Shatner Rules

these are such glamorous crossroads, and they are anything but. If you have to use a map, move away from the pinpoints and allow yourself a little more compass room, provided you haven’t thrown away your compass. The journey must be taken in individual moments. Enjoy the ride for the ride.
    What am I trying to say? Perhaps I should grab a marker and some pieces of cardboard.
    As you travel / Over hill and dale / Go get lost / But watch out for the ponytail!

QUIZ
    This simple quiz will test your understanding of the Shatner Rules so far. Please use pencil in case you need to erase.
     
    1. Would you like to take a quiz?
     
    Yes_____
    No_____

ANSWER KEY
    What part of “Say ‘yes’” don’t you understand? If you answered “yes,” please continue to the next page. If you answered “no,” then please go back to page 1, and start again. But enjoy again my roast barbs. I’m particularly proud of the Lisa Lampanelli one!

CHAPTER 5
RULE: Stay Hydrated
    O kay, they don’t all have to be funny. This one is important. Especially for an actor.
    I was on Broadway in the play
A
Shot in the Dark
in 1961, along with Julie Harris and Walter Matthau. It was a French farce that was later retooled as an Inspector Clouseau film for Peter Sellers. And by “retooled,” I mean “un-Shatnered.”
    The play was directed by the legendary director Harold Clurman, who became something of a legendary pain in the butt to me. He didn’t like my performance in the show, and always told me I was “playing the charm” rather than acting. What’s worse—he wouldn’t tell me what “playing the charm” actually meant.
    These kind of tensions make for rocky performances, and early in the run of the show, during previews, I “dried” on stage. What does that mean? It means, um . . . what does it mean . . . now . . . it, um . . . wait for it . . . it means, um . . .
RULE: Don’t Forget Your Lines!
    Again—not all these rules are jokes! Forgetting your lines is a terrifying thing for an actor. I was onstage, completely lost, and the only sound I could hear was the beating of my heart. And the sound of Harold Clurman in the audience, gasping in exasperation with me, rising up from his seat in the first row, and stomping all the way up the aisle in anger. At least his tantrum distracted the audience from the actor on stage who had drawn a lengthy and devastating blank.
    I might have been playing the charm, but I seemed unable to
turn on
the charm, especially when it came to Harold Clurman. This was especially hard on me because I had long admired his work with New York’s legendary Group Theater in the 1930s. He directed the first production of Clifford Odets’s
Golden Boy
, whose main character, Joe Bonaparte, was a character I strongly identified with as a teen. He’s a violinist who is seduced by the big-money world of boxing. As a kid who loved acting but who hid it from his football pals, I could clearly identify with the conflict of straddling both worlds. Now, my experience with Clurman had me straddling the two worlds of employment/unemployment.
    (NOTE: While I tried my best to keep my thespianic desires secret from my football chums, I was exposed as an actor by a high school history teacher who knew I had the bug and who tasked me with reciting Marc Anthony’s act 3, scene 1 speech from Shakespeare’s
Julius Caesar
to the entire class. Everyone was staring at me with great suspicion as I walked to the front of the classroom and tore into the speech, but by the time I bellowed, “Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war!” all my teammates were standing up and crying havoc themselves. Seriously, there was almost a mini riot.)
    I didn’t forget my lines again during the rest of the run of
A Shot in the Dark,
but an evening or two after I metaphorically “dried,” I literally “dried” on stage during previews. My throat began to tickle, and soon I had a full-fledged coughing fit on stage. Fortunately, my hacking was drowned out by the familiar sound of Harold Clurman having a coronary and throwing another stompfest in the audience.
    I vowed this was never going to happen to me again, so the evening before our opening night, I took the prop guy aside, pointed to a desk my character sat at during the show, and told him, “Make sure there is a glass of water in that desk every night.” If I felt a coughing fit coming on, I could always stroll over to the desk, open a drawer, and take a sip.