In lieu of my usual musings, I present the following. One of my Richard II cast used his experiences working on the show as part of a school project and, as part of that, asked me some questions. Here they are with my answers.
Can you give me a brief explanation of who you are and what your theater experience is like?
I’m a well-educated, highly imaginative man who has always tried to balance my right and left-brain lives in some way. I excelled in the hard sciences in high school and college and there was a family tradition of medical education that pushed me toward becoming a physician. I also always had a healthy interest in the humanities, reading voraciously and taking classes in history, sociology, literature, philosophy, and religion. At the age of sixteen, my high school built a new arts building with a theatre (we had never had one before). I had never done theater as a child but had been taken to live performance since I was old enough to sit still and had always enjoyed it. Something clicked, however, when I walked into that space and looked at things like the fly system. I wanted to learn how to use it to create. So, I signed up for technical theater and learned the basic elements of design, stage craft, and production. I found my niche as a stage manager and was later encouraged to try directing. I directed my first show, a one act, at the end of my senior year of high school.
When I went to college, I found there was a tradition of dorm theater. My freshman year, we decided to do a dorm production of You Can’t Take It With You. As I was the only one with directing experience, I got the job. The end result was reasonable It was seen by some upperclassmen prominent in campus theater who decided I had talent and was taken under their wing and I moved up the ranks in campus theater as both stage manager and director. Later, in medical school, I continued to stage manage and direct in community theater circles. It all came to an end when I hit residency and every fourth night on call.
I was away from theater for the next fifteen years building my medical career. In my early forties, after some life reverses, I felt a need to rebalance and decided to return to my old passion. I was encouraged this time to try performing. I had never considered myself a performer but figured what the heck and made the leap. Amazingly, I kept getting cast. Over the last two decades I’ve performed in over eighty productions in Birmingham and am occasionally given the chance to direct.
What inspired your production of Richard II?
Bell Tower Players, with whom I have worked off and on for a decade, is the only community theater locally that routinely does the classics. They have done a few Shakespeare plays in the past and a few years ago, decided to do Shakespeare in the summer and asked me to direct. My first production with them was A Midsummer Night’s Dream and last year we did The Merry Wives of Windsor. I wanted to challenge the group and move out of the comedies and didn’t think we were ready for any of the great tragedies so I decided that one of the history plays might be appropriate. I chose Richard II as I thought it would be castable out of our usual group and because it’s a particular favorite of mine in terms of its themes.
The play was chosen nearly a year ago and, as politics in the US progressed through that time, I began to think more and more about the themes of the play and how the major one that I wanted to highlight was that of power – how it is used, abused, and misused and how it can destroy an individual and ultimately a system of government. As I kept thinking about this, I decided that it would be interesting to highlight the parallels between Richard’s world and our own. Various ideas occurred to me and one of them was that the play was a memory play taking place in Richard’s mind as he awaits his inevitable death in his cell at the end. The technical limitations of our space and budget made me throw that out but I was intrigued of the idea of the jail setting and my original idea morphed into that of a political prison and more and more pieces fell into place as I continued to study the play.
I took ideas from varying sources such as Man of La Mancha, The Kiss of the Spiderwoman, Bent, the TV series Oz and scrambled them all together in my mind. I developed the idea of making the prison a temporary holding cell that has been thrown together, that it was a church basement to tie it closer to the audience’s actual experience, and came up with the idea of the color palette for the costumes to get the audience to subtly reflect on the meanings of the colors in various cultures. Then it was a matter of translating the action of the play into the milieu of the setting. What takes the place of throwing down gages? What does a tournament look like? How would a gardener show up to talk about plants?
Why do you believe community theater is important?
There are two words there. Community and Theater. I think the former is the most important. Community theaters are for the forming of a community, whether it be the show family created for each project or the group of people who find a theatrical home and return for production after production in some capacity. The theater is the team project. The thing that cannot be created by any one individual, but which requires everyone to do their part. Sometimes the smallest pieces become staggeringly important like with scissors. The pin is the most vital component. They are the training grounds where young people can get their first experience before moving on to more professional settings. They are the place of refuge for those who enjoy performing or creating but whose lives and life patterns preclude them from aspiring higher up the ladder. They can showcase incredible talents that will never be seen on Broadway and who deserve to share their gifts with the world. I see a lot of attitude among some in our area that they believe themselves too good to work on a small, low budget community theater show. I believe you’re never too good and that if the project is right for you, you can do smaller projects and mentor and inspire and raise the general quality of the art being produced.
How has being a part of community theater personally impacted you?
My adventures in community theater have taught me an enormous amount about human beings and human nature that has come in handy with my day job in medicine. It has helped me become a better and more creative problem solver. It has taught me communication skills that no class would be able to. I am definitely a more fulfilled, richer, and possibly more interesting person for all the things I’ve done.
What has been some challenges you’ve faced with Richard II?
I believe very strongly that good theater requires a cast to be an ensemble. That they learn to be comfortable with each other. To support each other. To work together as a unit. That way, when things go sideways, and they always do, they can handle it as a group and keep the show moving forward with minimal disruptions. With Richard II, I had a cast of sixteen, ranging in age from 19 to 86. Some had had decades of experience on stage. Some were complete novices. I had to figure out how to get them working together, to help them craft performances that balanced each other, and to keep them from being so scared of the language. As I say repeatedly, Shakespeare wasn’t writing Shakespeare. He was writing popular entertainments, and we need to approach it in that way to make sure it’s of interest to a modern audience. If everyone were to stand centerstage and declaim each speech in measured cadence, the audience would be asleep in twenty minutes. It has to be interesting. It has to be understood by the audience (which is more about intention and the actor understanding exactly what he or she is doing with what motivation) than it is about every word being perfect. We do these plays four hundred years later as Shakespeare was not only a brilliant poet, but also a keen observer of the human condition. It’s that latter which makes the plays still relatable and why we continue to enjoy them.
This particular production also had some major production issues. The lighting system died so I made the decision that we would simply use the work lights. As a concept, I didn’t hate it as that’s the kind of lighting this prison space would have had, but it meant we lost all control over using lights to help tell the story or to isolate particular areas of the stage that could have made it easier for the audience to follow some of the changes in setting in the Richard story. The costumer ending up in the ER twice in two weeks put costumes behind and I wasn’t able to refine some of the choices the way I might have otherwise. There were also significant difficulties with certain actors abilities to learn and retain their lines. One of them I planned for, the others I did not.
What about challenges with other productions?
I wrote, starred in, and helped produce a show called Politically Incorrect Cabaret that went through a dozen editions over fifteen years. We took it to venues in five states throughout the Southeast. The stories of that show are legion including unheated venues in below freezing weather, unairconditioned venues when it was over a hundred. Drunk tech crews (and one time a drunk cast member). Collapsing floors. Performing without a tech rehearsal. A power outage with the show done by candlelight and flashlights. I’m amazed that some of those actually made it on stage. But it’s semi-improv nature allowed us to get away with a lot.
I’ve had costumes disintegrate on stage, set pieces lowered on my head, falls off of platforms, a skid across the stage on my backside when a fellow cast member got a little over exuberant with a planned shove, been stuck on stage with a twelve year old when someone missed an entrance leading to five minutes of improv, missed cues, reordered lines, broken and missing props. It’s all part of what makes live theater so special.
I learned long ago to make Geoffrey Rush in Shakespeare in Love my spirit animal when it comes to theater.
What do you hope the audience takes away from Richard II?
I want them to leave the production thinking about something differently. Whether it is a different thought about our political moment, a new way of thinking about the possibilities of Shakespeare, or an increased respect for what Bell Tower Players and the performers are capable of achieving.
Can you share a story where you’ve witnessed the power of community theater positively impact another person?
I’ve seen a number of the young people with whom I have done community theater in the Birmingham area go on to professional careers. Perhaps the most famous is Jordan Fisher who will always be twelve-year-old Chulalongkorn in The King and I to me. Others I’ve worked with have gone on to national tours, Broadway, television, and national ad campaigns. I celebrate each and every one of them for their successes. Some get jealous. I don’t. I’m where I need to be.
Nearly twenty years ago, I played Mayor Shinn. The girl who played my younger daughter, eleven at the time, was just beginning in community theater. She went off, got her training and came back to town as a young adult and sixteen years later, I again played her father in Into the Woods in which she was a magical Cinderella.
What do you think about the health benefits (mental health or otherwise) of community theater, especially as a doctor?
Working in theater requires keeping ones mental faculties in shape and a certain level of self-discipline. It stimulates creativity, helps with memory, and often comes with a certain amount of aerobic exercise, especially when performing in a musical. A lot of stage performers continue to perform into their eighties as their training, and their performance regimens keep them in tip top shape.
As a geriatrician, when I find out that my patients have some sort of background in performance or music, I encourage them to pursue it on some level. It helps them tie in to pleasant experiences, encourages social connection and there is research that shows that both physical and cognitive abilities improve
What is your hope for the future of community theater?
That it will be seen to be as much a part of a healthy civic community as a sports team or an educational system, or recreational opportunities. The arts are as deserving of public funding as other aspects of civic life and should not be relegated to the whims of private funding or thought of as being less than other things we willingly fund like sports stadiums. Theater, more than any other art form, is the mirror of society as it exists as a collaboration between the performers and the audience. No two performances are ever exactly the same as no two audiences are ever exactly the same so the energy in the room is never duplicated. A film is always exactly the same. A play or musical is constantly reinterpreted for new audiences with new experiences and new historical context. It can always reflect both our better selves and those parts of ourselves we would rather not see.
Life, The Universe, and Everything 