Conversation with Kes Khemnu and Joe Wilson, Jr.
Don Cohen spoke with Khemnu and Wilson about their work in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Topdog/Underdog. They performed the play at Alliance Theatre Company in Atlanta and Trinity Repertory Company in Providence before coming to New Rep. Throughout the run, they have alternated the roles of brothers Booth and Lincoln.
Cohen: Is doing the play here in Newton a different experience from doing it in Atlanta or Providence?
Wilson: All the spaces have different challenges. The Alliance Stage was basically like performing in a bowling alley. Trinity is a bigger space with more of a thrust stage, so the audience was three-quarters around it. This space is by far the smallest of the three. It’s much more intimate. The audience is literally a foot away from the cage. We can hear everything they do: move a purse …
Khemnu: Snore.
Cohen: Not too often, I hope.
Wilson: It’s happened.
Cohen: Does being in a small space change the performance?
Wilson: The space makes the audience react in a different way. We’ve had to give them permission to respond here because they’re so close. The show is funny. It ends tragically but what they say to each other is funny. So we give them a little more permission here.
Khemnu: For example, if something happens to be humorous, you’ll do a pause to allow for that laugh. Psychologically, the audience goes, “Oh, I can laugh here.” They’re drawn into the rhythm of what you’re doing.
Cohen: You switch roles every night. How did that come about?
Wilson: It was the director’s idea. Part of it was to make the show more interesting to us, since we’re performing it for such a long time. I think they thought it would keep it fresh for us, but our job as actors is to keep it fresh. I’ve done the show on Broadway for six months, so I know what it’s like to perform for a long period of time. Honestly, I think the idea of switching came out of us being such different people in terms of physical type. I think it was a way for them to explore this physical difference.
Cohen: You’d think, with you being different physical types, that they would definitely say, “You’re Booth; you’re Lincoln.” The switch must make a big difference in how the performance works.
Wilson: The essence of the show remains the same, but they’re two very different shows. We’re very different physical types; we have very different sensibilities; we approach the work differently.
Khemnu: Speaking for myself, I realized that, having to switch the roles, I would have been damned if I’d do the same show, the same blocking, and the same choices that A or B did. Don’t ask me to switch a role if you don’t want a different performance.
Wilson: Look at our two Booths. Kes’s Booth is much funnier than mine—as Kes is also. His Booth defuses situations by making fun of himself, and making fun of Lincoln. There’s a child-like quality about this massive dude; he’s like the kid that takes over the space and is just there. My Booth is very sharp and angular and vicious, but I think very vulnerable—the kind of kid that lashes out and is angry because he wants someone to wrap him up and say everything is going to be OK. My Booth doesn’t come across as being that funny. I can’t afford to lose that much power against his Lincoln because I’m a small guy.
Cohen: Being smaller, you have to do different things to maintain your power?
Wilson: Exactly.
Khemnu: Even auditioning, I was thinking, “I’m a big son of a bitch, and someone is going to put me as a little brother? To who? King Kong?” But when we started working together I realized that I had to make choices for Booth that were going to draw people in and draw them away from thinking, “He’s bigger; he’s going to dominate him and he’s going to do something bad to him at the end.” I wanted their brains to go somewhere else. So an audience looking at my Booth goes, “Oh, he’s funny. He’s kind of like a clown or a buffoon, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Oh shit, he shot him.”
Cohen: These two guys staying in a room together reminds me of Pinter’s plays, where you have a threatening situation, a lot of emotional abuse, but nobody leaves.
Wilson: Absolutely. What makes them stay in this room together, and why hasn’t somebody kicked somebody’s ass already? She [Suzan-Lori Parks] gives them a reason to have to be together. She gives them a reason to have to communicate. She gives them a reason to need each other. They need something from each other that’s far more profound than the question of why doesn’t he just leave or why doesn’t he shoot him now?
Khemnu: One way you show what my Booth needs is by playing him in a childlike manner. He becomes kind of childlike when Lincoln is in the room; nobody knows that Booth is childlike at all until Lincoln walks in. The way we do this show, it has a kind of emotional velocity. We’ve taken out the pauses that were in the original text. If we maintained them, there would be much more the effect of: “What do you think?” I don’t know, what do you think?” The director chose to go somewhere else with it. We started in a bowling alley kind of setting and he realized that would be the best way to go.
Cohen: To keep people’s attention?
Khemnu: Yeah, and also to get the stuff out to the back.
Wilson: It’s also a great way to highlight the language. The text is so rich. These guys respond in the moment with words because that’s all they have. In a lot of contemporary texts, you have close-ups and fade-aways, you have music in the background, so you can watch somebody being silent. What makes the classics so good is that all those characters only have words to describe how they feel, how much they hurt, how much they love, how much they hate, how much they want. “But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks. It is the east and Juliet is the sun.” He’s describing the beauty of this woman. We don’t have close-up shots. No, all we have as audience members are words to describe the beauty this young man sees. That’s what makes this play so good. These guys are in this room with no TV, no radio, no bathroom, nothing. All they have are words to reveal their histories to each other and to reveal what they feel and need. Kent wanted to use language to engage those two men, versus them sitting in a cage looking at each other being silent and waiting—beat, beat, beat—and then someone speaks.
Cohen: Let’s talk about the cage: the set is a room in a cage.
Khemnu: The cage adds a humongous amount to how the creative forces come together.
Wilson: In this space, we don’t have to imagine the walls, because they’re there; we don’t have to imagine the fourth wall—we throw things against it. What you do by putting up these walls is take away the audience’s being able to decide how big or how small this room. We’re showing you exactly how big it is. As an actor I’m aware exactly how big it is. The audience sees that you’re trapped.
Cohen: Putting up what could be a barrier—this cage—maybe takes away an imaginative barrier, the audience creating distance by saying, “This room could be different sizes; it could be anywhere.”
Wilson: Yes, we take away your ability to imagine the space; we don’t want to give you the luxury of making it anything that it’s not. This space is a 12 by 12 box. It’s a prison, and we don’t want the audience to be able to let themselves off the hook by trying to imagine this space as being better than it actually is. It’s a shit hole. We also take away that luxury with the language propelling this thing: we’re not letting you off the hook because these guys aren’t let off the hook. They’re bound together; they’re tied together. This set doesn’t let me off the hook because I can’t go to the side of the set and say, “Maybe the wall’s over here; or maybe it’s a little further.” No that wall’s right here. I can’t go any further.
Cohen: Does the cage create the feeling of people watching animals in a zoo?
Khemnu: Of course. We use the word “cage” as opposed to prison because we’re not in jail. It’s called Topdog/Underdog—there are elements of animalistic behavior in both of them. Their “hobbies,” if you want to call them that, are preying upon society. One is a master of throwing cards and getting people’s money, playing on their insecurities to get their money. The other one, Booth, would steal whatever’s not nailed down.
Cohen: When you go to a zoo, you feel complicity with people who locked the animals in the zoo.
Khemnu: The animals are looking at you. There have been times when I look at the audience thinking, “You sons of bitches, I’m in a fucking cage.” And I want to cry or throw something. I’m up in this cage doing this show with audiences that may not have any frame of reference for what the hell this play is about, but they’re having an interesting experience. Being in a cage for this amount of time can’t help but affect you in some visceral ways.
Cohen: You’re near the end of a long run.
Wilson: I’m drained. One of the hardest things for an actor to do is to hear what’s being said as though it’s the first time. With this show, you’ve got two sets of lines swimming around in your head. You have to listen because you’re watching someone do what you also do. I’ve had to remain more focused from moment to moment out of sheer not wanting to screw up, not wanting to say a line that’s not mine, out of a sheer need to respect the other person’s work enough so I don’t fall victim to observing him. So for me it’s been a focus like I’ve never had to have on stage. It’s psychologically exhausting.
Khemnu: For me it’s a bit different because whenever I see him doing my lines I never think that they’re my lines. I’m so happy I don’t have to say what he’s saying; I’m just like, “Thank God. Maybe tomorrow but not today.” It makes me question this switching of roles thing. It might be good for a grad program, but as it relates to the consciousness of an audience that comes to see theater …
Wilson: Unless they see both, they have no idea. We’ve had quite a few come back and see the switch and I think they’re blown away by it.
Khemnu: Lots of people are going to say, “I already saw one cast so I’m not going to see the other one.”
Wilson: I don’t blame them. With True West on Broadway, Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly switched roles. They’re stars, so people want to come back and see them switch. But Joe Wilson and Kes Khemnu?
Khemnu: Kes Kem-who?
Cohen: I wonder if you’ll say, in retrospect, “I’m really glad I did that,” or, “I’ll never do that again.”
Wilson: I definitely know I’d ask for more rehearsal time and more money.
Khemnu: This was not a six-week rehearsal process.
Wilson: Three and a half weeks.
Khemnu: Six hours of rehearsal a day for one role. Then we go home, up until three or four in the morning learning lines, up at six.
Wilson: Usually memorizing lines is not an issue for an actor. It was an issue for this play because you had to know all of them.
Khemnu: Someone at a talkback Sunday asked, “Would you do this again?” I said, “Hell, no.” A day after, I said, “Of course I would do something like this again, this is my job. It’s my friggin’ destiny.”
Don Cohen is a writer, researcher, and consultant whose articles on knowledge management and social capital have been published in The Harvard Business Review, the California Management Review, and other journals. He is the co-author of several books on social capital in organizations and other cultural institutions. Also a playwright and fiction writer, Cohen lives in Lexington, Massachusetts, with his wife Helen.