Scenes from an American Life (3/25/71-The Forum)        

Scenes from American Life is a collection of nearly forty short scenes connected by scraps of period music, each scene showing a glimpse of life in upper-middle-class Buffalo over the course of about fifty years. A few of the characters appear in more than one scene, but most do not. Most of the characters are not even named; each is instantly recognizable, however, by his or her type.

     The Tale of Cymbeline (8/17/71-Delacorte Theater) ....Posthumus Leonatus
         a play by William Shakespeare
          
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     Caligula (11/25/71-Yale Repertory Theater)....Caligula
     Metamorphosis (4/8/72-American Place Theater)....Georg in The Judgement Act
     The Palace at 4am (8/72-John Drew Theater, E. Hampton, NY)....Oedipus
     Enemies (11/9/72- Beaumont Theater)....Sintsov

     The Plough and the Stars (1/4/73. Beaumont Theater)....Jack Clitheroe

               
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    The Merchant of Venice (4/1/73-Beaumont Theater) ....Bassanio

    Dance of Death/Miss Julie (5/11/73-Long Wharf, New Haven, CT)

    Houdini Musical (7/73-Lenox Art Center, Lenox, MA)...Harry Houdini

       


    Troilus and Cressida (12/2/73-Newhouse Theater)....Achilles
    The Tempest (2/10/74-Newhouse Theater)....Antonio

    Macbeth (4/13/74-Newhouse Theater)...Macbeth

"The role that I came away from with the most muscle was the one that I failed [ziemlich scheiterte] in: Macbeth. It's probably the most terrible role ever written, terrible in the literal sense of terrifying and enormous. This is a role that makes as many requirements [Anforderungen] on you as anything could. I played it at Lincoln Center for ten weeks [in 1974], eight shows a week, and I did not succeed [war nicht sehr glorreich] at all. Ten weeks' work, and we never even got reviewed, except by one.... " (CW)
"But I never regretted [bedauerte] doing it for a minute, because I came away from the production with this tremendous [enormen Einsicht] insight about myself and about acting that I could not possibly have gotten anywhere else. It was taking on that monster and being trounced [geprügelt] by it, but still learning something. That's what actors mean when they talk about stretching." (CW) 
 

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Christopher Lloyd played the role of "Banquo" in this production, which ran for 82 previews from April 13 to June 23, 1974.
Performed at the New York Shakespeare Festival, the production also starred Carol Kane and Peter Weller.
click to enlarge pics (3)

 

     Hamlet (10/16/74 -Center Playhouse, Seattle, WA)....Hamlet

"This production took place on Mars or something - the costumes were strange, it was a very strange thing...it was what they call a concept production. I was not happy with it.'' (CW)
"We were all dressed up like for Star Trek, with big pointed shoulders. I got into huge arguments, but I would be told, 'People are tired of seeing Hamlet - you have to make it a little different for them.' This way of doing Shakespeare in this country is of such epidemic proportions that if anybody did a classic production of the play it would be like a new thing. It's insanity." (CW)
 

    Kid Champion (1/28/75-Public/Anspacher) (Obie Award)

  I was a monster. I was the biggest bastard that ever lived, because [Kid Champion] was the biggest bastard." (CW)
  I cant wait until [Kid Champion] closes, because you are too much." (Georgianne Walken)

 

     Sweet Bird Of Youth (12/3/75-Brooklyn Academy of Music,
          12/29/75- Harkness Theater, 1/76- Academy  Festival Theater, Chicago, IL) ....Chance Wayne

"Walken is wonderful"...... 

(Worth received her second best-actress prize in 1976 for her portrayal of an aging but still glamorous movie star in a memorable revival of Tennessee Williams' "Sweet Bird of Youth," appearing in the play opposite a young Christopher Walken.)

"Walken`s body has brains. Dancing has enhanced that, but it's really a God-given gift. He moves in such an insinuating [schmeichlerischer Art] way. His pelvis is talking, his knees are talking. The way he handled his body in Sweet Bird turned everybody on. The girls with the production were affected by it, and so were a lot of the fellows, consciously or otherwise. He never bruised Irene Worth once. The only other person I've ever heard of with such exquisite kinetic control is Brando...In fact, Irene was supposed to do Sweet Bird with another actor in London, and she wouldn't. That's the kind of effect Chris had on her."


"Christopher Walken has also a kind of beauty to him but he invests it with a decadence that recalls Baudelaire and other doomed souls...both Miss Worth and Mr. Walken are superb - in timing, in temperament, even in dramatic temperature." 

      
click to enlarge (8) thanks a lot, dear Gwen!!


   

   Yale Repertory Theater, CT:
    The Wild Duck (4/78)...Gregers Werle (left pic)
    Measure for Measure (5/79)....Claudio   
       www.yalerep.org/press/r_history/index2.html (full size pics)

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    The Seagull (11/11/80-Public/Newman Theater)....Trigorin

       "Christopher Walken as Trigorin advances his standing as one of our most electrifying young actors...
        He is thoroughly convincing in the way he established Trigorin as the erotic center of the play." (Review)


 

   Henry IV, Part I (7/82-American Shakespeare Theater, Stratford, CT)....Henry Percy, Hotspur

"I love working on the stage too much to be inhibited [abgehalten werden] by dissenting opinions. As long as I get a strong reaction I'm quite happy. I've always thought of myself more as an entertainer than an actor. Whatever else I do I manage to get the audience's attention. Being unpredictable and creating surprise arouses interest." (CW)
"Anglicizing Shakespeare isn't something I'm prepared to comply with. I sound like an American which is what I am. I want people to identify with that. I may like to take risks but I don't believe that I could betray [hintergehe] Shakespeare's poetry. I have a natural sense of rhythm and music. Anyway I am perfectly confident that the Bard [Dichter] will survive anything I do to him. He will not be damaged in this encounter even if I am." (CW)

   Hamlet (82-American Shakespeare Theater, Stratford, CT)....Hamlet

   The Philanderer (82-Yale Repertory Theater, New Haven, CT) ...Leonard Charteris

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   Ivanov (7/83-Williamstown, MA)....Ivanov

"He (CW) uses a thick repertory of Brando mannerisms - mumbles, slurred words, sudden whispers -
and expresses melancholy by refusing to look at his fellow actors. His phrasings are almost always weird,
as in the reading ''I must change'' - pause - ''my clothes.'' (Review)

 

   Cinders (2/20/84-Public/Luesther)....The Director

"Christopher Walken, playing the director, is good and creepy. The production is appropriately drab [zäh] and,
at times, somewhat confusing. The actors do well.Christopher Walken is at his admirable best as the icy, detached
[distanzierter] film director." (Review)

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    Hurlyburly (6/21/84-Promenade Theater)....Mickey

Reviews:

"Christopher Walken, brilliant as the cynical Mickey, dances effortlessly through the role with assumed accents, ironic twists, and an irresistible charm."

"Walken creates a seedy remnant [schäbigen Rest] of a once elegant man, with a sublime sense of humor that infects the audience with every line. His fainting scene, in which he starts a merry dance, then seems to feign tripping [vorgetäuschte Schritte], falls to the ground, and lies perfectly still in the first stages of a stroke, is alone worth the price of admission. The cast could not be better...Mr. Walken, as a self-protective cynic, offers what may be his least mannered, most fully ripened [gereift] comic performance ever."

"The acting is all that any dramatist could want. Christopher Walken is Mickey, cool and laid back and seemingly untouched by events."

"With his puffy [schwülstiger] prettiness, Walken suggests the portrait of Dorian Gray in its early stages of decomposition [Verfall]."

                  
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   A Bill of Divorcement (1985-Westport Country Playhouse, Westport, CT)

       Christopher Walken with Katharine Houghton, the niece of Katharine Hepburn, starring in "A Bill of Divorcement."
       Hepburn, who made her 1932 film debut in the role her niece played, was in the audience.

 

   The House of Blue Leaves (2/28/86-Newhouse Theater)....Billy Einhorn
      "Billy Einhorn is an underwritten part, but Christopher Walken, giving one of his more zonked performances,
        further deflates it. He does, however, sport one of the most satirical hairdos...." (NY Mag.)

   A Streetcar Named Desire (8/86-Williamstown, MA)...Stanley Kowalski

A production at the Williamstown Theatre Festival featured Blythe Danner as Blanche, Christopher Walken as Stanley, Sigourney Weaver as Stella and James Naughton as Mitch. This production was directed by Nikos Psacharopoulos, who also directed the 1988 Broadway revival.

"While enhancing his role with a swaggering humor, Mr. Walken sacrifices a measure of Stanley's menace.  An additional difficulty is the actor's physical appearance; his bared torso physique does not seem convincingly Stanley-like. Despite his temperamental outbursts, Mr. Walken does not pose an ample threat to Blanche - until the dramatic rape scene, when he demonstrates that the role is within his range." - (Mel Gussow, August 22, 1986) 

 

   The Three Sisters (8/87-Williamstown, MA)....Vershinin

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          The right pic was taken in rehearsals for 'The Three Sisters" at the Williamstown Theatre Festival www.wtfestival.org

 

   Summer and Smoke (Williamstown Theatre Festival,1975)......John Buchanan Jr.
        (by Tennesse Williams)

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   Uncle Vanya (4/13/88-American Rep. Theater-Harvard, Hasty Pudding Theater) ...Astrov
 

David Mamet's modern adaptation of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya... The sleepy routine of a Russian country estate is upended by the arrival of its absentee owner and his young wife, exposing tensions and spurring confessions: “I've squandered my past on nonsense and my present is sunk in absurdity. Isn't that something? My one feeling is for you. Can I renounce it? My one feeling in life and it's dying like a ray of sun shone in a well." Mamet's adaptation had its theatrical debut in 1988, with Christopher Walken in the role of Astrov, but is best remembered as the basis for Louis Malle's final film, Vanya on 42nd Street, starring Wallace Shawn and Julianne Moore.
Christopher Walken has described seeing Laurence Olivier playing Dr. Astrov in Chekhov's Uncle Vanya and flipping the tone in Astrov's first long speech (click to enlarge)

   Coriolanus (11/8/88-Public/Anspacher)....Coriolanus

"..a man can learn a lot from watching an actress. Somehow that seems like a terrible thing to say. But I learned a lot from Hepburn and Davis and from working with Irene Worth." (CW)
 "I think Coriolanus is one of the better things I have done and Irene Worth was, as the New York Times put it, 'incomparable." (CW)
"Chris Walken played the lead and did well, but it was the conception and movement of the whole beast that helped him release his power, besides his own unique abilities." (Review)

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   Love Letters (Spring, 1989- Promenade theatre)

   Othello (6/4/91-Delecorte Theater)....Iago

 I don't learn lines, I just do them, over and over, and in that case [of Othello], hundreds of times. I put it on a tape recorder, stick it in my ear and walk around with it. Your mouth just starts to learn the muscle movements. Iago is the longest part in Shakespeare. Me talking at a rapid clip was, I believe, an hour and 20 minutes." (CW, 1995)

"The whole experience of directing Othello for me was one of the most satisfying in my 30 years of theater; to be able to experience Chris [Walken]'s extraordinary discipline, the fabulous rapport that Raul [Julia] had with the audience; and Mary Beth [Hurt]'s intelligence and intensity. What I remember most is that Joe Papp came to one of our final rehearsals. He was quite ill and hadn't been around at all during the process. I remember so vividly the outpouring of affection towards Joe from Raul and Chris and everyone involved. That turned out to be Joe's last visit to the Delacorte." (The director of Othello.)

Reviews:

"The best Iago I ever saw, because the most convincingly scary, was Christopher Walken. You could see why the
other characters accepted him as sane, though he was clearly unhinged [abgehoben]; he rarely raised his voice,
ut it was easy to believe that he might want to kill any number of people."
"Walken`s relaxed, informal rendering [Interpretation] of Shakespeare and dialogue makes the
language seem revolutionary, immediate, fresh and new."

 

   The Seagull (8/3/94-Williamstown Theater, Williamstown, MA)... Trigorin
         Christopher Walken spielte 2001 den Pyotr Sorin in The Seagull  von Anton Chekov (Kevin Kline den Boris Trigorin)
           und in früheren Inszenierungen-1980 und 1994-den Trigorin. In 1980, Rosemary Harris played Madame Arkadina,
           and Walken was the writer Boris Trigorin,  who's her lover.

 

   Him (6/5/95-Joseph Papp Public) ....Elvis 

Chris wrote and acted the main role in a play about Elvis Presley titled Him in 1995.
Reviews:
"Mr. Walken's most cheering and refreshingly absurd invention: Elvis did not die on that 1977 August afternoon in a Memphis hospital. Instead, he plotted his disappearance and transportation to a clinic in Morocco. There he underwent hormone treatments as the first steps toward his rebirth as a woman. " (NYT,1995)

"Rarely does one have a chance to see such a great actor being so foolishly self-indulgent." (NYT)
"Never has any fully clothed actor looked as naked on the stage as Mr. Walken does in HIM."

 "Mr. Walken's most cheering and refreshingly absurd invention: Elvis did not die on that 1977 August afternoon in a Memphis hospital. Instead, he plotted his disappearance and transportation to a clinic in Morocco. There he underwent hormone treatments as the first steps toward his rebirth as a woman. "
(NYT, 1995)
"Elvis was a big influence. He appeared in my formative, very impressionable years. He was so sexy, you know, he was really one of a kind". (CW, The Washington Post) Review

    James Joyce's The Dead (10/28/99-Playwright Horizons, Belasco Theater)...Gabriel Conroy

"(...) I even have a video of the movie of it that was made in 1987. The words I've been given are unusually beautiful. When I first read the script back in August, I started to read the book, then I thought, no. The book is one thing, the script another, and I figured I'd better stick with the latter. After all the years of doing movies, to do something with great dialogue is really wonderful. I'm not Irish, I'm not great at accents and I can't really sing, but I liked the script and the music so much, I wanted to do it from the start. They asked if I wanted to go to a singing coach. I told them no. I figured the man I play isn't really a singer, so I'll just do it like him." (CW) click to enlarge (2)

   The Seagull (7/24-8/26/01- Delacorte Theater)... Sorin

"Those who remember Christopher Walken's riveting Public Theater Trigorin of 20 years ago—the only Trigorin who ever convinced me he was a writer—get additional discomfiture from watching [Kevin] Kline glide through the part while Walken, often only a few feet away, is giving a preposterously active, robust rendition of Arkadina's older brother, Sorin, a retired bureaucrat and quasi-invalid, two things as which it is impossible to imagine Walken." (M. Feingold, 2001)
http://www.theatermania.com/new-york-city-theater/reviews/08-2001/the-seagull_1585.html

"Christopher Walken has once again not fared well with the critics; but it is time people recognized that he is one of the great American actors. I found his Sorin to be one of the most deliberate and surprising moment-to-moment performances I have ever seen. At first glance he would seem to have been better cast in the part of Trigorin (Walken probably thought so, too). But Nichols's instinct was correct. Instead of the decrepit, disappointed invalid of tradition, Walken creates a seedy remnant of a once elegant man, with a sublime sense of humor that infects the audience with every line. His fainting scene, in which he starts a merry dance, then seems to feign tripping, falls to the ground, and lies perfectly still in the first stages of a stroke, is alone worth the price of admission (even if admission to the park is free)." (R. Brustein, 2001)

"However, I’ve always loved Christopher Walken in anything he does, and I don’t intend to stop now. Mr. Walken plays Sorin, the retired, loopy brother of Arkadina, and he plays him with his customary loopy aplomb. He’s a most graceful actor, and we miss him whenever he exits. That he’s playing the somewhat aristocratic Sorin sucking on a cigar as if he’s trying out for The Sopranos isn’t quite the point. Nor even is it too important that the Sorin we see strolling nimbly about the place or hurling himself at a sofa because that’s what he wants to do is, in fact, a sick, arthritic man confined mostly to a wheelchair.

No, the point and genius of Mr. Walken is that he’s the only actor I’ve ever seen who can be in a role and step outside it  simultaneously. It’s an impossibility, but he pulls it off. And it puts him on the dangerous edge, which is where we—with Konstantin—always prefer theater to live. We cannot anticipate Mr. Walken for a second. He adores being onstage, conveying the intimate pleasure of it. And in return, we give him our hands. He brings the stage to unpredictable life and vitality, capturing the perplexed, half-mad spirit of the dying Sorin. For all his well-known faults, Mr. Walken’s a natural—the last person you might expect to be a Chekhov actor, and the only actor onstage who truly is." (J. Heilperm, 2001)  
                                                                        part 2 (2010---)