WALLY: By the way, is he still thin?
ANDRE: [Hesitates blankly.] What?
WALLY: Grotowski. Is he still thin?
ANDRE: Oh! Absolutely. Oh, waiter? Uh, I think we can do without this. [He hands him the flower from the table.] Thank you. [Wally laughs.]
WALLY: What about this one? [He points to something on the menu.]
ANDRE: [Laughing:] "Seven swank shrimp" [?]! [They laugh.]
WAITER: Are you ready for your order?
ANDRE: Uh, yes. The aragna kalouska [?], how do you prepare that?
WALLY'S NARRATION: [André discusses his order with the waiter.] André seemed to know an awful lot about the menu. I didn't understand a word of it.
WAITER: Very good, I think.
ANDRE: Hum. No, I think I'll have the cailles aux raisins...
WAITER: Very good.
ANDRE: [For Wally's benefit:] ...quail.
WALLY: Oh, quails! I'll have that as well.
ANDRE: Two, great! [The waiter concurs.]
WALLY: Great!
ANDRE: And then I think to begin with, a terrine de poisson.
WAITER: Yes.
WALLY: What is that?
ANDRE: It's a sort of pâté, light, made of fish.
WALLY: Does it have bones in it?
ANDRE: [Laughing:] No bones. Very safe.
WALLY: Hunh. Well, uh. What is the, uh, "vromborova polevka"?
WAITER: It's a potato soup. It's quite delicious.
WALLY: Oh, well, that's great! I'll have that.
WAITER: Thank you.
ANDRE: Thank you very much.
WALLY: Well! Now when was the last time that we saw each other?
WALLY'S NARRATION: [They talk.] So we talked for a while about my writing and my acting, and about my girlfriend Debby. And we talked about his wife, Chiquita, and his two children, Nicholas and Marina. [We can make out a fragment of something André says: "...and I stayed back in New York...."] Finally, I got around to asking him what he'd been up to in the last few years.
WALLY: ...and, God! I'm just dying to hear it!
ANDRE: Really?
WALLY: Really!
WALLY'S NARRATION: At first, he seemed a little reluctant to go into it. So I just kept asking, and finally he started to answer.
ANDRE: ...conference on paratheatrical work, then. And this must have been about five years ago. And Grotowski and I were walking along Fifth Avenue and we were talking. You see, he'd invited me to come to teach that summer in Poland--you know, to teach a workshop to actors and directors and whatever. And I told him that I didn't want to come because, really, I'd nothing left to teach. I'd nothing left to say. I didn't know anything. I couldn't teach anything. Exercises meant nothing to me any more. Working on scenes from plays seemed ridiculous. I didn't know what to do. I mean, I just couldn't do it. So he said: "Why don't you tell me anything you'd like to have, if you did a workshop for me, no matter how outrageous, and maybe I can give it to you." So I said: "Well, if you could give me forty Jewish women who speak neither English nor French, either women who've been in the theater for a long time and want to leave it but don't know why, or young women who love the theater but have never seen a theater that they could love, and if these women could all play the trumpet or the harp, and if I could work in a forest, I'd come!" [They both laugh.] A week later, two weeks later, he called me from Poland and he said: "Well, forty Jewish women is little hard to find!" But he said: "I do have forty women. They all pretty much fit the definition." And he said: "I also have some very interesting men, but you don't have to work with them. These are all people who have in common the fact that they're questioning the theater. They don't all play the trumpet or the harp, but they all play a musical instrument, and none of them speak English." And he'd found me a forest, Wally, and the only inhabitants of this forest were some wild boar and a hermit! So that was an offer I couldn't refuse! I had to go. So, I went to Poland. And it was a wonderful group of young men and women. And the forest he had found us was absolutely magic. You know, it was a huge forest, I mean, the trees were so large that four or five people linking their arms couldn't get their arms around the trees? So we were camped out beside the ruins of this tiny little castle, and we would eat around this great stone stab that served as a sort of a table. And our schedule was that usually we would start work around sunset, and then generally we'd work until about six or seven in the morning, and then, because the Poles love to sing and dance, we'd sing and dance until about ten or eleven in the morning, and then we'd have our food, which was generally bread and jam, cheese and tea. Then we'd sleep from around noon to sunset. Now technically, of course, technically the situation is a very interesting one, 'cause if you find yourself in a forest with a group of forty people who don't speak your language then all your moorings are gone.
WALLY: What do you mean, exactly?
ANDRE: Well, what we'd do is just sit there and wait for someone to have an impulse to do something. Now in a way that's something like a theatrical improvisation. I mean, you know, if you were a director working on a play by Chekhov, you might have the actors playing the mother, the son or the uncle all sit around in a room and do a made-up scene that isn't in the play. For instance you might say to them: all right, let's say that it's a rainy Sunday afternoon on Sorin's estate and you're all trapped in the drawing room together; and then everyone would improvise, saying and doing what their character might say and do in that circumstance. Except that in this type of improvisation, the kind we did in Poland, the theme is oneself. So, you follow the same law of improvisation, which is that you do whatever your impulse as the character tells you to do, but in this case, you're the character. So there's no imaginary situation to hide behind. And there's no other person to hide behind. What you're doing in fact is you're asking those same questions that Stanislavsky said the actor should constantly ask himself as a character: "Who am I? Why am I here? Where do I come from? And where am I going?" But instead of applying them to a rôle, you apply them to yourself. Or to look at it a little differently: in a way it's like going right back to childhood where a group of children simply come into a room, are brought into a room, without toys, and begin to play. Grown-ups were learning how to play again!
WALLY: So you would all sit together somewhere, and you would play in some way, but what would you actually do?
ANDRE: Well, I'll give you a good example. You see, we worked together for a week in the city before we went off to our forest. Of course, Grotowski was there in the city, too, and I heard that every night he conducted something called a beehive, and I loved the sound of this beehive, so a night or two before we were supposed to go off to the country, I grabbed him by the collar and I said: "Listen, about this beehive: you know, I'd kind of like to participate in one. Just instinctively I feel it would be something interesting." And he said: "Well, certainly. In fact, why don't you with your group lead the beehive instead of participating." Well, you know, Wally, I got very nervous, you know, and I said: "Well, what is a beehive?" He said: "Well, a beehive is at eight o'clock a hundred strangers come into a room." And I said: "Yes?" And he said: "Yes, and whatever happens is a beehive." And I said: "Yes, but what am I supposed to do?" He said: "That's up to you." I said: "No, no! I really don't want to do this. I'll just participate." And he said: "No, no. You lead the beehive!" Well, I was terrified, Wally. I mean, in a way I felt on stage. I did it anyway.