y father, Dr. Harold Renaud, died unexpectedly from hospital procedures on August 12th. Hours after his cremation, I was on a plane to Maui for a trip that had been planned long in advance. Over the next days I tried, however fitfully, to calculate the incalculable contribution my father made to my life in the theatre.  There among the mangos, beneath the banyans, at ocean's edge, I mostly only memorized my father's lovely woodwind voice, his long bones, his unique spirit as it lives on in my life in art.

In the most general terms, many of the overall sensibilities that give my professional life quality were given to me by my father. In addition to his beautiful voice and superior diction, he had a beautiful body that he took care of, a penetrating mind, a love of music, of reading, and an eye for design. He had a deeply ironic perspective on life and a singular wit. It was my father who brought to my attention the work of the Bauhaus masters, work that has become my life's work. Above all, most of the richness I enjoy in my professional life has come from the sustained work, sustained relationships, sustained inquiry--and the sustained  skepticism -- which my father taught me to value.

I also learned many specifics from my father which now surface in my work in various ways. I learned these specifics sometimes from what he said to me and sometimes simply from who he was. Let me list ten things.

1. Pacing.  Once as a child I heard a slow song on the radio with my father—Sinatra, I think. Later that evening my father heard me singing it, and asked why I was singing it so slowly. "That's the way it was on the radio," I said with great certainty. "Nope, he said, "it sounded slow to you because there was so much happening—you could hear every single sound so clearly and there was so much emotion. But if you sing along with it next time, you'll see that he's really singing quite swiftly. If he'd really sung it as slowly as you are doing, you would have felt restless." 

The experiences of "fast" and "slow" are different for the performer and the audience, and we have to learn to control those experiences from the stage.

2. Language. Once my father was trying to describe the sensation of pleasure he got from reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's prose. After saying it several different ways, he finally came to: "It's like drinking an ice-cold glass of milk!"

We can feel language with our whole bodies and with all of our different senses.

3. Telling the story.  My father gave me one of his greatest compliments after he saw my Yelena Petrovna in Turgenev's "A Month in the Country" (Israeli director David Zinder).  This is a five-act play with dozens of characters--each with several names, of course--and a plethora of sub-plots.  Backstage, when others might have said vaguely how "fantastic" the show was or how "great" the performances were, my father gave me a congratulatory hug and said firmly, "I understood everything that happened."

In rehearsal we may get interested in new interpretations or high concepts, but the bottom line is that the audience has to know what is happening.

4. Relaxation; humor. When I was a child, my father used to sing in the mornings while shaving for work. Mostly Bing Crosby and Sinatra. I eavesdropped raptly, putting off my own getting ready for school.  He sang these sentimental songs in liquid tones, fully resonant and engaged—and at the same time with a charming "wink" at his own silliness.

Pleasure singing is a good way to relax and focus for the day; humor lends charm to sentimental material.

5. Participation.  My father went through a period of loving recorder music, so he bought a beautiful Swiss recorder and started taking lessons.  This didn't last very long but it made a big impression on me. He didn't simply buy a bunch of recordings of someone else playing—he went out and did it himself.  He moved from the "receiving" end of the performance to the  "giving" end.

Performance is not "over there" somewhere; you can learn how to do what you see, you can participate in what you love.

6. The audience's job. Before we went to see a classical play, my father started reading up on the text some days ahead of time.  Sitting in the breakfast room with companions to the plays, he made outlines of Moliere's plots, he drew diagrams of Shakespeare's history plays, he made sure he had a basic grasp of the critical issues associated with the plays.

You'll enjoy the performance more if you do the work to find out about the text ahead of time. This is also a way to do your part as an audience member to make the show go well.

7. Inflation of titles.  My father was very impatient with people who exaggerated their accomplishments. He himself devoted his professional life to clinical psychology, and had a profound understanding of and affinity for Freud's work.  In his own field he was irritated, for example, with the kind of person who called himself a "psychiatrist"—a profession which requires a full medical degree and untold years of advanced training—when he had simply finished a two-year basic "counseling" program. He told me, "Be careful not to call yourself a 'school' if you are not accredited to be one.  People who are impressed by things like that are not worth your time, and you will discredit yourself with people whose respect you want to earn."

Do not call yourself An Actor after you've taken a few classes, or tell people you are "looking for a new agent" after a neighbor says you really should do commercials.

8. History. In elementary school, of course I had to read the (accepted) story of Columbus's trip to discover America.  My textbook read, "Columbus pointed excitedly and shouted, 'Those trees will make good masts for our ships!'"  My father found this hilarious. It struck him as completely absurd that 1) anyone would pretend to know what Columbus said, 2) anyone would think that writing such nonsense was a good way to educate children. Forever after, whenever someone said something completely unsubstantiated, no matter how official sounding it was, my father crowed, "Those trees will make good masts!" We heard this when someone announced what Freud thought, or what recent research had shown, or even how everyone should feel.

Be wary if someone tells you what Shakespeare or Stanislavsky thought about everything. Do the work to come to your own conclusions. Learn to recognize a faddish idea.

9. Subtext.  Because of my father's work in psychology, I grew up with a heightened sense that people often communicate their feelings or concerns in odd ways.  A. Sometimes they say things that reveal themselves without realizing it.  This is related to the idea that criminals often give themselves away without knowing they are doing it, or want to reveal themselves without knowing they want it. B. Sometimes someone feels too shy, scared or angry to talk about something, and so they use another topic of conversation to communicate in its stead.

These may sound simple to you, but it took me years of teaching to realize that my students really didn't know this. No idea. "How do you know that?!" they'd cry, mystified. Example of A: Aegeus tells Medea that a very subtle oracle told him he couldn't have a child until he stopped "loosing the wineskin's neck." I understood very clearly—although he didn't himself--that he was impotent from too much drinking. (The husband/thief in "Angel Street" ["Gaslight"] gives himself away in all sorts of ways, as well.)  Examples of B: Masha tells Vershinin she hears wind in the stove, and it seemed obvious to me that she was talking about her father. Toozenbach asks Irina to have his coffee ready when he gets back, and I knew he'd had a premonition he'd never see her again. Blanche says she wants to take a bath; I knew she didn't have a clean conscience about all the choices she'd made. Pinter is full of people talking about keys instead of infidelity and ducks instead of loneliness. 

Figure out what your characters' real concerns are, assume they can't talk about them directly and see how they express them in other ways—verbal, vocal, gestural, spatial, etc.

On the other hand, I also learned from my father not to over-interpret. When I first read Freud's Interpretation of Dreams in high school, I decided test my father. I announced at dinner that I'd had a dream, and I proceeded to tell a dream that I'd made up and which included every single element I knew to have heavy significance in Freud's work: teeth falling out, stairs, phallic symbols, death wishes, double entendre, etc.  When I finished, my father just looked blank and said, "I told you not to eat that liverwurst sandwich before you went to bed."

If someone in a Neil Simon play—or a George Bernard Shaw play--says he hears something on the stairs, he means he hears something, not that he's thinking about sleeping with his mother.

10.  Phoniness; class. My parents went to the symphony one night and warned my brothers and me that they'd be back very late. Then suddenly they were home again, hours early and giggling too hard to tell us what had happened.  Gradually the story came out, between gales of laughter, with tears streaming down their faces. The program had required the conductor to introduce each piece before it was played. During one introduction early on, it had suddenly struck my father that the fellow sounded exactly—exactly—like a used car salesman. He started to giggle. He whispered and my mother started to giggle. Of course this kind of contagious giggling escalated uncontrollably until people around them were glowering and shushing them and they escaped to the lobby. But every time they felt calm enough to go back in, they heard this conductor's voice again and it started all over. Eventually they just gave up and came home.

A worthwhile audience member can always tell when you are more focused on getting money out of him than sharing an artistic work with him; don't let your material outclass you.

I have picked these ten thoughts out of a swirl of other impressions relevant to this work: My father read some professional books again and again, carefully dating his notations in the margins year after year. He told me to make my hobby my work so I'd never get tired of it. He had a passion for pronouncing words correctly. He had us memorize long lists and poems and say them to him before bedtime. He made us exercise before breakfast and do pull-ups before dinner (we hated these). As a young man he looked like Gregory Peck to me and bore himself like a star. He thought I was beautiful and I carried that thought with me on stage for thirty years. He taught me to read a pun in a painting. He taught me to make only those resolutions one could actually carry out—not "I will never have a fight with my roommate on an opening night again," but "I will always keep my key in my left-hand pocket" or "I will always keep crackers in my rehearsal bag."  I notice that when I think of my father now, I keep thinking the phrase "unseduced by sentimentality"… 

In 1977 I did a lot of work with Niccolo Machiavelli's plays and (erotic) poetry. I came across this next passage from a letter Machiavelli wrote in 1513, and both my father and I have had it by our desks ever since:

"On the coming of evening, I return to my house and enter my study; and at the door I take off the day's clothing, covered with mud and dust, and put on garments regal and courtly; and reclothed appropriately, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men where, received by them with affection, I feed on that food which only is mine and which I was born for, where I am not ashamed to speak with them and ask them the reasons for their actions; and they in their kindness answer me; and for four hours of time I do not feel boredom. I forget every trouble, I do not dread poverty, I am not so frightened by death; I give myself entirely over to them."