Full of sound and fury, signifying…?

Full of sound and fury and tics and tears and fear and loathing, signifying…?

The Untold Story of the Collyer Brothers is a memory play (it’s not realistic – it… represents) outlining the life and fall of local Harlem folk legends. The Collyer Brothers were recluses who over time quite literally filled their Harlem brownstone with 140 tons of Stuff. The elder brother, Homer, became blind and eventually paralyzed. His caretaker younger brother, Langley, cared for him and for The Collection, and served as the visible avatar of strangeness for a neighborhood that couldn’t stop staring until Langley was actually crushed by a part of the collection leaving Homer to starve. It is a tale of pure brotherly love spoiled by a brain unable to escape the traps strung around it.

I was part of a workshop reading of the Untold Story of the Collyer Brothers this summer. I enjoyed it very much. I found the emotional dynamics engaging, the brother’s relationship compelling and the framework sturdy. I got to read two versions of the play at that point, as the initial version I received was an older – bulkier- version than the slimmer version we were actually performing for the reading. We are closing a run of a new revision since that reading.

All of this to say I have sat in and around Langley Collyer for a lot of the last four months.

Once cast, I considered my brief for this show to be:

• Embody the spirit of Langley as he exists in the broader memory/dream world of Homer’s imagining.
• Pull the audience into the anxiety and paranoia that Langley was feeling so that they were empathetic to his fears as the story unfolds.
• Implicate the audience as they become the thing that is haunting the brothers so they feel – something – when it all collapses.
• Be as much of a pathos-engine as the text allows to drive through a sympathetic reading of the brother’s situation.
• Keep the play energized.

I believe that the best performances come from measured and calibrated dynamics.

Playing each scene at a energy/intensity of 10 and then at a 1, setting the possibilities, and then the team makes the decision for where one plays the final product from there.

Or in a show like the Collyer Brothers – what Langley’s arc looks like.

Structurally for Langley, we need to work backwards from The Outburst, the meltdown in the brothers’ interview with newspaper reporter (and eventual semi-biographer) Helen Worden, which is the Cannon Event in the Collyer Universe. Whatever the base dynamic range eventually set for the show, the Outburst needs to be a 9-10 and every other scene needs to be emotionally smaller for both the characters and the audience relative to it.

This was the root of how I failed this show. I pinned The Outburst at a hard 10, we all agreed that that was pretty scary, and we never readjusted the dynamic range of it to human scale. I committed early to the idea of Langley being part of the exploded dream world of representative, non-realistic, Second Sighted Homer – with the Outburst being The Nightmare.

I don’t think the thinking was wrong, I think my execution of it stretched the rest of Langley’s emotional arc into a broader representation than was intended and it ossified into the style of the show as others followed.

My subintention was for Langley’s arc to feel a little like a grenade with the pin pulled being lobbed about the room – or any given impending car crash. I think that shows in the graph – the ebbs and flows until the pin is pulled in the Meta Scene at the top of Act 2 to set him up for Outburst.

But the anxiety (of the character) and the fear and the paranoia left him as basically three neuroses in a trench coat rather than as something human to relate to. Rather than embrace him, the audience mostly stayed at a remove. There is simply too much energy in the performance for it to ever be approachable. Even when folks want to approach they don’t know where to start.¹ The Outburst is horrifying but at the cost of the rest of the dynamic spectrum.

So how’d I do?

• Embody the spirit of Langley as he exists in the broader memory/dream world of Homer’s imagining.
  • I think this worked for certain versions of dream world. Maybe even this one.
  • 10/20
• Pull the audience into the anxiety and paranoia that Langley was feeling so that they were empathetic to his fears as the story unfolds.
  • I think this worked until The Outburst and then he becomes to obviously unwell to root for… ultimately unsuccessful.
  • 10/20
• Implicate the audience as they become the thing that is haunting the brothers so they feel – something – when it all collapses.
  • Complete failure. Langley is the monster here – not the external forces at work grinding at them.
  • 0/20
• Be as much of a pathos-engine as the text allows to drive through a sympathetic reading of the brother’s situation.
  • Complete failure. Every hurricane falls apart unmourned into the ocean at the end of every trip north. The quiet brotherly moment at the end gains a burble of sympathy for the brothers but…
  • 0/20
• Keep the play energized.
  • Sure.
  • 20/20

Outside of the disappointment of blown out emotional dynamics what did I succeed at?

Physicality
The range of physical sizes I played Langley at really worked I think. The amount of space he was taking up in each scene felt really responsive to his state in that moment. I also came to the show off of five years of playing glides and slashes and instead confining the rhythm and shape of gesture and gait to jabs and for true fear to inverted jabs felt specific to this moment and not generic actor movement.

Vocals
I was largely able to de-Shakespeare the vocals for the show. There were moments of regression, but they mostly called for it when they happened. I avoided New York vowels successfully. I was able to use a broad range of vocal dynamics suitable for the Evjue.

Repeatability
As ossified the show is emotionally and physically rigorous but it feels lived in and is still precisely repeatable.

The Core
I think folks liked Carl and I as brothers. I think we projected a relationship that stretched a great deal further into the past than having met in August.

All told – mostly I’ve come to think that in a larger talent pool this isn’t a role that would have come to me. I have been incredibly grateful that it did. I very much enjoyed the opportunity to play a different kind of role for a couple of months. I loved getting to stretch over the full emotional range in one project in order to cover the slalom course we set for the show.
I really loved getting to work with this group of humans.

I just wish I had delivered something a little more representative. I was able to sand down the raw explosion that he was when we opened a little by closing, but I wish that my choices left folks talking about the brothers, or the style of the text, or how great it is for a new maker in Madison to be making interesting new stuff instead talking the raw volume of emoting that I fit into 90 minutes.

No one wants to leave a show to the echoes of “you sure did do a lot of acting up there”.

I think that technically I said most of the words mostly in order signifying… nothing.

1. This is a very clever internal reference to the show. IYKYK ↩︎