The Select Equity Group Series on Theater

Philip Seymour Hoffman in Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. Photo: Will Hart.

March. 1992. Night. The offices at Circle Repertory Company were empty except for the green room. A few young actors were waiting to audition for a workshop production of Seth Zvi Rosenfeld’s Servy-n-Bernice 4Ever. I was directing. My heart sank as each guy read, when some kid walked in who looked totally wrong for the role. Oh God, I thought, I’ll never get this role cast; a strawberry-blond Irish-looking guy reading for the role of a Jewish kid who wants to be black? Seymour Hoffman? “Phil,” Seth said, “Philip.” The guy got the role, the little production rocked, a commercial producer picked up the play, and Phil and I were promptly replaced.

But almost overnight, there he was again in the film Scent of a Woman, then again in Nobody’s Fool, then a couple years later in Boogie Nights, always turning in a unique character performance of tremendous substance, honesty, and audacity. Go Phil! Well: he did. Sometime in the late ’90s after we had seen him in The Big Lebowski, Happiness, and Magnolia, we knew that he was a force, though nobody could have predicted his astonishing turn as Truman Capote. But back in 1992, many of us missed the fact that Phil and John Ortiz founded The LAByrinth Theater Company. With John Gould Rubin, the two are currently the company’s co-artistic directors. LAByrinth is one of New York’s most successful and multicultural theater companies. This spring, they will open Stephen Adly Guirgis’ Little Flower of East Orange, directed by Hoffman. And those of us who were fortunate got to see Phil’s foray into directing Guirgis’ powerful and hilarious plays including Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train and Our Lady of 121st Street. Both plays moved off Broadway; Jesus also went to London where it was nominated for an Oliver Award. Clearly, a director had been born. The direction was precise, motivated, daring, and most of all, strikingly alive. His current film performances in The Savages, Charlie Wilson’s War and Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, all playing simultaneously in a theater near you, are wildly diverse and downright inspired. What, I thought—being an actor and director myself—is the relationship between these two very different jobs? How does acting affect directing and directing affect acting? How does one articulate the ways in which they compliment each other? I went straight to the source.

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Issue 103 Spring 2008