Slouched in the front row of the labyrinth Theater Company’s performance space in New York’s West Village last May, Philip Seymour Hoffman was his typical focused, superdisciplined self. In the intimate 90-seat theater, Hoffman – always dressed in one or another of his seemingly interchangeable baggy pants and sweaters – was relentlessly pushing the cast and crew of the play he was directing, A Family for All Occasions, a new work by his friend Bob Glaudini. With his trademark near-religious quest for perfection, Hoffman obsessed over every aspect of the production. “From the napkin holder on the dining room table, every minute detail was debated and thought out,” recalls the company’s managing director, Danny Feldman. “Even after opening night, he said, ‘We’re still working – we’re still in rehearsal.'”
While Hoffman was working, he was always in complete command. “When he walked into a room, he didn’t have to say anything,” says a friend, Donovan Leitch. “He had a Bill Clinton kind of energy.” But away from the show he was quietly losing control. Two days after A Family for All Occasions opened, Hoffman checked himself into rehab after prescription drugs had triggered a relapse of his heroin use. Few if any in the play had known anything was amiss. “Whatever difficulties were going on then were not to be beheld,” recalls Glaudini. “He was present, there, creative. There was no dealing with the wayward artist.” It was the first sign of the private struggle of a man known to his many friends as a performer of ferocious discipline and seemingly limitless talent.
