A Life on the Stage

Long before she saw her first play, Marian Seldes knew she would become an actress. She knew as a six-year-old standing before a mirror in a nightgown that became "a costume in some dream," knew as a student standing before the ballet barre, "trying too hard to be a dancer," knew as a 16-year-old, standing before her parents and "auditioning" as Joan of Arc. So when she graduated from high school she turned down the college acceptances--among them, one from Radcliffe College--and took her first job in the theater (she ended up in Cambridge, after all, as a summer stock apprentice for the thenlegit Brattle Theater).

Her book defies simple categorizing, The Bright Lights is neither a collection of "Famous Theater Personalities I Have Known" anecdotes, though many celebrated names fill its pages, nor an intellectual sermon on the theater, though it contains many epigrams that any actor, established or aspiring, should cut out and tape to his mirror. Instead, the book combines both these elements, forming a recitation of memories interspersed with philosophy. It reads like a dreamy monologue, as if the reader and Miss Seldes went home together after her evening performance, and she began to describe her career. The soliloquy soon disregards the rules of sequential narration, as if the speaker began to interrupt herself, linking events by theme rather than by time, injecting the insights of the present into the past.

Seldes devotes her first chapter to recreating the quiet joy of her childhood: "I grew up in a home without quarrels or cruetly, where time and thoughts and friends were shared." As the book continues, however, biographical details dwindle into scattered references to a husband and daughter. Aside from her teaching drama at the Julliard School, the reader gains few insights into the offstage Seldes. Indeed, one begins to suspect that no such creature exists, so closely does The Bright Lights live up to its subtitle, "A Theatrical Life." Yet the book retains the tone of an intimate confession, because it deals with the personal side of being an actress.

Emotional Experiences

The events in Seldes' professional life are seen as emotional experiences. When a play she thought would run for a thousand performances closed after opening night, a newly-opened charge account goes unused, and taxis go unhailed. She marks a major career setback by measuring its small reverberations in her life-style. Similarly, she captures the human foibles of theatrical luminaries, such as Katharine Cornell's tendency to flutter her hands immediately before going onstage. Artists like Sir John Gieglud and Alfred Lunt are for the author magnificent human beings. Olivier in particular emerges not so much as the world's finest actor but as a perfect gentleman, treating young, awed actors as collegues, drinking with them, exchanging stories with them and giving advice. The gift of great actors is first and foremost their love and devotion to their fellow actors and their craft.

Tests

Evaluating these professionals in personal terms develop Seldes' strong emphasis on the integral role love plays in acting.

A play cannot live, Seldes says, if the actor fails to feel for it with "a caring" that embraces the whole meatrical enterprise. Her theme emerges clearly: "To act without love is cruel."

The book jacket states definitively (as book jackets tend to do) that The Bright Lights introduces Marian Seldes at the outset of a second distinguished career--as a writer." For one traned to convey emotion with the spoken word, Seldes expresses herself quite beautifully with written ones. Her style possesses a completely spontaneous quality, as if she were confiding these thoughts for the first time. Though concise, the writing frequently leaves an image that sways gentlyin the reader's mind.

Experiences with stillborn productions seem to dominate Seldes' career. On one level, The Bright Lights relates the story of an actress who has never quite made it. Although she is a Tony-award winner, she is not a star: the average theater goer would not recognize her name--a fact Seldes herself realizes. Often, she evaluates her career with humor.

Frequently, however, the comments are less flippant. She recalls a beloved director early in her career and his conviction that she would become a star, and she adds "I have worked continuously, but I was not able to live out his dreams for me as an actress." She imagines a less-beloved director in the less distant past classifying her as a "talented but disappointed actress."

Yet Seldes refuses to allow the reader's heart to bleed for her. All actors face the temptation to cuddle up to the sense of failure, but "it is unprofessional to indulge these feelings." As for herself:

Is what I am writing now, feeling now, an apology? For an actress's life? For my life? I do not want it to be that. Because in spite of the fact that the realness and humanness of my life seems separate now from those early dreams, the actual living of my life as an actress and as a person has been much richer, much more interesting than anything I imagined.

Small wonder, then, that The Bright Lights has no real bitterness, only an occasionally wistful--but unswerving--dedication to a capricious craft. In the chapter describing her role in Equus, she comments, "Chekhow has Nina say 'It seems to me a play must have some love in it.' So should a book that deals with the life of a play." And so does this book that deals with the life of many plays--and that of this actress as well.