Drama: An Actor's Education

the Loeb Drama Center. Its director was an intense and brilliant young man named Timothy S. Mayer. As seductive as he was abrasive, Tim Mayer was one of the most extraordinary characters I’ve ever known, and he looked the part. He was stoop-shouldered and pocky, with a rope of dark brown hair always hanging in front of his piercing, bespectacled gray eyes. He sported expensive tweeds and penny loafers, but the clothes hung shabbily on him and he wore no socks. He spoke in a language all his own, rapid-fire and dazzlingly clever. A heavy drinker and nonstop smoker, he was a man whose prodigious talent was matched by an equally prodigious strain of self- destructiveness. During his Harvard career, he would churn out a long string of electrifying productions, but he never scaled the same heights in the hazardous world of professional theater. As if consumed by his own demons, he died tragically young, of cancer, in his early thirties. By a quirk of fate, this amazing young man was to have a catalytic effect on the next several years of my life.

Of the many shows Tim directed at Harvard, Utopia, Limited was his maiden effort. He was fiercely determined to make a splash with it and to disprove the old adage that Gilbert and Sullivan is more fun to perform than to actually watch. His take on it was startlingly original. In W. S. Gilbert’s creaky, campy Victorian humor, he saw hidden strains of bitter, almost savage anti-imperialism. For all its high spirits, this was to be the thrust of his production. He pitched it on a grand scale, with an enormous cast, a thirty-piece orchestra, and lavish, pastel-colored costumes and sets. But as Tim conceived it, all of this extravagance was shot through with acid irony. He had joined forces with Gilbert to skewer Victorian smugness and arrogance, seventy years after the fact. With the bravura that would soon earn him the nickname “The Barnum of Brattle Street,” Tim touted Utopia, Limited (accurately) as the biggest spectacle yet produced at the Loeb.

All fall the Loeb was abuzz with breathless rumors of this magnum opus. But perilously late in the rehearsal period, the production was dealt a crippling blow. The actor playing the central comic role of King Paramount, ruler of the island nation of Ulalica, abruptly walked off the show. Suddenly this colossal enterprise had no leading man, and Tim Mayer, a frazzled director at the best of times, was desperate for a replacement. By now, my performances in Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Shaw had accorded me an embryonic star status in the tiny world of Harvard theater. So Tim sought me out. The phone rang in my dorm room. I answered. Mincing no words, he got right to the point:

“Can you sing?”

I’d never sung onstage in my life, and I told him so. But I knew plenty of songs. And so a half hour later I was standing on the stage of the Loeb, belting out an a cappella version of an English music hall song titled “I Live in Trafalgar Square.” I sung the last note and stared out into the house. With a shout, Tim cast me on the spot, and that evening I walked into my first rehearsal, leaping onto the speeding train known as Utopia, Limited.

In the run-up to our first performance, I was rushed through a kind of musical-theater boot camp. I was spoon-fed my recitatives and arias; I was drilled on the bass line of all the four-part singing; I was even sent downtown to the New England Conservatory for a few last-minute voice lessons. Ideally, the role of King Paramount should be sung in a big, resounding bass. For all my efforts, I never got beyond a thin, reedy baritone (and over the years, I haven’t improved much on that). But my pitch was reliable, every word was crystal clear, and I strove to squeeze every drop of wit out of Gilbert’s lyrics. And in all the book scenes, on much firmer ground, I was effortlessly funny. As rehearsals sped by in the countdown to our opening night, I methodically proceeded, scene by scene, to steal the show.

Act II of Utopia, Limited begins with a comic septet, taking its title from the first line, “Society Has Now Forsaken All Its Wicked Courses.” This number is sung by all of the principal men in the cast. As the plot unfolds, the island nation is transformed into an absurd Polynesian parody of English society. The song’s verses, sung by King Paramount, provide a long list of examples of that transformation. The verses are broken up by a snappy refrain sung at top speed by all seven men:

It really is surprising what a thorough Anglicizing

We have brought about — Utopia’s quite another land;

In our enterprising movements, we are England with improvements

Which we dutifully offer to our Mother-land!

The format of the septet is that of an English music hall minstrel show, with the seven men in white tie and tails seated on seven chairs, King Paramount in the middle. Every time the refrain is repeated, the men leap to their feet, producing all manner of instruments. As the song builds, so does the loopy energy of the singers. The lyrics are funny enough, but the theatrics of the staging make the number over-the-top hilarious. By tradition, it is such a hit that the seven singers plan a couple of encores just in case they’re needed, ready to perform ever more elaborate variations on that manic refrain.

Our production was no exception. All eight times we performed the song, we stopped the show with it. But for me, the first time was the life changer. That night, when the song proper came to an end, the applause was deafening. We all remained onstage, poised for our first encore. The conductor powered up the orchestra again, silencing the crowd. I repeated the last verse, and the seven of us bellowed the refrain. This time I did a frenzied mock tap dance with one of the men rapping on the stage floor at my feet with a pair of drumsticks. This brought an even bigger response from the crowd. Once again we stayed onstage, and once again we performed an encore. For this one I produced three Spaldeens, spray-painted gold, and juggled them inanely all through the refrain. An even bigger response. By now the crowd was delirious. We had only plotted the two encores, so the other six men picked up their instruments and chairs and walked into the wings. I remained onstage alone, ready to begin the next scene. But the audience did not stop applauding. The applause swelled into cheers. The cheers became a roar. I suppose the ovation must have lasted about twenty seconds, but to me it seemed five minutes at the very least. I stood there, grinning like an idiot, dizzy with the overdose of adulation pouring down on me.

That twenty seconds was all it took. There was no longer any question. I was going to be an actor.

MS Thr 546 (147), Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

[13] Hard Times on the Great Road

In 1966, the ground began to shake under our feet. The Vietnam War had grown into a major conflagration. Every Harvard student was grappling with the queasy reality of the draft. SDS antiwar rallies on Mt. Auburn Street were drawing larger and larger crowds. American rock and roll had risen to the challenge thrown down by the Beatles and the Stones. Bob Dylan had gone electric. Late-night dorm-room dope-smoking sessions had been a dark, paranoid ritual; now they were an offhand folkway. Students from California were returning from breaks with lubricious tales of LSD trips and orgies. The confluence of feminism and the Pill was transforming sexual mores and reducing Harvard’s rigid “parietal rules,” which barred women from men’s dormitories, to a travesty. Suddenly half the male student population were sporting long hair and scuzzy beards, and finding ingenious ways to mock the school’s fusty dress code. The social and political cataclysm of 1968 was still a couple of years away, but an atmosphere of liberation, radicalism, and incipient rebellion already hung in the air.

But the rushing waters of social change were flowing right past me. In September of 1966, before the start of my senior year at Harvard and a month shy of my twenty-first birthday, I got married.

I married Jean Taynton, the daughter of the librarian of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Jean was six years older than I and had been living and working in Cambridge, just blocks away from the Harvard campus. In those days she taught special education to public school kids with a wide range of emotional problems. We had met a year before, working together at the Highfield Theater, a summer light-opera company in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod. The theater was a summer adjunct of Oberlin College and its Music Conservatory, out in Ohio. Years before, as a student at Oberlin, Jean had spent several summers at Highfield, performing a long list of comic character roles. As a lark, she had returned there to appear in Patience, yet another Gilbert and Sullivan warhorse. She had come at the behest of the show’s young director, a rich, precocious