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 Adam Arkin & Allan Miller in Brooklyn Boy |
INTERVIEW
WITH ADAM ARKIN DURING THE STAGE PRODUCTION OF "BROOKLYN
BOY" ON BROADWAY, 2005
by Beth Stevens from
Broadway.com
(interview re-printed without permission purely for the purpose of publicising Mr Arkin's career. No infringement of copyright intended)
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Adam Arkin & Allan Miller in Brooklyn Boy |
Adam Arkin is returning to his roots. It's been about a dozen years since the Brooklyn-born actor garnered a Tony nomination for his Broadway debut in I Hate Hamlet, and now he is back on the boards in Donald Margulies' Brooklyn Boy, directed by Daniel Sullivan. Arkin, the son of famed actor Alan Arkin, plays Eric Weiss, a novelist who is unable to run away from his past. The play deals with a number of weighty themes: success and failure, fathers and sons, fact and fiction. Arkin relates. With the birth of a son two months ago, he is entering a new era in his life; and with the return to the New York stage after a successful career in Hollywood (most notably with TV's Chicago Hope), he is experiencing a sort of homecoming. By all counts, it is a warm welcome home.
Is it true
that you are a Brooklyn boy?
Yes! I was born in Brooklyn Heights. I was born in Brooklyn
hospital and lived in Brooklyn Heights until I was about five,
then I lived for a while in St. Louis and central California. I
moved back to New York when I was about 11, but by that point I
was a Greenwich Village boy.
You've
worked with Donald Margulies before in Sight Unseen,
didn't you?
Yes, but I was not a part of the original cast. I took over the
lead from Dennis Boutsikaris in the original production.
Ironically, I had been a huge fan of the play just as an audience
member. I was working on another piece for the Manhattan Theatre
Club at the time. I was doing Richard Greenberg's The Extra
Man, and Sight Unseen was also being done there. I
went to go see it and flipped out for it. I then went back and
took family members to go see it and was just talking about it
nonstop--never thinking that it was going to be something I was
going to get to do. And then a couple months later, The Extra
Man's run was coming to a close and Sight Unseen was
extending. Dennis wasn't going to continue on with it, and they
offered me the chance to take over the role. It was just a
wonderful opportunity to kind of enter a play that I had already
been in love with.
Your
brother, Matthew Arkin, made a splash in Donald's Dinner
with Friends. Is it becoming an Arkin family tradition
to perform in his plays?
Well, there is starting to be a real kind of extended family
connection between my brothers, and Donald and Dan [Sullivan] as
well. I've worked with Dan a number of times, and he directed Dinner
With Friends with Matthew. And then my brother Tony was in I'm
Not Rappaport, which Dan directed, so, there's starting to be
a lot of cross-pollination there.
What is it
about his work that moves you the most--especially in Brooklyn
Boy?
There are a few things I love about him. It's hard to break it
down, but I'm amazed at how incredibly funny his work is without
being joke-oriented. You know, he doesn't write jokes, and yet
the humor really comes out of a kind of deep situational reality
that is just unusual. And I love also the fact that he doesn't
declare whether the material is comedic or dramatic, and as a
result of that, I think it gets a lot of mileage out of both ends
of the spectrum. He has a tendency to get an audience's guard
down with humor and as a result of that, when the material turns
more emotional, it tends to be very effective. It's just a
wonderful mix...a sort of lifelike mix of the two.
You are
almost never offstage in this production. Is that difficult for
you?
It's working out fine. I mean the thing that was very interesting
about this play was how different the process of performing it
for an audience was from the process of rehearsing it. The
rehearsals were very wearing, and there was a kind of sadness and
loneliness to because of that. Because of the episodic nature of
the play, one scene partner would come in and work for a number
of hours, and then they'd leave and the next person would come
in, you know, refreshed and ready to go.
You were
the only person that wasn't rested and raring to go!
Exactly. I would just have to kind of keep going. My rehearsal
days were basically nonstop and the fresh-faced people would keep
parading in front of me. And the nature of the play is such that
my character doesn't have a lot of genuine companionship. The
combination of those two elements made something exhausting about
the rehearsals. What was satisfying was when we started doing it
for an audience. The revelation there was that the audience is on
his side. The audience sort of takes the journey with him. And
that changed the dynamic a lot.
How did you
approach playing Eric Weiss? What were the challenges to find a
way to unlock him?
It took some time to understand. I was really curious to kind of
unlock his culpability in the predicament that he's in and that
was a little bit of a mystery at first. It felt in the beginning
a little bit like they were these people that were just coming
after him you know, and I really had to spend time questioning
Donald and Dan and asking, "Where is his responsibility in
this?" and "What has he contributed to his
predicament?" Because I think in order for the evening to
work, ultimately, he's got to change, and I wanted to find out
what it was about him that needed change. And what started
emerging was a kind of denial that he was guilty of trying to
define himself through denying where he came from and what it was
that contributed to him being the person he was. And that was the
biggest challenge and became my most specific goal in trying to
understand what made him tick.
With this
play being so much about fathers and sons, and you having to
constantly acknowledge your father's fame in some way, did you
relate to this character on a personal level?
Yeah, I did. I related to the character in a number of ways. I
related from the standpoint of understanding that my connection
to my father is something that whether I choose to be conscious
of it moment to moment in my daily life, it doesn't matter. It is
going to be--for anyone that doesn't know me--one of the first
things that is on the table in my dealing with them. And you know
just as it doesn't matter whether Eric is thinking up this novel
as being really about him or not, whether he thinks its important
that he's Jewish or not, these are the things that in his
relationships with other people are very much defining how they
behave with him. And that doesn't mean he's got to go around with
himself thinking like that all the time. But if he's living in
denial about that, then he's just going to get slammed. What
started emerging for me is the concept of those things that
you're on the run from and the way they define you as much as any
stated goal you may have. That if you really want to be free of
something, you've got to acknowledge it consciously and integrate
it into that part of yourself that can evolve. But if you're just
on the run from it, it's going to keep rearing up and revisiting
you over and over again.
Is there
anything else that you think of as something you have to
integrate? Being famous, perhaps?
Well, first of all, I don't think of myself as famous. I've spent
time around people that are dealing with what I would call real
fame--you know, sort of uncut, undiluted fame--and that's a whole
other animal. What I have dealt with in varying degrees is a
level of recognizability from being on television. That has had
peaks and valleys for me. I guess, in a weird way, I grew up
around my father's notoriety and was sort of used to the idea
that it doesn't really mean anything about who you are. It's
really a byproduct of something. But I'm thankful that with
whatever objectivity I can muster, I don't feel like I bought
into all of that too much.
I'd expect
that the audiences at South Coast Rep in Costa Mesa, California
were very different than New York audiences for this play. Was
that the case?
The thing that was most surprising about that is that there
hasn't been a huge difference in the response. You know, we were
all kind of gearing ourselves up for the possibility of the
audiences at South Coast to not being able to really relate to
this play and that was not the case at all. What was really
refreshing to hear was that there were different people from
different ethnic and cultural backgrounds who felt very strongly
that there was universality to the play. Superficially, it dealt
with specifically Brooklyn and being Jewish, but just below the
surface there were themes that were universal.
Dana Reeve
withdrew from the play after her husband, Christopher Reeve,
passed away. How did the cast react to the difficult
circumstances?
That was difficult, and it was a kind of continuation of what had
been a very difficult way to wrap-up the run at South Coast
because Chris went into cardiac arrest the night prior to our
closing day. So we had finished the performance on a Saturday
night there, and Dana got the news that this had happened. We
spent the better part of that night as a cast - with Mimi Lieber
kind of spearheading the effort to try and figure out a way to
get her back to the East Coast that night. It was very sad.
It was also...you know, not that I would ever wish this on any cast - but it ended up being in and of itself a very bonding experience because it was something that we all went through to a certain degree with her. There was a surreality to the whole way that that ended, and I think that everybody was very very relieved that we knew we were going to get to reconvene in New York. Of course, at that point, no one knew what Dana's plans were going to be. We were all in a sort of wait-and-see mode. I don't think anyone was surprised when she decided that she felt it would be best not to commit to the run here, but it was sad to see her go. On the flipside of that, we did get the wonderful Polly Draper, who has from the minute she arrived just integrated herself into the cast beautifully.
On a
lighter note, I hear you have a newborn!
I do indeed. I'm sitting next to him right now. His name is
Emmett, and he's having some lunch with his mom. He'll be eight
weeks old tomorrow, and he's beautiful.
Are you a
typical sleepless new father?
I cannot claim that I'm getting no sleep. My wife has been a
saint about protecting my commitment to the show and making sure
I get rest. I help out a bit during the days, and she really
covers me at night.
With the
obvious question of autobiography in Brooklyn Boy,
you better watch out if Emmett grows up and writes a novel!
That's right! If he ever writes a book about a father named Aaron
Arkin, I'll assume it's a total fiction.
Donald must
be very sick of people asking him if this play is
autobiographical.
It's amazing how much he skewers the whole concept of people
doing that in this play. And even with that, after watching two
and a half hours of him protesting anybody asking him those
questions, that's the first thing people ask. It's just amazing.
What is the
book that you carry around onstage? The one with the Brooklyn
Boy cover?
It's Brooklyn Boy! Come on! Quite honestly, I don't know
what it is. I've never wanted to think of it as anything other
than what it's suppose to be. I know it's not, of course. I've
glanced, and there is a text in there. It's an actual book, but I
could not tell you what it is. In my mind it's only been one
thing: Brooklyn Boy!