Mark Rylance Discusses Minnesota Poet Louis Jenkins's Influence on Nice Fish's Script

At The New Yorker Mark Rylance, star of the play Nice Fish now running at St. Ann's Warehouse, discusses the impact of Louis Jenkins's prose poems on the play's script. Directed by Claire van Kampen, the play begins as a story about ice fishing. More:

Zipped into an orange snowsuit, red puffer jacket, orange balaclava, and lace-up snow boots, the actor Mark Rylance was sweating a little during a technical rehearsal of “Nice Fish,” which opened last week at St. Ann’s Warehouse, in Brooklyn. He was trying to do two things at once: collapse a blue nylon tent in a high wind during a five-second stage blackout, and dodge huge snowballs that shot across the stage like bowling balls. Rylance, a man who offstage radiates an almost spectral equanimity, was mildly exasperated.

The director, Claire van Kampen, was standing alongside the stage. “Let’s practice it,” she said. Van Kampen and Rylance have been married for twenty-seven years. “I’ll clap when there’s a blackout.”

“Usually when there’s a blackout, I come downstage with the snowballs, but you want me to stay and get the tent down?” Rylance called from the stage. “Which do you like better, Claire, my trying to avoid the snowballs or my being knocked down by them?” He paused. “I feel like I’m in a home movie.”

“Nice Fish” is about two old friends, Eric and Ron, who spend a day ice fishing on a lake in Minnesota. Rylance, formerly the director of the Globe Theatre, in London, has lived in England since his early twenties, but he grew up in Milwaukee, and he has retained an affinity for long winters and slow speech. During the past decade he has appeared frequently on the American stage and has won three Tony awards: for his portrayal of a hapless Midwestern visitor to a Paris bachelor pad, in the 2008 Broadway revival of “Boeing-Boeing”; for his 2011 role in “Jerusalem,” by Jez Butterworth, as an eccentric, phenomenally talkative layabout; and for playing the Countess Olivia, in “Twelfth Night,” in 2014.

Rylance’s acceptance speech at some of the award ceremonies baffled audiences. In 2008, his opening words were

When you are in town, wearing some kind of uniform is helpful, policeman, priest, etcetera. Driving a tank is very impressive, or a car with official lettering on the side. If that isn’t to your taste, you could join the revolution, wear an armband, carry a homemade flag tied to a broom handle, or a placard bearing an incendiary slogan.

During the award broadcast, the camera panned to van Kampen, who could be seen laughing uproariously. The passage turned out to be a prose poem by the Minnesota poet Louis Jenkins, who is now seventy-three. His poems, which are syncopated reveries about bologna sandwiches, sea lions, and the meaning of life, are integral to the “Nice Fish” script.

Read more at The New Yorker.