John Astin
It is quite strange that John Astin cannot be recognised by his own name. After a career spanning more than forty years as a professional actor (he gained early recognition for his New York Broadway performances of Iago in Othello and Vladimir in Waiting for Godot, and has had regular film and television work ever since), Astin seems to only be remembered as Gomez Addams, and sometimes as the second Riddler on the Batman series. It doesn’t worry him though. Having always very carefully selected the roles he has played, Astin is fortunate enough to be recognised as a character he loved to play. Now, in a return to the theatre, Astin is touring his one man show Edgar Allen Poe: Once Upon A Midnight to the Adelaide Fringe.
For John Astin, Edgar Allen Poe represents a lot more than just a poet and story teller; he is a thinker and an innovator. Astin was actually researching Poe as the subject of a performance when Paul Clemens and Ron Magid approached him with a one man show where Poe’s ghost returns to a theatre to set the record straight. “There’s a lot out there on Poe that’s just incorrect,” he says. Some of it is slanderous, some of it tends to trivialise him. So, one of the things this play does is straighten out the facts. Another reason I want to do this play is that many of the ideas in the play, Poe’s ideas, I think are valuable today. I want to share those ideas with other people. Poe anticipated many of the theories of modern science -the time space continuum, the expanding and contracting universe. I think, more than anything, it’s his quest to discover the meaning of life that fascinates me about Poe. His work, in my view, is all a quest for the meaning of life.”
The quest for the meaning of life was actually the basis for Astin’s portrayal of Gomez Addams, a character he was required to animate, only ever having seen him in the single frame Addams cartoons.
“I was a great fan of the Charles Addams cartoons,” he says, and the truth is quite obvious because as soon as he begins speaking about the cartoons and the television series he becomes excited and passionate like only a true fan could.
“Even when I had almost no funds at all,” Astin continues, describing his development of the character, “I would take a precious two dollars and put it towards purchasing a bound collection of Charles Addams. When it came time to do a series based on his cartoons, I was a little apprehensive because I wasn’t sure how it could be done. I decided the only way to approach this for me was to try to analyse the cartoons. Put them inside my gut and my heart and then try to figure out what he was getting at. What do these cartoons mean? Why did he draw them in the first place? And in analysing all this stuff it occurred to me that, well for one thing he’s attacking the clichés through the device of implied violence. ‘May I borrow a cup of cyanide?’ Now let’s say you follow that through, and she has the cyanide and has poisoned someone. That’s not going to be funny. It’s just the impertinence of that statement that’s funny because it’s twisting a cliché in an interesting way. I decided that he was trying to wake us up to the complexity and texture and fabric of life to which we were possibly asleep. Included in this was the joy of life. I decided that my character would be on a quest to bring forth the joy of life. That was essentially the spine of Gomez Addams.”
There is a slight pattern in John Astin’s career. He has been drawn towards work which could often be described as somewhat macabre. In addition to the roles already discussed, Astin worked with Peter Jackson on his horror/comedy The Frighteners, and with the brilliant Rod Serling on episodes of The Twilight Zone and Night Gallery. John says that Serling was a rarity in the television industry. “He was a wonderful guy,” he says. “Very creative. Very dedicated to the work. He never got tired of trying to work out a problem. I never saw him sluff anything off. He really wanted get things right. I liked that. He never seemed to fatigue in the area of trying to improve something. Very often, I think, there is a low threshold for fatigue in television and people give up and say, it’s alright this way. Rod really wanted to work until something was right and he felt good about it.”
John Astin’s life in television, film and theatre is almost ridiculous in its broad scope. Very few people are aware that he directed television series in the 1970s and 80s including Mr Merlin, Murder She Wrote and CHiPs. He was also involved in an innovative experiment with his friends Gary Marshall and Tony Randall on the set of The Odd Couple. It was going to be the first sitcom without a laugh-track, an institution in television comedy which ruined many of the jokes in the Addams Family, and which Astin finds to be “a really stupid convention.”
“You know what I’ve always wanted to do,” he says, once again finding that excitement and passion, “is get some marvellous old movie like Holiday with Carey Grant and Katherine Hepburn, and put a laugh track on it and show people how horrible it looks with a laugh track. Who are these people who are laughing, anyway?”
by Josh Kinal
John Astin was interviewed for his performance in Edgar Allen Poe: Once Upon a Midnight at the Arts Theatre in Adelaide.
