Irish Voice
10-29-1996
THIS may come as a relief to some - Eric Stoltz, the high-profile `Brat Pack' actor of the 1980s and an alternative/Tarantino darling of the 1990, found his current job in much the same way as anyone else might - he got it out of the New York Times.
"It's true," he said in an interview on Monday. "I was reading the Times this past summer, I think it was June or July, and I saw that Tony Walton was preparing to direct The Importance of Being Earnest at the Irish Rep."
Stoltz says he acted quickly. The 35-year-old telephoned around to his actor friends to see if any of them knew Walton, who has a golden reputation as a Broadway set and costume designer and was seeking to make his New York directoral with the celebrated Oscar Wilde play.
Like Stoltz, Walton also got this job through the papers, though in a more convoluted fashion. As written about in this space last week, the Irish Repertory Theatre's Charlotte Moore revealed that the current production by the "Rep." had its origin when she read in a magazine article about Walton's desire to someday direct The Importance of Being Earnest, written in by the Dublin-born playwright in the early 1890s and staged for the first time in London 1895. Moore got in touch with Walton and offered the space at the Irish Rep., and by early summer, Walton was looking for a cast.
"A friend of mine passed on my number to him," said Stoltz, referring to Walton.
"I had heard nothing but wonderful things about [Walton] through the years," said Stoltz. "I met with him, and I got the sense that he truly loved the material. That's usually a very good sign. If a director loves the play and that why he's doing it, then it's good. After I met hi, it became clear he was doing it for all the right reason."
For Walton, the foremost of those reasons was a desire to move beyond set and costume designing, fields in which he had already established himself as a Broadway great. Walton's main motivation for going off-Broadway, to the relatively cosy Irish Repertory theatre on West 22nd Street, was to cut his teeth as a director.
Stoltz's reasons are less obvious. A recognized Hollywood star who most recently co-starred with Liam Neeson in Rob Roy and John Travolta in Pulp Fiction, Stoltz certainly didn't need to take a part in a century-old stage play at an off-Broadway house. Why did he want the part?
"It was the material," said the 35-year-old. "I've always thought Importance of Being Earnest was a fabulous play, and it's great to have a chance to work with material that's constantly challenging, fun and exhausting."
Does Stoltz's decision to take the role indicate a break with his better-known film past?
"No, no, not at all," he said. "There's no thought or planning in this at all, to tell you the truth. I try to do a play every year or every couple of years. To be honest, there's virtually no reward career-wise, and certainly not financially either.
"But on a personal level, it's enormously rewarding."
LAST Saturday night, Stoltz and the other seven actors in The Importance...finished their first week of previews (the official opening night is this Thursday, October 24). Stoltz plays the feckless playboy Jack Worthing, a member of London's turn-of-the-century "leisure class." With a upper-crust London accent and a wisecracking delivery, Stoltz kept the sold-out crowd laughing throughout.
It was an impressive performance from an actor who is perhaps most widely known as the bathrobed heroin dealer in Pulp Fiction, or, more than a decade earlier, one of Spiccoli's stoner friends in Fast Times with Ridgemont High. For that reason, one could do nothing but cringe for Stoltz at the sight of autograph hounds after the Irish Rep. show - at the stage door was a man who held the soundtrack album of FAst Times, and a VHS cassette box of Pulp Fiction.
Stoltz is asked, how does it feel to be trying your hand at a serious stage drama like Importance of Being Earnest and some guy comes up to you with a Fast Times album?
"It happen every play I do," he says, as if resigned to a moderately unpleasant chore. "There are people who make their livings off getting signatures. What can I say? It takes all kinds.
"It's a bit like being shown a picture of your first girlfriend, and being asked to sign it. It's like, `Yes, this was a part of my life at one point.' It's a long time ago, granted, but I don't find it all disturbing."
Speaking of former roles, Stoltz is asked about his part in Pulp Fiction, a part which provided the movie's most notorious scene - the revival from a heroin overdose of Uma Thurman's character. Was the scene as harrowing to perform as it was squeamish for so many in the audience to watch?
"Well, I can't say I was terribly fond of that needle," says Stoltz, referring to a massive spike which was used to inject adrenaline directly into the overdosing character's heart. "So having to assemble it wasn't a lot of laughs. The actual shooting was very technical - a lot of changing of angles and all that. But still, I didn't want to be the one to puncture one of Uma's million-dollar lungs."
Stoltz laughs when reminded of some of the more, well, simple characters from his past, and enjoys a laugh at contrasting them to the well-educated and snobbish Jock Worthing.
"Most of my film roles have not exactly been cut from the Wildean cloth," says Stoltz. "That's the sad truth about the industry - great scripts hardly ever make it."
Does he think the wordy, old-school, three act play which Importance is will be able to go over well with modern audiences?
"Oh it already is, I think," he says. "People seem to be enjoying it very much. I find a lot of audiences are relieved to hear people [characters] speaking in complete sentences."
One of the most commonly-heard reactions heard from actors making a transition from screen work to stage work is how tiring stage work is compared to the stop-and-wait, stop-and-wait world of film jobs. Does Stoltz agree?
"Oh it's exhausting," he says. "It was very tedious at times. Learning the lines was the great chore. It's a very wordy play, and it's one of those plays that's written with an almost mathematical precision. If you forget one word, it will screw you up for four pages."
Stoltz, whose New York stage performances include parts in Down the Road, Two Shakespearean Actors and Our Town at Lincoln Center, clearly has a love for the theatre but does not want anyone to think that he was abandoning other mediums.
"Clearly, I'm supported by film and TV," says Stoltz, who lives in New York with girlfriend and fellow actor Bridget Fonda. "I don't know anyone who can support themselves just on theatre, unfortunately. Those days are long gone, certainly for anyone who likes to eat, anyway."
STILL, Stoltz says that this Wilde play was important enough to him for a voluntary cut in income.
"It's a great play, in the classic sense of a great Irish playwright, taking the piss out the great British social class structure," he says. That's something that everyone always likes to see, it's certainly something I always like to see.
"I'm part Irish, so I feel like I'm witnessing some side of my genes that I've never really bothered to get into."
Though he was born and raised on the Samoan islands in the Pacific Ocean, to American parents who worked there as teachers, Stoltz obviously feels some sort of kinship with Wilde and his wickedly sarcastic play.
"I admit, I'm really a mutt," he says. "German, French, Irish, British, Swedish, whatever. I'm sure my ancestors were either quite promiscuous or else they kept getting asked to leave. But I certainly do feel there's an Irish side of me that identifies closely with this play.
"It's a great play, well done, in a lovely theater, and that's certainly something the entire Irish community should support," he says. "I think people will be pleasantly surprised."
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