KINESTHETICS BY Laurence Luckinbill

Fourteen months in A Man for All Seasons taught me what a “classic” is.  It is a situation, characters and words that never grow stale or old or dry of nuance and meaning.  Scenes that you can never quite master, or feel you have given the exact right interpretation, or been fully present for.  Noel Willman’s direction was unfailing – crisp, intelligent, unsentimental – ideas first, emotions follow.  Be clear.  Robert Bolt’s script is a unique combination of the reality of the spirit at work in human affairs (through Thomas More, a true hero, as written) and the depiction of flawed, venal, cruel, confused, loving, furious, all-too-human humans reacting to the incarnation of spirit – Sir Thomas.  It’s not the gospel of Jesus Christ.  It is the story of one of his true apostles.

After a four-day train journey from New York to California, we opened in the huge outdoor Greek theater in the woods of Griffith Park in the Hollywood Hills.  Our set was the Broadway set by Motley, with a great stairway curving down from stage left and ending center stage.  My first entrance was down that stair and into Sir Thomas’ home.  Will Roper (me) is in high dudgeon (his usual driving gear) and wishes to have a dispute with his father-in-law.  I launched myself out and down the stairs, and I ran into a wall of fog so dense and bad tasting that it felt like a wet, dirty horse blanket had been thrown onto my face where it stuck.  I kept going down the steps from sheer inertia, but I had naturally lost momentum.  I remember glancing down at the stair, which was glistening with condensation – a flash of thought – “Don’t slip” – and I was out of the play and into a present danger.  Fog?  In Hollywood?  Nobody ever mentioned that.  Los Angeles was sun and oranges – San Francisco was cold, dense, impenetrable fog.  I knew that from going to work at 5:45 a.m. at the cannery, hearing fog horns in the Bay – 

When we got to L.A. the day before, I had rented a car and found the beaches where I spent all day exploring and swimming in the frozen Pacific. 

So, on the day of the opening, I had a painful sunburn (now at 84, I hear the dermatologist’s merry laugh as he freezes incipient skin cancers on my almost bare scalp and forearms – “Oh yes,” he chuckles, “these have been germinating since your first exposure to the sun.”)  

So, I came out on the top of the curving stair and ran down toward William Roderick, the British actor who played Sir Thomas More.  I yelled my first line as I ran – “Sir Thomas…” and hit the fog that had arisen in the Hollywood Hills at sundown.  I couldn’t see; I went on faith as I clattered down.  “Sir Thomas,” I yelled again, my mind occupied with not being able to see the room below. I got to the bottom and stopped short.  Sir Thomas was moving toward me in anticipation of the usual argument with his zealous but loving and earnest son-in-law.

I said nothing.  I had gone completely up.  I did not know who I was or where.  I vaguely remember Bill looking at me curiously – as he said his line and also mine, responding to my yell and telling me what I was supposed to say and giving me his quiet answer.  I said nothing, frozen to the bottom step, center stage, full light now, in front of almost Angelenos waiting for this new person to talk – a vast and dim audience sitting far into the darkness, and among them, no doubt, in my now blanked out consciousness, hundreds of movie agents, directors and producers now striking me off their “Good Actor, Must-See” lists.

The panic got worse.  Bill said another blended line of our scene.  I dimly recognized my own line as he said it, but I was like someone struck dumb, but unfortunately, not deaf or blind.  All I knew was I was a complete ass, a total failure at everything I prided myself I had learned to do.

Now, Bill moved across the stage in front of me, going stage right.  It was totally unexpected!  What?  No!  He’s supposed to move downstage, and I’m supposed to follow him.  And with that conscious thought, I returned to the present – to that all-important Now of the play.  The Be Here Now that is the essence of acting – being in the scene and only in the scene – in the four walls of Thomas More’s house in London – where I now saw not Bill Roderick, a lovely, kind man, but the Lord Chancellor of Henry VIII’s court, my father-in-law, Sir Thomas More, and I had a bone to pick with him!  And my next lines came out in a burst, and I moved downstage to where we ought to be.  Sir Thomas followed, smiling his dry smile and we were all right again.  

The scene had been saved by him, and I took off into Roper’s story, my story, with a lurch of renewed first-time-I’ve-ever-said-these-words fury, and perfectly in character. There was no Larry with a burning skin under my woolen tunic, no fog, no 12,000 eyes and ears watching and listening, no Hollywood, no movies.  

There was only this Thameside terror of a king who defied all the rules of the religious establishment and the need for opposition to wrong, and my sense of righteousness, which had to be “Right” itself.

What a splendid lesson.  Afterwards, when I profusely apologized and thanked him for saving me – Bill said simply, “Kinesthetics.  We learn our parts by our physical positions – by the blocking of the movements in a scene – willy-nilly, y’see?  And if you “dry” (the British term for what we call “going up”), the antidote is, simply change the blocking and Poof! – the words and thoughts return.  They were never gone, y’see, but in the exigencies of a long run, one’s brain gets stuck.  It’s simple and perfectly all right.  It was a bloody fog, wasn’t it?”

I have been grateful ever since that night to William Roderick.

The tour company was chock-full with the essence of the New York theater of a certain genre – the classically trained types who spoke like Brits on and offstage.  There were the knitters, the crocheters, the chess players, the solitaire players, and the crew who played poker.  There was Bruce Gordon, an accomplished American actor who looked like and played tough guys.  He was famously Frank Nitti on television in The Untouchables, but now in the England of the 16^th century, he was Thomas Cromwell.  And there was brusque Albert Dekker, a famous Hollywood movie heavy, who left the tour every free day to fly somewhere and get his “shots,” about which in the company there was lots of speculation.  He told me they were regeneration shots from Switzerland.  He became my friend.  I helped him move from the small Hastings-on-Hudson house where he had lived alone after his son’s death.  As much as anyone could be a friend with Albert, I was.  In the company, there were rivalries and rogues and petty quarrels.  I took no part in them.

All came to a full stop on November 22, 1963.  We were in Indianapolis, about to open (or had just opened).  I was awakened from an afternoon nap by the stage manager.  He said there would be no performance that night.  President John Kennedy had just been shot by an unknown assailant and had died in Dallas.  How the tour and the theater itself survived after that tsunami, I don’t know – but it did…

Watch our interview with Laurence Luckinbill!