A longtime member of this historic acting workshop, Madeleine had done her studying in New York, which had resulted in a remarkable stage career. She had originated the roles of Abigail in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible as well as “Sister Woman” in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Miss Lucy in Sweet Bird of Youth, both by Tennessee Williams. She was a force, that’s for sure: She had been blacklisted in the McCarthy era, had worked with Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights movement, was arrested while participating in a freedom walk, then jailed and sentenced to six months’ hard labor for “endangering the customs and mores of the people of Alabama” until her lawyer, the first African American to represent a white woman south of the Mason-Dixon Line, secured her release. She rarely talked about any of this, but you could feel it in her, like something lashing around, unwilling to settle down. A dust devil looking for loose dirt.
Two scenes were up that night: The first was from A Moon for the Misbegotten, by Eugene O’Neill with two characters, and the second was a monologue from Euripides’s Medea, adapted by Jean Anouilh. As everyone was filing in, Madeleine explained to me what I was to see, and how I should see it. The performers were to pick one or two very specific things they wanted to work on, and the scene was in no way to be considered a finished performance. Everything was a work in progress. It was study. She also told me that during the winter months the position of moderator would rotate according to whoever was available. Veterans and longtime members like Ellen Burstyn, Bruce Dern, Shelley Winters, and even Madeleine herself would show up on different nights, always actors who had studied closely with the guru—the acting teacher who had made the Actors Studio so famous and infamous, Lee Strasberg. But during the spring and throughout the summer Lee lived in L.A., and for those months it was the master himself who taught at this little neighborhood residence.
The lights went down and the first scene was up. I wasn’t familiar with A Moon for the Misbegotten, but even if I’d known it well, I wouldn’t have completely understood what was happening because whatever the two actors were working on, being heard wasn’t one of them. It didn’t matter. Their focus made it worth holding my breath to catch whatever words I could, as if we, the audience, were eavesdropping on something personal happening between these two people, something that they would hide if our presence were known.
After the scene, the actors gathered their things and adjusted their clothes, never looking out at the watchers, talking only to each other, as if allowing themselves the few moments it takes to leave the privacy of concentration. Tucking their emotions out of sight, just as they tucked in their shirts and tied their shoes. Eventually they sat on the edge of the stage with varying degrees of awkward composure until the moderator (I’m sorry to say I don’t remember who it was that night) asked them what they’d been working on. After the actors explained their tasks, the moderator gave comments and finally asked for comments from the audience—all actors and members or, like me, invited observers.
When the short break ended, everyone took their seats again and quieted as a tall, striking woman, a character actor I vaguely recognized, moved to center stage, keeping her eyes down. She stood still for what seemed to be a long time, then began to speak as Medea. Slowly, she raised her eyes and searched the audience, meeting one face, then another. And with a booming voice, she began to wail while strutting across the stage, then laughed insanely with her mouth open wide, looking toward the rafters. It was periodically mesmerizing, boldly unafraid, and at the same time hovered constantly on the edge of embarrassing. At the end of the long spew of words, she screamed with fierce abandon, ripping the bodice of her dress open, yanking it with the most authentic behavior thus far, and finally stood in the middle of the stage, breathless and bare chested. No one moved. I must admit, I admired her freedom, though perhaps not her sense of economy. After a moment, Madeleine leaned in to me, whispering a little too loudly, “She finds a way to do that in every scene, no matter what the play.” But I couldn’t take my eyes off of this exposed actor as she gathered her things just like the others had done, pulling herself back, transitioning from the place where she had been to look at the people sitting in front of her.
I can’t say I learned anything that night, or at least not anything I could take to the set with me the next day—God forbid—but I was totally compelled. I wanted to tell the actors what I thought, how at times I was confused and then completely transfixed, wanted to ask them why they chose to work on things that were so complicated to explain. I walked away with a new hunger, and not for chocolate cake. I wanted to get up there, wanted to work, really work—not the kind of work I’d been doing. I wanted to learn the break-it-down, bit-by-bit, layer-by-layer craft of it.
There’s a saying that actors have: “Life is what happens in between jobs.” Then there’s the riddle: “What is the worst time in an actor’s life?” Answer: “When they’re not working and when they’re working.” Both of these apply. During the months that The Flying Nun was in production, I had zero time off because I was in every scene of every script, so when hiatus arrived at the end of the first season, I tried to fill my life with everything I wouldn’t be able to do after the second season began.
Immediately, I started seeing a therapist once a week, even though I didn’t stay with him for long. I remember shuffling into his office for my session and sitting on the edge of his hard leather sofa, feeling just as stiff as the furniture. It was perhaps our second meeting, so I’m sure I looked terrified, because I was, and deeply sad, trying to hide myself in layers of baggy clothes, looking slightly childlike. Without even registering my appearance, he opened the session by scolding me for being fifteen minutes late, telling me I was acting disrespectfully to us both. I felt ambushed, tears dripping off my chin as I tried to defend myself, explaining how every day the clock was relentlessly on me and I was never late, admitting it was a luxury to allow myself a little tardiness, something I didn’t know I felt until I heard it come out of my mouth. I wish I could have said, “Thank you for your time, you’re not the right person for me,” and left. But I couldn’t find that part of myself, and as the session continued I fell back into my familiar cell, locked behind my face, unable to speak.
This same doctor insisted that I attend a torturous, weekend-long group marathon as well as his weekly group therapy sessions, when a knot of strangers, usually years older, would burst out laughing when one of the members asked if I’d driven there or had I flown over, one of a hundred unfunny jokes thrown in my direction while inside my head a voice pleaded for me to speak. Please speak. But I sat with my head down, a little ragamuffin girl, mute and now with a pounding headache.