Three interviews with the Ensemble of Skirmishes
Minor 'Skirmishes' in a Major Drama
A Four-Handed Juggling Act at the Matrix
by T.H. McCulloh
In a dim and forbidding bedroom in an old house in Liverpool an aged woman lies silently, eyes closed, waiting to slip away from this life. Her guardian, daughter Jean, stares absently into space until she is jolted into awareness by the arrival of sister Rita.
"Any change?" asks Rita.
Jean's eyes flash with recognition but there is a wry wariness as she stretches her composure to include the errant Rita. "She's gone out for a bag of chips," she barks.
Catherine Hayes' hour-and-a-half sojourn with the sisters and their dying mother, now playing at the Matrix Theatre, is most definitely not a play about death. It is a play about survival. And it is riddled with that odd humor with which all people defend themselves in catastrophe.
One of the definitions of the word "skirmish" is "contest," and Skirmishes most certainly is a contest of wills among three women. The three actresses who engage in these skirmishes engage in a different kind of heart-to-heart with their director Sam Weisman and Drama-Loguc in their dressing room before a recent performance. There is that same locker room badinage as between boxers before they go out to pummel one another.
Tyne Daly, who wrenches the soul out of put-upon sister Jean and lays it before her audience, smiles, "They've told us the trouble with this play is that we like each other too well to play these two broads." She lightly tosses a crumpled tissue into a shopping bag beside Carolyn Seymour, the coathanger-in-the-blouse sister Rita.
Seymour tilts her head curiously. "Why did you throw that in my makeup kit?"
"I thought it was the garbahge." Sylvia Meredith pats her face with a sponge and watches with twinkling eyes; eyes that become steel and anger as the suffering mother.
"The thing I like about the play," says Seymour, "is that when I first read it I found it funny enough to be valuable. Having been in that situation myself with various members of my family dying within the home there are always moments of extreme humor. And it's not hysterical humor. It's genuine. But there's absolutely no communication between any of them; then suddenly that one moment when Jean and I look as though we're going to make it and have a relationship is blown by mother's interruption. It's just agonizing. I like that aspect; the play's a three-hander and I couldn't think of a better person to do it with. Tyne got me going with it."
"So it's my fault."
Tyne Daly and Sylvia Merdith were the first choices for their roles but "we auditioned for Carolyn's part," Weisman says. "She beat out several heavyweight actresses."
Daly whips out. "Does that mean she was thinner than everybody?"
Actually, producer Joe Stern had seen the play and asked Weisman to direct it for the Matrix. "It's difficult," the director admits. "It's the most difficult play I've ever been involved with as an actor or director, I thought the only way to make the play work was to go for an hour-and-a-half of absolute reality. There's nothing imposed upon, it. The thing people get involved in, the red herring about the play, is that it's not about death. Because it's not, I think the people who don't get it insist upon thinking about it that way."
Seymour squints into her mirror as she applies an eye line. "Audiences love the fact that they're drawn into that room."
"The play affords an opportunity," Daly adds, "for the audience to just observe these three human beings in this space of time which is exactly the amount of time it takes everything to happen. There's no relief in this play. That's part of its purpose. It's very important to the telling of the story that all the people in the room going through the play, the players and the people witnessing it, take this trip of time. It's one of the interesting things about being in the theatre.
There is one long moment when Jean leaves the room to fix something to eat. Rita, for the first time is left alone with her mother. In approximately the time it takes to prepare a quick breakfast Rita has to acquaint herself with the world in which Jean has been living for the years of her mother's illness.
"It's amazing, doing that moment," Seymour explains. "The commitment to really being focused and in that room at that time has to be really heightened because I have nothing else to play off except the energy I give."
Daly agrees. "It takes an enormous amount of concentration to be alone in that room with people looking at you, the building of the fourth wall and the making of that place as a very private place, particularly those times when one of the sisters is out of the room. It's a very interesting thing for an actress to do. I've had a lot of fun with it."
Leaning back in her chair limply, Seymour sighs. "I have worked hard to be so simple. All she can do is react. She doesn't have an original thought in her body, this woman. It's been difficult to get out of my own way and shut up and listen and react to that. I've learned an enormous amount doing this play."
Skirmishes is an actor's play. Well, maybe a director's play. Daly holds up a hand at the categorizing. "Yes, the play is an interesting play for actors but you need a very strong hand, which is precisely what we had with Sam, to let the story go off the way it goes. You do the play right and the work of the writer is served by the director and, on another level, served by the actors and it all happens. We're making a balance. We're doing a juggling act in serving the play. For instance my impulse to begin with was just to lay it all onto Rita. Sam had to guide me away from looking at her because Jean is someone who is dying to talk to anybody. But she's so angry the minute there's anybody to talk to she's constipated with rage. It's been a very interesting trip."
Weisman's interest in the play was piqued by the opening lines: "Any change?" "She's gone out for a bag of chips."
"I thought any play that began that way, there's got to be something to it. I thought it was a great acting play and I like to do acting plays. That's where my strength is."
"It's almost unactable, of course," Daly laughs.
"That's true. But it plays better than it reads and the minute I read it I knew I wanted to do it."
So it is an actor's play and a director's play. It is also an audience play, providing the catharsis which all theatre is supposed to be about. We know that Rita and Jean will survive because they are real people dealing with real problems. And the religious event, which theatre is often called, occurs in Skirmishes.
"All good plays," Tyne Daly mumbles as she slowly pulls on one of the newly-laundered tatty socks which hang limply about Jean's ankles, "are about the mysteries, the big stuff, right? Birth and death and relationships on some level or another. All good plays are about that. I like it because it's beautifully written. It's wrought with a lot of care. The balance point of humor is really interesting."
"And we have this great ensemble feeling," Seymour enthuses, "which is lovely."
Truly an ensemble piece, Skirmishes forces the actresses to dig deeply. Sylvia Meredith, who spends most of the evening asleep in a most difficult assignment, says, "I had a very hard time finding out what the old lady was really about." But the characterization is fully realized, helped perhaps by the vibrations she gets from her nightgown. It belonged to Carolyn Seymour's great-grandmother, Moura, who was mistress to both Maxim Gorky and H.G. Wells.
A play about death? Not really. But a difficult play which must find its audience. It is an important play in the panoply of theatre growth in Los Angeles and, as Tyne Daly says with a laugh, "on any given Monday night you can go across town and see Carolyn in The Ruling Class, you can see me on television in Cagney and Lacey or on HBO in some picture that's seven or eight years old."
Or you can see their acclaimed performances in Catherine Hayes' Skirmishes. "Where we are now is here, telling our stories."
L.A. Times, Thursday, May 5, 1983
'Skirmishes': A Dying Mother's Battle
by Sylvie Drake
Mothers and daughters. Fascinating accomplices or adversaries or merely competitors, but interesting, always. Marsha Norman's Pulitzer Prize-winning play "'night, Mother" offers the most fevered case in point, but a new drama—or at least new to us—is again about to plunge us into the whole sticky business.
It is British playwright Catherine Hayes' "Skirmishes," an Actors for Themselves production destined to run in repertory with producer Joe Stern's distinguished mounting of "Eminent Domain" at the Matrix. It is officially described as "a drama of two daughters and their relationship to their dying mother," with the mother on stage and very much a part of the action.
Sylvia Meredith, recently nominated by the Los Angeles Drama Critics circle for her performance in "Going to See the Elephant," tackles that mother, while Carolyn Seymour and Tyne Daly (everyone's Mary Beth in TV's "Cagney and Lacy") play the two daughters.
How does Tyne Daly find time for Equity Waiver?
"Joe Stern came down and seduced me with the play," she said Tuesday. "Equity Waiver? What do you mean? I've always done Equity Waiver. After nine months of having my picture taken, I couldn't wait to get back on stage. I'm foolishly fond of doing theater. When I left New York City, I thought I had left theater forever, but, of course, I hadn't."
Of course, she hadn't. The rushing words tumbled, one after the other, in that uniquely breathless Daly style:
"I had been approached about doing 'Sister Mary' in New York, taking over the role, but the dates didn't, work out. So here I am in this play, in real time. I used to think I knew what it's about, but I don't know. I'm at that point where I don't understand anything. I ask myself, what are we doing here? Why am I in it? Who are these people? It always happens to me about two weeks into rehearsal. Well, it's about sisters at a very desperate time in their lives. I hope it's very funny and grueling and strange."
Earlier forays into Equity Waiver aside, Daly also did a notable run of shows at the Mark Taper and the Forum Lab. Memorably, she played an 80-year-old matriarch in Harvey Perr's "Gethsemane Springs," but wives seem to be her specialty—the wife in "Ashes," with Michael Cristofer playing her husband, and the wife in Cristofer's own "Black Angel," with its stunning final monologue.
"Another laugh riot," she quipped. "That monologue was Michael's revenge for his monologue in 'Ashes.' "
Not quite television, is it?
"Whaddayamean? TV's like doing the Play pf the Week, like stock." This was Mary Beth speaking. "It's a different way of finding your energy. When I do 'Skirmishes,' I'll be watching my mother die every night for two months. If I played 'Medea,' I'd be killing my children every night. But with Mary Beth, I know her in many different situations. With her brother—that's a new character—with her husband, I love that relationship with her husband.
"I've done 22 shows. That's probably the longest time I've worked on any project, including rep. It's a very good job. I hope it continues. If it doesn't, I hope I'll get another good job. The real prize is I've gotten to act every day for nine months. Not many American actors get to do that.
"What could be bad?"
What, indeed. "Skirmishes" opens May 24.
L.A. Times, 1983
Sylvia Meredith Plays it as it Lays in 'Skirmishes'
by Janice Arkatov
It's 8 p.m. center stage at the Matrix Theatre: time for Sylvia Meredith to go to work. She climbs into the large wood-frame bed, fluffs up her pillows, pulls up the blankets and closes her eyes. The play, Catherine Hayes' "Skirmishes," unfolds, with two sisters (Tyne Daly and Carolyn Seymour) railing at each other over their elderly mother's deathbed.
Through it all, Meredith lies mute and unmoving (with the exception of a few twitches, grimaces and one shrieked line), a hard and bitter object—almost a piece of human scenery. Could any actress ask for an easier time?
"Oh yes!" gasps the tiny, gray-pigtailed Meredith. "Let me tell you, lying there is such a trap. I have never kept such an absolute blank in my entire life—'cause if I even start thinking about what's happening on the front steps of Melrose, I begin to float. . . and I mean float. I have to stop myself; I have to listen all the time.
"In the beginning, our director, Sam Weisman, was actually thinking of installing an electrical device to prod me if I fell asleep. I didn't tell him that once during rehearsal I really did fall asleep. That was quite frightening, 'cause when I woke up, it was during one of those long silences in the play—and I didn't know where we were."
Keeping awake onstage isn't Meredith's only theatrical chore. Since last August, she's been performing alternate nights at Pasadena's De Lacey St. Theatre in "Coming to See the Elephant"—a role which recently earned her an L.A. Drama Critics' nomination (and the play a Dramalogue Award).
Of her dual roles in "Elephant" and "Skirmishes", Meredith says: "It is a bit like doing my own private repertory. But I've had it worse. Last Christmas time, I was playing at South Coast Rep in Jim Leonard's The Diviners.' I was driving to Costa Mesa in all the traffic for rehearsals and then coming back—in all the traffic—to Pasadena and doing 'Elephant' four times a week. So this is kind of a cinch.
"Of course," she continues reflectively, "it is a little shift of gears. 'Elephant* is a very dramatic role—but I know her. She's part of me. With 'Skirmishes,' I'm just beginning to know this old gal.
"At first, on paper, the character was such a bare skeleton. So I had to create a life outside the script. But now—I'm really full of her by the time that curtain goes up. I don't know what's conveyed to the audience, but I'm there and I feel her."
Meredith has been "feeling" characters since age 10, from professional stock performances in her native Minneapolis, through her teens: joining Chautauqua (a prestigious traveling company of actors and musicians during the 1920s), and later as a puppeteer—touring 11 years with the Sue Hastings Marionette Theatre.
At the beginning of World War II, she joined the U.S. Nurse Cadet Corps. It's one more role than she holds onto today.
"All this time," she explains proudly, "going back and forth, I maintain a part-time nursing job, working at a home health agency and supervising the aides. With four hours minimum each day, it doesn't leave me a lot of time to be bored. My bosses are very understanding; they know I'm an actress."
Meredith wears the title with relish. After her early nursing training, she returned to Broadway and regional theater—playing with Walter Matthau in "Season in the Sun," with Bert Lahr in "Harvey," and with Zero Mostel in "My Three Angels."
But her 1962 California move segued into social service work: at a boys' probation camp in the Lakeside Mountains, then 12 years as a supervising nurse at Juvenile Hall. In 1978 she retired and returned to the local stage, in her own "Days of the Life of Queen Victoria." Now she plays it as it comes.
"Well, you certainly can't plan ahead. What I'd really like to do is take about four months and work on my house; it's been neglected. When a nice role comes along, I think 'My house will always be here.' But it's slowly disappearing, 'cause I'm giving it no time at all."
"It's gotten to the point where utilities that need to be fixed I don't fix, 'cause I'm embarrassed to have someone come into the house. And I live in terror that my sister might come over to visit someday; I just don't want her to open that door!"
All major fears aside, Meredith shows no signs of regret—or slowing down.
"I would love to do a Shakespeare play , but there's really almost nothing for an older woman in Shakespeare. The thing I don't like about the nurse in 'Romeo and Juliet' is that everyone thinks she's supposed to be funny—and I don't think she's written funny."
Neither, of course, is her character in "Skirmishes".
"Joe Stern (the producer) had seen it performed in New York, where apparently the woman was an absolute horror. And he came to me and said, 'I just can't imagine you doing a part like that: You seem like such a nice lady.'"
Meredith pauses, eyes twinkling. She's pleased with the compliment, but that's not where it ends.
"Well—I didn't say this to him—I am a nice lady. But I'm also an actress!" It's one job Sylvia Meredith won't fall asleep on.
Drama-Logue, June 9-15, 1983
Joe Stern Offers Free Tickets to 'Skirmishes'
by Polly Warfield
Joe Stern of the Matrix Theatre and Actors For Themselves is offering a "free ticket" rush for the balance of the Skirmishes performances at the Matrix. One hour before the 8 pm curtain, all unsold seats will be given away free at the box office to first comers. Paid reserved seating is still in effect and donations will be accepted before and after the performance.
Stern explains, "We have an unusual situation with this play. The ticket-buying public has not responded as we had hoped and Skirmishes has too much going for it to let it die."
The play by Catherine Hayes offers critically acclaimed performances by Tyne Daly, Carolyn Seymour and Sylvia Meredith and is directed by L.A. Drama Critics Circle Award recipient (for AFT's production of Betrayal last year) Sam Weisman.
Playgoers may present themselves at the box office, 7657 Melrose Ave. in West Hollywood, between 7 and 8 pm, Sunday, Monday or Tuesday, through July 5.