THE PASSION OF QUINTERO

Thomas Mann had a curt dismissal for someone who “thought he could pluck a leaf from the tree of art without paying for it with his life.” No one understands in his bones the meaning of that line more than Jose Quintero.

Quintero has paid, over and over again, for being one of the greatest directors this country has known, by the way he uses the torment and complications of his productions on himself before he lays them out for his actors. His friend and colleague in the theater, Jason Robards, said, “Every production he does damn near kills him.” Even his recent comments surrounding the powerful re-staging of “The Iceman Cometh,” which closed at the Doolittle here after successful runs in Washington D.C. and New York, suggest someone rousing himself from a moribund state.

“Doing ‘Iceman’ again was one of the most frightening experiences of my life,” he said. “The plunging into that play was almost more than I could bear. I’d made up my mind I wouldn’t direct anymore.The tearing down of the theaters in New York had a punishing effect on me. It was only two theaters, but their destruction meant that New York was dead, dying. Its ghosts were escaping, like something out of Goya.

“Those places were holy temples. In the Morosco, ‘Our Town’ opened. The whole world heard. ‘A Moon For the Misbegotten,’ ‘A Streetcar Named Desire,’ ‘Death of a Salesman’ opened there. To see that the best works of the American repertory have not been respected by the people in the American theater meant the sense of spirituality, ritual, is going.

“The deeper the ritual, the deeper the communication. It’s difficult to articulate. I ran away. My mother died in Panama. I said I wanted to go back to my beginnings. People think I’m looking for TV, but I’m a man of the theater. I’m passionately in love with the theater.”

Every now and then Quintero will say “I’m a theatrical man” by way of explanation when every other attempt at self-revelation fails. He may even tilt his chin upward slightly and trail one of his slender arms, Camille-like, in a manner reminiscent of those old-time movie queens he saw as a boy in Panama City. But, with him, and given the penchant of Latins for drama, the manner doesn’t seem an affectation.

“I have always been aware of life happening in the present sense,” he said. “I go back and I imagine forward, but I always live in the present.”

So does the theater, and that may be one of the many reasons why the bloodlines of Quintero and American drama at its height have been so deeply entangled. His recent award from the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle is only the latest of a cluster that includes two Tonys, two Drama Desk Awards, an Obie, an Outer Circle Award, an Emmy and the Eugene O’Neill Gold Medal gathered over a 35-year international career--and that’s not all of them (his Order of Vasco Nunez de Balboa should no doubt expedite matters at Panamanian Customs).

Quintero was one of the principal figures in the last great chapter of American theater, the early to late-’50s in New York, when the young actors at his Circle In The Square (which he co-founded with Theodore Mann) included Jason Robards, Geraldine Page, George C. Scott and Colleen Dewhurst. The other seminal group was the Actors Studio which, with its more lustrous (at the time) roster of stars and heavy Method theorizing, did only three commercial productions outside of “The Three Sisters” and “Strange Interlude”--which Quintero directed.

(“The Actors Studio could’ve been our national theater,” Quintero says, in retrospect. “They could’ve called in any actor in America. But it was mismanaged. Lee Strasberg was fighting with Elia Kazan. They didn’t know it, but they lost their whole magnificent opportunity because they couldn’t straight-jacket their egos”).

Quintero has never taken a course in directing. Before he started out, he was such a miserable academic failure that a chemistry professor at Los Angeles City College offered him a passing grade with the proviso that he never take a science course again (Quintero happily accepted the proposition). If he wants to, which is almost never, he can traffic in the lingo of Sense Memory and other technical specifics of acting theory. But he’s not a theoretician. He doesn’t come to early rehearsal with a worked out schematic in mind. The success or failure of a Quintero production ultimately depends on how much he’s been able to absord the play into his own psychological makeup.

Robards, whose stature as one of our two or three top American actors has been gained considerably by working with Quintero, describes his approach:

“Jose’ll be the first to admit that 80% of successful production is casting. He spends a lot of time and energy there, and it gives everyone a leg up. He’s constantly reading the play. If we run into a problem, he’ll say, ‘Let’s see what the old man has to say’ (except for a production of ‘Macbeth,’ all my work with Jose has been in O’Neill). When he gets it on his feet, he goes slowly, second by second. He doesn’t give a lot of specific directions--neither does O’Neill, who gives attitudes instead of stage directions. We can be into previews and still not be blocked. He’ll tell you, ‘I want a clean play.’

“What struck me about Jose the first time I met him in the Village was that he seemed to have such a knowledge of the human condition,” says Colleen Dewhurst, who has worked with him in several productions, most notably “A Moon For the Misbegotten.” “When he approaches a play, he lets you think he’s following your discoveries, when in fact he’s way ahead of you. He’s completely non-destructive in a profession that can be very destructive. He takes a lot from his actors; from the first reading his presence allows you to enter dangerous areas. You trust him not to let you go beyond the play or where you should go. He enters the process of discovery with you, unlike some directors, who feel compelled to tell you at the first reading what the play is about.

“He creates an aura or feeling and at the right moment he’ll say ‘Ah!’ and the thing is fixed. He knows you don’t express sadness by crying, or love by being romantic, and that you can literally punch someone while loving him. He’s a man of passion, which we’re missing in life now, and he understands the fragile ego of the actor. I’d trust him with my life.”

Quintero understands the actor because he’s principally an actor himself, though he’s never performed onstage. He came to the theater before he knew what theater was; for him, the separation between real life and its human behavioral depiction on a stage is virtually nonexistent, especially since theatrical expression for Quintero--as it was with O’Neill--is rooted in religious impulse and memory.

For example, he tells this story about his boyhood:

“I was put into a boarding school when I was seven. It was horrifying. Later I could love Dickens, though he was so far away from me, for what he knew about that stone, that loneliness. It was a Catholic place; its myth and ritual began to literally possess me. It was so easy to give life to the Virgin.

“When everyone was out playing soccer, I’d light a candle to the Virgin, tell her about my sorrow. One time, to my chagrin, I heard my schoolmate’s footsteps. I had been caught in the act of delirious love. When one loves, pain will come, or else love can’t come. I had to experience jealousy. They knelt before her. I saw her moving and smiling. When they left, I came back and said, ‘I’m going to kill you!’ I blew out the candles, I screamed and fainted, and this high fever came. I had killed my mother by banishing her to the shadows. It took a long time to pass the chapel again and see her, but we made up.

“Love takes that complex of emotions. No one has been in love that love has not caused him pain. That had a lot to do with theater: It all happened in the imagination, understanding through the trappings of the candles, that she was a queen, a mother. It began my understanding of always having the gods present. I say ‘gods’ because I’m no longer a Roman Catholic; I guess I’m a Catholic--they equipped me for what I was to do later on. The ritual of death and resurrection led me to the understanding of priests as actors. You had the costumes. You got the sense of color as conveying meaning, death and majesty--the purples and blues: All of that they taught me.

“Also, the Mass could not happen without an audience that totally believed the play. They bowed their heads. Everyone totally believed.”

Another aspect of Quintero as actor, as priestly convincer, is his appearance. At 62, he’s held on to the good looks of what was once typified as the Latin-American playboy, the kind of lean, preternaturally sun-tanned face you saw smiling in the flash of a night club photograph, the Rubirosa caught in mid-sentence catching the camera back. He’s tall and boyishly slender--he looks like someone who passed from pre-adolescence to middle age without the intervening years of a young man’s filling out, and his arms, wrists amd hands are poetically slim (he uses them eloquently).

His facial features are neatly balanced; not too sensual, not too meager. He has a bright, handsome smile. His eyes are arresting. They’re dark enough to look as though filled up completely by black pupils that simultaneously drink you in and generate what faintly demonic passion he’s feeling at the moment. The voice, which is rough to the point of harshness, is heavily accented with Spanish vehemence. If you didn’t know him, and despite his cordial manners, you’d still sense that this was not someone to be slighted.

Quintero often uses the word “destiny,” at one point saying, “Once you learn your destiny, you rebel.” How much our fate is set in motion from a point far beyond our comprehension, not to mention our control, is illustrated here by the interest of a priest in a young fisherman on the Pacific island of Taboga. The fisherman was Quintero’s grandfather. The priest convinced some members of the local aristocracy to stake the boy to a formal education.

“At that time we had a war between the liberals and the conservatives,” Quintero said. “He was the only one on the island who could read or write, so they gave him a commission. That began a career which ended when he became President of the Supreme Court. He became one of the deepest influences in my life. It destroyed all his sons.”

When one of the sons, a dashing politician, married a Convent-bred girl, their lives as Quintero’s parents took on an extraordinary closeness to that of the haunted Tyrones in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” and Eugene O’Neill’s life as well. In the play, James Tyrone (O’Neill’s father, thinly disguised) is a once-famous matinee idol whose talent dried up after he dedicate himself to the empty commercialism of playing “The Count of Monte Cristo” for too many years. Mary Tyrone first saw him when she was living in a convent. Quintero describes his parents:

“He was a sensual man, very appealing. She was dazzled by him. He eventually became Minister of , but I think the responsibility, and trying to live up to his father, became too great. He wanted to run away. Countries like Panama are so small. In America, a man can rise and accept his own freedom as though he created his state. Not in Panama. To find oneself a Minister yet not allowed into the aristocracy had to have an enormous affect on him, particularly since my mother, by virtue of being Spanish and having had a tutor with social prestige, was immediately accepted. It’s very hard to supercede the class you believe in; an enormous fear follows.

“My father ran way with a 17-year-old girl. When he sent my mother and me to Los Angeles so that I could go to college, it was really so that he could be with her. He resigned and went to live with the workers. She left him. She had wanted him to get a divorce. My mother was very understanding.” But also, of course, very Catholic.

“It wasn’t until so many years later, when I did ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night,’ that I began to understand what had been hidden behind the doors of my life. The sexual guilt.” Quintero shook his head incredulously. “It’s horrifying to see defeat in a parent, to see your father, who once wanted you to treat him like a god, run and hide and tremble and sweat. I try to understand him only to understand myself. You have to be careful not to play out that role again.”

“There was love in the Tyrones. Because of that play I was able to forgive my own dead, and tap into my own loneliness and pain. It shows how ultimately you wind up with a love that binds and a sense of loss that binds, as well as the guilt and failure. It makes you breathe with them. That’s what great theater does--it gives you a catharsis.”

“The Iceman Cometh” is also a play whose resonances reach more deeply into Quintero than in most other directors. It was a play that had been considered a failure before he revived it in 1956, and began his battle with the ghosts of O’Neill (it was on the strength of the revival that O’Neill’s widow Carlotta allowed ‘Long Day’s Journey’ to be produced by the Circle in the Square). Quintero absorbed somewhat the lives that holed up in Harry Hope’s saloon. He began drinking.

Quintero’s bio, which lists two or more productions a year from 1951 through 1984, shows a curious gap between 1971 and 1973. That was the period when he hit bottom.

His experience with putting together Mart Crowley’s “Remote Asylum” at the Ahmanson in 1970 accelerated the skid.

“The play wasn’t coming together,” Quintero recalled. “Mart, whom I have an affection for, had an enormous writing block. He couldn’t write another scene. I begged Elliot Martin, who was producing, to get someone else. I was going through so much. I hated facing anyone, going to rehearsals. The thought that you’re not good enough occurs whenever you do a play. I couldn’t go on feeling the way I was feeling, but I couldn’t stop drinking because the pain would be unbearable.

“I wanted out of everything. The play brought my chaos into focus. There was no form you could hang on to. A play’s form puts a corset on your life. But Mart’s play was faulty in structure, faulty in character. I began to hate it. I was living a lie, trying to explain to actors what Mart and I had not resolved. I’m not blaming him. ‘Boys in the Band’ and ‘Breeze in the Gulf’ are lovely plays. He was going through a deeper pain than I was.

“Elliot said ‘Stay and hack it. You’ll get the percentages.’ It was a horrendous solution. Mart understood. I just took a plane to New York.

“You never get over your inhibitions. The thing that made you drink is always there. If I could function, I’d go back to drinking. But I can’t. My father could drink and function. So could Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullman”--Quintero has directed both. “I’d see them drink aqua vite all night and come to work the next day perfectly all right. But liquor, as soon as it touches my body, does something chemically to me. I get out of control. All I want to do is sit immobile and drink from morning til night.

“Once, after directing a disastrous Broadway musical called ‘The Pousse Cafe’--the only time I’ve ever taken a job for money--I left after opening night and walked all the way from 46th St. to the Bowery, fell, and slept in the street like a bum. In a tuxedo, which made it more ludicrous.

“For a while I had no money. I started to make candles commercially, and sell them. We lived in a dark apartment that looked onto a brick wall” (“We”includes Quintero’s companion of 27 years, Nick Tsacrios). “Everything was closing in. I had alienated everyone. One day Nick left a pice of paper on the table with the name of a man who treats disorders. I made an appointment to begin treatment. For a while I had never felt so sick in my life. But I haven’t had a drink since.”

Quintero was sitting at his dining room table. It was midafternoon. As he recalled the memory his face began to tremble as though something were trying to burst through his skin, but he kept hold of himself. He stared out the window. The light coming in had the same icy whiteness as the light we saw pouring into Harry Hope’s place at the Doolittle. It drained his face of color.

Talent, even genius, are not by themselves enough to generate the impact, the palpable sense of contact with the mystery of being alive and being part of an endlessly complicated conjugation of family life, that comes up in a Quintero production when it’s focussed and felt all the way through. It takes history and temperament as well. Quintero’s family history lends him acute sympathy with the sensibility of Eugene O’Neill; and his emotional temperament, the lighter, more feminine regard of lyricism and sensuality, creates an inner bond with Tennessee Williams.

It was Williams who confirmed Quintero’s decision to go into the theater, after Quintero as a young man saw “The Glass Menagerie” starring Laurette Taylor in Chicago. “Afterwards, I walked all night long. I knew then something had made me feel whole. Here was someone who could understand my pain, my loneliness, and put it into such beautiful words. It was the first time in my life I stopped feeling alone, even though it was going to be a lonesome journey.”

Quintero is planning a summer vacation, and some teaching. Beyond that, there’s nothing specific, though Gordon Davidson reports that the Taper would like to use Quintero heavily for the 1988 O’Neill Centennial (“Jose’s important to us, no matter what he does,” says Davidson. “I call him in to look at what we’re doing. He’s our unofficial artistic eye”).

In the meantime, he’s lying low, filling up. O’Neill once wrote, “We spend our outer lives hounded by the masks of others and our inner lives haunted by the masks of the self.” Lucky for us that that, like O’Neill, Quintero has found in the theater a way to express those complex, perilous confrontations. Lucky too that his revolt against his sense of destiny hasn’t been complete, and that we’ve been able to see it so richly played out.