“There is a law. The law is clear. Fugitive slaves must be
returned to their owners.”
So says General Benjamin Franklin Butler to runaway
Virginian slave Shepard Mallory. Mallory is seeking refuge in the Union fort
Butler commands in the heart of Virginia. Less than 24 hours earlier, Virginia
had formally seceded from the United States.
As playwright Richard Strand suggests in his play BEN
BUTLER, things aren’t nearly as “clear” for Butler as he’d initially imagined. Butler
may later say to Mallory that “everything is fine like it is.” But throughout
Strand’s play, both the law and life itself prove otherwise, springing
surprises that will forever alter the script Butler inherited – while making
him a pivotal player during one of the most significant dramas in all of American
history.
With a hefty assist from Mallory, both Butler and his
adjutant – Lieutenant Kelly – eventually open their hearts to the prospect that
they might play their scenes in that history differently. Strand approached his
play with a similarly open mind. “It is hard for me in retrospect,” he said
during a March 2016 interview in American Theatre magazine, “to be sure what I
had in mind when I wrote the play.”
For trained lawyers like Butler, soldiers like Kelly – and,
yes, theatre artists like Strand – moving forward often involves summoning the
courage to be uncertain or even lost. Straying from the path opens one to new
ways of seeing. It frees the mind of the rituals and conventions that lead us
to trace increasingly narrow circles. And it’s integral to how the phenomenally
talented Michael Cotey approaches directing, as he’s making clear once again in
directing Milwaukee Chamber Theatre’s production of BEN BUTLER.
Multiple Choice(s) .
. .
I spent time with Michael and his cast during the second
week of BUTLER rehearsals.
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| Michael Cotey (left) and the cast of BEN BUTLER: Marques Causey, Drew Brhel, Chase Stoeger, and David Sapiro. |
The cast’s initial three days of invaluable table work –
during which they’d explored the historical background to Strand’s play, as
well as what makes their respective characters tick – were now behind them. Full
runs of the play – during which the cast starts from the top of the show and
works all the way through to the end – were still ahead of them.
The rehearsals I attended occupied that unsettling but also
exciting middle period during which actors were first on their feet, immersing
themselves fully in each scene while playing with everything from where they
moved to when and how Mallory nudged Butler and Kelly toward a moral awakening.
Does that awakening happen for both men all at once, like an
epiphany? Or did they – like most of us whose nagging conscience natters away
at us even as we stubbornly continue to sleepwalk – gradually stumble toward a
new dawn?
In challenging his actors to answer such questions, Michael
urged them to exercise what Keats once referred to as “negative capability”:
opening their minds to the many ways one might play a scene, without
prematurely feeling compelled to choose one of them. Actors understandably want
to lock down how long they hold a beat, how to inflect a line, and when to move
in on a scenic partner; at some point they must do these things so that a
production can cohere.
But just over one week into the rehearsal process, Michael
was in no rush for his actors to get there. Doing so risked overlooking
possible solutions to a scenic problem – just as Butler risked missing a legal
and practical solution to the dilemma posed by runaway slaves if he assumed he already
knew all the answers.
Butler, like the actors embodying this story, needed to take time to ask questions. Was he just going to interpret history? Or would he be an agent who might change it?
. . . And Alternative
Histories
During the two full days I watched rehearsal, Michael
repeatedly sidestepped his four actors’ attempts to pin down how they should play
a particular moment.
“Just try something,” he said to them, more than once. Pick
a place to stand or move, he’d suggest, without specifying the specific line
where it should happen. He and his cast played with adding comic bits – in a
script that includes a generous helping of humor – which he freely admitted he
might later take out. Michael encouraged the cast to use as much of the stage
as possible, while conscious that at some point they’d need to make definitive
choices involving direction and space.
“Everyone right now should be trying all the choices that
come to them and seeing how they play out,” Michael said to me during a pre-rehearsal
chat in MCT’s conference room.
“Actors sometimes stop themselves midstream and then back up
because they’re afraid of making the wrong choice and are trying too early to
make the right one,” Michael continued. “I want actors right now to be making
choices that may feel wrong, but that then cascade into other choices we might
have otherwise never known are possible. And even if one makes a choice that
ultimately doesn’t make sense, it can help us figure out what the right choice
is.”
Michael emphasized that as a director, he himself regularly
makes midstream adjustments, as he tries to practice what he preaches to his
actors: remaining open to the hidden possibilities within a script. A moment. A
performance. A life.
“You think you know what you want, but then you see your
actors rehearsing the play and you learn more about what the play is,” he said.
“You’re also learning how the actors in your cast work, and what’s the best way
to speak with each of them about what you see.
“I often feel full of BS in the early stages of rehearsal,
because I know I’ll adjust what I’m saying and how we’ll proceed, based on
things I see in the room. That’s why, in the first few weeks of rehearsal, I
don’t like giving my cast an ultimate destination or saying ‘this is what
you’ve got to do.’ I want them to figure some of that out for themselves. I
want us to figure that out together.”
Much as Butler does, with the help of Shepard Mallory and
Lieutenant Kelly.
For what’s true in Michael’s rehearsal room is also true of
the characters these actors play in BUTLER: By recognizing that history is
contingent and messy rather than preordained, we can better appreciate and more
fully inhabit each minute of the present, while leaving ourselves available to
the full potential of the future.
“So many possibilities,” George says at the end of
Sondheim’s SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE. For “every second of time,” as Walter
Benjamin once wrote, could be “the strait gate through which the Messiah might
enter.” One just need open’s one eyes. And see.
Even as Raether attests that plotting
is the most difficult part of her playwriting process, she praises
Wodehouse for his ability to craft an airtight, improbable sequence
of events and seeks to nail that spirit of screwball comedy in her
own work. "My favorite word to write is 'pandemonium,'" she
shares. "It's in all of my scripts. It's good to be on
hand for the first production because then I can help work out what
happens. 'What do you want here?' I'm asked.
'Pandemonium!' I say."
Estrada and Raether both reflect on
that delicious retreat-the safety and dazzle of Wodehouse's
fictional England-when I speak with them. "It was such a
strange time," laughs Estrada. "They had money and nothing to
do, so they could collect weird things and have bizarre passions
and pursuits. What does Madeline do? Nothing."
The worst of Madeline's travails are in firming up to whom she's
engaged. Raether muses, "I've always been fascinated by the
fact that during a tremendous depression-people didn't resent
movies about this kind of thing. They didn't want to burn
down the cinema. For them, it was fun to visit a world where
everyone wears those divine gowns to dinner." Her reflection
takes the analysis one step further. "Perhaps it isn't just
the clothes or the social status. In fact, there is perhaps
something satisfying about the fabulously wealthy getting into a
tizzy, into fabulously ridiculous predicaments."