A Chat with Olympia
I still remember that day in late 1963 when I picked up a copy of the Boston Sunday Globe, rushed to the entertainment section, and saw that someone named Olympia Dukakis was appearing in a production of Six Characters in Search of an Author at a local theater. I snorted in disgust. This, I was convinced in my 17-year-old wisdom, was proof positive that Boston was a backwater town. Look who was on New York stages. Mary Martin! Albert Finney! Robert Preston! And who did we get in Boston? Olympia Dukakis, whoever she was.
Ah, but Olympia Dukakis wound up winning an Oscar, which none of those folks named above ever did. And by the time she won for portraying Rose Castorini in Moonstruck, I’d been an Olympia Dukakis fan for more than 20 years — for, in 1967, she did splendidly as the title character in Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children. I can still see and hear Dukakis at the first-act curtain, when she snarled “Curse the war!” before showing a smile that said she really didn’t mean it, that she knew she needed the hostilities to keep her business profitable. Within a month, I had read most of what Brecht had written, and that happened because of this woman whose name I once scorned.
I felt a little less guilty about it after talking to her last week because I learned that, back in 1963, Olympia Dukakis didn’t like her name, either. In fact, she told me that there are still days when she doesn’t like it, but she cautioned, “Ask me again tomorrow.” We both laughed, since Ask Me Again Tomorrow is the name of the memoir she wrote with Emily Heckman that’s just been published by Harper Collins (208 pp.; $25.95). Here’s how some of the rest of our conversation went:
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Q: What’s the biggest surprise you’ve had in life?
A: Getting involved in theater. As a teenager, I loved doing individual stuff — fencing, tennis. But later, when I got interested in theater, I loved being part of a company and I learned that acting is a team sport.
Q: Except for when you did that one-woman show, Rose.
A: And there, I really missed the conviviality of an ensemble.
Q: I would think you also missed the back of a chair! You sat there for two hours on a backless bench, never moving. Didn’t that kill you?
A: Sure, at first. You really have to learn how to pace yourself. It took three months before I could do it without any pain.
Q: And speaking of pain: When you were producing artistic director at the Whole Theater [in Montclair, New Jersey from 1971-1990], you hired your mother to be in a show. I was surprised to read that, because she wasn’t originally supportive of your acting ambitions. What made you do it?
A: I thought she’d be good! I tell you, whenever she saw that the audience was laughing at her, she always milked the moment. The rest of us had to stand around while she did. Other actors would come up to me later and say, “You have to speak to her about that,” so I did. But the worst time of all was when she did the Strega in The Rose Tattoo. It’s a small part, someone who just comes in and snarls for a while. But one night, late in the play, I don’t know what happened: My mother didn’t make her second entrance, so we just omitted her scene and went on. But later in the performance, my sister-in-law Maggie, who was in the show, too, saw my mother getting ready to walk on stage even though she wasn’t supposed to. Maggie tried to stop her but she came charging up: “Let me on! I missed my entrance!” Maggie told her that we’d just gone on but she wouldn’t take that: “No, the audience wants to know what happened to Strega! Let me on!” And there I was on stage as Serafina, interacting with another actress, when all of a sudden I saw the poor actress’s eyes widen in terror, and I immediately knew what had happened. I whispered, “Just keep going, just keep going,” and the actress did — but so did my mother. We got louder. She got louder. Oh, I’m telling you, she was a force, that little lady. [Dukakis’s husband] Louis [Zorich] still loves to tell that story.
Q: You mention in the book that you met your Louis while rehearsing a play, but you don’t identify it. Do you remember what it was called?
A: The Opening of a Window, and it was the first lead I played Off-Broadway, in 1961. I was to be a wife with a sickly husband who’d die at the end of the first act. Well, Louis looked too healthy and handsome and seemed incapable of dying. He was really “hot,” though that was a term we didn’t use then.
(An aside: In the book, Dukakis writes that her first date with Zorich occurred after their friend Tom Brennan gave them two tickets to a musical version of Twelfth Night. I daresay it was a musical version of The Rivals, for Tom Brennan did stage the Off-Broadway show All in Love, which opened in 1961. While there have been many musical versions of Twelfth Night, none pre-dated Dukakis and Zorich’s 1962 marriage and none involved Tom Brennan. But I didn’t have the heart to tell her. If the book were still in the galleys stage, I would have.)
Q: You mention a marvelous incident that occurred when you were Wendy Hiller’s understudy in The Aspern Papers in 1962. During the Philadelphia tryout, Dame Wendy seemed too ill to go on that night, so you were suddenly pushed into a rehearsal…
A: Yes, and while I was doing the first scene, I felt someone pushing me: Dame Wendy, who actually finished the line I had started. She may have had an ear infection but she wasn’t letting anyone take her part. If she’d had her leg shot off, she would have played the part and dragged a bloody stump around the stage.
Q: So, at that point in your career, you must have been devastated that you were so near yet so far from doing a lead in a Broadway-bound play.
A: Actually, I had never rehearsed the part before, so I was grateful I didn’t have to go on.
Q: I was stunned to see that you made your Broadway debut in Abraham Cochrane.
A: My God! Did you see that? It only ran one night!
Q: No, I wasn’t living in New York in 1964, but I was paying attention to Broadway then and I sure remember the title. What was it like?
A: All I remember is that it was the type of play they used to do 50 years ago — meaning 50 years before it was produced back then! It actually had lines in it like, “Touché!”
Q: And you played…?
A: All I remember is that I played a woman.
Q: Which hasn’t always been the case, has it, considering that you played a transsexual in Tales of the City?
A: Right! But I can tell you for sure that Anna Madrigal was a much better part than whatever one I had in Abraham Cochrane!
(By the way, later I checked the Best Plays of 1963-1964, and found this description of the play: “About a couple’s unhappy marriage and how a visit by the husband’s wartime buddy finally and completely destroys the marriage.” Now we know.)
Q: Were you aware then that the play was bad?
A: No, I was too wrapped up in being in my first Broadway show. They were fussing over my hair dye, they gave me two different suits, so I was happy — until we went to Sardi’s on opening night. At one point, I said to Louis, “I wonder when the reviews come out?” And he said, “They already have. Take a look at the room.” That’s when I noticed that people were leaving the party. So we went home, too.
Q: Back then, did you and Louis ever predict that you’d both make spectacular recoveries, what with you working all the time and him playing Paul Reiser’s father in Mad About You?
A: No, because I never thought of what I was doing in career terms and never made the “right” career “moves.” I just wanted to work, to get good parts — and for someone to pay me. That all that happened was a miracle.
Q: What roles did you miss that you now regret you never can play?
A: Masha in Three Sisters. I did play Olga, but never Masha. Nina in The Sea Gull, too — and that’s a shame, for when I was the right age for Nina, her life was my life. At the very least, I was a wounded sea gull, a real mess.
Q: Do you think that your Greek heritage gives you an affinity for the classics?
A: I actually do. I’m going to be doing Clytemnestra in Agamemnon next February with the Aquila Theatre Company, and already I’m looking forward to it.
Q: With “kefti”?
A: Ah, you remembered the word “kefti” from the book! I’m so glad of that. Kefti is such a wonderful word, one of my favorite Greek words. You can just feel from it that it means a zest life, a spirit to live and to celebrate. Zorba the Greek had it.
Q: And so do you, yes?
A: I have my problems embracing it. I think I’m getting better as I get older.
Q: What grade would you give yourself in kefti?
A: C-plus.
Q: There was a time when you were failing the course.
A: Oh, yes. But if I have a couple of drinks in me, my kefti rises.
Q: Ouzo?
A: Tequila.
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[To contact Peter Filichia directly, e-mail him at pfilichia@aol.com]
