Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [40]
By Christmas, Lola was pregnant. The discovery triggered some understandable economic anxiety—and also a breakthrough. Watching Redford rehearse a piece on the ANTA stage one afternoon in December, the instructor Richard Altman saw “a suddenness, like an exhalation of breath. Bob had been struggling for eighteen months. But it stopped abruptly. It was a revelation. He wasn’t fighting himself anymore. Exceptional stress can inspire exceptional art.”
The transformation, says Redford, occurred in a workshop for Arthur Miller’s All My Sons. Altman had assigned Redford the role of the son, and a much older man named Harry was to play the father. Altman sent both to the greenroom to rehearse the last scene of the second act, when the son confronts the father about manufacturing shoddy aircraft parts that caused the death of his brother. “Harry had all the lines and was so full of nervous tics and orders about how to proceed,” says Redford. “I had just a few words, where I scream at the father, ‘Don’t you live in the world? Where do you live all day!’—and then I pound him back into his chair. At that point, Harry instructed me to be careful of his suit, because he had to go back to his day job after the workshop.” When they started performing, Redford focused on what Harry had warned him about: Be careful, don’t damage my suit. “When the time came for me to pound him into his chair,” says Redford, “I leaped at him, grabbed him by the neck and flung him across the stage. He crumpled up under a table. I felt instant remorse and shame. And Altman said, ‘All right, thank you. Who do we have next?’ ” Backstage, Harry confronted Redford in tears, accusing him of inexcusable behavior. “I told him, ‘You’re right, I apologize, it was inexcusable,’ and I thought at that moment that acting was finished for me. I was ready to walk out of the theater and never look back. But Altman called me aside and said, ‘Don’t apologize. I think I know where you are going with this, and we’ll talk more tomorrow. Just keep going with it.’ ”
Two school plays were to be performed after Christmas, Chekhov’s The Seagull and Jean Anouilh’s Antigone. In The Seagull Redford was cast as Konstantin Treplev, and he was not keen on director Francis Lettin’s interpretation of the role. The drama starts with a play within a play, when Treplev stages a dense symbolist show to impress his mother, the famous actress Arkadina. She laughs at him, and he storms off. “Lettin saw my character as a wounded, soft, desiccated boy,” Redford remembers. “I disagreed. This was a radical work, designed to knock down the barriers of melodrama. I saw in Treplev insanity, passion and anger. Most of all, I saw incestuous desire. This is a young man who secretly wants to take his mother to bed, to win her affection. All this anger and physicality was comfortable to me, and I started playing Treplev that way, which Lettin didn’t like at all. I was physical, I stomped around the stage, I was a caged animal, stifled by my incestuous thoughts.”
Redford rehearsed in Central Park, walking down Broadway, riding in cars—“never at home. I needed emotional isolation to brew the part, and I did it in a state of purposeful agitated movement, working up steam.” When he was primed, Redford rehearsed with another student, Ellen Siccama, concentrating on sexual chemistry, but both Frances Fuller and Lettin opposed him. “Lettin kept calling me to a halt. ‘Why are you moving around there? What is that supposed to achieve?’ And then, at the last minute, he did an