Friends for 50 years, Stacy Keach and Harris Yulin bring Jung and Freud to Zoom

Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung had a long, intense relationship, a competitive friendship that was undone by their rivalry. 

So portraying the dynamics between these icons in the field of psychology requires a chemistry, ideally one born of history together. In Jim McGrath’s “Vienna,” the newest entry from Stacy Keach Zoom Theater, Keach, as Jung, reunites with his old friend, Harris Yulin’s Freud, bringing decades of friendship and collaboration to the task. 

Both men made their name on stage, especially in the classics — they’ve each played King Lear and Willy Loman — but have a long and varied career in TV and film, too. Early on, their careers were intertwined.  

They first worked together in 1968 at the Yale Repertory Theater, with Keach in the title role of “Coriolanus” and Yulin playing his rival, Aufidius. 

In 1970, they appeared in their first film together, “End Of The Road,” following that quickly with 1971’s “Doc” — Keach was again in the title role, as Doc Holliday, with Yulin as Wyatt Earp. Two years later, Keach directed Yulin in Arthur Miller’s “Incident at Vichy” for PBS. And the following year, they both appeared in the film “Watched” and at the Mark Taper Forum, where Keach played Hamlet and Yulin took on Claudius. In 1976, they appeared in the James Michener miniseries, “Dynasty.”

While their careers took them in different directions, they maintained a strong friendship, reuniting only once more, at the Goodman Theater in Chicago in Arthur Miller’s final play, “Finishing the Picture” in 2004.

Keach, 80, and Yulin, 84, remain busy as actors but as they recently discussed in a joint video interview, they were thrilled to finally get the chance to work together again. The free show debuts at www.stacykeachzoomtheater.com on November 28th at 5 p.m. PST, with all donations going to the Actors’ Fund. 

This interview has been condensed for length and clarity.  

Q. How did you first become friends?

Yulin: Stacy was doing “Macbird!” off-Broadway and he came to my apartment to look into subletting it. 

Keach: Your apartment was six flights up. I was so tired just walking it. But we became good friends right away. We bonded over Shakespeare. We were both passionate about actors and art, and we were both athletic.

Yulin: Later, we played football on the beach.

Keach: We also played tennis together and a lot of ping pong. We had great matches, very competitive. We pushed each other to do better. When we were filming “Doc,” we had amazing chess games between takes we became pretty good, and the makeup and prop people would gather around to see what the next move would be. 

Q. How did this friendship help your performances?

Yulin: In “Coriolanus,” we played two opposing warriors who are fierce enemies but at the same time great admirers of each other’s prowess, so our relationship fed into the texture of the performance. 

Keach: It has been like great musicians working together to inspire one another to do better, to be more imaginative.

Q. What else did you bond over in the early days?

Keach: Max Raab, the producer of “End of the Road,” the first movie we did together, introduced us to these Super 8 cameras. We’d shoot little movies and then we’d have screenings at Harris’ apartment. We’d invite our girlfriends and play either Beatles or Randy Newman songs in the background and spread our wings.

Yulin: The films were three or four minutes each. It was a great time. But somebody stole my camera.

Keach: Really? Oh no. I still have the films. And we would often go sailing together. What was the name of our friend Tony’s boat?

Yulin: Pacifica.

Keach: Right. Harris saved our life one day. We were a little tipsy and didn’t realize there were small craft warnings. We were going to sail to Catalina with Tony, my brother James and myself. Out on the ocean, we hit a storm and the waves were unbelievable. I thought we were going to die. But Harris took the tiller and got us back in. It took six hours. 

Q. There were some long gaps between working together but you stayed friends. Did you always think you’d get to work together again?

Yulin: We always talked about it. Recently, we came up with various ideas about what we could do together.

Keach: We talked about playing Brigham Young and Joseph Smith or Lewis and Clark.

Yulin: Or doing “Waiting for Godot.”

Q. What appealed to you about Freud and Jung?

Yulin: They both always fascinated me and their relationship did, too. I played Freud in Christopher Hampton’s play “The Talking Cure” at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. But mostly, it was the prospect of us getting to work together that appealed to me.

Keach: I pitched the idea to Jim McGrath, who wrote my one-man Ernest Hemingway show (“Pamplona”) and he loves Harris’ work, so he immediately said, “I’m in.” He wrote a first draft, then it became us all working together.

Yulin: The process was great fun. We crammed as much research as we could into the time we had. The material felt both familiar and fresh because we were looking at it anew.

Q. How did you balance the history with the need for character and story?

Yulin: We would put details in, then take others out. It was a really good collaboration.

Keach: We went back into the books and reread both Freud and Jung to find details of their lives together and individually. I had feared it would get intellectually boring, but Jim found a way to make it palatable and interesting. We found photos of them hunting, fishing and sunbathing together. I was so happy to be able to use them in the show. It really humanized them. 

Yulin: My fear was that we’d oversimplify and it would not be sufficiently complex, but it has passed muster with the psychiatrists I’ve shown it to.

Q. What were some of the bigger surprises about the two men you found in your research?

Keach: There are revelations. I never knew about Jung’s experience with the older man. 

Yulin: The part about Freud wetting himself. If I’d known about that, I’d forgotten it completely.

Keach: It’s a good thing to forget.

Q. Will you consider taking this from the computer screen into the theater?

Keach: We’ve talked about it. It would be incredible

Yulin: This show could transfer almost as-is onto the stage. And working together again onstage would be the ultimate thing.