We move rehearsals on to the stage later this week, out of the newly tiled and cleaned-up karate studio, and I am really looking forward to seeing the set that Bruce has designed and John built—the renderings look fabulous.
John Logan, the playwright, has selected lots of repetitions from the source material (court transcripts, newspaper and radio accounts) of this play. For instance, his Robert Crowe says, in his five-minute closing summation, “…there is but one penalty that is proportional to the turpitude of this crime, only one penalty that applies to a crime of this sort, and that is death.” Director Michael has been relentless in making me emphasize, depend on, trust in those repetitions. Though this play depicts a bloody crime, it’s ultimately a very talky courtroom drama, and Michael’s vision, as I understand it, is to throw key ideas into precise, high relief: judgment by a jury of peers, mercy, justice, the rule of law. Logan also retains the declamatory conventions of the pre-television age: alliteration, direct quotations from the Pentateuch.
Michael asked me to do something else that no director has ever needed to ask me before: to stop gesturing. In scene 18, Crowe and Clarence Darrow have their one duet scene, a meeting just outside the courtroom. The normally intellectual Crowe, who begins by saying, “I really don’t have to justify anything to you,” in fact spends most of the scene trying to do just that to Darrow, explaining his hardball tactics in pursuit of the death sentence. In the midst of a flailing emotional outburst, Crowe takes the personal tack with Darrow:
You know what’s happening in Chicago. You know about the gangs and corruption. It’s just creeping in. Everywhere. All because the laws are not being enforced! You like that? I want my children to grow up in a city where they can depend on the law to protect them.
And it is Michael’s wisdom to direct me to keep this passage intimate, personal, not stagey. Early on, he walked over to me during a rehearsal of this bit and took my hands in his and placed them at my sides. So I’m forced to use my eyes, my face, my voice to convince Darrow that I’m right.
Claire, who is responsible for hair, took the clippers to us last week. Most of the younger cast members are growing theirs out. I, on the other hand, am still stuck in the 1970s when it comes to the back of my head, so Claire had lots of hair to hack off back there. Crowe had a lush head of hair on his crown, however, and we’re looking for ways to train my baby-fine locks into a bushy fighting Irish do.
Sam and Ryan, playing the teenaged killers Dick Loeb and Nathan “Babe” Leopold, are scary-creepy good at what they do.