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 t h e a t r e

OnStage, May 02

Dennis Cunningham interviewed Alan Bates and Frank Langella in late May 2002, on the TV1 cable program "OnStage." The interview was about 7 minutes long.

Alan appeared on the Rosie O'Donnell Show Thursday, 4 April 2002, to talk about "Fortune's Fool." The interview was about 5 minutes long.

The New York Times
31 March 2002

WHEN ACTORS face off, the results can be as stimulating to them as to the audience. In "Fortune's Fool," adapted from a play by Ivan Turgenev and opening on Tuesday at the Music Box Theater on Broadway, Alan Bates and Frank Langella portray antagonists. They talked about their roles recently with Barry Singer; here are excerpts.
 
FRANK LANGELLA There aren't that many plays where two actors of a certain age get to play characters so challenging and equally exciting in such different ways.

ALAN BATES Mr. Turgenev just wrote two wonderful guys. Although they have different natures - one is a child, a baby, and the other is a snake, a great charmer.

LANGELLA Yet they balance beautifully. Mine demands that I bring out the absolute worst in my nature. While Alan must bring out the very best in his.

BATES We're constantly flirting with our parts, aren't we?

LANGELLA And even when we do finally decide that this is it--

BATES "It" is still only a loose framework.

LANGELLA Our director, Arthur Penn, encourages this.

BATES Sometimes, though, one of us will jump a line and neither of us can tolerate ever missing a laugh.

LANGELLA Just the other night, Alan jumped one of my best laughs. So I went back and I got the laugh in, even though he saw what I was doing and insisted on talking through it. We wound up with a minute and a half of exquisite improvisation.

BATES Yes, it was. Extremely funny.

LANGELLA Kept within the framework of the play at all times.

BATES Yes! We didn't leave the play at all.

LANGELLA We never talk about it much.

BATES Well, we do after. We sometimes have a very brief analysis afterward.

LANGELLA We give each other notes. Which I think is very rare.

BATES Many actors get their feathers ruffled so easily. It's difficult to talk directly.

LANGELLA We really do want the best for each other; as great as he is, it makes me greater, and the other way around. We're both smart enough to know that.

BATES There are plays where the parts fight each other.

LANGELLA These could! These parts could, in two other hands, I think.

BATES Careful, Frank.

LANGELLA We'll see who takes over for you, dear. It'll probably be me.

BATES We could exchange parts. I am tempted.

LANGELLA You love my character.

BATES I love his character. I don't love his more than I love mine. But I do love his.

LANGELLA And I like his. But I also know what's required of him. It's very different from what's required of me. Much tougher.

BATES It took a long time for me to enjoy it. The circumstances that my character, Kuzovkin, is in are very alarming. Deeply sad. Yet often hilariously funny.

LANGELLA Why is my character, Tropatchov, so cruel to him? I have a very specific reason. But it's my secret. I've imagined all sorts of dark things. I know Alan must too. But if you give those things away, if they get into the ether, you never get them back.

BATES I know some Tropatchovs and I know, less, but I know a few Kuzovkins.

LANGELLA Yes, in our own business. There are four or five very famous theater people who are Tropatchov.

BATES I hope we haven't given too much away. I'm sort of jealous of this play. It was written 150 years ago and nobody's seen it. And I sort of want to keep it to myself until we're absolutely ready.

LANGELLA Well, we have managed to get through the entire interview without saying that we love each other. We have managed to keep that to ourselves.

BATES Yes, that is remarkable. |||  

Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company

New York Daily News, April 2, 2002 -- "ACTORS TALKING about acting can be so terribly pretentious. Sometimes I read an article about myself and I think, 'Oh, no! Not again. Please don't say all that again.' "
With this, Bates produces an overt acting gesture, pitching forward while grasping his forehead so as to shield his eyes from words on an imagined page.
Just a bit of fun on a day when the 68-year-old British star, most recently on film in "Gosford Park," is at the ready in his dressing room at the Music Box Theater to talk about - what else? - acting.
He and Frank Langella are in previews with "Fortune's Fool," an adaptation, opening tonight, of a little-known 1848 play, "A Poor Gentleman," by the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev.

Bates' role is that of the broken-down Kuzovkin, who for 30 years has been living off the largesse of the Petrovna family. As the play opens, he is awaiting the arrival of the estate's heiress, Olga (Enid Graham), and her new husband. His fear is that he cannot depend on their continued kindness. Indeed, a neighbor (Langella) humiliates him in front of the couple. Stung and drunk, Kuzovkin reveals a dire secret.
The play proceeds in high drama - one carefully managed by director Arthur Penn, who won a Tony in 1960 for "The Miracle Worker" but who has worked primarily in movies, including 1967's "Bonnie and Clyde."
Playing Olga's husband is Benedick Bates. Father and 31-year-old son are reprising the roles, having appeared in the play, adapted by Michael Poulton, in England in 1996. The two have worked together four times in all.
"We don't bring our relationship into it. We're just actors," says Bates. "We give each other notes. But I do enjoy it."
Bates has had many famous moments, including the nude wrestle with Oliver Reed in Ken Russell's 1969 "Women in Love" ("I look back on it fondly, much more fondly than when we were doing it") and his major introduction to U.S. audiences.

He emerged in 1956 from "Look Back in Anger," the John Osborne play that roughed up British theater, with a full-blown career on stage (Harold Pinter's "The Caretaker"), film ("Zorba the Greek" and "Georgy Girl") and television ("The Mayor of Casterbridge"). Bates won a Tony in the 1973 production of Simon Gray's "Butley."
He has been accused of resisting conventional stardom, but he says that's not the case. "Perhaps it's that I have a perverse streak," he says. "I just try to follow whatever part touches me. Although there were certain areas of fame I resisted. You don't want to be taken over by a machine."
In 1990, Bates was taken over by personal loss. Benedick's twin, actor Tristan, died at 19 of an allergic reaction. Two years later, Bates' wife, actress and journalist Victoria Ward, died of heart failure.
"You think, I'll go on and I'll enjoy what I do and I'll do it very often for their sake and in their name," says Bates, who established the Tristan Bates Theatre at London's Actors Centre.
He says he has no idea of what he'll move on to. If "Fortune's Fool" is a success, there's a film adaptation in the works.
"That's what I hope will happen. If not, I tend not to plan," Bates says. "I really don't want to know much about what happens next." |||

New York Post, March 31, 2002 -- DURING A preview performance of "Fortune's Fool," starring Alan Bates and Frank Langella, a door on the set closed with such force that a chandelier fell down.
There it lay on the floor. No one knew what to do. The actors stepped gamely around it, ignoring the glittering distraction until the man who plays Langella's toady entered the room.
"Do mind the chandelier!" Langella announced in perfect ad-lib. "Better still, get rid of it!" The other actor complied, the audience applauded - and the stage was clear again.
"If something goes wrong, I [ad-lib]," Langella told The Post. "It's like the 800-pound gorilla - you'd be a fool to ignore it. If the audience sees it, there should be some way to deal with it in a way that seems intelligent or funny.
"Hopefully, funny."
You might not think "funny" is his forte, given that some of Langella's finest performances have been in dark roles (the amoral lover in 1970's "Diary of a Mad Housewife," the sexiest "Dracula" to draw blood on Broadway and the cut-throat White House chief of staff in "Dave").
But in "Fortune's Fool," an adaptation of the 19th-century Turgenev comedy opening Tuesday at Broadway's Music Box Theater, Langella has 'em howling as an over-the-top fop.

His Flegont Alexandrovitch Tropatchov is a flamboyant, French-spouting aristocrat, a snob who sums up winter in St. Petersburg with a withering, "Darkness, slush . . . all that fur!"
But underneath the pomp is a poisonous agenda - and Langella says he knew just how to play it.
"This is a man who, like so many people in my profession, feeds off the misfortunes of others," he said evenly. "He uses their weaknesses against them, he finds an Achilles heel and goes in for the kill . . .
"He's venal and contemptuous, and he has all the cushions people like that need: lots of money, employees who depend on him and will do what he asks, no conscience and no morality.
"There are so many people in my profession like that," Langella continued. "It lends itself to extraordinary, one-of-a-kind great people, but it's also filled with people who are unscrupulous, quite without morality."
Will he name names? Of course not.
Instead, sitting in the back room at a restaurant near the theater, he simply shook his head and rearranged the cutlery.
At 62, the Bayonne, N.J.-born actor is still a strikingly handsome man. His hair is white, but his dark eyes and full lips look as sensual as ever. Even so, he wouldn't let The Post take his picture, because he dislikes candid photos.

Still, he is gracious, especially when talking about Alan Bates, who plays the man Flegont seems determined to undo.
"It's perfection," Langella said. "He's a first-rate actor and a first-rate guy, as is his son" - Benedick Bates, who's also in the cast.
"It's a very congenial and happy company, and that isn't always the case. Lots of actors say we're a big happy family when they're cutting each other's throats."
That might sound surprisingly bitter from a man who's won nearly a dozen theater awards (a Tony and four Drama Desks among them), though never an Oscar.
He said he missed "99 percent" of last week's Oscar broadcast, though he did catch Denzel Washington's win for Best Actor, something Langella calls "very pleasing. I think he's a first-rate actor."
But ask him about show host Whoopi Goldberg - his companion for five years, until a few years ago - or, for that matter, who he's seeing now, and those dark eyes flash.
"Don't go there," he intoned.
Only a fool - or an 800-pound gorilla - would dare. |||

Copyright 2002 NYP Holdings, Inc. All rights reserved.

Frank Langella, Arthur Penn and Alan Bates. Photo by Richard P. Pheneger,
courtesy of Anarene Barr, Board Member, Stamford Center for the Arts

`Fool' Lures Director Back To Broadway
February 20, 2002
By RON DICKER, Special to The Courant

NEW YORK -- The 79-year-old director Arthur Penn said he will retire "when I'm absolutely stiff in a box." In the meantime, he wants to teach Broadway a thing or two.
Penn, who won a Tony in 1960 for "The Miracle Worker," has not worked on Broadway in 20 years. It has taken a comedy by Ivan Turgenev called "Fortune's Fool" to bring him back. The play has its tryout at Stamford's Rich Forum from Friday to March 3 before its scheduled opening in New York on April 8.
Penn, a slight man with gray wavy hair and cloudy blue eyes, toyed with a miniature of the "Fortune's Fool" set recently in a rehearsal space on West 43rd Street. In a brief interview, his reason for taking on the rarely staged work of a 19th-century Russian writer became clear: because a dumbed-down Broadway needs it.
"What I think we've been missing in the theater for quite a number of years are plays of a certain substance and an intellectual complexity and beauty," he said. "And this one has it."

Penn has British actor Alan Bates to help him in his mission. Bates, who has not performed on Broadway since his Tony-winning turn in 1972's "Butley," is reprising his "Fortune's Fool" role as Kuzovkin from a production staged at the Chichester Festival in England.
Kuzovkin is a nobleman by circumstance. He was taken in by a wealthy family as a kind of court jester and has lived alone on their estate since the man of the house died. When the man's daughter returns home with her new husband to claim the inheritance, Kuzovkin fears he will be evicted. Frank Langella plays a boorish neighbor who gets Kuzovkin drunk, leading to the revelation that Kuzovkin might be the heiress' real father.
Turgenev wrote "Fortune's Fool" in 1848, creating the better-known "A Month in the Country" six years later. This production is from an adaptation by Mike Poulton.
"I think it's important to keep a very high standard of classical work," Penn said. "The proven great writers of the past - it's all there: the density, the richness, the thought. You can't afford not to give that to each generation."

Penn and Bates see hope for Broadway beyond "Fortune's Fool." Both mentioned works by two of America's greatest living playwrights joining Turgenev on Broadway. Edward Albee's "The Goat, Or Who Is Sylvia?" will have its premiere March 10 and Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" began its run last week.
Enid Graham, a Tony nominee for "Honour" and also from the Hartford Stage Company's "Enchanted April," plays the heiress Olga in "Fortune's Fool." She is far too young to qualify for curmudgeon status, but she says a little culture couldn't hurt.
"It's so wonderful to try to find some way to find a living, breathing human being under the clothes, the language, underneath the formality of the time," she said. "And if you can do that even for a minute, it's so exciting. Then it really is like history coming to life."
Penn himself is history come to life. He began his career schlepping cue cards for Milton Berle, honed his directing skills in the Golden Age of Television, and then earned three Academy Award nominations for best director in the 1960s with an adaptation of "The Miracle Worker," "Bonnie and Clyde" and "Alice's Restaurant."
The last movie he directed, an apartheid drama called "Inside," was in 1996. His last Broadway play was a sequel to "The Miracle Worker" called "Monday After the Miracle" (1982), which closed in four days.
"I never left Broadway," he said. "Broadway sort of bored me."
In recent years, he served as president of the Actors Studio and developed a graduate theater program at the New School in Manhattan. Hollywood is no longer on his itinerary.
"I'm not knocked out by the movies that they're making," he said. "I miss frankly what we have here, which is a play of substance. And it's very hard to get a movie of substance made." |||