Drama: An Actor's Education

L’Histoire du Soldat.

• In a Radcliffe College common room, I recited Dylan Thomas’s poetic reminiscence “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.” Beside me, a Radcliffe girl in a black leotard (future actress Lindsay Crouse) did a Jules Feifferesque dance interpretation of the entire piece.

• With a few ringers from the New England Conservatory of Music, I staged Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro in a dorm dining hall (the conductor grew up to be the Pulitzer Prize — winning composer John Adams).

• I played the role of Sparky in Sergeant Musgrave’s Dance by John Arden (the title role was played by a student from Texas, a year younger than I, named Tommy Lee Jones).

• I directed John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera in yet another dining hall (the orchestra’s harpsichord was played by future world-class conductor William Christie, and the cast included a talented, bawdy young actress named Stockard Channing).

• I designed the sets for Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars (though in truth they were the ugliest, most ungainly sets ever seen on the Main Stage of the Loeb Drama Center).

• I designed and directed an elaborate production of Georg Buchner’s Woyzeck at the Loeb. This is a dark, expressionistic German work, seething with hot-blooded sex, sulphurous jealousy, and murderous vengeance. Although I was a senior by this time and twenty-one years old, I didn’t have a clue about even the most basic of these primal human emotions. But more on that particular blind spot later.

MS Thr 546 (71), Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Of the many students swirling around me in those days, several were destined to intersect with my professional life in years to come. One of the actors in that Moliere one-act was a fellow named Tim Hunter. He wasn’t much of an actor, but he later became a notable filmmaker and directed me in an episode of the TV drama Dexter. The stage manager of every show I directed was a peppy, tart New Yorker named Victoria Traube. Still one of my best friends, she is a longtime executive of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization and an indispensable fixture of the New York theater scene. In my senior year, an eager freshman named Tom Werner arrived on the scene. Although I never knew him at Harvard, years later he too became a good friend. He also became my boss. His company Carsey-Werner produced the six seasons of 3rd Rock from the Sun for NBC-TV. Also showing up that year was a young would-be journalist who immediately started writing for The Harvard Crimson. Before long his gimlet eye would be sizing up my performances on Broadway in his role as drama critic for the New York Times. His name was Frank Rich.

But all of these estimable figures in the cultural landscape of the future were happy amateurs like me in those days, with unformed notions of what was to come. We were all fiercely ambitious without being entirely sure what the object of that ambition was. For the moment, we were grabbing at everything Harvard had to offer, unguided missiles trying on different versions of ourselves in an effort to figure out who the hell we really were. True, I was wide open to periodic spasms of insecurity and self-doubt all through those years. But those moments were rare and fleeting. Mostly I was having a wonderful time.

Years later I had a rare opportunity to vicariously recapture the excitement of all that extracurricular activity. In the twenty years after I graduated from Harvard, I had little to do with the place. I rarely even told people that I had gone there. When you are struggling to establish yourself as a working actor — trying out for a soap opera, for example, or for a laxative commercial — you tend to keep a Harvard degree to yourself. But in my forties, in the midst of a thriving acting career, I finally restored the Harvard connection. I was elected to a six-year tenure on Harvard’s Board of Overseers, a thirty-person governing board chosen by the alumni. As the first candidate from the creative arts since Robert Frost in the 1930s, I was a shoo-in. I even outpolled Bishop Desmond Tutu. From 1989 to 1995, I attended seven Cambridge meetings a year, in the company of bankers, lawyers, corporate magnates, college presidents, and senators (among them Tommy Lee Jones’s old roommate, Al Gore). For the first three years of my service I was an empty suit, wondering what in the world I was doing in the company of such movers and shakers.

But then I began to make my presence felt. I embraced my role as “the overseer from the arts.” I launched an initiative on behalf of Harvard undergraduates that, since then, has evolved into an essential Harvard institution. It is called Arts First. It was the best example in my life of the power of a simple idea. Arts First is an annual festival of undergraduate arts, held on the first weekend of every May. It is an exhilarating celebration of springtime, of the completion of the school year, and of youthful creativity and talent. And it is arguably my proudest achievement.

First produced in 1993, halfway through my time as an overseer, Arts First has grown into Harvard’s version of the Edinburgh Festival. By now it is impossible to imagine a year at Harvard without it. During its four-day span, hundreds of students act, dance, sing, play music, exhibit their art, and show their films. Thousands more watch. Every theater and concert hall on the campus is pressed into service. Twenty-odd college buildings are converted to performance spaces. Harvard Yard is flung open to the public and nearly everything is free. And every spring I show up, an eager vicarious participant. Each year, my hair is a little grayer and there’s a little less of it, but my enthusiasm never flags. The students regenerate me. In them, I see my dimly remembered self of many years ago, with all the reckless, inexhaustible excess of youth.

And what about my actual Harvard education?

As a student, let’s just say I was a very good actor. Concurrently with all of my frenzied extracurricular exploits, I managed to fake my way through my studies. I had chosen an extremely rigorous major, English History and Literature. This was an academic field packed with star professors and driven, high-powered students. Although I never completed the reading for a single class and sat mute through most classroom discussions, nobody seemed to notice what a plodding intellectual slowpoke I was.

Oh, but I was crafty. A prime example of my craftiness was an “independent study” I cobbled together for course credit. It focused on London in the eighteenth century, taking Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year as its central text. To my shame, I never even read the book. My one-on-one teacher was an amiable young assistant professor named David Sachs. The course consisted of three or four pleasant conversations in his office, spread over an entire semester. In years to come, Sachs would achieve a distinguished career in academia. I ran into him by chance a few years ago, and he gently reminded me that I still owed him a paper.

But despite my academic sleight of hand, my distracted brain managed to absorb great swatches of knowledge. Most of my professors were grizzled old superstars of the Harvard firmament who had long since learned how to put on a great show. Lecturing for as many as six hundred students at a time, they were masters at conveying and inspiring a genuine passion for their various subjects. The names of these venerable men barely register now, but in those days they were spoken of around Harvard with solemn reverence. I learned the Homeric epics from John Finley, the history of drama from William Alfred, Romantic poetry from Walter Jackson Bate, art history from Seymour Slive, a smattering of psychology from Erik Erickson, and on and on. And if I did the least possible amount of studying to get by, get by I did. I never got less than a C (and I only got one of those), I wrote a sixty-page honors thesis (on satire in Restoration comedy), I graduated magna cum laude, and I was one of a handful of my classmates inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. On the day I graduated, I secretly felt as if I had gotten away with murder.

So in this whirlwind of grinding academics and amateur theatrics, when did I decide to embrace my destiny and become a professional actor? I can narrow it down to a minute-long span of time late one evening in December of 1964.

It happened like this.

From that long list of student productions from my four years at Harvard I’ve left one title out. It is Utopia, Limited; or, The Flowers of Progress, an 1893 operetta by Gilbert and Sullivan. An epic-sized and overdrawn satire of British colonialism on a South Sea island, Utopia, Limited is the least known and least performed of the entire G&S canon. It is a raucous, vaguely racist piece of work that probably deserves its obscurity, but in my own modest history it looms large. Although an unlikely candidate for a life-altering experience, Utopia, Limited was the show that distinctly altered my life.

Early in the autumn of my sophomore year, a production of the operetta was slated for the Main Stage of