Post by Techguy on Aug 16, 2006 1:13:45 GMT -5
www.ericbogosian.com/centerstage.html
Jill Rachel Morris, Production Dramaturg at Center Stage in Baltimore, interviews Eric Bogosian for the upcoming production of Griller (November 19 - December 19, 1999).
Eric Bogosian: Playmaker
August 6, 1999. Suburban New Jersey.
On creating an event and why he keeps writing for the stage:
When I’m working on a play, I’m not thinking I’ll create this literary thing that you can read and that I can send to playwriting contests to be judged on how it sits on the page. It has to work as a blueprint for what will happen when the play is staged. That means I have to know what it takes to activate the stage.
...I’m trying to create something that is its own thing. It is a play. It is an event. It isn’t meant to be an imitation of something else. It is what it is, and you come to the theatre to participate in it. You are a participant because you’re live and your laughter or... just your eyes watching, even your silence is part of what’s happening when that thing occurs. And it’ll only occur a finite number of times... And that’s why I write for the stage. I’m writing to be a participant in the making of theatre.
On landing in New York with a theatre degree:
I had pretty typical theatre training until I came to New York in ‘75. I graduated from Oberlin in the Theatre Department, and I’d say at that point the Oberlin idea of cutting edge theatre was Pinter and Beckett and Albee...literary playwrights. You can read them and you will experience a piece of literature. The theatre making process as it exists in the academic world gravitates toward the script and toward talking about the script. But Shakespeare, for example...when it was made, it was an event created on a stage -- more like a happening than a naturalistic play.
Now, I still love Pinter and a lot of literary plays, but I became aware of a new theatre that was bursting at its seams in the early ‘70s when I got to New York. The work and the audience were not from the traditional theatre scene -- it was musicians, visual artists, dancers, choreographers. And the greatest hero of all that for me was Richard Foreman. If you take a Richard Foreman play and attempt to read the script -- I don’t know how you could make any sense out of it. It could only be interesting as an artifact of the play.
And yet that theatre, for me, is great theatre. Mabou Mines and...well, Sam Shepard’s a perfect example -- you could argue for the literary-ness of Sam Shepard but, really, you’ve got to be there. You’ve got to see this stuff staged. And that’s what I’m part of -- the tradition where you’ve got to see the stuff staged. I hate to admit it, but I think with the solos and the monologues I’ve done, you’re missing 75% of it if you think you can read it and understand what it is. You could say the same for Pinter and Beckett, but I’m talking about a very active event, staged. It’s sophisticated, but the energy is right out of punk clubs and rock and roll. For years we had been watching Mick Jagger or Iggy Pop or David Bowie talking to the audience. And it seemed so obvious to me -- it’s just so much more immediate.
I made my early work in front of downtown audiences that demanded and celebrated only the most anarchic, outrageous stuff. I was always encouraged to go for it and try things. For me, that was really exciting and it shaped what became my habits and the kind of work I make. In order to make art, I think it’s really important to get awkward. And it’s hard to get awkward. It’s hard to be willing to be awkward. But nobody’s going to make any art without taking chances and taking those kinds of risks.
On words, words, words:
Having said that, I have a strong literary background. I’ve always been a writer and read tons of books and I can’t help wanting to shape the words and make the word part of it. But it’s about ensemble; it’s about everybody’s contribution to the whole. So when I’m putting a play together, I do it in a manner of fits and starts. I try things. I look at what it is and I will only know when it’s working as I’m watching it being done in workshops. I’m pretty good at understanding what something will look like when it’s onstage, but I’m not a guy who can sit down at a wordprocessor, type something out, and know what I want it to be. And part of that is because I’m not only interested in the dialogue and the dynamic of the dialogue. I’m interested in the way people will be sitting on the stage and glances and all kinds of things that are going on.
On significance and finding archetypes for his tribe:
For me, the really important questions are why and how audiences accept what’s happening on the stage as being significant to them. I’m not trying to see how close I can make my characters to the ‘real’ thing. I’m trying to see how close I can get an experience to the way people recognize it as the way it lives in their heads. That’s what I think is happening in the theatre.
I like what Brecht said about trying to keep the audience at a distance slightly. I’m not interested in seducing the audience into believing that this is a reality, the way when you watch a film it’s as if you’re dreaming out loud. I’m looking for a set of archetypes we all will recognize. Or at least my tribe will recognize. Because the archetypes won’t be recognizable to everybody. How many times have I done solos and people have come up to me and said, “I know that guy. O, THAT guy. That’s my bother-in-law. Boy, did you get him.” Well, I wasn’t trying to get your brother-in-law. I was trying to get that universal guy. But I have to make him specific as well, or he won’t come to life. And of course, in the plays, other actors use my blueprint to create characters. When I write, I’m attempting to connect the specific dramas that exist in me to a more universal sense of those dramas that we all share.
Most playwrights become known in the first place because they manage to hit a major chord and everybody responds to it. And then they often go into their mannered period, when they’re more interested in experiences that are very specific to them. And sometimes they leave everybody else behind. Tennessee Williams wrote the most amazing dramas, and then moved on to work that almost nobody could follow and I don’t even know if it’s coherent. The experiences must have meant something to him, though, or he wouldn’t have written about them. But when he was writing about Brick and Cat and when he was writing about Big Daddy, the audience got it instantly. Everybody has a Big Daddy in their life. Everybody knows what Brick feels like.
On performance and doing ‘big’:
“Griller” is deliberately set outdoors; the characters hang around at a backyard barbecue. In “Talk Radio” I speak to the audience and use the audience as a kind of witness to my performance on the radio. It’s as if they’re in the booth watching me. In “subUrbia,” the characters are out in the 7-Eleven parking lot. These settings tell actors that they have to project. That really changes the way actors will present themselves in the stage space and to the audience.
Brecht said that theatre should be like circus or like a prize fight, and the audience should be able to kick back and smoke cigars and watch people perform in a certain space. I think that’s extreme and it’s interesting. The funny thing is that Brecht never went that far himself. But you can try for that.
...Film actors have taught themselves to speak (his voice drops, not to a whisper, but to a speaking voice I can barely make out across a kitchen table) in very low voices because it’s very sexy if you keep your voice low and gravelly. (back to full voice) And that is all about internal, it’s all about creating veracity, and it has nothing to do with what I’m interested in in the theatre. I’m in love with Frank Langella and Willem Dafoe and guys who come out and blast off when they’re on stage. They’re energized by the people in the audience and they want to do ‘big’ and they want the people in the last row...which is where I sat when I saw Frank Langella do “Dracula” and I was knocked out of my seat. I was in the last row of the balcony and I was pulled into his thing. To me that’s incredible magic.
On writing dialogue and letting the characters lead him to the play:
In the case of “Griller,” I will say to myself, “This character and this character haven’t said anything to each other in the whole play. What would happen if they had a conversation?”. I don’t know where this is going to go in the play. I have no idea if it’s related to the plot. I write it out and I can hear the characters talking. Sometimes I’m thinking about somebody I know, but, again, I know them the way they exist in my head. There might be somebody that I knew thirty years ago, and I think about this person all the time and, like a stone that’s being smoothed in a riverbed, that character has now achieved some kind of icon status in my head. I think I know everything about that guy. When I write for him I can hear him talking... But I never try to get every characteristic in there. I’m not trying to make something endlessly complex. I’m trying to make something that’s potent. I use the parts that keep the character very active.
When you put two characters together that create some kind of chemistry between them, that’s what we’re interested in watching on stage. That’s when a dramatic event occurs -- when one character and another character are in each other’s presence and their relationship is changing due to the chemistry between them. And that -- subtext -- is what an audience finds they cannot stop watching. At least for me. I want to get a lot of energy going between characters.
On plot, themes, and writing questions:
You can sort of know where you’re headed... you can think you know...but I let the piece tell me where it’s going. The most interesting things will get told to me through the dialogue. I let it flow, and I don’t know where it’s going. Sometimes characters say things to each other and in that one moment of exchange suddenly out pops a big truth about them and their relationships to the other characters.
When I start writing, I’m not always aware of the deepest themes. While I work, I learn what I’m really thinking about right now. The greatest challenge is to not write what I think audiences want me to write, or what I think I’m supposed to write, but to write something that is on the edge of my consciousness -- something that I need to figure out about what is going on with me right now. In other words, I’m not trying to write answers, I’m trying to write questions. And they have to be important to me, extremely important; they have to be questions I really care about.
On getting action:
I live by a very, very simple idea in the theatre which I learned from Richard Foreman. I make the theatre that I want to see. If I walk into a theatre and I sit down in one of the seats, would I want to stay in that seat until the performance is over or would I walk out? At the end of the day I want to create an excuse for getting actors on a stage, acting their asses off with a lot of dynamic energy, holding the audience, and keeping them interested.
On “Griller” and how his characters struggle to live by what they believe, what they think they believe, or what they’ve been convinced they believe:
The characters in “Griller,” like a lot of my characters, are searching for the right way to live. In the long run, there’s often no simple moral choice, no clear “right way”.
I think some people talk a lot and in the meantime they behave any number of ways. I’m of a generation that did a huge amount of banner waving in the ‘60s and early ‘70s -- banner waving about ideologies that I don’t see reflected in the way people behave today. I’m of a generation, and of course this is what “Griller” is about, ‘the Gussie generation’...I’m not fifty, but I’m certainly evaluating what I’ve done with my life. I’m watching my kids grow and so forth. Gussie is a child of the sixties. Gussie’s from a time when, for instance, it was seen as incredibly uncool to drive Cadillacs because they were gas-guzzling, ecologically horrible things. You should drive a little Volkswagen -- it’s cheap and cheaply uses gas, etcetera. Great. So why do so many of us today have big SUV’s and Land Cruisers and Land Rovers and all that junk? There’s no logic to it. If you really believed something twenty-five or thirty years ago, where’s that belief?
Materialism was seen as a completely bad thing by my generation. You know, we all had torn jeans and we didn’t want to make any money and we were doing our own thing. And then over time, that changed. I’m not saying either way is right or wrong. What I am interested in is THE FACT THAT IT CHANGED. And I’m not saying I even know why. I’m just saying, isn’t it interesting that people can so strongly believe one thing and thirty years later believe a completely different thing?
Or maybe people are doing something else entirely, which is what I think is happening with Gussie. Maybe they’re CLAIMING that they still believe what they believed thirty years ago, while they’re LIVING something very different. That’s interesting. It’s even more interesting in the context of children. The children of the ‘60s looked at the children of the ‘20s and ‘30s and said, “You’re hypocrites. You’re bad people and you made big mistakes and you’re ruining the world. We’re going to come along, and we’re going to do Woodstock, and we’re going to make it all different. We’re going to create a world that’s full of peace and harmony. And it’ll be efficient and make careful use of energy resources. We’ll do all these good things, and we’re not going to do what you did.” But now, here we are thirty years down the line and we’re doing everything the same way our parents did. And we have children and they’re looking at us and they’re saying, “You’re hypocrites. You’re bad people.” And we say, “No, we’re not bad people. Because we had good intentions.” And it’s gotten pretty complicated.
As I move into my late 40’s and into my 50’s, it occurs to me that maybe all this talking and thinking was just a function of where I was at during any particular time in my life. That when I’m in my 20’s I’m gonna feel rebellious; and when I’m in my 30’s I’m gonna feel like buckling down; and when I’m in my 40’s I’m gonna feel like slowing down, and by the time I’m 70 I’ll think it was all just a joke anyway and people made too big a deal out of things.
On philosophical swings, ideological extremes, and weathering the latest trend in moral fashion:
Everyone’s thinking naturally changes and hopefully becomes wiser as we live and engage in the world. That’s life. Except that isn’t what people are being told. The American philosophical systems... If you look at all the ways that Americans have tried to organize themselves ideologically and philosophically, it’s never relativistic. Or in any way mature. It’s always absolute. All or nothing. So, in the ‘60s, we were impoverished and hippies and lived in old clothes. And in the ‘80s we were the greediest people we could be and we were going to try to accumulate as much money as we could. These horrible swings all the way from one side to the other are absurd.
Each approach is like some kind of grapefruit diet except it’s a philosophy of life. “I’ve suddenly decided this is what I’m gonna do. This is gonna solve all the problems I have. Now I understand: ‘Men are from Mars. Women are from Venus.’ Well. Now I don’t have to think about men and women anymore, because now I understand. All from that simple metaphor.” Life isn’t simple. You do change. You realize when you have kids that you have to come up with a new set of rules.
Well. Now we’re mired in all this and I’ll never come out with a straight answer. That’s why I make art.
This fall, Eric Bogosian comes to Center Stage to make the theatre that he wants to see.
Jill Rachel Morris, Production Dramaturg at Center Stage in Baltimore, interviews Eric Bogosian for the upcoming production of Griller (November 19 - December 19, 1999).
Eric Bogosian: Playmaker
August 6, 1999. Suburban New Jersey.
On creating an event and why he keeps writing for the stage:
When I’m working on a play, I’m not thinking I’ll create this literary thing that you can read and that I can send to playwriting contests to be judged on how it sits on the page. It has to work as a blueprint for what will happen when the play is staged. That means I have to know what it takes to activate the stage.
...I’m trying to create something that is its own thing. It is a play. It is an event. It isn’t meant to be an imitation of something else. It is what it is, and you come to the theatre to participate in it. You are a participant because you’re live and your laughter or... just your eyes watching, even your silence is part of what’s happening when that thing occurs. And it’ll only occur a finite number of times... And that’s why I write for the stage. I’m writing to be a participant in the making of theatre.
On landing in New York with a theatre degree:
I had pretty typical theatre training until I came to New York in ‘75. I graduated from Oberlin in the Theatre Department, and I’d say at that point the Oberlin idea of cutting edge theatre was Pinter and Beckett and Albee...literary playwrights. You can read them and you will experience a piece of literature. The theatre making process as it exists in the academic world gravitates toward the script and toward talking about the script. But Shakespeare, for example...when it was made, it was an event created on a stage -- more like a happening than a naturalistic play.
Now, I still love Pinter and a lot of literary plays, but I became aware of a new theatre that was bursting at its seams in the early ‘70s when I got to New York. The work and the audience were not from the traditional theatre scene -- it was musicians, visual artists, dancers, choreographers. And the greatest hero of all that for me was Richard Foreman. If you take a Richard Foreman play and attempt to read the script -- I don’t know how you could make any sense out of it. It could only be interesting as an artifact of the play.
And yet that theatre, for me, is great theatre. Mabou Mines and...well, Sam Shepard’s a perfect example -- you could argue for the literary-ness of Sam Shepard but, really, you’ve got to be there. You’ve got to see this stuff staged. And that’s what I’m part of -- the tradition where you’ve got to see the stuff staged. I hate to admit it, but I think with the solos and the monologues I’ve done, you’re missing 75% of it if you think you can read it and understand what it is. You could say the same for Pinter and Beckett, but I’m talking about a very active event, staged. It’s sophisticated, but the energy is right out of punk clubs and rock and roll. For years we had been watching Mick Jagger or Iggy Pop or David Bowie talking to the audience. And it seemed so obvious to me -- it’s just so much more immediate.
I made my early work in front of downtown audiences that demanded and celebrated only the most anarchic, outrageous stuff. I was always encouraged to go for it and try things. For me, that was really exciting and it shaped what became my habits and the kind of work I make. In order to make art, I think it’s really important to get awkward. And it’s hard to get awkward. It’s hard to be willing to be awkward. But nobody’s going to make any art without taking chances and taking those kinds of risks.
On words, words, words:
Having said that, I have a strong literary background. I’ve always been a writer and read tons of books and I can’t help wanting to shape the words and make the word part of it. But it’s about ensemble; it’s about everybody’s contribution to the whole. So when I’m putting a play together, I do it in a manner of fits and starts. I try things. I look at what it is and I will only know when it’s working as I’m watching it being done in workshops. I’m pretty good at understanding what something will look like when it’s onstage, but I’m not a guy who can sit down at a wordprocessor, type something out, and know what I want it to be. And part of that is because I’m not only interested in the dialogue and the dynamic of the dialogue. I’m interested in the way people will be sitting on the stage and glances and all kinds of things that are going on.
On significance and finding archetypes for his tribe:
For me, the really important questions are why and how audiences accept what’s happening on the stage as being significant to them. I’m not trying to see how close I can make my characters to the ‘real’ thing. I’m trying to see how close I can get an experience to the way people recognize it as the way it lives in their heads. That’s what I think is happening in the theatre.
I like what Brecht said about trying to keep the audience at a distance slightly. I’m not interested in seducing the audience into believing that this is a reality, the way when you watch a film it’s as if you’re dreaming out loud. I’m looking for a set of archetypes we all will recognize. Or at least my tribe will recognize. Because the archetypes won’t be recognizable to everybody. How many times have I done solos and people have come up to me and said, “I know that guy. O, THAT guy. That’s my bother-in-law. Boy, did you get him.” Well, I wasn’t trying to get your brother-in-law. I was trying to get that universal guy. But I have to make him specific as well, or he won’t come to life. And of course, in the plays, other actors use my blueprint to create characters. When I write, I’m attempting to connect the specific dramas that exist in me to a more universal sense of those dramas that we all share.
Most playwrights become known in the first place because they manage to hit a major chord and everybody responds to it. And then they often go into their mannered period, when they’re more interested in experiences that are very specific to them. And sometimes they leave everybody else behind. Tennessee Williams wrote the most amazing dramas, and then moved on to work that almost nobody could follow and I don’t even know if it’s coherent. The experiences must have meant something to him, though, or he wouldn’t have written about them. But when he was writing about Brick and Cat and when he was writing about Big Daddy, the audience got it instantly. Everybody has a Big Daddy in their life. Everybody knows what Brick feels like.
On performance and doing ‘big’:
“Griller” is deliberately set outdoors; the characters hang around at a backyard barbecue. In “Talk Radio” I speak to the audience and use the audience as a kind of witness to my performance on the radio. It’s as if they’re in the booth watching me. In “subUrbia,” the characters are out in the 7-Eleven parking lot. These settings tell actors that they have to project. That really changes the way actors will present themselves in the stage space and to the audience.
Brecht said that theatre should be like circus or like a prize fight, and the audience should be able to kick back and smoke cigars and watch people perform in a certain space. I think that’s extreme and it’s interesting. The funny thing is that Brecht never went that far himself. But you can try for that.
...Film actors have taught themselves to speak (his voice drops, not to a whisper, but to a speaking voice I can barely make out across a kitchen table) in very low voices because it’s very sexy if you keep your voice low and gravelly. (back to full voice) And that is all about internal, it’s all about creating veracity, and it has nothing to do with what I’m interested in in the theatre. I’m in love with Frank Langella and Willem Dafoe and guys who come out and blast off when they’re on stage. They’re energized by the people in the audience and they want to do ‘big’ and they want the people in the last row...which is where I sat when I saw Frank Langella do “Dracula” and I was knocked out of my seat. I was in the last row of the balcony and I was pulled into his thing. To me that’s incredible magic.
On writing dialogue and letting the characters lead him to the play:
In the case of “Griller,” I will say to myself, “This character and this character haven’t said anything to each other in the whole play. What would happen if they had a conversation?”. I don’t know where this is going to go in the play. I have no idea if it’s related to the plot. I write it out and I can hear the characters talking. Sometimes I’m thinking about somebody I know, but, again, I know them the way they exist in my head. There might be somebody that I knew thirty years ago, and I think about this person all the time and, like a stone that’s being smoothed in a riverbed, that character has now achieved some kind of icon status in my head. I think I know everything about that guy. When I write for him I can hear him talking... But I never try to get every characteristic in there. I’m not trying to make something endlessly complex. I’m trying to make something that’s potent. I use the parts that keep the character very active.
When you put two characters together that create some kind of chemistry between them, that’s what we’re interested in watching on stage. That’s when a dramatic event occurs -- when one character and another character are in each other’s presence and their relationship is changing due to the chemistry between them. And that -- subtext -- is what an audience finds they cannot stop watching. At least for me. I want to get a lot of energy going between characters.
On plot, themes, and writing questions:
You can sort of know where you’re headed... you can think you know...but I let the piece tell me where it’s going. The most interesting things will get told to me through the dialogue. I let it flow, and I don’t know where it’s going. Sometimes characters say things to each other and in that one moment of exchange suddenly out pops a big truth about them and their relationships to the other characters.
When I start writing, I’m not always aware of the deepest themes. While I work, I learn what I’m really thinking about right now. The greatest challenge is to not write what I think audiences want me to write, or what I think I’m supposed to write, but to write something that is on the edge of my consciousness -- something that I need to figure out about what is going on with me right now. In other words, I’m not trying to write answers, I’m trying to write questions. And they have to be important to me, extremely important; they have to be questions I really care about.
On getting action:
I live by a very, very simple idea in the theatre which I learned from Richard Foreman. I make the theatre that I want to see. If I walk into a theatre and I sit down in one of the seats, would I want to stay in that seat until the performance is over or would I walk out? At the end of the day I want to create an excuse for getting actors on a stage, acting their asses off with a lot of dynamic energy, holding the audience, and keeping them interested.
On “Griller” and how his characters struggle to live by what they believe, what they think they believe, or what they’ve been convinced they believe:
The characters in “Griller,” like a lot of my characters, are searching for the right way to live. In the long run, there’s often no simple moral choice, no clear “right way”.
I think some people talk a lot and in the meantime they behave any number of ways. I’m of a generation that did a huge amount of banner waving in the ‘60s and early ‘70s -- banner waving about ideologies that I don’t see reflected in the way people behave today. I’m of a generation, and of course this is what “Griller” is about, ‘the Gussie generation’...I’m not fifty, but I’m certainly evaluating what I’ve done with my life. I’m watching my kids grow and so forth. Gussie is a child of the sixties. Gussie’s from a time when, for instance, it was seen as incredibly uncool to drive Cadillacs because they were gas-guzzling, ecologically horrible things. You should drive a little Volkswagen -- it’s cheap and cheaply uses gas, etcetera. Great. So why do so many of us today have big SUV’s and Land Cruisers and Land Rovers and all that junk? There’s no logic to it. If you really believed something twenty-five or thirty years ago, where’s that belief?
Materialism was seen as a completely bad thing by my generation. You know, we all had torn jeans and we didn’t want to make any money and we were doing our own thing. And then over time, that changed. I’m not saying either way is right or wrong. What I am interested in is THE FACT THAT IT CHANGED. And I’m not saying I even know why. I’m just saying, isn’t it interesting that people can so strongly believe one thing and thirty years later believe a completely different thing?
Or maybe people are doing something else entirely, which is what I think is happening with Gussie. Maybe they’re CLAIMING that they still believe what they believed thirty years ago, while they’re LIVING something very different. That’s interesting. It’s even more interesting in the context of children. The children of the ‘60s looked at the children of the ‘20s and ‘30s and said, “You’re hypocrites. You’re bad people and you made big mistakes and you’re ruining the world. We’re going to come along, and we’re going to do Woodstock, and we’re going to make it all different. We’re going to create a world that’s full of peace and harmony. And it’ll be efficient and make careful use of energy resources. We’ll do all these good things, and we’re not going to do what you did.” But now, here we are thirty years down the line and we’re doing everything the same way our parents did. And we have children and they’re looking at us and they’re saying, “You’re hypocrites. You’re bad people.” And we say, “No, we’re not bad people. Because we had good intentions.” And it’s gotten pretty complicated.
As I move into my late 40’s and into my 50’s, it occurs to me that maybe all this talking and thinking was just a function of where I was at during any particular time in my life. That when I’m in my 20’s I’m gonna feel rebellious; and when I’m in my 30’s I’m gonna feel like buckling down; and when I’m in my 40’s I’m gonna feel like slowing down, and by the time I’m 70 I’ll think it was all just a joke anyway and people made too big a deal out of things.
On philosophical swings, ideological extremes, and weathering the latest trend in moral fashion:
Everyone’s thinking naturally changes and hopefully becomes wiser as we live and engage in the world. That’s life. Except that isn’t what people are being told. The American philosophical systems... If you look at all the ways that Americans have tried to organize themselves ideologically and philosophically, it’s never relativistic. Or in any way mature. It’s always absolute. All or nothing. So, in the ‘60s, we were impoverished and hippies and lived in old clothes. And in the ‘80s we were the greediest people we could be and we were going to try to accumulate as much money as we could. These horrible swings all the way from one side to the other are absurd.
Each approach is like some kind of grapefruit diet except it’s a philosophy of life. “I’ve suddenly decided this is what I’m gonna do. This is gonna solve all the problems I have. Now I understand: ‘Men are from Mars. Women are from Venus.’ Well. Now I don’t have to think about men and women anymore, because now I understand. All from that simple metaphor.” Life isn’t simple. You do change. You realize when you have kids that you have to come up with a new set of rules.
Well. Now we’re mired in all this and I’ll never come out with a straight answer. That’s why I make art.
This fall, Eric Bogosian comes to Center Stage to make the theatre that he wants to see.
Patrick Roy, 2006 inductee into the Hockey Hall of Fame