PLAYWRIGHT, DIRECTOR: THE LONG-RUNNING DUO

The actors, finished with the run-through, pause. The director, not pausing, jumps up from his chair. He crosses over the bright red tape that marks the edge of the imaginary stage in the rehearsal room and huddles with his cast.

“You don’t have to move so quickly . It’s not like I’m asking you to behave like marionettes,” he says gently. “Rather, it’s a case of discovering, moment to moment, how you get from this line to that line, this move to that move. That takes time. If you’re pressing yourself, that won’t happen.”

He turns to the playwright, sitting at a table directly behind him. “I don’t think it can go much faster than that.”

“No,” the playwright concurs, “there’s no way it can.”

The cast knew what director Marshall W. Mason was saying. He had been saying it all week. And, as usual, playwright Lanford Wilson was thinking Mason’s thoughts.

That’s what comes from working for 21 years--to the month--together. Mason is staging Wilson’s “Burn This” in its world premiere at the Mark Taper Forum, opening Thursday night. It’s their 20th collaboration on a new Wilson play.

Theirs is the longest sustained director-playwright collaboration in recent American theater history. In an art form marked by clashing currents, Mason and Wilson stand apart. It’s not only their ability to last this long together that sets them apart, but their common vision of America--a hopeful view of a troubled culture.

They met in the East Village in the early ‘60s, when Off Off Broadway was the American theater’s New Wave. Instantly they forged an artistic union--based, according to Mason, “as much on our musical sensibilities as our theatrical ones.” Eventually they helped co-found their own theater, Circle Repertory.

As Wilson remarks, “When you find a person who understands your work, you’d be an idiot not to stay with him.”

But isn’t it still a little true, even for these two, that the writer’s mind--by necessity insular and contemplative--will clash with the director’s--visionary and, perhaps, domineering?

Isn’t director Charles Marowitz’s black comment that “most writers fear change, and the engagement of the director is like the approach of the abortionist to a mother determined to have her baby,” something of a physical law in the theater?

We visited the Taper’s rehearsal space across the street from the Music Center to find out.

The rehearsal room is large and characterless, lit by industrial-style lamps and what sun manages to get through the musty windows. In one corner sits a huge table for stage manager Michelle Miner and her assistant Tami Toon. This is Miner’s space--no one comes in without her knowing about it, and no detail gets by her.

She and Mason check the elaborate work schedule, with every day until opening night plotted out. Next to this calendar is a grid marking each of the play’s four characters and each scene or “beat” (as Mason refers to it) they are in.

On the wall hangs designer John Lee Beatty’s drawing of the set. It depicts the Lower East Side loft apartment shared by Wilson’s characters--Anna, a dancer (played by Joan Allen), and her roommate Larry, an ad designer (Lou Liberatore). Another roommate, Robbie, has just died in an accident.

Anna shares what time she has here with her screenwriter boyfriend, Burton (Jonathan Hogan). Then Robbie’s brother Jimmy (John Malkovich)--nicknamed “Pale” since he drinks only brandy--comes to pick up Jimmy’s clothes. Instead, he sweeps Anna off her feet.

“Their living space,” Mason explains, “can also double as Anna’s performance space. So there’s a large, hardwood floor and a lighting grid. Kind of a stage within a stage.”

Next to these sketches are elevations--drawings of architectural details within a set; for example, Corinthian columns adorning two pillars that stand in the middle of the room.

The taped-off rehearsal stage exactly measures out to the Taper’s stage dimensions. All the props (the actors are using the stage sofa during rehearsals) are in their place.

It’s time to start and Mason is ready. “This is the fifth play and fourth time we’ve worked here (Wilson’s “Hot l Baltimore” in 1975, “Talley’s Folly” and “Fifth of July” in repertory in 1979 and “A Tale Told” in 1981), so we know the Taper very well. I always make sure that the rehearsal space is as close to the actual set as we can get it, so the actors have no rude surprises.”

That’s the way Mason works: carefully, carefully. Perhaps it comes, in the strange way one can observe in the work of fellow Texan Robert Wilson, from the unsparing lines of the Panhandle terrain where Mason grew up. It is a place, someone once remarked, where you can stand knee-deep in mud and have dust blow in your face, where no room for error is allowed.

Mason was thrust into a very different cosmos when he attended Northwestern University in the late ‘50s. He fell under the spell of the great teacher, Alvina Krause, whose methodology of breaking down acts for rehearsal purposes into “beats” of three or four pages each has had a lasting impact.

“I learned everything I know about directing from her,” recalls the tall, bony, graceful director. “The key is collaboration. Another view says that the writer is the central creative element and then you bring people together to put on a show and nobody else really contributes anything. That’s just not the way I see it at all.”

He is a theater man who sticks with his collaborators. If Mason is director, you can almost bet that Beatty will design the set, Laura Crow will do the costumes and Dennis Parichy will create the lighting.

“My classical training showed me that the real question is: How well are all the people--actors, designers, director, assistants--doing their work? You don’t question the play. The play is there. That’s what makes a company.”

Lanford Wilson, a young man from the Arkansas Ozarks, was bubbling with ideas for plays and running around the Off Off Broadway terrain of cafes and church basements in the early ‘60s. He had heard about this mythic notion of a “theater company.” He wondered if he would ever see it in action.

“I had read about how it was supposed to be,” he recalls. “Then, with ‘Balm in Gilead,’ I saw it happen and it was just thrilling.”

The director was the 24-year-old Marshall Mason. “I didn’t know how to talk to a director,” Wilson chuckles. “I don’t know if he knew how to talk to a playwright. But he sat me down and said, ‘Let me tell you about your play,’ and he proceeded to tell me everything about it, from the social milieu to the musical nature of the language. He described what my process had been for the past year of my life writing the damn thing.

“Then, he was able to go out and stage it. You know, there are a lot of directors who can talk a great show, but can’t direct their way through a soda straw.”

Allen and Liberatore are sitting around Anna’s low Japanese table (“better for the Taper sight lines,” Mason explains) as Anna describes Robbie’s pathetic funeral. Larry tries to console her.

It’s the first scene in Act I and the first time in several days that the script’s first six beats have been rehearsed in a straight run-through. Hogan had exited the scene earlier, but now he comes back to listen to Mason’s notes.

“Not bad for a week off,” the director smiles as he lopes over to a pillow, resting his knees on it as if bowing to Mecca. “Joan, today you didn’t seem as freshly angered, as if you hadn’t just come back from the funeral.”

Allen nods her head.

“There’s also that frustration about not knowing everything about Robbie’s death. You’re showing that frustration now, but it’s just a little less than what we need. I mean you’ve just gone over it all with Burton, and now you have to start all over with Larry, so you’re really ticked off.”

Wilson had earlier mentioned to a visitor that he tries not to interject comments during Mason’s note-giving (“It interrupts his process”). But now, sitting at his customary place at the “front row” table, he does: “Also, Anna, you’ve told perhaps 12 people about this by now, so it’s almost--not quite--by rote.”

“Yes,” says the director. “You had that last time we did the scene. Don’t lose that.”

For Jonathan Hogan, “The only moment I had any problem was when Burton launches into his new movie idea. I think it’s getting too big too soon. Because when he realizes that he’s being insensitive to her and says, ‘We don’t have to talk about it,’ that’s a big transition. Right now, we’re sort of blending one moment into another.”

Mason writes no notes. It’s only one of his techniques that sets him apart from other directors. “The way I look at it, if I can’t remember it, it’s not important. The important things stick in my mind. A lot of directors make a big mistake when they take meticulous notes, and then give the actors all sorts of needless information.”

But some things, like the best way for Liberatore to make coffee in the apartment’s kitchenette, are not needless. “ Always use cold water,” Wilson instructs Liberatore.

John Malkovich, recovering from a slight knee injury, walks in and notices the crowd worrying if the coffee making might take too long. “You guys are still talking about that bleeping coffee?”

Later, Mason was thinking about the hazard and chance of creative minds meeting. “If I hadn’t met Lance (Mason’s nickname for Wilson) at the time of ‘Balm in Gilead,’ I’m not sure I would have broken out of the classical mold because there wasn’t much new being done then on the American stage that was very interesting to me.”

Nor to Wilson, which was part of the reason they, and the entire Off Off Broadway movement, were so active: a theatrical void needed filling.

“That first time with Marshall really made me want to keep all these people together permanently. My thinking,” Wilson says self-bemused, “was that if they could do it once, they could do it every time. In reality, it’s more like one out of every eight.”

Mason dryly tosses in an understatement: “Our batting average is pretty high.” The theater equivalent to a record baseball statistic is, for some, the award. For Mason, it’s been five directing Obies, five Tony nominations (three of them Wilson plays that made it to Broadway); for Wilson, an innumerable cache including the Pulitzer Prize for “Talley’s Folly.” For both of them, it was an Obie for “sustained achievement.”

What has sustained Circle Rep over nearly two decades is, for Mason, “that we’ve been able to find a way of getting that sense of ensemble even on a brand new script, even in the rehearsal process.”

“Burn This” is a work for quartet, a play of emotional junctures and schisms, of well-made plans dashed. It presents an unmistakable challenge to an ensemble.

Mason says now it puzzled him a bit. “I was so scared of Pale. I was responding to him I suppose in the way an audience will respond to him. He’s so violent, and honest. He’s definitely not someone we encounter on the stage. I’ve never heard this particular voice before.”

On the day after Christmas, Malkovich, Allen, Hogan and Liberatore read their lines before rehearsal begins. Smoke from countless Camels fills the room. Today, they’re doing all of Act I, complete with light cues. Mason requires that the actors know the lines for whatever beat is being done that day. This is not a rehearsal room full of actors walking around with scripts in their hands.

The run-through begins after Mason suggests to his cast that they “concentrate on the temperature of things, the feel of things around you.”

Anna, after sharing time and consolation with her friends, suddenly finds herself faced with Pale, a dark, midnight kind of fellow, who arrives in the wee hours for Robbie’s clothes. Through some strange transmission of his grief to hers, they find themselves in each other’s arms, making love.

At one moment, Malkovich is savagely pounding his fist into the sofa; the next, he is burying his head in his hands like a Rodin figure. Pale’s language rocks the room, and Wilson quietly laughs with pleasure at the actors and his lines. He leans over to a visitor: “I’m keeping score of the laugh lines. They’re not doing so badly.”

Mason mixes compliments for Malkovich and Allen with criticisms.

Such as this: “Pale and Anna are down there on the sofa, all over each other, but I don’t think we buy it yet.”

And this one: “I think we’re still lost at the beginning and end of the second scene (with Anna and Pale). When Lance wrote this scene, I wasn’t sure about it. . . . “

(Months earlier, playwright and director had struggled with this crucial turning point in the script. Wilson insisted that, underneath, Pale is no beast, but a lost, vulnerable man missing his brother. Anna would fall for him. Mason remained unconvinced.)

” . . . but when I saw it read for the first time,” Mason recalls, “I felt Lance did pull it off. But now, I’m not sure we’re bringing it together.”

Then Mason launches into a confessional mood, trying to drive his point home. “I know we’re dealing with a peculiar scene here. But maybe not. When my grandmother, with whom I was very close, died, that same night I made love to somebody. There’s something going on inside a person who’s grieving that really needs that, that . . . affection, support.”

A year ago, when Wilson had finished his first draft of “Burn This,” both he and Mason thought of Robert De Niro and Al Pacino to play Pale. “But something told me that Lance was in a Steppenwolf frame of mind when he wrote this. That made me think of Malkovich.”

Malkovich was one of the co-founders of Steppenwolf Theatre, the Chicago-based group (which Allen later joined) that had originated out of Illinois State University and, like Off Off Broadway, had started in basements and with a radical sensibility.

Wilson: “Something of Steppenwolf was in there. I went to see their production of ‘Orphans,’ and the staging was what they call ‘kick ass.’ I thought, ‘Hell, I can do that.’ ”

“But if we don’t see Pale’s vulnerability--” Mason began.

“--then you can just shove the whole thing down the river,” the playwright finishes.

Casting was completed at the uncommonly early date of April last year. The script was sent to the Taper for artistic director Gordon Davidson’s and dramaturge Jack Viertel’s comments. Viertel suggested they reverse their usual pattern, and stage it in Los Angeles first, before going back to the New York critical jungle.

“It’s just like Broadway for (Circle Rep) now,” Viertel says in his office. “In a way, they’re victims of their own success. Every time out now, it’s a big deal. If the reviews are bad, you’re through.” But, Mason adds, “That doesn’t mean we’re treating L.A. like New Haven. The script’s in terrific shape now.”

Readings of the play were held last August at Circle Rep’s summer residence at Saratoga Springs, N.Y. Viertel was there, giving more notes. More fine-tuning, especially of the first scene, ensued. By the time December arrived, and it was time to come out to the Taper, “Burn This” had been nursed with care.

Now, it’s the final stretch.

“At this point,” Wilson reveals, “I’m usually rewriting Act II while they’re rehearsing Act I.”

The new play marks a jump for Wilson, one of which he’s cognizant, into a nasty urban reality with which he is not usually associated. “Oh sure, things start out comfortably for these people, but Pale just blows them away. After writing so many plays I couldn’t use it in, I’m so happy to be back with street jargon.”

Viertel: “I’m sure our subscribers will appreciate that.”

Mason: “Listen. They’re going to have to be warned at the door.”

Viertel: “ ‘Intense, explicit language.’ That one?

Mason: “Maybe. I’m wondering if my two nephews and niece are mature enough to see it.”

Wilson: “What about my mother?!”

The winter flu bug had struck Wilson and was threatening Mason. Playwrights can afford to miss a few rehearsals; directors cannot. Besides, the Pale-Burton fight scene--a crucial juncture in the play when a drunk Pale comes back to Anna’s place on New Year’s Eve and encounters Burton for the first time--was scheduled for this afternoon. So Mason intrepidly plows through it with Malkovich, Hogan and fight choreographer Randy Kovitz.

“We may not need all these lines during the fight,” Mason announces. Kovitz had practiced the moves with Malkovich and Hogan for two weeks at this point, and Mason broke down those moves into three separate fights: first, aikido (Burton teaches it at the YMCA), then barroom style, and last, karate.

A problem emerges: After the fight action, Allen comes downstage, puts herself between the charging Hogan and the seated Malkovich to stop the fight.

“Jon,” Mason looks at Hogan, “why don’t you grab him by the lapels?”

Malkovich interjects, “No, I wouldn’t let him grab me. She’s the one who has to stop the fight. Otherwise we’ll just start punching away again.”

“But the lines,” Mason argues, “suggest that something is still going on between Pale and Burton.”

“I think the focus is on Anna and Burton,” says Malkovich.

“It still seems terribly inactive to me,” says Mason.

“I’m on the ropes, though.”

“I don’t believe the fight is over. If it is, then there’s far too much dialogue.”

“If I don’t stay slumped over in my chair, he’s dead meat as far as I’m concerned. She can emotionally stop the fight.”

Mason agrees, and then they discover four lines to cut. It transforms the scene.

Wilson, back the next day and armed with handkerchief and decongestant, proclaims, with something between irony and pride: “I don’t think they went far enough. I would have cut more.”

Wilson isn’t always the more ruthless editor of his work. He recalls that Mason was a majority of one concerning the play that was to win Wilson the Pulitzer: “Talley’s Folly.”

“Everyone else loved it during the first reading. Marshall just tore it apart. The next day I went into a script conference with him with a big chip on my shoulder. Within 10 minutes, he had me opening my pad to take notes. His method,” he said, looking over at Mason, “is critical tact.”

But have they ever had any big fights, the kind euphemistically described as “creative differences”?

Mason couldn’t think of any.

“But don’t you remember the priest in ‘Angels Fall?’ ” says the playwright, trying to jog Mason’s memory about his 1983 work regarding the question of faith in the Nuclear Age.

Before Mason could barely get out an “Oh, yeah,” Wilson recounts the story, his voice and Ozark accent rising: “He told me outright that he absolutely refused to do a play in (Circle Rep’s) theater that said that Catholicism was anywhere near right.

“I didn’t intend for that to be the statement at all! And Marshall said, ‘Well, it is, because of this, this and this.’ So I had to address that. It turned out, as usual, that he was right.”

Keep in mind that Wilson, though the playwright of most renown, is only one of dozens under the Circle Rep’s wings. As artistic director since its inception, Mason has increasingly found the demands and pressures of husbanding such a successfully burgeoning operation to be his own worst enemy.

In 1982, he took a two-year sabbatical. But as of this July, marking the theater’s 18th anniversary, Mason will relinquish his post to an as-yet-unnamed replacement.

A difficult decision, triggered by several factors. “Over the past several months, three close friends of mine--Neil Flanagan, Rob Thirkield and Marilyn Sutter--have died. And the pressures were getting in the way of the work I want to do in theater and film (he hopes to begin shooting his first feature film, “The Front Runner”).

He will continue staging a few Circle Rep shows, and all of Wilson’s.

“Early on in ‘Burn This,’ Anna says, ‘You become aware how little time you have to accomplish any of the things you want to do.’ That’s been haunting me a lot lately.”

Playing a scene on the day it actually occurs--New Year’s Day, for instance--rarely happens in theater. And though it is the day after New Year’s, it feels close enough.

Malkovich suggests an actor perpetually exploring every avenue his character could travel. It’s made most manifest by the fact that he seldom does a scene the same way twice, even playing lines to different actors on different run-throughs. (Mason: “I love it. He keeps everybody else on their toes.”) Today, the scene in which Pale is told by Anna to get out of her life is run through five times, crescendoing with a high emotional intensity on the fifth.

Each time Allen, Malkovich and Liberatore play it, Mason sits in a different spot in the room, since the scene’s action covers the entire stage. He asks Allen to emphasize “defensiveness” on the third take, “ferocity” on the fourth.

“Convince him,” Mason coaches Allen, “that it’s through between them. John, if you play up the vulnerability too much, then Pale might just come back next week as if nothing has happened. At one point, Pale has to be like Stanley (in “Streetcar Named Desire”) screaming, ‘Stella!’ ”

Malkovich then offers something to Mason from his actor’s mind, revealing what his performance has suggested all along. “Pale is very willful. But when he’s told that he’s truculent, ‘like a truck,’ that’s really a remark on his soul. He’s prepared to never see her again.”

Mason adds, nodding, “When I was threatening to quit Circle Rep some years ago, one of the board members said to me, ‘You shouldn’t make threats that you can’t follow through with, because somebody might say, Fine, go ahead.’ ”

Four days from the first preview performance--it’s the first day of rehearsal on the Taper stage. Allen, Malkovich and Hogan sit in the back row for a line reading. Before they have a go at both acts, Mason suggests that they “vocally reach. Bodies in the seats will absorb the sound. You’ll need to use your vocal energy more than you think.”

What energy they have, the actors are clearly conserving. “It’s tense now,” says Mason. “It’s a little shaky,” mutters Allen. “It’s always like this the first day,” muses Wilson.

The new home includes Beatty’s set, now installed minus a few details. The enormity of it takes one aback--Japanese space, Greek grandeur and Gotham grime mix in a blue-turquoise color scheme.

There are the unsurprising slips and flubs. When Malkovich walks, not into Anna’s, but into her gay roommate’s bedroom, Mason deadpans, “Do it that way, John, and we’ll have an altogether different morning after.”

As the first preview audience filters into the Taper, they’re handed a questionnaire. Does the play ends happily? Is it an accurate reflection of our times? The Taper, and others, take this piece of paper seriously. According to Viertel, there are regulars who come only to previews, so they can get in their two cents. Everybody’s a critic. . . .

The reaction to the first act proves this is a comedy. One of Malkovich’s speeches even garners applause. “If he doesn’t get it,” Mason notes outside the theater during intermission, “he’s doing something wrong. Last night, (Jan. 10) though, was traumatic (It was an invitational, pre-preview performance for Taper and Circle Rep friends and other comrades). They kept wanting to have such a good time that they obliterated everybody’s timing. John couldn’t get two words out of his mouth without half the house cracking up. It was awful. Tonight, they’re sober.”

Sober, and a little critical. Mason, Wilson, the cast, Viertel, Davidson and the understudies pore over the questionnaires. (Some didn’t bother to write their comments, such as a woman who exclaimed at the end, “What a marathon! They could cut an hour out of that. No one will be able to take it!”)

Mason finds the mixed reactions a good sign. “We have one here who liked the happy ending, while another felt that these characters were so screwed up that a happy ending was out of their reach. That’s good. They’re thinking.”

Almost everyone, though, seemed to have a deuce of a time hearing the play. Wilson waves one of the yellow answer sheets in the air: “Five said they wouldn’t recommend it. Most of those five said, ‘How can I recommend something I can’t even hear?”

Mason did take a ream of notes this time; he reviews them with the cast, with a special emphasis on the low volume. He suggests to Liberatore how, instead of swallowing a line, he can deliver it to the entire house with a simple turn of his head. He reminds Malkovich that we must hear Pale singing Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire” in his first scene, or the first act’s closing line makes no sense.

The director delivers the notes on actors’ technique, then Wilson drops a bombshell at 12:30 a.m. “Marshall, you said earlier that we’d do a few small cuts so they can get them by Wednesday rehearsal. Not quite true. One: I’m gonna cut a lot . Two: I’m reinvestigating Anna’s character from top to bottom. There’s going to be new material for her.”

“Now don’t scare them,” Mason said quietly.

“No, no. It’s just that she’s a creative artist, and I haven’t fully realized what that is, what it means. I can’t hear Joan sometimes, and it’s not her fault. She’s not interested in the line, and I don’t blame her.”

This wasn’t quite a case of rewriting the second act while rehearsing the first, but it was close enough. “Burn This” was still in progress.

The room falls silent. The questions no one dares ask, 10 days from opening, are: What does Wilson have in mind? and What will happen to Anna?

Wilson turns to Miner. “I want a typewriter at my hotel tomorrow morning. And paper.”