A View From the Wings: A Theatre Memoir by Greene James

Author:Greene, James [Greene, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-12-26T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

I’ll Never Work Again

“I’ll never work again.” Those four little words—that one insidious thought—bedevils the great majority of actors whenever their most recent jobs come to an end. Even stars, I suppose, worry about falling off the pedestal, fearful of the day when the scripts stop coming in the mail, the offers stop pouring in. I can’t speak for them because I’ve never been in that enviable position of being constantly in demand, having to choose between a lucrative TV series or a potentially long-running play or a choice part in a new film shooting in the South of France. No, the actors like myself, who number well over 90 percent of the members of the three unions—Equity, SAG, and AFTRA (the last two of which are now SAG-AFTRA)—have to prove themselves over and over and over again. They never stop auditioning. They suffer rejection throughout their careers and never get used to it. But I had been relieved of this common theatrical experience during my six-year stint with two repertory companies. And now I would be plunged back into the icy pool of the unemployed, waiting for the phone to ring, waiting to hear from my agent that a play was casting, waiting to prepare an audition that hopefully would stand out and outshine all the other auditions by all the other out-of-work actors who also were thinking, “I’ll never work again.”

The work I had been doing in New York during those six years of repertory, appearing in a wide variety of plays, performing a wide variety of roles, presumably had not gone unnoticed, however, and I must assume that it led to my being hired by Michael Kahn for not one play but a summer of plays at the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut. Joseph Verner Reed, the executive producer, had been drawn to this quiet little town on the Housatonic River by its name, of course, and if the work presented there never equaled that of its namesake theatres in England and Canada, it was not for lack of talent. The four plays chosen for that summer of 1969 were Henry V , Much Ado about Nothing , The Three Sisters , and Hamlet . I was cast in all but the last play.

Michael directed Henry V and the Chekhov. Much Ado was staged by the young English director Peter Gill. And another Englishman, the irascible John Dexter, directed Hamlet . The designers were Karl Eigsti and Ed Wittstein. William Ritman did the sets. Jane Greenwood and Jeanne Button designed the costumes, and Thomas Skelton designed the lighting. No slouches there. And there were music and songs by the inimitable Village composer Al Carmines.

And let me give a partial list of the many gifted actors who gathered that summer to do the classics: Brian Bedford, Len Cariou, Morris Carnovsky, Charles Cioffe, Barry Corbin, Danny Davis, Herb Davis, Mary Doyle, Patricia Elliott, Robert Foxworth, William Glover, James Greene, William Hickey, Tom Klunis, Joseph Maher, Roberta Maxwell,

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