KP: So, going back to high school – was it a concerted interest in cartooning and illustration, or was it just sort of a hobby?
URBANIAK: Just general interest in the arts. I would write little things now and then, and I would draw cartoons. I had enjoyed acting, although I did less of it in high school. Like I said, I did a couple high school plays and a couple of community theater shows where I had small parts. But I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, and I wasn’t very focused, so I had done pretty well in school up until about my sophomore year and then I just kind of lost interest. And then junior year was just like… a disaster.
KP: You can’t just use that word and not define “disaster”…
URBANIAK: Oh, I just mean like getting D’s in English, which was a really good subject for me. And doing poorly in art class, which was a favorite class. But even classes that I enjoyed I was getting bad grades in.
KP: Was it just an overall malaise that set in?
URBANIAK: It was just some kind of weird malaise, yeah. I just kinda… my energy and interests went elsewhere, and I just stopped paying attention. And as they tell you, that’s a very important year. You screw that up, you don’t get into college. So then near the end of that year, I realized I guess I should study a little more. And then senior year I did a lot better, but by then it was too late, because when you apply to college they look at your grades…
KP: Right.
URBANIAK: My junior year and before that. I remember writing this exculpatory letter. I applied to Rutgers, and I wrote, “I realize my grades are really bad, but I was pursuing other interests, and…” Classic bullshit letter…
KP: “I was pursuing a multi-focus…”
URBANIAK: They rejected me, and so I went to a community college called Brookdale Community College in New Jersey.
KP: Was this at your parent’s insistence, or did you feel you had to do something?
URBANIAK: No, I just wanted to go. They liked the idea of me going to college.
KP: I’m sure they weren’t terribly enthused with how you spent your high school career.
URBANIAK: No. No. They weren’t that crazy about… I was a classic underachiever. Classic underachiever. And just for whatever reason. Probably having something to do with the school itself. I didn’t find much inspiration in that school. I’m sure other people did, but I didn’t. So anyway, I ended up going to this junior college, which meant you just paid and you could go. Anyone could go. And I took a whole bunch of different classes. I took graphic arts classes. I started there in the fall of ’81. This is actually pre-word processing, so I was taking old-fashioned lettering classes where you drew letters by hand…
KP: No.
URBANIAK: You learn fonts.
KP: You lie.
URBANIAK: I really enjoyed that stuff, actually, but again I kinda was all over the place and didn’t really have a specific focus. I also started working on this college radio station which I really enjoyed, and then I thought, “Oh, maybe broadcasting.” Then I ended up working on and becoming editor of the school newspaper. The college newspaper. So that school was actually kinda great because it gave me an opportunity to try all different things. And meanwhile, while I was doing all that stuff, I started doing school plays. And that school was doing a lot of plays. They had theater teachers who would stage plays, but then there was a pretty active student theater group that staged their own plays. And I got involved with all those people, and then I just found myself doing play after play after play.
KP: What was the initial trigger that made you walk back into the theater?
URBANIAK: Just being in an environment that I enjoyed. And feeling like I had… I don’t know. When I started going to that school, I just… I think I had a lot more energy because I’d realize that I’d kind of screwed up the last couple years. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I knew I wasn’t that focused. And I just think I probably, as a young guy… you know, a lot of people who go to junior college feel this way – It’s like, well, it’s a second chance. And so I just had all this energy, and I’d always enjoyed acting, and part of it was, like a lot of schools like this, it had a big beautiful performing arts center. A giant stage. And it had theater teachers who were interested, and a lot of kids who were into the idea. So there was a whole social scene, too, you know? So all those elements just kind of came together and I got very interested in performing again. Which I hadn’t done much over the course of high school. I was always good at it, so then I was immediately taken to be one of the better actors at Brookdale Community College! (laughing) And I had opportunity to be in everyone’s plays again. It was like being in fourth grade again. You know – Jimmy saves the day.
KP: I’m surprised there aren’t tee shirts yet…
URBANIAK: That was a pretty fun time. After a couple years there… I never graduated that school. By the time I was about 20 or 21, I thought, “Well, I guess maybe I kinda sorta would like to maybe be an actor…” (laughing) And then it was another couple years of basically bumming around New Jersey, working a couple of different day jobs, and seeing a lot of community amateur theater, and really being… I said this in many interviews, but being the quintessential slacker. In high school I was a classic underachiever, and then in the early to mid-80s, I was sort of a class slacker. A kind of… you know, a kinda bright kid who was sort of post-college and didn’t quite know what he wanted to do, and spent most of my time hanging out and kind of, you know, going to see art films and being a kind of New Jersey hipster kid. (laughing)
KP: New Jersey Bohemian.
URBANIAK: A little New Jersey Bohemian. Going to Red Bank and Long Branch and hanging out in the glory days of the Long Branch pier in the mid-80s, before it burned down. And running with a whole kind of mid-80s fedora-wearing, you know, secondhand clothes-shopping classic type characters.
KP: What color was your fedora?
URBANIAK: I never wore a fedora, but….
KP: Did you wear a vest?
URBANIAK: I probably did wear a vest a couple of times. You know, those embarrassing second-hand layers like in Pretty in Pink. You know – Ducky. I was running with the Ducky crowd. I remember I had a William S. Burroughs tee shirt which I thought was really cool. So that’s when I got into sort of being a little alterna-kid.
KP: So, prior to that, had you seen acting as an art or just a fun hobby?
URBANIAK: It had been a fun hobby. Even throughout high school when I was doing it, I always had sort of an artistic spirit and I was always very interested in the creative arts. I still am, in all aspects of it. Today I was reading this New Yorker article about conductors, and I know nothing about conducting, and it was fascinating. It’s got its own language and technical qualities that are completely foreign to me, and yet in a fascinating way kind of parallel to what you’re doing as an actor. And so I just responded to any kind of creative endeavor back then. And since I was particularly good at acting, I just enjoyed doing it. But as far as understanding it or it being an art, I don’t think I understood it that well. In fact, I don’t have any real formal acting training. I have a high school diploma and a couple years puttering around at junior college.
KP: And real world experience saving the day.
URBANIAK: I took a couple classes at H-B, which is a famous acting school in New York, where you had to audition for some classes. Some you could just take. They were, like, entry level classes. So I took some of the entry level classes around the time that I was going to school, like when I was around 19 and 20. In fact, I studied with a famous character actor named William Hickey, who’s known as Old Don in Prizzi’s Honor.
KP: I know him well.
URBANIAK: He was a great guy and a great character.
KP: I have to ask – what were lessons with him like?
URBANIAK: Well, they were fascinating. He would sit there… I do a great impersonation but it’s… I’ll have to describe it to you because it’s very physical. He was a very thin man, and he would sit hunched over with his legs wrapped around each other, and a cigarette – which tells you how long ago this was. He would actually smoke in class.
KP: I think he would still do that today if he were around.
URBANIAK: You could do that in the early 80s. He wore glasses. He was probably in his mid-50s, but he looked like he was 75. And he would sit there with his legs crossed, and he would take what seemed like five minutes to strike a match. He would wear a watch that was sort of coming off. Like it wasn’t completely closed. The band was sort of half open. And you would do a scene, and then he would say, “Okay,” in his classic kind of gravelly New York-inflected voice, and he’d go, “Now what part of the scene was hard for you?” And you would say, “Well, I loved the… I had trouble telling my mother that I was leaving. That I was going to Alaska to seek my fortune…” Whatever the scene’s about. Then he would light his cigarette for, like, five minutes. And he’d finally get it lit. And then he would say something like this: “When I first got my dog, my mother didn’t like it.” And then he would stand up and go, “And I said, ‘MA! You can criticize me all you want. But don’t criticize that dog!’ Now, I loved her, but I had to tell her what I thought.” And you would say, “Oh, yeah.” And he would always take some story from his life – which 80% of the time had to do with his mom or his dog. And then there were the fantastic stories about show business, about having lunch with Bert Lahr and stuff. And once Hickey got a job and he was out for a couple weeks and we had another acting teacher come in who was very different and had a very precise quality to him. Hickey was kind of… Hickey seemed like some homeless guy who’d wandered in to teach an acting class.
KP: With a body like dry kindling.
URBANIAK: A gregarious, bright homeless guy. But this other guy had a buttoned up shirt and was very kind of proper, and he sat down and he said, “Okay. So Bill’s gonna be out for a couple weeks. I’m going to teach the class. Now, I could tell you stories about my mother and my dog but we’re not gonna work that way.” (laughing) So, like, “Yes! Oh my god, a dig at Hickey!” But getting back to your question about whether I understood it as art or whatever, that was an acting class, and that was the first real acting class I took where they used the vocabulary of acting classes and acting – which was like intention, motivation… whatever. Breaking down the scene. You know – “What are your beats in the scene?” And I remember at the time not understanding any of that. It was just, like, “What are these words?” But I think I had a lot of raw talent, and I think I sort of instinctively was doing a lot of what they were talking about but I didn’t have the vocabulary for it. And I hadn’t codified it in that way. And so it was only years later, after acting more and more, that I would then think, “Ah, yes, now I know what they were talking about in that class.”
KP: Did you feel at the time that “this is stuff I should learn”?
URBANIAK: Yes. And it was very… I’m sure a lot of young actors have found this. It was also very frustrating, because I really didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. Because part of what one loves about acting is just… it’s just pure energy and instinct. And the idea that you could structure that energy, especially when you’re a young guy, and codify the thing that you’re feeling and structure it, and approach it technically…. Which, of course, is essential and you must do, but at the time, those two things almost felt contradictory to me. It’s like, you know, I just want to go out there and feel it, man. Do it.
KP: Based on the experience I’ve had in observing acting classes, it seems like there’s a tendency not to ask questions of the instructor.
URBANIAK: I think there’s probably an element of that, because you really feel like a novice, and that the teacher knows all. And you know, there’s the thing of just… I think it’s probably hard to learn, just ’cause of what I’m talking about, because you’ve got this… really, when you’re a young actor, you’re really behaving on instinct. And it’s actually important to keep that sense of raw instinct throughout one’s entire career. Young actors who don’t know the technical names for things can come up with great stuff. There’s something great about not being experienced and not having the technique. There’s a whole school of thought… arguably, you can look at certain actors and say, “Ah, Julliard.” Because there’s a certain Julliard house style. Or you go, “Ah yes, the Yale school of drama technique.”
QS: “Ah, yes. Bill Hickey.”
URBANIAK: Bill Hickey had a kind of old school character actor’s style.
KP: If you were to teach an acting class at this point…
URBANIAK: (laughing) God forbid!
KP: Do you have your own mother and dog that you would cart out?
URBANIAK: I don’t know. I’ve thought about it, and I really don’t think I’d be that good. I’m just not that interested in teaching. So there’s the main reason.
KP: Well, who’s to say that Bill Hickey was…Maybe he just needed an outlet for the mom and dog stories.
URBANIAK: What he was doing is, if you responded to a story like that – it could really unlock the scene for me. And throughout my life, I’ve often found that the best direction is not literal. Is actually taking… sort of a roundabout thing. Not specifically talking about what’s happening in the scene, but finding some sort of story or idea that then suggests a parallel desire or energy. And I’ve even had directors who in their arty way have said, “It’s like a Miro painting.” And if it’s the right moment, and you know what they’re saying, that can actually unlock something in you. A lot of great direction isn’t literal, it’s actually kind of figurative and abstract. But you’re going for something very specific. It creates this valley where there’s a dynamic between the character and what you’re trying to do. Whereas if it’s too on the nose – like, “Oh, well, you’re mad at your mother because… think about your mother.” It’s really not a good idea to think about your own mom if the scene is about a mom. It’s actually a good idea to maybe think about something else.
KP: What’s the best direction you’ve ever received? If you could isolate one thing that still resonates…
URBANIAK: That’s… oh wow. That’s quite a question, young man. There have been… I don’t know. I can think of a couple of examples of just striking pieces of direction. Like, Hal Hartley gave me great direction in Henry Fool once. We were doing a scene where Henry tells Simon that he just slept with his mother. Simon’s mother. And Simon says, “I don’t know how to respond to that.” He says, “I don’t want to think about this.” And he says, “You have to think about it, you’re a poet!” The scene between the two of them.
KP: Right.
URBANIAK: So we did it, and we were shooting, and he said, “I just slept with your mother,’ and I thought, “Wow, that’s really heavy news. How would I react?” And so I had the character betray how upset he was. He got kinda teary eyed, and sort of losing it, basically. Which is not very Hartley-esque. It also may not have been the best choice for any, if that scene was in anybody’s film – not necessarily a Hal Hartley movie where people kind of withhold their emotions in that film. And so he said, “Let’s just try something else. Bring it down, and maybe when he tells you, just get up and walk over to the door and look at him. Very simple. Just get up and walk away.” And I did and it ended up creating this really nice sort of, very full kind of tension. Very nice, very simple moment that was much better than my kind of on-the-nose way of showing that the character was upset.
KP: Right.
URBANIAK: And Hal didn’t say get up and walk away because you’re dealing with it. He just said get up and walk to the door. It was very utilitarian direction. But as an actor, I was able to see how that was also an active, even sort of emotional direction. So the best directors are kinda like that. They find an interesting roundabout way to get you at a kind of emotional place. That’s the trick with acting. It’s a cliché to say don’t work yourself up into an emotion, but it’s actually about creating a kind of tension, a dynamic between what the character’s doing and what you have to do to get there, that then kind of forces something out. And if you just layer a parallel emotion you’re feeling on top of what the character’s feeling, it’s not gonna have that kind of tension… if you know what I’m saying.
KP: Right.
URBANIAK: It’s got to be some kind of dynamic where you can kinda get in there. You gotta get in there between what the character wants and what you have to do, and that’s where the performance exists. And a great director helps you get in that place. In an interesting, surprising way. Where it’s almost like you go, “Oh my god, I’m in here! (laughing) Like, when Hal said just walk to the door, I just walked to the door, and then suddenly the mere act of doing that felt very sort of active and… you know, right for the scene and the character. So that’s just one example of a great, very simple piece of direction.
KP: What tends to be the worst kind of direction that someone can give you?
URBANIAK: Well, I did a play in New York with a very well known director who works a lot in the mainstream theater world. We did a play… (laughing) It was a restoration comedy. And his direction would be like, “Be more foppish. Stand like this, but in a foppish way.” Like, he would just direct qualities – like, the most clichéd versions of the way you’ve seen characters in these plays act. The guy who comes in and flutters his hands in the air.
KP: So, basically, the opposite of what Hartley had you do…
URBANIAK: Yeah. And the thing is, it’s not inappropriate to want the characters in a play like that to have certain qualities. But the thing is, the play’s only going to be entertaining and human and funny if we approach those characters like real people. Not just caricatures. Any comedy’s gonna be funnier if the people are reacting and behaving like people within this crazy, comic world. You know, like, Animal House is incredibly broad, but if you look at the performances, they’re really very well observed and really kind of planted on the earth They all kind of seem like real guys in this crazy world. But this guy was all about, “Just be funny.” “Be big.” You know, “Be foppish.” And it was like, well, what does that even mean? Why am I being foppish? You’ve gotta find a reason for me to act like that. He never said, “Oh, well, your character wants to rise above his station and so he affects this foppish manner in order to compete.” It’s very simple… a great director will find a way to actively draw a quality out of you. That’s the key. It’s acting. It’s gotta be active. And this director would just throw qualities at you, and say, “Have this quality, have that quality.” And that’s bad directing.
KP: What do you do when you’re acting in a vacuum like that?
URBANIAK: Well, it was very hard, because I would try to… (laughing) At one point, I actually… and I knew this guy didn’t really know who I was, and at one point, I actually – you know, in a pleasant way which I’m assuming, “Well, we’re all peers here…” I argued a point. And he delivered what I can only be described as a stage sigh. He went, “Ahh. James…” (laughing) And it was like he was saying, “Why is this guy questioning me?” That was the other big thing with this guy was, it was also a sense of not being collaborative. Of just saying, “I’m gonna tell you how you do this, and you’re gonna do what I say.” And a great director needs to have a very specific point of view. There’s nothing wrong with wanting a quality – but as I say, you have to have the vocabulary to allow the actors to discover that quality, as opposed to just starting with the quality.
KP: As an actor, since he is the director, at what point do you have to resign yourself to his direction?
URBANIAK: Well, in that case it was interesting, because what I ended up doing… I would actually come home really upset and complain to my wife. It was a hard time.
KP: For her.
URBANIAK: I was such a jerk! (laughing) And eventually, I realized the old cliché – “Well, use it.” So, I ended up saying, “Well, I’ve got to find a way to parallel my frustration with the situation in these rehearsals, and somehow put that into the character, and find a way to put that into the character’s life.” Because the character himself was a frustrated character. And so I was actually able to find a way to kind of emotionally cap how pissed off I was at this director, and put it into the character. But ultimately it’s very unsatisfying, because in a sense it wasn’t really… I felt like that wasn’t really my performance. It was basically me doing the best I could to maintain my own integrity while really serving what I felt was a very hacky approach to a play and a character. But it was also a thing where I wasn’t… there were more famous actors in that play than I was, and I kind of… To that director I was not a person of status. And so my arguments were considered a waste of time.
KP: In some ways, is that the kind of production where you’re just marking time?
URBANIAK: Well, I didn’t want to mark time because I really… I wanted to do the best I could within the environment. And eventually what I thought was, “Well, it’s not my production. I’m not directing it. I don’t like the direction. And it could be a lot better. I’ve just gotta kind of…” I created a performance in the cracks. Wherever I could, whenever I’d try to do something my way, he would always make it kind of streamlined and hacky, so I had to find a way just to find little nooks and crannies where I could kind of fill it with my own idiosyncratic ideas. Which I thought frankly were more true to the spirit of the play. But again, it was all me attempting to make the character a real person, who exists in a theatrical world. I’m not saying that characters in plays or movies should be like real life. They shouldn’t be. They’re in their own world, but that world should have a truth to it. And the world this director was creating, I felt, was very secondhand. It wasn’t like, “Let’s create this crazy world of these characters who lived long ago.” It was more like, “Oh, here’s how you do these old fashioned plays. You walk around like this, and you talk like this. And that’s what you do.” (laughing)
KP: So, it was presenting the cliché…
URBANIAK: It was just not honest. It was secondhand. And it was very frustrating. But eventually I just had to kind of let it go and do what I could, and then just kind of let it slide. I was fine in the play, and it all worked out. I’ll never work with that guy. And I don’t want to mention names, but just Google it and figure out who I’m talking about.
KP: I think that will be the contest for the interview. Over the years, have you developed a sort of warning system for signs that this might not be a production you want to work on, or someone that you won’t enjoy working with?
URBANIAK: It’s hard to tell. I did a play with another director who… you know, my approach these days is extremely technical. (laughing) I talked about how when I was a young actor I didn’t understand the technical aspects and the vocabulary. I even sounded kinda frustrated. Today, I’m all about that. It’s all about technique. Because the only way you can reach the dizzy heights of poetic inspiration is by having an extremely structured technical approach to something. It’s the dynamic between those two things. And you’ve got to know the rules before you can break them, etc. So I’m all about technique, and I’m all about being incredibly specific and knowing why you’re doing what you’re doing at any given moment, and it’s just a very simple, meticulous technical thing. But I did this play – it was downtown with this young director, and we came in and we did a read-through. And this guy sat down, and he would read the stage direction. He had a very kinda precise manner. So we would do the play and he would read the stage direction, and he would say, “He walks to the door. Walks. Walks to the door.” He would repeat the line. He runs through. He shoves her away and goes to the window. He’d be like, “He shoves her and goes to the window. Shoves. Shoves her. Goes to the…” like he’s talking about the judicious choices… he’s talking about the stage direction, and I’m thinking, “Who is this arty farty lunatic?”
KP: Didn’t Bill Cosby do the same thing?
URBANIAK: But then he ended up being a great director, because throughout rehearsals he would just kinda question everything in a way that was really great. Because you can’t be too specific in directing or acting. And so he was just kind of creating this environment where he himself I’m sure would later say, “Oh yeah, that walk to the door… As you walk to the door, there’s no reason to question that word, but let’s just throw it out there so maybe we think about that.” It’s just that when he started doing it at the table read this was almost like a parody of a kind of, you know, arty sort of approach. But he actually ended up being really great. But the funny thing was that my first impression was, “Oh boy. I’m in for it now. With this guy.” But I ended up thinking he was really good, and he is good.
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