Mark Rylance, Unplugged (New York Mag)

Mark Rylance, moments after the curtain, on October 21.
(Photo: Christopher Anderson/Magnum Photos)

Mark Rylance Unplugged

With one breathtaking, breakneck 30-minute monologue, he steals the season.

By Scott Brown. Published Oct 31, 2010 – New York Mag

Mark Rylance has just stepped offstage after nearly 90 minutes—at least 30 of them spent disgorging a torrential, nonstop monologue about, well, nothing. (In rhymed verse, no less.) And despite spewing—in addition to words—belches, flatulence, and half-chewed bits of melon, the star of Broadway’s glittery Molière pastiche La Bête looks impossibly composed. To play the diabolically guileless (or is that guilelessly diabolical?) seventeenth-century street clown Valere—tormentor of fastidious court playwright Elomire (David Hyde Pierce)—Rylance crams a rotten-looking dental prosthesis in his puss, dons a rancid wig that resembles something Indiana Jones might’ve stabbed to death with a stalagmite, and decks himself in putrefied mock-chevalier garb that makes Johnny Depp’s pirate drag look Brooks Brothers sober by comparison. He also spends a good five minutes locked in a trunk.

The monologue is one of the more remarkable feats of theatrical chutzpah you’re likely to witness this or any other year. And it’s even more remarkable given its mutability. Rylance couldn’t tell you how long it is: The length varies from night to night, audience to audience. And if anyone asks him the ubiquitous question, the one thing every civilian asks every actor—How do you remember all those lines?—Rylance has an intriguing response. He doesn’t.

At least, not in the traditional fashion. Memorization is the actor’s last priority. “What I try to learn by the first day, before I go in, is not the words per se,” he says in his feather-soft London lilt. “I don’t want to learn them separate from what’s being received or offered by the other actors. Even in final dress rehearsals, I won’t know everything correctly—I won’t know it correctly before I need to know it.” He grins from ear to ear—a sweet yet vulpine smile with a hint of Valere in it. “The danger of it is, I learn a lot of things incorrectly.”

But then, Rylance feeds on spontaneity. It’s at the core of his approach to Shakespeare. (He was artistic director of the Globe for ten years.) Indeed, he hopes “a lot of things will go wrong, for something unexpected to happen.” Even in performance, he’s still improvising—not with David Hirson’s lapidary verse, of course, but with his intonations, blocking, timing, and … other things. “Like having a shit and carrying on talking,” he says, referring to the memorable mid-monologue moment when Valere, still yammering, drops a load in Elomire’s library alcove, then tidies up with pages from his host’s books. Rylance and director Matthew Warchus found “the shit” via improv. “And we put it in different places. In fact, my burp comes in different places. I just drink a lot of fizzy water right before I go on. It comes up randomly. Which is really nice for all of us.”

“I originally wanted the fart to come in different places, too,” he adds. “But Matthew eventually decided it needed to be fixed. We tried it randomly and kept missing. Because you can’t have it too loud or it’s not real.” He shakes his head, mourning the loss of this supremely organic moment: “The difficulty with the fart is, it’s run by technicians.”

Mark Rylance ready for another go at “Jerusalem” for Broadway!

It’s such a huge tragedy that I never got the chance to see “Jerusalem” either at Royal Court or at the Apollo in London. When “Jerusalem” transfers to Broadway, I’M BUYING A PLANE TICKET TO NEW YORK CITY AND SEE MY IDOL ONSTAGE!

from the Arts Beat (NYT):

Will the Tony Award-winning actor Mark Rylance (“Boeing-Boeing”) be competing against himself in the 2011 Tony competition for best actor in a play?

It’s increasingly possible. Mr. Rylance has earned rave reviews as the delightfully narcissistic street performer Valere in the play “La Bête,” which is scheduled to run at the Music Box through mid-February, and it now looks very likely that he will return to Broadway in the spring to reprise his widely acclaimed London performance as Rooster Byron in Jez Butterworth’s play “Jerusalem.”

Mr. Rylance won the 2010 Olivier Award (Britain’s equivalent to the Tony) for best actor for “Jerusalem,” a play of epic themes about the state of England, about fathers and sons and friendship — all humanity. The play centers on Byron, a drug-dealing foul-mouthed antihero and squatter deeply beloved by his friends and customers, who join him to pass the time in the middle of a wood that developers hungrily eye.

The three-hour-plus dark comedy also was named best play, and Mr. Rylance best actor, in The London Evening Standard Theater Awards in 2009. The Royal Court Theater production in 2009, and subsequent transfer to the West End in 2010, were the talk of London playgoers until the play closed and Mr. Rylance moved on to “La Bête.”

American and British theater producers have been eyeing a Broadway run for “Jerusalem” for some time, and Mr. Rylance said in an interview Thursday that it looked likely for this season. He said that the director of the London production, Ian Rickson, was on board, and that his co-star, the British actor Mackenzie Crook — who played Rooster’s buddy Ginger — had agreed to join the Broadway production assuming all necessary arrangements with Actors’ Equity can be made. (Mr. Rickson directed Mr. Crook as the forlorn playwright Konstantin in the Kristin Scott Thomas-led “Seagull” on Broadway in 2008.)

“It’s all moving ahead well for ‘Jerusalem,’ especially now that Mackenzie is coming over, because I wasn’t sure I could do it without him,” Mr. Rylance said. “Everyone seems on board for the spring, the final arrangements seem under way. The plan is to start rehearsals for Broadway three or four weeks after ‘La Bête’ finishes up.” The producers have been in talks with Equity about bringing over British actors like Mr. Rylance and Mr. Crook for the spring and making all the other necessary deals. A spokesman for the production said on Friday that there was nothing to announce at this point.

If “Jerusalem” does open on Broadway this spring, it would be before April 28, the cut-off date for plays and musicals to qualify for the Tony Awards. The best actor category will include five actors, and there are several high-profile performances on tap by men this season: from Al Pacino in “The Merchant of Venice,” James Earl Jones in “Driving Miss Daisy,” and Jeffrey Wright in “A Free Man of Color” in productions now under way, to Ben Stiller in “House of Blue Leaves,” Robin Williams in “Bengal Tiger in the Baghdad Zoo,” Joe Mantello in “The Normal Heart” (if that production comes together) and others in the spring.

So it’s possible, of course, that Mr. Rylance would not be nominated for both “La Bête” and “Jerusalem.” But two big performances in one season by Mr. Rylance, widely regarded as Britain’s leading stage actor today, could make for a very interesting Tony ballot.

 

New York Times: Mark Rylance keeping it “fresh” for La Bete

To prepare for his role in “La Bête,” Mark Rylance often plays volleyball with other cast members in the Music Box Theater.

from the New York Times: November 15, 2010

The Spike and Other Improv Lessons

By PATRICK HEALY

For all the words in the 25-minute monologue of megalomania that Mark Rylance delivers in the Broadway play “La Bête,” many of the comic payoffs flow from the stunned or dumbfounded looks, the tense or foolish body language, traded among Mr. Rylance’s crude street clown and the high-minded characters played by David Hyde Pierce and Stephen Ouimette. You can rehearse and rehearse such moments, but at their best they flow from instinct and risk-taking.

Mr. Rylance has his own preparation method: Improvisational games, the sort of unscripted, spontaneous exercises that he began learning three decades ago as an acting student in London. Sometimes he gathers with another actor or two simply to create scenes from scratch to rev up his reflexes, now that he’s been delivering the monologue eight times a week since June, on Broadway and previously in London. Lately, too, he has been joining his “La Bête” cast mates and crew members in a homemade version of volleyball amid the empty seats of the Music Box Theater before the audience streams in for the play about a showdown between high and low culture, set in the age of Molière.

“For me, improv is all about firing up parts of the mind and imagination in new ways,” said Mr. Rylance, who won a best-actor Tony Award in 2008 for his work in “Boeing-Boeing.” “Our volleyball has been a great part of that. It brings everyone into the present, and you notice the way their minds work and whether each of us has had a bad day or a good day. In the end acting is all about passing and receiving something, and hopefully taking risks and being attentive to the unusualness of stage work.”

Mark Rylance and David Hyde Pierce in “La Bete”

Such was the theme of a four-day improvisation workshop that Mr. Rylance taught early this month at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting in New York. Joined by two theater mentors from London, Ben Benison and Roddy Maude-Roxby, Mr. Rylance focused on building confidence among the students to trust whatever improvised scene or dialogue was unfolding and to push themselves to contribute. He did this partly by using various masks, covering all or half of the students’ faces, which he always found to be a liberating tool.

“When you do improv you often inevitably start with an old feeling of boundaries and fear, of a sense that there’s a right way to do things — and one point of improv is to try a new way that might not be quite right,” Mr. Rylance said.

In the Music Box volleyball game, for instance, players can hit the ball with their hands while it is on their side of the net, but they have to butt it with their heads to hit it over the net. “You’re used to hitting it over with your hands, that’s what your instinct tells you to do, but you have to open your mind to a new direction,” he explained. (The producers of “La Bête” announced on Monday that the show, which had been selling slowly, would close on Jan. 9, a month ahead of schedule.)

As part of his work at the Adler Studio, Mr. Rylance, his two mentors and three actors from “La Bête” held a master class on improv last week for the public that doubled as a benefit for the school, raising $10,000. The evening at the Cherry Pit theater began with a bare stage as Mr. Rylance, Mr. Maude-Roxby and Liza Sadovy and Sally Wingert from “La Bête” stood on the sidelines. Slowly, each began to place stray chairs in a semicircle. They sat and glanced at one another for a good 15 seconds.

From left, Mark Rylance, Michael Milligan, Liza Sadovy and Sally Wingert during an improv class at the Cherry Pit theater.

The silence was a bit unnerving; a couple of audience members twittered as if to suggest, Would anyone come up with a good idea to start?

“Well, I think I’ll pack it in,” Mr. Maude-Roxby said, triggering relieved laughter.

“Yeah?” Mr. Rylance said.

“It’s cold!” Ms. Wingert barked suddenly. To Mr. Rylance she said, “You could turn up the heat a little.”

“Mom, I’m boiling, I’m sweating here,” he replied, creating a whole world of family dynamics and tension in one quick sentence. “I can’t, I, I, I, I can’t stay awake any longer, I’ve got to go to bed.”

“Feel my hands!” Ms. Wingert moaned. “I’m supposed to be having hot flashes, but I’m freezing.”

“You’re old, Mom,” Mr. Rylance deadpanned, drawing a huge laugh.

Mr. Maude-Roxby, who had evidently assumed the role of Dad, mumbled a protest. To which Mr. Rylance shot back, “No, Dad, she’s old.”

The six actors spent the next hour blending in masks, some bananas and a few props and chairs into more sketches. Mr. Rylance, as a shy woman talking to a suitor, used a fan to hide and reveal his facial hair to hysterical effect. Another scene seemed headed in two directions, with Mr. Rylance becoming an alcoholic at an A.A. meeting and Mr. Benison playing a flasher, until Ms. Wingert entered carrying a carton of water bottles and asking, “Who ordered the case of Dewars?” Mr. Rylance’s alcoholic winced, and then Mr. Benison said, “I drink as well — I flash best when drunk,” tying various strands of the scene together in nutty style.

Tom Oppenheim, the artistic director of the Adler Studio (and a grandson of Stella Adler), said that Mr. Rylance’s improv reflected a lesson of the school: Dialogue is only a starting point in a performance, which needs to be infused with a viewpoint, tone and body language.

“So much of acting is about seeing and listening to what others are doing,” Mr. Oppenheim said, “and it requires your senses to be fully open, which improv can help tremendously with.”

At “La Bête” the night after the Adler benefit, Mr. Rylance said he felt that the improv had a “marvelous effect” on his stage work, which requires him, as Valere, to revel in his own perceived brilliance while chastising himself for going too far — all in rhyming couplets. (“What hubris! What vulgarity What nerve!/ No, slap me! Slap me! That’s what I deserve!”)

“In that scene you ideally want to be leaping from one subject to another in desperation to impress the other characters onstage, like someone leaping from lifeboat to lifeboat as one sinks,” Mr. Rylance said. “My ability to do that varies after these last few months: I get attached to getting the same laugh from the audience that I did the night before, or another result that I liked in the past. But on Tuesday I felt completely impulsive.”

Playbill interviews Mark Rylance, Mark Rylance to perform BENEFIT GIG, and other news.

An illustration of La Bete cast: David Hyde Pierce, Mark Rylance, and Joanna Lumley. Wonderfully illustrated by Ken Fallin.

From Playbill.com:

Mark Rylance is tearing up the stage, literally, with his tour-de-force comic performance in David Hirson’s La Bête on Broadway. We spoke to him on opening night.

Tony and Oliver Award-winning actor Mark Rylance earned acclaim for his Broadway debut as the disheveled Robert in the 2008 revival of the sex comedy Boeing-Boeing under the direction of Matthew Warchus. Reuniting with Warchus for a revised revival of David Hirson’s 1991 verse comedy La Bête, first in London and currently on Broadway, Rylance again plays a clown — the earthy street actor Valere, who spews food, gas and an endless strain of self-aggrandizing iambic pentameter. The turn, which includes a 40-minute speech that dazzles audiences with quirky rhymes and sight gags, is being hailed as one of Broadway’s most exciting performances of the season — partly for the sheer stamina of it all. An hour after the curtain came down on opening night, Rylance shared thoughts about his work, his director and his wish list of roles.

What you do with the play is incredible, holding court for the first half an hour, in a rhyming-verse monologue that takes you all over the stage. As an audience member, it seems like it must be terrifying. What is it like for you?
Mark Rylance: It’s not terrifying at all, no. It’s like if I was a surfer, surfing in Hawaii or somewhere. There’s such great waves of laughter that come from the audience, and riding those, knowing when to get up on them and come down and when to move into the next one — each night’s very different. No, I don’t feel frightened about it at all. It just feels like a lot of fun, to go out and play like that.

Your co-star Joanna Lumley said you wring so much out of a few words and one couplet.
MR: I think it’s called “milking.” Is it called “milking” in America? “Milking the cow”? Yeah, I’m afraid that’s what I do.

But you’re clearly relishing the moment.
MR: Oh, I love making people laugh! It’s an amazing feeling, yeah. I’m not a very funny person in reality. I can never remember jokes and I don’t make people laugh very often. I’m a quite serious character, really. But I have a certain fool that I can play, and going out in front of people and having people laugh a lot — it’s a great job, huh? A great job.

There seems to be a great collaboration, a safety net between you and your fellow actors onstage.
MR: Oh, yeah. It’s like being in a jazz band. We’re able to expand phrases. Like James Brown would say to someone, “You play now! Play along! Go on, play that!” And then you can take it back and then you can hand it on. Even tonight, a couple of things happened that had never happened before, so inside, you have also a sense of humor and a sense of enjoying, “Oh, that’s incredible what someone does,” and passing the ball around it. It’s a wonderful cast, very good.

Had Valere been a role on a wish list for you?
MR: No, I don’t have a wish list of roles. I’d like to be able to play myself some day. I don’t have a list of roles, no. No, [Matthew Warchus] came to me with it and said, “Would you be interested?” and — yeah, certainly, I’d be interested in that role.

Your collaboration with Matthew Warchus has been so fruitful. Could you imagine having tackled this part without him at the helm?
MR: No. No. There are about three directors I work with primarily now, who I really like to work with. I like the theatre ’cause it’s live, you know, and so I do like quite a bit of freedom — not freedom to pervert the story or just draw attention to yourself, but freedom to respond to the moment, that each audience is new, and they don’t want to see last night’s performance. They want to have it tonight, and it’s live. It’s not recorded or set. So I anchor myself more in internal things rather than external things, and Matthew’s very understanding and appreciative of that, so that each night is a discovery and each night is a dance with the audience who are there. Sometimes, in matinees, they’re quieter, and then we go into other areas; and sometimes, like tonight, they’re very wild and laugh a lot, and then we go into other areas. But the main thing is to be present in the theatre, and I like working with directors [who have that] objective, too, that we’re “live and direct,” as Bob Marley would say, that we’re there and present. He’s terrific that way. We must have done about seven plays together now. Shakespeare and Sam Shepherd and Boeing-Boeing and this. Even my first play that I wrote, he directed.

There’s such a sense of magic in the play, with the language and also with what Matthew’s put into the staging itself.
MR: Yeah, he’s very, very good at the staging, and he’s very good at bringing something down to the essential ingredients. He’s a very thoughtful person. He’s a classical musician, you know. He’s a very good guitarist, and so he has a great sense of the music, of the rhythm of the piece and has a marvelous team who work with him always on the technical side, so his lighting and his sound and his conception of the design [are always honored]. He doesn’t say a lot. He’s a lovely director; he doesn’t come in with any plan, really. He sees what unfolds with the cast that he’s chosen and then shapes it very late on, so I’m able to be completely chaotic. And I must have thrown out just as many ideas as I use. … So that’s a very nice way to work. He’s a proper gardener, you know. He doesn’t just impose a scheme on the landscape. He really looks at the landscape and sees what’s there and then brings out and shapes it so that the audience can [appreciate it]. That’s what he does. He really keeps an innocence, which is what you need from a director. You need them to be really thinking about the audience — what do they need to understand the story or the joke or what’s moving about it here.

You’re doing this in iambic pentameter, so if anyone drops a line…how do you cover?
MR: Oh, you can’t, really. No, you can’t cover. I have had to make up Shakespeare. I used to forget my lines in Shakespeare, and all the other actors — after a while, they would turn to me and think, “Oh, now what’s he going to say?” and I’d have to make something up. But my memory’s got a bit better lately. I’ve been taking supplements … Memory’s an important thing for me. When that goes, then I’m done.

(Adam Hetrick is staff writer of Playbill.com. Write him at ahetrick@playbill.com.)

Mark Rylance to perform benefit gig for the Stella Adler Studio — GET YOUR TICKETS IF YOU’RE IN NEW YORK CITY!

Tony Award winner Mark Rylance will perform a special benefit show, entitled Off the Grid in Manhattan, on Monday, November 8, at 7pm.

The evening will include spontaneous improv theater with Rylance and friends in full support of the Stella Adler Studio.

Rylance is currently starring on Broadway in La Bête. He won a Tony for Boeing-Boeing, and recent credits also include the West End productions of Jerusalem and Endgame. He is widely recognized as one of the world’s most prominent Shakespearean actors, and is the former artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre.

Benefit tickets are $100 general admission or $250 VIP seats. To purchase, click here.

NOTE: If anyone is going to the benefit gig, please send me photos so I can post it on the Mark Rylance Fan Page. Thanks.

Mark Rylance, at the after-show party for “La Bete” in NYC!

Mark Rylance, celebrating the opening of La Bete at an aftershow party in New York City. October 14, 2010

Mark Rylance, with Joanna Lumley and David Hyde Pierce

La Bete in photos (Broadway production, 2010)

Mark Rylance and David Hyde Pierce

Mark Rylance, Joanna Lumley, and David Hyde Pierce

Stephen Ouimette and Mark Rylance

Mark Rylance

Mark Rylance

Mark Rylance and Liza Sadovy

U.S reviews for the Broadway version of “La Bete” come pouring in for Mark Rylance’s performance!

For some reason, U.S critics are responding a lot more favorably to La Bete than the British did over the summer. To no one’s surprise, Mark Rylance’s performance is garnering a lot of critical acclaim and praise:

Mark Rylance is a fool’s fool. Belching, bragging, accompanying his own self-aggrandizing soliloquies with stunning four-part flatulence, he tears into the first half of La Bête, David Hirson’s 1991 meta-Molière oddity, with a 400-line megalogue. In rhymed couplets. Not a syllable of which, I’m happy to report, isn’t uproarious. With all due respect to his excellent co-stars, David Hyde Pierce and Joanna Lumley, and the fine ensemble that embroiders the show’s frilly edges, Rylance is clearly the show’s raison d’être. His performance as the irresistibly loathsome street clown Valere — a lowbrow bête noire visited upon the tidy playwright Elomire (Pierce) — is the grand prize at the bottom of a box of confetti. (New York Mag, 10/14/10)

La Bete is a beautiful piece of art about the existential traps built into making beautiful art.  (The Atlantic, 10/12/10)

In the revival that opened Thursday night at the Music Box, the rest of us get to judge whether the play deserved better. And on the basis of director Matthew Warchus’s stylish production, featuring a sensational turn by a clown from outer space, Mark Rylance, one can say categorically, unequivocally, that “La Bête” is one half of a surefire evening.

The good stuff begins the instant Rylance starts jabbering — an act he keeps up virtually nonstop for 40 riotous minutes — and ends with the marvelous entrance of Joanna Lumley as a French royal arriving in a tornado of glitter. Then, stack by stack, the meticulously amassed comic riches are subtracted, in a plot that shrivels up into limp satire and facile posturing. One comes to see why the play faded away quickly the first time around. (The Washington Post, 10/15/10)

But early in the work comes a jolt of Adrenalin: Mark Rylance (“Boeing-Boeing”) appears wearing a pair of terrible false teeth and delivers an astonishing, 20-minute soliloquy that leaves audiences in hysterics, stunned and cheering.

He almost steals the show, but there’s more: David Hyde Pierce (“Spamalot,” TV’s “Frasier”) is also onboard, at his subtle, arch best, and Joanna Lumley (TV’s “Absolutely Fabulous”) gives a spiky, haughty performance as the princess.

….Much will be made of Rylance’s initial monologue, an exhausting piece of acrobatic wordplay that threatens to destabilize the rest of the play. He emerges spitting melon, burps, scratches himself and even defecates in a chamber pot — all while delivering a torrent of words in a slightly crazed, California surfer-dude accent.

He is boastful and pompous, falsely modest and offensive. He rudely complains about the lavish dinner that was served in his honor (especially the “acidic vinaigrette”), he lectures without knowing what he’s talking about, makes up his own terms (he likes “verbobos” instead of “words” because it’s more cheery) and never lets anyone else get in a word — sorry “verbobos.” (NOLA, 10/14/10)

But the show belongs to British star Rylance, who won a Tony for “Boeing-Boeing.” As Valere, he makes his entrance spitting out slices of melon, burping, farting and even worse. It’s no fluke that the show curtain is illustrated with what looks like a stomach-shaped caption balloon filled with words.

By far, Valere’s worst characteristic is that he jibber-jabbers nonstop and nonsensically about his art, especially in a brain-dizzying speech that lasts close to half an hour. Rylance, hair scraggly, teeth protruding, delivers it with so much finesse you shake with laughter. Days later, it still cracks me up when I think about his performance. (NY Daily News, 10/15/10)

I can’t really tell from Ben Brantley‘s review in the New York Times whether he liked “La Bete” or not. But the sizzling play opened on Broadway last night and Mark Rylance gave a tour de force performance. He is just sensational as Valere, and audiences will love David Hyde Pierce and Joanna Lumley (famous from “Absolutely Fabulous”).

Early on in David Hirson‘s 1991 play, Rylance makes his appearance and gives what amounts to a 30 minute comic monologue. It only seems like a dialogue because Hyde Pierce, who is with him on the scene, manages to take his character’s stunned silence and turn it into conversation. By the time Lumley enters–and she has some spectacular entry–the audience is mesmerized and exhausted. (Showbiz 411, 10/15/10)

He’s been described as the new Olivier, but I don’t recall Olivier ever taking on the Jerry Lewis role in Boeing Boeing or playing a street clown who spits, farts, and spews rhymed couplets of narcissistic nonsense in La Bete.Mark Rylance has done that–and more–throwing himself fearlessly into anything that lets him show his healthy love of theatrical playfulness.

In La Bete–the revival of a play that failed almost 20 years ago on Broadway–he’s a 17th Century French buffoon who speaks in 20-minute or so monologues that he makes riveting, hilarious, and likable, even though his character uses works of literature for toilet paper. (The Village Voice, 10/15/10)

and there’s many more reviews online. There is one article about Mark Rylance at Newsday, but unfortunately I am not a subscriber. If anyone of you are subscribed to Newsday, please copy and paste the article to me so I can post it on the Mark Rylance Fan Page. Thanks.