Who Has the Right Stuff for the Part? : In casting, the actor’s personality is not always considered a plus

W rong for th e part. The phrase comes up a lot when performances are being discussed. I used it myself the other day in regard to Topol’s portrayal of Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof.” What does it mean, to be “wrong for the part”? What does it mean to be right for the part?

And in whose opinion? The critic may think that actor X is out-of-sync with character Y, but the producer and director obviously thought that they were a match--or, at least, that they would sell tickets together. And often they do.

For example, a Broadway show whose time is running out will often hire a star name to keep the customers coming--Joan Rivers as the mother in “Broadway Bound,” Tony Randall as the diplomat in “M. Butterfly.” Not the people who would have been cast for the role in the first place, perhaps, but high-profile personalities who fall within the general requirements of the part.

And sometimes it works. David Bowie did “Elephant Man” in Chicago a few summers ago, and he was elegant. On the other hand, Richard Burton went into “Equus” as a warm-up for the movie, and he was flat. You never know.

That goes for casting in general. Only one principle applies: Theater is about pretending. If the actor helps the audience to pretend in the right direction, he or she has been well cast. If not, not.

Start with the question of physical type. It is not as crucial as one might think. Yes, the player has to show whether the character is male or female, young or old, hearty or frail. We’re not doing radio here.

However, the eye is rather easily satisfied in the theater. It will settle for a few carefully selected details, rather than insisting on a complete bill of particulars, as when watching a movie. That’s how Claudette Colbert can still get away with it on stage, to everybody’s delight.

Or, consider the all-male casts of Shakespeare’s day. Audiences were able to look at a gangly boy actor and see Ophelia. A play registers in the imagination, not on the retina. That’s why the argument against racially mixed casts is so weak. A black Hamlet takes about three minutes to get used to . . . if he makes us think of a prince. A short Prince Hamlet might take longer to get used to. When Judith Anderson played the role years ago at ACT, that was the major impediment: Her Medea. But her Hamlet seemed to be about a boy prince, and that wasn’t the story.

But don’t be quick to say what the story is. The right actor can make it a new one. For years we thought of Willy Loman as being a biggish man, simply because he was first played by a biggish actor, Lee J. Cobb.

Then Dustin Hoffman showed us that Willy could just as well be seen a little guy--the mascot who always wanted to make the team. Without invalidating the previous image, Hoffman provided an alternative view of it. That’s how the great theater roles grow over the centuries--a ring at a time.

But if the eye is tolerant in theater, the ear makes demands. About two-thirds of what’s going on with a character will be conveyed by the actor’s voice. This does have to suit the character--and the style of the play. Funny voices and funky accents will set up the wrong associations, which is a well-trained actor has purged himself of whatever localisms he grew up, and has learned to speak a clear, neutral English that smacks of nowhere in particular.

This isn’t affected. It’s practical. If Desdemona has a Valley accent, it’s going to set up a train of thought that is not to the story’s purpose--unless the director has set the story in the Valley. Looking the part isn’t half as important as sounding it. Now the fun starts. Assuming that Actor X fits the role physically and vocally, how does he fit it temperamentally? What does he bring to the part that another actor wouldn’t? How does he “read” on stage? What’s his aura?

Producers, directors, casting directors and critics talk about these things all the time. Their answers can be intensely subjective. Many an actor has profited, or lost, from setting up signals within the appraiser’s emotional field akin to those once aroused by the appraiser’s Aunt Clara.

But auras aren’t totally imaginary. Audiences do pick up on the signals that actors send out, whether they mean to or not. Actors do project qualities that can augment a role, or diminish it, or muddle it.

Ethel Merman in “Gypsy”? Perfect. Ethel Merman in “Three Sisters”? Not unless you made her the noisy sister-in-law, and even then she might wreck the show. Chopin can’t be played on the trumpet.

Tyne Daly in “Gypsy”? Absolutely. Got the brains and got the guts. Daly as Lola in LATC’s “Come Back, Little Sheba”? Well . . . she made it work.

Topol in “Fiddler”? Magnificent physical casting. Probably the most masterly performance of Tevye that we’ve seen. But the persona is so monumental that we lost sight of Teyve’s insecurities and little ironies. Topol as Moses? Perfect.

How about Mark Harelik in Vaclav Havel’s “Temptation” at the Taper? Clearly, this was a judgment call on the part of director Richard Jordan. Harelik reads as a very American type: the guy who doesn’t mean any harm.

He’s good therefore when it comes to showing the innocent side of Havel’s hero, who thinks he can play the Devil against the authorities and somehow come out a winner. But he doesn’t project the man’s crafty side, something a more cerebral actor (someone suggested Sam Waterston) would have had no trouble conveying. The result doesn’t help us figure out a play that’s none too clear to begin with.

We do expect the actor to provide answers here, even when they contradict the answer the last actor gave. Elizabeth Huddle played Christopher Durang’s Sister Mary Ignatius as a superficially jolly nun who had grown up watching Ingrid Bergman in “The Bell’s of St. Mary’s.” Then Lynn Redgrave stepped in and made her an Irish nun with no sense of humor at all.

Who was right? They were both right. But it would be possible to be wrong about Sister Mary, too. For instance, you could cast her with an actress who played her so vitriollically (think of Estelle Parsons in “Miss Margarida’s Way”) that the play lost all its laughter and become an anti-Catholic diatribe. Overtones, overtones.

Actors can’t escape them. Laurence Olivier prided himself on having no personal qualities at all as an actor--it all depended on what nose he put on. But the obituarists agreed that Olivier had a natural leaning towards comedy, and that he was never more happily cast than when playing a rascal like Archie Rice or Richard III.

John Gielgud’s aura, on the other hand, is mellow and intellectual. There always was something autumnal about Gielgud’s work, and the older he grows, the more enchanted it becomes. (It’s time that someone filmed him as Prospero.)

Yet, when it came to playing warrior-men like Othello, Gielgud has said that he had to “pretend like mad.” And watching Olivier as Big Daddy on TV, the audience had to pretend like mad. No matter how big the talent, it’s always possible to be wrong for the part.