R.I.P. 2023 North Coast: Donald, Charlie and Bernadette

 Among those that the North Coast and North Coast theatre lost in 2023 were Donald Forrest, Charlie Myers and Bernadette Cheyne. 

Donald Forrest was an artistic director of Dell’Arte in the 1970s , together with Michael Fields and Joan Schirle. They were very active as performers, not only on the North Coast but throughout California and elsewhere in the world.

  Before that he’d been an actor in Manhattan (Broadway to Off-Off) and a member of the San Francisco Mime Troupe. “He brought physical theater to new heights,” said his friend Michael Fields.  Fields directed Forrest’s last performance shortly before his death: the title role in an adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear called The Logger Lear, performed at the Logger Bar (which Fields now owns) in Blue Lake. Donald Forrest also became known locally for starting a theatre program in Blue Lake schools, and bringing an eighth grade student production to the Carlo Theatre annually.  

Donald Forrest in Logger Lear

I’m aware of seeing him on stage only once, in a Redwood Curtain production of a new play called The Lawn, also directed by Fields. I met him when we were both participants in a staged reading at the Carlo in 2011 of the Sinclair Lewis play It Can’t Happen Here, marking the 75^th anniversary of that play’s premiere as part of the Federal Theatre Project.  I met him again around a long table at the Abruzzi Restaurant in Arcata (now gone), where I was invited to dinner with what turned out to be a lot of Dell’Arte people.  Forrest and the others (including Joan Schirle) engaged in a hilarious round of stories about the old days.  I only wish there had been a tape recorder on the table, for it was an event that can never be repeated. 

 Donald Forrest died in October of complications from Covid-19. He was 73.

 Charlie Myers may be remembered more broadly for his love of film.  He was the movie reviewer for the North Coast Journal during some of the years I was writing their theatre column, and before that he circulated a weekly roundup via email of movies showing in Arcata.  But within the North Coast theatre community he was known as a director and a teacher.  He came to Humboldt State College in 1969 and didn’t fully retire until well into the 21^st century. 

 Charlie was one of the first people I met when Margaret and I moved to Humboldt in 1996.  He was chair of what was then the Theatre Arts department of Humboldt State University, and was instrumental in hiring Margaret to teach dramatic writing.  He and his wife Claudia even found us our first dwelling place here.  From him especially (but also John Heckel) we heard tales of the theatre department in its heyday, when the faculty was much larger, and there were many more productions with longer runs.  It turned out we arrived for the last few years of the department’s glory. For someone with a fairly sardonic view of things, I was impressed by how much he was sincerely concerned for the department’s students. 

 Charlie was a very sociable guy and had a wide range of interests, including music and books (I envied his extensive climate-controlled library at his rural home—where, during a housesitting gig, I made particular friends with their goat.)  Those interests and more on his very full life are reflected in Claudia’s appreciation published in the Lost Coast Outpost.  Charlie Myers died in September 2023.  Again complications from Covid-19 were involved.  He was 85.

Bernadette Cheyne came to the North Coast from Texas by way of Alaska and her family’s farm in Wisconsin.  She taught a range of courses for HSU theatre, but was especially known for her acting classes and her work with acting students on vocal production and dialects.  From the start she acted with distinction in university and community productions, then added directing, both of which she continued to do into her final year.

 Bernadette was also adept at university politics, and served on the statewide academic Senate, then becoming the vice-chair of the California State University Board of Trustees.  It had been her advocacy and skill as chair of what had become the HSU Department of Theatre, Film and Dance that went a long way in saving the department from extinction during a budget crisis. After her retirement in 2013 she was active for some years in the Humboldt County Grand Jury. 

 As department chair, Bernadette hired me to do publicity for several HSU productions, which led to a regular gig. She was always encouraging and her support was definitive. We also shared a devotion to Star Trek: The Next Generation, and so I showed up at her retirement party in uniform.

 She and Margaret were close.  Bernadette was just about the only person we saw in the early Covid years: we visited her at her home surrounded by woods, and she was our guest here.  

Bernadette in "Mother Courage"
at HSU

In the pamphlet for her memorial event, her family selected this quote from her in 2011: “Vitality.  It’s about the force that allows us to live, to grow to develop.  It’s in the classroom, it’s in ourselves, it’s in the environment all around us that just breathes this extraordinary passion and the thirst for knowledge.  A desire to teach, a desire to learn, a desire to grow.”

 Vitality—in her work, her conversation and social life, her personal warmth, and the way she dressed and presented herself to the world—characterized Bernadette.  I remember seeing her in the spring of a year she was chair, and she was clearly at the edge of exhaustion. But by the fall she had bounced back, ready to embrace the challenges and opportunities of a new school year.

 Bernadette’s brain cancer wasn’t apparent until it was advanced.  She died in October.  She was 74.

 May they rest in peace.  The legacy of their lives and work lives on in the lives and work of others.  

R.I.P. Joan Schirle and Clint Rebik

 

Update 2/16: Though North Coast media has so far failed to recognize Joan's achievements, the San Francisco Chronicle Datebook has a long article here, following the American Theatre magazine tribute here.

Joan Schirle died on February 1. I miss her already. Though I hadn't been in touch in recent years, knowing she was in the world made it a better place.

There are others who can better chronicle her considerable achievements, here on the North Coast and elsewhere in the world, and I hope they will do so. 

 But I can venture this much: As a creator of theatre, a teacher and communicator, there is no one I know of who has been more important for a longer time to the arts and their character in this community. I hope that this is recognized.

 I can only speak of what I know and feel. Joan was associated with Dell’Arte for nearly half a century. She was its Founding Artistic Director. As a creator and performer, she could excel at the robust, exaggerated commedia style, though even in the shows of that style that I saw, she added a more nuanced dimension. A prime example in more recent years was her performance as Mary Jane in Dell Arte’s bravura show, Mary Jane: The Musical. She commanded that stage as a star.

 But she was also adept at more subtle and delicate work, based on movement and music, gesture and image and poetry. Her work explored untold or little told stories of quiet heroism and love in dire or difficult circumstances, often instances of injustice.  For example, Elisabeth's Book.

 In my experience, Joan was just as authentic as a person. In a context where relationships are so often mostly transactional, she was genuine. I am grateful to her personally for two specific acts. She included me as performer and presenter in Dell Arte’s staged reading of the Sinclair Lewis play, It Can’t Happen Here, marking the 75th anniversary of that play’s opening in 18 theatres across America, produced by the Depression-era Federal Theatre Project. Joan was a principal organizer of simultaneous readings in 20 other cities. Apart from allowing me to participate in this meaningful event, she honored me with my only opportunity to be on the other side of the stage in my years on the North Coast. 

 Then when I was unceremoniously fired without cause as theatre columnist, she was the first member of the theatre community to support me in public, by posting on the local theatre Facebook page, eliciting other such statements.

 

I imagine there are many who have similar and better stories to tell about Joan’s kindness and courage, her openness and responsiveness, her humanity. 

 It seems to me that Joan had a very full life. She performed and taught and traveled all over the world. She was honored with awards in California and in Europe. She had a family, a daughter, a granddaughter. I hope that she felt that way about her life.

 Joan was born a couple of years before me, in 1944. She said to me once, we’ve got ten good years left, don’t we? Of course, being this age, I don’t remember how long ago she said this. But I’d like to think that however many they were, that on balance, they were good years.

 Last year the North Coast lost another of its theatre founders and important figures for decades. Clint Rebik was co-creator and artistic director of the Redwood Curtain theatre.

 I knew Clint since that theatre began more than 20 years ago. Besides being a talented actor and director, and in recent years a valued administrator at HSU, Clint was a model of integrity and kindness, generosity, good humor and judicious good sense. I wrote about his theatre and their productions for a decade, though I was also there for their first night. When my column was axed, Clint reached out and assured me I would have a free seat there anyway. 

We did not know each other well, but for awhile we occasionally had coffee when I stopped by his HSU Admissions office. He was widely admired in this community. Clint was only 55. He left behind two sons he loved, a partner and many friends.

Jonathan Miller

Of all the people I didn't know who died in 2019, I was most saddened by the death of Jonathan Miller.  He was an important presence at various times in my life.  When I was in college in the 1960s, one of my teachers (Douglas Wilson) mentioned this comedic satire by four young Englishmen called Beyond the Fringe. I soon acquired the album from their Broadway show, and pretty much memorized many of the bits.  In many ways it was life-changing, and certainly influenced my creative life for a long time.

The four members of Beyond the Fringe--Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Arnold Bennett and Jonathan Miller--were the Beatles of comedy.  Without Beyond the Fringe there would have been no Monty Python or Firesign Theatre, and possibly no Douglas Adams or Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. 

 But they were an artificial supergroup of funny guys from Oxford and Cambridge assembled by the official Edinburgh Festival to compete with its unofficial fringe festival comedies. They were such a hit they moved on to a commercial gig in London, and then to New York. After their Broadway success they disbanded, but while Bennett cultivated a career as a playwright, the other three stayed in the public eye throughout the 60s.  Peter Cook and Dudley Moore were the most visible, on British TV and a few Hollywood films (notably Bedazzled.) Miller was studying medicine, but kept get invitations to direct plays, TV shows and movies.

Meanwhile in my life, after intense periods in Boston and Washington, I returned to western Pennsylvania in the late 70s.  I was freelancing for magazines and then working on a book, so my life consisted of short bursts of travel and long periods of relative isolation.  My intellectual stimulation came chiefly from reading, and was mostly embodied by precious moments on film and especially on television.

The Body in Question, Miller's series carried in the US on PBS stations about the history of medicine, was one of the programs of the golden age for such stimulating series that included Bronowski's The Ascent of Man, the James Burke programs, Robert Hughes' The Art of the New, Ronald Harwood's theatre history All the World's A Stage, and Carl Sagan's Cosmos.  Probably the last were produced by Bill Moyers into the 1990s.  All of these were as important to my mental nourishment, sense of self, and my sanity.

Though Miller stopped formal performing, he was such an engaging talker that he was often featured on American talk shows, which were far more present and far more likely to hold some intellectual interest in the 60s into the 80s than since. In particular, he was given entire hours by Dick Cavett in the 1980s, often several strung together. His marvellous intelligence was inspiring and encouraging as well as stimulating. Miller's talk was absolute sustenance to me in those years.

 While I was aware of Miller as producer and director of several Shakespeare plays for the BBC project of filming all of them, and I'd heard him talk about at least one of them, it was years later in California when I was writing regularly about theatre that I watched tapes of these productions provided by the Humboldt University library.  It was then that I read with great interest his 1986 book Subsequent Performances, about approaching new productions of classic plays. Even more recently I caught up with his provocative 1960s television adaptation--or reimagining--of Alice in Wonderland on DVD.

directing Alice in Wonderland

In these and other ways, Jonathan Miller was a presence in my life over 5 decades, even though I didn't know him, never met him, and never saw on stage a production he directed.  Now, since his death was announced in November, I've been reading about him (including in a 1992 book, A Profile of Jonathan Miller), re-reading Subsequent Performances and watching what I could find on YouTube. There's actually quite alot: many interviews--including the 80s appearances on Cavett and several with Clive James, who died the same week as Miller--and several television dramas he directed.  I've deepened my knowledge of the man and his achievements.

As a director, producer and administrator of the Old Vic, he brought a fearless originality to his theatrical productions, while at the same time endearing himself to the people he worked with--particularly actors--with his humor, encouragement and respect for their own creativity.  Though he was the victim of clueless criticism, he got good notices as well.  Many of his theatre productions were hits with audiences, and several of his opera productions ran for decades.  Though I probably would not have agreed with some of his interpretations, they were dazzling in their daring and internal consistency.

Early in his directing career he mounted new plays and adaptations, with authors generally enthusiastic about his approach.  Even when he tended to stay with older works and favored Shakespeare and Chekhov in particular, he also rediscovered older plays seldom done on the modern stage, and brought a range of European plays to the British mainstream, particularly when he ran the Old Vic.

directing John Cleese in BBC Taming of the Shrew

Though Miller brought conceptual frameworks to his productions, and coordinated designs (often selecting painters for his designers to see), he felt his contributions as a director were in details--in small moments and gestures by the actors.  His approach was informed by what his novelist mother told him was a function of fiction: to make the negligible considerable, and the forgettable memorable. The job of directing, he felt, was directing attention.

He used his experience as a doctor observing everything about a patient to collect small human gestures which he suggested to his actors.  To the madness of Lear and other characters, he brought medical knowledge of how disorder or old age are expressed in concrete behavior.

Bob Hoskins and Anthony Hopkins in
Miller's BBC-TV Othello

 While his interpretations were sometimes controversial, they were grounded in history and had a particular logic, often based on actual human behavior rather than a metaphorical conceit.

Some changed how many plays are now approached.  For example, after his working class Iago (Bob Hoskins), no production of Othello can ignore the precedent.  He made the racial components of Othello and The Merchant of Venice more realistic by softening the apparent differences, while revealing and sharpening racial divides in The Tempest--also an interpretation no subsequent production can ignore.

He enlivened classics like Hamlet and Lear and several Chekhov plays partly by emphasizing characters that are usually played as minor, such as Claudius in Hamlet. He approached opera as another kind of play, bringing new interest to audiences.

Those who worked with him often mentioned his humor, and the sense of rehearsal as play.  "For me, what is attractive about the stage is contained in the name of what it is we do," he wrote.  "It is a play and is playful."

 He wrote this to explain his conflict at the National when Peter Hall took over.  He felt Hall (who I praise in an earlier memorial post) was too pretentious about the role of theatre.  He had enjoyed the National in the early years, when he worked closely with Lawrence Olivier, who he greatly admired.


In A Profile of Jonathan Miller, a notable number of actors and producers name Tyrone Guthrie as Miller’s closest resemblance in directorial style. In addition to his humor, they often mentioned his warmth with actors, inventiveness and keen eye for behavior. He began productions with a strong sense of time and place, and with a visual style selected, but collaborated closely with designers and actors to produce effects that worked for them, the audience and the show.

 Miller’s work in directing opera transformed opera productions down to the present. Robert Brustein claims that Miller’s direction of Robert Lowell’s Old Glory transformed American theatre. “Alot of stage directors...know only about the theatre and not too much about anything else,” observed opera orchestra conductor Kent Nagano. “Jonathan knows about everything.” In addition to his knowledge and intelligence, Nagano adds, “That’s what he brings into his productions—a sense of everyday life.”

  Miller directed tragedy, and in every play he looked for the irony.Whether or not it is a tragic irony, in the 1980s Miller helped found the UK's Alzheimer's Society and was an  its president for many years, using his skills and presence to bring attention to the previously obscure disease.  In 2019 he himself succumbed to it.  His mother died relatively young of early onset Alzheimer's, but Jonathan Miller, who once said he would be satisfied with living 80 years, made it to 85. May he rest in peace.  His work lives on.

Peter Hall

One of the many essays that appeared after Peter Hall's recent death, written by younger theatre artists he mentored,  ended with traditional words: We shall not see his like again.

Traditional, even cliched, and yet they are not only true in his case, it's hard to think of anyone in theatre since Olivier of whom these words so clearly apply.  And equally hard to think of anyone now alive to whom they could apply, at least in the same way.

His achievements were institutional and artistic.  He founded the Royal Shakespeare Company and led the National Theatre into prominence, taking it from a small company doing a half dozen plays a year at the Old Vic, to its huge new building with more than 100 actors and 500 staff producing 18 to 20 plays a year.  In the process, the National overcame general opposition to join the RSC as institutions so identified with British theatre that it seems they must have always existed.

Peter Hall was also a director who changed the way Shakespeare was performed and even spoken.  Together with John Barton (whose "Playing Shakespeare" series lives on YouTube) he found in Shakespeare verse the directions for speaking it, and playing the part.  He insisted that the director's job was to reveal the play on its own terms, not impose concepts or see the plays as opportunities for the director's self-expression.   He insisted on specifics and favored collaboration with the cast, even to the extent of involving the cast in set and costume design as well as the blocking of the play.

In the 1950s, Peter Hall introduced Samuel Beckett to England with his production of Waiting for Godot, and he was the first to direct Harold Pinter (going on to direct 10 of his plays.)  If he had done nothing else, this contribution to theatre would have been astounding.

His influence was felt in American theatre as well, as evidenced in this essay and in his New York Times obit.

Finally, these two excerpts from a kind of biographical monologue, also on YouTube.  May he rest in peace, for his legacy lives on.

R.I.P. Sam Shepard

The most exciting evening I'd experienced as an audience member of professional theatre to that time, and really never to be surpassed, was seeing Curse of the Starving Class at the Public Theatre in 1978, by a playwright unknown to me named Sam Shepard.

 I walked into the Public Theatre in complete innocence. At that time the Public was like a multiplex of live theatre, with as many as four plays on stage every night. I chose Curse of the Starving Class partly because of the title, and mostly because there was a ticket available.

 Apparently in the cast were Olympia Dukakis, Pamela Reed and Michael J. Pollard, but it was the writing that blew me away: the words. They expanded my conception of what was possible at this level. Either at intermission or after the play I bought a copy in the lobby of Angel City, Curse of the Starving Class & Other Plays by Shepard.

 Although I would later see another original production--Fool for Love ( with Will Paton the week after he took over the role from Ed Harris)--plus the PBS filming of the Steppenwolf production of True West, and a production somewhere of Buried Child, my main experience thereafter would be reading his works--other plays and play collections, and his prose pieces in Motel Chronicles. All about the words.

 Shepard was a downtown Manhattan star before he became a movie star, and his lore was everywhere there. Wikipedia has him meeting Jessica Lang on the set of a movie, but legend of that time said he met her when she worked as a waitress at the hip downtown bar where he hung out.

 Shepard influenced others, and helped establish a theatre of words for awhile (the most successful of which probably was David Rabe's Hurlyburly which made it to Broadway.) This was much to my predilections as a writer, though I realized that I was not comfortable enough with violence to write quite like he did, nor as a consequence would I reach such deep places in an audience. But those long arias of words, spoken in one play by an actor playing drums, were riveting.

I saw all his movies for awhile, including the one he directed, Far North. Though his New York Times obit refers to his play A Lie of the Mind as "great," at the time reviewers called it disappointing, as I recall. He seemed to fade into the firmament by the end of the 1980s, though he kept writing and acting.

 Oddly then, it was only a couple of years ago that Fool For Love was first produced on Broadway. I don't know when Shepard was diagnosed with ALS, a disease that varies a great deal in his symptoms and progress, but always ends the same, as it did for my father. It's said that Shepard dealt with it with the same stoic dignity of his on-screen persona.

 At the New Yorker, Patti Smith writes an intimate memorial. I had no intimate or even actual relationship, but he touched my life nevertheless, and that's as much as I can honestly write about him. Sam Shepard died at age 73.  May he rest in peace.  His work lives on.

R.I.P. Leonard Nimoy

Leonard Nimoy started on the stage in Boston, and returned to the stage in the 1970s, appearing in Equus on Broadway.  His best-known role of course was Mr. Spock in Star Trek on television and in eight of the twelve feature films, as well as on several episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation.   His attention to creating that role, protecting its integrity, and developing it over four decades is unique in modern acting, with multiple lessons for actors in all media.  The character he created transcended entertainment to become a contemporary archetype, one of the few mythological figures of our age.

Leonard Nimoy was buried today in Los Angeles.  May he rest in peace.  His work lives on, into the future.

R.I.P. 2014

Mike Nichols began as a comic writer and performer, and achieved fame as a film director.  But in between he became a stage director, and continued to direct Broadway plays during his film career, winning 9 Tony Awards.  He directed several Neil Simon plays, George C. Scott in Nichols' translation of Uncle Vanya,  and in 1984, had two major first-run plays on Broadway simultaneously: Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing and David Rabe's Hurlyburly.  I saw both of those productions that year.  And of course, his film career began with Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? He also brought Angels in America to the screen.

Philip Seymour Hoffman acted on the New York stage before and during his film career, winning three Tony nominations for revivals of plays by Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller and Sam Shepard.  In the offbeat 2008 film Synecdoche, New York he played a theatre director who uses the money from a genius grant to mount a production that is being reworked in rehearsals for decades.  Meanwhile he responds to the many ways in which his life unravels, including a fatal illness.  He has the perfect last words for an obsessed theatre director: a final revelation that he knows how to do this play.

Robin Williams was a comic genius as a stand-up and television performer, and he was an accomplished film actor.  But he also acted on the stage, most notably opposite Steve Martin in a 1988 Broadway production of Waiting for Godot.

Marian Seldes acted in New York from 1948 to 2012, and was elected to the American Theatre Hall of Fame in 1995.  She appeared in premieres of several Edward Albee plays, winning her first Tony for A Delicate Balance.  She was also a legendary acting teacher for several succeeding generations.

Also in that production of A Delicate Balance and also elected to the Hall of Fame in 1995 was another long-time legend, Elaine Stritch.  She acted in major plays both on New York and London stages, and became known as a show-stopping singer in musicals, including in the original cast of Company.  She made many television appearances, and performed in several one-woman shows.

Eli Wallach studied with Sanford Meisner (as did Seldes) and also Lee Strasberg, and helped to form the Actors Studio.  Known for many character parts in movies, he acted on stage from 1945 to 2000. He was an active champion for the American stage, appearing in several first productions of Tennessee Williams.

Among her many accomplishments as a film actor, playwright, screenwriter, poet and activist, Ruby Dee was the first black woman to play leading roles (Kate, Cordelia) in the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut.  She starred in the breakthrough play Raisin in the Sun on Broadway and on screen, and continued to pioneer in television (prime time, soap operas, documentaries, etc.) for new generations of African Americans, especially women.

Bob Hoskins was a unique and fearless actor in British and American films, handling comedy, drama and song and dance.  He also created a memorable and much imitated Iago for Jonathan Miller's Othello.

Mickey Rooney's long career as a movie and television actor began with the role of Puck in the 1935 film of A Midsummer Night's Dream, a role he had played on the stage that same year at age 13.

Hollywood stars James Garner and Lauren Bacall began their acting apprenticeship on the New York stage. Bacall returned to Broadway in the 60s and over the next decades, winning two Tonys. German-born actor and Academy Award winner Maximillian Schell acted on stage in Germany, famed there for his Hamlet.

British film director and actor Richard Attenborough began as a stage actor.  One of distinguished film director Paul Mazursky's films was a modern adaptation of The Tempest.  Towards the end of his ground-breaking film-making career, Alain Renais adapted plays by Alan Ayckbourn and Jean Anouilh for the screen.

Many lesser known dramatic storytellers passed away in 2014, among them: actor Eddie Lawrence, who played in the 1950s New York production of The Threepenny Opera; film actor Juanita Moore, British actor Joseph Pasco, musical lyricist Sandy Wilson, actors Pauline Wagner (age 103), Leslie Carlson, Meshach Taylor, Nancy Malone, Beverly Long, Mona Freeman, Joan Loring, Perlita Neilson, Helena Bliss, Wendy Hughes, Phyllis Frelich, Marc Platt (age 100), Carmen Zapata, John Horsley (age 96), Christopher Jones, Rene Ricard.

The theatre also lost playwright, actor and director Roberto Gomez Bolanos, playwright Peter Whelon and drama critic Richard Eder.  May they rest in peace, and new generations carry on their work into the future.

This North Coast Weekend

Redwood Curtain opens Making God Laugh, a comedy by Sean Grennan this weekend.  Directed by Kristen Mack, it features Teresa Desch, Randy Wayne, Rigel Schmitt, Sasha Shay and Luke Sikora.  Previews are Thursday and Friday, with official opening and reception on Saturday February 15 at 8 p.m.

This is the final weekend for Oedipus the King and Women in Congress at North Coast Rep.  Last performance is Saturday.

This past week we lost two legendary performers.  Sid Caesar transformed vaudeville comedy for television in the 1950s, linking past and the future he helped to create.  He nurtured an equally influential set of writers, including Neil Simon, whose play about the Caesar team, Laughter on the 23rd Floor, was produced at North Coast Rep in 2012.   Here's the background on Sid Caesar I wrote at the time of that production.

Shirley Temple's reign as the shining child star of the Depression years is known today mostly by reputation, though the boomer generation will remember some of those movies on TV.  Some of her tap-dancing routines with the great Bill Robinson are preserved in video compilations like That's Dancing.  In her autobiography, she noted that when she held his hand after one of their dances, it was the first time a white female and a black male had touched on the silver screen.

As an adult, Shirley Temple produced a series of fairy tale films for television, including Babes in Toyland.  That production influenced the version that Dell'Arte performed this past Christmas.  As I noted, in her introduction to this show she seemed almost a parody of the sweet child she had worked hard to portray.  But in the show itself she was almost unrecognizable in her marvelous performance as a wicked witch.  There was more to Shirley Temple than the image.

May they rest in peace.  Their work lives on.

R.I.P. 2013

Among the losses to international stages are these, the famous and the lesser known, who represent others not named here:

Like many British actors--particularly of his generation and before--Peter O'Toole was a star on the stage before he made his first film.  His Hamlet, using the full text (which is rare), was much praised.

Richard Griffiths was primarily known as Uncle Vernon in the Harry Potter films, but he was mostly a stage actor, costarring recently with Harry himself, Daniel Radcliffe.

American actor Julie Harris was renowned as much for her stage work as for her movies, though her performance in East of Eden opposite James Dean is indelible.  Other American actors known primarily for film and television are Eileen Brennan, Jean Stapleton, Eleanor Parker, Deanna Durbin and Esther Williams.  Lesser known American actors whose loss will be felt on stages are Ruth Maleczech, Martha Greenhouse, Kevin Gray, Patricia Blair, Jane Connell.  American stages also lost director and actor Arthur Storch, and director and author Herbert Blau.

British actors lost this year also include Lewis Collins, Jean Kent, Paul Rogers, Nigel Davenport, Pat Keen, Barbara Hicks, Bill Wallis, David Lyon and Keith March.  Canadian, South American, European and Asian stages lost important figures as well.

Nobel Laureate Seamus Heany was a playwright as well as poet, and Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing wrote plays and libreti for opera as well as fiction and essays.  She was also a keen theatre-goer.

  Poland lost one of its foremost international playwrights, Slawomir Mrozek.  Franca Rane was a prominent Italian playwright and actor.   Ostad Mohammad was a playwright and director.  Walter Muparutsa was an important playwright and actor in Zimbabwe.

Cuban-born Dolores Prida was known primarily as a columnist for the New York Daily News but also found success as an Off-Broadway playwright. Pittsburgh lost an important playwright in its vibrant theatre scene with the death of Mary Virginia Whipple.  Donald Bevan began as a Broadway playwright and later became a Broadway caricaturist. Playwright John Davidson also founded the Children's Theatre.  A former reporter, Thomas Tafero was a young playwright and actor in New York.

Many of these playwrights were also actors, directors, producers and teachers.  But their focus remained foremost on theatre and film.  There are others however who include the stage in an even larger scope of endeavors.  Philip Slater had that kind of life.  Known primarily as the author of nonfiction books such as The Pursuit of Loneliness, or the fiction/nonfiction hybrid Earthwalk, his livelihood was provided mostly by university teaching.  Yet he also had a life as an actor and playwright.  While his death at age 86 is to be mourned, his books remain alive, and his plays exist to be brought to life by future generations.  It seems like an honorable and fulfilling life.

Update 1/4/2014: Here's what playwright and actor Alan Bennett wrote about the death of Richard Griffiths in journal excerpts from 2013 just published (and posted) in the London Review of Books. Bennett wrote the play and screenplay The History Boys, one of Griffiths' better known performances.  He won many awards for his performance in it on stage, including a Tony.

29 March. Richard Griffiths dies. We’ve been away for a couple of days so are spared the unctuous telephone calls that always come from the tabloids on such occasions, ‘We’re sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings’ or ‘We hope we’re not intruding on your grief.’ Outside his family the person who would have known him best as an actor at the National and who would have been most acquainted with the logistic difficulties caused by his bulk was his dresser. No one will think to ask him, and I’ve never known him gossip about the actors he’s dressed (myself included), but he would have an angle on Richard and how he coped with his life that is unshared by any of the obituary writers.

Richard had an unending repertoire of anecdotes and an enviable spontaneous wit besides. I was working with him at the time when Henry VIII’s flagship the Mary Rose was being laboriously raised from the depths of the Solent. This was being done by means of a cradle when suddenly a cable snapped and the wreck slipped back into the water.

‘Ah,’ said Richard. ‘A slight hiccup on the atypical journey from grave to cradle.’

Here's a story on Griffith's funeral, which brought out the Brit acting elite, including Daniel Radcliffe.

R.I.P. 2012

These days actors become famous for their work in movies and on television.  But many of the famous who died in 2012 were also stage actors, and not only at the beginning of their careers.  British actor Joyce Redmond was nominated for an Oscar for her film performance as Desdemona opposite Laurence Olivier in his Othello, though she was later most famous for the notorious eating scene with Albert Finney in the film Tom Jones.  But she maintained a classical theatre career, as is typical in England.

What's less organized (and less known) is that American actors can do the same.  Celeste Holm made her stage debut opposite Leslie Howard in Hamlet. One of her last performances was in the comedy I Hate Hamlet.  Charles Durning won his acting stripes in Tennessee Williams, as did Ben Gazzara (photo directly below Durning.)  He was the original Brick in Cat On a Hot Tin Roof.  Gazzara played in O'Neill and Odets, and probably did more stage work than was good for his screen career.

Lupe Ontiveros used her visibility as a TV and film actor to further stage possibilities for others as a founding board member of the Latino Theatre Company in Los Angeles. Someone else who wanted to expand the theatre community was British playwright John Arden, who Michael Billington notes was probably "ahead of his time." But texts last, and the work can be revived.  Stage performances disappear however, so it's a further irony that these actors will live on through their movie and TV performances.   

Other theatrical personages who died in 2012 include actor Ernest Borgnine (another actor who started out in Tennessee Williams), playwright and musical adapter Mark O'Donnell (I saw one of his plays in New York many years ago, and had a long funny interview with him), composers Marvin Hamlisch and Richard Adler, designer Eiko Ishioka, playwright Jack Richardson, director Gunnar Eide, actors Jack Klugman, Joan Roberts, Jerome Kitty, Patricia Kennedy.  May they rest in peace, and their work live on. 

Wendy Williams

Sad news: North Coast playwright Wendy J. Williams has passed away. She came to Humboldt as a journalist but found a home in theatre, first by acting for the Pacific Arts Center Theatre, Ferndale Rep and NCRT in the 1980s and 90s, and then earning an MFA in dramatic writing at HSU. Among her works was a one-person show, Motherhood: Made in China, based on her own experiences adopting a girl in China. She performed it at the Plays in Progress theatre. Her play Range of Light, inspired by the life of Eureka’s Carole Sund and her murder at Yosemite, was produced at HSU in 2006. (This small photo is from a group shot when she participated in the HSU 10 Minute Play Festival.)

Over those years she worked with many people still active in the North Coast theatre community.  I wrote a little about her in my Stage Matters column this week, and I knew of several people involved in productions mentioned in the column that she worked with.  Her teachers at HSU, her editor at the TV publication she wrote for, all admired her.

 I spoke with her at length only once, when I talked to her about Range of Light, with her daughter (then in grade school, now a teenager) doing her homework at the next table in the late afternoon light on the Wildberries patio.  She was the only person who specifically mentioned reading the last chapters of the paperback edition of The Malling of America, in which I wrote about the experience of writing and publishing it.  As a journalist and freelance writer, that interested her.

 Of her portrait of motherhood in Range of Light, she told Journal reporter Cynthia E. Gilmer: "Even the little, everyday acts of kindness can lead to greatness." It’s one kind of greatness by which Wendy will be remembered.

R.I.P. 2011

top, l to r: Pete Postlethwaite, Peter Falk, Vaclev Havel, Susannah York.
Harry Morgan, Elisabeth Sladen, Anna Massey, Romulus Linney, Ellen
Stewart, Lanford Wilson.

Among those the international world of theatre lost in 2011 were: Czech playwright and author Vaclev Havel (who later got a day job as the first president of the Czech Republic,) and American playwrights Lanford Wilson and Romulus Linney. 

Also American playwright and dramaturg Max Wilks, British playwright N.F. Simpson. Ellen Stewart (founder of La Mama), Arthur Laurents (playwright, screenwriter, director,) Irene Gilbert (actor and teacher), and Gilbert Cates (founder of the UCLA School of Theatre, Film & Television.)

These days actors are known primarily for film and television. Particularly in the UK but also to some extent in the U.S., the participation of these actors in live theatre is important. So among those lost to UK theatre are Pete Postlethwaite, Susannah York, Anna Massey, Dulcie Gray, Roy Skelton, Donald Hewett, Dulcie Gray, Shelagh Delaney, Elisabeth Sladen. American actors Peter Falk, Paul Michael, Harry Morgan, Elizabeth Taylor, Dana Wynter, Michael Sarrazin, Cliff Roberson, Jackie Cooper.  American actor and critic Leonard Harris, choreographer and actor Tony Stevens, choreographer Roland Petit. May their work be remembered, and may they rest in peace.

R. I. P. 2009

Among the theatre and film artists we lost in 2009: Natasha Richardson (seen here in A Streetcar Named Desire), Karl Malden (who appeared with Marlon Brando in the original Broadway stage production of "Streetcar"), David Carradine, Ricardo Montalban, Paul Burke, Jennifer Jones, Ron Silver, James Whitmore (pictured here in one of his one-man shows, playing Will Rodgers), Patrick Swayze. Not pictured: actors Wendy Richards, Betsy Blair, Richard Todd, Bea Arthur, Brittany Murphy, Henry Gibson, Gene Barry, Patrick McGoohan, Farah Fawcett, Joseph Wiseman; directors John Hughes, Bud Shulberg and Howard Zieff; writer Larry Gelbart, dancer Merce Cunningham.

Natasha Richardson on Stage

Natasha Richardson, who died as the result of a skiing accident at the age of 45, is known to most of us from films, but she was also an accomplished stage actor--following in the family tradition of 3 generations and counting. That's her with mother Vanessa Redgrave and sister Joely Richardson, and again with her mother (below left) in a scene from the film Evening. Some filmgoers may not realize who she is because she took on a variety of roles, and the same is true in her stage work. She won high praise in Broadway revivals of A Streetcar Named Desire (middle bottom photo, playing Blanche DuBois) and Cabaret (for which he won a Tony), as well as Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie. Among other notable roles were Ibsen's The Lady and the Sea (top right photo) and Patrick Marber's Closer (bottom right)-- coincidentally an HSU student group is performing a Studio Theatre production of this play's first act in early April. A New York Times article briefly describes her family legacy in film, but there is much, much more of it. These photos are all from the New York Times as well. Click collage to enlarge.

In Memoriam 2008

Harold Pinter (center) and Eartha Kitt(top left) were the most recent theatre artists who passed away in 2008. They are, top l to r: dancer Cyd Charisse (before Hollywood she was in the Ballet Ruse), musical theatre star Eartha Kitt, Robert Mulligan, film director of To Kill A Mockingbird, actor Mel Ferrer. Playwright, director and actor Harold Pinter (center). Bottom row: actor and director Paul Newman in his stage role as the Stage Manager in Our Town, director Anthony Minghella, playwright Simon Gray (Otherwise Engaged, Butley) and actor Paul Scofield, famous from films but whose stage Lear was legendary. Click collage to make it real big. Here's the Guardian's account of Pinter's memorial service.