HaRRy cLaRke
In a 2018 interview for Audible, actor Billy Crudup, director Leigh Silverman, and playwright David Cale discussed with Vineyard Theatre Co-Artistic Director Sarah Stern the process of imagining and embodying the world of Harry Clarke. The following excerpts have been edited for clarity and are reproduced with permission from Audible. DAVID ON WRITING THE PLAY:
It was written very intuitively, very instinctively. I was initially curious how it would be if I started a show with the line, “I could always do an immaculate English accent,” because I was doing shows in places that some people knew who I was, and I thought it would tilt the whole thing, that, suddenly — “Is he not actually English?” Philip and Harry led the story, and I just kind of wrote it down. It was written out loud, and it sort of took on a life of its own. BILLY ON TAKING IT ON:
One of the things that is extremely exciting about being an actor is getting opportunities to do things that you feel like are beyond you, in a way. So, there’s no question from the first line, “I could always do an immaculate English accent,” which I can’t, this is going to be a really huge challenge. And then, the story — there was something to me that struck me emotionally about Philip’s story, and about his search for intimacy and connection to people and how contorted it became and despite the lack of an emotional base he had, he still tried in every way he knew how to connect to other people. And that to me seemed like a very human story, and the more contorted it got the more human it became to me. And so, I responded to those things initially. BILLY ON LEIGH SILVERMAN:
I had seen Leigh’s work for a very long time. The New York theatre commu10 | THE BERKELEY REP MAGAZINE
LEIGH ON DIRECTING SOLO WORK:
It’s so interesting in a play, because really you are building towards a conflict between people onstage, usually more than one person, and in a solo show the conflict is between a person and themselves. And so figuring out how to mine that conflict so that it feels like drama, so that it feels like a piece of theatre, and articulating that, and being able to have someone smart enough to understand what that conflict is and how to do that, is I kind of feel like my job as the director. And to work with somebody like David, who has been a solo performer for many years and is in fact one of our great, great, great solo performers, to take the material he’s written and to give it to arguably the greatest actor in the American theatre, it’s like, yeah, sign me up. DAVID ON WORKING WITH BILLY:
There wa s a rea l ly wonderf ul moment when we first met in the room — because I’m really instinctive, and I really trust my instincts, by and large, and I trust them over my brain, by far — and when we first came together, and Billy jumped in and just read it, and I thought we’re just going to talk about it, and Billy just jumped in — and I thought to myself, "This is why you listen to your instincts. This is it." It was really a beautiful moment for me, personally. BILLY ON ENTERING THE PLAY:
Trying to enter [Cale’s] world, which is kind of one of the things you do as
PHOTO: PHOTO:CAROL LIAM ALEXANDER ROSEGG
CREATING THE WORLD OF
nity is a small community and kind of gets smaller the older you get, so the people you want to populate your experience within the theatre gets clearer and clearer — the people you want to collaborate with, the people you don’t want to collaborate with, and these were three that just felt like the perfect environment for me to try to get to do something I’ve never done before and to hopefully grow and learn and change as an artist and all those things.
