UK Theatre Network

René Auberjonois had been a busy actor on stage and screen for thirty years before he played Odo, the shape-shifting constable on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993-99). In 2004 he took the role of venerable lawyer Paul Lewiston on the acclaimed legal drama Boston Legal. Lately, he has appeared in Warehouse 13 and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and has participated in an audio recording of the Bible.

Auberjonois attended Carnegie-Mellon University where he studied theatre in-depth, learning not only about acting but about the entire process of producing a play. After college, he acted with various theatre companies, starting at the prestigious Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. He helped found the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music Repertory Company in New York. Eventually, Auberjonois landed a role on Broadway in 1968, alternating between the Fool to Lee J. Cobb's King Lear (the longest running production of the play in Broadway history) and Ned in A Cry of Players (opposite Frank Langella), directly followed by Marco in Fire!. The next year, he won a Tony Award for his performance as Sebastian Baye alongside Katharine Hepburn in Coco. Other Tony nominations were for Neil Simon's The Good Doctor (1973, opposite Christopher Plummer); as The Duke in Big River (1984), winning a Drama Desk Award; and, memorably, as Buddy Fidler/Irwin S. Irving in City of Angels (1989), written by Larry Gelbart and Cy Coleman. Other Broadway appearances include Malvolio in Twelfth Night (1972); Mr. Samsa in Steven Berkoff’s Metamorphosis opposite Mikhail Baryshnikov (1989); Professor Abronsius in Dance of the Vampires, and Jethro Crouch in Sly Fox (2004, for which he was nominated for an Outer Critics Circle Award). As a member of the Second Drama Quartet, Auberjonois toured with Ed Asner, Dianne Wiest, and Harris Yulin. He also appeared in the Tom Stoppard and Andre Previn work, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, at the Kennedy Center and the Metropolitan Opera and played the titular character in Molière's The Imaginary Invalid at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C. in 2008. Auberjonois has also directed many theatrical productions.


Photo by Suzanne Vanweddigen

CK: Are you going to do another play in the near future?
RA: If I do another play, one possibility is L’Avare - The Miser.
CK: Ah, yes! You said you might want to do that.
RA: Yes. So we’ll have to see if we can make it happen. It’s a tough play. We just were in Paris and we saw the Comédie Française, their production of it, which was extraordinary in some ways and very wrong-headed in other ways. I suppose the problem with doing a classic that is so well known, to find a new way of telling it, sometimes people kind of push it out of shape. The hard thing is it’s very easy to say that The Miser should be dark. Molière had darkness in him but he was basically a comedian and he had to deliver the laughs. He was like Neil Simon. And so to deny that clowning is to counteract the work, I think.
CK: Right, I completely agree. You said you might want to do King Lear some time.
RA: No, I didn’t. You never heard me say that.
CK: Oh yes, I read it in an interview.
RA: If you read it in an interview, how do you know it’s true?CK: Well, that’s true. (Laughs) So, you don’t want to do it?
RA: No, it’s not that I don’t want to do it. It’s that I did it, you know. I played Lear when I was very young and of course I couldn’t possibly achieve it, but it was a tremendous challenge and it taught me a tremendous amount. That was at ACT. And then I went on to New York City, to Lincoln Center, and I played the Fool in the play with Lee J. Cobb…and then a few years later, I played Edgar with James Earl Jones as Lear, that was the one that Raul Julia was in. So I’ve done the three best parts in the play. And I’m not sure what I have to offer the part. It would have to be a wonderful director who wanted to do it. I wouldn’t want to do it just so that I may say the lines, and slog through a mediocre production. And you know, my friend Stacy Keach did a wonderful production very recently, and I went to see my friend Robert Foxworth just a month and half, two months ago in San Diego playing Lear, and I saw Dakin Matthews playing Lear. So I’ve seen a lot of Lears recently, and they all had brilliant parts. But it is like Everest. It is a mountain that will defeat you ultimately. So you know you’ll just have to be humble in the face of it. You need a great director. I had a great director in Ed Sherrin in the production in Shakespeare in the Park with James Earl Jones. It’s on video.
CK: Yes, usually theatre productions are so boring when you watch them on video but this one is very exciting.
RA: I can’t watch it because I know that the real experience was so much more. You know, it was pretty powerful.
CK: I hope you’ll do something in London, too.
RA: I know, you keep saying that.
(Laughter)
CK: Tell me, what are some of the dramatists you appreciate?
RA: Beckett—who I suspect perhaps actors enjoy performing and the audience sometimes less watching it. Sometimes it can be a difficult experience. Beckett is wonderful. Chekhov, which I’ve got to do very little of, really, but I feel an affinity, as if the little bit of Chekhov that I did, that I have done, has had a real influence on me as an actor. When I think of any play and any character…because what Chekhov was so brilliant at is defining his characters: how intricate they can be, their foibles, weaknesses, arrogance, all things that he saw in people, shimmering like water. That’s a wonderful thing, if you can achieve that as an actor. Also showing a lot of different facets of a character. Beckett and Chekhov, and Pinter, who I’ve also done very little of, then Shakespeare. I would love to do David Mamet, but I am the kind of actor that he would think: “Oh no, he can’t do my plays.”
CK: Why would that matter?
RA: Living playwrights have casting approval. When I first played Tartuffe, I got to play Tartuffe because Richard Wilbur, whose translation we were using—it was a revival of a production that the director had directed a year or so before—Richard Wilbur would only give them the rights to the play if the actor who played Tartuffe in the first production didn’t. And that was why I was cast. The actor who he wouldn’t let play it was a brilliant actor but a very eccentric, quirky kind of actor and I think Richard Wilbur felt he distorted his work…but he was a wonderful actor. So what I’m saying is: I can’t imagine Mamet casting me in a new play for him, to have just written that play and say, “Oh, maybe that guy could play this part!” I don’t think he would ever do that. 
CK: In Germany, we have a different kind of theatre. You probably know post-dramatic theatre where the director is really the creative force and the writer is almost unimportant.
RA: Like movies?
CK: No, it’s like the death of the character. There are no real characters, the actors just say lines but they are not a character. They might express a certain mood, maybe, but it’s like Richard Wilson or, I don’t know if you know Elfriede Jelinek, she won the Nobel Prize, she is a good example. We have a lot of this kind of theatre in Germany. Would you be interested in doing anything like that if it ever was offered to you?
RA: Oh, I don’t know what exactly…I’m not clear on what it is, but I’m always interested. Do you know the work of Steven Berkoff by any chance?
CK: Yes!
RA: Well, I did Metamorphosis on Broadway with Mikhail Baryshnikov and I loved doing that. Now he’s not everybody’s cup of tea, you know. Some people just hate Steven Berkoff. One of my friends came to see me rehearsing it and saw a run through and she said, “How are you doing this?” because it was all so articulated, and timed and lines coming out in a certain way. We were the family of Gregor Samsa … And when we were eating it had to be a certain way. When we were saying the lines—dom, dom dom….you know.
CK: That goes in that direction, yes.
RA: I loved doing it. I just loved it. Once you learn it, it’s like a dance. Once you learn it, the steps, then you forget it, you just dance. There’s such a foundation. It’s not improvising. Improvising can be wonderful, but it can feel dangerous because you can lose it and not be interesting. But dancing like that and having rigid form that you then forget that you’ve done all that work and you just….
CK: There is a really exciting play—Every Good Boy Deserves Favour—which is shared by an orchestra and actors.
RA: You know that I did that.
CK: Yes, I do! I just saw it in the National Theatre. I thought it was so great. I never saw it before, I had only a record of it.
RA: Ah, with John Wood, right…John Wood must have done the recording.
CK: It’s Ian Richardson and Patrick Stewart.
RA: Oh, really?
CK: Yes, and Ian McKellen.
RA: That’s interesting, because John Wood created the role the first time it was performed, and then I did it when they came to the Kennedy Center in Washington and John Wood moved over there and we went to the Metropolitan Opera in Los Angeles with the Los Angeles Philharmonic with our son Remy, he was playing the boy. It’s a wonderful piece. You know, for a while I thought, after the fall of the Soviet Union, it will never be done again. But now I think it’s time to keep it active. It would be fun to do it again.
CK: You could do it in London!
(Laughter)
RA: Yes...
CK: Michael Grandage said he was thinking of you. Now he is not going to take over the National Theatre, unfortunately….
RA: He isn’t?
CK: No, he says he now wants to concentrate on his creative work. He wants to direct but he could always say, “Well, I want to do this thing. Let’s ask René if he wants to be in it.”
RA: Ah, that’s nice.
CK: Thank you very much for your time.
RA: Thank you, Carolin. 

They say you should write what you know.  When David Mamet had a holiday job in a sales office pitching valueless real estate to credulous punters he stored up this first-hand experience to create his iconic 1980s stage play Glengarry Glen Ross.

The salesmen of this particular firm are, like all sales reps, psychotic, paranoid, blame-shifting, duplicitous egomaniacs, constantly harking back to some golden age when commissions fell like pennies from heaven, and each convinced that the manager is passing them poor leads and no-hope clients.  Bad enough when you’re trying to earn an honest buck on a day-to-day basis - but when this month’s sales figures will either win you a Cadillac or your cards, unconventional and desperate tactics are required.

Anyone expecting fireworks and melodrama will be surprised by director Chris Honer’s subtle and refined reading.  He gives us a humane Tolstoy-like perspective on the characters, reflecting their internal view of themselves rather than crudely externalising their flaws and failings.

It is perhaps unusual, but you can get away with this kind of understatement in the intimate confines of the Library Theatre (a proximity emphasised by Judith Croft’s design which puts the Act 1 set right at the front of the stage).  And pitch perfect casting means you recognise the characters before they even open their mouths.  Leigh Symonds’ apologetic Lingk is a professional victim; James Quinn’s sweaty Aaronow is a little guy in a big guy’s body; Paul Barnhill’s nerdish Williamson has been promoted above his abilities but is too dumb to realise it; and John McAndrew’s baby-faced Moss is brazen in his treachery.  All these qualities can be seen at a glance, so there’s never any need for the actors to overstate characteristics which they already embody.  

That incredibly powerful actor David Fleeshman, here as the delusional has-been Shelly Levene, plays against his own inherent physicality and gives us a detailed, almost finickerty interpretation of the role that rationalises all the conflicts and contradictions in the man.

Finally Richard Dormer is mesmerising as smiling wolf Richard Roma, the company’s ruthless über-salesman.  Dangerous, charming and charged like an electric wire, he’s an alpha-male in a testosterone-fuelled world yet almost girlish in the way he dances and flirts to achieve his own ends.   

Judith Croft’s set is superbly realised, from the Chinese restaurant’s plush velvet booths to the faithful recreation of a shabby 1980s office where even the cheap plywood desks appear to be authentic period pieces.

Those who are familiar with the film should be warned that the dramatis personae of the stage version are slightly different.  Ironically Chris Honer’s production is more forensic and close-up than any film would dare to be with a Mamet script, while high production values and a first-rate cast make this one not to miss.

Glengarry Glen Ross is on until Saturday 3 April 2010

Prices: £8.00-£18.00 (concessions available)

Eves: Mon-Thurs @ 7.30pm; Fri & Sat @ 8pm

Matinees: Thurs & Sat @ 3pm

Box Office: 0161 236 7110

www.librarytheatre.com

David Mamet’s taut two-hander from 1992 takes place in one location over a few days, but it demonstrates the seismic shifts in power which have occurred in the whole of society over recent decades.

Successful, charismatic and slightly complacent college teacher John has almost attained the academic holy grail of tenure of post – there’s just the formality of an interview to go through before it’s rubber-stamped - and he’s now in the process of buying a house worthy of his new status.  But there’s a last minute glitch with the paperwork, and he ends up fielding a barrage of phone calls from his lawyer and wife while having an impromptu meeting with Carol, an under-achieving student who’s worried about her grades.

The opening scene is a comedy of crossed-lines and miscommunication as John and Carol stutter, repeat, interrupt and contradict themselves in Mamet’s idiosyncratic style, barely seeming to understand what they want to articulate themselves, let alone able to comprehend what the other is saying.  Carol’s constant complaint is that she doesn’t understand the formal language of education - you wonder why she doesn’t just buy a dictionary – while John, although a teacher of teaching, is ironically unable to teach her.  Finally overcoming his mounting sense of frustration, John decides to try to reach out and help Carol.  Unfortunately his overtures are misinterpreted, with dramatic consequences.

In 1992 Oleanna was seen either as a veiled attack on feminism by a rampant misogynist, or a chilling warning of how civilisation might be destroyed by the newly emerging political correctness.  During the first UK production audiences were reported to be fighting in the stalls and cheering at the escalating on-stage violence.  However there were no fisticuffs at Bolton on Friday night – partly because the two protagonists seemed so evenly matched, and partly because, since the introduction of tuition fees and wider access to higher education, the play has a whole new set of resonances for a British audience.

Kosha Engler’s Carol appears to be strong and secure from the outset, completely unembarrassed by overhearing John’s fraught telephone conversations, let alone worried about her crisis meeting.  Colin Stinton as John is a kindly and fairly patient tutor who doesn’t seem to deserve the fate that is meted out to him.  Guest director Iqbal Khan has cast two American-born actors and thus cleverly by-passed any worries about authenticity of accent - no wonder the “Mamet-speak” is pitch-perfect, delivered faultlessly and at a great lick.

However the actors are upstaged by the sheer beauty of Ciaran Bagnall’s set and lighting design.  Although deceptively simple – a desk, a couple of chairs, a few gleaming stainless-steel rods delineating the room’s proportions, with a wall of mirrors along the rear – it lends a sophistication and elegance to the Octagon’s black-box-studio feel.  And when the lighting changes at the beginning of the third act, and the mirrors are miraculously transformed into glass-fronted bookcases, the whole tone of the evening suddenly becomes more three-dimensional and human.

The Octagon is the perfect venue for this chamber-piece, which has become even more complex and interesting with the passing years.  Gripping, thought-provoking and entertaining stuff.

Oleanna is on at Bolton Octagon until Saturday 23 May 2009

Tickets: from £9.00

Evenings: Mon-Sat at 7.30pm

Matinees: Wednesday 13 and Saturday 23 May @ 2pm

Box Office: 01204 520661

www.octagonbolton.co.uk