“I didn’t want to be an actress,” says Bea Arthur, whose new cabaret act comes to the Park West Tuesday for a ten-day run. “I wanted to be a little starlet. June Allyson killed me–I thought she was the end. I wanted to be like her, very small and very blond. But there I was, this tall lady with large breasts and a deep voice.”
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So Arthur studied acting under Erwin Piscator, the leftist German director whose notions of “epic theater” influenced Bertolt Brecht. A refugee from Hitler’s regime, Piscator had established his Dramatic Workshop at the New School for Social Research in New York. “We did repertory every weekend,” Arthur says, “and he cast me as Lysistrata and Lady Macbeth and Clytemnestra. I looked cute in one of those togas, but I couldn’t act worth, you’ll pardon the expression, shit.”
“She influenced me more than anyone, possibly with the exception of Sid Caesar,” Arthur says of Lenya. “She told me, ‘Never do anything unless you can’t not do it.’” The dictum defines the precision that characterizes Arthur’s work, whether spitting one-liners on Maude or bouncing through the comic showstopper “Bosom Buddies” in Mame.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Courtesy Weill-Lenya Research Center.
