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Two Actors, of Two Ages, in Search of One Character
by Matt Wolf
New York Times
May 20, 2001
Do they think they look alike? The actors Richard Easton and Robert Sean Leonard, both smiling, took a minute to size each other up before leaping in with a response.
Mr. Leonard: "Well, we are actually about the same height" slightly over six feet.
Mr. Easton: "And sort of shape" he laughed "though I've begun to fill out."
Playing the older version of Mr. Leonard's youthful self in Tom Stoppard's "Invention of Love," Mr. Easton said, "I just thicken my eyebrows, and that's it oh, and try and pretend that my nose goes slightly the other way."
Two weeks ago, Mr. Easton, 68, and Mr. Leonard, 32, were nominated for Tony Awards for, respectively, best actor and best featured actor in "The Invention of Love." Their play has been nominated in three other categories, including best play. It has also won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award as the season's best.
In "The Invention of Love," Mr. Stoppard poses the sort of conceit that, one could argue, happens frequently on screen: an older character is presented whose younger self is seen in flashbacks so that the audience can compare now to then. But while the theater, in its turn, has thrived on a character's public persona set against his private one as in Brian Friel's "Philadelphia, Here I Come!" or Alan Bennett's "Lady in the Van" Mr. Stoppard's script demands of its two principal actors something rather different.
Mr. Easton must enact the 77-year-old A. E. Housman, , the British poet and classicist, as he thinks back on his life from beyond the grave. (In Mr. Stoppard's whimsical view of things, A.E.H. as the elder Housman is referred to in the play's text for purposes of differentiation is first glimpsed preparing to be ferried to the underworld across the River Styx.) But scarcely has Mr. Easton embarked on some of the most luxuriant passages in even Mr. Stoppard's distinguished career when a fresh-faced, nattily dressed Mr. Leonard appears as Housman, which is to say A.E.H. as he was as an Oxford undergraduate and in the years immediately thereafter.
Both men are impressive separately and together, especially in comparison with the original and altogether different 1997 London production at the Royal National Theater, which mostly seemed a vehicle for the prodigious A.E.H. of the actor John Wood.
Reviewing the New York premiere in March in The New York Times, Ben Brantley praised the play's "bright, lambent wit," adding that "Mr. Easton and Mr. Leonard, playing the different ages of one man, provide vital portraits that haunt even as they entertain."
In casting the current Lincoln Center Theater production at the Lyceum Theater, the director Jack O'Brien said he was keen to consider the home team. "I must confess, I'm fairly nationalistic," Mr. O'Brien said. "I really think our actors are every bit as good" as the British, "if not in certain instances better. I don't like not considering our own talent in deference to theirs."
Still, how do you play two halves of a whole? Or suggest a continuum of intellectual inquiry, classical scholarship and brilliance and, yes, erotic grief, as both the young Housman and his older self reckon with the disquieting sense of loss inherent in living in the mind and not the body? ("My life," says the voluble A.E.H., "was marked by long silences.")
"I have my own performance and Richard has his," said Mr. Leonard, joining Mr. Easton backstage for interviews with the actors. "What an audience takes from those two, I'm only half responsible for. I can't imagine what it adds up to in their minds."
The point, said Mr. Easton, speaking in a dressing room adorned with photos of himself from plays at the same theater in the late 1960's, is that "we're playing what did happen and what could have happened."
Mr. Leonard (who portrays Housman from the ages of 18 to 26): "I play him to a certain point, which is heartbreak and solitude a withdrawal from, I think, intimacy with others and Richard plays him from then on."
Mr. Easton: "You can read this play in terms of its cleverness and its literary qualities, like Shakespeare. But if you suddenly read it for the play and what's actually there behind the words, then you begin to see what will happen if you play the scenes from behind the text."
What a theatergoer may find is that A.E.H., even in death, is haunted by a fellow student, an athlete named Moses Jackson, who unwittingly took over and perhaps even consumed Housman's life. "I would have died for you but I never had the luck!" A.E.H. calls out early on to Jackson, who turned away from Housman's entreaties and ultimately married. And so the poet's passion was deflected toward such classical love elegists as Catullus and Propertius. Scholarship, he says at one point, became "my sand castle against the confounding sea."
Like Mr. Easton, Mr. Leonard was not deterred by the play's high-minded, quote-heavy text. "The cry in this play is so You almost want to say primordial," he said. "It's Cyrano, the love of Cyrano that thing of: `All right, all right; I'm fine here. I just want to be near you.' It's that thing you want more than anything for no good reason." And that Housman never found.
Mr. Easton: "One of the nice surprises of our production is that it's not pedantry."
Mr. Leonard laughed. "My accountant called me today and said, `Talk me through it before I go.' And I said, `You're being so silly about this.' "
Speaking of "Arcadia," a previous Stoppard play in which Mr. Leonard appeared at Lincoln Center in 1995, the actor said: "The last thing I worried about was the chaos mathematics, because Tom writes that stuff better than anybody. When I explained iterated algorithms in `Arcadia,' I could feel people just leaning forward, it's so beautifully written."
And what of "The Invention of Love"?
Mr. Leonard: "People imagine us having entire scenes in Latin"
Mr. Easton: "Or that they're missing out on something."
But, said Mr. Easton, by way of comparison: "Most of the jokes in Shakespeare are not meant to be good jokes. They're meant to be character laughs, and so it works on that level, and the same is true of this. Most of the Latin jokes work because there are these preeny, peacocky people saying these things that are supposed to be funny, and you laugh because that's funny, not because the line is."
At the same time, both men acknowledged that they had initially been unsure about the play's viability for New York audiences. "I didn't think it would go, at the very first," Mr. Easton said.
Mr. Leonard described being handed the script three years ago by his girlfriend, who is studying for her doctorate in classics at Columbia University. "I read it and thought (a) my girlfriend's an alien because I don't know what she's laughing at, and (b) if people thought `Arcadia' was tough, I mean, math and science are a lot more readily understandable than the classics and Oxford and Jowett and Ruskin."
In the end, he said, he realized that "you have to find the love the romance, I guess in it." Compared with "Arcadia," he added, "this is a much more romantic play."
It is also a showcase for two performers who, though more than a generation apart, are both undeniable theater animals.
Born in Montreal to a Canadian father and an English mother, Mr. Easton is among the few actors to have played all three Stratfords: in Ontario, Connecticut and the English Cotswolds. While he has been in New York for the last 18 months, he spent the decade before that "living on the beach in San Diego" and acting mostly at that city's Old Globe Theater now known as the Globe under the leadership of Mr. O'Brien.
It was there that he and Mr. Leonard first worked together, playing Gloucester and Edgar which is to say father and son in a production of "King Lear," with Hal Holbrook in the title role.
"I'm a company man, really," Mr. Easton said. "I don't have the temperament for stardom. It doesn't interest me; myself doesn't interest me. I've always said I would much rather play Gloucester than Lear" he smiled "because it's a better part."
Mr. Leonard began his career Off Broadway at 15, as the understudy for Chad Lowe in a play at the Public Theater. By age 17 he was appearing with Sir Derek Jacobi in the Broadway premiere of "Breaking the Code." In between he was, by his reckoning, Broadway's fifth Eugene Matthew Broderick's original role in Neil Simon's "Brighton Beach Memoirs." Along the way, films inevitably beckoned, some higher profile "Dead Poets Society" in 1989 than others.
Mr. Leonard can currently be seen playing what he called "a Jerry Maguire-like sports agent" in the Sylvester Stallone movie "Driven." (He said he had yet to see the finished product.) Indeed, if he weren't onstage at the moment, he would be at the Cannes Film Festival, accompanying his friend Ethan Hawke to the premiere of "Chelsea Walls," which Mr. Hawke directed. The cast includes Natasha Richardson, Uma Thurman (Mr. Hawke's wife) and Mr. Leonard.
But both Mr. Leonard and Mr. Easton seem pleased to be on Broadway in each other's company, as well as Mr. Stoppard's, and to be candidates for Tonys, no matter how momentary and ephemeral awards hoopla can be.
"I like acting," Mr. Easton said, "and I like good acting, and it's very nice to get awards." He grinned in Mr. Leonard's direction: "It's thrilling, really, because Bobby was willing to pretend to be a supporting player."
Mr. Leonard looked down bashfully. "I feel really, really proud and happy for Tom," Mr. Leonard said of Mr. Stoppard. "I know how important Broadway is to him, how important New York is to him. Obviously, if you're not involved, awards are just ridiculous, but when they nominate you, it's so great."
