Published: January 10, 2013
SEEING Ethan Hawke perched on a folding chair in a grungy Midtown rehearsal space leading actors through a reading is a bit of a shock. Not that he is there: Mr. Hawke is a steady presence in the New York theater scene, and he is rehearsing “Clive,” a play about a ’90s-era New York rocker gone very, very bad, in which he stars and directs.
No, it’s his hair. Vertical and shot through with silver, with notes of green (or is that blue?), his mane looks like a prop, which in a way, it is. “I don’t know how to explain it exactly,” he said, pointing at his head. “I didn’t want to feel like me when I did this role.” He added: “I’m trying to do that old-school, third-person thing by unlocking something as utterly superficial as my hair. I was shooting for a Bowie thing, but then I saw a picture of him after I did it, and he didn’t really do his hair like this.”
It’s a goofy gambit to serious ends, a very physical expression of his desire to do something remarkable. And like much else taken on by Mr. Hawke, a former movie heartthrob and Gen X hood ornament who is now a 42-year-old father of four, it would seem pretentious if it weren’t done in dead earnest.
“Clive” is an adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s “Baal” written by Mr. Hawke’s longtime friend Jonathan Marc Sherman. For Mr. Hawke the play is of a piece with a theater career that has included founding a scrappy company with like-minded buddies, directing new work as often as he can, and a gritty star turn in the revival of David Rabe’s“Hurlyburly,” which, like “Clive,” was produced by the New Group. That’s been mixed with high-minded work like Tom Stoppard’s “Coast of Utopia” trilogy, for which Mr. Hawke earned a Tony nomination, and the melancholy title character in Chekhov’s “Ivanov,” which he recently performed at Classic Stage Company.
“He attacked the life of that character, and like everything he does it is very much of the moment,” said Philip Seymour Hoffman, who starred with Mr. Hawke in Sidney Lumet’s movie “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead.” By now that’s no surprise, he added: “Almost every single season he is doing something significant here in New York.”
It was Mr. Stoppard who accidentally got the ball rolling on “Clive.” He was taken by the intensity of Mr. Hawke’s performance in a small role in “The Winter’s Tale” and said he should think about performing “Baal,” Brecht’s early play about a murderously misspent youth. Mr. Hawke brought the idea to Mr. Sherman, who settled on a retelling through his own experience of addiction. “Clive,” which matches “Baal” character for character, scene for scene, begins performances Thursday at the Acorn Theater, with a cast that includes Vincent D’Onofrio, Zoe Kazan and Mr. Sherman himself.
Mr. Hawke will do everything but take tickets — act, direct, and sing his way through a scabrous portrait of a talented rocker and ferocious addict who is on his way to hell and leaves claw marks in everything around him as he goes. “He hurts people he loves,” Mr. Hawke explained. “But I think Brecht was thinking about something other than whether he’s good or bad, and I’m trying to get at those other things with the performance.”
Famous since he was 18 and certified Hollywood bankable after “Reality Bites” in 1994, he seemed to have enough cachet to live a relatively privileged professional life. And it’s not like he quit on mainstream film work. He received an Academy Award nomination in 2002 for his supporting role alongside Denzel Washington in “Training Day.”Lately, with money on his mind, he lined up two horror movies, “Sinister,” which did very well, and “The Purge,” which will be out in May.
Before that he will come full circle when “Before Midnight” has its premiere at theSundance Film Festival — the third film in Richard Linklater’s series in which Mr. Hawke stars with Julie Delpy in a meet-cute romance that, during the films, blossoms into a long-running dialogue about the nature of love and connection.
Given that he married and divorced Uma Thurman, going through the tabloid spanking machine in the process (he has since remarried), it’s not as if Mr. Hawke has completely lived the life of a monkish theater rat. But on balance the work that preoccupies him happens in rooms full of paper coffee cups, dog-eared scripts and long hours.
At the “Clive” rehearsal he is collaborative and encouraging, but clearly in charge and clear about what he wants. Before he leaves, he runs a debrief on the day’s work with everyone, slaps hands as he says it went “great,” and exits.
Walking down Ninth Avenue afterward, he may be the least put-together star you’ll ever see. One tail of the shirt is perpetually untucked; whatever he has on most likely emerged from a pile of similarly unremarkable garments.
He talks frankly about the magic coin of celebrity, the one that can be used to party like a rock star, mate with someone fabulous while picking and choosing among projects. He’s done all of those things, but at this point in his life directing an Off Broadway play in New York with like-minded actors seems like the highest and best use of his skills. As it turns out, Mr. Hawke, who in movies often played the reluctant pretty boy who was smarter than he was given credit for, has been playing to type all along.
“Early on when I experienced some success, I grew incredibly weary of what fame meant on a DNA level,” he explained. “My talent, whatever it was or is, was not strong enough to survive that. I had an allergy to being famous and have been neurotically chasing a larger dream, a substantive life in the arts, so that I didn’t end up getting defined by it.”
A great-grandnephew of Tennessee Williams, Mr. Hawke is a New York University English program dropout who has written two novels and is working on a third. He wants to be taken seriously but not come off as a jerk in the process. While some have found his always-on, go-for-broke approach wearying, he couldn’t care less.
“I’ve spent my whole life aping the theater work of others, learning on the way, but I feel like I’m stumbling on something that is original with this group of people,” he said of his “Clive” collaborators. “You haven’t seen a play like this before, and I don’t know exactly how it is going to work, but I do know it’s what I want to do with my life.”
Even early on in the rehearsals the complicated glories of the project are easy to spot. The music will emanate from seven doors onstage that have been converted to musical instruments, played by the actors. Cords and knobs seem stuck to everything, except the cast members, who play multiple roles. There are a lot of drugs, drink, bloody hookups and the kind of mayhem that puts shrapnel into all bystanders, including the audience.
At the center of it all is Clive, who sees fresh meat everywhere he looks.
Mr. Sherman, a former prodigy who wrote “Women and Wallace” at the age of 18, took a significant detour into mood-altering chemicals before rebounding with “Things We Want,” which Mr. Hawke directed in 2007. His take on Brecht is built on a Greek chorus of addicts. In one scene Clive is in a room full of them, one of whom lies dead from an overdose even as the rest continue to game their next high.
Surveying the corpse, Clive cuts to the chase: “He has his rest. We have our restlessness. Both are all right. After sleep we wake up. After sleep he doesn’t wake up. Both are all right.” There’s not a trace of empathy in his voice as he cadges the deceased’s bottle of whisky and his A.T.M. card.
While the stage will seem littered with shattered glass and broken humans, Mr. Sherman is very happy to be back in business with his antic, energetic friend. “I think that Ethan should leave his body to science,” he said. “He has a level of energy that I have not seen in people outside of those on major substances, and has this level of curiosity that just drives him. Live theater unlocks that.”
Part of why Mr. Hawke finds so much traction in the theater has to do with the nature of the transaction.
“When someone tells you they saw you in ‘Training Day,’ and that they liked what you did, it feels good, but I wasn’t there,” he said. “But if it is a piece of theater, I was part of it, and if someone, including other people I respect, comes to see some little play I did, that means a lot to me.”
Mr. D’Onofrio said the dual roles of acting and directing suit a mature Mr. Hawke. “Ethan has absolute confidence in what he is doing with ‘Clive’ and what he is doing with the rest of his career,” he said. “It’s about failing miserably and succeeding triumphantly, both.”
Mr. Hawke says that unlike Robert De Niro or his friend Mr. Hoffman, he cannot invent a character out of whole cloth. Every part he plays contains some component of who he is. Like Jesse, his character in “Before Midnight,” he has been divorced, is extremely emotional and dedicated when it comes to his children and is always wondering about the worth of work he chooses. How rare, then, that the young Ethan Hawke and the middle-age Ethan Hawke have been captured, like a time-lapse, in Mr. Linklater’s films.
“ ‘Before Sunrise’ was such an important movie for me because I learned to talk on screen,” Mr. Hawke explained. “Before that, all I had ever been asked was to brood for the camera. ‘Before Midnight,’ because of its sheer existence, ends up being about the passage of time. And yeah, your face falls apart and all that. But what I noticed is how much the same I am, how much of whatever I am is there in each film.”
True to form, Mr. Hawke retains his purchase on boyishness in the movie, but he does seem a little different more than 15 years later. Maybe because he knows who he is.
