Brian Dennehy
You decided to do Inherit the Wind especially to work with Christopher Plummer, right?
That was the appeal from the beginning—the chance to work with one of the last remaining icons of the theater world from the second half of the 20th century. When you name 10 or 15 of the best English-speaking actors, Plummer has to be one of those guys. He was in the original company of the National Theatre; he worked with Olivier and Richardson and did virtually every Shakespearean role. So when this came up, even though I knew Brady was a difficult part to play, I wanted to work with Chris.
Plummer's role, which is based on Clarence Darrow, is clearly the showy one. You didn't mind that?
Obviously, every actor likes to be top dog, but sometimes solving a character problem is as interesting as anything else. I wrestled with this one for a quite a while. Brady is a good man who, at least in terms of the play, had a literalist attitude toward the Bible. He's a creature of the 19th century destroyed by the changing environment of the 20th century. It's not an easy part; it doesn't have the layers that the real William Jennings Bryan had. Unlike Willy [Loman in Death of a Salesman] and [James] Tyrone [in Long Day's Journey Into Night], parts that are like continents or planets, this part was written essentially as a foil—as an opportunity for the playwrights to make their point. As an actor, you have to try to find the things that make this guy interesting and complicated. But I think I've found a way to play it, which is as a Christian gentleman.
Do you think the play is fair in its depiction of religious people?
No. Bryan was worried that the idea of "survival of the fittest" would be applied to human behavior, and that Christian values of generosity and goodness would be thrown out. That was his real objective in attacking Darwinism. But Darrow turned their confrontation into a debate about the poetry of the Bible, and Bryan became victimized. Darrow hated organized religion and fought against it for most of his career.
A few reviewers said you look almost too healthy for the part.
What's the dynamic between you and Christopher Plummer onstage?
Let's talk awards: You expressed ambivalence about the Tonys before the nominations came out eight years ago, when you were doing Death of a Salesman.
Now that you've got two [for Salesman and for Long Day's Journey in 2003], do you care about the Tonys this year?
It's shaping up as one of the toughest Best Actor races in a long time, between Liev Schreiber [in Talk Radio]…
Switching gears, how did you come to play Alfred P. Doolittle in the recent My Fair Lady concerts at the New York Philharmonic?
Really? I've never heard anything about that.
Would you like to do more musicals?
How do you decide which projects you're going to do?
Why are you still so enthusiastic about acting onstage?
What's the best performance you've ever given?
You saw The History Boys four or five times?
When do you realize that you had an affinity for the plays of Eugene O'Neill?
It was wonderful that Arthur Miller lived to see your production of Death of a Salesman.
Have you ever given a movie performance that meant as much to you as your best stage performances?
What do people on the street recognize you for most?
Well, the people from South Park put you in their movie!
Have your kids seen Inherit the Wind?
That's the beauty of it.
See Brian Dennehy in Inherit the Wind at the Lyceum Theatre.
I'm in terrible shape. I have the body of an 80-year-old [chuckles].
Oh, is that what they are saying? I stay away from the reviews—which, this week apparently, is a good thing. They can't help you when they're good, and they can't help you when they're bad. All they can do is fuck you up. Nobody, including The New York Times, knows this part as well as I do. No one's worked harder on it than me. No one knows more about William Jennings Bryan right now than I do. So nobody can tell me how to play this part.
It's a lot of fun. He's a wonderful guy who is fun to be with and fun to act with. He likes working with me. My job essentially is to pitch the ball down the middle and let him hit it out of the park, which I try to do. He knows that that's what I'm doing, and the audience loves it. Everybody regards this play as a big confrontation or debate, but it's not a debate at all—it's somebody [Brady] getting beaten up intellectually.
I'm not as ambivalent now. I like the whole idea of it now [laughs].
I want Chris Plummer to win it this year. Oh yeah. I really want him to win.
…Liev, and I hear Frank Langella [in Frost/Nixon] is amazing, although I haven't seen it yet. I've got a feeling Vanessa is a done deal [in The Year of Magical Thinking], and it should be. She should win just for her life.
It was just a weird coincidence. Tom Shepard, a freelance producer who worked for years for RCA, is a personal friend of mine. When they decided they were going to do this concert version, it was his idea to get in touch with me. He was vaguely aware that I had done musicals years ago.
It was a long time ago, and they were not big deals. But I used to be able to sing a little bit, and I used to be able to move well. I don't do that anymore, but I know how to fake it. When Tom asked me, I agreed and he said, "It won't take any time." Well, that turned out not to be the case [laughs]. But I'm glad I did it because it reminded me of why I became an actor in the first place. It was a lot of fun—and it's nice to have fun! I was under-rehearsed for it, which was my fault, not theirs, and I was working with people who were absolutely wonderful. Kelli O'Hara [Eliza] is just extraordinary. Poor kid—she's an enormously talented singer, dancer and actress, and the musical is almost a defunct art form now because it's so expensive. Thirty or 40 years ago, she would have been a huge star. She's a pretty big star anyway, but nobody's writing that stuff now. My Fair Lady is great for her because it's such an amazing piece of work that would never be done today.
Yeah, but what am I going to play in a musical? I'm a 70-year-old man. How many roles are there, outside of opera, which I definitely can't do? Anyway, I had a great time. Kelsey [Grammer as Higgins] was terrific, Kelli was amazing, and I was reminded of how extraordinary the ensemble performers, the singers and dancers, are in this business. The gypsies are the ones who make the shows work. They're always more talented than we are, but for one reason or another, we have the names and the reputations. These kids are astounding, and that was something else I needed to find out again.
If they ask me and I'm free and the money is anywhere in the ballpark, I say yes. At my age, the options are to work or sit home, and I'd rather work. There are a few things I want to do. We're trying to work out one now, sometime in the next year or so, a Beckett—I don't want to say what yet—and I want to do some Shakespeare.
Falstaff was supposed to happen, but for personal reasons, I'm not going to be able to do it this summer. I may do it in the fall, I have to talk to Oskar [Eustis, artistic director of the Public Theater] in a couple of weeks. I want to do Falstaff before I get too old. And I want to do Lear sometime in the next few years, because you've got to be strong to do it. I just have to find the place to do them and someone willing to put up the money, and we'll see what happens.
Why not? [Grins.] As long as they'll let me do it, I'll do it. It's what I do. And the idea of retiring … retire to what? My brother is a retired police officer. He and his wife travel, and he has all kinds of enthusiasms, but not me. I read constantly, and I want to do some directing; I talk to young actors from time to time, but I'm so cynical about the business that it's probably not a good idea to let me do that. I always tell them to go to dental school [laughs]. I've been in the business for 40 years, and the opportunities today are so much less, at a time when the academy is pumping out thousands and thousands of these kids. There were three or four acting schools of any note back in those days. Now every university has a profit center in the arts: "Oh you want to study theater? No problem, we've got a million people to teach it because they can't get jobs in the theater." Always be suspicious when the people teaching you haven't been able to find a job in the profession.
There's no way to answer that. There were performances I gave as Willy that were great, and ones that were not so great. There were performances I gave as Tyrone that were great. I gave a couple of great performances in Streamers 30 years ago. Sometimes it's just a moment onstage when you say something the right way and the whole scene becomes transcendent—and then two minutes later it goes back to normal. I have seen transcendent performances in my life. Jason Robards gave two or three of them. Laurence Olivier in The Entertainer, which I saw when I was 17 or 18 years old—I'll never forget that. John Gielgud in Richard II was unbelievable. Richard Griffiths in The History Boys, when he recites the Thomas Hardy poem about Drummer Hodge? It doesn't get much better than that. And the gay kid in that, Sam Barnett? Fucking unbelievable performance. I saw him do that four or five times, and I never saw that kid give anything other than an amazing performance.
If I like something, I go to see it a lot. And Richard and I are friends. I saw it three or four times in London, and I think it was better here. The [Broadhurst] theater was better. That damn Lyttleton at the National is a terrible theater to watch plays in.
Probably when I woke up with my first hangover, which was a long time ago [laughs]. Any Irish-American understands O'Neill, and lived a considerable part of his life dealing with the same demons. O'Neill is hard. He never gave a shit about actors or directors. In fact, he never really gave a damn whether his stuff was produced or not. What he was interested in was the writing. He did something really interesting in his later years: Before the show opened, he would always send a copy of the script to the critics because he was convinced that the actors and the director would screw it up, and usually they did. He was dead before [director Jose] Quintero started doing his amazing revivals.
Miller was a great playwright, and a really good friend. I did that play 650 times, and it never got boring. It was always different, and there was always some other place to go. The last week I did the play in London, although I knew it had come to an end, it was as interesting to me as the first time I did it six years before. But with O'Neill, there's always another door, another room to go into, another floor in the house to explore. He's the deep diver.
Olivier had the best description of acting in the movies: He said that you rehearse a scene five times and then they pick the best one. That's exactly what it is. The best way for me to look at movies now is to watch the ones I did 15 or 20 years ago. That way, you're divorced from it. It's like watching another person. I saw Presumed Innocent a few weeks ago by accident. I was just sitting there and it came on, and I don't think I had ever really watched it. There were a couple of scenes where I thought, "This is damn good." I mean my performance; the whole movie was fine. But even then, it's only moments. I did a movie 20 years ago called The Belly of an Architect with Peter Greenaway, and there are scenes in that picture that I feel pretty good about. He just shot master shots, entire scenes from one perspective, which is never done in the movies or television.
Some picture that Charlie Durning did [laughs]. Sometimes Tommy Boy. Usually they say, "Whatever happened to those two little kids you did that TV series with?" I say, "You mean the one that Brian Keith did [Family Affair]? The little girl died of a drug overdose."
I guess that's the height of some kind of celebrity when you become a character on South Park—me and Tom Cruise.
It's an unbelievable blessing. Kids don't give a shit about your self-absorption. They don't care that you're preparing for a part, and your career is not exactly working, and you've got this phone call to make and this trip to take. They say, "Hey, I'm the most important thing!" And that's good. Because actors are too damned self-absorbed to begin with, and when you get old, you really become self-absorbed. They're not interested! I am constantly reminded of the fact that the future is out there ahead for them. And I want them to have the love and the security and the preparation that they'll need for it because I've got a feeling it's going to be a tough ride in the next 20 or 30 years.
Cormac has seen it. Sarah, my daughter, couldn't be less interested in the whole goddamn business. She's interested in horses, and she likes her dogs. She's the furthest removed from being stagestruck or impressed by any of it. To her, it's just me going off to work and making money so she can do various things, and I support that. He has a healthy interest—not, thank god, in the performing part of it, but he's curious and has what I would call writer's interest in it, a critic's interest in it. That's a good interest to have. He enjoys all the craziness, but he knows that it's all ephemeral. Stage acting is one of the most existential art forms. It only exists in your memory.
I think it is! The moment comes, you do it, it's there and then it's gone. What I do tonight will be completely different from what I did last week. And there will be people who in some minor way will be changed by what happens—not because of my performance necessarily, but because of the writing and some emotion that touches them someplace, some memory that's been created. With Salesman, one night during the argument scene in the kitchen, a woman broke into hysterics and had to be taken out of the theater. That didn't have anything to do with us—it had to do with her and her life. But that's the power of this existential art form. What happens in a theater cannot happen at the movies. It certainly can't happen on television. And it never will—only in the theater. Every once in a while [in Inherit the Wind] when [Brady] stands up and begins to recite the prophets, the books of the Old Testament, there's something about his wonder and his transcendence as he repeats those names that makes the audiences go absolutely quiet. They're affected by his fear and his faith. If I get that right, and I don't always, it makes everything else work.