Allen and his dog, Jack

Yesterday, we talked with Allen Fitzpatrick, who plays the lead role of Gallimard in Charlotte Rep’s co-production (along with Syracuse Stage) of M. Butterfly. It was the first sunny day in a week, so we went to a park in the Elizabeth neighborhood, and sat outside in the late afternoon sun.

Do you still have Jack the dog?

Yes, I do. He’ll be turning ten in January.

We found a picture of Jack on the internet.

That’s remarkable. Yes, that’s Jack. He’s greyer now, as am I. That picture was taken on Staten Island. There are dog beaches on Staten Island that very few people know about. This picture is from six or seven years ago. Jack wishes he were here now. He likes open spaces. He was on tour with me for Sunset Boulevard, for the last six months of the year and a half I was in that show (as Max von Meyerling in the national tour, opposite Petula Clark).

Why isn’t he with you now?

We’re only here for three and a half weeks. It’s a little disruptive, as he gets older.

How are the Charlotte audiences?

Last night’s audience was excellent. They were superb. And I’m pleased to say that, like the Syracuse audiences, they all jumped to their feet at the end of the show. We’d been told that we might find Charlotte audiences a little more reserved, but that hasn’t been the case. There are some surprises in the show, sort of a big twist, and it seems to me that Charlotte audiences are a little more surprised by the twist than they were up north. It’s great. We love for the show to be a surprise to people, and that’s working really, really well.

Do you know anyone here?

I know a couple who have a company called Compact Broadway. They live in Charlotte and are in New York City a lot. I’ve met them on a number of occasions, through various shows that I do. I believe what they do is produce interview shows that are aired on public radio. They interview the actors in Broadway and Off-Broadway shows, and they include snippets from sound tracks of the shows. I’ve done a couple of shows for them. And I know the chair of the theatre department at Winthrop University. She’s been to the show. I’m going to go down to Winthrop and talk to some classes there next week.

Are the classes coming to the show?

I don’t know if arrangements have been made for Winthrop students or not. I’m talking to acting students, and some other aspect of theatre... possibly playwriting.

Are you a playwright?

No. I have dabbled very lightly in writing over the years, and it’s something I’m always intending to come back to. I haven’t written anything that’s been produced. I’ve helped other people on their projects. A lot of people seem to be writing their own projects, as an opportunity to break out and get seen, without having to wait for the right project to come their way.

They write something as a vehicle for themselves?

Right. From John Leguizamo, who’s probably the most famous actor in that regard, to Whoopi Goldberg and Eric Bogosian. They do it and they seem to get themselves on the map.

Sexaholic was a great show.

I didn’t see it. I try to see most things in New York, but sometimes I miss a show because, luckily, I’m working. Sometimes when you’re in a show, they invite you to see a final dress, or what they call a "gypsy run," that’s just done for other actors. I see some things that way.

Did you know Michael Bush or Matt Olin before you did this show?

I didn’t know Matt, though he worked for Dodger Theatricals. (Dodger Theatricals produced the revival of 42nd Street, in which Allen played Mac.) Michael has told me that he knew my work. I never had a chance to work at MTC, but we met at my audition in New York, an audition that was co-sponsored by Michael Bush and Bob Moss. Michael certainly had input into the casting process, and he and Bob were both for my being cast in it. That was very exciting for me.

I really wanted to do this play. The last project I did was Sweet Smell of Success on Broadway, and we closed abruptly, and rather unfairly, I thought, on June 15. I had started auditioning for other parts, and got the offer to do M. Butterfly, and then offers for four other projects came in that same week. It was sort of miraculous, and I had a chance to pick and choose among a lot of projects for the next thing. M. Butterfly was just very, very sweet. There were three projects in New York that weren’t nearly as interesting for what I’d be doing in them, and there was another regional production of a show. But this play... a Tony Award-winning play, and a great role where you virtually never leave the stage. I thought, "This is perfect."

So, it was an eleven-week commitment. I have no regrets about my choice. It’s been great. The show continues to grow. I look back and I see how much the show has evolved since those first performances in Syracuse, and it’s really come a long way. Charlotte audiences are the great beneficiaries of the fact that this was a co-production. I’m not saying that when we did the show in Syracuse it was loose. It was very good then. Still, it’s only through doing it in front of many audiences that it gets better and better, and the rhythms get better, and you understand how the audience perceives it, and what you should speed up and what you should slow down, and all sorts of things. Not that the Syracuse audiences were slighted, but Charlotte is getting the peak of our performances.

You think that’s generally true, that the play improves as the cast gets more comfortable, and more accustomed to what works with an audience?

Absolutely.

And do the audiences vary a lot from performance to performance?

The audiences vary extraordinarily. I don’t know whether it’s the particular nature of our play, which has political issues, and gender issues, and power issues. The audience always appreciates it, and they always jump to their feet at the end. But during the show, the vocal responses and the energy responses are incredibly varied. There are audiences that are extremely reserved, who sit there, very quietly and respectfully. They’re almost afraid to laugh; they don’t want to interrupt us. We can’t really have a rapport with them. Then we have other audiences, like last night’s, which are extremely vocal and responsive. The show is filled with humor, and we want to get a quick repartee going between the audience and us, so we can have an exchange of energy. I don’t think most audiences, and I mean audiences everywhere, realize how vital it is that the actors hear them from the first; that they hear them laughing, or snorting, or making whatever noises they make; that it’s critical to get the energy flow going. The audience will cause themselves to see a mediocre performance if they don’t participate one hundred per cent. I’ve seen it so many times, and been in audiences where it happened. It’s not like they just pay their thirty bucks or whatever. They have to play their part.

It’s almost like you want someone with a good laugh, or someone who claps first, to sit in the middle.

Yes. You often see it. There are a couple of people in the audience who are loose with their response, and that will get things going. Things will start to crackle and it’s infectious, and it’ll go. Thank god those people are there. It’s a two-way street. Not to be too far-falutin, but the energy is a flow, a circle. It goes out and comes back. You need those folks to be vibrant in their response. A passive audience is the most disappointing thing you can have. Things are going very well here.

We read somewhere that you got your Actors Equity card on your twenty-first birthday.

Right around then, I think... shortly thereafter. I graduated from the University of Virginia in 1975, and then went up to northern Virginia and did some non-Equity dinner theatre for about six months. Right after my birthday, an Equity theatre there was doing My Fair Lady, and I auditioned. They offered it to me, and I ended up getting my Equity card out of it. I wanted to join the union, because I wanted to make a concentrated effort to go forward and have a career. I stayed around the Washington DC area for another six months or so, and realized that there weren’t enough opportunities to stay in one place. I headed up to New York.

What do you consider your first big break? What made you feel validated in your decision to become a professional actor?

It took a long time. I was content just to be working, but then in 1990 I got into my first Off-Broadway show, The Rothschilds, a revival at Circle in the Square. That got a lot of attention, and here I am in a hit Off-Broadway show. I felt very immersed in it. A few months later I got my first Broadway show, Les Misérables, where I made my Broadway debut, which was a terrifying and exciting thing. That show is closing soon. I guess I did it early on; it’d only been open 4 years when I did it.

What’s your favorite play, of all the plays you’ve done? Is that an unfair question?

No, not at all. It’s hard because the experience of doing theatre is caught up with so many things: not only the part, but the piece itself and how the audience responds, where you did it, the actors you were doing it with, the director who directed you, and possibly what community you ended up performing it in. I’ll say that one of my greatest triumphs was playing Sweeney in the musical Sweeney Todd by Stephen Sondheimm at the Goodspeed Opera House about five years ago. It felt like a great triumph. It’s a tremendous show; it’s one of the best musicals ever written. It was a perfect fit for my talents and personality, and it was sort of famously regarded.

And then, of course, doing Sweet Smell of Success, I was standby for John Lithgow. I went on for John several times when he was in Los Angeles. Going on in that leading role, on Broadway in a brand new show, and having a bit of a triumph, that was great, too. Most of those audiences that I played for knew beforehand that they weren’t going to see John, so it was nice that there were 800 people a night there who were willing to see me play the lead.

You’ve gotten a lot of good reviews for your singing, and it seems you’ve done more musicals than non-musicals; the current play aside, would you say that you generally prefer doing musicals?

There’s a different kind of energy to musicals. There’s an excitement about it; it’s sort of a different creature. Sometimes you get tired of doing too many musicals, and musical theatre actors are very wary of doing only musicals. There’s a certain amount of pigeon-holing in how actors are seen and cast. I’m in a phase now where I’d like to do less musicals and more plays. I’ve never regretted entering musical theatre, and if you’re living in New York, and you can sing, there are so many more opportunities to work as a singing actor than as an actor who doesn’t sing. In an ideal world, I would alternate. I would do a couple of plays, then a musical, then a couple of plays, then another musical. The other thing is, when you do a musical, you’ve got to take care of yourself a little better. You have to watch your voice. It’s more demanding of your vocal chords. You can’t stay out quite as late, and you have to be more protective of yourself. You get a little sniffle and worry that you’ll be able to sing the show.

For musical auditions, it’s common that a piece of music from the show, or in the style of the show, is selected and you learn that.

Yes, that seems to be the new process.

If you pick your own song, what do you choose?

It depends. I’ve worked up a portfolio. I’ve never actually been very good at choosing. I used to sing old songs from old-fashioned shows, and then all of a sudden Broadway started changing, and everybody wanted pop rock. I still don’t have any pop rock. I don’t have a good repertoire of stuff for the kinds of musicals that are being written today. For instance, when I auditioned for Bat Boy, I didn’t have any songs right for it, and I didn’t get the part. I still sing Rogers and Hammerstein, and Sondheim.

Do you read your own reviews?

No.

Do you ever read them eventually?

It depends. If I’m in New York, I’ll read the major reviews because the consequences of those reviews will determine the length of employment. Outside of that, I have no real reason to read the reviews. They’re not going to affect my performance. If they’re bad, they’re just going to make me feel bad, and I’ll have to dismiss them, and if they’re good, it’s just ego gratification. I know what I’m doing in the show, and think I’m a better judge of what’s going on onstage than someone who comes in and sees it for the first time.

Let’s talk about M. Butterfly. You came to the first rehearsals perhaps more prepared than you would be for most things. What did you do to prepare yourself?

Because the show is so complex, and I wanted it to be a great success, I wanted to know everything about the play, everything that’s mentioned in it, and everything that happened to the character. I did a lot of research. I read about the real life characters that it’s based on to get a sense of what they were like and their dynamic. I studied the Chinese Cultural Revolution, so I could understand what was happening politically in the period. The background of where and when it takes place... it happens at a critical point in history and that backdrop is like another character in the show. It plays a huge role in how the events unfold. I also learned about Chinese opera, and a great deal about Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, the opera itself, because it’s the character’s favorite opera.

I spent hours each day on the lines. It took three to four weeks just to learn the lines. I spent a couple of hours each day doing research about other aspects of the show. I watched the film version with Jeremy Irons, to see how they approached it. I don’t mind seeing other people’s interpretations. I also listened to the audio recording of John Lithgow and B.D. Wong. I was probably better prepared than I’ve ever been for anything. I knew we were coming in for just two weeks of rehearsal, so I had to be completely off book. I knew we were going to spend everything on blocking and working on the actor relationships, so I had to know it cold the minute I got off the plane in Syracuse.

The character Gallimard is interesting. He’s pathetic and compelling at the same time. How do you bring that to life?

That’s the hard one. I try to figure out everything he does and why he does it. Once I understand those things, it kind of floods out. I’m an intuitive actor. I read the script and get under the thing and try to figure out what the intentions are, and what may have happened in the past that gives him those motivations. You look for things in your own life and personality that are resonant with the character’s feelings. I’ve done enough parts and lived long enough that there are very few experiences that I encounter on the page that I can’t relate to some emotional experience in my own life. You just let it play, and then you contour it during rehearsals as to levels at which it’s played, and then you change it more in front of audiences. Our performances change subtly from night to night.

Do you miss a character when you finish a play?

Oh yes. You live with it for so long that it’s part of you. Sometimes you take on characteristics of a character. If I’m playing someone who has great authority, I’ll feel that authority more in my real life when I’m walking the street. Or if you’re playing someone who’s dark and has some mild psychosis, you’ll feel those feeling a little more. You tend to carry a character with you, so at the end of a play’s run there’s certainly a process of withdrawal. This one will be hard because it’s a great character to play. But we’ll have done eleven weeks, and that’s a good chunk: just enough that we’ve squeezed everything out of the play that we could. But not so long that we’ve gotten tired of doing it, which often happens to a show after five or six months.

What’s your next project?

I don’t know. I don’t think any of us have anything lined up. It’s hard to go away for this long and not have auditioned for anything else, but we’re going back at a good time. So it’ll be calling up the agent, and seeing what’s going on. I have some friends that are developing projects as producers, and there may be something for me in one of their shows at the beginning of the year. I get to go back to New York, and it’ll be the holiday season. I have friends who are in A Christmas Carol every year. They do ten to twelve shows a week, so their holidays are all about work. I’ll get to relax and enjoy the season.

Thanks for taking the time to talk to us.

~ Lydia Arnold
November 1, 2002