A Midsummer Night's Dream; Actors... | Buy

In this volume, F. Murray Abraham provides a joyful commentary on playing the character of Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream, his favorite role in his forty-year career in the theater. Writing with both insight and passion, Abraham not only shares his own experiences in playing Bottom in different productions-most notably and most fondly at Joseph Papp's Public Theater in New York City in 1987-but also analyzes the play's characters and breaks down its language to assist the reader in understanding the richness of the humor and the sheer inventiveness of the plot.

F. Murray Abraham has had a forty-year career as an actor in film and, especially, theater. He received an Academy Award for his portrayal of Antonio Salieri in Amadeus. He lives in New York City.

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Excerpted from A Midsummer Night’s Dream by F. Murray Abraham. Copyright © 2005 by F. Murray Abraham. Published in December 2005 by Faber and Faber, an affiliate of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.

PART I

View from the Bottom

An Elizabethan context

The center of the universe continues to shift. For a long time it was the earth. Then it became the sun. Now there is no center at all, just billions of tiny particles speeding through us, ignoring us, not even bothering to shoulder us aside while they visit the thousands of parallel worlds that overlap and surround us. Giordano Bruno described something like this to the court of Queen Elizabeth in his ‘Theory of Concentric Worlds’, and
I wonder if that partly inspired Shakespeare’s concept of the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The fairy world is certainly an ancient fantasy, and in literature it usually takes a metaphoric leap in the dark to get there: you jump in a lake; step through a wardrobe (to Narnia) or into a hole in a wall; and to ‘be’ John Malkovich find Floor 7 1/2 and enter his portal—but whatever it is, you need to travel into a separate world to get there. In Shakespeare’s vision it is right here, truly parallel to our own world, accessible by a walk into the woods. Its citizens inhabit an alternative space living side by side with us. And though visits from the fairies are common enough, a visit to their world is hard to pull off; a guide is needed, an interpreter who is able to communicate easily with the inhabitants of this bizarre otherworld and link them for us convincingly to the everyday world of Athens.

To make that communication plausible, Shakespeare had to create someone with a substantial ego, someone who could recognize the existence of many other egos, but subdue them sufficiently by the sheer size of his own generous, charming, overwhelming confidence—someone who would believe himself to be the center of any universe; in other words, an actor.

Bottom

Of course, an actor. After all, inventing worlds is our stock in trade and apparently it’s a healthy thing to do. In America, actors have one of the lowest rates of suicide—psychiatrists one of the highest. This puzzles me, as both professions deal with basically the same thing: understanding and making whole another human being. Maybe psychiatrists should be required to take acting classes. Maybe everyone should. You find out amazing things about yourself by pretending to be someone else, and Bottom, the character I played, is a natural—ostensibly a weaver, he dramatizes every moment of his life. He is Shakespeare’s great character actor and consequently to analyze Bottom is to analyze acting.

What a feast is this role, a one-man banquet. Bottom’s claim, ‘I can play taller, shorter, fat, thin, I can do it,’ is the actor’s credo, for unless an actor believes himself capable of this ability to interpret everything and nothing, he’ll soon establish limitations and become complacent. Shakespeare gives Bottom his cue to carry the torch for every actor who has asked just for the chance to ‘show his stuff’. Like any good actor, he’s ready to find out everything about himself. I love his confidence, his exuberance, his desire to be involved in every single thing. His openness is disarming and invites us to respond in kind. He accepts so completely who he is (and who he can be), that we are almost forced by his healthy self-regard to acknowledge its justification, and even if we feel skeptical of his persistent optimism, we also feel slightly envious of it. There is a wonderful irony in how I’ve described Bottom because it is completely opposite to the way I was feeling when Bottom was offered to me in autumn 1988.

Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune

I had just come through a desperately bitter experience concerning the original theatrical production of Terrence McNally’s Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune. Terrence was a dear, old friend—we met in 1972 when I auditioned for his off-Broadway play Where Has Tommy Flowers Gone?—and over several years I performed or read publicly every play he wrote: Bad Habits, Ravenswood, The Ritz (later made into a film directed by Richard Lester), It’s Only A Play, Lisbon Traviata, and eventually Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune. He knew my work well and had written the play as a two-hander for me and Kathy Bates (if not specifically, then with us both very much in mind) and we were crucial to Terrence’s conception of the characters and therefore crucial in the overall formation of the play as a workshop production. There is a special Equity contract that allows union actors to work for almost nothing (below scale rates) in order to try out new plays, giving opportunities to experiment and develop work—equally good for writers and performers: it encourages and helps fledgling plays that might not otherwise find an audience and/or investors. A maximum of four weeks rehearsal and two weeks of performance is permissible, with the understanding (promise) of the role to the actor in the event of a full production. My personal history with the play went back even further (about a year), involving public readings and discussions of early drafts. With the remarkable Ms Bates as Frankie, we became very, very good together. It was her first naked scene, although not her last, as she appeared nude with Jack Nicholson in the hot-tub scene for About Schmidt (2002). What terrific company Kathy keeps for disrobing herself.

My association with Terrence had explored a variety of roles, so he knew me well, and with Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune I thought he had written something spectacular for me, opposite an actress I adored, in a perfectly tailored modern play. So for those two weeks, in an auditorium the size of a postage stamp, about nine hundred people saw the best work I had ever done. In other words, it was a dream come true. And that was the last time I did it. I had been contracted to shoot a film overlapping the play’s schedule (for the transfer of the full production) by two weeks, and the producers were either unwilling or unable to change the dates. If you want to get an actor’s blood up, ask him to tell you about ‘the one that got away’—we all have stories of losing a job through schedule conflicts. It’s possible to go for months without work, forcing you to take the first thing that comes along, only to be offered a plum the day after you sign. But if you can stick around long enough, things even out; into your lap falls somebody else’s loss. In some cases, as in this one, losing a job can be a blessing.

When the off-Broadway production finally became a reality it did so without its original Johnny. The loss to me was devastating and it awakened all of those ‘actor’s doubts’ that I thought I’d finally laid to rest with the arrival of ‘Oscar’. The Academy Award for Best Actor in Amadeus changed my life. Instead of auditioning, I was inundated with offers, but what crap so many of those offers were. Salieri was much rarer than I had realized. Peter Shaffer’s creation was brilliantly originated by Paul Scofield at the National Theatre in London; Ian McKellen won the Tony in New York; and for me it won the Oscar. Obviously, Peter is largely responsible for our success, but great contemporary roles don’t come along very often and Johnny was like a ray of sunshine for me. When I lost it I lost my bearings.

I realize now that I wanted to do Johnny for all the wrong reasons—to change my image, to show off what I could do in a custom-made part. One value in doing it was good business sense, and more than a touch of vanity—I really looked good without clothes. I guess it’s plain that I was being swept up in the ‘biz’ of show business. Now the doubts came flooding back, and there is nothing worse than doubt for an actor—or a lover, for that matter. I truly was ‘rescued’ by A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Excerpted from A Midsummer Night's Dream by F. Murray Abraham
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