Oleanna, Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90012. Runs through July 12. Performances Tues.-Fri. at 8:00 pm; Sat. 2:30 and 8:00 pm; Sun.1:00 and 6:30 pm. Tickets: Call 213-628-2772 or visit www.centertheatregroup.org.
Bill Pullman can as easily extol the virtues of pitting loquats with a pal as dissect his latest David Mamet role. Not to mention the importance of chill hours for growing stone fruit or the intoxicating fragrance of his mature pittosporum.
(That’s a mock orange tree for those of you with nefarious minds.)
“They blossom and smell very similar to the citrus,” explains Pullman over breakfast at the Village Coffee Shop in Beachwood Canyon, sitting in a window booth that ironically faces a newspaper box featuring a cover photo of his former While You Were Sleeping co-star Sandra Bullock “with a younger guy,” he wryly notes.
“We harvest all these things and make stuff out of it,” he continues, speaking of the 120 varieties of fruit grown on his property up the road. “It’s a meditation. It’s also a nice way to have discussions while you’re doing something with your hands. I remember Jon Turteltaub, who directed While You Were Sleeping, came over on Mother’s Day. We were pitting loquats and had such a lively time. It wouldn’t have happened if we just sat in a room with our coffees and talked. There’s something else that comes about. I’ve always loved the time with family when we’re doing those kinds of things.”
Shape shifting from salt-of-the-earth pragmatist to erudite intellectual is as much a through line in his personal life as it is in the characters that Pullman has chosen to play during his nearly 30 year career. That he is tackling Mamet’s embroiled university professor in the current Taper production of Oleanna opposite Julia Stiles on the heels of last year’s turn as a famous Napa Valley vintner in Bottle Shock makes sense for a man as deeply committed to the earth as he is to the stage or screen.
“That’s what I liked about it,” Pullman admits about playing Chateau Montelena’s Jim Barrett, whose Pinot Chardonnay historically beat the French in the 1976 Paris tasting. “It really was the triumph of agriculture. You don’t get to do those characters too often. I’m not a huge wine drinker. I don’t get into that sort of glazed eye, dreamy reveries that most people do. I got more into the soils than I did into the wine.
“They are very brilliant at it, Jim’s son Bo and wife Heidi Barrett, the self proclaimed ’samurai knights of wine making,” he laughs. “They’re so good at analyzing the micro niches of the way the land lays so they can really take advantage of the smallest little scoops that might collect chill longer. Another 50 feet off might be a different experience. It’s always great when you get that intense about agriculture because I have a little bit of that.”
Tackling the Politics of Oleanna
Intense is an apt adjective to describe both Oleanna and, in a more subtle way, breakfast with Pullman. Clad in western jeans, boots and a shirt, he is every inch the picture of a Montana ranch owner whose generous open range warmth is lightly laced with a wickedly subversive streak. Think Sam Shepard with a Jack Nicholson infusion.
Three days before opening night, he is immersed in previews and excited by the challenges inherent in tackling Mamet’s controversial theatrical response to the 1992 Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas sexual harassment scandal. Pullman has recently been the “go to” guy for new Albee plays, having done the 2002 world premiere of The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? followed by Peter and Jerry in 2007. In between, he sandwiched a 2006 stint at the Kennedy Center in The Subject Was Roses with Judith Ivey before world premiering his own written and directed multimedia performance piece entitled Expedition 6 at San Francisco’s Magic Theatre. Oleanna offers Pullman a completely different rhythm to explore.
“I’m really amazed by this play, a piece that I continue to admire more and more,” he enthuses. “And we’re just starting out! I’m really looking forward to the repetition. A lot of people outside the theatre say, Jesus, you have to do it every night! The journey you take with a good script, that’s the privilege.”
According to Pullman, Julia Stiles was the force behind the current production. Stiles had played the student role previously in London with Aaron Eckhart in 2004 and wanted to reprise it in New York. She ultimately brought it to Jeffery Finn who had produced Pullman’s The Subject Was Roses, On Golden Pond and the new Blithe Spirit among others. By 2009, the spring season on Broadway was already loaded. When the Taper cancelled its scheduled production of Uncle Vanya, a slot opened up and Pullman was asked to participate. He’d met director Doug Hughes decades earlier during his first job in New York as an understudy in the Keith Reddin play Life and Limb with Hughes’ sister Laura.
“I’ve known Doug for a long time,” he says. “I’ve talked to him about a lot of other things. What I liked was his real curiosity about the play. His certainty about it being a strong piece of material that had somewhat been left in people’s memories as flawed. He really had a sense that it was one of Mamet’s three best–American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Ross, and Oleanna. The challenge is making that not a statement, but evidenced in the action of the play, is what we’ve been wrestling with!” He laughs. “I don’t know where that’s gonna take us but I think we’re on the road for better or worse. And it’s much more about the personal elements than the political elements.”
But it was exactly those politics and the public dissection of the role prior to rehearsal that Pullman found to be both belittling and counterproductive to his process.
“I really resented all the political comments,” he stresses. “The ‘oh you’re going to play that character. He’s such an asshole.’ And ‘he has to do this and this and this. Did he or did he not?’ Then you have to decide whether you’re going to go there or do that. This is the exact opposite of how I’ve approached any other play! From these kind of external calibrations of gesture that represent this or that. It doesn’t come from an organic place. So Doug’s vision was to really take it back and build from the text.”
Julia Stiles as Carol
When asked about the trajectory of Stiles’ role as Carol, Pullman believes there is eerie overlap between the two each night. “Carol has a definite journey,” he says. “I think there is a stage of life in which your identity is in such flux. Julia, who is a colleague of great reserve, has a way that serves her very well. And it’s very opaque. It’s almost opaque to her. I find it haunting sometimes, the way she will be saying things to me on stage that are sort of buried in her. It’s the kind of thing like, hello? We were just talking. We almost just had a similar point of contact. We were talking the same language. Where did you just go? Because I’m not seeing anybody inside right now.”
Pullman says he’s found the emotions unleashed by the violence at the end of play hard to shake off after the performance.
“It does kind of flood through you for awhile afterward,” he confesses, compulsively running his hands through his hair. “As much as you think you’ve got it all contained. I don’t know what will happen in the course of the run but it’s still pretty fluxy. You know you’re flushing all this stuff through your system. It’s like that line, ‘you see me in class, I smile,’ and we’re at the end of the play smiling and everything. I can feel these little things bubbling up an hour later. It triggers strange things. Almost like a muscle memory that’ll come back to me.
The Goat and The Zoo Story
When Edward Albee was preparing to cast his new play The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? in 2001, Pullman hadn’t been in a substantive stage run since the 1993 Los Angeles MET production of Beth Henley’s Control Freaks with Holly Hunter. He had been a fixture of the LA theatre scene since arriving in the mid ’80s following a critically acclaimed Off Broadway turn in Sam Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class opposite Kathy Bates. A production of Nanawatai lured Pullman to LATC where he later performed in shows like Barrabas, All My Sons and Demon Wine with Tom Waits while his screen career took off in films like Ruthless People, Spaceballs and The Accidental Tourist.
“There are a couple of guys working tech at the Taper who were at LATC,” smiles Pullman mischievously. “We’re all like former Basque separatists or something. It feels like we’re in disguise. We say hello and have our little side conversations. During that time I really did feel polarized to the Taper and what the Taper what about.”
After Control Freaks, he co-produced Miss Margarida’s Way at the Zephyr Theatre on Melrose in 1996 and appeared briefly in The Sad Lament of Pecos Bill on the Eve Killing His Wife Killer’s Head/Action at the Signature Theater Company in 1997. The ’90s saw Pullman busy starring in films like A League of Their Own, Wyatt Earp, Sleepless in Seattle, While You Were Sleeping, Mistrial, Independence Day, Lost Highway and The Virginian, which he also directed. In between, he tried to make do with staged readings.
“You spend so many years doing theatre, then you end up doing a lot of years of readings,” he laughs. “You know, the ‘pseudo-theatre’ that you can kind of test your brain with in LA. If you have an audience, you can make things happen beyond just the reading. And if you’re good at it, you can come away with (in a Jack Nicholson type voice) ‘damn, once again pulled it out of the bag! Fuckin’ freaked ‘em out.’ And that can be satisfying but it’s still not the real deal.”
The real deal was originating the role of Martin on Broadway, Albee’s successful Pritzker Prize winning architect whose life falls apart when he admits to having an affair with a goat, without the play having garnered previous exposure anywhere. No public readings, no workshops, no prior regional productions. Pullman almost didn’t do it.
“I did turn it down because I was kind of freaked by it,” he admits. “I was in the middle of reading a couple of things and had some advice that was like ‘don’t touch this.’ ‘Don’t do it.’ ‘I have to high five it to ya’ after I said no. Those kinds of remarks. Then when I couldn’t stop thinking about it, I realized I’ve got to get back on top of this.”
Albee’s controversial play about “dealing with the unimaginable” became the sensation of Broadway’s 2002 season, earning a Pulitzer Prize nomination, Tony Award and Drama Desk Awards for Best Play, a Drama Desk nomination for Pullman, plus a Tony and Drama Desk nominations for Mercedes Ruehl, who co-starred as Martin’s wife Stevie. Whether people interpreted the goat literally or as a metaphor for infidelity, the reaction from critics and audiences towards Martin’s dilemma was unequivocally condemning. Pullman admits he appreciated Albee’s backbone during a time when “we were getting slammed. The boat was taking on water, man.
“It was a challenge for both Mercedes and me in a lot of different ways,” he explains. “Each of us had to better our game. For me it was overcoming the shame from the people. I found that physically I was contracting.” Pullman caves in his body to illustrate. “I could feel this grrrr, you know,” making a guttural sound. “This despising, this dismissal, this judgment. You have to become a shaman of shame. To carry it openly and see it, and help other people see it as horrible as it is. So that was hard.”
According to Pullman, Ruehl also had a tricky part because while her character scores comic points in the first part, she has to also engender audience sympathy during the second.
“Mercedes was in the talkbacks, and people were saying ‘you were so shrill in your rejection of him, it seemed like that was what drove him to the goat!’” laughs Pullman. “Some of that I think is in the writing. I think there’s a trap in there. And Mercedes, she did a really amazing calibration that shifted it around where her journey got more interesting.”
During a May 2002 Charlie Rose interview with Albee and Ruehl, Pullman compared the situation his character faces in The Goat, with the opposition he faced to a career in theatre:
“When I started in the theatre, nobody thought it was a good idea. ‘When are you going to quit this?’ There’s that way when you come into a passion about something that you are not going to become dislodged from and no one is going to demean it enough to dissuade you from it. That’s probably closer to what I identified with when I read it.”
Three years ago, Albee called Pullman with a different proposition. He had revisited The Zoo Story, his seminal 1958 one act play and written a new first act to precede it called Homelife, which had been commissioned by the Hartford Stage. He intended the two to be heretofore performed as Peter and Jerry (recently changed to At Home at the Zoo), presenting the debut at Hartford in 2004. Albee wanted Pullman to play book publisher Peter in the New York transfer, who the playwright believed had gotten shortchanged by the piece’s heightened emphasis on drifter Jerry’s histrionic monologue. Homelife added the character of Peter’s wife Anne whose conversation leads him to reveal a long submerged secret.
“I think it was a brilliant, brilliant exercise,” notes Pullman. “It’s a gift to playwrights. If you look to The Zoo Story and say, write an act that would come before this in which these things are prepared for, without them being direct or literal preparations. Look at the way the first one, Homelife, is structured. There’s so much information about what’s churning in Peter. It gets established then what becomes all of this subtext in The Zoo Story without ever feeling like you were given obvious things. So the mystery and the tickle of it all stay alive.”
Not that working with Albee a second time turned out to be easier than the first. A clash of wills erupted during a rehearsal for The Zoo Story over the last part of the play. Pullman reluctantly acquiesced only to have Albee return after a break with an earlier section of the play removed.
“It was always respectful,” Pullman emphasizes. “You really are honestly hitting and then being pushed back about something. He is not as dismissive as he appears to be. He’s very surly and difficult in certain ways but he’s very compassionate in others. Here’s a play that’s been in existence for 50 years. He hasn’t changed it since ‘83. So that was a huge thing.”
Peter and Jerry debuted Off Broadway on November 11, 2007 at the Second Stage with Pullman, Johanna Davis and Dallas Roberts. In his New York Times review, Ben Brantley makes the case for Pullman’s position as the quintessential Albee translator. “As Mr. Pullman demonstrated in The Goat, he is the ideal interpreter of the diffident Albee man who is brutally surprised by what lurks within him. Mr. Albee has generously given Peter a monologue, about a nasty sexual encounter, that nearly matches Jerry’s. And Mr. Pullman’s presentation of Peter’s confession is harrowing in its controlled, regretful and just slightly prurient quietness.”
Asked about the similarities between the two Albee characters and his new Mamet role - playing educated men with seemingly good marriages who each face a sexual episode that contributes to an act of violence at the end - Pullman admits to never having laid them out that way.
“Martin has a secret he is hiding and Peter has something within him he has no knowledge of,” stresses Pullman. “The evolution of that is opposite. Peter’s encounter with something hidden in him is more like a noir thing where you suddenly realize you are capable of something and you’re left in a stunned, inarticulate aftermath without ever collecting it into a last chapter.
“Martin is almost moving towards the tragic enlightenment that comes with a huge downfall. The period that comes like Oedipus at Colonus, blind but now sees. Having destroyed his family. Having destroyed everything. Then the issues become much more than about bestiality. So many people think of it as the play about a guy who fucks a goat. That’s just the first trick. Then the kiss with the son and the Christ on the Cross, the ejaculating. Albee opens it out and he’s just saying it all.”
When told of a first-hand account by a former World War II USO performer who saw goats wearing the dog tags of servicemen stationed on an island off the U.S. coast where she was sent to perform, Pullman bursts out laughing. “Wow! Dog tags! That’s a great additional anecdote to our special story set!” He shakes his head, “Guys.”
Space Exploration & Cornerstone
Pullman was moved to create Expedition 6 after watching news reports of the February 3, 2003 Columbia Shuttle disaster and the problems its disintegration upon returning to Earth’s atmosphere created for the three men remaining on the space station, two astronauts and a cosmonaut. Their plight juxtaposed against the start of the Iraq War the following month became the basis for an imagistic theater piece featuring low flying trapeze with a dramatic text gleaned from the astronaut’s space chronicles as well as other NASA first person accounts. Developed first at the National Theatre Conservatory at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, the piece was workshopped at the New York Stage and Film’s Powerhouse Theatre, The Kennedy Center and Baltimore Theatre Project before making its world premiere at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco in fall 2007.
Despite the opportunity to meet the actual astronauts, Don Pettit and Ken Bowersox, collaborate with them on the script and bond during a demonstration of their re-entry while seated in a Soyuz capsule mock-up, Pullman says he’s put the project away for now.
“It ended up being so out of the box, it killed me,” he admits. ”Partly because it had a low flying trapeze in it, the fundraising became as much a part of doing it. Every theatre we did it in needed extra money brought to the table to make it happen. I really enjoyed it a lot but it’s something I’ve probably boxed away somewhere. I’ve had some encouragement to reshape it for Edinburgh and take it to Europe, which has a certain set of venues that are already geared for it. It’s a hard piece to put in the middle of a rep theatre where no one knows quite what to do with it. There’s an opportunity to do a full production in Denver where it started in workshop. Maybe if they can do it in a year and a half I can do it.”
Noting that Pullman seems to have his life scheduled pretty far out, he laughs. “Yeah. It’s anticipating different levels of pain! There’s a new play by Beth Henley called The Jacksonian we’re going to workshop at New York’s Powerhouse Theatre in August. It’s a really strong, scary piece set in the ’60s. Very autobiographical. It’s like David Lynch and Henley together.”
Bill Pullman in Oleanna
When he’s not navigating space odysseys, Pullman is a board member of The Cornerstone Theatre Company. The first production he saw was their Twelfth Night, followed by other ensemble pieces, which intrigued him to see the community based shows.
“It’s not the kind of theatre I’m trained in and don’t necessarily feel I would be a good actor for that,” he admits. “But I have such respect for what they do. The ensemble is just a collection of geniuses of their own order. I really love the way I’ve seen LA through experiencing the stories they collect from so many different environments and perspectives. I could never believe that you could make a play from such things, you know? It’s a miracle every time.
“It’s always hard when the founding artistic director leaves but I think that Tali Pressman is very capable. Bill (Rauch) has always had a little bit of preacher about him that makes him a very unique kind of theatre person. He’s very healing. He wants to hear everybody and has a generosity of soul that’s really palpable in the room. Michael (John Garcés) is more ‘I’m here to facilitate everyone’s visions and keep moving forward.’ There’s a different kind of practical aspect that’s also empowering. Perhaps the other ensemble people are being encouraged to become leaders now as well.”
So how does he balance his own unique mix of theatre and film, acting and directing?
“To work in theatre, you have to give up a lot of different employment things,” he sighs. “It throws the rhythm off four or five months where you can’t be available. Everybody knows that’s the game. Part of our arts subsidies is actors giving their time. I don’t complain. I’ve got a job and I’m getting paid for it. With each play, I remember those early years when I first spent a lot of time doing it. It comes to you like water to somebody who’s been in the desert for a long time.”
Pullman says he is alert to that passion in his children. “When you have kids you wonder: Are they going to find it? Are they going to tap into it and at what cost? They have to have this idea that it’s going to forge something in them if they stick with it. ”
He sees the same innate love of performance in his daughter and wonders aloud if it’s truly part of his family’s gene pool. “It’s funny. My daughter is a performer. In music, but she’s done some plays. Sometimes I’m surprised to see that genetic flow of instincts that comes down through the line. She has an incredible sense of present tense. She did Juliet when she was 14. I’d never seen a production where Juliet was actually 14. Especially as a father watching his daughter really process the incredible rush of power, thrill of danger and sense of rebellion. All of that was very evident in her. I don’t own it. I didn’t invent it. But I can see it.”
Feature Image and Story Images of Bill Pullman and Julia Stiles by Craig Schwartz.
