AGENT: And the dining room…
CLIENT: Oh boy.
AGENT: You see how these rooms were designed to catch the early morning light?
CLIENT: I’ll say.
At the end of W. R. Gurney’s The Dining Room, all six actors are on stage, playing the descendants of the original family owning the house. One of 
them, RUTH, goes to the sideboard and picks up a book of matches. She returns to the table to light two candles.
Then she turns and speaks –not to the other family members assembled there but directly to the audience, remembering what used to be and has changed now. It’s a beautiful, moving, elegiac speech.
RUTH: Lately I‘ve been having this recurrent dream. We’re giving this perfect party. We have our dining room back, and Grandmother’s silver, before it was stolen, and Charlie’s mother’s royal blue dinner plates, before the movers dropped them, and even the finger bowls, if I knew where they were. And I’ve invited all our favorite people. Oh, I don’t mean just our friends. I mean everyone we’ve ever known and liked. We’d have the man who fixes our Toyota, and that intelligent young couple who bought the Payton house, and the receptionist at the doctor’s office, and the new teller at the bank. And our children would be invited, too. And they’d all come back from wherever they are. And we’d have two cocktails, and hot hors d’oeuvres, and a first-rate cook in the kitchen, and two maids to serve, and everyone would get along famously.
(The candles are lit by now.)
My husband laughs when I tell him this dream. “Do you realize,” he says, “what a party like that would cost? Do you realize what we’d have to pay these days for a party like that?” Well, I know. I know all that. But sometimes I think it might almost be worth it.
People move again. The men at the table pull out the women’s chairs and they talk animatedly. Everyone has a wonderful time being together again. The Host goes to the sideboard where the maid for the evening, Annie, has left a bottle of wine in a silver bucket. He wraps a linen napkin around it and fills people’s glasses. Conversation waxes and wanes. The lights start to dim. The Host reaches his own seat at the head of the table and pours a glass of wine for himself. He raises his glass for a toast.
It’s valedictory, though he doesn’t know it, a bow to a way of living that no longer survives.
To all of us, he says.
They raise their glasses, drink, lower their glasses. The lights fade to black, only the table left bathed in the light of the two candles. Actors unobtrusively snuff out the candles and the play is over.
***
I started out as a singer, not an actor. But to act in high school, my high school at least, all you needed was the ability to memorize lines, a voice that carried across the stage and over the audience, and no fear of making a fool of yourself. These were qualities I had in surplus. So my junior year, I was on stage in a play for the first time, playing the romantic lead, no less, Jeb, a “feuding’ cousin” in Hillbilly Wedding, by playwright Le Roma Rose. (Could the name possibly have been a pseudonym?) The written-for-high-school production play was a ripoff of the Sadie Hawkins Day story line in Al Capp’s comic strip, Li’l Abner: virile hillbilly lad forced to marry nubile hillbilly lass. At 6′ 3″ and 145 pounds, I don’t know how virile I looked but I was the lad and Nancy Crider the lass. Somewhere, I have a photograph of us on stage. My best friend Irv Hodson was the preacher and want it or not, Jeb was going to get married. I buried that photo for good reason. If I ever find it again, I’ll show it to no one.
My senior year, I was romantic lead again, the young attorney or reporter who with the aid of a hot looking girlfriend solves the case in another made-for-high-school epic. The first two weeks of rehearsal for that play are a haze: I spent more time off stage than on, snuggling in dark corners with my co-star. The third week, she dropped me and I began to pay more attention to my lines but when the play closed a couple of weeks later, there was no agent waiting at the stage door to sign me up for Hollywood.
WHY I WASN’T IDEAL FOR ROMANTIC LEAD: At the Valentine’s Day dance in 1953, with left to right, Carl Husted, my steady, Sandy Kline, Maryann Eichenberg, Judy Stetz and Dave Kratovil. We thought we were so cool!
In college, I sang fairly steadily but didn’t act much, but I did have a couple of bit parts. I played Killian in Weber’s Der Freischutz (The Magic Bullet): eleven lines and a comic aria. And my senior year, I played Dr. Bird, a psychologist called in to testify against Capt. Queeg, in The Caine Mutiny Court Martial. I didn’t cover myself with laurels in either.
Three summers on the Showboat Majestic changed the balance. I was recruited primarily because I sang (quartet, solo, duet, and finale) but I acted almost every night in melodrama or vaudeville or both. I played a villain once, the evil financier Gideon Bloodgood in Dion Boucicault’s 19th-century The Poor of New York. My friend Nancy Bowker said I was the best villain she saw on the Boat. Thanks, Nancy, but I wasn’t.
Here’s the Boat now in June 30, 2019. Linda Price Jardini (Hiram ’60 and Showboat Majestic ’58) took the picture while on a river cruise. The old Majestic, retired for decades, lies tied up in dry dock by the side the Ohio River. The tug that pushed the Majestic was The Attaboy. This one isn’t it. For one thing, I can’t tell if this one uses a paddle wheel to propel itself. For another, there’s no steam calliope on the roof. If you look from the tug to the boat proper, my bedroom (it slept six) was in the back of the main boat, on the second floor. When the calliope played, a hundred feet from my bedroom, it could be heard five miles down the river. Acting crew quarters were on the second floor of the Boat proper. Reynolds, his son Roy, and the cook had teeny bedrooms on the tug, which also housed the galley where meals were prepared and the dining room. (We ate in two shifts.) The ground floor of the Majestic was mostly auditorium and stage. It seated four hundred. Customers entered by way of the front gangway and wesold popcorn and soda on the deck.
We rotated four plays on the Boat. Three were nineteenth-century melodramas —Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Ticket-of-Leave Man, and Ten Nights in a Bar Room. The fourth was an original melodrama by Brad Field, who had been on the Boat a few years before me, entitled Lust, Lucre and Liquor. There were a few signature turns in the plays. In Ten Nights in a Barroom, my friend Bob Shattuck slowly growing drunker and drunker, reaching insane extremes of drunkenness. Friend Rachel Lewis, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, had to ascend to heaven after her demise, as the saintly Little Eva, in a rope harness pulled up by actors off stage. One night, the hoist got stuck halfway up and refused to move any further. Eva was left immobile in mid-air, hands clasped together in prayer, for what seemed minutes but was probably seconds, until the curtains were closed and they got Rachel out of her harness. Acting on the Boat would have been heaven at any age but especially then, when like puppy dogs we were all looking for affection and sociable as hell. By the end of the first summer, my crew mates were my family when we folded back into college life.
***
A year out of college, 1959, I started teaching in my home town, Olmsted Falls. I made money then singing barbershop quartet music in SPEBSQSA Parades (shows) and Afterglows (after the show performances for chapter members and friends). (SPEBSQSA stands for Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barbershop Quartet Singing in America.) My first quartet, the Tune Charmers, made it to the internationals one year and the second, the Post Grads, won the District championship after five weeks of practicing, which was a big deal.That summer, we soloed with the Cleveland Orchestra in a Pops Concert. That was an even bigger deal, the first time a barbershop group had sung with the orchestra, much less been featured. We sang three songs from The Music Man and two from The Most Happy Fella.
(An embarrassing photograph but it shows what we looked like.)
The biggest thing that happened to me teaching was that my second year at the high school, in 1961-62, I took on directing the high school plays. The balance between singing and acting, and now directing, had shifted, though not to the exclusion of any of these activities. When I started directing there, they put on two plays a year, a junior class play and a senior class play, participation restricted to members of the classes. I dumped that, also the two plays a year. We moved to three plays a year open to everyone from ninth grade to twelfth. At least one of the plays each year had to have an out-sized cast so we could recruit new people to acting and back stage work. We formed a Masquers Club and at the end of the year, had a celebratory banquet in the high school cafeteria where we handed out awards for best performances and best backstage support.
I started modestly –with a written-for-high-school adaptation of a popular television series about a teenager whose problems weren’t that different from the ones my students had: Max Shulman’s The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, with six male and twelve female roles to fill. I didn’t stretch much in the next two plays either, Mary Chase’s Harvey and Mrs. McThing. But Chase was a Pulitzer Prize winning playwright and both plays had done well on Broadway. Chase won the Pulitzer Prize for Harvey (1945) and when Mrs. McThing opened at the Belasco in New York in 1952, it ran for 320 performances with Helen Hayes and Brandon De Wilde as its stars.
Harvey, as most people know from the 1945 film starring James Stewart as Elwood P. Dowd, is about a rich man who sees a large white rabbit where nobody else sees anything. Everyone thinks Elwood is drunk or mad but in the end, Harvey is there, a real Harvey, and Harvey saves Elwood. Mrs. McThing is about an old lady who’s a witch, a bunch of thugs with funny names and a kidnapped little boy whom the witch saves and returns to his family after many shenanigans. Both were gentle stories with the kind of roles inexperienced actors could handle and a sweet, lovely take on fantasy that appealed to high school and parent audiences.
Harvey and Elwood Mrs. McThing with the hoods
I’d always liked reading plays. In my college Spanish classes, we’d read scenes from the Golden Age classics: Lope de Vega’s Fuenteovejuna; Tirso de Molina’s El burlador de Sevilla (The Trickster of Seville), the original Don Juan play; Pedro Calderon de la Barca’s La Vida Es Sueno (Life Is a Dream). I’d memorized Segismundo’s main soliloquy in Sueno, the one where he’s back in a cage and realizes what a fool he’d been to accept appearance as reality. But directing for the first time, I read plays and scripts differently, more purposefully, with an eye to staging them. It changed what I saw and thought, opening up the pictorial side of my thinking. Plays are auditory, kinetic and visual. They’re bound by the space they’re performed –whether proscenium arch stage or theater in the round or something between. You dress up actors. You have props and stage sets and ah, great news for me, music! It was then that I started my lifelong fascination with prelude and accompaniment to staged productions, which meant I could meld my fascination with words with my fascination with sound.
I first fiddled around with music for a scene in Harvey where Elwood’s oh so socially conscious older sister is hosting a musical soiree in the parlor of their sumptuous mansion. Elwood wanders in to the house, opens the door and hears the worst, most pretentious singing he’s ever heard. I used Jonathan and Darlene Edwards’s recording of “Autumn in New York” –Jo Stafford singing off key and her husband, band leader Paul Weston massacring the piano.
Mary Chase done with, I upped the stakes, at first a little and then a lot. We did two one-actors, with Jeff Bricmont, one of my star actors, directing the first, the suspense thriller, Sorry, Wrong Number. (It’s a monologue. One of my best actresses, Joyce Trickett, played the role. Two years later, her sister Jan, just as talented, played a key role, the Ant Dictator, in The Insect Comedy). The second was mine: George S. Kaufman’s The Still Alarm. Like most things he wrote, its dialogue was sparkling and the plot elliptic and loony.
By then, I was obsessed with plays. I read them non-stop. That’s been a pattern for me all through my life, from grade school on. I find an author, a topic, a field of knowledge that captures my attention and for a time, who knows how long, I read in it without surcease.
I read many brilliant plays that were no-shows for my half-country half-suburban high school. I didn’t have actors for them nor did I have an audience for them. Thus, as much as I’d love to do Georg Buchner’s Woyzeck (1913) somewhere, I wouldn’t be putting it on at Olmsted Falls High School and I doubted I’d be seeing it a community theater either. No Irish plays, because no matter how good they were, my actors would mangle the accent and language, and flowing graceful exuberant language was central to the playwrights whose works I was devouring –thus no Synge, O’Casey, Behan…
I thought of doing The Importance of Being Earnest but someone had just done it one town over. Ditto Charlie’s Aunt, the other great end-of-century farce. I spent a summer doing carpentry work for a theater one town over and the season was, with one exception, all Kaufman and Hart, so those plays were scratched too. Most Theater of the Absurd stuff was out automatically! It required a knowledge of life my students didn’t have and much was wrenchingly harsh. Pinter? Genet? Adamov? Ghelderode or Jarry? Too hard! They made demands beyond my students’ and audiences’ capacities! The same was true of Eugene O’Neill. The thought of fifteen to eighteen-year-olds pretending their way through that great turmoil was too much to contemplate. No Shakespeare but I’m not sure why. I think I just didn’t look. No Miller or Inge. Definitely no Tennessee Williams, not in my town!
I put on one melodrama, directing and acting in it. (By then, I missed acting.) It was The Poor of New York, with me reprising the villain, Gideon Bloodgood, wearing a black suit, white shirt and black string tie, and a long black cloak with a red satin lining that one of my students sewed up for me. (She reminded me about making it on FaceBook fifty years later.)
I made my jump. I picked a play that no one knew or did any more outside of a few specialty theaters far distant from sleepy little town: the Capek brothers’ Insect Comedy (1921). It had a cast of thirty, 21 men and nine women. I had way more women than men so I changed some of the men’s roles to women’s. The rehearsal schedule was a bear: I had to juggle four groups of students in four distinct acts. (For rehearsal purposes, I treated the prologue and epilogue as one act.)
But everybody rose to the challenge and I liked big casts. They let me recruit new people to acting and backstage work. I made a special effort to recruit cheerleaders and athletes. First, they usually didn’t try out for plays so they didn’t know what they were missing, and second, they were natural social leaders in the high school and their example influenced others to try out with them.
The plot: A tramp, in the final stages of dementia, stumbles on stage, lamenting the course his life has gone, the state of society after the Great War. He falls asleep. Dreams start. First butterflies appear, white dresses for the girls, white trousers, shirts and bowties for the boys. Dialogue and actions are light and airy. The butterflies represent upper class society, frivolous in the face of the dangers of class discontent that lie below them. The Tramp wakes. He engages them in conversation but gives up in disgust: hey don’t have a clue what’s going on beneath and around them. He lies down to sleep again.
The second act: worker insects appear, among them a beetle pushing a huge ball of dung back and forth across the stage –it’s a hoarder, with no vision beyond acquisition. The Tramp gains no more from talking to these insects than the previous ones. They don’t see anything beyond the fronts of their noses. He goes back to sleep and the emergence of his final Dream.
In act three, social insects appear: an army of ants, led by a militaristic ant dictator (played by Jan Trickett) who makes all the decisions for them and incites them to violence against unseen enemies. Unless mankind awakens, they are the future of society.
In the Epilogue: The Tramp wakes, recaps what’s he’s seen and dies. End of the play.
I used organ music for the play, starting with two jig fugues by Bach before the prologue and first act and growing in grandeur, a Bach toccata, for act two. Then I switched to Hindemith organ sonatas before and after act three –Bach-like but much more modern, wrenching, disoriented sounding. Then back to the grand Bach toccata for the final curtain.
From our production
The dung beetle in another production 
Next we did Archibald MacLeish’s J.B. (1958), a re-telling of the Job story. When it opened on Broadway, Raymond Massey and Christopher Plummer played the roles, respectively, of Zuss (Old Testament God) and Nickles (Satan, the Tempter). The play, written in free verse, won MacLeish a Pulitzer. I had twenty-three roles to fill in J.B.: I doubled some but it gave me the chance to let students act who’d never done it before.
Hot off of that, we put on a double bill: Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano and a cut-down version of Moliere’s The Doctor in Spite of Himself. The first was absurdist comedy, the other eighteenth-century classic theater, but as I noted in the program, behind the wild variances in their style and language, the two were virtually the same play; dances with words, farces, and both French, French, French.
The Bald Soprano (above)
The Doctor in Spite of Himself (to the right)
In the summer of 1963, I met Esther. We played the young lovers, Matt and Luisa, in Schmidt and Jones’s The Fantastics, a remake of Ferenc Molnar’s Les Romanesques (1884). After the final rehearsal, we didn’t want to leave when everyone else did so we walked down to the lake, a few hundred feet away. We sat on a big rock jutting out into Lake Erie, looked at the sky –it was jet black but there were stars in it– and talked. Talking led to kissing and we became a thing that night. Every performance for the next three weeks was magical. When Esther moved to New York afterwards, as she’d planned to do for months, I drove her there and every third weekend or so over the next year and a half, I drove between Berea, Ohio, and Manhattan to spend weekends with her. Holidays and summer vacation, if she didn’t visit Ohio, I moved in with her. A year and a half later, on the day after Christmas, 1964, we married. I left Olmsted Falls and Ohio, not to return, except for family visits, for fifty-two years to come.
cast of The Fantastics
Before I left, I did one more play in high school, Giraudoux’s Antigone.
My final year at OFHS, my work assignment included overseeing one study hall. My high school principal, who was a gem, allowed me to run it as a play-reading study hall: on days when tests or papers weren’t coming up, my students read plays together out loud. Anyone could drop out of reading but most didn’t.
***
From the close of 1964 until the fall of 1980, I didn’t act or sing. I still read plays, but not as many. I remember reading Peter Weiss’s The Investigation, a Brechtian dance around the Nurenburg War Criminal Trials. Years later, in 2013 or 2014, I spent a week trying to figure out how I could scale it down to present it as a staged reading but couldn’t figure out how: there were too many characters on stage at one time, it was too complicated and long, and the theme, though critical to history, was probably too far removed in time for my Modesto CA audience, not to mention depressing.
Another play I read was Rolf Hochhuth’s The Deputy (1963), about Pius XII’s indifference toward the fate of Jews in World War II. In 1967, I read Hochhuth’s Soldiers, about Churchill’s supposed complicity in the death of General Sikorsky, head of the Polish government in exile during the War. Both plays generated controversy, mostly over how accurate Hochhuth’s history was. In the spring of 1965, we saw a dynamite production Genet’s The Blacks off-Broadway, a play that had driven me wild when I read it. A week later, we went to a movie theater to watch Peter Brooks’s staging of Weiss’s Marat/Sade and shortly after that, saw Richard Burton in John Gielgud’s Hamlet and the movie of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s staging of Othello, with Olivier as a very weird Moor. Lastly, in that productive spring, we suffered through Albee’s terminally obscure Tiny Alice. Also, there was Shakespeare in the Park.
But though I didn’t stop thinking about plays or reading one now and then, my interests had turned elsewhere for the next sixteen years, as I started graduate school and moved into college teaching.
***
Fast forward to 1980. All during this time, Esther sang and performed and I didn’t. By 1980, though, I was through with my dissertation, god knows it took long enough, ten years, and after teaching for seven years –history- at Wells College in Aurora, NY, I’d left teaching for a small-potatoes jobs director at a fledgeling SUNY (State University of New York) college in Utica, NY. I had started to work my way up the administrative ladder –a year as director, then three as assistant dean, then another as assistant to the vice president for everything, and finally a deanship in 1983. I wasn’t doing research any more, nor did I have to prepare every night for a full day of teaching ahead, though I still taught occasionally at my school and long distance courses for Empire State College. I’d never had as much time on my hands as I had then.
One night, Esther said to me: “They’re putting on Fiorello! at Players Theater. Why don’t we try out?” We did. She got the female lead, Marie, the mayor’s long-suffering secretary who finally gets him to notice and marry her. I played Fiorello’s campaign manager, Morris. We even had a duet together, “Marie’s Law,” Esther leading and me echoing her.
The door to the theater opened again for me.
rehearsing Fiorello!
A year later, I was in BJCB (1982), an original opera by a Koussevitsky fellow who taught musical composition and performance at a local college. It was about the meeting of BB (Buffalo Bill) and JC (you figure that one out) and the settlers’ usurpation of Native American lands in the West. As an experience, it was a mixed bag –good music, badly muddled script, a work in progress. Jeff Linebeck, who played JC (beautiful voice!) and I had to learn a completely new scene, plus song and lyrics, at the dress rehearsal and perform it letter perfect the next night.
Jeff and I kicking up a storm 
Next up for Esther and me was God’s Favorite (1974), Neil Simon’s black comedy on the Book of Job. I played Simon, God’s messenger; Esther played Rose Benjamin, Joe Benjamin’s (Job’s) wife. The play was a mess script-wise but we both had plum parts, which counts for a lot when you’re the actor.
Then Esther did a preview scene from Simon’s The Goodbye Girl (1976) and I took on a good-sized role –Truckle– in Sly Fox (1977), Larry Gelbart’s rewrite of Ben Jonson’s vicious comedy about greed and morality, Volpone. Next I played “Larry the Liquidator” in a preview of Other People’s Money (year uncertain, 1980s). We couldn’t get the royalty rights to the play so it never moved to mainstage.
Before Stephen Sondheim, there was a non-musical version of Sweeney Todd (1973), written by Christopher Bond, an English playwright who seems to have specialized in dramatizing penny-dreadfuls. Sondheim adapted the play for a musical, retaining most of the plot and much of the non-music parts of the dialogue. Players put on the non-musical version, and I played Todd, the mad barber who sliced and diced customers in revenge for his forced arrest and transportation and the rape of his wife and abduction of his baby daughter in his absence by a corrupt Judge. The premiere actress in the area, Jane Metzger, played Mrs. Lovett, the pie shop keeper who persuades Todd to give her the dead bodies of the men whose throats he slits so she can mince them and serve them up in her meat pies.
It’s a garish play, but affecting. You think you’re able to keep a critical distance from it but you don’t. Provided the actors take the play seriously, so do you. I’d never been as play as messy as that one was. By the end of a performance, I’d killed eight people and blood ran down my arms and spattered my shirt so badly that it had to be scrubbed and bleached every night. I used up seven or eight blood bulbs a night, holding them close to the victim’s neck with one hand while I slit his throat with an over-sized cut-throat razor in the other. Then I got my own throat slit, down on my knees and weeping because I’d turned over the body of the last person I’d killed and realized it was my wife, whom I’d thought dead for years.
It’s the only play I’ve been in that seriously affected my mood. I had to get away from people to gear myself up before each rehearsal or performance. I listened obsessively to the cast recording of the musical during that run.
Jane as Lovett, me as Todd
More plays. I played Pseudolus, in Sondheim’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966). It was fun but my, was it work! I had eight major songs, seven in the first act, and Sondheim’s music is tricky, lyrics and melodies, plus there were three or four reprises in the second act and I was running on and off stage constantly. I’m 6′ 3″ and not slight but Emily, the girl who played Gymnasia, the courtesan I want to buy from Marcus Lycus, was an inch taller than me, wore heels, and had spiky red hair that stood up several inches above her scalp.
Anna Ascends (1920) was the first play to air on Broadway featuring Arab-Americans. The next year it was translated into Arabic and printed in whole in a New York Arabic-language newspaper and in 1922 it was made into a silent film. The English language script vanished. All copies of the film were lost; a six-minute fragment remains. A Utica school administrator, Lebanese in descent, came across the Arabic version and translated it back into English. His son, Gerard Moses, taught theater in Syracuse and acted with Syracuse Stage. He agreed to direct it at Players. I played Saeed, the Syrian restaurant owner who is ‘godfather’ to Anna Ayoub, the heroine. In typical melodrama fashion, she ends up being wooed by the wealthy, handsome scion of a Scottish-American publishing company. The play was about ethnic melding in the great melting pot of New York, and all of the characters were stereotypes, though Saeed less than the others. Like all melodrama, the characters’ emotions and motives were simple.
Gerard was a wonderful director. He taught us (gently, obliquely) while he directed. He gave us two pieces of advice that stick with me today. First, on a tight stage, don’t be concerned so much with blocking as with making the space your own, the place where your character lives. Sure, avoid upstaging other actors if you can and try to face toward the audience so your voice projects. But naturalness in behavior is your primary concern and not actorly mechanics. Second, the characters in melodrama are always shallow. This is not Shakespeare. Motivation is thin and behavior almost childlike. But these are people, not cartoons, and if you treat them like cartoon characters, your audience will know you’re faking it. You must take your character seriously, no matter how thin his motives may be. Only if you do that, will your audience take him seriously too.
Anna Ascends was presented in the pub at Players, with the audience sitting at tables around the performance space on three sides. It wasn’t an ordinary audience. There are lots of Lebanese in Utica and they descended on the theater not so much to see the play as to confirm their past. Every night, before the audience was admitted into the Pub, I started up a copper pot of Arabic coffee, with spoonfuls of sugar added to it. I’d take out a wooden salad bowl and grind parsley and garlic in it with a wooden pestle. When the audience entered, smells had infused the room! Every time I used an Arabic phrase in that play, someone in the audience would react. “Did he say just khussa?” “Yes he did!” By the time we opened, we not only had a good play with a tight ensemble, we had created magic for an audience.
Here’s what khussa looks like. 
in 1982-3 (’83-4?), Esther and I formed a musical cabaret group, Just Friends, with another couple and a pianist, and we put on a feature show at the Stanley Theater, the local Big Box stage.
Here we are below, rehearsing.
Esther played the lead in Maltby and Shire’s Baby, and I had a small part.
She played the witch, Mrs. Seuss, in the children’s play Old Kieg of Malfi and Mrs. Belotti in an Equity production of The Hot l Baltimore at Hamilton College.
Esther enters on roller skates, Old Kieg of Malfi
Mrs. Belotti, The Hot l Baltimore
When I played Publisher Webb in Our Town, I found how hard it was to pantomime pushing a hand mower without a real mower in front of me to resist pushing. Then, I was in another home grown play, Holy Smoke, playing a double role, a messenger, who sounded like Arnold Stang, and the Devil, who was straight up Jackie Mason. Smoke was confused and not very funny, supposedly a play about Catholic guilt. My last play in Utica, before we moved to California in 1992, was W. R. Gurnie’s The Dining Room, about the decline and disappearance of the upper middle class WASP ideal life.
***
Between 1994 and 2001, I performed in several plays at my university, CSU Stanislaus in Turlock, California. The best was the first: Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, in which I played Hamm’s decrepit old father, Nagg, who lives in a barrel beside another barrel that has his equally bedraggled wife in it. Saying Nagg’s lines night after night in rehearsal and then performance confirmed what I felt reading Beckett. He was a genius with words. I’ve had this experience four times while reading a play, the feeling I’m reading something beyond dialogue, an alternate gateway to poetry. I felt it acting in Shakespeare’s The Tempest and King Lear, Beckett’s Endgame and Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. These three authors were more than playwrights. They were word wizards who composed dialogue that read as much like poetry as it did like prose.
Next after Endgame was a feminist adaptation of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter in which I played Chillingworth, the avenger. Then I was Peachum, “King of the Thieves,” in Brecht and Weill’s The Three-Penny Opera, and the drunken Shakespearean actor, Selsden, in Noises Off, a classic farce.
During this time, Esther kept singing, but irregularly, and she didn’t act any more at all. Her best stint was with a guitarist, Carmen Caramonica, in Utica just before we left. Our first spring in California, she took a course in jazz singing class at Modesto Junior College, and performed in concert, singing “Don’t Fence Me” and wearing a flowered dress and red leather cowboy boots. (She wore the same boots and dress when we went to New Haven that spring to celebrate Jeremy’s Class Day with him.)
In 1994-5, she went to New York to study cabaret singing for a year at the Singer’s Forum. She closed the year with a one-woman show, Love’s Situations, presented in Andy’s Place, the school’s performance space.
Back in California that summer, she soloed with the Stanislaus Symphony Orchestra at the Labor Day concert, two to three thousand people sitting in the open, listening to songs from West Side Story and The Phantom of the Opera. She didn’t perform after that. That was a loss! She had a great talent.
***
Off to Dubai, 2001-4. No theater. Back again, 2004. I returned to acting, 2006, with Visiting Mr. Green. An okay play, but a great part.
Mr Green, in Visiting Mr Green
Candy followed in Of Mice and Men. 
Then Yvan in “Art.” 
Then, 71 years old, my first Shakespeare: Prospero in The Tempest. 
Lend Me a Tenor. 
Bach at Leipzig
Isaac Newton in Durrenmatt’s The Physicists. Itamar Moses’s Bach at Leipzig. The Cardinal Inquisitor in Brecht’s Life of Galileo. 
Twelve Angry Men. Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. King Lear.
I was recruited to play Lear nine months before rehearsals started. I read the play over and over beforehand, even paid Jack Souza, the best director in the Central Valley, to coach me for eight sessions. I read whatever I could find on the play. Best was Oliver Ford Davies’s Playing Lear (2003).
Then I played it. I was uneasy in one scene, the heath scene –Lear’s first mad breakout, Nature echoing his turmoil. I didn’t like the way it was staged and never settled into it. (I had proposed bringing in two actors, dressed to vanish into the background and equipped with cloth whips, with which they would lash me as my as anguish and madness grew. They wouldn’t be real people but Lear’s imaginings in the deepest depth of his madness. I knew it would break the realism of the play but it was the first time Lear was truly mad and it would have given me something concrete to react against, not occasional lightning and thunder crashes off in the background).
But for the rest of the play, I was spot on, maybe at 90%-95% efficiency. Photos of me as Lear, like the one below, have a quality halfway between Caravaggio and Rembrandt. They are affecting.
I’ve been fortunate in the roles I’ve played and I’ve done well enough in most of them, but I’ve never had an experience like playing Lear.
A side point: Lear is hard to play because for the most part, Shakespeare eschewed his usual actors’ aids in the play. The language, though rich, is blunt and harsh. There are precious few versified passages for Lear to speak. (Verse eases memorization of lines.) It’s blunt talking instead. Then there are Lear’s different sides: he’s imperious, then angry, then fuming, then losing it, all out mad and back again, then there’s the epiphany of realizing that all he thought he was getting back with Cordelia is finally lost forever, and this knowledge kills him. Even writing about it stirs me up!
More roles. The mayor in Hecht and MacArthur’s The Front Page (1928). The soothsayer and Cassius’s associate in Julius Caesar. My final role before leaving California in 2016: Matthew Brady, the William Jennings Bryan stand-in, in Inherit the Wind, which is loosely about the Scopes “Monkey” Trial. That was a great one too!
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Jim Johnston and I, Inherit the Wind
Five of these plays I’ve done for Heike Hambley: The Tempest, King Lear, The Physicists, Bach at Leipzig, Inherit the Wind. For Jack Souza, I’ve done Galileo, The Front Page and Julius Caesar. Also, he supported my work on Readers’ Theater and acted in one of the readings. I did Endgame, The Threepenny Opera and The Dining Room for Jere O’Donnell, The Scarlet Letter for Patty O’Donnell and Noises Off and Lend Me a Tenor for John Mayer, all at CSU Stanislaus. Thank you all!
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Acting obviously involves reading. And thinking. But for reading and thinking about plays, the seminal experience for me was Readers’ Theater. for three and a half years, 2013-2016, I ran the newly created Readers’ Theater program at the Prospect Theater (“the little theater with an edge”) in Modesto CA, where we lived. During that time, I casted and directed twelve staged readings and what had been an occasional enterprise became a seasonal offering with four plays a year, food and drink provided, and a talk-back session with actors and director after the reading had ended. Each reading had to be staged and lit effectively and for each, I selected the sound track and wrote the program.
The actors sat on stools on the main stage with music stands and open scripts in front of them. They dressed alike, black and white, and for the most part, talked directly to the audience rather than to each other, as though in cones of speech, even when in dialogue.
The music wove in and out of the dialogue. It made the transitions from scene to scene and bolstered mood. Thus for one of my two adaptations, archie and mehitabel, which is about a vers libre poet reincarnated as a cockroach for his sins (writing free verse), and his alleycat friend Mehitabel, who swears she was Cleopatra in an earlier life but doesn’t act like it, I used Jazz Age music, starting with Joe Venuti and Eddie Lang and ending with Slam Stewart and Tiny Grimes’s “Flat Foot Floogie (With a Floy Floy).” For Mamet’s Anarchist, one of whose two characters is a 70s radical, it was electric rock, The Cream dominating. Letters came with a full portfolio of songs, from Gyorgi Ligeti to “Stars and Stripes Forever,” played full bore ahead. And for Gruesome Playground Injuries, I drew on the solo recordings of saxophone virtuoso John Surman, strange affecting pieces that evoke memories of you’re not sure of what.
Here are the plays we did. I’ve put an asterisk in front of ones in which I also read a part.
*Caryl Churchill: A Number / David Harrower: Blackbird / David Hare: The Vertical Hour / *don marquis: the lives and times of archie and mehitabel (adapted for stage by me) / *Alan Bennett: the Woman in the Van / Arthur Miller: The Price / *David Mamet: The Duck Variations / *Letters (adapted by me from a collection of letters) / David Mamet: The Anarchist / Rajiv Joseph: Gruesome Playground Injuries / Sharr White: The Other Place / Joan Didion: The Year of Living Magically
During that span, I directed two plays on the main stage too, one (a reprise of The Vertical Hour) well enough, the other (Richard Greenberg’s Three Days of Rain) no more than adequately. Both were well received –they were good plays with very strong casts and stage sets– but interestingly enough the one I did less well on as director, Rain, was the one that garnered the most attention.
I learned something during that span. I’m good at staging play readings, less so on main stage presentations. It’s because I think of plays in my head editorially first, and only secondarily as configurations in space, and even within the configurations, I prefer static forms to flowing. It’s like I conceive of a play as a picture or a Venn diagram, not a movie.
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Another thing the Prospect Theater did for me? I read new playwrights, not just for my own readings but plays I had seen on its stage and more plays by the same playwrights. Two examples: Before going to see Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, I read it again, along with another of Frayn’s historical plays. Second, after seeing Brian Friel’s Molly Sweeney ( inspired by an essay by neurologist poet Oliver Sacks), I read more of Friel’s amazing plays, including The Faith Healer, which I saw twice in different productions, though with two of the same actors.
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July 9-10, 2019. I’m reading two new plays now, Annie Baker’s The Antipodes and Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins’s The Octoroon. The Octoroon was rewritten completely from Dion Boucicault’s 19th-century melodrama of mixed marriage. Baker and Jacob-Jenkins are both Pulitzer Prize winners and Baker won a MacArthur Foundation Genius Award. I’ve read all of Baker’s published works except John, which I saw performed this season. Baker is a master of gesture, silence and American colloquial: she comes across at times like an odd blending of David Mamet (dialogue) and Pinter (mood and silence intimating things). I’m also planning to re-read Richard Nelson’s four Apple family plays, set in up-Hudson New York from 2010 to 2013, and tying together of-the-day politics and family affairs. The plays were written for a resident company as the events detailed in the plays unfurled in the media.
The Antipodes An Octoroon Nelson: That Hopey Chancey Thing
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Another book that I found helpful in thinking –about performing mainly but also about staging plays– was Steven Berkoff’s Meditations on Metamorphosis (1995). Berkoff is a brilliant actor in the Artaud-Living Theater line of playing and a somewhat impenetrable playwright but this account of rehearsals in Tokyo in 1992 for his adaptation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis is not only good reading, but good instruction. The problem for an actor –at least for me– is usually the body. Mind conforms to a new persona easier than limbs, so that whatever movement the limbs and torso make seems inherently awkward, embarrassing. When I’m on stage, I realize I’m standing and moving in front of an audience and find it harder to move naturally.
When I sang on the Showboat, I used to have a wire backed chair placed on stage with me. After I had stood in the middle of the stage singing long enough, I’d nonchalantly put my hand on the chair back, maybe turn the chair around and sit straddling it. If I did it right, I could move through three or four positions in the course of the song. But what to do for the next song?! I’ve gotten better with my body over time but reading about body movement intrigues me.
(I remember the time Esther and I and friends Sherm and Jan Cochran went to see Julian and Judith Malina Beck’s Living Theater in its production of Paradise Now, a free form, wholly improvised night of theatrics. At one point, actors came into the audience –not for the first time– and drew us out to go with them up on stage. Esther and I went, me eager, her less so. They wanted us to pile on top of other audience members in a huge heap in the middle of the stage. Esther wouldn’t do it because she was wearing a miniskirt and was afraid she’d expose herself in front of all the people who’d stayed in the audience and were now staring at us. That’s what they wanted us to realize, I thought, how we’re bound by the knowledge of others watching and judging and how much we want to look right in other people’s eyes.)
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