A Conversation with Thomas Derrah
Thomas Derrah plays Wylie Dance and Sufi Sid in Michael Weller’s Approaching Moomtaj. Derrah has played many roles at the A.R.T. Including Iago in Othello, Ulysses in Highway Ulysses, Orgon in Tartuffe, and the title role in Woyzeck. He played twenty-six roles in Jackie: An American Life on Broadway. Don Cohen spoke to him on September 2, one week into rehearsals of Moomtaj.
Cohen: When you create a character—and in the case of Moomtaj you play two characters—how much do you try to become the person you find on the page and how much do you invent or bring to the role?
Derrah: You never lose yourself completely in anything you do because you bring your own point of view and your observations and research to the table. But I’m a great believer in the idea of transformation. That’s what makes acting fun: to pretend to be someone you’re not. In this play, I’m a kind of slacker guy—I can’t remember ever having played anything quite like that before—and I’m Sufi Sid, a comic Arabian Nights sidekick, a kind of B-movie character, which, being Danish, I have definitely never played before. The material you have, the play, is the rulebook. You do invent and discover, but you do it given that material.
Cohen: Do you see the character clearly when you read the script, or do you discover who he is gradually, through rehearsal and performance?
Derrah: I’m a very late bloomer. I don’t like to make set-in-stone decisions too early because that would block me. Over time, you learn more, you get more information from the other actors as they’re making their journeys, and that informs your choices. Because you’re taking something off the page and trying to bring it to life, you have to have information that the other members of the creative team bring—the director, the other actors, the playwright, even the designers. It’s difficult to make decisions until you have all the information.
Cohen: Can you think of a specific example of something happening in rehearsal that changes your idea of how to approach the character?
Derrah: It happened yesterday in a scene I had with Rachel [Harker]. She and I play very combative characters. I was going at her and I suddenly realized that, no, what I needed to do was to be almost obsequious, to try wheedle my way into her favor to get what I wanted. To do that, I had to go back and reassess my approach to the scene. It was exciting because it hadn’t occurred to me before.
Cohen: How did you know you needed to make that change?
Derrah: I realized halfway through the scene that I couldn’t get what I wanted of her by slamming her down and dissing her the whole time. Michael has written such a strong rivalry between the characters that I took it for granted that that’s what I should do. The right tactic had eluded me. Rick and I both discovered it at about the same time. In the middle of the scene, he said “Whoa” and I said, “Yeah, I got it. I know.” It was an instance of discovering what the engine of the scene was, how to make it work. It’s fun when something like that happens. It’s always a journey. There are days when you walk home and you say, “Ahh! I can’t figure this out! I suck!” Other days, you walk home and think, “Wow! Good stuff happened today. That was exciting.” It’s schizophrenic, but it’s necessary—that inner torment, that harsh self-criticism, and then those little victories that you win all build toward the final thing.
Cohen: So when, typically, do you feel you’ve arrived at the final thing?
Derrah: For me, it doesn’t happen until about halfway through the run. I wish I could begin there, but it’s impossible because you learn so much from that missing character, which is the audience. You have to live without them for so long; when you add them, everything changes. That extra character which makes the theater is the people sitting in the seats watching it.
Cohen: Does the cast develop together on something like that kind of schedule?
Derrah: Ideally it’s a joint development. I’ve also been in situations where something will start to deteriorate for one reason or another, but usually you find that you all hit your stride in the middle somewhere.
Cohen: The run is going to be four weeks. Is that typical for your work?
Derrah: Yes. When the A.R.T. used to be in rotating rep, you went on for months because you shared the time block with another play. A play on tour can go on for months. I did that one Broadway play—Jackie: An American Life—for eight-and-a-half months, which was probably too long for me.
Cohen: You get stale doing one part for that long?
Derrah: Not stale, just crazy. I’m not denigrating the play—it was great fun to do, but the material didn’t need a lot of discovery, at least for that long a time. It was a lot of great cartoony characters that you play in rapid-fire succession. It wasn’t heavy on emotional information. I think any play would turn into hard work at a certain point for me. There are people that can do something like Cats for years, but I can’t imagine that it feeds you. Yes, it feeds you because you can go to the grocery store but, for me, it wouldn’t be very interesting creatively after a while.
Cohen: Do you hit moments during rehearsal when you think, “Unh-uh, that’s just not right. We can’t go that way?”
Derrah: That’s always part of the process. The best way to do it is not to accuse anyone of doing anything wrong but just say, “Can we talk about this? It doesn’t feel right to me.” Sometimes you have to negotiate. It’s early in the process, but everyone is working beautifully and well together. There’s a lot of creative stuff popping. Everybody’s main concern is getting the play as right as we can get it.
Cohen: Do you think of a specific example of that kind of negotiation?
Derrah: In a scene the other day, I was supposed to be in control with Robert, who’s playing Walker, and I didn’t feel anchored. He’s so much bigger than I am and I said, “I feel like a Chihuahua nipping at the heels of a boxer.” It was a status thing that needed to be adjusted so I didn’t feel like a yappy little dog. I had to have some credibility as a person with something vital and dangerous to say.
Cohen: So did he sit down?
Derrah: We figured out a way for him to feel defeated. Any production is about solving problems. A lot of times the director has the chief veto but it’s really done in committee. I’m amazed every time a play actually gets on, because you think, “How can you have this many creative people with this many opinions actually come together and make something?”
Cohen: Does having the playwright at rehearsals make the experience different?
Derrah: I love it. Especially when the playwright is amenable to collaboration, as Michael very much is. He listens to people’s problems with a certain line or a certain take and is good at explaining what his intention was in writing.
Cohen: And changes lines if necessary?
Derrah: The play is very different now than what it was when I first read it back in February. And it’s different today from what it was a week ago because he’s made some tweaks that have made everything came into focus.
Cohen: For instance?
Derrah: He clarified the back-story between the brothers: the very telling turning point in the desert. It now has more to do with the idea of Wylie saving Walker from a fire, jumping off and taking a chance, which ties into the notion of his obsession with the twin towers and people jumping, and the idea that, metaphorically, Walker is afraid to jump.
Cohen: Are there special problems that come from being two characters: either preventing one from leaking into the other, or knowing how much they’re supposed to leak?
Derrah: Everybody does a dual role in the play and I don’t think anybody has got it figured it out completely yet. There certainly are characteristics that bleed from one to the other because they’re all perceived through Walker’s experience and partly through Wylie’s invention. But they’re so different.
Cohen: You don’t have to remind yourself, “I’m Wylie now, I have to stop being Sid”?
Derrah: Luckily, there are two worlds in this play. One is Cobble Hill in Brooklyn and the other is this crazy b-movie Scheherazade adventure film. Behavior and language are so different in those worlds. The slang that I have in Brooklyn is very different from the slang that Sufi Sid has in Moomtaj.
Cohen: Wylie seems quite complex: a kind of slacker, but also dangerous: chaotic, unpredictable, with a crazy energy. How do you play all of that?
Derrah: And there are other elements. He’s extremely generous and cares about humanity, a kind of genius who has created something to benefit mankind. He loves his family, such as it is: his brother and his nephew. So he’s an anarchist/slacker/drug dealer/lowlife in a weird dichotomy with this techno-genius with high aspirations for inner and world peace. It’s not easy. It’s part of what I’m learning.
Cohen: Are there other particular challenges you’ve had with this play?
Derrah: Sometimes you read a playwright’s description that can be intimidating to an actor. Michael describes Sufi Sid as “b-movie oily Levantine meets outer-borough New York.” You go, “Wait, how do I do that?” But I think the main thing is to get the general impression. It’s a wonderful description but if you become too technical, trying to take those two things and bring them together, it doesn’t work. I know the character is accented, I know he’s comic, he comes from a particular kind of world. I think that’s all I need to know. I have to depend on my memories and my imagination to pull the character together.
Cohen: For Michael, too, the description is probably an attempt to capture an impression. How is it being the first person to play a role, rather than being part of a tradition of performances of classic roles?
Derrah: It’s exciting because the character is brand new and you get to try it out for the first time. But you still find traditions to use. Especially in the world of Moomtaj, the character is drawn from archetypes. You can look at those influences and steal little bits, or, let’s say, you can quote from those other sources. It’s kind of stealing, but it’s honest.
Cohen: It’s an homage.
Derrah: It is. It’s being in someone’s debt. So there is an aspect of tradition, but yes, it’s fun to be the pioneer.
Don Cohen is a writer and editor who also spent seven years as technology manager of the school division of D.C. Heath, the educational publisher. His articles on knowledge management initiatives and ideas have been published in California Management Review, Knowledge and Process Management, and by The Harvard Business Review. He is also the co-author of several books on social capital.. Also a playwright and fiction writer, Cohen lives in Lexington, Massachusetts, with his wife Helen and their two daughters, Rebecca and Sarah.