Drama: An Actor's Education

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For reasons that will shortly be revealed, the two seasons of the Akron Shakespeare Festival were presented in two completely different settings. The first was the terrace of Stan Hywet Hall, with the rear facade of the Tudor manor house providing a backdrop. For the festival’s inaugural season, my father chose a repertory of four plays that echoed the start of his triumphant Antioch run. These were the first four history plays from Shakespeare’s retelling of the War of the Roses—Richard II; Henry IV, parts 1 and 2; and Henry V. In keeping with his trademark style, the plays were staged simply, on a symmetrical arrangement of bare platforms, and performed by a small troupe of accomplished young actors imported from New York. But though the productions were straightforward and unadorned, the setting made them glorious. It is hard to imagine a more appropriate and more beautiful spot in America for this most English of historical pageants. The leaded-glass windows glinted behind Falstaff in his scenes inside the Boar’s Head Tavern; Richard II cried out in defeat, “Down, down I come!” from a crenellated parapet high above the audience; and when Henry V declaimed “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more!” the looming, starlit manor house stood in for Harfleur Castle.

Initially, I just hung around rehearsals, much as I had done years before during those happy summers in Yellow Springs. But by now I was a gangly fourteen-year-old. I had arrived at the age when, to the forgiving eyes of an audience, I could pass for an adult. By the time the company began rehearsing the two parts of Henry IV, the play’s big battle scenes forced the director, Edward Payson Call, to look for spear carriers anywhere he could find them. Inevitably, I was conscripted, and soon I was rehearsing five or six scenes in each of the last three plays. My first assignment was the only part I was remotely right for: I was one of Falstaff’s wretched platoon of army recruits, old men and young boys whom Falstaff dismisses as “food for powder.” I had a comic crossover with four other raggd peasants. For a weapon, I carried a rake.

But the summer wore on and I was quickly promoted through the ranks. The fight choreography grew more elaborate. I became more confident and histrionic. I dashed around with pennants and banners, swords and pikes. I yelled battle cries in English and French. I stoutly fought for the Yorks and the Lancasters, for the English and the French, killing and being killed with near-operatic flourish.

And when Henry V rolled around, something wonderful happened. In a reprise of my “Mustardseed” moment from seven years before, I was given an actual role. I was cast as “A French Messenger.” It was the smallest speaking role in the play, but a speaking role nonetheless. I had a single line. It was my job to walk into the French king’s court and announce the arrival of Exeter, an envoy from England. For a week, I dutifully rehearsed with the full company. I ran my single line about a thousand times. On the night of the first performance, I waited nervously in the wings, dressed in black tights and a belted white tabard with blue fleurs-de-lys stenciled all over it. Nearby, pacing restlessly in the dark, was Exeter himself. He was played by the young David Carradine (yes, that David Carradine, from Kung Fu). As my cue arrived, I bolted up six stairs onto the stage-left platform and yelled as loud as I could in a piping, barely audible voice:

“Ambassadors from Harry, King of England, do crave admittance to your majesty!”

It was my first line spoken onstage as a grown-up actor.

Although I regarded this as another stunning success, I knew very well that I was on the lowliest rung of the company hierarchy. At the topmost rung was our acknowledged leading player. This was a splendid actor named Donald Moffat. His roles in the four plays included Richard II, the Chorus in Henry V, and a poignant and hilarious Justice Shallow in Henry IV, part 2. Donald was a thirty-year-old Englishman from the West Country, trained at RADA, and transplanted to New York with an actress wife, a gamine four-year-old daughter, and a baby boy. In the years following that summer, he grew to be a major actor in New York theater and a familiar face on screen (he played LBJ in the film of The Right Stuff). Nowadays he has slipped gracefully into retirement, embracing an old actor’s obscurity with dignity and contentment.

In those days, Donald was a striking young man, a British edition of the young Max von Sydow. He had a rangy frame, a long face, penetrating eyes, and a soft voice. In a company of actors who relied on high energy and bluff athleticism, he was the quiet center of the storm, commanding the stage with poetic simplicity. He was quick-witted and intelligent, a man of uncompromising taste, with a warm smile and a stealthy sense of humor. Best of all, he was reflexively curious about all sorts of people and things outside the insular world of theater. From the moment we met, he took a bemused interest in me, especially in my precocious commitment to art. Such an interest was enormously flattering to a fourteen-year-old. I instantly put him on a pedestal and secretly made him my mentor. In the next few years, theater gradually seduced me away from art. I suspect this would never have happened if my father had never hired Donald Moffat.

For all its glories, the Shakespeare Festival’s tenure at Stan Hywet was a flash in the pan. Following a familiar pattern, my father found himself on unsteady ground as the executive director of Stan Hywet Hall. After the close of the festival season, he soon learned that not everybody was pleased with its success. It became clear that half the members of the board of directors had vastly different priorities for Stan Hywet than my father did. These men and women were pillars of wealthy Akron society. They did not see Stan Hywet as a center for arts and culture. In their eyes it was a historic landmark, a museum, a garden center, a symbol of Akron’s lost splendors, and a shrine to F. A. Seiberling. An outdoor Shakespeare festival, no matter how successful, had no place in their grand design. Massive lighting towers on the back terrace? Wooden risers and hundreds of folding chairs atop the reflecting pool? Sweaty, scrofulous young men in nothing but shorts and sandals, rehearsing noisy outdoor battle scenes or dashing through tapestried halls as they rushed to make an entrance? Cast parties on opening nights, with the campy squeals of happy, drunken New York actors, floating through the summer air? This would not do.

But my father pressed on. Either through defiance or denial, he began planning for a second summer of Shakespeare, giving only a nod to the everyday business of Stan Hywet Hall. Manned by its legions of volunteer ladies, Stan Hywet hummed along on autopilot. There were flower shows, salon concerts, a Christmas pageant, and a Festival of Tudor Sports. But Dad showed only a halfhearted interest. His passions lay elsewhere. He was intent on expanding the scope of his festival. Unbeknownst to him (or perhaps not), a quiet conspiracy was under way to prevent him from ever doing so.

And so it was that on a Sunday in April the following spring, Stan Hywet’s board of directors met to decide whether to cancel the second season of the festival and, more ominously, whether to remove my father from his position. Once again, our fate hung in the balance. I was fifteen now, but apparently just as thick-headed as ever: like all those other times, my father’s professional jeopardy took me completely by surprise. Adding to the drama of the moment was the fact that the fateful board meeting was held in a large common room in the carriage house, just beneath our living room floor. The whole family, including my father, sat around waiting while our future was being hotly debated down below. Dad had his ardent supporters, of course, so passions ran high on both sides. We could hear shouting under the floorboards. But a strange gallows humor prevailed, and all of us were manically upbeat. All of us, that is, except my five-year-old sister, Sarah Jane, who sat in a corner by herself, in uncharacteristic silence.

My folks had a peppy, exuberant friend on the board, a lawyer named Ralph Felver. Ralph was a forceful advocate of my father’s cause. Several times during the meeting, he sprinted upstairs to give us reports from the front. Late in the afternoon he burst in and shouted, “They killed the festival! Now they’re goin’ after the kid!” He turned and ran back downstairs, in a last-ditch attempt to save my father’s job. At that point, Sarah Jane stood, walked over to my father and asked in a quavering voice, “Daddy, what kid does he mean?”

Dad was fired that day. Our days at Stan Hywet Hall were numbered. And I was left with an abiding, lifelong suspicion of small-bore civic boosters, genteel pseudo-aristocrats, conniving garden club mavens, and Ohio Republicans. For a few more months, Dad stayed on at Stan Hywet as a lame duck, but I can’t imagine that he gave the place much attention. Apart from his understandable bitterness, he had something far more pressing on his mind. In an eerie echo of the Toledo episode, he had passed the point of no return in planning the upcoming summer festival. Once again, actors had been hired, contracts had been signed, and obligations had to be met. He had to put on another season of the Akron Shakespeare Festival. He was legally bound. And anyway, what the hell else was he going to do? The question was where.