On November 20th, 2011, the Graduate Acting department at NYU hosted the event Raise a Glass to Liviu Ciulei as his former students and colleagues reunited to pay tribute to this man of great quality. Directors Andrei Serban and Niky Wolcz from Columbia University were also present at the gathering. After having attended the event and having heard so many touching stories about him and his relationship with his actors and collaborators, I was inspired to gather a bouquet a memories from those close to him at the university. The outpouring of love and longing for this generous man is chronicled here for the newer generations, in the hope that Liviu Ciulei will be a source of inspiration and an example of the artist who gives all to his art, "who", to quote the voices here, collectively, "lived and breathed for his art." Romanian-American director Andrei Serban very eloquently describes the complexity of this remarkable man - "Ciulei was a true Renaissance man... a volcano who constantly erupted for Art."
I extend my heartfelt gratitude to all the participants in this adventure in time, whom I met in cafes, delis, restaurants, bistros, in the rehearsal spaces and offices at NYU, in rain, snow or sunshine and in great New York spirit, while looking for Liviu...
A special note of thanks to Ann Mathews, Director of Production at Tisch School of the Arts, who is an encyclopedia of Liviuisms and simply remembers every name, every play, every actor, every moment of stage business, and who generously provided all the resources during the intense process of piecing together this mosaic, this portrait of an Artist.
I dedicate these recollections to him whom I consider my grandfather in the theater, to Liviu Ciulei, with love.
Liviu Ciulei directing Lynn Hawley in Mary Stuart (1992)
Courtesy of NYU Tisch School of the Arts © Walter Garschagen
Nathan Darrow, Actor
The First Acting Lesson
I first met Liviu when I was in the first year at NYU. They called a few of us over to the Second Avenue space where they were beginning to rehearse Andorra and he needed three of us to play roles. We had heard of him and after the rehearsal, he started to read us for the roles of the Somebody, the Idiot and the Jew Detector. That was an incredible moment for me, to work with him just that little bit, because even though he was just meeting us and evaluating us for the production, almost the second or third sentence was an acting lesson, it was an acting law. I think the first thing he said to me was "You have to have absolutely no tension when you act." And he gave a little demonstration of a scene where his face was completely loose. I was first playing the Idiot in Andorra, later I played Somebody. The Idiot has no words, he just walks and looks around, but I moved my eyes when I looked about, and Liviu stopped me and said "As soon as you move your eyes like that you are hiding something. The Idiot, when he looks at something, his whole head turns. It's all completely open." And I thought "Wow, I'm in the presence of somebody who has thought about this stuff and who has an incredible desire to communicate it specifically to actors and make that happen." I ended up playing Somebody who had quite a bit of text through which he took me very carefully. It was a great experience of feeling quite at home on stage in a way I never had, even though I think I was doing just what he told me to do, I was trying to get the essence when he would do it himself and it seemed to work for me, it seemed to be alive because he was very clued into who the characters were.
I loved that he was very precise in the stage directions, everything that you do is part of the play, it's there to be seen, and I understand that overanalyzing things in the hands of a director that didn't have the perception and the sensitivity of Liviu would be terrible, but for me it seemed that he was seeing and experiencing it himself, and I went with it, I trusted it, I tried to live in it and I found I could. I loved listening to him and watching him direct other actors was phenomenal. The English that he would sometimes stumble on was gold for an actor, for the drama of the situation. I remember him directing the actress who played the lead in Andorra and he said "You are cooking the thoughts or the ideas" and I thought, wow, what a fantastic verb to do on stage, you're mixing and measuring inside - it was interesting theater and life too, it made me think of life.
You Must Have the Courage to Cry
I remember after the last dress rehearsal of Andorra he was talking to a designer and I was just in his area, he caught my eye and said "When the Jew Detector lets you go, start to cry!" and then he goes back to his designer. But I am this actor in his first year and I'm completely intimidated, freaked out, and of course, thinking - I can't just cry! And he notices this while he's with the designer, came back to me and he did it himself, he cried, with tears, and it was believable. The last thing he said to me before he went to Europe for the break when we were still in the run of the play was "You must have the courage to cry." I saw his Month in the Country with the second year class and I was so struck by that production because it felt like it had no director and having worked with Liviu, I knew that it had a micro-director, everything was probably really directed, but it seemed as if it wasn't.
Then in my third year I did The Philistines and I worked more with him because I had a major role. I'll never forget when he said after the first week of rehearsal "You're in a good line". We would go to the smoking lounge on Second Ave, and I was talking to one of my classmates about The Seagull, I had played Treplev in college and I was terrible, I was dreadful, and I thought I'm just going to go out on a limb, I'm just going to ask, I'm going to try to get some little nugget from Liviu about Treplev, and I introduced it "Liviu, I played Treplev in college and I was awful..." and without missing a beat, he just looked at me and said "I played it great!" And he was immediately in the story of when he played it in Europe and toured Europe, and "I was in love with Nina, we were madly in love...". [Liviu Ciulei and his wife, legendary Romanian actress Clody Bertola, played Treplev and Nina in The Seagull in 1949.]
Kansas City - New York - London - Bucharest - Munich
My career since NYU was here and there, and I thought I would give up. I spent quite some time in my hometown of Kansas City doing a lot of theater, and now and then, a dream would come into my mind that I thought I should start to pursue, just to go to Romania and find Liviu. I knew he had gone back there and I thought - I'll find him, I'll sweep out the cupboards, and every once in a while we can work on Hamlet or Treplev or something like that. And it remained just a dream, I didn't make those moves, it didn't happen. But then I got a job, I got The Bridge Project, this is after I had come back to New York and given it another go. The Bridge Project was going to take me around the world, we started in London and I already knew I was closer than I'd been. We had a week break between our performances in Hong Kong and our performances in Ávila, Spain. We had one week off, and the producer said we'll fly you home and fly you to Spain, or if you want to take care of yourselves getting to Spain over that week, we'll reimburse you for the cost.
I had a week and I said to myself - I'm going to go see him, I'm going to find Liviu. I didn't know how, I'm a very unorganized person, I wait till the last minute, I think about things, I don't do it. I sent an email to someone but I got nothing back, yet I booked travel to Bucharest. I didn't know he wasn't there. So I got myself to Bucharest, a place I had never been to, a good adventure! I didn't know anyone there but I found good lodging while I was also communicating with my girlfriend back in New York, whose teacher is Niky Wolcz at Columbia University and he was getting information about Liviu. So I got to Bucharest, I spent one night, I woke up that next morning thinking that I would just go down to The National Theater, I was very close to it, and I was thinking he is Liviu Ciulei, he's a famous person, I'll find him. I didn't have his home address. But in the morning, I received an email from my girlfriend saying that he is in Munich, in the hospital. Then I just packed up, I went to the train station and took a train to Munich for a day or so. I didn't know where he was necessarily in the city, but by the time I got to Munich, I also got a phone number, yet I didn't know how he was doing, I didn't know if he could see anybody. So I hemmed and hawed about that a little bit and a very good friend's voice came into my head saying "Don't let that stop you, call the number!" I called and Helga [Ciulei] answered, I recognized her voice, I told her who I was, a former student, and before me even saying anything, she asked "Do you want to come see Liviu?" and I said "Of course, of course!", so I went to see him at home.
The Last Acting Lesson
We started talking about NYU and this and that, we walked in the apartment, he couldn't breathe very well, his energy was very low. I don't know how we got on the topic, but he did say that he found out a secret after he left NYU, and of course I couldn't believe this, my ears perked. I mean, I really feel like I'm coming to see him to say "Thank you, you are important to me, I love you." And he was telling me a secret, he said that he found that every character has a center of concentration that is physical and he gave these two examples: the first one, Vanya and Astrov are men who want what they can't have, so the concentration rests right around their mouth; and the other example was of a young girl going to church with her book, and he says her center is right above the buttocks, in the lower back. He says that and then he goes "Try, try!" So he has me stand up, and Helga is in the back saying "He doesn't want to be the giiirl!", in the meantime I'm thinking on the inside - This is beautiful, of course I want this - so I did the girl!...
It was all very amazing, it was dreamlike for me because it was the end of this journey to see him, and then in a little while he got tired. He was completely gracious through all of that, I think the first thing he said to me was "I'm very sick", and at some point he went into a bedroom and I stayed there with him, we talked a little bit more and I think that's when I confessed that I had thought of finding him and working on something, and he said, well, it's a little late now... He said "Don't forget me" and I hope that I expressed this, I tried to express to him how that was so impossible, not to let that worry him at all, that he didn't have to give me that directive. And then I kissed him on the head and left. A month later, I found out he passed away.
The Art of The Theater
I thought of finding him and working with him again, because he just always came to mind when it came to the real art. We back into the art sometimes and we run up against it or our energy and our exuberance as professionals in New York, as Americans maybe we get it sometimes, but Liviu just seemed to walk with it. And I felt that he would also want this, maybe I thought that he would respond to it, that there was a possibility that actually I could see that happen. He seems like a person who sees the mission to continue the work of the theater, that he would want to pass it on, share it. I also felt he liked me, I felt he respected me as an actor. One thing I recall when we were working on The Philistines is that we had a translation which was very wordy, so we were cutting things, cutting a lot, and I do remember at one point noticing something and I said "If you cut this, you have to put this back", or I said "If you cut this, you also have to cut this" and we were all in awe of him generally, but I remember going ahead and pointing this out to him as we broke for something, and he looked at it and said "You're right" and he also said "I love it when I'm wrong because then I'm learning" - he said that more than once. That's the spirit! He didn't own it, it wasn't in his possession, it was something that he wanted to be a part of, he wanted to be in and lifted by the real Art - this is getting hard to talk about...
I guess it's the pursuit of the real stuff, the real stuff that is, in fact, undeniable. A lot of theater, a lot of what we do, especially in New York, also everywhere, and I'm sure this happens in Europe too - it attempts something, we experiment and it's up to the audience or up to us to get it. I feel that with Liviu that was nonsense, that we're looking for something here and when we find it, no one can say it's not it. It will be clear, we will know it, and he clearly brought an incredible observation of life to the work. It was amazing, I remember him excoriating - is that the word? - this was a direction he gave me in fact which he stole from another actor in something else, but it was something in Andorra where he wanted me to play with my seam a little bit, as I was waiting for the Jew Detector, and then he just turned to everybody and said that we have to be so observant of these things in life, we have to see these things in life, and it's true, when we do, we serve something else. In acting especially, it can become a score, like a physical set of moves, a physical score, it's no different than what Stanislavski started to respond to, or anybody started to respond to, we have them now, they just happen to be, they happen to be more like what we know, but we still see them, and Liviu was always drilling those down and making them specific, making those physical things specific. I remember him saying one time when I was sharing with him that I had trouble with my emotional life and my head, that the head takes over and I want that to go away, and he said "No, it has to be both, you have to have both things."
I feel there was a dialogue for him between the outer and the inner, you saw that existing in him, and if you could try to access that yourself, he was amazing to work with because he would give you the shape, he would give you this way of sitting, and if you awake to it, if you are alive on the inside, my God, the work is done! As actors we don't want it to be torture, we want it to be free, we want it to be fun, a fantasy, and in this area specifically he had unbelievable skill. He also had generosity. One of the first things he said after he told me "You must have no tension when you act" was that he had learned very incorrectly, he said he had terrible instruction at first, until that turned around, but he was open even with that. That's enormous, that's enormous for someone who is trying to learn and feels that they are tight, or thinks oh, gosh, if I go down this wrong path I'll never get back, but he was an example of somebody who's saying you can always get back, keep going, keep working on yourself. That's huge! We loved him as an actor.
Nathan Darrow - Nil in The Philistines (2000)
Courtesy of NYU Tisch School of the Arts
Productions with Liviu Ciulei at New York University - Tisch School of the Arts, Graduate Acting: Somebody in Andorra by Max Frisch (December 1998); Nil in The Philistines by Maxim Gorky (December 2000).
Nathan Darrow: Theater - Long Day's Journey Into Night (Arena Stage); Richard III (The Bridge Project: BAM, Old Vic, World Tour); In The Next Room or The Vibrator Play (Broadway-LCT); Major Barbara (Roundabout); Trade, Paternity (Cherry Lane); Death of a Salesman (Weston Playhouse); Ajax (A.R.T.) Translations, Taking Sides, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Kansas City Actors' Theatre); Henry V, Romeo and Juliet (HASF); To Kill A Mockingbird (KC Rep); Much Ado About Nothing (Berkeley Rep); The Pillowman, The Little Dog Laughed (Unicorn Theatre); Magnetic North (Public Theatre-ME). Netflix - House of Cards. Film - Civil War Stories. Education - B.S., University of Evansville; M.F.A., NYU under Zelda Fichandler, Ron Van Lieu.