Alan Arkin was born in New York City, and became the focus of attention as a performer at family gatherings. After his family moved to California, Alan studied drama at Los Angeles City College. He accepted a drama scholarship to Bennington College for women in Vermont and for two years he played all the male leads. Eventually he became a member of Second City, the improvisational theater group in Chicago where he was able to refine his technique. Alan made his Broadway debut with the troupe in a revue called From the Second City. His other Broadway credits are Joseph Stein's Enter Laughing, for which he won the Tony, and Murray Schisagal's Luv with Anne Jackson and Eli Wallach. Alan was nominated for two Oscars, for his film debut in The Russians are Coming! The Russians are Coming! and for his portrayal of the deaf mute in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. He has appeared in numerous films, including Catch 22, The In-Laws, Wait Until Dark, The Last of the Red Hot Lovers. Edward Scisscorshand, and Glengarry Glen Ross. Alan is a Renaissance man who, in addition to roles on stage, film and TV, has been an author, musician, song-writer, and Obie Award-winning director in theater and films.

Amanda Plummer is the daughter of actors Christopher Plummer and Tammy Grimes, but she didn't decide to be an actress until she was seventeen. For a while Amanda resisted her parents profession and wanted to be a jockey, "but I came to a point where I wanted to be around people, and either I could join the circus or I could join acting." Amand had little formal training. After a stint with an acting group in Middlebury College in Vermont she was accepted at the Williamstown Theatre Festival where her repertoire included playing a fairy in A Midsummer's Night Dream. Then she was cast in A Month in the Country, which led to roles in off-Broadway productions of A Lie of the Mind and The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore. Amanda was Eliza in Shaw's Pygmalion opposite Peter O'Toole and was nominated for a Tony for her performance. She has also appeared as Laura in The Glass Menagerie and Jo in A Taste of Honey, for which she was again nominated for the Tony. Amanda won the Tony, along with the Drama Desk Award and the Outer Critics Circle Award for her portrayal of Agnes in Agnes of God. In film she has been seen in The World According to Garp and The Fisher King, to name a few.

When I told Alan Arkin that Amanda Plummer had agreed to be in our series, he said he would like to appear with her, since he was a fan and they had never met. When Amanda heard that Alan wanted to appear with her, she was equally enthusiastic. Amanda was living in a small private house, and when I went to pick her up, she asked me to come in. She was smoking and seemed tense. She told me she had trouble sleeping the previous night because she was nervous about her evening with us. I reassured her all would be well. I marveled that an actress of Amanda's experience would be nervous about answering questions in front of an audience. I had seen her in many roles where she took daring chances. Perhaps an actor takes a greater risk when she appears as herself, and when she doesn't know what the script will be in advance.
When I finished introducing Aland and Amanda there was much applause, but no one appeared. I could hear them chatting behind the curtain as if oblivious of the crowd that was waiting for them. After they had finally made their entrance and seated themselves, I explained that the series title "The Magic of Theater," describes what happened to the audience."
"The magic can happen to the actors, too, David," said Alan. "It can happen as much for the actors as for the audience."
'If it doesn't happen for the actors, I don't think it would happen for the audience," added Amanda.
I asked Alan and Amanda if their experience as actors is different from the rest of ours because they are actors.
"The difference between us and an ordinary audience" said Alan "is that when it's not good we know how to analyze why it's not, and when it's good we lose ourselves the same as the audience." When an actor watches someone he knows perform, does he say to himself, "I can see how he's doing it.?" "If I do, then he's not doing good work," said Alan. "I can get lost in my kid's work. Adam did some brilliant work last year on [the TV series] 'A Year in the Life,' so good that it was unsung. It was a living person that you were seeing up there, so he didn't get an enormous amount of attention for it, but he was wonderful. He absolutely transported me on that occasion." Alan beamed with parental pride. "I forgot he was my son, and once in awhile I would think of him as my son, but not know for a minute that he had those places in him where he was going. That was very exciting. If you can do it with your own kids, you can do it with anybody."
Is is one of the ways to judge good acting, when the actor is not noticed? Alan nodded, "A lot of times, yes. My idea of a good movie is when you come out and you don't notice anything. I mean that literally. If you come out and you're talking about a performance, the movie didn't work. If you're talking about how great the writing was in this scene or that scene, the movie didn't work. It works if you come out and you can't talk about anything. That's when the movie works. Things shouldn't stick out. An actor shouldn't be saying 'Hey ma, look how good I'm doing!' We should all be committed to the event. But it's not just in the movies. It's in life as well. The more we are committed to the event, and not our particitipation in it, the more the event is going to work and be an entity. Some actors, I don't know how they do it, can manage to be very showy and very true at the same time. My son can't do that. He doesn't work that way."
In Agnes of God, Agnes is a young nun accused of bearing and murdering a child. Sitting across from Amanda on the New School stage, it was hard to imagine her playing this role. She sat quietly between Alan and myself, with her delicate hands folded in her lap, and her voice was soft and faint, almost like that of a child. I asked her what she did to find something in Agnes she could identify with so she could play the part.
"There are so many things," she said. "The easiest to talk about is the amount of reading I did. I read a great deal of Jung on the subject of dementia praecox, and somnambulism and twilight states. I read a great deal on that, and it seemed to fit in between the blank spaces of the words on the page, what is not being said by this character. I could fill in the back of her head, where you wouldn't know what she is really saying. She's saying something, she's meaning it, but there are a lot of things going on which add to what is being said.
"Agnes was not altogether a direct kind of confrontational speaking woman. She had a lot of problems and secrets, and she was very manipulative. You couldn't take her on face value, nor can you do that with anyone, which is what's fascinating about doing any rule. It's what is not being said, what gesture is made (and then how the opposite gesture could have been made), [that helps] you get a whole human being with a curiousness. Then once in a while you reach where you are so enlightened and inspired and you already dreamed into that character. So my own imagination didn't have to work like a workhorse very much. I had to get the details down, but it was more exciting because she was already very much alive in my mind and my body."
John Pielmeyer, who wrote Agnes of God, was brought up as a Catholic. Did the playwright's background influence what he was trying to say in the play? "I was not at all interested," said Amanda. "I loved him. He was a wonderful man and writer, but we actually disagreed on a few things. Not violently. So I took my route and it didn't invade his own beliefs that much. You could see his point of view from what my performance was, as well as the way I was living her."
There are different stages in approaching a role. An actor does a certain amount of preparation by herself before rehearsals, and a certain amount with rehearsals with the director. Amanda recalled, "He said, 'Do what you are doing. It's interesting. I'm going to stay out of the way.' Then he asked me politely, 'Do you mind?' I said, 'No I don't mind,' and as rehearsals progressed we got into questions. He was great. Michael Lindsay-Hogg is a wonderful director and very curious, lots of questions, lots of 'I don't really know what's going on' and we'd find out together which is the best way."
What about the character in "Wait Until Dark?" "That was an anomaly in my career," said Alan. "I just disappeared. I went away. When I was in Chicago working in Second City, I met a whole underground society I had never met before. I was kind of naive until then. I met a lot of criminals. I met prostitutes, I met drug addicts. The character [in Wait Until Dark] was a composite figure based on several addicts I knew. What I found to be true of them was that they disappeared. They just went away. And I tried to disappear when I played that character, and not be theree, to be in several other places simultaneously. And what I have found, oddly enough, about a lot of people who commit evil acts (I've listened to a lot of interviews since then) is that they talk about not being there a lot. They talk as if they weren't there. I hated playing the part as it went on. It revolted me. I'm glad I did it because I'm happy to find that I was revolted by things like that. I wouldn't want to do it again."
When actors do research for their characters, is it necessary to have an in-depth understanding of the historical period in which the character lives?
"I have the desire to live like [the character]," said Amanda, "and live in a part of New York City or move to Mississippi for a little while if the play takes place in Mississippi. For one play, I lived in a whore hotel for a year to communicate and make friends with people that I had not come across on such a personal level in my life."
Alan last appeared on the stage in the play Luv, over twenty-three years ago. That's too long for an actor of Alan's talents to be absent from the stage. "It's too long if that's what I was supposed to have done with my life," Alan said, "But I don't think that's what I was supposed to have done with my life. It has nothing to do with movies or television. It has to do with something which already doesn't have to do with the theater at all. I found that being onstage two hours a night was a twenty-four-hour-a-day job. When I wasn't acting, I had no life of any kind. The only life I had was on the stage, and there was something in me that screamed that this is wrong. That I have no right to do this to my family, I have no right to do this to the people I love, the people who love me, and even worse, I have no right to do this to myself. Initially it started in part as an idea that I wasn't going to be able to feed even the persona I was onstage, unless I had some identity to feed it with- and I felt like I had none. It began a kind of exploration into who I am that has become as important to me and as exciting to me as any character I have ever played. It sounds egotistical, but it's not, because when you start discovering who and what you are, it's bigger than anything you ever imagined yourself to be. And, by definition, it's generous. It's a generous exploration. The more of you you find the more of you there is to give to those you love."
"I am facing the same things now, too," added Amanda. "There isn't much of a life going on." Her hand worried nervously over the hem of her miniskirt. "It is a twenty-four-hour job. I miss things, and I'm thirty-one now. I am missing a home. I want a home of my own, and it's hard to know what to do. I am just coming up to those realizations for the first time."
In Agnes of God, the playwright also left out some key background information about whether Agnes was raped. I asked Amanda if, in order to play the role, she had to make a decision about whether Agnes was, in fact, raped.
"Yes I did," she said, "but it was my secret. There wre shades of it in the performance, but it's never spoken in the play. There would be shades of what might have happened, but still it was up in the air. People still didn't know what really happened. In my mind and in Agnes's mind it was clear. I knew she knew. She knew it all the time, but it was under so many levels of denial."
Was there a discussion between the actors and the director and the playwright about that? "No", said Amanda. No one ever was concerned about that? "No, not that I can remember."
I asked Alan if he felt he could be funny without playing a role. "I think I can now," Alan said. "You made me laugh," said Amanda, with a sudden, open smile.
Alan said, "Each one of us has the seeds of absolutely everything within us. Anybody who has studied acting for any length of time knows that you become the other person, but it's also you. Sooner or later, if you identify yourself with the part, you find that part in you, be it an axe murderer, be it any aberration under the sun, any elevated state under teh sun you want to think of. We have the seeds of that withinus. It's a question of degree. It's a question of where that graph plays out in us. If you are playing somebody who's got demonic sides, you have to throw that off every night. You have to find ways of throwing them off, and sometimes it's not so pleasant. And it's not so easy sometimes. If you are playing someone who is elevated, a saint if you will, or a great sul, then you have to reach for that constantly."
"The soul goes through a changling," said Amanda. "The actual soul that you are goes through a changed direction, and you have to follow the direction it takes you."
When an actor succeeds in immersing herself in her character, does that diminish her need to seek approval from the audience? "That's complicated," said Amanda. "I need for that piece of work, I love to be admired. It's not that I don't want to please anybody. I want people to understand. I don't want to be misunderstood." There was a sad yearning to her voice. "I don't want my character to be misunderstood. I don't work towards that goal. Something comes together and you want it strong and whole enough so that people can see it clearly. They don't want to identify with it. If they do, that's wonderful. If they don't, that's wonderful. I don't do it so that they will feel it. I hope that they will."
Sometimes an actor has to portray a character with unattractive qualities. Laura in The Glass Menagerie is a shy girl, and to act shy, the actor has to do a lot of negative actions. We imagine that a shy person doesn't talk very much. She hides. She puts her eyes down. But Amanda found positive actions for Laura.
"A shy person can be quite outspoken and be very shy," said Amanda, "crippingly shy, near-to-death shy, I didn't think of her as a shy person, but other people viewing her would say, 'Yes, she is a spy person.' Laura goes, 'Well, people think I'm shy. I gues that's the easiest way to explain the way I behave among people. All right, I'm shy.' Laura was a very difficult role for me. I did her very poorly."
"I can't believe that," said Alan.
"I did." repeated Amanda emphatically. "I ddid her very poorly, I believe. The director once brought me off the stage and sat me down in the seats and said, 'You are too close to her. Now do some acting.' or words to that effect. I couldn't do anything about it. I was so immersed in her from the moment go. I wanted to add so much to her, beyond myself. When I do a role, I want to grow, I want to learn more about who I am, since I basically am nothing, too. I like myself. this is okay. So I want to grow in these roles. I want to learn more about me, and I didn't [learn] through her. I don't know what I learned from doing this role."
What happens when an actor gets into a part where it really is dragging him down. I asked.Aland and Amanda if they had ever tried to get out of a play. "Taste of Honey," said Amanda. "In my favorite play that I have ever done, and it ran for a wonderful year. I kept discovering more and more. Unbelievable. She gave me a whole new walk, Her skin." She studied her own hand as if seeing a different life emerge from within. " might look at my hand and- Oh, it was great! Oh, what a role she was! It was my first lead role in New York City, and I wanted to listen to the director, and I listened to the director and I tried to do it but I was unhappy. I knew inside I was wrong and I would have these little arguments with him. But then I would say, 'All right, I'll do it.' About a week before opening, I went to the producers and I said, 'I hope to quit becaue I am not employing myself. I don't feel like I am doing this well at all. It's not what I had imagined. Or find another director.' So we directed ourselves, and then we opened."
I asked Alan if he would like to direct Amanda in something.
"I would love to," he said. "I have the feeling it would be the easiest job I ever had."

The article is accompanied by a small black and white photo of Alan Arkin in 'Room Service' and a small black and white photo of Amand in "A Month in the Country".