I N T R O D U C T I O N
Larry Moss is an actor, director and acting coach. He trained and worked as a professional actor in New York before transitioning into teaching and directing. Since making this transition, he wrote the acting textbook Intent to Live, and has directed numerous film and television productions. He taught at Juilliard and Circle in the Square in New York before moving to Los Angeles and co-founding The Larry Moss Studio (now The Acting Studio at Edgemar Center for the Arts). I first read his book on acting technique while in acting school in 2006 and I studied with him briefly in 2011 in Los Angeles. We caught up with each other on the phone for this interview, which took place in early 2012.
E A R L Y L I F E E X P E R I E N C E R E L E V A N T T O A C T I N G
LM: I think I learned starting with the great performers, going back to when I was 10 and saw Nat King Cole live, Frank Sinatra, Lena Horne, and Sammy Davis Jr., I was able to gratefully see greatness in music when I was very young. My parents were lovers of pop music. That introduced me to the world of imagination and feeling and melody, as well as lyric content. I think those things as well as going to the theater young, and films became more of a reality rather than the difficult problems of my family. My mother was mentally ill and there was a lot of violence, dysfunction, and sadness in my childhood. I was very hyped up as a child in terms of my adrenaline and in terms of my relationship to theatrics. I was attracted to the imaginary because the reality was so difficult. I believed in watching these performers live, and then Kazan’s movies. These movies made a huge impact on me because they were so human and filled with drama. It kind of mirrored my life but in a very high way with joy even though there was a lot of pain in the movies. I began to understand that there was something called art, which mirrored reality. It was a way to express my own grief, anger, joy, and sadness. At the same time, I realized I was not alone. I think that was reading J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye when I was very young, and reading Steinbeck, Huxley, and moving on to Ibsen, Strindberg, Williams, and Miller. All these people were in my life in my teenage years. I had a lot of hope based on drama, but it was also a way to distance myself from family drama that was painful.
T R A I N I N G
JW: When did you first start training and where did you go and what was the progression of your formal training as an artist?
LM: The first school that I went to, I was 18, was in NY called AMDA. It was run by Sanford Meisner. It was designed particularly for people who wanted to be in musical theater. I was there for about a year, but I was on fire to perform and I was getting good training. I got my first season of stock and then came back, quit school, but continued to study the Meisner work with other teachers. I think the Meisner work is very good at the beginning of your career because it gives you the sense of responding to somebody else’s behavior and being sensitive and empathic to someone outside of yourself. Since the teen years are so, out of necessity, narcissistic, and also because the brain isn’t finished congealing, the ability to reason as I understand it doesn’t happen in the frontal lobe until you are 20 or 21. So your brain is immature, therefore, you are very self-involved, self-centered, and subjective. The Meisner method makes you look outside of yourself and watch another person’s behavior and comment on it; so you begin to see outside of yourself and allow your natural impulses to happen based on what you are seeing and hearing in the other actor.
Those exercises, the repeat exercises Meisner did, kind of shocked me out of my small world of responses. I then went on work as an actor a lot. I did the revival of West Side Story at City Center. I started working on Broadway very young. I then did The Upstairs the Downstairs with Madeline Kahn and Lily Tomlin and did Political and Social Satire for 2 years at this very chic nightclub. I continued to study with Meisner teachers, but I would say the transformative experience was with Stella Adler, which happened later in my 30s. I worked with teachers who were very emotional based. In other words, would help you cry, get angry, and express volatile emotions: that was very helpful because I was very inhibited. I didn’t understand until Stella Adler character. Stella helped me to understand the writers. I worked with her for 3 years on script analysis, working on Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Miller, and William Inge. You studied the writer, the writer’s life. You studied the plays based on when they were written in the writer’s life.
What I learned from Stella was that the socioeconomic level of the character was everything. That had never dawned on me how you are educated, how much money you have, what your parents did for a living, how you were raised religiously; you know, the impact of your childhood made you make choices. It’s like Maggie the Cat in “Tin Roof”, that I was ‘so disgustingly poor all my life.’ You know what it is to suck up to people you hate in order to get hand me downs. Without understanding that, you can’t play those parts. Without understanding the Civil War, how can you play the women characters like Blanche and Stella? They are descendants of a time in history where women were thought of as virgin goddesses. When the South fell, there was nowhere for them to go but madness because they weren’t raised in reality, they were hostesses, they were in beauty. They didn’t have to fight for anything. They were giving parties. They were having a grand time and when the Civil War happened and everyone began to fall. That’s what Williams wrote about. No one ever taught me that.
Stella really got me functioning to understand Clifford Odets, what it was to be in the Depression, what it was to be poor, what it was to be an immigrant. So I understood Golden Boy and Waiting for Lefty. When Clifford Odets went to Hollywood and was bought by Hollywood, he was aware he was destroying himself and couldn’t stop it. He bought into the drinking, the sex, and chasing success. He became the character the Golden Boy. When you read Odets and you find out what happened in his life, it’s a Chinese box, a hall of mirrors. So it was understanding the writer, why he/she wrote out of their own lives, and imagination that made you understand Eugene O’Neill, his family and the alcoholism, the drug addiction, and his relationship to the sea. It comes out of the depths of these great writers lives and that was the change in my work as a teacher, actor, and director
JW: Did you feel like that was the last time you were receiving training as it were and the rest of the time it’s been experience working and discovering for yourself?
LM: I read all the time; I read other teachers’ works. For instance I was really affected by Robert Lewis’ books Method or Madness and Advice to the Actors. Also, Uta Hagen’s books and William Ball’s book called A Sense of Direction. This is a book about directing as a director and teacher at ACT in San Francisco, a textbook for understanding production on every level. I’m constantly studying. I go to the theater all the time. I see everything. I saw the new Death of a Salesman three times. I never stop studying because I have much to learn and also because I have got involved in music again. I’ve been directing a wonderful singer named Clint Holmes. We just did a show based on the music of Paul Simon and Cole Porter. We created a man’s life from his innocence to his fall to his redemption through the lyrics of Paul Simon and Cole Porter. I’ve gone back to the musical world in a powerful way. I’m about to do a new play called Cork Town about an Irish family in the 50s in Philadelphia. So I’m going back and forth between directing plays and then working in cabaret and traveling the world. I’m going to Australia, Berlin, Vancouver, and Toronto; and teach in NY and LA. My life at this point is very eclectic both in teaching and directing. That teaches me because I am not stuck in one thing. I’m constantly learning. I just read an extraordinary book called The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker. It really is an important book.
JW: It really is; it’s extraordinary.
LM: It made me understand something and I’m still processing it… again, very slowly because it made me understand life, literally. Also, the problem in show business can become, which happened to Clifford Odets, Tennessee Williams, William Inge, and Lanford Wilson… you have a great success, and you are respected and admired and loved but then when they don’t like you, it’s all taken away. They do that to writers. I’m not saying the critics shouldn’t be honest, but there is a terrible illness in show business in that I have to please you, awards, money, and fame. You can lose yourself. In a way, you can lose the transformation because it becomes about do you love me and like me and “am I successful” as opposed to “what I am putting out there”. Edward Albee said it brilliantly when he hadn’t had a play produced in NY for 15 years. Some journalist asked him, “how do you feel about not being produced on Broadway,” and he responded, “just because you didn’t like it didn’t mean I stopped writing. I was writing for the whole 15 years. I just wasn’t popular but it doesn’t mean I wasn’t growing”. I think that is the bottom line. You can’t lose your soul to show business. You’ve got to keep trying to reveal the human condition as you understand it, deeper in your own life, and keep transforming.
Larry Moss
T R A N S F O R M A T I O N
JW: This is why the personal transformation in the work is such an interesting part of the conversation for me. The woman who wrote Eat, Pray, Love; Elizabeth Gilbert, did an interesting TED talk on the archetype of the genius and how it was treated in certain archaic cultures and how we treat it these days and the sort of personal ownership about it. She made some points how healthy it would be to treat it as if were not a personal thing. There is something about being of service to some inner guidance that that’s the real transformative process. That’s the real artistic process and it really can’t be polluted by what’s going on around us, or whether people like it. There has to be an answering to a higher calling as it were which we only as individuals can know. There is a deep hunger in the community or a need to have some wisdom about that sort of thing.
LM: Otherwise it’s all American Idol. Yet the greater actors and writers because of film are there forever. Kim Stanley did two films which are a must see. One is called The Goddess. The other is called Séance on a Wet Afternoon. I saw Kim Stanley when I was 15 years old in A Far Country where she played Freud’s first patient that has a hysterical paralysis. I wrote about it in my book. I had never seen anyone have a nervous breakdown in front of an audience. Kim made me believe that it was real. Kim was told that the reason she couldn’t walk was because she didn’t tend to her father. Her father was ill and she was tired of being a nursemaid. That night he died and she couldn’t walk. When Freud says to her you wanted to be young, pretty, and go to dances; you did not want to take care of your sick father and you did not want to help him that night. She started screaming and they brought the curtain down and tears were spurting out of her eyes. In the dark she was screaming and sobbing.
The transformation felt like I wasn’t watching acting. She was able to plumb an emotional catharsis technically and reach inside of herself to something that was so wrong but on cue. That’s transformation. I saw George C. Scott do it in Desire Under the Elms by Eugene O’ Neil and in Death of a Salesman. I saw James Earl Jones do it magnificently in The Great White Hope playing the first black heavy weight champion. These are performances I will hold in me forever. These are why I call my book the Intent to Live and not the Intent to Act. When to watch for instance Brando how articulate he was in an inarticulate character… when he is talking to his brother, he almost leads in an effeminate way this brother with his cheek. He played an ex-prize fighter who would never expose his cheek to his opponent but exposes vulnerability to his brother in a way- kiss me, hug me, or kill me; I’m completely vulnerable. He studied with Stella and that psychological gesture of offering his face to his brother in such a raw way was craft. He knew what he was doing, it wasn’t just instinct.
That’s what we are talking about- that an actor can be smart enough, gifted enough, human enough, and get into the circumstances of the writer and breathe life into it. In a way that no one can understand where great acting lives because it is the experience of the actor or actress is having in that moment right in front of you. The “now of now” as the great musical theater teacher David Craig would say. He would ask “when does a song take place”; we would always say now. He would say it doesn’t take place now, it takes place in the now of now. A song can never be sung in any other moment but in that second because of what is making the person sing the song, which is the relationship to the other person. The exploration of the now of now which the audience gets to witness is when you leave the theater and know why I am alive or why I exist in this world. That’s the human condition. I just saw it.
JW: I don’t think it needs spiritual words, but I find myself fascinated or inspired by literally taking the spirit in. Something is inspiring about connecting or looking at these great mystical traditions and looking at how they relate to the work we do in theater. We have ritual roots in what we do but it’s certainly not at its best dogmatic. That process of leaving people awakened or revitalized…
LM: They say that the three greatest human pleasures are sex, exercise, and going to the theater. Something happens to the body. Clearly in the sex and exercise it’s endorphins. I suspect the expectation of the transformative is that we hope when we sit down in the theater and watch the curtain go up; we don’t know what’s going to happen. We pray that the transformation will happen in front of us. When it does, it changes people’s lives.
JW: I relate to the quality of growing up in a difficult circumstance growing up. Did you also get interested in other sorts of transformation, meditation for example?
LM: Still working on that sort of internal stillness. My mother was very interested in astrology and I also became interested partially because of observing her relationship. I found an extraordinary astrologer, which is the reason why I became a director because I had been teaching for 25 years and doing well, but I felt sad so I went to see her. Her name is Maria Napoli. She said, “You are depressed because you need to direct. You can’t just teach. You have to direct. You should have seen your chart. You’ve got to work with writers to produce new works and you will have to work with them to produce a new work.”
I went back to class which was maybe 40 people and gave them an exercise which was basically meditating for a half hour, which is basically breathing and muscle release. After that I turned to them and said I want you remember something that happened yesterday or 20 years ago. Don’t pick it, breathe, and just let it pick you. Within 5 minutes the entire room was either was weeping or looked shocked or fearful. I knew I had hit a nerve. Now I said remember every sensorial aspect of the memory. That went on for another half hour. People were literally falling to the ground as they remembered the taste, the touch, the smell of what they saw. Now turn to the person next to you and tell them the story in sensory detail. The partners were clutching and hugging each other and crying. Now let the other person who heard the story tell it back to you so you can hear it as a story and not as a subjective experience. The whole exercise lasted for about 3 hours.
Now bring it to the stage. They all looked shocked; because I had seen Meryl Streep do about 3 minutes in a production of Alice in Wonderland where she went back and forth between the White Queen and Alice for 3 minutes. I went back three times to watch it 3 minutes again. I thought you could build an entire play like that if the actor was good enough. I went to see Patrick Stewart in A Christmas Carol. He told the story of A Christmas Carol by himself and played every character. Long story short, something intrigued me. Based on my early work and my observing great singing performers, there was something about the power of one that became very spiritually exciting to me, bigger than me.
I waited a month and a month after I gave the exercise, this South African woman came up and her memory was the murder of her grandfather was she was 10 years old. He was stabbed 22 times, he was 82. She got up and told the story. She played her mother and her father, grandmother and grandfather, and herself as a child and her black nanny. The exercise went on for 20 minutes and I told her to write this. It became this thing we worked on for 4 years with 24 characters and we opened it in Seattle and brought it to NY and it won every award which was lovely. We went to the National Theater with it and all over the world. It became a TV show and Random House wanted to make it a novel and now it’s going to be a movie. It became out of my astrologer saying to work with someone to build a new piece.
I didn’t know where I was going. I just knew this actress Pamela Dean was like a shaman. Her technique vocally and physically was so high that she could become a child in one second even though she was in her 30s and then become an old man and a black woman. The transformative moment was when we went into Cape Town and 90% of the audience in this theater was young black people and they were watching a white woman play a black woman. It was scary. They came but there was a sense of you better pull this off. Pamela was so brilliant in this play and this play was strong. Black kids stood up and cried. They stood for her and screamed for her and we all cried together. It was the healing and understanding of what happened in the Apartheid. Her father would see blacks in the waiting room and would treat them when it wasn’t allowed. It was against the law and yet he did it anyways. A doctor came to see the show in NY and was waiting for Pam. He was shaking and sobbing and said he forgot that during the riots in South Africa he had treated a young 14yearold girl in a blue dress. I thought I could save her and she had been shot. As I turned her over, I saw a bullet though her back and realized she was going to die. I had forgotten her but tonight you reminded me of her and I wanted to thank you. It’s those moments that theater truly makes a transformative healing and grieving. That was an extraordinary experience.
JW: I have some experience with astrology as well. I had the sense that when I had my chart read by a particularly skilled person, the dynamics of my life and soul, I was getting a view of it and getting contours of it. It matched up with what I was experiencing in my life. When it matched up and I got aligned with that, a lot of energy was released. My experience has been that there is a larger order as it were at work. There’s an archetypal, transpersonal dimension to our lives. Just like getting present to the social or cultural contexts, those kinds of truths, I find that there are these other truths, spiritual truths or these transpersonal truths that are present. If we start to look at them and utilize them, they supercharge the work we do. It’s funny that you use the word shaman because shamanic technology, as it were, is one way to access levels of power or intensity or information that I wouldn’t have access to otherwise. I heard through the grapevine that you’ve come to your own personal process to have some faith or experience of psychic experience as a genuine thing. Somehow that thing has been informative or enriching for you. Is that true?
LM: My spiritual life, which is changing now as I’m growing older, I can’t describe how it’s changing, I just feel it. You look at your life and you go, isn’t that interesting that those are the choices I made when I made them; even working on some Paul Simon songs. He wrote a song- some people’s lives roll easy, some people’s lives roll hard. I look back at the intensity and sadness of my childhood but realize that the sensitivity and reaction to those things made me search for something better, something healing, something loving: something that wasn’t destruction. The great thing about the theater is that you are always constructing the set; you are always constructing the performance, the lights, making decisions that are constructive.
My spiritual journey is through theaterworking on it, observing it, learning about it, being fascinating by it. I don’t have a religion or spiritual guide. My spiritual guide is the theater. My spiritual journey is about the fact that I heard the things about therapy, astrology, and the theater; I could hear my higher self. I heard the choices that were going to heal me and give something to the world that was positive, know it was true, and follow it. Stella Adler said find out what you do well and do it like Hercules and give it everything and more. That is spiritual to me because I heard it but a lot of people heard it. I heard Stella and I heard my therapists. My great therapist, the first Cuban analyst in America, Gabriella de Vega said you have to earn your death. I heard him. My spiritual consciousness is that I could hear it and know it’s true.
Sometimes people ask how I know something when I teach. I just feel it. I see it in their bodies. I hear it in their bodies, and in their voices, and the need to breathe into their voices to get out the trauma. That’s because of the years of therapy and I’ve been teaching for 40 years and acted nonstop for 20 years. You never stop. I’m on my way right now to meet the writer and see if we have a play to produce. You keep on going and because of your energy which is positive, other people attach to you because they can feel your spiritual positivity. That is something I truly feel is the spiritual aspect of my life- I could listen to the spiritual advice and react on it, which I couldn’t have done had I not been in therapy. Not to blame my parents, but I was basically raised to destroy myself. Partially due to a chemical imbalance which is genetic and partially because of tragedies I witnessed as a child as many people have. Some use their free will to create and some use their free will to destroy. It’s much more interesting to be constructive, it’s always a surprise. If you’re smart, you are going to use construction, even if you are attracted to the dark, and use that energy for Apollo as opposed to Dionysus.
LM: Otherwise it’s all American Idol. Yet the greater actors and writers because of film are there forever. Kim Stanley did two films which are a must see. One is called The Goddess. The other is called Séance on a Wet Afternoon. I saw Kim Stanley when I was 15 years old in A Far Country where she played Freud’s first patient that has a hysterical paralysis. I wrote about it in my book. I had never seen anyone have a nervous breakdown in front of an audience. Kim made me believe that it was real. Kim was told that the reason she couldn’t walk was because she didn’t tend to her father. Her father was ill and she was tired of being a nursemaid. That night he died and she couldn’t walk. When Freud says to her you wanted to be young, pretty, and go to dances; you did not want to take care of your sick father and you did not want to help him that night. She started screaming and they brought the curtain down and tears were spurting out of her eyes. In the dark she was screaming and sobbing.
The transformation felt like I wasn’t watching acting. She was able to plumb an emotional catharsis technically and reach inside of herself to something that was so wrong but on cue. That’s transformation. I saw George C. Scott do it in Desire Under the Elms by Eugene O’ Neil and in Death of a Salesman. I saw James Earl Jones do it magnificently in The Great White Hope playing the first black heavy weight champion. These are performances I will hold in me forever. These are why I call my book the Intent to Live and not the Intent to Act. When to watch for instance Brando how articulate he was in an inarticulate character… when he is talking to his brother, he almost leads in an effeminate way this brother with his cheek. He played an ex-prize fighter who would never expose his cheek to his opponent but exposes vulnerability to his brother in a way- kiss me, hug me, or kill me; I’m completely vulnerable. He studied with Stella and that psychological gesture of offering his face to his brother in such a raw way was craft. He knew what he was doing, it wasn’t just instinct.
That’s what we are talking about- that an actor can be smart enough, gifted enough, human enough, and get into the circumstances of the writer and breathe life into it. In a way that no one can understand where great acting lives because it is the experience of the actor or actress is having in that moment right in front of you. The “now of now” as the great musical theater teacher David Craig would say. He would ask “when does a song take place”; we would always say now. He would say it doesn’t take place now, it takes place in the now of now. A song can never be sung in any other moment but in that second because of what is making the person sing the song, which is the relationship to the other person. The exploration of the now of now which the audience gets to witness is when you leave the theater and know why I am alive or why I exist in this world. That’s the human condition. I just saw it.
JW: I don’t think it needs spiritual words, but I find myself fascinated or inspired by literally taking the spirit in. Something is inspiring about connecting or looking at these great mystical traditions and looking at how they relate to the work we do in theater. We have ritual roots in what we do but it’s certainly not at its best dogmatic. That process of leaving people awakened or revitalized…
LM: They say that the three greatest human pleasures are sex, exercise, and going to the theater. Something happens to the body. Clearly in the sex and exercise it’s endorphins. I suspect the expectation of the transformative is that we hope when we sit down in the theater and watch the curtain go up; we don’t know what’s going to happen. We pray that the transformation will happen in front of us. When it does, it changes people’s lives.
JW: I relate to the quality of growing up in a difficult circumstance growing up. Did you also get interested in other sorts of transformation, meditation for example?
LM: Still working on that sort of internal stillness. My mother was very interested in astrology and I also became interested partially because of observing her relationship. I found an extraordinary astrologer, which is the reason why I became a director because I had been teaching for 25 years and doing well, but I felt sad so I went to see her. Her name is Maria Napoli. She said, “You are depressed because you need to direct. You can’t just teach. You have to direct. You should have seen your chart. You’ve got to work with writers to produce new works and you will have to work with them to produce a new work.”
I went back to class which was maybe 40 people and gave them an exercise which was basically meditating for a half hour, which is basically breathing and muscle release. After that I turned to them and said I want you remember something that happened yesterday or 20 years ago. Don’t pick it, breathe, and just let it pick you. Within 5 minutes the entire room was either was weeping or looked shocked or fearful. I knew I had hit a nerve. Now I said remember every sensorial aspect of the memory. That went on for another half hour. People were literally falling to the ground as they remembered the taste, the touch, the smell of what they saw. Now turn to the person next to you and tell them the story in sensory detail. The partners were clutching and hugging each other and crying. Now let the other person who heard the story tell it back to you so you can hear it as a story and not as a subjective experience. The whole exercise lasted for about 3 hours.
Now bring it to the stage. They all looked shocked; because I had seen Meryl Streep do about 3 minutes in a production of Alice in Wonderland where she went back and forth between the White Queen and Alice for 3 minutes. I went back three times to watch it 3 minutes again. I thought you could build an entire play like that if the actor was good enough. I went to see Patrick Stewart in A Christmas Carol. He told the story of A Christmas Carol by himself and played every character. Long story short, something intrigued me. Based on my early work and my observing great singing performers, there was something about the power of one that became very spiritually exciting to me, bigger than me.
I waited a month and a month after I gave the exercise, this South African woman came up and her memory was the murder of her grandfather was she was 10 years old. He was stabbed 22 times, he was 82. She got up and told the story. She played her mother and her father, grandmother and grandfather, and herself as a child and her black nanny. The exercise went on for 20 minutes and I told her to write this. It became this thing we worked on for 4 years with 24 characters and we opened it in Seattle and brought it to NY and it won every award which was lovely. We went to the National Theater with it and all over the world. It became a TV show and Random House wanted to make it a novel and now it’s going to be a movie. It became out of my astrologer saying to work with someone to build a new piece.
I didn’t know where I was going. I just knew this actress Pamela Dean was like a shaman. Her technique vocally and physically was so high that she could become a child in one second even though she was in her 30s and then become an old man and a black woman. The transformative moment was when we went into Cape Town and 90% of the audience in this theater was young black people and they were watching a white woman play a black woman. It was scary. They came but there was a sense of you better pull this off. Pamela was so brilliant in this play and this play was strong. Black kids stood up and cried. They stood for her and screamed for her and we all cried together. It was the healing and understanding of what happened in the Apartheid. Her father would see blacks in the waiting room and would treat them when it wasn’t allowed. It was against the law and yet he did it anyways. A doctor came to see the show in NY and was waiting for Pam. He was shaking and sobbing and said he forgot that during the riots in South Africa he had treated a young 14yearold girl in a blue dress. I thought I could save her and she had been shot. As I turned her over, I saw a bullet though her back and realized she was going to die. I had forgotten her but tonight you reminded me of her and I wanted to thank you. It’s those moments that theater truly makes a transformative healing and grieving. That was an extraordinary experience.
JW: I have some experience with astrology as well. I had the sense that when I had my chart read by a particularly skilled person, the dynamics of my life and soul, I was getting a view of it and getting contours of it. It matched up with what I was experiencing in my life. When it matched up and I got aligned with that, a lot of energy was released. My experience has been that there is a larger order as it were at work. There’s an archetypal, transpersonal dimension to our lives. Just like getting present to the social or cultural contexts, those kinds of truths, I find that there are these other truths, spiritual truths or these transpersonal truths that are present. If we start to look at them and utilize them, they supercharge the work we do. It’s funny that you use the word shaman because shamanic technology, as it were, is one way to access levels of power or intensity or information that I wouldn’t have access to otherwise. I heard through the grapevine that you’ve come to your own personal process to have some faith or experience of psychic experience as a genuine thing. Somehow that thing has been informative or enriching for you. Is that true?
LM: My spiritual life, which is changing now as I’m growing older, I can’t describe how it’s changing, I just feel it. You look at your life and you go, isn’t that interesting that those are the choices I made when I made them; even working on some Paul Simon songs. He wrote a song- some people’s lives roll easy, some people’s lives roll hard. I look back at the intensity and sadness of my childhood but realize that the sensitivity and reaction to those things made me search for something better, something healing, something loving: something that wasn’t destruction. The great thing about the theater is that you are always constructing the set; you are always constructing the performance, the lights, making decisions that are constructive.
My spiritual journey is through theaterworking on it, observing it, learning about it, being fascinating by it. I don’t have a religion or spiritual guide. My spiritual guide is the theater. My spiritual journey is about the fact that I heard the things about therapy, astrology, and the theater; I could hear my higher self. I heard the choices that were going to heal me and give something to the world that was positive, know it was true, and follow it. Stella Adler said find out what you do well and do it like Hercules and give it everything and more. That is spiritual to me because I heard it but a lot of people heard it. I heard Stella and I heard my therapists. My great therapist, the first Cuban analyst in America, Gabriella de Vega said you have to earn your death. I heard him. My spiritual consciousness is that I could hear it and know it’s true.
Sometimes people ask how I know something when I teach. I just feel it. I see it in their bodies. I hear it in their bodies, and in their voices, and the need to breathe into their voices to get out the trauma. That’s because of the years of therapy and I’ve been teaching for 40 years and acted nonstop for 20 years. You never stop. I’m on my way right now to meet the writer and see if we have a play to produce. You keep on going and because of your energy which is positive, other people attach to you because they can feel your spiritual positivity. That is something I truly feel is the spiritual aspect of my life- I could listen to the spiritual advice and react on it, which I couldn’t have done had I not been in therapy. Not to blame my parents, but I was basically raised to destroy myself. Partially due to a chemical imbalance which is genetic and partially because of tragedies I witnessed as a child as many people have. Some use their free will to create and some use their free will to destroy. It’s much more interesting to be constructive, it’s always a surprise. If you’re smart, you are going to use construction, even if you are attracted to the dark, and use that energy for Apollo as opposed to Dionysus.
A P O L L O A N D D I O N Y S U S
JW: Can you say more about what you mean about those two archetypes?
LM: Astrologically Scorpio is a very passionate sign, fiery. As a young person, I feel you explore sex, you explore alcohol, and you explore drugs. You explore the dark and find it exciting. There’s a certain point when you go that’s a great energy but I’m not going to use it for destruction. I have to visit it so I understand its energy and then I have to use it to go to Apollo. Dionysus is like this orgiastic feeling that can be positive and used for construction but you can lose yourself. Thomas Moore wrote a book called A Care in the Soul and talks about Dionysus and that energy; extrapolating the energy to it to feeling, love, healing, and the highest of man. The highest of man is art.
LM: Astrologically Scorpio is a very passionate sign, fiery. As a young person, I feel you explore sex, you explore alcohol, and you explore drugs. You explore the dark and find it exciting. There’s a certain point when you go that’s a great energy but I’m not going to use it for destruction. I have to visit it so I understand its energy and then I have to use it to go to Apollo. Dionysus is like this orgiastic feeling that can be positive and used for construction but you can lose yourself. Thomas Moore wrote a book called A Care in the Soul and talks about Dionysus and that energy; extrapolating the energy to it to feeling, love, healing, and the highest of man. The highest of man is art.
A R T A N D C O M M E R C E
JW: Coming around to this conversation about art… particularly about art and commerce, as it were, and where those things overlap even though they often feel like they don’t…
LM: They can. I believe that they can. It’s just very rare that something has a very high quality of storytelling that is deep and that can please a middle class audience that comes for entertainment. The Chorus Line was a very good example of a show that had both. Book of Mormon has both. Death of a Salesman is a huge hit right now. Certainly arguably one of the greatest American plays. With the right cast and director, it is a huge success and it’s making its money back and more. What was interesting about that production was that when it opened it was good, but it wasn’t good enough. I saw it three times. Now, apparently the performances have grown and deepened. So it does happen. Two very interesting plays in NY right now. One called Tribes from England; fascinating play about a deaf child in a hearing family. Another play that just opened here called Cock. It’s a four- person play that is done as a cock fight amongst a gay couple and one of the men falls in love with a woman and the drama that ensues. It is done in a very stylized way, it’s almost like a dance, very heightened verbally. Both these plays are very verbal and intelligent. I feel very heartened about commerce and art but it’s rare.
JW: In some ways your teaching reflects that. You make a good living and charge a good rate for your coaching and teaching, and yet at the same time, one of the things that makes that work is that you’re awake on enough levels or firing on all cylinders so you can meet people where they are and yet walk them towards where they can go, no matter where that is. I feel that a great work of art is also like that. It pleases me on many levels. It satisfies many dimensions of who I am. The great works are the things you can come back to over and over. They affect you as a teenager and when you are fifty-five in a totally different way, at least that’s the sense I have.
LM: No, it’s right. It’s like every time you see Hamlet and you go ‘Oh. Right, I really get that now.” There’s a wonderful documentary, I don’t know if you have seen it, but it has all the internationally known actors that played Hamlet. They all do excerpts from Hamlet.
JW: What’s the name of it?
LM: I don’t know, so sorry to say, I saw it a long time ago. It was remarkable, talking about what you are talking about.
JW: I’ll have to come back to it. I had an experience with Love Labors Lost recently and I was astounded. I’ve been doing this monologue and pieces from this character for the past ten years. I can’t believe every time I do, something reveals itself.
LM: They can. I believe that they can. It’s just very rare that something has a very high quality of storytelling that is deep and that can please a middle class audience that comes for entertainment. The Chorus Line was a very good example of a show that had both. Book of Mormon has both. Death of a Salesman is a huge hit right now. Certainly arguably one of the greatest American plays. With the right cast and director, it is a huge success and it’s making its money back and more. What was interesting about that production was that when it opened it was good, but it wasn’t good enough. I saw it three times. Now, apparently the performances have grown and deepened. So it does happen. Two very interesting plays in NY right now. One called Tribes from England; fascinating play about a deaf child in a hearing family. Another play that just opened here called Cock. It’s a four- person play that is done as a cock fight amongst a gay couple and one of the men falls in love with a woman and the drama that ensues. It is done in a very stylized way, it’s almost like a dance, very heightened verbally. Both these plays are very verbal and intelligent. I feel very heartened about commerce and art but it’s rare.
JW: In some ways your teaching reflects that. You make a good living and charge a good rate for your coaching and teaching, and yet at the same time, one of the things that makes that work is that you’re awake on enough levels or firing on all cylinders so you can meet people where they are and yet walk them towards where they can go, no matter where that is. I feel that a great work of art is also like that. It pleases me on many levels. It satisfies many dimensions of who I am. The great works are the things you can come back to over and over. They affect you as a teenager and when you are fifty-five in a totally different way, at least that’s the sense I have.
LM: No, it’s right. It’s like every time you see Hamlet and you go ‘Oh. Right, I really get that now.” There’s a wonderful documentary, I don’t know if you have seen it, but it has all the internationally known actors that played Hamlet. They all do excerpts from Hamlet.
JW: What’s the name of it?
LM: I don’t know, so sorry to say, I saw it a long time ago. It was remarkable, talking about what you are talking about.
JW: I’ll have to come back to it. I had an experience with Love Labors Lost recently and I was astounded. I’ve been doing this monologue and pieces from this character for the past ten years. I can’t believe every time I do, something reveals itself.
P R O F O U N D C O M P A S S I O N
JW: Can you talk about the role of compassion and empathy in your experience as an actor and your teaching of actors?
LM: Yes, I can. The first thing that comes to mind is working with Hillary Swank first on Boys Don’t Cry and then on Million Dollar Baby. I was interviewed a lot about her. I had worked on The Green Mile the same year with Michael Clarke Duncan as I had worked with Hillary on Million Dollar Baby. Then they both got nominated for Oscars and suddenly I was thrust into the limelight and interviewed a lot. What I learned that year, working with Michael and Hillary, was the amount of compassion that Michael found in John Coffey based on his love of his mother and what she sacrificed to bring the kids up without a father. When he connected with the love of his mother, the whole part opened up because John Coffey is a Christ figure. I told him that he had to carry all the pain of the world in his eyes. Once he began to talk about the sacrifices his mother made; his gratitude, love, and compassion for her was so profound that when he screen tested for it… I was invited to the screen test, they screen tested three actors for the part and they each did three scenes four times. So you watched two hours of screen test. You really got this character. The second take of the second scene, they did a push in to Michael’s eyes and there it was. He had found a connection to compassion and it had changed his life. That compassion he brought to John Coffey changed his life. It was out of love and compassion for his mother.
JW: You mentioned that that was a very personal experience for him. You mentioned the Christ figure. Do you sometimes work with those archetypal energies or things that are larger than a personal energy?
LM: Yes, there’s a heightened, I don’t want to use this word but it comes to mind, there is a universal high level of the human condition and understanding in the worst of us, there is also the best of us. There was a quote from Mother Theresa when they asked her why she was able to sacrifice so much of herself and give so much. She said, ‘Because I know Hitler lives inside of me.’ I thought that was magnificent. I don’t know if it was a direct quote but it came from somewhere. I knew what she meant or what that meant was that you have free will to choose to live a life of compassion for not only other people but for yourself.
I’m working with a young woman right now on a play called Scar. She was the youngest survivor of pancreatic cancer in the history of pancreatic cancer. She got it when she was eighteen. She had the same surgery that Steve Jobs had. They took out five of her major organs and she’s still alive. The year she was diagnosed, 13,700 people were diagnosed and 200 are alive. She was one of them. We are doing the story of her life. What is also essential in her journey is that she was raped when she was seven. The incision of the man who raped her and the incision of the doctor who saved her, the ability to destroy an invasion and to save and heal an invasion is part of what it is about. I sit with her, we have worked a lot over the last two years.
Every question you are asking me is in this show. First of all, what is the meaning of life? Does it have meaning? What is compassion? What is faith (It’s a huge one)? What is God in all these questions that we do ask? We talk about it every time we work and today we just finished. Today it was about when she was under the anesthetic operated on and she had this vision of angels. She had spirits when she was five years old hounding her. That’s how the play starts- with the spirits hounding her. The question is did she make up the spirits out of a desire to survive it or are there spirits? So it is an interesting question.
So I have a spirit that talks to me sometimes but it only says one thing and it says it the same way every time. It goes, ‘Larry! Larry! Larry!’ And I say, ‘What is the subtext?’ and it says, ‘Wake up,’ I had it first when I was three years old. Every now and then I hear the voice. I don’t know where it comes from. Then I meet this actress/writer who has gone through this incredible pancreatic cancer survival and she talks to me about the spirits that have been with her since she was five. The spirits poke her. She works for car shows to make money. She was sitting next to one of her friends. She kept getting poked. She turned to this young man that was sitting next to her and told him that somebody was poking her. ‘Do you know anybody who laughs like this? ‘She did the laugh for this guy and he said that it was his mother. ‘Well, she keeps poking me and telling me to tell you to not give up your music.’ He started sobbing and she didn’t know he was even involved with music at all. He said, ‘Wow, I was going to give up today because I feel so lost in my career.’ She said, ‘Well your mother keeps poking me and telling me to tell you to not give it up.” You hear stories like that and you go oh my fucking god.
LM: Yes, I can. The first thing that comes to mind is working with Hillary Swank first on Boys Don’t Cry and then on Million Dollar Baby. I was interviewed a lot about her. I had worked on The Green Mile the same year with Michael Clarke Duncan as I had worked with Hillary on Million Dollar Baby. Then they both got nominated for Oscars and suddenly I was thrust into the limelight and interviewed a lot. What I learned that year, working with Michael and Hillary, was the amount of compassion that Michael found in John Coffey based on his love of his mother and what she sacrificed to bring the kids up without a father. When he connected with the love of his mother, the whole part opened up because John Coffey is a Christ figure. I told him that he had to carry all the pain of the world in his eyes. Once he began to talk about the sacrifices his mother made; his gratitude, love, and compassion for her was so profound that when he screen tested for it… I was invited to the screen test, they screen tested three actors for the part and they each did three scenes four times. So you watched two hours of screen test. You really got this character. The second take of the second scene, they did a push in to Michael’s eyes and there it was. He had found a connection to compassion and it had changed his life. That compassion he brought to John Coffey changed his life. It was out of love and compassion for his mother.
JW: You mentioned that that was a very personal experience for him. You mentioned the Christ figure. Do you sometimes work with those archetypal energies or things that are larger than a personal energy?
LM: Yes, there’s a heightened, I don’t want to use this word but it comes to mind, there is a universal high level of the human condition and understanding in the worst of us, there is also the best of us. There was a quote from Mother Theresa when they asked her why she was able to sacrifice so much of herself and give so much. She said, ‘Because I know Hitler lives inside of me.’ I thought that was magnificent. I don’t know if it was a direct quote but it came from somewhere. I knew what she meant or what that meant was that you have free will to choose to live a life of compassion for not only other people but for yourself.
I’m working with a young woman right now on a play called Scar. She was the youngest survivor of pancreatic cancer in the history of pancreatic cancer. She got it when she was eighteen. She had the same surgery that Steve Jobs had. They took out five of her major organs and she’s still alive. The year she was diagnosed, 13,700 people were diagnosed and 200 are alive. She was one of them. We are doing the story of her life. What is also essential in her journey is that she was raped when she was seven. The incision of the man who raped her and the incision of the doctor who saved her, the ability to destroy an invasion and to save and heal an invasion is part of what it is about. I sit with her, we have worked a lot over the last two years.
Every question you are asking me is in this show. First of all, what is the meaning of life? Does it have meaning? What is compassion? What is faith (It’s a huge one)? What is God in all these questions that we do ask? We talk about it every time we work and today we just finished. Today it was about when she was under the anesthetic operated on and she had this vision of angels. She had spirits when she was five years old hounding her. That’s how the play starts- with the spirits hounding her. The question is did she make up the spirits out of a desire to survive it or are there spirits? So it is an interesting question.
So I have a spirit that talks to me sometimes but it only says one thing and it says it the same way every time. It goes, ‘Larry! Larry! Larry!’ And I say, ‘What is the subtext?’ and it says, ‘Wake up,’ I had it first when I was three years old. Every now and then I hear the voice. I don’t know where it comes from. Then I meet this actress/writer who has gone through this incredible pancreatic cancer survival and she talks to me about the spirits that have been with her since she was five. The spirits poke her. She works for car shows to make money. She was sitting next to one of her friends. She kept getting poked. She turned to this young man that was sitting next to her and told him that somebody was poking her. ‘Do you know anybody who laughs like this? ‘She did the laugh for this guy and he said that it was his mother. ‘Well, she keeps poking me and telling me to tell you to not give up your music.’ He started sobbing and she didn’t know he was even involved with music at all. He said, ‘Wow, I was going to give up today because I feel so lost in my career.’ She said, ‘Well your mother keeps poking me and telling me to tell you to not give it up.” You hear stories like that and you go oh my fucking god.
S P I R I T U A L D I M E N T I O N S
JW: I have to say. This is something that is coming up for me around the transpersonal realm or the subtle dimensions of various traditions, and people talk about it in a variety of ways. I feel like, for example in Shakespeare, Kristin Linklater said something to the effect of such a visceral and spiritual urgency in those texts. Many of us modern actors can’t achieve them simply because we don’t have either of those two tThings—either - either the visceral aliveness or the spiritually palpable reality of what that is. We are so disconnected in that way. I think the ghosts and the fairies, some of it can be seen as poetic fantasy, but some of it is a very real dimension that I feel like I’m able to make contact with more and more through certain experiences that open me up and that I’m not just making it up. It’s a very real experience that I can bring to the stage just in the way that a kitchen sink drama has a reality. There’s a real part of my world that is reflected in those plays. Does that make sense to you?
LM: Yeah. I had an experience when I went to London and saw Vanessa Redgrave do Ghosts. I watched her and it was as if there was a glow around her body, a golden aura. I kept on blinking my eyes. It didn’t go away. I thought it was a trick of light, but it wasn’t. I remember when I saw her in The Loves of Isadora; I had the same feeling watching her. There’s a thing that happens to actors when they have given their life over to the art. They become transparent. They lived so many lives through their body that in their brain, there is an awakening inside of them. It is a place where artists go. I remember seeing Lena Hornet, her one- woman show, The Lady and her Music. I saw it twenty-five times because I felt like I’m never going to see anyone do what she’s doing at sixty-five years old because she is carrying all the pain with her of being a black woman; the glamour of being a star. The year that her father died, her son died and her husband died. She was standing there with a white gown on Broadway singing “Stormy Weather” that made her famous. She sang it in the first act. That was her big song. She did the arrangement that was done in the movie of Stormy Weather. Somewhat of a band arrangement you might call it, the old- fashioned band arrangement of that era. Right at the end of the show, she did a song that she said had taken her a lot of years to grow into. She sang it again with a completely different arrangement; that was so full of pain and so full of love and loss; that I couldn’t believe what I was hearing and seeing.
There’s a great teacher named David Craig that has since passed who said, “When you sing a song correctly, it’s as if you wrote it.” You’re not performing it. You’re living it. That’s what she did in Stormy Weather. There is another song called “Yesterday When I was Young.” The last lyric is that “Now, there’s only me on stage all alone waiting to end my play. There are so many songs in me that I have not sung. I feel the bitter taste pierce upon my tongue. The time for me has now come to pay, to pay for yesterday when I was young.” Then she had a pacemaker put into her heart. She toured with that show. Ten years later she did a concert at Carnegie Hall at seventy-five. I took a plane to NY to be there. She did those songs again and I couldn’t believe she was closer to death. She lived into her 90s. Those kind of people that work their whole lives, there is something chemical that happens to their bodies and to their brains that becomes…it’s hard for me to describe, a spiritual high level of putting together the physical world with the metaphysical world. That’s what Shakespeare did, that’s what Williams did, what Strindberg did. Death of a Salesman and A Streetcar Named Desire are on Broadway right now. That can’t die. They are just too good. They are very metaphysical. They are very irrational plays in many ways. The spiritual part of life is in the great art.
LM: Yeah. I had an experience when I went to London and saw Vanessa Redgrave do Ghosts. I watched her and it was as if there was a glow around her body, a golden aura. I kept on blinking my eyes. It didn’t go away. I thought it was a trick of light, but it wasn’t. I remember when I saw her in The Loves of Isadora; I had the same feeling watching her. There’s a thing that happens to actors when they have given their life over to the art. They become transparent. They lived so many lives through their body that in their brain, there is an awakening inside of them. It is a place where artists go. I remember seeing Lena Hornet, her one- woman show, The Lady and her Music. I saw it twenty-five times because I felt like I’m never going to see anyone do what she’s doing at sixty-five years old because she is carrying all the pain with her of being a black woman; the glamour of being a star. The year that her father died, her son died and her husband died. She was standing there with a white gown on Broadway singing “Stormy Weather” that made her famous. She sang it in the first act. That was her big song. She did the arrangement that was done in the movie of Stormy Weather. Somewhat of a band arrangement you might call it, the old- fashioned band arrangement of that era. Right at the end of the show, she did a song that she said had taken her a lot of years to grow into. She sang it again with a completely different arrangement; that was so full of pain and so full of love and loss; that I couldn’t believe what I was hearing and seeing.
There’s a great teacher named David Craig that has since passed who said, “When you sing a song correctly, it’s as if you wrote it.” You’re not performing it. You’re living it. That’s what she did in Stormy Weather. There is another song called “Yesterday When I was Young.” The last lyric is that “Now, there’s only me on stage all alone waiting to end my play. There are so many songs in me that I have not sung. I feel the bitter taste pierce upon my tongue. The time for me has now come to pay, to pay for yesterday when I was young.” Then she had a pacemaker put into her heart. She toured with that show. Ten years later she did a concert at Carnegie Hall at seventy-five. I took a plane to NY to be there. She did those songs again and I couldn’t believe she was closer to death. She lived into her 90s. Those kind of people that work their whole lives, there is something chemical that happens to their bodies and to their brains that becomes…it’s hard for me to describe, a spiritual high level of putting together the physical world with the metaphysical world. That’s what Shakespeare did, that’s what Williams did, what Strindberg did. Death of a Salesman and A Streetcar Named Desire are on Broadway right now. That can’t die. They are just too good. They are very metaphysical. They are very irrational plays in many ways. The spiritual part of life is in the great art.
Larry Moss
E N E R G Y B O D Y
JW: No, yeah. I’ve been involved in the paratheatre, its ritual work, very intense. One of the results of that is the activation of what I would call the energy body. That’s one of the things we were talking about. Whether it’s the aura, there’s a million different ways people talk about the subtle energetic dimension or that slightly dense dimension of our universe; whether it be ghosts or spirits or the subtle energies that move through somebody. There are literal energetic maps in the human body. Each location, I think it was said that the actor would even be surprised to realize that the soul has substance, location, and organs. The energies actually have location in the physical organs. It’s interesting that certain locations in the body have certain qualities of archetypal energy. When someone is energetically lit up, they are almost like a space alien. There is something very different about their presence and their aura, especially as you say, over a thirty- year career, especially if they are doing it over and over again. I noticed in your classes and your books for instance, you often are keyed into the semantic stuff- into the body, but there’s also a psychological dimension and you draw people into that. Could you speak about where you started to learn that or how you work with that these days?
LM: Yeah. I was guided in a very interesting way in that I knew from when I was very young that I was going to be a part of the performing arts. Because I grew up around someone who was very mentally ill and there was a lot of turmoil and conflict in the family, I believed in psychotherapy from a very young age, because in the 50s when I was growing up, it was startinged to be talked about. All these psychoanalysts who were finding and exploring and treating people with mental illness, I knew that it existed. I knew that being traumatized as a kid; I was going to have to go to therapy. I knew it when I thirteen. So I did when I was twenty. I also whent to the theater a great deal. I was driven by something inside of me to continue to go to theater, to continue to go to film, listening to music. It was my way of survival. I knew that I had been injured psychologically and that I was in danger of not living; there were serious troubles. When I was fifteen, I got a job as an usher and watched the final tour The Visit. I remember it to this day; those performances are indelible to my mind. I remember their faces, their bodies, what they were wearing, and the set. I was drawn to it, I went to it, and I found my way to it any way that I could. It spoke to me of healing. It was like a hospital to heal.
Once I began my therapy I never stopped going to different therapists for periods of time. Between eight to ten years, I went four to five times a week. Because I was tormented in ways that were filled with depression and ignited with joy, so I thought it was because of abuse. That was true, but it was also partially chemical. That was something that I learned later- that I had a chemical imbalance. Once I had the right medication, I realized that peoples’ brains are different, just like peoples kidneys and hearts…It’s so stupid for people to think that the human brain is the same in everybody and the chemicals in the brain are in equal measure in everybody. I think this is why witches were burned and people who were eccentric were probably chemically imbalanced. People who were bipolar had too much of one chemical and not enough of the other. I find it remarkable that when I’m not medicated, I’m almost on the verge of tears every time. It’s chemical; it’s not psychological. You put together the psychological injuries and the chemical imbalance, you have a potential tragedy.
It’s very hard for a person to decide what is psychological and what is physical. One of my therapists said you will never be able to, no matter how much therapy you go to, be able to get rid of this depression because it’s not psychological, it’s physical. I fought her for several years. I can beat this I thought and she said, “You are arrogant because you can’t, nobody can.” Therefore, that journey has led me to observe in others their defense mechanisms, their physical tension, their lack of breathing, their rhythm of their breathing, where their bodies are frozen, whether it’s grief or anger or repression that has to be opened up. What I like to do with people is to get them to open, asking for things that they need through the body or expressing the anger or giving them a text where they can feel their emotions or their body connected to a text. There are certain people who believe the raison d’etre is to get emotional, but that is not acting. The therapy is an enormous part of my teaching because I had journeyed within myself and saw my destruction and my rage and my Hamlet, to be or not to be. So I saw it in everyone or aspects of it and in every character. It was the studying the great plays where you start to get a sense of the human experience through these great writers. You go, “We are the same now as we were then.” Man can’t understand their terror of death, and because man can’t accept their death, they create righteousness, and I see it in everyone. Oh yes, I’m Catholic, I’m Christian, I’m a Jew, I’m agnostic. Well, you believe in something, you believe in not believing instead of saying I don’t know. So I see it in everyone when I teach.
JW: There’s a great book James Fowler wrote, I forget the exact title. One of the concepts I got from that that I relate to is that we just choose different things to worship. I feel like it’s an innate part of us, there is a God idea somewhere in there. Thank you for the piece about the chemical stuff. I had a conversation with one of the founding members of South Coast Repertory earlier this week. He was talking about how at some point chemical help for his ADD made a huge difference in his work and in his life. One of the other interesting things is that you shared very openly about the therapy you have done.
LM: Yeah. I was guided in a very interesting way in that I knew from when I was very young that I was going to be a part of the performing arts. Because I grew up around someone who was very mentally ill and there was a lot of turmoil and conflict in the family, I believed in psychotherapy from a very young age, because in the 50s when I was growing up, it was startinged to be talked about. All these psychoanalysts who were finding and exploring and treating people with mental illness, I knew that it existed. I knew that being traumatized as a kid; I was going to have to go to therapy. I knew it when I thirteen. So I did when I was twenty. I also whent to the theater a great deal. I was driven by something inside of me to continue to go to theater, to continue to go to film, listening to music. It was my way of survival. I knew that I had been injured psychologically and that I was in danger of not living; there were serious troubles. When I was fifteen, I got a job as an usher and watched the final tour The Visit. I remember it to this day; those performances are indelible to my mind. I remember their faces, their bodies, what they were wearing, and the set. I was drawn to it, I went to it, and I found my way to it any way that I could. It spoke to me of healing. It was like a hospital to heal.
Once I began my therapy I never stopped going to different therapists for periods of time. Between eight to ten years, I went four to five times a week. Because I was tormented in ways that were filled with depression and ignited with joy, so I thought it was because of abuse. That was true, but it was also partially chemical. That was something that I learned later- that I had a chemical imbalance. Once I had the right medication, I realized that peoples’ brains are different, just like peoples kidneys and hearts…It’s so stupid for people to think that the human brain is the same in everybody and the chemicals in the brain are in equal measure in everybody. I think this is why witches were burned and people who were eccentric were probably chemically imbalanced. People who were bipolar had too much of one chemical and not enough of the other. I find it remarkable that when I’m not medicated, I’m almost on the verge of tears every time. It’s chemical; it’s not psychological. You put together the psychological injuries and the chemical imbalance, you have a potential tragedy.
It’s very hard for a person to decide what is psychological and what is physical. One of my therapists said you will never be able to, no matter how much therapy you go to, be able to get rid of this depression because it’s not psychological, it’s physical. I fought her for several years. I can beat this I thought and she said, “You are arrogant because you can’t, nobody can.” Therefore, that journey has led me to observe in others their defense mechanisms, their physical tension, their lack of breathing, their rhythm of their breathing, where their bodies are frozen, whether it’s grief or anger or repression that has to be opened up. What I like to do with people is to get them to open, asking for things that they need through the body or expressing the anger or giving them a text where they can feel their emotions or their body connected to a text. There are certain people who believe the raison d’etre is to get emotional, but that is not acting. The therapy is an enormous part of my teaching because I had journeyed within myself and saw my destruction and my rage and my Hamlet, to be or not to be. So I saw it in everyone or aspects of it and in every character. It was the studying the great plays where you start to get a sense of the human experience through these great writers. You go, “We are the same now as we were then.” Man can’t understand their terror of death, and because man can’t accept their death, they create righteousness, and I see it in everyone. Oh yes, I’m Catholic, I’m Christian, I’m a Jew, I’m agnostic. Well, you believe in something, you believe in not believing instead of saying I don’t know. So I see it in everyone when I teach.
JW: There’s a great book James Fowler wrote, I forget the exact title. One of the concepts I got from that that I relate to is that we just choose different things to worship. I feel like it’s an innate part of us, there is a God idea somewhere in there. Thank you for the piece about the chemical stuff. I had a conversation with one of the founding members of South Coast Repertory earlier this week. He was talking about how at some point chemical help for his ADD made a huge difference in his work and in his life. One of the other interesting things is that you shared very openly about the therapy you have done.
A D D I C T I O N A N D S P I R I T U A L R E C O V E R Y
JW: On a private level, I came from an alcoholic home and I’ve had to deal with some addiction issues and with myself. The language of recovery and the experience has opened to me. I often hear what sounds like recovery language from other places and that often excites me because there is something common in the experience regardless. It makes me feel less special or alone there in the corner, you know what I mean?
LM: So much so. When you have an addictive personality, as one of my shrinks said, self- destruction is fun, but the consequence is deadly. The brain as I really understand now…I was flirting with smoking for a while and I liked it. I really was looking forward to that cigarette in the morning, etc. I would say I only smoke three or four a day. Then it’s five and six and you are addicted. And then I said I’m not doing this. Then I got through it. I took a cigarette six months later and I hated it. I was really addicted to the nicotine. It was a high, like being a drug addict. My brain is no longer craving that drug, and now I don’t even like it. That was another lesson to me that whatever the addiction is was because you are hiding from something else and will not deal with it. Uta Hagen said a great thing in class once working on Romeo and Juliet. She said innocence is the inability to understand consequence. I think addicts don’t really get it. They don’t realize they are going to die. Some people choose death. There is a documentary coming out on my work. One of the things I say in it is, “I like reality, even when it’s a bitter pill. It served me better than fantasy.”
JW: A dear friend of mine said to me, “James, reality is your friend”. That was not my experience at the time, but I’m grateful because I think that is quite true.
LM: It is true. Lily Tomlin said of her character in the Bag Lady, ‘Reality is a collective hunch.’ It’s the most hilarious line, but there is a reality. I remember my mother saying at a Thanksgiving dinner where there was a bowl of fruit on the table, that is was not really an apple. ‘It’s not really if you break it down. It’s just energy.’
JW: Was she Buddhist?
LM: She dabbled in Eastern. She was very into Buddhism and Hinduism. She was trying to find out why she was crazy. There is such a thing as an apple. There is such a thing if you drink too much, you are going to be an alcoholic and you are going to die or get a disease. That’s reality. If you are unkind to people, you are going to do damage and you are going to get damage back. There are certain realities.
JW: It’s such a baffling and heart- breaking universe. It’s not un-human, it’s very human… so many of us are going through a variation on the theme.
LM: I like to act out. I just don’t do it very much because I will realize I’m going to die and I’d rather live. Also, destruction is boring and construction is always a surprise. If you are a person of any kind of thought or feeling or imagination, you are going to go for the construction. It’s more interesting.
JW: In Dante’s Inferno, one of the rings of Hell, there are these people that are confused and baffled by their own experience. It can be like that. There is such a lack of clarity when people are lost. The spiritual metaphor of being lost and found makes sense to me at this point. It’s quite baffling. I’ve had some experiences in my own life of how baffling it can be to have a lot of access to spiritual wisdom and information and have insanity in the same breath, like you were talking about with the apple.
LM: Absolutely, because you don’t stay grounded in the finite, which is where you have to live. In the finite world, there is the infinite. You are living in the finite and that becomes reality. It will almost always have the last say. If you speed in a car, there’s much more of a chance of crashing… cause and effect: innocence and consequence. I’m sure you have done this too and I have as well. You test it like children test their parents.
JW: How much am I able to get away with?
LM: As much as you can, that’s the answer. You may be able to get away with a lot.
JW: The whole trap is getting away with anything. The whole getting away with is for me a faulty action to be playing as a human being. I have been fascinated in this process discovering the role between personal how do I live my life…the artistic cushion becoming like the yoga or mediation mat Everything I come up against in my art speaks to who I am being in my life. In some ways the obsession with my own work, although it’s been self-destructive at times, has also led to say that if it leads me to progress in this area, I have to progress as a person. There’s no two ways about it.
LM: Stella Adler used to say, ‘You have to be somebody to be an actor. The other thing is, the audience doesn’t come to see you, they come to see themselves. It reminds me of etc etc. That’s what theater does. It makes people talk about their life.
JW: There’s a wonderful book (that I will send you as a thank you for your time) called the Spirituality of Imperfection. It comes from a guy who has come from recovery but he’s gone beyond that in the writing of the book. He’s really talking about how storytelling is this spirituality of imperfection. It’s a beautiful book.
LM: I would love to read it. I found in the story exercise I mentioned last time, it was essentially telling stories to each other.
JW: This also relates to the quote you mentioned earlier by Adler. I find that more and more for myself and other people I come across, the more I am connected to my own story, it’s almost like a precursor to telling someone else’s story. It was so difficult for me to authentically tell other peoples stories until I had my own.
LM: It’s different for different people. Olivier talked about ‘I don’t want to know anything about my life. I just want to find the character and live their life.’ That great story where he did Othello and that night everyone came from the squawk box because they had heard a performance Olivier had never given before. Everyone heard it and watched from the wings. After he finished it, the audience went bonkers and he wouldn’t come out from his dressing room until everyone left. The stage manager said,’ Sir Laurence, we have to close the theater.’ When he opened the door was told he was magnificent that night. He said he knew but he didn’t know how he did it or if he could ever do that again.
JW: These days, there can be successful acting but it is not “great” in the way Olivier was great that night.
LM: Yes, Uta Hagen said, or I think she said, she did a thousand performances of Martha in Virginia Wolf. ‘I did three that I loved but I thought I hid everything.’ I went to the theater last week to see Tribes and some other shows. Eight times a week! If you think you are going to hit this spiritual high, you are going to do what happened to a lot of actors in the 50s, they finished a show and went to the bar. That’s neurotic. I played my actions, I did my physicality, I did everything I could to tell that story and that was my job. There was an actress that I had directed in a show. She apologized and when I asked her why she said she wasn’t able to be emotional tonight. There are about ten people in the audience who can’t get out of their chairs so I guess she did something right. It’s not about how much water comes out of your eyes.
JW: The real greatness in a lot of ways isn’t my own. I just try to do my part and let the muses come and go as they may to a certain degree. How would you define great acting at this point in your life?
LM: So much so. When you have an addictive personality, as one of my shrinks said, self- destruction is fun, but the consequence is deadly. The brain as I really understand now…I was flirting with smoking for a while and I liked it. I really was looking forward to that cigarette in the morning, etc. I would say I only smoke three or four a day. Then it’s five and six and you are addicted. And then I said I’m not doing this. Then I got through it. I took a cigarette six months later and I hated it. I was really addicted to the nicotine. It was a high, like being a drug addict. My brain is no longer craving that drug, and now I don’t even like it. That was another lesson to me that whatever the addiction is was because you are hiding from something else and will not deal with it. Uta Hagen said a great thing in class once working on Romeo and Juliet. She said innocence is the inability to understand consequence. I think addicts don’t really get it. They don’t realize they are going to die. Some people choose death. There is a documentary coming out on my work. One of the things I say in it is, “I like reality, even when it’s a bitter pill. It served me better than fantasy.”
JW: A dear friend of mine said to me, “James, reality is your friend”. That was not my experience at the time, but I’m grateful because I think that is quite true.
LM: It is true. Lily Tomlin said of her character in the Bag Lady, ‘Reality is a collective hunch.’ It’s the most hilarious line, but there is a reality. I remember my mother saying at a Thanksgiving dinner where there was a bowl of fruit on the table, that is was not really an apple. ‘It’s not really if you break it down. It’s just energy.’
JW: Was she Buddhist?
LM: She dabbled in Eastern. She was very into Buddhism and Hinduism. She was trying to find out why she was crazy. There is such a thing as an apple. There is such a thing if you drink too much, you are going to be an alcoholic and you are going to die or get a disease. That’s reality. If you are unkind to people, you are going to do damage and you are going to get damage back. There are certain realities.
JW: It’s such a baffling and heart- breaking universe. It’s not un-human, it’s very human… so many of us are going through a variation on the theme.
LM: I like to act out. I just don’t do it very much because I will realize I’m going to die and I’d rather live. Also, destruction is boring and construction is always a surprise. If you are a person of any kind of thought or feeling or imagination, you are going to go for the construction. It’s more interesting.
JW: In Dante’s Inferno, one of the rings of Hell, there are these people that are confused and baffled by their own experience. It can be like that. There is such a lack of clarity when people are lost. The spiritual metaphor of being lost and found makes sense to me at this point. It’s quite baffling. I’ve had some experiences in my own life of how baffling it can be to have a lot of access to spiritual wisdom and information and have insanity in the same breath, like you were talking about with the apple.
LM: Absolutely, because you don’t stay grounded in the finite, which is where you have to live. In the finite world, there is the infinite. You are living in the finite and that becomes reality. It will almost always have the last say. If you speed in a car, there’s much more of a chance of crashing… cause and effect: innocence and consequence. I’m sure you have done this too and I have as well. You test it like children test their parents.
JW: How much am I able to get away with?
LM: As much as you can, that’s the answer. You may be able to get away with a lot.
JW: The whole trap is getting away with anything. The whole getting away with is for me a faulty action to be playing as a human being. I have been fascinated in this process discovering the role between personal how do I live my life…the artistic cushion becoming like the yoga or mediation mat Everything I come up against in my art speaks to who I am being in my life. In some ways the obsession with my own work, although it’s been self-destructive at times, has also led to say that if it leads me to progress in this area, I have to progress as a person. There’s no two ways about it.
LM: Stella Adler used to say, ‘You have to be somebody to be an actor. The other thing is, the audience doesn’t come to see you, they come to see themselves. It reminds me of etc etc. That’s what theater does. It makes people talk about their life.
JW: There’s a wonderful book (that I will send you as a thank you for your time) called the Spirituality of Imperfection. It comes from a guy who has come from recovery but he’s gone beyond that in the writing of the book. He’s really talking about how storytelling is this spirituality of imperfection. It’s a beautiful book.
LM: I would love to read it. I found in the story exercise I mentioned last time, it was essentially telling stories to each other.
JW: This also relates to the quote you mentioned earlier by Adler. I find that more and more for myself and other people I come across, the more I am connected to my own story, it’s almost like a precursor to telling someone else’s story. It was so difficult for me to authentically tell other peoples stories until I had my own.
LM: It’s different for different people. Olivier talked about ‘I don’t want to know anything about my life. I just want to find the character and live their life.’ That great story where he did Othello and that night everyone came from the squawk box because they had heard a performance Olivier had never given before. Everyone heard it and watched from the wings. After he finished it, the audience went bonkers and he wouldn’t come out from his dressing room until everyone left. The stage manager said,’ Sir Laurence, we have to close the theater.’ When he opened the door was told he was magnificent that night. He said he knew but he didn’t know how he did it or if he could ever do that again.
JW: These days, there can be successful acting but it is not “great” in the way Olivier was great that night.
LM: Yes, Uta Hagen said, or I think she said, she did a thousand performances of Martha in Virginia Wolf. ‘I did three that I loved but I thought I hid everything.’ I went to the theater last week to see Tribes and some other shows. Eight times a week! If you think you are going to hit this spiritual high, you are going to do what happened to a lot of actors in the 50s, they finished a show and went to the bar. That’s neurotic. I played my actions, I did my physicality, I did everything I could to tell that story and that was my job. There was an actress that I had directed in a show. She apologized and when I asked her why she said she wasn’t able to be emotional tonight. There are about ten people in the audience who can’t get out of their chairs so I guess she did something right. It’s not about how much water comes out of your eyes.
JW: The real greatness in a lot of ways isn’t my own. I just try to do my part and let the muses come and go as they may to a certain degree. How would you define great acting at this point in your life?
G R E A T N E S S
LM: When I think of the word great, I shudder because it’s so subjective. My great experiences as an audience has been when I have forgotten I was in a theater or film and I was blasted into the lives of the characters I was watching. There’s a type of non-acting- meaning it’s experiential in the now of now as if you are making it up because you are not thinking ahead or behind, you’re exploring. I talk a lot about this in the documentary about the now of now without knowing the answers. It’s in the not knowing that makes for great acting. For example, you can say ‘the pasta smells delicious’ or you can give it a specific smell that will imbue the line with a life. I saw a film of a ballerina that was fifty-four who did Romeo and Juliet dancing as Juliet. She had a lined face but her eyes were fourteen. Her imagination into the realm of that story and into the innocence, passion, exploration, and curiosity of Juliet was all there. I’ve seen it in dancers, singers, and actors. I think, except for the few people who have it when they are very young like James Dean and Brando; that it is a gift from the gods, and unfortunately both those men destructed. I always think if you aren’t of service to the playwright, go fuck yourself. You’re going to crash and burn, and get bored with yourself. There’s something more profound in being of service. We are living in an age where people are so desperate for self-acknowledgement; because they don’t feel a relationship to their own value. Being of service to others provides meaning.
JW: Being of service to something larger than ourselves and watching out for that pitfall of self-absorption. I think that’s the core thing that cuts us off.
LM: It does, it just sours and poisons itself into non-existence.
JW: Being of service to something larger than ourselves and watching out for that pitfall of self-absorption. I think that’s the core thing that cuts us off.
LM: It does, it just sours and poisons itself into non-existence.