Halfway through McNEAL, the title character, portrayed by Robert Downey Jr, and his adult son, Harlan, portrayed by Rafi Gavron, engage in a tense, pivotal conversation involving many forms of trauma. There is no small talk: weapons both verbal and actual are immediately evident. I asked Gavron recently, in a pre-performance interview, how he approaches the playing of such a scene.
“It’s very easy for me to do it with guns blazing right from the gate,” Gavron said. “The criticism has been: why is this character so angry all the time so quickly? But why wouldn’t I be angry with a narcissistic father and with all the trauma I’ve experienced -- and that still lives inside me?”
The challenge, Gavron said, “is not to do the scene full-out right away – to do something different with the dialogue and then get to a place where guns are blazing.” After listening to feedback from the production’s creative team and from people he trusts who have seen McNEAL, Gavron said that he has “tried to find a balance between guns-blazing and a slower build.”
It’s usually a mistake to reduce an actor’s performance to his personal history but in the case of Gavron’s intense and very moving performance in McNEAL some context is helpful. His young-actor days provide a start. During the casting process of the 2006 movie “Breaking and Entering,” for which Gavron received a British Independent Film Award nomination for Best Newcomer, Gavron’s father died suddenly.
“I was 15, and I had grown up in London, full of bravado,” the actor said, “and then my father died suddenly and some of that bravado got knocked out of me. Two weeks after his death, I was on set making a movie about a boy whose dad has died. Anthony Minghella, who directed, knew that by being humbled by a life experience I would be pliable in all the right ways necessary for the part.”
Gavron credits Minghella and Juliette Binoche, who in the movie plays his mother, for teaching him the basics of performance. “I’d never had an acting lesson. All I’d ever done was Macbeth in a school play.” Gavron added: “The movie was really positive for me. Anthony was incredibly kind to everyone in my family. Among other things, he let my nine-year-old brother sit in the director’s chair and call ‘Action!’”
But the experience of “Breaking and Entering,” however consoling, didn’t erase Gavron’s need to deal with his father’s death. He got offered plum movie parts. (He can next be seen in the film “Mercy.”) “But I said no, I can’t do them, I’ve gotta grieve. I didn’t realize how lucky I had been. It took me many years to get back to a place where I could get a decent job.”
Playing Harlan in McNEAL is the first theater Gavron has done since that Macbeth of almost 20 years ago. He doesn’t disguise the fact that he finds the experience difficult. “I don’t understand the repetitive nature of theater. It almost makes me not want to be an actor. But I decided before rehearsals began that I would do the play and do it well. I’m grateful for the opportunity. It has allowed me to commit to working with people I love who have been supportive to me, especially Downey. Everyone here at the theater has been so kind, and the play has been important from a confidence-building standpoint.”
Gavron said he would not have had the confidence to do Harlan a decade ago. “Playing the trauma night after night would have been too much for me. But I’ve learned the truth of a cliche: that the most uncomfortable experiences in your life are often the most formative.” He added: “No matter how comfortable I think I’ve gotten during the run of McNEAL it’s still daunting to get in front of almost 1100 people every night. And trying to get it right.”
Brendan Lemon is a freelance journalist in New York.
