Drama: An Actor's Education

[6] The Beefeater

A fleeting memory of my father has always stuck in my mind. It was a memory from when I was seven. On a hot afternoon in Yellow Springs in the days of his Antioch festival, Dad was directing a rehearsal for The Taming of the Shrew. This was a tall order, considering that he was also playing the leading male role of Petruchio. (Opposite him in that production was Nancy Marchand in the role of Katharina. Years later she would grab a lot more attention for playing Tony Soprano’s diabolical mother Livia on HBO.) On the day of that long-ago rehearsal, my mother had packed a brown-bag lunch for my dad and had asked me to deliver it to him. Choosing my moment, I climbed up onto the stage and handed the bag to him. He took it from my hands without looking at me, removed a sandwich, unwrapped it, and bit into it, without taking his attention off of the rehearsal for even an instant. Looking up at him, I was filled with awe, admiration, and unease. There was something unsettling about his intensity. My father was not unloving, he was never harsh or cruel, he never punished me for anything (even when I most certainly deserved it). But he shared with every artist a forbidding fixity: when he focused on the work at hand, he was strangely absent.

I saw that same look on his face about a week after the Stan Hywet board of directors had fired him. He had been driving around Akron, scouting out a venue for his suddenly unmoored summer festival. I was along for the ride. Dad pulled the Studebaker into the parking lot of Perkins Park, a neglected, uninviting patch of city-owned ground. We got out of the car to explore the three or four acres of weedy parkland. Trash was everywhere. The air was full of the shouts of city kids and the barking of stray dogs. The place couldn’t have been more different from the serene back terrace of Stan Hywet Hall.

Something caught Dad’s attention. His whole nervous system seemed to quicken, like a dog catching a scent. Looking down a hillside at an open grove surrounded by dusty trees, he suddenly pictured a stage, with rows and rows of chairs set up in front of it. He pictured scaffolding with stage lights mounted on top. He pictured a lighting booth, a box office, and a concession stand. He swiveled around and calculated the number of parking spaces. In an animated stream of consciousness, he described out loud every detail of an imaginary outdoor playhouse. One week before, this man had suffered a terrible personal and professional setback, but now his mood was buoyant, almost giddy. His ardent expression was the same one I recognized from that Shrew rehearsal, all those years before. And just as I had back then, I felt oddly excluded from his flight of fancy. But this time, I was feeling something else, too. Looking down at the ugly expanse of Perkins Park, I knew that a Shakespeare festival would never be held there. I was asking myself, “Is my father completely out of his mind?”

Well, not quite. The second season of the Akron Shakespeare Festival did not take place in Perkins Park, but it did take place. My father found a venue only slightly less unlikely. This was the Ohio Theatre in Cuyahoga Falls, a derelict, run-down, four-hundred-seat theater perched on the edge of a gorge, across the Cuyahoga River from Akron proper. In its day, the Ohio had been a vaudeville house, a movie theater, and, most recently, a tabernacle for the Akron evangelist Rex Humbard. On the back wall, six feet above the stage, was a long-obsolete cement baptismal font. This dismal old building became the site of yet another of my father’s quixotic exploits. He set to work fitting out the Ohio Theatre for Shakespeare, creating something from nothing on the scrubby banks of the Cuyahoga. Time was short and the task was enormous, but this only seemed to heighten his energy and sharpen his focus. He tackled the project with the missionary zeal of Rex Humbard himself. Shakespeare provided his text, and he would quote it with twinkling eyes and an impish smile: “Sweet are the uses of adversity.”

Dad brought in an old friend, a man named Clyde Blakeley, to mastermind the rapid renovation of the Ohio. Wiry and bespectacled, Clyde might have stepped out of the pages of Where’s Waldo? In a couple of my father’s other ventures, he had proven himself a miracle worker in the area of theatrical barn- raising. Clyde was a theater professor at the nearby Lake Erie College for Women, and he brought with him four of his best students to form the core of his technical support staff. To this tiny platoon of youthful theater rats, my big sister and I were willing recruits. Robin even dragooned a couple of her Buchtel girlfriends. This gave us a backstage crew of eight. At fifteen, I was the youngest, two years younger than the next oldest, and the only boy.

As the days passed, ticking down to the opening of the summer season, I worked fifteen-hour days with this hardy band of young Amazons, performing every conceivable task. We painted the walls of the auditorium, perched on teetering scaffolds. We poured concrete for the stage floor. We stitched and stenciled a curtain to hang below the balcony of the unit set. We repaired dozens of battered, borrowed stage lights and outfitted them with colored gels. We hauled in and wired up two massive dimmer boards. We installed makeup tables, lights, and mirrors for the improvised dressing rooms. We mopped, we swept, we scrubbed. We even spent an entire day digging up a broken drainpipe and laying a new one for the one and only backstage sink. When water rattled down the drain and gushed through the new pipe, we cheered like a conquering army.

In the midst of all this feverish activity, the actors arrived from New York and started to rehearse the first play. My father was the director, and, of all things, the play was The Taming of the Shrew. I paid no attention. I was too busy to notice. I wasn’t carrying a spear anymore, nor was I fetching my father’s lunch. I was a working stiff. I had a Social Security number. I was paid by check. I got seventy dollars a week, less deductions. I adored everyone around me. Among my sister’s pals, I even had a crush. In secret, stolen moments, I was regularly reaching first base with her. I was in heaven.

Starting over from scratch, the festival was under extra pressure to bring in the crowds. Hence, Dad had chosen a slate of four Shakespearean warhorses. After Shrew came Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Macbeth. By August, all four were running in repertory. The productions were a little shoddy, but they were acted with the clarity and brio of my dad’s best work. The quality of the acting company was very high. It was full of holdovers from the preceding summer, including my idol Donald Moffat in the roles of Gremio, Malvolio, and Macbeth. Amazingly, when the doors were flung open and performances commenced, audiences showed up. They kept coming all summer, though not exactly in droves. But if sellouts were a rarity, the very fact that the festival had happened at all was success enough for all of us.

I spent that whole summer backstage. I was in the cramped, sweltering lighting booth at every performance, operating the stage lights from one of the ancient dimmer boards. Mine held about twenty dimmers, each a disk of metal and cracked porcelain, a foot in diameter, operated independently of all the others by a ten- inch handle. On any given light cue, I would crank as many as eight of the dimmers at once, twisting myself into elaborate contortions and using three of my four limbs. The dimmers would sizzle and spark, spitting at me like so many angry cats, burning my forearms and zapping me with vicious bolts of electricity. And through all of this, I would hear familiar strains of Shakespearean verse, wafting toward me from the stage through the stultifying air.

One night in late summer, Arthur Lithgow pulled off an outrageous onstage stunt. Over the years, this stunt took on the shimmering aura of legend for everyone who knew him. It was the work of a mad theatrical alchemist. That night, for two dazzling hours, he summoned up the same cocksure wizardry that had produced the entire summer season. I can think of no better example of his creativity, his charm, and his lunatic optimism.

It happened like this. That summer the leading role of Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew was played by a protean young actor named Kenneth Ruta. When my father had hired him for the season, Ken had specified a single night when he had to be away to attend a wedding. The night was in August, during the time when all four plays were to be performed in rep. Dad had played Petruchio several times before so he scheduled The Taming of the Shrew for that night, intending to replace Ken for one performance only.

But once the season got under way, another problem arose. The actor playing the role of Baptista in The Taming of the Shrew left the company, so my father stepped into his role for the remainder of the season. The night was approaching when Ken Ruta would be absent, and, of course, Dad was scheduled to replace him as well. In the play, Baptista is the crotchety father of Kate the Shrew. Petruchio is her rambunctious suitor. Baptista and Petruchio share several scenes. Clearly another actor had to be found. Everyone wondered who that might be. My father stayed mum.

A couple of days before the crucial night, Dad instructed the prop woman to construct a freestanding coat