Arnie Burton: (Quick) Change Is Good!
A lifetime of acting at theater companies across the country, in plays both classic The Merchant of Venice and up-to-date I Am My Own Wife, Mere Mortals, prepared Arnie Burton for one of the most unusual challenges of his career: juggling multiple roles—including lightning-fast quick changes—and slapstick stunts as part of the four-person cast of the Roundabout Theatre Company's Broadway production of The 39 Steps. This entertaining, super-clever stage adaptation of the Alfred Hitchcock thriller just transferred to the Cort Theatre, allowing Burton as the blandly named Man #2 and Cliff Saunders as Man #1 to work their magic alongside leading man Charles Edwards as hero Richard Hannay and Jennifer Ferrin as three mysterious women he encounters after being pulled into a spy plot. Having witnessed Burton's amazing tranformations, we just had to ask: How do you do it? And what inspires your playful sense of comedy?
I confess: I love a good quick change. Maybe it's the running offstage into the dark where waiting hands are ready to rip off your clothes and slap new ones on. Maybe it's the rush against time: five seconds to change from the Spy to Mrs. McGarrigle...go! Maybe it's just the pure theatricality of it. The magic of a quick change can only happen live.
This is one of the many reasons why performing in Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps on Broadway is such a joy the other reasons being my amazing fellow actors, Charles Edwards, Jennifer Ferrin and my other half, Cliff Saunders. One of the comments I hear most from people after seeing the show is, "It looks like you are having so much fun up there." We are, not only onstage but offstage as well. I wish we could sell tickets to backstage during a performance.
Because of the nature of the show—"four actors, 150 characters"—offstage has to be as carefully choreographed as onstage. Well, maybe a little less choreographed and a bit more chaotic. During the course of the evening I play a spy, a lascivious salesman, a cheeky milkman, a Scottish paperboy, an assortment of constables, an evil mastermind who is digitally challenged, a smelly bog, a sign, a highland river, a music hall emcee and a Scottish innkeeper, Mrs. McGarrigle, to name but a few. If I am not onstage as one of these characters, I am offstage changing into another one. This is where the dresser comes in.
There was a time early on, during our run at the Huntington Theatre in Boston, when I came off as the emcee and did my own change into the milkman. I thought, "Wow, I have a lot of time. Damn, Burton, you're getting good at this!" Then my dresser ran up and grabbed me and said, "You're in the wrong costume; you're supposed to be the spy." I had jumped a whole scene. She ripped the milkman off me and threw on the spy; I grabbed the lamppost and made the entrance just in time. In those first few performances, I would basically run off and ask, "Where am I going and who am I next?" Now the terror is gone, but the exhilaration remains. None of us stop for the full two hours; even intermission involves changing our wet costumes for dry ones.
Another reason why The 39 Steps is such a joy to perform is that it gives me a chance to act out my childhood fantasies. As a painfully shy and weird kid growing up in Arizona, I had two obsessions: classic horror films from the '30s and The Carol Burnett Show. On Saturday night at 9PM, I would watch Carol and Harvey and Tim and Vicki. I was on a first name basis with them. I remember them doing a takeoff on Hitchcock's Rebecca and being struck how much fun those four people were having—and wanting to be up there with them. Then at 10:30, "Chiller Theatre" would show horror films like Frankenstein, The Bride of Frankenstein and Dracula. I would watch actors like Colin Clive, Dwight Frye and Una O'Conner in their black-and-white world, doing that particular style of acting peculiar to the 1930s. Now, onstage, I get to be all these people—a bit of Colin Clive, then Harvey Korman, then a little Una O'Conner—and I get to do it with three people I enjoy and respect.
But really, our version of The 39 Steps is not about Hitchcock or the movies. What it really is, as our brilliant director Maria Aitken puts it, is "a valentine to the theater." This is what I love most about our show. It celebrates the essence of the theater, the purity of it. No big literal sets lumbering on, just four actors, a bare stage, a few props, some rather terrific lighting and...go! And in keeping with its period, the humor in The 39 Steps is not ironic or cynical or smartass, the trademarks of comedy today. Maria made sure that the comedy always comes from an innocent, joyful place. She would remind us "You're just four actors trying their very best against all odds to put on a show." Amen.