Creating the World of 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 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 community 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.

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 was a really wonderful 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 an actor when you get material is you try to enter the world of the storyteller so that you know what piece of the story — are you going to be the good guy, are you going to be the bad guy, are you going to be the confused person — and getting into David’s head is a whole different scenario. There are things that are going on simultaneously as a storyteller and as characters in the world that are a challenge for my brain, that’s not the way I typically operate. I don’t operate as a dramaturg usually. I count on rehearsals to be the period where you shape the story and then you get onstage, and you try to create an event with the other actors. Having to be the dramaturg at the same time, kind of pick up on where the story needs momentum now, what the audience is getting, what they’re not getting, that’s a whole new thing, so I’m learning a lot.

LEIGH ON CREATING THE WORLD ON STAGE:

My idea, that the designers and I worked towards, was creating a space that was — kind of immediately put the audience at ease, like, “Oh I know what this place is, I know what it looks like, it’s a deck, or it’s a —.” For me, the nightmare of going to see a solo show is that you walk in and it’s like a stool and, like, a rack with hats. [David Cale: That’s my last show!] ’Cause you’re just like “Oh God.” And so, I wanted to create a space that — except for David’s shows. [DC: I can pull a hat rack off.] Yeah, you sure can. But I wanted to create a space that felt like something, and that transformed over the course of the night the way that the character did.

BILLY ON PERFORMING ALONE:

Anytime you put yourself in an unfamiliar environment, you know, it can be unnerving and unsettling, that’s one of the reasons you do it. Out of that you force yourself to change, because you’re scared, most of the time. So, most of the process was a scary process, because this is a beautiful story when you read it insofar as a piece of drama. But then when you get to the practical part of how one performs that, it’s totally new terrain for me. I’ve spent most of my career putting a wall up right there, for sure, anytime I get freaked out onstage, the mandate is you look at the person who is onstage with you and you be like, “We’re in this together, right?” Like that is how I know how to recover. And so, the first number of weeks onstage, these two were so supportive, they would kind of be, like, “Okay, go ahead, it’s okay, go out there, we’re here, we’re just offstage, it’s fine, you’ll be fine.” And I come back offstage afterwards and I’m like [panting] “What happened?” Full-on blackout. So, you know, I don’t even know how to begin to describe how many things I’ve learned, but the one thing that has been thrilling is that I wanted to create and collaborate with these guys. And this performance you see, despite it being just me onstage, is the three of us, working together for months, trying to orchestrate what creates a small hour and 20 minutes of theatre for people.”

To listen to the complete interview and download the Audible Theater production of Harry Clarke, which also features a performance of Cale’s Obie Award-winning one-man show Lillian, starring the playwright himself, visit audible.com.