Photographs by David Nicolas
An Almost Holy Picture dramatizes one anguished man’s crisis of faith when his daughter faces a mysterious illness. But has it acquired additional meaning in a time of national reflection? Front & Center recently stopped by the rehearsal room to ask how the Roundabout company was approaching this introspective play.
Michael Mayer (director): For me, this play isn’t so much about faith as it is about personal possibility. That’s what I relate to, as I look at this play again and again, for the first time since I originally worked on it six years ago at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey. In light of the events in September, what strikes me is how significant Samuel’s interior journey is, how we must understand how complicit he is in the tragic events which are the play’s genesis. At this moment in American life, I personally was interested—in a global way, not just in terms of the play—in how important it is to examine the ways in which our actions have some effect on the nature of world events. How are we complicit, if at all? If we are complicit, how do we remedy that? Instead of looking outward all the time, what happens when we look inward, and ask how we can change?
It’s an old question: why do bad things happen to good people? Is it just bad luck, or do you participate in it in some way? Let me add: I personally have been thinking about this as we rehearse the play, but I don’t necessarily speak for anyone else here. I don’t want to impose any point of view on them.
Kevin Bacon (actor): Well, speaking for myself, I try not to work philosophically. I think that’s really up to the playwright. As an actor you have to think about whatever you’re doing in a scene: watching the little girl, putting on your clothes, and so on. The most basic things. Especially when you’re working on a role, you really have to try not to think about what the play might mean or how it’s going to affect people. Because I think that undercuts what your job is as an actor; if you wrote it, that’s one thing. So I try to work as specifically as possible: I have to ask, what am I saying at this particular moment? Then we work a lot at trying to piece everything together: the play has a strong poetic element, and at times it can be a little confusing, so we have to keep talking to each other to find each moment in a scene, and decide what it means to the character—not what it means in general.
 
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Mayer: But what about when you read the play before you started working on it? What did you think about? Did you think about what all these words might be communicating?
Bacon: With this play, what it says was nearly the last thing I came to think about. I thought more about how I connect with the character: a man with a daughter. How I connect with a man who is confused, who is thinking about spirituality and what that means in his life. And how, like everyone after September 11, I could connect to a man with an experience of tragedy. Those are the things I connect to: just being here and sharing that rather than any particular message
John Dossett (actor): For me, even though I’ll be performing the role only once a week, I still needed to define a personal link to the character. And as it happens, my own emotional connection to Samuel comes from being a young father. I have a young son. Being a parent creates a very strong bond with this character. Like so many parents, Samuel faces a lot of hard questions about who he is. Kevin has children, too.
Bacon: A son and a daughter. They’re 12 and 9. My daughter is 9.
Todd Haimes (Artistic Director): It’s so rare to read a one-person play about an average person—average in the best sense of the word, like we all are, not someone particularly special. That was something that really struck me about An Almost Holy Picture the first time I read it. Normally I’m not the biggest fan of one-person plays. Everybody seems to be writing them, so I read a lot of them, and most of them are about big people, people who are larger than life. Either they’re famous, or they should have been famous, and in the play they do their star turn—whatever it is. For example, I’ve probably read about 19 Eleanora Duse plays!
Bacon: Actually, from an actor’s perspective, I would say that any character can be Everyman in the way Todd describes. I try to think of characters as real people. Once in a while, in a certain production, a character will become kind of hyper-realistic. But I look for real connections, and try to find people in my own life I can relate them to.
Mayer: There’s something else we have to remember, too: although this is a solo monologue, we see Samuel in different contexts throughout. The play is divided into different parts, each with different qualities. His language changes from section to section too. If you look at the play on the page, each part has a different look to it. The negative, white space on the page has a completely different pattern. Part of it looks like prose, part of it looks like poetry. And even the nature of the poetry changes between parts, as the prose does. So in rehearsal we’re trying to find each of those dynamics and push it to an extreme.
Bacon: Yes, it does feel different depending on which part of the play you’re in. But strangely enough, these parts actually seem more together than separate in my mind. I’m starting to see more and more connections and logic in it.
"What happens when we look inward, and ask how we can change?"
Haimes: One reason those connections can be discovered in rehearsal is that Heather McDonald is so careful to tell a story by giving the play a beginning, a middle, and an end. In that sense it’s almost like a more conventional narrative (such as Arthur Miller would write), except that it has only one character. I find that structural fact very striking, even though the poetic dimensions obviously go way beyond it. It makes the play so compelling just to read: some scripts read more like blueprints for a future performance, but An Almost Holy Picture really felt like a work of literature.
Mayer: But of course in a production we have to take those poetic elements and give them physical life. It comes back to what Kevin said about needing to define the inner logic of the world on stage. For instance, Samuel has a lot of physical rituals in his life, which gives us a lot of permission to be inventive in rehearsal. Because it’s an abstract world that we’re living in, and because there’s so much ritual, I’ve found that we can make up our own rituals too. So we’ll just decide that suddenly the chairs do different things, for example. No one has to know; the audience doesn’t have to know exactly what we’re doing. But if we know what we’re doing, then it carries through.
Bacon: I think when the play mainly consists of just one person standing up there talking, it’s so important also to have movement and lights, to keep events dramatic visually as well.
Mayer: Yes, it’s important to keep stage events active. It’s very easy just to fall into playing a quality or an emotional state of being. But an actor has to know exactly what he or she is doing at any given time in a scene. Otherwise it doesn’t have any force behind it, and the audience isn’t following the character’s journey. That journey involves movement; you have to make sure you’re always moving toward something, even if it’s an internal journey we’re talking about. In rehearsal we have to discover what makes scenes active, and it’s not always an intellectual process; sometimes we’ll see what’s right because of the way Kevin moves his body, for instance.
Bacon: Everything is connected. The more you do it, the more your body starts to trigger the words and vice versa. It will take a certain amount of emotional stamina to do this seven shows a week!
Haimes: I should add that we usually don’t usually do new plays in the American Airlines Theatre. But following the events of September 11, we had cancelled our production of Assassins and needed to move one production into this time slot. Since Kevin and Michael were both available to work at the right time, we were able to do it. But it is unusual to have a new play on the larger stage. Having said that, there is also something potentially enduring about the play, like one of the classics you would see in the same theatre.
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