Today, when murders are streamed live and even Scott Baio is full of hot tweets, it may be hard to imagine a man shaking up anything by performing monologues in a theater.
Bogosian could dart from cowboy to panhandler, British rocker to neighborhood bully, self-loathing talk show host to slick Mr. Business without so much as stopping for a sip of water.
“It was sort of like speed metal,” he says now. “You get out there and do that set after set after set, and you walk off the stage and you’re just drenched with sweat, and that’s the show.”
Ethan Hawke remembers, as a young actor, watching the performance and “feeling like somebody took the roof off of my head.”
“It wasn’t some play where you wore a suit or you had a glass of Chablis afterward,” the actor said. “It was street art. It felt illegal.”
“Performance art meets stand-up meets sketch comedy,” adds Sam Rockwell. “I can’t really think of an equivalent. Maybe Lenny Bruce or Louis C.K. or Bill Burr. But I don’t know of anybody who was doing what Eric was doing. It’s almost like a different medium.”
Bogosian’s daring, one-man shows started small before leaping into theaters, packing houses and winning awards. Eventually, Bogosian moved into movies and TV and today, he’s better known as Capt. Danny Ross on “Law & Order: Criminal Intent” than for any of his stage roles.
Which is part of why, on a recent Saturday, a series of actors arrived, in shifts roughly three hours apart, at a small studio in Lower Manhattan. They were here for a special project that’s taken two years and counting. Bogosian is having 100 monologues he wrote between 1980 and 2000 filmed and posted online.
“These monologues need to be preserved,” said Mike Carlsen, 36, the “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” actor who came to do a 1981 piece called “Nice Shoes.” “Nobody is doing this anymore. Nobody is willing to get on stage for an hour and a half and just talk, talk in 10 or 15 characters. This is important.”
Bogosian launched "100 (monologues)" early in 2014. The idea is to recruit a slate of actors, some familiar (Hawke, Rockwell, Vincent D'Onofrio, Jennifer Tilly), some virtually unknown. The writer and actor, now 63, could certainly have performed the monologues himself, but that's not the point. He wants to see these characters interpreted by others. He's the director and tries to post a new monologue on the project's website every month. He's at 54 and growing.
“I think it just started as a ‘Hey, wouldn’t this be fun with all these friends and colleagues who are just great actors,’ ” says director Jo Bonney, Bogosian’s wife. “But now that it’s moving along, he sees the scale of it and as it accumulates, he’s becoming proud of it.”
How do you get some of the world’s best actors to film 100 monologues for free? You ask.
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Eric Bogosian leads a slate of acclaimed actors through 100 of his monologues.
There is no business plan. Actors work for a deferred $300 fee and potential, future ownership share of the site, though Bogosian tells them not to count on much, if anything. So far, “100 (monologues)” has cost about $75,000, with Bogosian kicking in $30,000, raising $25,000 on Kickstarter, and receiving a $20,000 donation from “Fela!” producers Stephen and Ruth Hendel.
Many of the actors have known Bogosian for years.
That includes Philip Seymour Hoffman, a close friend, who he sadly notes was set to play the ceramic tile salesman from 1986’s “Drinking in America” before his death in 2014. (Brian d’Arcy James ended up doing the monologue.)
“Phil was, to me, the epitome of what this whole exercise was about,” Bogosian says. “He is a person who becomes a character, inhabits the character, but he always plays it a little broadly so you know that he’s acting. It’s not real. We’re not trying to be real. I’m not a method actor. It’s a contrived thing. But if you can get the audience to think and feel that there’s a real person there, you’ve succeeded in some really crazy, delicate operation.”
Not every actor is a close friend. Tilly is a professional poker player who met him at a game. Bogosian told her about “100 (monologues).” Tilly felt an instant connection to the writing. It felt so New York City.
“You’re walking down the street and you hear someone crying on the phone, someone breaking up with their boyfriend, fights on the street. If you could just write down the rhythm of what people sound like and how they talk and how they interacted, it would be the most brilliant screenplay. That’s what Eric captures.”
‘Galleries of characters’
“You, you with the glasses.”
Saturday morning. Cameras rolling. Carlsen, needing a shave and wearing a deliciously outdated Members Only leather jacket, taunts the camera in thick street-speak. He is the first of four actors scheduled for a shoot that is scheduled to run into the night. Bogosian and his son, Travis, 25, first assistant director, oversee the nine-person crew.
“Come here for a second,” says Carlsen, in character. “I wanna ask you a question. . . . How ya doin’ there, Mike?”
“Nice Shoes” was inspired by an encounter Bogosian had in the late ’70s in Little Italy. A guy tried to steal his boombox. In the monologue, Carlsen, standing alone but aiming his menace at a camera representing the aforementioned Mike, bullies his target to give him his new shoes.
The director doesn’t say much. A few weeks earlier, he talked through the script with Carlsen and also showed him a clip he found useful, of a violent scene from Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye.”
Carlsen showed up ready. The call sheet set aside more than two hours for just him. Carlsen effectively nails “Nice Shoes” in five minutes. That’s no small feat. Many shoots have gone smoothly. Others have been tougher, with the actor needing to be fed lines like breath mints.
“Wow,” Bogosian says, standing and clapping. “Jesus, Mike. Great. We’ve never seen anybody nail the take the first time.”
Later, during a break, Bogosian analyzes Carlsen’s performance.
“You’ll see that in an actor like Mike,” he says. “He knows he’s good, he wants the world to know he’s good, he doesn’t have time for fear. I make a lot of parallels with professional sports with what we do. And you see this in utility players. They’re sick and tired of not being appreciated. Now Mike knows how good he is. He just doesn’t have time to be afraid. And he’s got an opportunity to flex his muscles. Which is what I want these things to be.”
Bogosian did not start his own career as a monologuist. After graduating from Oberlin College in 1976, he came to New York City and wrote and directed plays with full casts. He founded the dance program at the Broome Street loft known as “The Kitchen,” a space famous for performances by Mapplethorpe, Brian Eno, Meredith Monk and the Beastie Boys.
In 1978, Bogosian began experimenting with a tape recorder as a way to improve his voice on stage. He discovered the method helped him develop characters and monologues.
“I knew the direct address was one thing that makes theater exciting, [particularly] for a contemporary audience that’s used to rock bands playing to them,” Bogosian says. “To see people talking to each other on stage kind of leaves out the audience. Talking to the audience would step it up. And then there were all the taboos you can screw with. The first one, like any blue comedy, is sex stuff. You talk about sex in a very rude way. And you’ve got people’s interests. But death, also death . . . I had one bit where I walk out and it’s supposed to be me talking to the audience. I say, ‘It’s great to be here tonight.’ And then I go on and on and on about how, basically, if I died up here tonight that actually the audience would find it more memorable than if I just did the show. ‘Honestly, really, you would dine out on that for months. I was there. That guy died on stage. How great. Come on. Be honest.’ It makes people kind of tingle a little bit.”
Back then, he drank, smoked, did heroin. Bogosian cleaned up in 1984 and, two years later, had a huge hit with “Drinking in America.” In 1988, Oliver Stone adapted his play “Talk Radio,” with Bogosian starring as the abrasive, doomed shock jock Barry Champlain.
The monologues, or “galleries of characters,” as he calls them, captured a range of human behavior and emotion, including vulnerability, anger, bravado and paranoia.
Performances were intense.
“When people heard that we had children together, I think they were genuinely concerned for me and my children,” Bonney says. “I would always go, he’s an actor, and he’s acting. That’s not to say he didn’t have all that energy and intensity and moments of anarchy and anger. But those were just elements of a human being.”
Salty after all these years
His curly hair is grayer now and he watches what he eats, admitting that the slice of cheese pizza he's folded over for lunch is a rare indulgence. But Bogosian hasn't necessarily softened up. Witness his recent criticism of the French weekly Charlie Hebdo. He's also not afraid to confess his perhaps irrational distaste for Jake Gyllenhaal, who he inserted into one of his monologues to represent Hollywood pretention.
He loves high art, but he’s not too snooty to talk about the thrill of playing the mad villain in a Steven Seagal blockbuster, as he did in 1995’s “Under Siege 2: Dark Territory.” He also isn’t one to complain about his legacy or that his most innovative stage work isn’t being properly recognized.
“One of the first things that attracted me to do what I do is that it’s ephemeral,” Bogosian says of his one-man shows. “We knew when we made these things they were here today, gone tomorrow.”
He brings up "Extreme Exposure," an anthology of other people's monologues that Bonney edited in 1999.
“Lord Buckley’s in there. Brother Theodore. Real heroes of mine, and nobody’s ever heard of them,” Bogosian says. “I have pride but, I mean, I feel that way about a lot of my work. I’ve written three novels that no one knows about. I have a whole bunch of plays that I can’t get produced in New York City. If I stay in this zone of ‘why isn’t this work more something,’ I just see that as self-indulgent. So I just keep working.”
That doesn’t mean he’s ready to let his monologues go. He’s performed them in spurts over the years, including a short run at Labyrinth in 2013 and four shows in Dallas earlier this year. But Bogosian isn’t interested in reviving them for a lengthy theater run.
“I don’t want to be the old punk guy,” he says. “There are a couple of guys who can pull that off. Iggy can do that. Carlin could do that. And I have these images if I just lost another 20 pounds and got on speed and started chain-smoking again, I could get out there. But why?”
To hear him tell it, the idea of filming began small, sparked by a few conversations with friends after Theatre Communications Group published the monologues in a single volume in 2014. The project became more involved after the shoots began. And watching him oversee a “100 (monologues)” shoot, it’s obvious how much Bogosian enjoys watching other actors work.
Take Alison Wright, who arrives in early afternoon after Carlsen leaves. The English actress has become a favorite for her portrayal of Martha Hanson on “The Americans.” Bogosian assigned her “Gated,” a piece that centers on a broker interviewing a family looking to move into a fenced-off community.
Paid or not, Wright takes her assignment seriously.
“Our performances on stage are fleeting, they’re transitory,” she says. “This is going to be on the Internet for everyone to see forever.”
While Carlsen blasted through his scene, Wright tries hers over several takes. She experiments with starting in one spot, walking across the set, and taking a seat behind a desk. She dials up the charm on her second take, a syrupy sweet sell so pleasing that Bogosian, watching from the wings, breaks into a broad smile.
At one point, during a break, Bogosian praises Wright for making the character “just on the verge of being scary.”
“There’s a quality that’s evolving where she’s almost conspiratorial,” he says after another take. “This is what all great sales people do. That I’ve got something to share that not anyone else has.”
When Bogosian tells her they’ve got everything they need, Wright asks to do one more take, her “wild card.”
“Wild card?” Bogosian asks.
“Like the one that doesn’t look like anybody else in the room,” she says.
A few minutes later, Wright leaves and Bogosian and his crew take a break until the third actor of the day arrives. Walking around Manhattan, Bogosian talks about how sometimes, just a small flourish — the way an actress touches her ear during a take, the emphasis of a single word — reveals something new about a piece he’s known for 30 years.
“It’s magical,” he says. “I don’t know what’s happening. I don’t know what I’m seeing. I don’t know how it works. I’m not always sure why one is good and one is bad, but when it all comes together, it’s just a gorgeous thing.”
