John Douglas Thompson, who is forty-eight and regarded by some people as the best classical actor in America, has been acting for twenty years, following an epiphany he had as a travelling salesman of computers, A.T.M.s, and check-sorting machines. Thompson is known for Othello and Macbeth and for Brutus Jones, in “The Emperor Jones,” by Eugene O’Neill. His admirers include Ben Brantley and Charles Isherwood, the theatre critics for the Times, and James Shapiro, a Shakespeare scholar at Columbia who frequently consults for directors in London and New York, and who describes Thompson as “the best American actor in Shakespeare, hands down.”
Any list of American actors accomplished at Shakespeare would include Kevin Kline, Liev Schreiber, Al Pacino, F. Murray Abraham, and Meryl Streep. What makes Thompson different from them, aside from being black, is that he is almost exclusively a stage actor. Fewer people have seen him perform in person than have heard him ask, “Everything all right in there?,” his only line in his largest movie role, as a jail guard in “Michael Clayton.”
“John wants to make films and do TV,” Jeffrey Horowitz, the artistic director of Theatre for a New Audience, says, “but when he talks he talks passionately about great classical roles. That is unusual.” Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theatre, says, “The path John has chosen is so idiosyncratic that the rest of us who are devoted to the theatre feel ennobled by it.”
To succeed in Shakespeare as a tragic hero, an actor needs to convince the audience that he is deep enough and of sufficient size to contain the emotions his character is feeling. Shakespeare drew on mythological templates of character. Meanness and poverty of spirit are the attributes of smaller men, whose inner lives are stunted, as they would be in a fairy tale. Iago is almost never portrayed as larger than Othello, and a small, portly man or a tall, gaunt one would have a hard time enacting Macbeth. Thompson is six feet one, with broad shoulders and a large chest and arms—he looks like a linebacker. Onstage, he seems even bigger. An inventory of his additional attributes for Shakespeare includes several intangible traits, among them, Horowitz says, “compassion, vulnerability, sexuality, and danger.” Arin Arbus, who has directed Thompson as Othello and as Macbeth, says that Thompson grasps “what honor means in Shakespeare. I also think he understands the size of the love, and the kind, in Shakespeare’s plays. Those qualities are essential for Macbeth and Othello, and they’re not something you can explain to an actor.”
Whether Thompson has lines or not, he manages to convey the sense that whatever is being said has a bearing on him. Last fall, playing the Earl of Kent, in “King Lear,” at the Public Theatre, he made apparent that while he listened to Lear he wasn’t merely attending; he was thinking of what he could do to save him. He has an open face and a quick smile, and his features are handsomely proportioned. “He’s just beautiful, when you get right down to it,” Deborah Brown, a casting director, says. “He’s an old-fashioned leading man, and there aren’t a lot of those.” His voice is commanding and, occasionally, a little raspy. It seems to reverberate within him before being launched. Tina Packer, for whom Thompson played Othello at Shakespeare & Company, the repertory theatre and acting school in western Massachusetts, says that Thompson always had a good voice. Even so, “he worked at strengthening it so that he could attract attention to himself without doing show-biz mannerisms. Most actors for the stage are trained in musicals, and when you’re in musicals you have to do showier things to get people to look at you. When you’re doing classical work, everybody has to be so interested in the inner life of the character that they come to you.”
Othello is conventionally played as someone deranged by anger. Thompson regarded him, instead, as a sensitive man, deeply in love, who becomes unsettled and then mortified by his wife’s imagined unfaithfulness. He is a remorseless soldier but a cultivated presence, an African prince—Thompson calls him “a warrior poet.” The pleasure he takes in Desdemona’s company is almost childlike. When Thompson left the stage, the force of the play seemed to diminish slightly.
Thompson says that when he plays Othello he lives within the play, and isn’t certain that he will kill Desdemona until the moment he does. “I know what’s coming, but I don’t know how it’s going to fashion itself,” he says. “Instead, I’m conscious of where I am—what my scene partner is doing, or what I’m hearing, and I know that I need to respond. I believe I have a chance to change the outcome. My wife is going to reveal the truth to me, or I’m going to wake up and realize it’s not possible that she can be unfaithful.”
Thompson is currently in Chicago, in a production of O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh,” which stars Nathan Lane. The play concerns a fraternity of drunks who congregate in a skid-row saloon, where they shun loud noises and bright lights, and boast. Some of them are louts, some are in withdrawal from lives they were unable to sustain. One is a wreck of a lawyer, who went to Harvard at his father’s insistence, one is a disillusioned anarchist, and one is the bar owner, who extends them all credit, sometimes truculently.
The main character, Hickey (Lane), a salesman, urges the others to sober up, as he has, and to abandon the illusions that enslave them. Thompson’s character, Joe Mott, once had a gambling joint and lost it. The night that I saw the play, Thompson played Mott as proud and defiant, a tempestuous brooder and malcontent who is also blighted by the craven timidity that lurks within all addicts. Standing in the center of the stage, in a rage and threatening the others for patronizing him, he was for the moment the gear that the rest of the play seemed to revolve around. When he subsided into torpor, you felt as if a storm had passed. Lane’s presence suggests the possibility that the play might move to Broadway, where Thompson has had two smaller roles, in “Julius Caesar,” with Denzel Washington, and in “Cyrano,” with Kevin Kline.
No actor arrives at Thompson’s status without knowing the reach and range of his or her talents. When I asked him what he regarded as his strengths, he answered, a little uneasily, “I have some deep wells, places I can go. I don’t know if they’re always correct, and I don’t know how deep to go fishing, but I know I have them always to fish in. I can also take classical language and create character. I have enough courage to try risky things and fail.”
Lately, in an effort to broaden himself, Thompson has decided that he wants to play Shakespeare’s comic roles—Malvolio, in “Twelfth Night,” Bottom, in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and, eventually, Falstaff. A comic temperament is not a common thing, and Thompson isn’t sure if he has one. His approach to acting is painstaking, and, like a salesman, he believes that preparation and hard work can overcome many obstacles. He feels that, to play comic roles persuasively, he needs to learn the traditions of clowning, and maybe even—as Bill Irwin, an embodiment of modern clowning, puts it—“try on the big shoes,” something that he briefly attempted years ago, as a student.
The first theatrical clown, in the late sixteenth century, was Richard Tarlton, who specialized in a bawdy version of a jig, which he performed once a play had ended. Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, included a clown named William Kemp, who also excelled at the jig. Shakespeare wrote Peter in “Romeo and Juliet” for Kemp, and also Bottom. Kemp was replaced by Robert Armin, who didn’t dance as much and whose style was more cerebral. The Fool in “King Lear” was written for him.
A standard exercise in the training of modern theatrical clowns is called the ring of fire. Aspirants sit in a circle, and one of them occupies the center until he or she has made everyone laugh. Novices tend to begin by telling a joke, which may work but is beside the point, since clowning doesn’t depend on words. Jane Nichols, a clown teacher who has taught at Juilliard, says that she has seen someone remain in the circle for as long as an hour. By degrees, the person tends to grow meaner and angrier, she says, and sometimes will do desperate things to get out. A while ago, in a clown class at the Yale School of Drama, a young woman pulled down her pants and bent over, which worked.
Thompson sat in the ring of fire about twenty years ago, while auditing a clown class taught by Nichols at Shakespeare & Company. Each time he tried to get out of the circle, Nichols said “That’s boring” or “I don’t think that’s funny,” and then she asked the others, “Do you?” After about fifteen minutes, Thompson walked out of the circle, which is very bad form. He told Nichols, “I can’t do this,” and he left the class.
Last winter before going to Chicago, Thompson began to study clowning with Christopher Bayes, who teaches at Yale. Thompson will be working with Bayes over the next two years, as their schedules allow; afterward, he hopes to take on a comic role, probably Malvolio, who is a transitional figure, both comic and vengeful. “It’s the perfect role for me,” Thompson said, “because it doesn’t say out loud, with a neon sign, ‘Clown, clown, clown,’ so I don’t have to worry about being funny.”
Second-year clown class at the Yale School of Drama, led by Christopher Bayes: “Shake out your body! Yum, yum, yum. Open up your face, wide—ahhhhh—spread your arms, open it up, mouths wide. Me, me, me, last time, open it and leave it open, staring into each other’s eyes. A little inhalation, and hold and look at your funny friends across from you, simpleminded mouth breathers.”
Thompson sat on a chair in a corner, watching twenty-one young men and women in sweatpants and shorts and jeans roll their shoulders, scream, and high-kick like chorus girls. He looked pensive and uncomfortable. Bayes announced, “Open for business,” and had the class hop and quack. “I’ve got a happy body,” he told them. “Try to hang on to that happy body. Keep it squirrelly.” He walked around touching each student on his or her back and saying, “Yes, yes, yes, you will be so funny today. No, no, no, I won’t be worried about being so funny,” and each person he touched bent forward limply, like a wilted flower.
“And now it’s time for our Tuesday-afternoon emotional spelunking, so let’s take a little walk,” Bayes said. “Promenade if you will, sashay if you dare.” The students strutted and slunk in tight circles or across the room, making woeful sounds. Several wept.
“It’s courageous to do this stuff,” Thompson said quietly. He sat with his arms and legs crossed, as if he were bound. “You have to let go, and you can’t stop yourself, or that would end the thought,” he added. “It must take time to get there.”
Walking among the students, Bayes said, “Point to it. Say with a loud, boisterous voice full of curiosity, ‘Hey, what is that?’ Investigate it. Say, ‘I like that. That is the funniest thing I have ever seen in my life.’ Make the sound that would make it true. Off you go.” Several students bent over and pointed at the floor, then, laughing, rose and looked around to share their amazement. One young woman pointed at a little piece of tape on the wall and shook with laughter. Another held a bag in one hand and kept looking into it and exclaiming, while she laughed so hard that her eyes watered. Bayes let the students wander like lunatics while he sat down next to Thompson.
“Clowning is pretty scary,” Thompson said.
“It’s the only form where you know right away if it works,” Bayes said. “The horrible momentum of silence.” Bayes was wearing a T-shirt and bluejeans. He is a small, lithe man with curly black hair like a bloom. He walked to the door and opened it. “Just wanted to check who’s out there,” he announced. “There’s funny out there. Who’s going to go?” A young man in sweatpants and a T-shirt ran out.
The rules of this exercise, a second cousin of the ring of fire, were that the player had to return and, while unable to speak because he was laughing so hard, convey what he had seen so that the others would share his pleasure. Apparently, a machine with an arm that went up and down had exploded. A couple of times, overcome, the young man stopped and simply pointed toward the door, and when no one laughed, he sobbed, and then they laughed. After about two minutes Bayes said, “All right,” and the young man stood solemnly in front of him. “It’s good when your desperation creeps in,” he said. “It sabotages you a bit.” Bayes walked back to the door. “It’s still out there,” he said. “It’s totally different now.” Another young man ran to investigate. He came back flailing his arms, laughing frantically, and pointing toward the door. Occasionally, he would lean back for another look. Some sort of contraption had broken something, possibly by dropping it. When he stood still, Bayes told him to keep moving his legs—“otherwise, it’s all muscle, and forced.” After one more actor took a turn, Bayes dismissed the class.
Thompson seemed subdued, like a kid who wanted his driver’s license but had just been shown a film of car accidents.
As an undergraduate at Le Moyne College, a Jesuit school in Syracuse, New York, Thompson studied economics and marketing. He had an internship with a company that made business machines, and by the time he graduated he had a salary. He moved to Connecticut, and was assigned for training to a woman named Lori Tiel.
Thompson says that Tiel taught him how to “walk into an account, introduce myself, find out who the major decision-makers were, then build, maintain, and close a sales cycle.” He bought conservative suits—stylish suits on a black man might lead clients to mistrust him, he thought—and he leased a Mercedes, which he drove sometimes two hundred miles a day, visiting clients. One night, he went to see August Wilson’s “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” at the Yale Repertory Theatre. The only production he’d seen before was “The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” a musical, which didn’t mean much to him, but in Wilson’s play “I saw people who looked like me,” he says. “One runs a boardinghouse, another works in a church, another is looking for his wife. I was so drawn in by them that when it was over I said, ‘Please, God, make me an actor. Teach me how to do that, and make this possible for me.’ ”
Thompson earned a lot of money as a salesman, however, and, much as he wanted to act, it was difficult to give it up. It was only when he was laid off, a few years later, that he decided to try to become an actor. To prepare for living without an income, he sold all his suits except one, and he sold his stereo system and most of his CD collection. The Mercedes he found too difficult to part with.
In a newspaper, he saw a notice for an open call in Boston, for a play called “Worl’ Do for Fraid,” by Nabie Swaray, which was based loosely on “Hamlet.” Thompson got the lead role, but when he was told to move stage left or right he didn’t know what it meant.
His girlfriend, Denise Draper, who died a few years ago, of cancer, and her sister Christina were in the audience one night. “He had on this old blue suit,” Christina says, “and my sister and I were looking at each other, like, Oh, my God, he’s going to ask us how it was. I don’t remember who he played. I just remember it was bad. It wasn’t apparent that the person on the stage was the person he is now.”
Next, Thompson auditioned to play a banker in a commercial. The casting director asked if he had considered studying acting. “I thought, What, there’s a school to teach people how to be themselves? Which is what I assumed acting was,” Thompson says. “Playing yourself, emoting, and doing what’s necessary to draw attention.” The director arranged for Thompson to audition at Trinity Repertory Company, in Providence, which had a conservatory school, and he was accepted.
Thompson, then twenty-nine, was the second-oldest member of his class, and the least experienced. “I realized early that while I had been a salesman these kids had been in plays—they knew playwrights, repertoires, and roles that were good for them,” he says. “I didn’t know quite how to shape myself to do this. I thought, If I throw myself at it, I’ll find my way through it, but I worried that I had made the wrong choice, and that the fire that had got me into this was going to burn out and leave me.”
Thompson’s voice teacher was Paula Langton, who is now the head of the acting program at the Boston University School of Theatre. Langton recalls Thompson’s having “a huge, beautiful smile.” She told me, “One day, I said, ‘What would happen if you didn’t smile?’ And his face muscles relaxed, and his breath dropped deeper into his body, and tears came to his eyes. I said, ‘Do you want to say anything?’ ”
Thompson told the class that, the night before, he had been walking to a play at Trinity Rep. Two white women came toward him on the sidewalk, and each moved her purse from one shoulder to the other at the sight of him, and crossed the street.
“I kept walking and went into the theatre and saw the play,” Thompson says, “but in talking about it I just broke down and cried, and I cried for the rest of the class.”
“The whole class was in tears,” Langton says. “He had all that salesman in him—‘I can sell you anything’—and then he dropped it and did something very brave and risky. His ability to be transparent is his great strength. When I see him onstage, I think, Maybe that’s as huge as we’re supposed to be. He’s holding the mirror, saying, ‘We’re this deep, this wide,’ just as he did in class.”
During Thompson’s second year, he shared an apartment with a student named Eric Evenson. “One morning we woke up and looked out the window, and his Mercedes-Benz was gone,” Evenson says. “The repo man had taken it. He knew even back then the sacrifices he would have to make to be an actor.”
Thompson’s mother, Mary, who is no longer alive, and his father, John, had known each other in Jamaica, but they had moved separately to England, where they met again and were married. Thompson was born in Bath in 1963. He has an older brother and two sisters, one of whom died several years ago. When Thompson was two, his parents moved to Montreal, and when he was nine they moved to Rochester, New York, where his father worked for Bausch & Lomb.
Thompson’s parents did not welcome his decision to be an actor. “Jamaican culture has a very strong work ethic,” Christina Draper says, “and John’s parents were, like, ‘What do you mean you’re going to leave a career as a salesman to take up a profession where half the people draw unemployment?’ ” Still, Thompson’s father says that he wasn’t completely surprised when his son became an actor. “I knew that he had a gift for communication,” he says. “In school, the group always selected him to be their debater, so I thought he was going to be a lawyer or a parson, because he can make you see things easier than your way. You listen to his argument, and you forget your way.”
Thompson sent his parents reviews. His father, who now lives in Florida, has seen him onstage twice; his mother saw him once. “I longed to walk out of the dressing room and see my parents,” Thompson says. “I wanted my father, especially, to love what I did, because this was not something he wanted me to do. If he saw me act regularly, he’d see so much of himself. He appears in these idiosyncratic ways in characters––the way he walks or bears himself, the gestures, a thing he does with his lips when he’s thinking, or something he does with his hands.”
Thompson learns lines by following the thoughts they express. If you learn a word or a phrase at a time, you can freeze up onstage and not know where to go, which has happened to Thompson. When he’s working, he runs his lines constantly, starting after breakfast. As he washes dishes or cleans his apartment, he recites his entire part. He likes to move around as he speaks, because he feels that it “gets the lines into your body.” He says the lines as he runs errands, and then he has a nap and says them again. “I need to know: you did it this morning, you did it this afternoon, you got your nap, you’ve done all this work, it’s in your body, it’s here for recall.” When he goes onstage, he’s “extremely nervous, very scared, butterflies, very worried,” but, having worked all day, he also feels confident.
He likes to put characters he has played together in his mind with ones he is attempting and have them speak to each other. An affection for a character is essential, even if the character is disreputable. “You can have a moral judgment,” he says, “but you have to ask, ‘Does your character judge himself?’ If he doesn’t, you can’t, otherwise you play what your judgments are.”
The two roles in New York that really established Thompson were Othello, for Theatre for a New Audience, and Brutus Jones, in O’Neill’s “The Emperor Jones,” at the Irish Repertory, both in 2009. “The Emperor Jones” is the account of an American black man who has escaped from a chain gang and taken over a Caribbean island and its people. By the end of the play, he has dissolved into madness. In the audience at one performance was Tony Gilroy, who wrote the “Bourne” films and is directing the new one, “The Bourne Legacy.” Gilroy had cast Thompson as the jail guard in “Michael Clayton,” which he wrote and directed, but had forgotten him. From a casting agent, he got Thompson’s e-mail and wrote, “There was a vague sense of recognition as you took the stage, but it was swamped immediately by your incredible performance. I got up this morning and started trying to figure out who the hell you were and how I’d gone so long without knowing about you.”
Gilroy told me, “There’s about nine million ways for that play to be terrible. One person, Jones, has to struggle with all the text, and John was amazing.” Gilroy has cast Thompson as a general in a scene in “The Bourne Legacy.” “It’s a fairly briskly done piece of business,” Gilroy said, “and John did it well, but I remember thinking as we shot it how cloistered he was, how much of his life has been on the stage.”
Thompson says that no one had told him who his scene partner would be. He assumed that he would play opposite “an average Joe like me”—meaning another working actor—and was startled when Ed Norton sat down across a table from him. Thompson also thought that he was supposed to settle on a consistent version of his role and refine it over a series of takes. He was halfway through the takes when he realized that he could experiment. Norton, he says, told him kindly that his gestures, while fine for the stage, were too large for film, and that he was speaking too clearly.
Studying clowning involves finding and encouraging the character within you who yearns to do stupid things. Thompson is concerned that his clown might be mean. Bill Irwin played the Fool last November in the production of “King Lear” in which Thompson played Kent, and I asked Irwin what he thought Thompson’s clown might be like. “Maybe one where assertion and apology are in a volatile dynamic,” he said. “I think he’s going to end up getting his chest and his chin and talking mechanism way out in front of his thoughts, and he’s going to do a lot of apologizing.” Thompson’s manner is so cheerful—his answering machine urges you to have a nice day—that you can’t help imagining a darker quality lurking within him.
Before clown class one morning, Thompson and Bayes met in the lobby of the building in New Haven where the class was held. They sat on stools at a tall, round table, and Thompson took out a notebook.
“The clown work I’m watching in clown class is created out of nothing, right?” Thompson asked. “All the texts I’ve worked with, though, you can’t improvise. Because it’s Shakespeare, I feel the constraints of the language, yet the work of the clown has to be expansive. How do I do that?”
“The thing is not necessarily that you improvise but that you have the freedom to play and the possibility of it falling apart—failure,” Bayes said.
“Failure?”
“If you don’t have the possibility of everything’s falling apart, there’s never a possibility of real triumph.”
“Is there anything I can do before I start the physical clown work?” Thompson asked. “Personal work I can do to find my clown?”
“I can give you the homework I give all my students.”
Thompson held his pen above his notebook.
“You have to start singing little songs about things as you do them,” Bayes said. “A washing-the-dishes song, or, It’s recycling day. Be open to the possibility of lyricism. That’s very important.”
Bayes began a song about going to an audition. “I’m never going to get that job,” he sang. “I don’t want that job anyway.”
Thompson nodded.
“And you need to start laughing more,” Bayes said. “Don’t worry about being polite.”
“I can do that.”
“When you run to the subway, and you just make it, and the doors go bing-bong, you need to say, ‘Sweet!,’ so everyone can hear you in the car. And when you miss it, say—”
“Fuck.”
Bayes shrugged. “I like to say, ‘Aw, nuts!’ ”
Bayes said that the audience would tell you immediately if the clown was working.
“What if I don’t get from the audience what I want?” Thompson asked.
“It’s because you didn’t bring it,” Bayes said. “It’s never the audience’s fault. You have to love that thing you brought. Otherwise, you brought an abstraction. You try. You sing badly, but you try.”
“And failure?”
“The more you love something, the greater the possibility of tragedy,” Bayes said. “I’ve brought something that isn’t understood, it fails, then there is the effort to reëstablish it. Or you begin to cry.”
“Where do you go from tears?”
“Try again,” Bayes said. “The tragedy of the clown’s life is the flop. You leave, you come back. ‘This time, it’s going to be good. I figured it out.’ ”
“So it’s hope and fear?”
“Plus your ability to play your tragedy. To be ready to take it in the face.”
“Are you trying to elicit sympathy?”
Bayes didn’t think it was quite as manipulative as that. “Perhaps they laugh because you’re being honest,” he said.
“You mean, the stakes are high. You really want it to work—it needs to work.”
“ ‘It’s going to be great,’ ” Bayes said, picking up Thompson’s lead. “ ‘You guys are going to love this.’ Oops.”
Thompson nodded. “Now, how many years does it take to develop these skills?” he asked.
“Some people are quick learners. It’s about living in your body without a filter. In a playful way, you’re meant to be vulnerable.”
“I tend to do that in dramatic action, so I’m hoping I can bring that over as an identifiable skill,” Thompson said, sounding like a salesman.
“Find a sense of play,” Bayes said.
Thompson seemed unsure.
“There’s certain parts of your talent that you have confidence in,” Bayes said.
“Right,” Thompson said, brightening.
“That’s not what I’m interested in,” Bayes replied. Then he said it was time for class.
Over the summer, after “Iceman” closes in Chicago, Thompson will create the characters of Louis Armstrong and his manager, a white man named Joe Glaser, in a one-man, two-character play called “Satchmo at the Waldorf,” by Terry Teachout, an Armstrong biographer. Thompson is a little nervous about playing a man who was so widely known, “because people might judge me on my ability to portray him as they recall him,” he says. “When you don’t look like him, you don’t sing like him, and you don’t play the trumpet like him, then, yeah, I got a lot to worry about.”
One morning, I drove with Teachout and Thompson to Queens College, where there is an archive of Armstrong recordings. Armstrong was one of the first people in the country to own a tape recorder. “Bing Crosby persuaded him to get one,” Teachout said. “You’re going to hear him as most people never did. You’re going to hear him be angry and vengeful.” The Armstrong recordings are under the care of a young piano player and archivist named Ricky Riccardi. Riccardi played a tape of Armstrong talking about how having Glaser as his manager had protected him when he got involved in a dispute with the Mob. Then he played an interview with Glaser talking about how Armstrong was breaking box-office records. Thompson bent his ear to the speaker.
“So that’s what Joe Glaser’s voice sounded like,” Thompson said when the tape finished.
“It’s flat,” Teachout said. “And high in the mask.”
“Quite nasal. And he swears quite a bit in the play.”
“It’s like Mamet.”
“Like somebody who’s bilingual,” Thompson said, meaning bilingual in English and profanity.
Thompson wants to portray a version of Armstrong that resembles the musician’s private self. People grew so accustomed to being recorded when they were at Armstrong’s house that they often forgot the machine was on, Teachout said. We listened to a tape of a party breaking up. Armstrong’s wife, Lucille, saw the guests to the door. It was about five in the morning. One of them, in saying good night, called her an African queen, and she came up the stairs saying, “I ain’t no goddam African queen. The American queen.” Armstrong urged her to come to bed.
“Hey, what? Shit, I’ve been trying to go to bed for nine hours, now don’t be rushing me!” she said.
“I ain’t rushing. I just want to fuck.”
“Well, you always want to fuck.”
“Yeah, well, I want to fuck now.”
“You always want to fuck now.”
What began as a seduction turned into a Mr. and Mrs. in which Lucille accused Armstrong of not caring about her except for sex. He said he lived for his horn, and she said, Bullshit, you live for sex. Next, she accused him of infidelities.
“Oh, you know better,” he said wearily. “You’re just full of whiskey tonight.”
They continued to argue until Armstrong finally said, “You miss this, and you’ll see how great you are.”
“Miss what?”
“Satchmo!”
“Oh, now, let’s don’t get all carried away with ourselves,” Lucille said scornfully. “You ain’t that great enough, either. You just a man, you just my husband. I didn’t marry a horn, I married a man.”
Thompson’s ear practically touched the speaker. When the tape ended, with Armstrong and Lucille heading to bed unreconciled, he sat back and exhaled as if he had been holding his breath.
By March, Thompson was entertaining Joe Mott, Satchmo, and Hamlet in his mind. Bill Irwin had said that if Thompson ever played Hamlet he would be willing to play Polonius, and Thompson was looking for a theatre where they might do it, perhaps in the fall, if neither “Satchmo at the Waldorf” nor “The Iceman Cometh” went on to runs elsewhere. On his phone he kept a picture he’d taken of a subway ad showing a small black boy from years ago wearing a tweed cap and coat, because it represented to him what Mott might have looked like as a child. He had also been listening to Armstrong recordings from the twenties and thirties, imagining Mott listening to them, too. In addition, he had begun having imaginary discussions between Joe Mott and Brutus Jones––both being O’Neill’s creations.
“You start to hear how they talk, and their fears,” Thompson said. “They’ve been interesting dialogues. They’re dominated by Brutus Jones, who is much more aggressive—Joe’s pretty quiet around him. They don’t quite get along. Brutus doesn’t have a lot of respect for Joe. He hasn’t killed him yet, but he would if he had the opportunity. He’s what Joe would like to be. Brutus would never want to be Joe, because he considers him to be weak.”
Thompson had also begun to sing songs about brushing his teeth and vacuuming his apartment. “Anything I do, I try to sing,” he said. “It’s hard. I keep falling back on some of the same ditties, but I try not to sing the same rhythm.
“And I’ve played around with laughing, but I just end up laughing for a little while, and it dies. I’m not sure how much clown I can find in me right now. I’m just sure of absolute and imminent failure first. You can’t approach clowning successfully. Over time, maybe. But your first encounters are bound to fail, so get used to it.” ♦
