NY Times Article about learning lines

Whispers Offstage? Could Be Actor’s Next Line
By PATRICK HEALY
Published: October 28, 2009
Ticket holders at this week’s first previews of Matthew Broderick’s new Off Broadway play have been privy to a second drama: watching the veteran theater actor try to learn his lines, with help from a prompter sitting in the front row.

Veteran stage actors, including Angela Lansbury, have used prompts as fallbacks.
In 2002, Vanessa Redgrave asked if she could have a prompter in the front row for “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”

Matt Mulhern said he was recently fired from a Hartford Stage theater production because he peeked at bits of dialogue.
The play, Kenneth Lonergan’s “Starry Messenger,” has been undergoing rewrites amid preview performances, and Mr. Broderick has struggled so much that he called out for lines multiple times on Monday and Tuesday nights. His offstage helper is expected to be on hand at least until this weekend.

The problems have led the show’s producer, the New Group, to delay opening night for a week; at the same time some audience members have complained about paying to see a star who has not memorized his part. Mr. Broderick was not available to comment, but Scott Elliott, artistic director of the New Group, said there was no shame in using a prompter. “It happens now and then,” he said, “but people simply don’t know about it.”

The stage and screen legend Angela Lansbury, for instance, said in an interview this week that she used an earpiece to stay on cue during her Tony Award-winning turn in “Blithe Spirit” on Broadway last season.

“It’s not something you ever want to do, but if we’re going to play important roles at our age, where our names are above the title on the marquee, we’re going to ask for some support if we need it,” said Ms. Lansbury, 84, who is set to star this winter in the Broadway revival of “A Little Night Music.”

But now the use of prompts has become a matter of inquiry for the Actors’ Equity union, which is investigating a recent dismissal by the Hartford Stage theater of an actor who peeked at bits of dialogue that he had taped inside his character’s hat for a difficult scene.

While opera companies have long had hidden prompters at the rim of the stage, many theater actors shudder at the idea of needing help with lines during performances. For them, mastery of a script is a benchmark of professionalism. Still, acting fallbacks have a long but largely unnoticed history in the theater. During the national tour of “Legends” in the 1980s, Mary Martin, who was in her 70s at the time, used an earpiece that also picked up taxi signals, according to published accounts.

In the Hartford Stage incident, the fired actor, Matt Mulhern, 49, was appearing in Horton Foote’s “Orphans’ Home Cycle,” a series of three plays over nine hours. Mr. Mulhern said he never received any warning from Hartford Stage that his job might be in jeopardy; “Orphans” is a co-production with Signature Theater Company in New York, where it is transferring next month.

In an interview, Mr. Mulhern described the prompt in his hat as a “crutch” that he relied on because of script changes during rehearsals. He said he had been “emotionally devastated” by his Sept. 22 dismissal, the first of his 27-year career. He also acknowledged he had “ruffled feathers” among colleagues for a variety of other reasons after rehearsals began in July.

Michael Wilson, the artistic director of Hartford Stage and director of “The Orphans’ Home Cycle,” declined to comment, saying the theater did not discuss employment issues. Maria Somma, a spokeswoman for Actors’ Equity, also declined to comment.

Hartford Stage has yet to give Equity a formal reason for firing Mr. Mulhern, according to the actor. Ms. Somma again would not comment on the matter.

“Actors being fired for this reason vary by the situation,” Harry Weintraub, general counsel of the League of Resident Theaters, which includes Hartford Stage, said in an interview. When asked if the production created hardships for actors because it spanned nine hours and included script changes, Mr. Weintraub said, “I wasn’t aware that Mr. Mulhern had nine hours of lines to learn.”

Actors’ Equity contracts do not forbid actors to use prompts, though directors sometimes fire actors who have trouble learning their lines. Robert Falls, the artistic director of the Goodman Theater in Chicago, said he had done so in the past. But he has also made adjustments, he said.

In 2002, for instance, Vanessa Redgrave was having “a stressful time learning the lines” for the role of Mary Tyrone in the Goodman’s production of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” Mr. Falls said. When previews began, she asked the producers and Mr. Falls if she could have a prompter in the front row with a script. Ms. Redgrave never called for a line, he said. She went on to win the Tony Award for best actress when the production transferred to Broadway in 2003.

“The prompter was more of a security blanket for Vanessa than anything else,” Mr. Falls said. A representative for Ms. Redgrave said she had no comment.

In the Broadway production of “The Gin Game” (1977-78), the characters played by Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn spent stretches of time playing gin rummy. The actors at first used randomly dealt cards with numbers that, naturally, did not match the dialogue. While the two spent extra hours drilling lines for the gin rummy sequences, they were both nearing 70 and had memory lapses.

“The initial solution for this was to pare down each scene, then write notes on the top of the card table” for the actors to refer to, said Nina Seely Sommer, the production supervisor for the show. “This was difficult, because the stage was raked so that the audience could see the top of the table, so these notes had to look like player graffiti.” Eventually the faces of the playing cards were sanded off, so the actors would not get confused.

Although prompters once played a part in theater, audiences are no longer accustomed to them. And with Broadway producers now charging $125 for orchestra seats, ticket buyers expect at a minimum that actors will know their parts. New wireless technology has made it easier for actors to mask, say, flesh-colored earpieces. Ms. Lansbury recalled that when she and Marian Seldes were on Broadway in Terrence McNally’s “Deuce” in 2007, a tiny speaker was behind their chairs in early performances to pipe lines to them if needed.

Ms. Lansbury emphasized, though, that neither the “Blithe Spirit” nor “Deuce” prompts diminished the productions — or audiences’ apparent pleasure.

“In the early days of theater, there was a ‘prompt corner’ with a person ready to throw the line to any actor,” Ms. Lansbury recalled. “In the electronic age, some 80-year-old performers wear earpieces. And all of us lose ourselves in a play at moments. Laurence Olivier did at the height of his career. This is part of theater.”

This season “A Steady Rain” is one of the most dialogue-driven plays on Broadway, with the actors Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig — who have extensive experience in the theater, not just movies — shouldering all 90 minutes of dialogue. A spokesman for the show said this week that neither man used prompts. Still, Mr. Jackman said in an interview in August that the amount of memorization was a tall order and that he and Mr. Craig even tossed a ball back and forth while running their lines.

“I hope we won’t have to use cue cards,” Mr. Jackman joked, then added, “It’s a slog to learn the whole script, but there’s no other way to do it.”