I thought I was going to be a professional (laugh)…all I had to do was take one objective look to see that was not going happen. But who’s objective at that age.
T R A I N I N G
JW: What sport?
HL: Uh…Basketball was the one I guess I focused on. 5’11” …can’t jump…you know. So, I tried out for the freshman team at the university of Arizona. You know they had a freshman team back then…and I got cut. So, I was just looking for something to do…something to replace that. So I took an acting class at the University of Arizona. I knew I had some ability, because in speech classes in high school I had done well…especially any kind of memorized thing. And so, this guy, who directed this theatre, he casts me in “Look Homeward Angel” …and it was just…I had no idea what I was doing. And it went okay; because it was a difficult part and in no way was I prepared for it…the way it was supposed to be done. But I finished out. Then I took acting that first semester and again the second semester. And I wasn’t thinking of continuing. But then this director asked me to play a small part in “The World of Suzy Wong”, and I had the role of a sailor that would come in and do a comic turn. And I would get applause at the end of my scene. And for all the wrong reasons I thought, “Yeah… I’m going to get into acting”. And so… that’s when I decided to major in drama. To my credit, I soon realized getting applause every night wasn’t the main attraction to be an actor. Although they didn’t train us to be actors at the University of Arizona, they did do good plays. We did Pinter, Beckett, Shakespeare, Giraudoux, you know…they didn’t just do Broadway hits or anything like that…I mean they did sometimes. The guy also did all the best work (Avant Garde and stuff like that), so I got a good taste for good dramatic literature. That really fueled me and playing those kinds of parts and so forth.
And then I started to read about and hear about the resident theatre movement. At the time it was The Actors Workshop, Guthrie, and Huston…The Alley in Huston… the Washington Arena… those four…and The Globe in the summer time in San Diego… but that for some reason that really appealed to me. Also, I was really attracted to the English actors and they were always trying to create that kind of situation for themselves. So…as soon as I got out of college I became an apprentice at The Actors Workshop, and then I heard about South Coast Repertory and I came out there…and that was the same kind of deal… he idea that you play all kinds of different roles and all kinds of different styles. Sometimes you’re a lead, and sometimes you’re a small supporting role…and that was kind of my dream. And I guess that was pretty much fulfilled in the work with South Coast Repertory…and a little bit later I started doing a little bit of Film and TV because I needed a little bit of money.
JW: And at what point did you…you went back and did some training… beyond your university training. Did you go back and do the Chekhov work as formal training? Or was that something you picked up in an informal way…?
HL: Uh…Basketball was the one I guess I focused on. 5’11” …can’t jump…you know. So, I tried out for the freshman team at the university of Arizona. You know they had a freshman team back then…and I got cut. So, I was just looking for something to do…something to replace that. So I took an acting class at the University of Arizona. I knew I had some ability, because in speech classes in high school I had done well…especially any kind of memorized thing. And so, this guy, who directed this theatre, he casts me in “Look Homeward Angel” …and it was just…I had no idea what I was doing. And it went okay; because it was a difficult part and in no way was I prepared for it…the way it was supposed to be done. But I finished out. Then I took acting that first semester and again the second semester. And I wasn’t thinking of continuing. But then this director asked me to play a small part in “The World of Suzy Wong”, and I had the role of a sailor that would come in and do a comic turn. And I would get applause at the end of my scene. And for all the wrong reasons I thought, “Yeah… I’m going to get into acting”. And so… that’s when I decided to major in drama. To my credit, I soon realized getting applause every night wasn’t the main attraction to be an actor. Although they didn’t train us to be actors at the University of Arizona, they did do good plays. We did Pinter, Beckett, Shakespeare, Giraudoux, you know…they didn’t just do Broadway hits or anything like that…I mean they did sometimes. The guy also did all the best work (Avant Garde and stuff like that), so I got a good taste for good dramatic literature. That really fueled me and playing those kinds of parts and so forth.
And then I started to read about and hear about the resident theatre movement. At the time it was The Actors Workshop, Guthrie, and Huston…The Alley in Huston… the Washington Arena… those four…and The Globe in the summer time in San Diego… but that for some reason that really appealed to me. Also, I was really attracted to the English actors and they were always trying to create that kind of situation for themselves. So…as soon as I got out of college I became an apprentice at The Actors Workshop, and then I heard about South Coast Repertory and I came out there…and that was the same kind of deal… he idea that you play all kinds of different roles and all kinds of different styles. Sometimes you’re a lead, and sometimes you’re a small supporting role…and that was kind of my dream. And I guess that was pretty much fulfilled in the work with South Coast Repertory…and a little bit later I started doing a little bit of Film and TV because I needed a little bit of money.
JW: And at what point did you…you went back and did some training… beyond your university training. Did you go back and do the Chekhov work as formal training? Or was that something you picked up in an informal way…?
Hal Landon, Jr. as Frankin in SCR's production of "Faithhealer"
M I D – C A R E E R T R A I N I N G
HL: No, it was formal. That was kind of a difficult time for us…like I said, I didn’t have any sort of formal training, I was just reinventing the wheel each time I got a part. And when South Coast Repertory moved to the present location, the larger theatre, they started being able to attract actors from all over the country. They didn’t just need the four or five of us that usually played the larger parts. I won’t say they could get whoever they wanted…but they had a much larger pool. But I found that I wasn’t playing very good parts anymore. And as a result, I also felt the pressure of this bigger theatre. And I think what happened was I started to push to indicate, you know…what I thought was necessary to fill this larger space or whatever. I kind of lost my way and acting was kind of agony for me for a while. So, I realized I kind of had a choice of either solving this, which meant getting better, taking a significant step forward as an actor…or find something else to do. The book To the Actor by Michael Chekhov had always appealed to me, and I had even taken a few classes with a guy that was doing exercises from that book, but he didn’t really know it. And I was about to enroll in the actor’s studio west…but then I saw in, I think it was Dramalogue at the time, that George Shdanoff was forming new classes and the book To the Actor was dedicated to him. So, I went and got out the copy and sure enough it had been dedicated to George Shdanoff. So I started taking classes with him. And it turned out that he was Michael Chekhov’s, if not his best friend, then one of them. And that had even helped Chekhov kind of formulate what Chekhov intuitively did as an actor into a teachable technique. So he really knew his stuff. And so, I studied with him pretty consistently. I mean he would have classes like 8 weeks in length, and just about every time he formed a new class I would take it. And I studied with him for three or four years. And well…I improved (laugh)and took that step forward. It was great. And a lot of that was that if you’re having trouble…just find another way in. And I think also, and maybe this is because I was struggling with ADD, but it had a structure to it…so if you were having a problem there was a place you could solve it; in a specific way… but in a creative way, in an imaginative way. The things that stood out to me from what you wrote, was what Suzuki said about how lights and all the technical stuff actually gets in the way of the performance…and you know, the theatre does a lot of staged readings of plays they are interested in doing, and I don’t know how many times that the staged reading has been more impactful, more enjoyable, more whatever…a better experience than when they actually end up producing the play.
JW: I’ve had that several times too. I’m feeling it in the play I’m in now…and I don’t know if that’s because the first couple times I could just be on the outside and experience it as a viewer, but something got lost as we put it on its feet. I thought that maybe it was impactful because it was almost entirely in my imagination during the reading…and maybe that was why it was so effective…
HL: Yes…and the audience has a chance to use their imagination because you’re not spelling it out as much.
JW: Yes, it activates…that’s one argument for novels rather than movies. Because when reading a novel, the reader is dreaming, and their imagination is fully activated to fill it all in. Whereas when watching the movie or video game, all that imagination work is done for you. The receiver doesn’t get activated in the same way. I think it’s a good argument for the “poor theatre”, or that stripped down, Peter Brooke or Grotowski or other people who’ve suggested, “Hey, let the audience keep their imagination, don’t fill in all the blanks.”
HL: And even in Shakespeare’s theatre…you know, the stuff they did at the Globe, I guess they did use costumes and light and sound and stuff…it was done during the day…but so much was still up to the language and the actors working on the audience’s imagination.
JW: Yes, reminds me of that great Henry V prologue speech. A few things that strike me…and I think also what I’m saying about the psychological gesture, and the power of movement work, especially on the level of the archetypal energies if you want to call it that, or gestures…what you say rings true for me in my experience of Grotowski inspired work. Its viscerally, energetically charged, that work…And I’ve struggled with how…because when I’m doing that Grotowski inspired work, I’m doing it with no words, three hours of vocal work with no words…and then bringing that to language has been a bit of…you know, I joked about the drawing room dramas and Artaud railed about the talking heads…but think, how often were you playing a part where you could actually embody that archetypal gesture at some point in the play. There’s such an emphasis on language in most plays that it can be challenging to find a full expression of physicality.
HL: And that was maybe part of my frustration. I don’t know if Chekhov did this, but I know the guy I studied with did…one of the first things he would teach us were what he called the energy movements…one for lightness and ease, one for contact, and most of it was done from psychological gesture. And the one for contact was very simple, you just go from a closed position to a very open position, it seems very simple, but not surprising that you feel very open and in contact with what’s around you. So, the intent was that it frees your ability to open, to receive, to give not only to the other characters and the audience. And the “lightness and ease” was a streaming up gesture. And that was one of the most useful things to me, that I got out of the training, because I tended to have some actor tension in my work back in those days. And we worked on this one scene where the character was very intense the whole time and I would get physically intense…and the only direction he gave me was ‘lightness and ease’ now. And I don’t know if I ever got the scene, but I was able to do it with lightness and ease. So, it’s not what I use to think of…as relaxed…but there would be not ‘actor’ tension…but the character is fully alive and if he’s tense, he’s tense. And I discovered how much of a block that actor tension is to the free flow of emotion. So that was big. And the other…oh, fire… we use to have this exercise called fire. We stand around an imaginary fire. And absorb that…and then send it out, and always have that going when you’re on stage.
JW: So, the fire you would imagine as an imaginary substance around you, you’d absorb it into your body, and then you’d radiate it out.
HL: And then there was the ability to just radiate.
JW: Whatever the quality. You could radiate anything.
HL: Yeah. And that was even one of the character qualities, you’d have these six…mold, floating, flying, staccato, radiating, etc. - and one was just radiating. With that you’d radiating light. Certain ethereal or charismatic or extremely intense characters you’d radiate light…but the molding through a thick substance and your ability to move through this thick substance, overcome that resistance, gives you a quality of strength or power, whether it be physical, or it could be internal. But the interesting thing, as it relates to some of the stuff you’ve been talking about, I guess is the synchrony between the mental and imagination and the even the emotions and the physical body…because they are both working at the same time in a focused and very intense way. And one of the byproducts for me, was that my body for me, after doing those exercises for many years, became more free, and the ability to respond physically to what I was feeling became more free, and the ability to respond to a physical gesture emotionally was also more connected.
JW: That those two parts of you were syncing up through those exercises.
HL: Like it would be easy for the physical gesture…like it would overload maybe. But after doing these exercises my body was more alive…I now get people commenting that physical aliveness is something that I have, which I had considered a weakness before. It became a strong point of mine.
JW: And the movements from psychological gesture all way through, it’s usually through the whole body, from the fingertips and toes to the top of your head, and everything in between its all working as one piece. And I’ve experienced that as essential as an actor. For many actors, parts of them are immobilized.
HL: I see a lot of actors acting from the upper torso up and everything else is kind of dead.
JW: I’ve had that several times too. I’m feeling it in the play I’m in now…and I don’t know if that’s because the first couple times I could just be on the outside and experience it as a viewer, but something got lost as we put it on its feet. I thought that maybe it was impactful because it was almost entirely in my imagination during the reading…and maybe that was why it was so effective…
HL: Yes…and the audience has a chance to use their imagination because you’re not spelling it out as much.
JW: Yes, it activates…that’s one argument for novels rather than movies. Because when reading a novel, the reader is dreaming, and their imagination is fully activated to fill it all in. Whereas when watching the movie or video game, all that imagination work is done for you. The receiver doesn’t get activated in the same way. I think it’s a good argument for the “poor theatre”, or that stripped down, Peter Brooke or Grotowski or other people who’ve suggested, “Hey, let the audience keep their imagination, don’t fill in all the blanks.”
HL: And even in Shakespeare’s theatre…you know, the stuff they did at the Globe, I guess they did use costumes and light and sound and stuff…it was done during the day…but so much was still up to the language and the actors working on the audience’s imagination.
JW: Yes, reminds me of that great Henry V prologue speech. A few things that strike me…and I think also what I’m saying about the psychological gesture, and the power of movement work, especially on the level of the archetypal energies if you want to call it that, or gestures…what you say rings true for me in my experience of Grotowski inspired work. Its viscerally, energetically charged, that work…And I’ve struggled with how…because when I’m doing that Grotowski inspired work, I’m doing it with no words, three hours of vocal work with no words…and then bringing that to language has been a bit of…you know, I joked about the drawing room dramas and Artaud railed about the talking heads…but think, how often were you playing a part where you could actually embody that archetypal gesture at some point in the play. There’s such an emphasis on language in most plays that it can be challenging to find a full expression of physicality.
HL: And that was maybe part of my frustration. I don’t know if Chekhov did this, but I know the guy I studied with did…one of the first things he would teach us were what he called the energy movements…one for lightness and ease, one for contact, and most of it was done from psychological gesture. And the one for contact was very simple, you just go from a closed position to a very open position, it seems very simple, but not surprising that you feel very open and in contact with what’s around you. So, the intent was that it frees your ability to open, to receive, to give not only to the other characters and the audience. And the “lightness and ease” was a streaming up gesture. And that was one of the most useful things to me, that I got out of the training, because I tended to have some actor tension in my work back in those days. And we worked on this one scene where the character was very intense the whole time and I would get physically intense…and the only direction he gave me was ‘lightness and ease’ now. And I don’t know if I ever got the scene, but I was able to do it with lightness and ease. So, it’s not what I use to think of…as relaxed…but there would be not ‘actor’ tension…but the character is fully alive and if he’s tense, he’s tense. And I discovered how much of a block that actor tension is to the free flow of emotion. So that was big. And the other…oh, fire… we use to have this exercise called fire. We stand around an imaginary fire. And absorb that…and then send it out, and always have that going when you’re on stage.
JW: So, the fire you would imagine as an imaginary substance around you, you’d absorb it into your body, and then you’d radiate it out.
HL: And then there was the ability to just radiate.
JW: Whatever the quality. You could radiate anything.
HL: Yeah. And that was even one of the character qualities, you’d have these six…mold, floating, flying, staccato, radiating, etc. - and one was just radiating. With that you’d radiating light. Certain ethereal or charismatic or extremely intense characters you’d radiate light…but the molding through a thick substance and your ability to move through this thick substance, overcome that resistance, gives you a quality of strength or power, whether it be physical, or it could be internal. But the interesting thing, as it relates to some of the stuff you’ve been talking about, I guess is the synchrony between the mental and imagination and the even the emotions and the physical body…because they are both working at the same time in a focused and very intense way. And one of the byproducts for me, was that my body for me, after doing those exercises for many years, became more free, and the ability to respond physically to what I was feeling became more free, and the ability to respond to a physical gesture emotionally was also more connected.
JW: That those two parts of you were syncing up through those exercises.
HL: Like it would be easy for the physical gesture…like it would overload maybe. But after doing these exercises my body was more alive…I now get people commenting that physical aliveness is something that I have, which I had considered a weakness before. It became a strong point of mine.
JW: And the movements from psychological gesture all way through, it’s usually through the whole body, from the fingertips and toes to the top of your head, and everything in between its all working as one piece. And I’ve experienced that as essential as an actor. For many actors, parts of them are immobilized.
HL: I see a lot of actors acting from the upper torso up and everything else is kind of dead.
T R A N S F O R M A T I V E P R A C T I C E
JW: And when you came to the TM, I’m assuming that was a time in this country when that was first becoming quite a big thing. you said something about when, intuitively looking back, maybe you were attracted to it in terms of how it would help you focused… but were there other motivators there, what triggered the interest there or what brought you there or kept you there, I mean did you try a bunch of other different things or?
HL: Yeah, I don’t know. I guess…I had a difficult period I remember, and I read a Salinger book. I think it was “Franny and Zooey”. Anyway, the characters were into Zen, so I read a bunch of books on Zen Buddhism. I mean just the idea of Satori or…blissful absolute transcendental consciousness…I don’t know, was just really appealing to me. But I didn’t much pursue that. And it was when my younger sister got into TM (Transcendental Meditation) before I did, and she became a teacher and she and her husband became teachers for a while…I was inspired to kind of give it a try by them. And I took to it right away. I knew there was something good here…and 42 years later…
JW: And it’s a daily thing for you still?
HL: Yeah.
JW: And what is it, 30 minutes once a day or twice a day.
HL: 20 minutes twice a day.
JW: 20 minutes?
HL: Uh hum.
JW: And it seems, I don’t know much about it, but it seems in the Zen way…it’s a non-dogmatic or stripped-down practice. It doesn’t seem a theology or a religious thing in some way. It just seems a technique.
HL: If you get into the movement, I know, there’s quite a bit of Hindu philosophy…you know they don’t get into worshipping Shiva and all that kind of stuff… but the Ayurveda medicine practices… and then there’s other, you know there’s the sutras you can do, and yogic flying and stuff like that… which I did that for a while…but then I just went back to the…
JW:And is it the kind of thing where there’s a community? You go practice as a group or is it always a solo thing?
HL:No, in fact they encourage group practice…there is a community in Fairfield Iowa, meditators and they all meditate together in a big dome. There have been a lot of studies and so forth that…where there’s a level of coherence that occurs throughout a community if a certain number of meditators are meditating, that radiates a certain…they’ve even sent meditators to hot spots around the world, in fact they have a very large number in various places. And there’s been some success in creating more peaceful harmonious environment in those places. And they’re doing a lot of work now with TM in schools, particularly lower income troubled schools, and they’ve had a lot of success with how those students respond and now they’re doing it in prisons and with returning veterans to help cope with posttraumatic stress.
JW: Just two other questions on this topic then we’ll get back to some of the acting stuff. One is that that I know the mantra is sort of a central part of the practice and there’s some sort of importance around the privacy, like when you receive it, you can’t share it.
HL: I can say no more. Not supposed to tell anyone. (Laugh)Part of it is that I’ve heard that in voicing it loses some of its power.
JW: I find that interesting, that idea of keeping the most sacred private thing…in several traditions you don’t actually say the real name of god. The other question was about the evolution of the practice for you. You said you don’t know if you could say you’d really be a different person. But sometimes people can say, that over periods of time…after 5 years I started to feel this and after 10 this really started to change in me, or this old way that I was really evaporated. But maybe for you it’s just been a steady course.
HL : I think so, yeah. Because there have been other things along the way that have…like some psychotherapy, some medication I’ve taken, also the TM…the combination of different things. Plus some people I’ve met, I got married and had kids, so my evolution as a person…I couldn’t say what part of that has been caused by TM.
JW: Yeah. Part of what I’m trying to do is put words to things…trying to map the territories…in the Vedic traditions they talk about these three bodies…they talk about the physical body, the energy body (what I think Chekhov calls the imaginary body), and what they causal body…and its much larger than the other two, and it’s just space, like spaciousness.
HL: Huh, that’s interesting. I’ve never heard of that.
JW: And it’s interesting because I think when I experience people who do a lot of what I would call causal meditation or emptiness meditation or pure formless meditation…they often have a really strong presence or causal body, and that’s actually what I experience with you, and it seems it would be the kind of thing that would be developed by a TM type of practice. So this third body, if you were lifting weights you would be training your physical body, but doing that kind of emptiness meditation, from what I gather, trains a causal body, and what you were describing about the way that people respond to you in terms of that solidness and that presence…and it would make sense to me that would be the kind of quality that someone would, just energetically, develop around themselves as a result of doing the practice that you do.
HL: Yeah
JW: And so that helps me connect the dots and makes a kind of sense to me. And I really like what you were saying about the matrix of things: family, a little therapy, a little medication, maybe meditation. All of those things contributed to your evolution. I don’t know if you know a guy named Ken Wilber, and I‘ve read a lot of his work and he’s a big background and influence for me…and he considers himself an “integral” thinker…so he’s really interested in how all these dimensions contribute to human potential and human growth and how they interact with each other. You mentioned therapy and we talked about some personal life things that influenced your work as an actor…I’ve come across characters, situations, or scenes where I felt blocked, inauthentic or disconnected in some way…and for me, because my story has been wrought with a lot of therapy and psychological issues and that sort of thing…I had to go do that personal work so I could open up and deal with some traumas and then I could go back to the scene at a much later date, and there was a level of authenticity or connection that wasn’t there before. I know that’s not true for every actor…but that was definitely part of my story. Was that part of your experience, that your delving into the psychological or therapeutic work that it helped you open or reclaim parts of yourself that made you more accessible in the work, or was that never really an issue for you?
HL: Well, I can’t see any direct cause and effect between the therapy and the work…a lot of the therapy had to do with dealing with being an actor.
JW: But if I heard you correctly part of the therapy was to deal with the difficulties of being an actor… like the financial insecurity and lack of stability… because sometimes I’ve had experiences of having a hard time leaving things behind.
HL: I’ve had that happen, although for years I claimed it didn’t. No, the therapy ended up being about how I presented myself as a person…about being my true self with people…and how not to act the role they wanted me to be. And I became aware that it was probably affecting my career. And I would come across to directors and such as inauthentic, as trying to be some other guy, as struggling to say what they wanted to hear. And I spent quite a bit of time working on that.
JW: Hearing that, I have a hard time imagining that didn’t affect your work.
HL: Yeah, it probably did.
JW: One of the reasons I love this work is that whatever is coming up in my work, is usually a direct mirror of what is happening in my life. For example, if I were doing what you were just describing working on in therapy. I would probably be doing that in the rehearsal hall as well. I might be presenting an idea of who I think this person is supposed to be rather than having an experience and telling the truth moment to moment.
HL: And if those experiences are kept paramount then you end up doing that on stage as well, like how am I coming across to the audience. That’s much more prevalent or significant.
JW: Yeah, and with the director too. I’ve had to burn through a lot of trying to please the director rather than staying with my own discovery and staying honest with what it is I’m feeling is happening.
JW: In terms of your career…I wonder if you could share 2 or 3 of your favorite moments or most satisfying artistic experiences in your career.
HL: Yeah, I don’t know. I guess…I had a difficult period I remember, and I read a Salinger book. I think it was “Franny and Zooey”. Anyway, the characters were into Zen, so I read a bunch of books on Zen Buddhism. I mean just the idea of Satori or…blissful absolute transcendental consciousness…I don’t know, was just really appealing to me. But I didn’t much pursue that. And it was when my younger sister got into TM (Transcendental Meditation) before I did, and she became a teacher and she and her husband became teachers for a while…I was inspired to kind of give it a try by them. And I took to it right away. I knew there was something good here…and 42 years later…
JW: And it’s a daily thing for you still?
HL: Yeah.
JW: And what is it, 30 minutes once a day or twice a day.
HL: 20 minutes twice a day.
JW: 20 minutes?
HL: Uh hum.
JW: And it seems, I don’t know much about it, but it seems in the Zen way…it’s a non-dogmatic or stripped-down practice. It doesn’t seem a theology or a religious thing in some way. It just seems a technique.
HL: If you get into the movement, I know, there’s quite a bit of Hindu philosophy…you know they don’t get into worshipping Shiva and all that kind of stuff… but the Ayurveda medicine practices… and then there’s other, you know there’s the sutras you can do, and yogic flying and stuff like that… which I did that for a while…but then I just went back to the…
JW:And is it the kind of thing where there’s a community? You go practice as a group or is it always a solo thing?
HL:No, in fact they encourage group practice…there is a community in Fairfield Iowa, meditators and they all meditate together in a big dome. There have been a lot of studies and so forth that…where there’s a level of coherence that occurs throughout a community if a certain number of meditators are meditating, that radiates a certain…they’ve even sent meditators to hot spots around the world, in fact they have a very large number in various places. And there’s been some success in creating more peaceful harmonious environment in those places. And they’re doing a lot of work now with TM in schools, particularly lower income troubled schools, and they’ve had a lot of success with how those students respond and now they’re doing it in prisons and with returning veterans to help cope with posttraumatic stress.
JW: Just two other questions on this topic then we’ll get back to some of the acting stuff. One is that that I know the mantra is sort of a central part of the practice and there’s some sort of importance around the privacy, like when you receive it, you can’t share it.
HL: I can say no more. Not supposed to tell anyone. (Laugh)Part of it is that I’ve heard that in voicing it loses some of its power.
JW: I find that interesting, that idea of keeping the most sacred private thing…in several traditions you don’t actually say the real name of god. The other question was about the evolution of the practice for you. You said you don’t know if you could say you’d really be a different person. But sometimes people can say, that over periods of time…after 5 years I started to feel this and after 10 this really started to change in me, or this old way that I was really evaporated. But maybe for you it’s just been a steady course.
HL : I think so, yeah. Because there have been other things along the way that have…like some psychotherapy, some medication I’ve taken, also the TM…the combination of different things. Plus some people I’ve met, I got married and had kids, so my evolution as a person…I couldn’t say what part of that has been caused by TM.
JW: Yeah. Part of what I’m trying to do is put words to things…trying to map the territories…in the Vedic traditions they talk about these three bodies…they talk about the physical body, the energy body (what I think Chekhov calls the imaginary body), and what they causal body…and its much larger than the other two, and it’s just space, like spaciousness.
HL: Huh, that’s interesting. I’ve never heard of that.
JW: And it’s interesting because I think when I experience people who do a lot of what I would call causal meditation or emptiness meditation or pure formless meditation…they often have a really strong presence or causal body, and that’s actually what I experience with you, and it seems it would be the kind of thing that would be developed by a TM type of practice. So this third body, if you were lifting weights you would be training your physical body, but doing that kind of emptiness meditation, from what I gather, trains a causal body, and what you were describing about the way that people respond to you in terms of that solidness and that presence…and it would make sense to me that would be the kind of quality that someone would, just energetically, develop around themselves as a result of doing the practice that you do.
HL: Yeah
JW: And so that helps me connect the dots and makes a kind of sense to me. And I really like what you were saying about the matrix of things: family, a little therapy, a little medication, maybe meditation. All of those things contributed to your evolution. I don’t know if you know a guy named Ken Wilber, and I‘ve read a lot of his work and he’s a big background and influence for me…and he considers himself an “integral” thinker…so he’s really interested in how all these dimensions contribute to human potential and human growth and how they interact with each other. You mentioned therapy and we talked about some personal life things that influenced your work as an actor…I’ve come across characters, situations, or scenes where I felt blocked, inauthentic or disconnected in some way…and for me, because my story has been wrought with a lot of therapy and psychological issues and that sort of thing…I had to go do that personal work so I could open up and deal with some traumas and then I could go back to the scene at a much later date, and there was a level of authenticity or connection that wasn’t there before. I know that’s not true for every actor…but that was definitely part of my story. Was that part of your experience, that your delving into the psychological or therapeutic work that it helped you open or reclaim parts of yourself that made you more accessible in the work, or was that never really an issue for you?
HL: Well, I can’t see any direct cause and effect between the therapy and the work…a lot of the therapy had to do with dealing with being an actor.
JW: But if I heard you correctly part of the therapy was to deal with the difficulties of being an actor… like the financial insecurity and lack of stability… because sometimes I’ve had experiences of having a hard time leaving things behind.
HL: I’ve had that happen, although for years I claimed it didn’t. No, the therapy ended up being about how I presented myself as a person…about being my true self with people…and how not to act the role they wanted me to be. And I became aware that it was probably affecting my career. And I would come across to directors and such as inauthentic, as trying to be some other guy, as struggling to say what they wanted to hear. And I spent quite a bit of time working on that.
JW: Hearing that, I have a hard time imagining that didn’t affect your work.
HL: Yeah, it probably did.
JW: One of the reasons I love this work is that whatever is coming up in my work, is usually a direct mirror of what is happening in my life. For example, if I were doing what you were just describing working on in therapy. I would probably be doing that in the rehearsal hall as well. I might be presenting an idea of who I think this person is supposed to be rather than having an experience and telling the truth moment to moment.
HL: And if those experiences are kept paramount then you end up doing that on stage as well, like how am I coming across to the audience. That’s much more prevalent or significant.
JW: Yeah, and with the director too. I’ve had to burn through a lot of trying to please the director rather than staying with my own discovery and staying honest with what it is I’m feeling is happening.
JW: In terms of your career…I wonder if you could share 2 or 3 of your favorite moments or most satisfying artistic experiences in your career.
C H R I S T M A S C A R O L
HL: Uh huh. Well, one that comes to mind is doing this Christmas Carol…how many years it’s been…but it’s over thirty. And I’ve had this experience of having done a part so many times that you don’t have to think about it anymore… So, as a result I’ve been more successful, in having that feeling of immersing myself in a role. I don’t know, I always go to this silly thing of trying to figure out the percentage, maybe it’s 20 percent, or I think I had about 60 percent there, and about 40 percent there… but who knows. But it feels like I have more success in becoming more of the character than me because I don’t have to think about what the next line is or any of the technical demands, you know, I’m free of those. So, you know, I end up having a pretty high percentage of peaks of experiencing. And, it made me think, you know, when I was in college and I use to read about places like the Moscow Art Theatre… and you’d read about how they’d rehearse a play for what six months or something like that., because here four weeks is considered a long rehearsal…but you always think, what the hell did they do for six months…but now, having had this experience with Christmas Carol, I assume one of the things they did was just kept going over it and over it until they could immerse themselves completely in the part. So that’s been a really interesting and satisfying experience.
Hal Landon Jr., right, is Scrooge and Timothy Landfield is the Ghost of Christmas Present in
South Coast Repertory's 2013 production of A Christmas Carol.
D R A W E R B O Y
But let’s see, I did a play about five years ago…the Drawer Boy. And it was a part I was really suited for…I guess I felt like everything that I’d been doing up to that time kind of came to fruition in doing that part. It’s like… it was just before I kind of got retired from SCR. You know they always promised us 26 weeks of work every season…which was fantastic…but when we all hit 65, at least the four or five of us, they said we just can’t do it…we can’t find that many parts for guys your age. So that was my last major leading part at that theatre other than Christmas Carol. But it was an extremely satisfying experience. I used the psychological gesture, kind of that signature technique, it was enormously helpful, I got so much out of that. And I was able to combat the dreaded anticipation for most of that time. So, it really felt like a happy fulfilling experience.
B U F F A L O B I L L
The other one that keeps coming back… and this was before I meditated, before anything. I was doing Indians and I was playing Buffalo Bill…and I had this one moment…and it could have been fatigue because I think I was doing a paper route from 3 to 5 in the morning because there was no other time to work…and uh…actually this might have been what you might have called supernormal or something like that…there was this one moment where I was kind of gone, where I didn’t know where I was. Was this a play, or what’s going on here? I wasn’t out of it, but…it felt good. It felt right, in a way; except I didn’t have a lot of control over it if anything…and it didn’t last very long. But it felt like…it was the play. The character was kind of freaking out…I’ve never really freaked out like this and I didn’t lose it lose it…but it’s hard to describe, but I’d never had an experience like that before.
JW: Physical exhaustion often precedes many of these experiences; whether it’s a sweat lodge or a vision quest or a sesshin in Zen. That sort of intensity seems to generate enough heat, in the alchemical sense, for transformation. And Grotowski would also work in that way, where intensity would lead to certain barriers dropping…but it sounds like the energy of the experience of the losing it, the chaos or the panic or…sounds like it was genuine, and it was hard for you to…
HL: Maybe it kind of scared me. I didn’t pay much attention to it at the time…and now talking to you and reading some of the material…well, I still remember it vividly. But the other thing that struck me, I think I mentioned this, I kind of always use the psychological gesture. The way I use it is to find a full-bodied expression of the characters super-objective…and that always helps me, but there has been a couple of times where the response to doing the psychological gesture was kind of overpowering. Really shook me to the core, so to speak, in a way that I’m not sure I was…I wish I could bring all of this on stage with me…and while it certainly helped my performance, that experience seemed more profound than anything I performed on stage. But maybe that’s selfish of me. It definitely filled me with something. I was able to use that part of the character and bring it into performance to some degree.
JW: I hear you. I think it’s interesting that the state that the character was in…I mean…had you ever taken any hallucinogens or take any hallucinogens, if you don’t mind me asking.
HL: No, I don’t mind. I did take LSD once. It wasn’t a particularly pleasant experience. This was a couple of years after that. The scene was with Wild Bill and Buffalo Bill’s trying to plead his case, trying to justify or rationalize these kind of horrible things he’s done to the Indians…so the character was in a fairly high emotional state, and then all of a sudden these images start coming to him…images of himself, other actors that looked like me…and all of a sudden this one time it became fairly real…like being in a dream real, and it took me a moment to snap out of it and be in the play again.
JW: So, your inner imagery started to become very affecting not just the images on stage.
HL: Right.
JW: It was interesting to me because if someone had been playing a hallucinating character and had never hallucinated or taken hallucinogens, that might have been interesting. In that book, cleansing the doors of perception… sometimes taking hallucinogens opens something up that wouldn’t otherwise be open. And in some of the research I’ve done, the Grotowski work, and some of the ritual or shamanic work, the roots of theatre being in shaman or religious rites or Greek theatre, which was ritualistic and masks, mask work being all that kind of thing…issues of trance and possession come up and are sometimes very useful for actors; getting in and out of those kinds of states.
JW: Physical exhaustion often precedes many of these experiences; whether it’s a sweat lodge or a vision quest or a sesshin in Zen. That sort of intensity seems to generate enough heat, in the alchemical sense, for transformation. And Grotowski would also work in that way, where intensity would lead to certain barriers dropping…but it sounds like the energy of the experience of the losing it, the chaos or the panic or…sounds like it was genuine, and it was hard for you to…
HL: Maybe it kind of scared me. I didn’t pay much attention to it at the time…and now talking to you and reading some of the material…well, I still remember it vividly. But the other thing that struck me, I think I mentioned this, I kind of always use the psychological gesture. The way I use it is to find a full-bodied expression of the characters super-objective…and that always helps me, but there has been a couple of times where the response to doing the psychological gesture was kind of overpowering. Really shook me to the core, so to speak, in a way that I’m not sure I was…I wish I could bring all of this on stage with me…and while it certainly helped my performance, that experience seemed more profound than anything I performed on stage. But maybe that’s selfish of me. It definitely filled me with something. I was able to use that part of the character and bring it into performance to some degree.
JW: I hear you. I think it’s interesting that the state that the character was in…I mean…had you ever taken any hallucinogens or take any hallucinogens, if you don’t mind me asking.
HL: No, I don’t mind. I did take LSD once. It wasn’t a particularly pleasant experience. This was a couple of years after that. The scene was with Wild Bill and Buffalo Bill’s trying to plead his case, trying to justify or rationalize these kind of horrible things he’s done to the Indians…so the character was in a fairly high emotional state, and then all of a sudden these images start coming to him…images of himself, other actors that looked like me…and all of a sudden this one time it became fairly real…like being in a dream real, and it took me a moment to snap out of it and be in the play again.
JW: So, your inner imagery started to become very affecting not just the images on stage.
HL: Right.
JW: It was interesting to me because if someone had been playing a hallucinating character and had never hallucinated or taken hallucinogens, that might have been interesting. In that book, cleansing the doors of perception… sometimes taking hallucinogens opens something up that wouldn’t otherwise be open. And in some of the research I’ve done, the Grotowski work, and some of the ritual or shamanic work, the roots of theatre being in shaman or religious rites or Greek theatre, which was ritualistic and masks, mask work being all that kind of thing…issues of trance and possession come up and are sometimes very useful for actors; getting in and out of those kinds of states.
Hal Landon, Jr. as Orgon in SCR's production of Tartuffe
G R E A T A C T I N G
JW: Final question and then we’ll wrap it up. A lot of people don’t know what I mean by supernormal functioning, but most people know a great performance when they see it…so what is a great performance? What do you pursue or how would you describe great acting when you see it?
HL: Well, I guess to really break it down, the two things that fill me, or move me when I see a performance, are that the actor is able to transform; they have done a transformation from themselves to this other person. And the more unlike themselves they are the more I am thrilled by the performance. And some of that transformation is, can they live in this other body. And the other is, is it emotionally true? In the small moments do I believe it completely and am I moved by the big ones; pretty simple. And someone like Meryl Streep is pretty good for me… someone who is so deep in the film…like in out of Africa, particularly.
JW: And I think that’s what you pursue too, complete transformation, and the sense of truth in every little detail. What about greatest performances you’ve ever seen?
HL: I’ve seen Kandis Chappell do several great roles…
JW: Was she a company member?
HL: No, she worked a lot down at the old globe. You know when you see someone inhabit a character and do it fully and believably, you know it transcends that ugliness and the pain in a way, and its uplifting to watch.
JW: Chekhov talks about that too. One of the concepts entirety or beauty. I don’t recall how he put it.
HL: As I recall there was even a technique for the feeling of beauty.
JW: I always find that interesting. Giving students the assignment around finding out what they feel attracted to, what they find beautiful. I feel like with all the technique I was given, I was so rarely asked what I thought was beautiful, but as an artist I am sitting there wanting to make something beyond functional, but even the beautiful.
HL: And then the ability to see the beauty in everything. I think the Maharishi…talking about finding beauty in a rotting dog. Someone asked the maharishi about ugliness…
JW: It’s interesting that I came across in my reading, I think at some level, that’s what we do…we have this indiscriminate search for beauty in life. We get it all. There’s nothing excluded…nothing not fit for dramatic enactment at one level. Every possibility of human situation is open and available to actors…and to find beauty in all of that is a profound prospect. There is Zen tradition where the monk goes with a begging bowl and vows to eat whatever he is given as an exercise in the willingness to accept life, everything. There is a story of a guy eating a finger that was jokingly put in the bowl. There is some tradition of sexual priestesses…I forget the details…but as I recall, some part of their ritual was to sexually accept the first man that came to them with absolutely no qualification. It was a spiritual initiation of absolute unconditional embrace, unconditional acceptance and surrender to what life presents to you.
HL: Well, I guess to really break it down, the two things that fill me, or move me when I see a performance, are that the actor is able to transform; they have done a transformation from themselves to this other person. And the more unlike themselves they are the more I am thrilled by the performance. And some of that transformation is, can they live in this other body. And the other is, is it emotionally true? In the small moments do I believe it completely and am I moved by the big ones; pretty simple. And someone like Meryl Streep is pretty good for me… someone who is so deep in the film…like in out of Africa, particularly.
JW: And I think that’s what you pursue too, complete transformation, and the sense of truth in every little detail. What about greatest performances you’ve ever seen?
HL: I’ve seen Kandis Chappell do several great roles…
JW: Was she a company member?
HL: No, she worked a lot down at the old globe. You know when you see someone inhabit a character and do it fully and believably, you know it transcends that ugliness and the pain in a way, and its uplifting to watch.
JW: Chekhov talks about that too. One of the concepts entirety or beauty. I don’t recall how he put it.
HL: As I recall there was even a technique for the feeling of beauty.
JW: I always find that interesting. Giving students the assignment around finding out what they feel attracted to, what they find beautiful. I feel like with all the technique I was given, I was so rarely asked what I thought was beautiful, but as an artist I am sitting there wanting to make something beyond functional, but even the beautiful.
HL: And then the ability to see the beauty in everything. I think the Maharishi…talking about finding beauty in a rotting dog. Someone asked the maharishi about ugliness…
JW: It’s interesting that I came across in my reading, I think at some level, that’s what we do…we have this indiscriminate search for beauty in life. We get it all. There’s nothing excluded…nothing not fit for dramatic enactment at one level. Every possibility of human situation is open and available to actors…and to find beauty in all of that is a profound prospect. There is Zen tradition where the monk goes with a begging bowl and vows to eat whatever he is given as an exercise in the willingness to accept life, everything. There is a story of a guy eating a finger that was jokingly put in the bowl. There is some tradition of sexual priestesses…I forget the details…but as I recall, some part of their ritual was to sexually accept the first man that came to them with absolutely no qualification. It was a spiritual initiation of absolute unconditional embrace, unconditional acceptance and surrender to what life presents to you.