Q&A

Ron Silver on the Price of Activism

June 7, 1992

By BARBARA ISENBERG, Barbara Isenberg is a Times staff writer

Step
into Ron Silver’s dressing room backstage at the Hollywood Playhouse.
There’s a black binder lying open on the dressing table; it’s packed
with clippings on health care. A baseball hat with Chinese lettering
rests alongside a book–"Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power
and Peace"–and nearby is a pamphlet called "Curing U.S. Health Care
Ills."

Hardly the light reading one would expect from an actor
taking on a 90-minute, one-man show. But neither the actor nor the
show–"and" by journalist Roger Rosenblatt–is predictable Hollywood
fare.

Silver, at 45, is president of Actors’ Equity and won a
Tony for his stage performance as slick movie producer Charlie Fox in
David Mamet’s "Speed-the-Plow." He played the intense lawyer Alan
Dershowitz in the film "Reversal of Fortune" and the hapless Holocaust
survivor with three wives in "Enemies: A Love Story."

Rosenblatt’s
play, which opens Wednesday, is a complex monologue about writing,
dreams and compromise. Its unnamed hero is a journalist who reflects on
risk-taking; journalism is too easy for him, too insignificant. The
play ran in New York for a month earlier this year but has been
considerably rewritten.

It is a story that, in many ways, was
written for Silver. Although playwright and actor did not know each
other before, they connected through the words. They fit Silver, he
says, and Silver, says Rosenblatt, fit the story.

"The one
quality the play required above everything else, since it’s a man
talking to himself, is a man who is persuasively very smart," says
Rosenblatt, editor-at-large of Life magazine. "He can’t be acting.
Apart from Ron’s enormous range of acting skills, you have the sense of
a very deep, comprehensive brooding intelligence."

A Chinese
history scholar turned actor and political activist, Silver does not
hide his passions. From fighting for National Endowment for the Arts
funding in Washington, D.C. to reminding the Tony Awards audience last
Sunday that "AIDS affects us all," Silver is among his profession’s
most articulate and committed spokesmen.

Silver founded and
heads the Creative Coalition, a star-studded roster of actor-activists
who advocate reform or other action on such issues as the NEA, national
health care, the environment, the homeless and reproductive rights.

The
actor has three films awaiting release, but meanwhile there’s the
challenge of playing Rosenblatt’s writer each evening through June 28.
"This is real mano-a-mano, " Silver says. "Your mind can’t wander for a
moment. There’s nobody out there to help you."

Question: What was your initial reaction to "and"?

Answer:
It was just about love at first sight. The fit was very very
comfortable. The rhythms and the words seem very much my own–almost
like an organic extension of myself. I connected with the material, the
text, what I thought it was saying.

At first glance it’s a very
specific story about the writer not wanting to do what he has done
before and wanting to write something else. But it’s also about
somebody trying to get back and discover what is really in his heart.
Where do those dreams go when you’re a kid? Why does nothing ever turn
out as dreamed?

Q: Did you dream of becoming an actor? You’ve said in the past that you dwindled into it? What do you mean?

A:
It’s a paraphrase of (William) Congreve, who has a line in a play where
somebody dwindled into marriage. I imagine many people do that as well.
I didn’t wake up and say, ‘Mom, I have to be on the stage.’ It just
never quite happened like that.

I went to graduate school in
Chinese history and when I was (in Taiwan) studying, I traveled to
Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam . . . It was almost an extended adolescence.
It was very adventuresome and I had done things that horrify me in
retrospect. And when I got back in 1970, I didn’t want to work in
government, so I got the MA in Chinese history (at St. Johns University
in Queens) and was a social worker for a year. I didn’t know quite what
I was doing.

I started taking acting classes because I had
fooled around with it in college and I had received some encouragement
and liked it. There was a diversity of people that I had not come into
contact with before. And there was something very unorthodox about the
whole group. While everybody else was going home and having dinner,
these people were going out to rehearsal. I did it basically as a
hobby, as a lark. But I received a great deal of encouragement from
Herbert Berghof and later Lee Strasberg. I don’t know how tenacious I
might have been if I had many years of not working and just taking
classes.

(I went to Los Angeles with "El Grande de Coca Cola")
and then I started to do TV. And slowly it dawned on me this is what I
do and I really want to be good and take it seriously.

I think
most people don’t have dramatic epiphanies. Most people I know go
through their lives, and what is charming about most of my friends is
that they don’t change. They’re predictable. But every time you see
some sort of artistic enterprise, people are having these revelations
about life. In 22 minutes on a sitcom, 49 minutes on an hour show and
an hour and 53 minutes in a movie, people have these extraordinary
revelations that change their lives overnight. What I like about most
of the people I know is they’ve been doing the same thing for 30 years;
they never change.

Q: But you seem to change, to play
different roles in life. Does your activism, for instance, influence
your choice of roles on stage?

A: There are only so many
good scripts and so many movies and there are so many people ahead of
me that it’s not a matter of my choosing. I wish it were. But it’s not.
It’s interesting to me when a journalist asks an actor, "but why did
you do that?" If you’re Jack Nicholson or Tom Cruise, that question
makes sense. But for 75% of the actors who are doing well, you kind of
know why you did it–because it was offered to you or it was the best
thing available to you.

I’m an actor by calling, and I’m an
activist by inclination but I try not to confuse the two. Maybe if I
had more integrity I would confuse the two more and integrate them
more. I don’t make judgments based on that.

Q: Where does that sense of social responsibility come from?

A:
Everybody comes to their political commitments in a different way. For
me, there is no individual redemption–for there to be salvation, it
has to happen as an individual in the community.

This seems
particularly appropriate today. Individual needs have become so rampant
that the sense of community has suffered, and we obviously have to find
our way back. And I think that’s a pretty apt model for improving
things today. I just feel that it’s less than a whole life not to try
to involve yourself and to give something back. I can’t feel whole when
I’m surrounded by injustices.

I’ve always been politically
engaged. Sometimes the acting in a strange way can be very removed from
the real world. It can be such an obsession with yourself and your own
truths . . . that it can kind of make you a little detached and aloof
from what’s going on around you. So it’s always been very gratifying
for me to be involved.

Basically I’m trying to be useful. It
comes down to that. But I’ve always thought involvement in public
affairs is a legitimate use of celebrity. A celebrity’s capacity for
indignation is as great as any other citizen’s, but our ability to find
a forum for its expression is greater.

Q: Is that what led to your founding the Creative Coalition?

A:
It came out of the (Michael) Dukakis campaign actually. There was a
group of celebrities coming back from Queens after a Dukakis rally and
on the bus we were talking–Christine Lahti, Susan Sarandon and all
sorts of other people.

I was receiving literature from two
groups on the West Coast–the Hollywood Women’s Political Committee and
Show Coalition–and I asked why there wasn’t an industrywide network
for political education in New York as well. There seemed to be a
general frustration that celebrities are just used ornamentally, to
raise funds and to put their names on invitations or attract crowds.

We
had a power–whether we deserve to have that power or not was a very
arguable proposition, but we did. So how could we use it responsibly?
We just felt adding our voices together and having an organization
behind us would give us access to information and people and we could
educate ourselves about the political process.

Q: You’re also now president of Actors’ Equity, the actors’ union. How did that come about?

A:
I was on Equity’s Council when (the musical) "Miss Saigon" was going to
play on Broadway with Jonathan Pryce in the role of a Eurasian pimp,
and Actors’ Equity members protested that decision. I saw the
possibilities for leadership in a sensitive area. I like taking
responsibility, and here was a situation where there were two
fundamental principles at stake. One was the redress of grievances
about minority members who had been denied equal opportunity and access
to roles–even to the extent that roles specifically written for them
were denied them. The other was the unfettered artistic autonomy that
creative people in this business must enjoy. (Former Equity president)
Colleen Dewhurst also snookered me into (the presidency). Colleen asked
me to go out to dinner one night and she more or less wanted to know
what I thought about possibly succeeding her. And I think the reason
Colleen suggested me and the nominating committee nominated me is that
they wanted a very activist person at the helm who was willing to
attempt changing long-established patterns.

I was also very
interested in the health care issue because it’s affecting Equity as
much as it is any other organization. It’s had a particularly
devastating effect upon Equity because of the extraordinary incidence
of AIDS in our community. (It’s had) a catastrophic effect on the
union’s finances and viability of its health care plan and it even
endangered to some extent its pension plan. And it’s all very, very
sad. But again it has relevance in terms of the larger society. The
health care situation is not affecting simply Equity. It’s affecting
everybody.

Q: Have you ever thought of running for a political office?

A: And lose whatever influence I now have? Nobody would ever listen to me again.