The Passion of Estelle Parsons
By A.G.Britton
Academy Award winner Parsons speaks with her daughter, journalist A.G. Britton, about the development of the actor’s craft.
I’m 51 and I’ve just noticed that my mother has the most incredible pale blue eyes. They are clear and spiritual and I have an urge to swim in them. I’m elated that I’ve discovered them, and disappointed in myself that it has taken me so many years to notice.
At the café in the hip and fabulous Sunset Marquis Hotel in Hollywood, my mother, Estelle Parsons, also known as “the Queen” around our house, is sitting right next to me. Despite an early California chill, we are eating outdoors, which she loves. A beautiful hand with its wobbly veins, a history- carrying hand, is resting on my arm. They are hands which look as if they’ve worked bread dough, just like the hands of my beloved Swedish grandmother, Elinor Ingebore Mattson, my mother’s mother.
Estelle is sitting very close to me with that hand on my forearm — uncharacteristic. There are two other people at the table, my closest friend, screenwriter P.J. Hankoff and one of my sons, Augustus. But mother is looking into my eyes, telling me something, I can’t remember what. And I am mesmerized. I want to remember her eyes. Because I have never really seen them before.
In town literally overnight from New York, where she raised my sister and brother and me, she is here to film some scenes of Salomaybe! This is a rather ticklish and funny cinema verité by Al Pacino of the ongoing collective experimental-theatre work which mother has directed. Earlier in the year, Mom and Pacino put up Salomé Oscar Wilde’s 1894 brilliantly languaged one-act, for a six-week run at the Wadsworth Theatre in Los Angeles. The reviews were mixed. The troupe could have cared less. This was not about reviews — not the kind that get written in L.A. anyway — the ones that pay minimal attention to character development and lots of attention to what mother calls “arm-waving” actors and eye-catching sets. It was about how real actors work when they plunge down into the place where life is and rise to the surface, prey between their teeth.
Working together, Estelle, Pacino, and the rotating actors are using a deeply intuitive and psychologically searching acting technique begun many, many years earlier, when they began as actors. It is one that draws deeply from the center of the actor’s life and being and then injects it into the character.
I have spent my entire life in darkened theaters with mother all over the country, from Broadway (Miss Margarida’s Way, by Roberto Athayde) to Metunuck, Rhode Island (Hey You Light Man, by Oliver Hailey), to Woodstock Summer Theatre and Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera. I am a snob about it. I know what makes great theater the way I know the sky will be there in the morning. I am in awe of this process mother is constantly working on, because it produces incredible authenticity.
The last staged reading of Wilde’s Salomé. at the Actors Studio on Sunset, was a breathtaking interplay of truth, wild language, physicality, and intense intimacy between the actors. With the work set up in such a way, the audience feels voyeuristic on the subtext of the performance. In all of mother’s pieces, the ones she directs and acts in, there is an undercurrent that mesmerizes. The actor blossoms in a multitude of dimensions — the eyes, the scent, the shape of the body, everything is included. This is what mother goes for: Truth in all its forms. No wonder the people who work with her have traditionally been terrified of her, myself included; there just is no room for halfway in Estelle’s creative world. This is why she won an Academy Award for her performance in Bonnie and Clyde in 1967, why she was nominated a year later for Rachel Rachel, and why she has always been an actor’s actor.
Her methodical, take-no-prisoners search for the depth of the truth is not for everybody. It makes people feel vulnerable and ashamed, or, if they can handle it, alive and accomplished in a new and extraordinary way. Real actors want to go on this journey with Estelle. The strong survive. There was a price to be paid during the journey, and we all paid it — my sister Martha, mother, and I. But it was worth it.
1967, The Summer of Love
It was the summer of love, 1967. And in the world of movies the golden reign of the studios was ending. Films that were transitioning from entertainment to important “pieces” either psychological or political were hitting the theaters. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, A Patch of Blue, Midnight Cowboy, The Graduate – these were all in the making, or trying to get released. The idea was that movies no longer had to be big musicals, or big epics or sagas, but instead show a side of external or internal life not usually for the world to see. This New Hollywood between 1966 and 1980 saw a generation of young filmmakers come to prominence. They drastically changed not only the way Hollywood films were produced and marketed, but also the kinds of films that were made.
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| The author and her sister, Martha, as photographed by Diane Arbus in 1966 and 1969 |
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Mother had been working consistently in both musicals and straight plays. She’d won a Theater World award for her 1962 performance in William Hanley’s Mrs. Dally Has a Lover, would win an Obie award the next year, and had been playing Pirate Jenny and Mrs. Peachum in Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera. These early shows in my life I remember most, probably. In the case of Threepenny, because of the fun of watching mother getting heavily made up in her dressing room for both parts. These are things a child of an actress remembers — time spent in the dressing rooms, playing with makeup, sitting in the darkened theatre during endless rehearsal. The theatre was my sister and my babysitter — a wonderfully lively one. It was mother’s work that educated us. The work, she explained to me, she had wanted to do since she was 6, when Elinor — her mother — took her to community theatre in Marblehead, Massachusetts. Marblehead was where mother grew up in a community of first-generation Swedes and melancholy New England Protestants.
That 1967 summer, mother was at the Berkshire Theater Festival, because she wanted very much to work with director Arthur Penn (Bonnie & Clyde). I remember the time well because of the smell of the warm grassy fields and because my dog Scamper had five puppies. And because Anne Bancroft (The Miracle Worker) and I had sat across from each other in the actor’s bunkhouse, telling each other ridiculous jokes and laughing until our faces hurt. I had one of those childhood revelations that the theater and its people were my real family. What I didn’t know was the working process mother was experiencing, which is what I ask her about now. And she says:
We didn’t make much money in Stockbridge. My agent was very unhappy that I went because I could have made so much money in musicals. I had to make all the contacts myself. In Stockbridge I was doing The Skin of Our Teeth, by Thornton Wilder, directed by Arthur Penn. Working with Arthur was more important to me than doing the other. It excited me.
Murray Schisgal had written a play called Fragments. Gene Hackman, Dustin Hoffman, and I were in it. And Frank Langella and Alvin Epstein — we were all in The Skin of Our Teeth. George Tabori directed The Merchant of Venice, with Viveca Lindfors, me, Alvin Epstein. Viveca and George had spent the whole year putting this summer together. Annie Bancroft and Mel Brooks were there. Merchant was directed as if it had been in a concentration camp; it was so interesting. Viveca played Portia, Alvin played the Jew, and I played Nerrisa, the hand maiden. They were all experimental productions.
Working with Arthur was nothing like anything I’d ever done. This was very important for me. We did not work in the conventional way — pretending you were the character. If you have good material you can’t pretend to be another person so quickly. I realized my sense of truth had always been a little abused by trying to pretend to be something it wasn’t, and I was distressed.
So this process with Arthur was to bring yourself bit by bit, until you can bring this person inside you to the fore. It happens slowly, and with each rehearsal you begin to become that person on a much deeper level. You tried to do the scene in your own words, and then the [other] person in the scene would jump in when they thought you were ready. It was a very complicated process.
This method came from Arthur. He felt that if you tried to be somebody else before you’ve put yourself into the package of the character, then you lose all the wonderful individual information and you will never find you in it. But if you look for you and say I am not the character yet and say I am me I am me — it happens. You are in there. If you watch Arthur Penn’s movies you find actors who are incredibly full. You get a whole experience
At the end of that summer, mother had decided that we (my sister and me and mother) were going to move to San Francisco, because mother had a job with a company there. The apartment we’d always lived in in New York was sublet, and the trunks were packed…
I got a call that we weren’t going to San Francisco. The theater company fell through. Arthur gave me this script for Bonnie and Clyde. I had turned down a lot of movies and TV because I was interested in the theater. But I kept reading, and I realized it was an extraordinary role, the emotional journey of Blanche Barrow, Clyde’s sister-in-law, was fascinating. I spent the fall in the library researching this character. I never do that — because usually with good material you have everything you need to work on a role. But this was a real life character. I went to the public library on 42nd Street and I would sit in the locked room they have, pouring over a book about Bonnie and my character, Blanche Barrow. I went through all the newspapers .
In the newspaper photographs, Blanche Barrow wore these English jodhpurs. I identified with that because as a kid I had wanted jodhpurs and cowboy boots.
What was she doing in Texas in English riding clothes? I discovered in my library research that the Texas newspapers at that time had all these advertisements for English jodhpurs. Bonnie and Blanche would disguise themselves, dye their hair, and take the bus into the big cities and buy clothes. So I wore English jodhpurs in the movie -- clothes which came out of the wardrobe truck that had come to Texas from Hollywood for the movie. They had been worn by Barbara Stanwyck in some earlier movie.
I had wanted to meet Blanche. I told Warren (Beatty, who produced Bonnie and Clyde) I wanted to meet this woman. But by the time Warren came to me and said I could, my character had come alive and I didn’t want to change the energy of her. So I never met the actual Blanche.
Arthur had unlocked something in me, in my perceptions of what acting was about. It was a matter of relationship between actor and director.
Estelle’s Journey
From the time I was small, we journeyed all over the country from theater to theater, I was acutely aware that mother was what was known as a character actor. And that this was a cut above other actors. She was a transformer, like a shape-shifter. It was not remotely odd for me to see her, for example, as a man in Krapp’s Last Tape, by Samuel Beckett. Today, I am inspired by her commitment to her craft, her ability to stay in what I view as one of the most debilitating professions in the world.
Whenever actors tell me they’re actors, I always give my condolences to their family. But mother has taught me endurance for the sake of art. And I am always mining her for what her truth is. When I ask her what acting is to her, she says to me: Well you better tell me, because I have no idea what you want me to say.
Mother’s blue eyes look off at a waiter she has made friends with. She smiles. Then she looks back at me. I can see her thinking. Her thumb rubs the material on my shirt.
Really what acting is about is words and behavior. A great playwright is so important. One who feeds material to be swum in. But where does the behavior come from?
I was always really interested in the real-life things people do and say that are unfathomable — from their deeper wellsprings. There is all this stuff that makes no sense. If you watched the human race you would say people are crazy because they do unfathomable stuff.
It is all that stuff that is an entertainment tool.
I’ve always been fascinated by the Vaudevillians and how they were on the stage all the time. So there was this theatrical truth and theatrical being. You develop a whole new you because of the work you are immersed in all the time. This is how I work now. In the theater you must rehearse. The director has to set up the room, because things come out of the subconscious when they want to. A director has to set up the room to induce that.
I’ve always been interested in performing and doing things in front of a large group of people. It is impossible to put into words. But I’ve always been drawn to watching people figuring out why they do what they do. I like to watch the process of the directors and actors creating other people and trying to figure it all out.
I am interested in getting things to come up from the deep. This is why I am doing this now.
For my next project I have found an experimental space so the relationship with the performers will be different. The theater should be about acting and not about scenery. And you know me, all my life I have always attempted to encourage actors to be artists. A real actor does not show up and say: Okay, where do you want me? It makes a difference for people to show up and work fully. I am basically an actor.
But it is not all inside work. The theater has a major responsibility, it always has, to reflect the real world, and that is not white and rich. I do a lot of multicultural work as a director. In the ’80s, when I developed Joe Papp’s multi-cultural Shakespeare troupe, I felt a political responsibility to bring a confluence of all cultures into the theatre. All cultures working together and reflecting is rich and exciting.
Now I’m directing a play written in 1932, called Night Over Taos, by Maxwell Anderson. It is about the Taos revolt of 1847 – the difficult interactions between the Spanish, the Native Americans, and the Anglos. I am having a wonderful time wandering around in that time. Night Over Taos has the greatest role ever written for a Latino male.
